Tag: Books
reading changes your brain and challenges your presumptions, pick up a book and install new software!
check out my recommended reading list at https://turningleafs.com/book-list/
book a free coaching consulting appointment https://calendly.com/turningleafs
reading changes your brain and challenges your presumptions, pick up a book and install new software!
check out my recommended reading list at https://turningleafs.com/book-list/
book a free coaching consulting appointment https://calendly.com/turningleafs
They also find accountability partners that help them to stay the course. It doesn’t matter what the industry is or their specific profession. Aristotle said, “We are what we do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”
The pursuit of personal improvement can be as addictive as some substances. It can cloud the vision of those on the path seeking personal growth, like the fog in a mountain valley. It is not so easy to consider it a balance between work and family life. It is more a balance of development between different personality traits, or as Ben Franklin called them “virtues”.
The individual that can maintain a steady pace and a balance between the different virtues is the one that over time has the greatest growth. In Ben Franklin‘s life, he picked 13 virtues and rotated them every week throughout the year. This model allowed him to spend four weeks a year on each “virtue”. Over time, it became evident to him that success in each “virtue” multiplied across the others.
I would start thinking about them the 3rd week of December and gauge how I had done the previous year. Of course, like many resolutions, it was pass or fail and the changes I wanted to make felt like a mountain l would never be able to scale.
One April, when I was 14 years old, my mom pulled me aside to chat with me about how I was doing. She was greatly concerned, because as the oldest, I was getting the brunt of my parents fighting. She wanted to give me some guidance and help me change despite the example being set at home. She knew I would need encouragement to be willing to not follow in my parent’s mistakes.
Her talk provided me with some insight into people and, for a while, it stuck. Of course, I then went on to be a rebellious teen. Once I realized that I was only hurting myself with my decisions, I decided that I needed to get serious about changing me. It took a few days for me to work through the old thinking and start to weed out the bad ideas about myself and others. Within a week, I had made some sweeping changes in my life. I cut out a lot of media, music, and books that weren’t helping me in order to change my thoughts and attitude. I know that for my few friends these steps seemed extreme.