Are you getting everything you can out of this life?
A self-less, feel-good blog about love, life, and work by career coach and existential adventurer, Cliff Flamer
Redemption only comes to those who are willing to gather the pain they’ve caused
and put it back inside their own body.
It is not a collaborative effort. It is not something to ask for. It is not found nestled neatly into words.
Relief from torment is in the ache.
Look nowhere … Read more...
Things are tough out there.
I’m seeing a lot of pain in people, doing more therapy than career coaching.
People are having the rug pulled out from under them, people who never thought they’d be the ones getting hit.
Layoffs to fix balance sheets.
Strikes to balance paych… Read more...
My daughter gave me a homework assignment before she fluttered off to Santa Cruz for a Girl Scout sleepover:
“I need to catch a fly for Biotech class.”
Easy enough.
Flies seem to find their way into our sunroom all the time. If one didn’t end lifeless on the window… Read more...
I’ve worked with a lot of managers and a lot of individual contributors so I know what each wants from the other.
I thought it necessary to share, particularly since what each group wants is often in opposition to the other, particularly when it comes to change.
Leaders prefe… Read more...
When someone breaks something of ours – a thief cracking our window, a boss changing our schedule, a loved one not showing up — we blame them for disrupting our way of being. We villify them.
And perhaps we are right. Maybe they are the evil in our hero’s quest.
B… Read more...
I finally ran out of staples.
It took 25 years.
In my first job as a temp at the Writer’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, I went into the supply closet after hours and stole a crate of staples. Not a box, a whole crate.
The staples were for my manuscripts.
Writing was my thing… Read more...
Some days, I feel like I’ve cracked the code in making a living, that I’ve created a business where I draw people to me at the most pivotal times in their lives, a facilitator of change, a beacon of hope (and paid for it too!)
Unabashedly me. And the “me” p… Read more...
Even as a child,
I’d leave behind the chaos of the monkey bars at recess
and go lay down in the shaded dark green grass by an abandoned remnant of playground equipment: a lone pole with a chain attached at the top.
And I’d listen to the sound of the chain clanging into t… Read more...
I love my car.
Excessively so.
I wash it by hand. I never park under trees or power lines. I try not to take it out in the rain.
I talk to it. “Good to see you… Sorry about the rain.”
So when I came out of Rockin’ Jump Trampoline World and saw that my driver&#… Read more...
One thing you can never overdo is love.
“Stop loving me so much!” — said no one ever.
Iterating and reiterating love is always welcome.
Even better than that? Finding a new way to love someone, or a new thing to love about them. Or (oh yes!) a new thing to love abo… Read more...