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
“I’ve always thought about doing that.”
I hear this from clients a lot and my response is always the same: Go do that!
This is not necessarily about your calling. It doesn’t matter if this thing becomes your career or not. What matters is that you scratch th… Read more...
On the plane ride home from the east coast, I sat next to a guitarist in a pretty well-known jam band. He’s engaged to be married, has played all the big venues in the Bay Area, loves chocolate wafer cookies (“the most underrated snack”), always travels with his… Read more...
Raise your hand if you have too much on your plate.
Okay, time to delegate. The first step is figuring out what to unload. We all usually make it to this step and then get stuck. We know what we want to get rid of but we keep holding onto it and then perseverate on why we’re… Read more...
I’ve gotten rid of all my recurring nightmares — the big snake dream, the naked dream, the skunk dream, the homework dream.
My trick?
I bring the real me into the dream world. It’s like showing an architect a house they built. They know all the rooms and doors. Th… Read more...
I’ve been keeping a journal most of my life.
It started in 9th grade at the demand of Mr. V, my English teacher, who I thought I was fooling when I crammed in a week’s worth of journal entries during homeroom. But thinking is thinking and writing is writing; it doesn&… Read more...
One time in my youth while on mushrooms in the woods of Iowa, in the middle of a cross-country trip out West, I came to a crossroads.
Literally.
I had strayed from the group, mostly because I was afraid to sit in the tall grass where the snakes were.
I stood at the fork in the road… Read more...
I think we’re present in the wrong emotions. All of us are experts in obsessing over things we forgot to do, did wrong, or can’t control. We perseverate on our failings more than anything else, and I guess that’s about survival: study what went wrong so you can … Read more...
I learned long ago that the bad feelings don’t go anywhere, especially if you try to pretend they’re not there. You
No, the only option, really, in order to get them out, is to let them live inside of y… Read more...
No matter how great yesterday was, we tend to plateau. Eventually, we get bored of our days (again) and long for NEWNESS: new experiences, new feelings, the rewarding climb to the next plateau.
This may sound crazy and you may hate me for saying this but I think we hide our own ma… Read more...
Grassroots movements look very similar in the beginning:
A handful of people, tired but excited, sitting in someone’s living room or in a church rec room (thank God for churches!) on a weekday evening, big smiles and big ideas.
Not much gets done in the first meeting. It take… Read more...