How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 5: Keeping Your Feedback Loops Running Smoothly

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 5: Keeping Your Feedback Loops Running Smoothly

Your goal-achievement machinery only operates properly when you have information to work with, so the natural tendency to avoid bad news can gum up the works. Fortunately, you don't need to go far to find what you need to keep things moving. 

Read More

Using Your Setbacks as Building Blocks: An Olympic Case Study

Using Your Setbacks as Building Blocks: An Olympic Case Study

You've probably experienced disaster striking just when things are going great. It happened to skier Hannah Kearney in the 2014 Winter Olympics. Here's a close look at how she used a setback to gain insight and move onward and upward—and how you can, too.

Read More

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 4: Goal Hierarchies and Your Emotions

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 4: Goal Hierarchies and Your Emotions

How you feel en route to your goals involves more than the progress you're making. Exploring the third dimension of your goals helps you fine-tune your understanding of what matters to you, and discover new motivations.

Read More

The Problem With Trying to Be Happy All the Time

The Problem With Trying to Be Happy All the Time

Popular culture frames unhappy moments as weeds in the garden, and so long as any remain, you have more pulling to do. But when you cast your unhappiness as an antagonist, you become blind to its merits, and can keep yourself from true well-being.

Read More

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 3: Taking Your Rate of Progress Into Account

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 3: Taking Your Rate of Progress Into Account

If you think that setting a goal and then achieving it on time will make you happy, then you may be in for a surprise. Your pace of progress is incredibly important to how you feel about the process of achievement, and sets the stage for what happens next.

Read More

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 2: Tackling the Rogue Aversion

How to Achieve Your Goals, Step 2: Tackling the Rogue Aversion

When it comes to your life, knowing what you don’t want, but not being sure what you do want, can cause you big problems. Free-floating aversions can sap your energy and feelings of well-being—and tending to them can yield widespread benefits.

Read More

The Science of Loneliness and the Mindfulness Connection

The Science of Loneliness and the Mindfulness Connection

Between 15% and 30% of the U.S. population feels lonely chronically. Here I cover the causes and effects of loneliness, and the latest methods of working with it. Mindfulness meditation has a lot in common with them, so there's yet another reason to start meditating.  

Read More