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
When we leave a job or a partner, or a residence after so many years, that feeling of being lost is bound to surface. Options overwhelm. Distance suffocates.
The mistake we often make is in where we look to reorient ourselves. We tend to look out into the woods for a marker or the… Read more...
Staying in the same job for several years can almost be like falling into a depression.
It swallows you up and that’s all you see. It’s not so much whether the job is good or bad; it’s just that you can easily lose the ability to compare your surroundings to thos… Read more...
If you’re having trouble getting started, you’re probably starting too big.
Take a page from reporters and novelists. When telling a story, they usually start with tiny details: the doorway of a building, the button of a jacket, a word, a name, an action. Big themes ha… Read more...
The space bar on my keyboard has a noticeable indentation right where my thumb hits it. It’s so smooth and streamlined that, when I first noticed it, I thought it must have come like that. What a perfect resting place for a thumb!
But time and erosion are more diligent than … Read more...
I found an incredible deal for a TV, bought it, and then returned it because it had a crack in it. While waiting to hear back from the company, I started to second-guess my buying decision. I went to Best Buy and looked at 50 other TVs, read their little tags, talked to an overze… Read more...
The most interesting clients I work with have such tangled, meandering work histories, they’re often misinterpreted as lost, noncommittal, or passion-less, when, indeed, it’s just the opposite.
It’s these folks who are so committed to their passions, to their ind… Read more...
I’ve always loved drinking, so it was hard to give up my scotch on the rocks in the evening. No more beer with dinner. Now, it’s tea with honey and water water water. As the decades go by and death’s become more like a relative than a cartoon character, I’… Read more...
Novelists get to choose their plot points, to weave efficient storylines without excess. At least that’s how it appears…
In reality, novelists know writing is mostly a reductive process: rounds and rounds of trimming out everything unnecessary. It’s these strateg… Read more...
Repetition is the origin of habit. So, in some ways, our jobs – inevitably repetitious to some degree – are formulas for the habits we see in our lives. The patterns we run at work migrate into our personal pursuits. The metaphors we use, the way we approach relations… Read more...
I did a webinar this week and right before signing in, I got butterflies in my stomach. The same thing happens when I do karaoke, when writing to publishers, or whenever I enter a new room or prepare to have a difficult conversation.
The instinct is to retract, to get rid of the b… Read more...