Personal Development for Smart People^TM

I posted a list of values in the articles section today. This list will be referenced by a future article on how to discover your values and live congruently with them, but I thought I’d go ahead and post the list now instead of waiting until the complete article is ready.
In a couple hours […]

In an article I wrote a few years ago called Do It Now, I explained some time management techniques that allowed me to finish college more quickly than usual. What I probably didn’t make clear in the article was that I didn’t overwhelm myself like a workaholic to pull it off. I had […]

Should we or should we not set big, hairy, audacious goals where success is far from certain (at least without the benefit of hindsight)?
I for one am grateful for the existence of people who set big goals. My country (the USA) would not exist otherwise. Nor would my city, my family, our computers, […]

This was a comment on the last post that I’d like to address, since it’s a very common issue related to personal growth:

Why improve at all? We are born. We die. Everything else shares the same fate. Then why this struggle to improve? What is the use? Expectations can only lead to misery if we […]

Here’s a link to an issue of a PDF newsletter from 2003 World Champion of Public Speaking Jim Key. The title of this issue is Give, and it includes a simple story about the power of giving that I think you’ll find inspiring.
This past summer I saw Jim give a one-hour speech on the […]

Yesterday I was visiting a fellow Toastmaster, and we watched a DVD called Magic Moments II. This is a video that analyzes 30 clips from the 2001-2003 International World Championship of Public Speaking Competition in order to study some of the best practices. I saw this same presentation live at the 2004 Toastmasters […]

How do you deal with difficult, irrational, or abusive people, especially those in positions of authority who have some degree of control over your life?
I’ve never met a totally rational human being. Our ability to store and process information is far too imperfect for that. But our emotions are a shortcut. The book Emotional Intelligence […]

I received much feedback on the previous post regarding the challenge of consciously directing one’s thoughts to feel a certain way.
First of all, recognize that there are people and corporations with a strong vested interest in conditioning you to maintain the (false) belief that you need some kind of external validation to feel a certain […]

Last night I gave a speech called “The Value of Confidence,” which was about how to mentally put yourself into a state of confidence, feeling certain of success even when your knowledge suggests you should expect to fail. Delivering a speech like this puts an extra burden on the speaker, since it must be […]

Habit #7 in Steve Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is called “Sharpen the Saw.” Covey uses the common analogy of a woodcutter who is sawing for several days straight and is becoming less and less productive. The process of cutting dulls the blade. So the solution is to periodically […]