If it keeps you busy or entertains you now, but will hurt you someday, it’s a distraction. Don’t settle.

What is the opposite of distraction?

Traction — you want to create consistent traction on the road of life.

If you’ve been spinning your figurative wheels a lot lately, feeling a bit tired and vexed without much forward progress, I highly recommend you rethink how you’re investing your time, and replace the meaningless with the meaningful — the distraction with traction!

Ultimately, you become a true master of your life when you learn how to master your focus — where your energy goes. Value what you give your time to. Rise above the pettiness trying to draw you in. Figure out where your attention actually goes, and gradually remove needless distractions. Remember, there’s a big difference between empty fatigue and gratifying exhaustion. Life is too short not to focus more on [Read more…]

Patience is not about waiting, it’s the ability to maintain a positive outlook while working consistently for what you believe in.

Have you ever told yourself that you’re going to make something happen and then nothing happened? All details aside, it’s because you didn’t have the right habits in place — the little things you do every day that build up to something bigger. Your habits truly make or break you. Because in all walks of life you become what you habitually do. You will never make progress or change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is always found in your daily habits and routines.

In other words, regardless of your unique life situation or how you personally define success, you can’t become an overnight success. You become successful over time from all the little things you do one day at a time.

Failure occurs in the same way. All your little daily failures (that you don’t [Read more…]

Do more than just exist. We all exist. The question is: Do you live?

Throughout a decade of life, relationship, and small business coaching, Angel and I have witnessed people reinventing themselves at all ages — 48-year-olds starting families, 57-year-olds graduating from college for the first time, 71-year-olds starting successful businesses, and so forth. How did they do it? They insisted on making gradual progress in their lives.

Obviously though, it can take some time to get yourself into the right rhythm. And I am no exception. About 20 years ago I had an intervention with myself. I sat down at the local library on a Saturday morning and read through hundreds of archived entries in my journal. Specifically, I was looking for all the unfulfilled goals and visions for the future that I had jotted down over the years. It didn’t take long before I realized that the entire course my life had taken up to that point had been the product of [Read more…]

There is a big difference between empty fatigue and gratifying exhaustion. Life is too short not to focus more on what matters most.

Before you know it you’ll be asking, “How did it get so late so soon?” So take time to figure yourself out. Take time to realize what you want and need. Take time to take calculated risks. Take time to love, laugh, cry, learn, and forgive. Life is so much shorter than it often seems.

In our line of work we speak with people on a weekly basis who have been forced to ‘wake up’ to life’s fleeting nature. Consider these two excerpts from people’s stories that we recently received in our email [Read more…]