A White Man’s Racial Stereotypes

I stared at the piece of paper in front of me, taken aback by how insightful and obvious my notes were. Learning as Leadership had organized a race and gender dialogue conference, and seven of the participants were gathered in a ...

Procrastinating on Uncomfortable Conversations

Note: This post is the final in a four part series. In this final post of the series on emotional clarity as a pathway to self-discipline, we’ll examine how these tools can help leaders breakthrough the most common form of ...

Learning Leads to Self-Discipline

In last week’s post, we examined the power of using the emotional clarity of contribution to move beyond our fears and find a higher purpose for taking action.  This week, we explore the other tool for emotional clarity: learning goals. In previous posts, I’ve been discussing my resistance to writing a book as an example of how emotional clarity can lead to discipline. This week, I’d like to offer up a different example to highlight the importance of learning goals: My role as CEO of LaL.

The Emotional Clarity Of Contribution Unleashes our True Potential

Note: This post is the second in a series. In last week’s post, we looked at the role fear plays in preventing us from getting things done and its impact on self-discipline. This week, we continue with the topic by moving beyond the exploration of our fears to finding a more powerful place of emotional clarity. Once you’ve answered the question “What are my fears about this (project, task, conversation)?” you have achieved a certain degree of emotional clarity about why you are not disciplined.

Clarity, Not Willpower, Generates Self-Discipline

Procrastinate? Can’t get yourself to exercise regularly? Or not eat that greasy food that is so bad it’s good? You know that you need to have a difficult conversation about performance with your direct report, but keep putting it off? Many of our clients, even those who are highly accomplished and productive, complain that they lack discipline in key areas of their life. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find that ‘willpower’ (“I just need to do it”) is a largely useless strategy to overcoming internal resistance. Over the next four posts, I’ll explore the role that emotional clarity has in creating discipline and offer some practical ways you can get unstuck from any project, goal or to-do you have been blocked from taking action on. When I first