I remember how happy I was on my graduation from the Royal Military College of Canada. The double-major I chose had the heaviest course load of any program at my college, so each fall and spring exam session was a gruelling non-stop blur. I was so happy to never endure another exam for the rest of my life!

As I transitioned to my new career, that hope was somewhat dashed, but it wasn't so bad. There were some tests, but nothing that really pushed me to my limits as did the exams I endured in college. And what tests I did have to take became fewer as I progressed in my career.

Our society is set up to minimize discomfort, but I'm not sure that it is necessarily a good thing. Without opportunities to measure our abilities, there is little incentive to further explore our potential. I'm grateful for not having to relive the pressure of test-taking like I had in college, but on the other hand, I miss the opportunity to measure my abilities and push myself to a new level of performance.

I believe it is important to proactively put challenges in front of oneself in order to provoke growth and development, before life imposes a test that one might not be ready to take.

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Let's face it – you have to be insane to leave the world of the employed and choose the path of starting your own business. The uncertainty of where your next paycheck will come from. The constant marketing and self-promotion. Always sporting a happy face at 7am or 5pm, even if you don't want to be at that networking event. The paperwork, the financial risk, the lack of structure, support and security. How does one do it?

If there is one thing you can count on in these uncertain times is that you can count on nothing except yourself. I'm not saying to trust no one, what I mean is that we are living in a time of accelerating change. What you can count on is that the way things are now can change in an instant. I sensed this in my own life fifteen years ago when I stepped out of the career track and into self-employment, and I feel the pace of change accelerating exponentially from year to year. So how to move forward without losing your way?

Being self-employed means being able to let go of the orderliness of knowing what you are going to do today, this week, a month from now, five years from now. Because most likely something will pop up today that could have the ability to completely change your life: a new client, a new opportunity, or a new situation, bad or good, within your control or outside of it.

The responsible thing to do is to earn a living. There are far easier ways of doing so than being self-employed.

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We are programmed from an early age to think: "If I just work harder, I can reach my goals faster." This attitude is reflected in Daft Punk's hit "Harder Faster Better Stronger":

Work It. Make It. Do It. Makes Us
Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger.
Work it harder, make it better,
Do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever hour after
Our work is never over

But what if this belief is false? What if working harder, instead of making my results happen faster, just contributes to burn out?

Does turning the thermostat all the way up make the room heat up faster? So why would just "working harder" accelerate success?

My realization is that I should "work smarter": find the right level of effort that yields the best results. And take care of myself better so I can build a stronger personal foundation to support results that last longer.

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Low-level anxiety about the future is an insidious form of stress that can sap your confidence just like a slow leak in your car's radiator compromises the engine's power. However, not knowing is a normal part of life. At the extreme, we do not usually know when or how we will die, yet few of us obsess about that. Instead, we waste precious mental cycles and heartbeats worrying about little things outside of our control, over which we crave an unattainable certainty.

A professional driver checks his car's tire pressure, fluid levels, belts, hoses and lights before he sets out for a day of driving. You can also take control of these confidence leaks and restore your mental and emotional energy by performing this ten-point inspection on a daily basis.

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What does the word "tactical" mean to you? It might conjure up images of heavily armed soldiers storming a building, a swarm of tanks overrunning enemy defenses, a squadron of aircraft dueling it out over the English channel. Tactics rhymes with execution, punch, getting things done.

Are you thinking tactically enough to win?

Most entrepreneurs have a big-picture idea of what they want, recorded in a business plan or vision document or a simple list of goals. But then the document stays in a drawer or on the hard drive as they stumble into reactive mode, day after day, and not accomplishing what they initially said they wanted.

Planning requires two levels of thinking: strategic and tactical. Strategic planning is vision-focused, the "who am I", "what do I want to create" and "why is this important to me".  Strategic is longer term, one, three, five, ten years out. Strategic planning is important, because it gives a context and a purpose for action.

Tactical planning is goal-focused, the "how", the detailed actions needed to move the yardstick forward toward the big vision.

Where the strategic plan can be done in the abstract, because it deals with possibilities and assumptions, the tactical plan is how we dance with reality, respond to the actual situation on the ground, execute to create results. Tactical plans are meant to be short term: created quickly, executed boldly, then superseded by the next tactical plan based on the new situation. Rapid execution of a succession of tactical plans moves you step by step towards realizing the overall strategic plan.

For the entrepreneur, thinking tactically means creating a daily, execution-focused, tactical plan. [Read more →]

Why is it so tempting to procrastinate when faced with an otherwise simple task? Even if you have the skills, knowledge, experience, resources and even a great motivation to accomplish the task, there is something that can sabotage your best intentions, and before you know it, there goes another blown promise or missed deadline...

The culprit lies within the deepest recesses of our brain, in a primitive organ - the amygdala. This "lizard brain" is the centre of our basic emotions: fear, anger and sexual desire.

If fear exists is because it the amygdala senses a threat to our survival. Since the beginning of evolution, our natural fear reflex helped us to either avoid or react to the often fatal dangers we faced.  But does this visceral reaction still serve us well in our modern environment?

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Do you have a task that you've been procrastinating on, one that gets bigger every day even though you're trying to ignore it? I usually have a couple of those on my list. These are tasks that I'm dreading for one reason or another: tediousness, refusal to face the truth, fear, shame...

The more I try to push these tasks to the future, the bigger they get, to the point that just resisting them is sapping my energy and blocking my ability to spot and respond to other opportunities.

So it's time to do something about it.   [Read more →]

So it's a New Year, but how are you going to make this different then the old one? Here are three ideas to help you make this year your best ever!

For more information:

Link to this video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBAMjY2vHto

My YouTube channel (includes my videos and other "favorites"):
http://www.youtube.com/coachdavender