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
One of the great joys in life is being surprised by a loved one.
I don’t mean like a surprise party. I mean being surprised by learning something new about them, something that didn’t fit your idea of who they are.
Like when you find out about your partner had a childho… Read more...
I just read Catcher in the Rye again.
Funny how different you can see a book the second or third or fourth time you read it.
In high school, as a mixed-race-white-looking-class-individual-child-of-divorce-latchkey-kid, I saw Holden Caulfield as a hero: a justifiably disaffected, per… Read more...
I gain empathy for a person immediately after I get to know them. We all do. That’s how it works.
But why wait until then?
I went to a Latin Jazz/Funk show because I felt the need to move around after a particularly heavy week. We got there early to beat the crowd and get a g… Read more...
I was hard at work prepping for a school fundraiser at my house.
I had just finished calibrating the stereo and microphones. I still needed to set up the auxiliary A/V system (just in case), make blackberry rosemary syrup for the cocktails, trim back the ivy on the stoop, vacuum t… Read more...
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...
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...