Somewhere early in my upbringing, I'd acquired the belief that if I wanted something that seemed too good to be true, speaking it would greatly reduce the chances of it happening or even prevent it altogether. At a subconscious level, I'd been programmed to believe that to talk about the very thing I desired would be to jinx myself from getting what I wanted. This… read more
Sandbagging is a technique often used to mitigate the risk of failure, to aim for something less than what is possible to help ensure we don’t fall short of our expectations. I learned the term years ago in my first sales job, when the annual budget I’d submitted was viewed as much too conservative. I was told to stop “sandbagging” and shore up my numbers… read more
We may be certain of a place we want to go, but even when our destination is clearly within sight, it requires conscious diligence to reach our desired endpoint. I used to tell with a healthy dose of self-deprecation the story of how I got lost on the Great Wall of China, but I recognized only recently that this story has been a glaring metaphor… read more
