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“Good Job” Isn’t Good Enough: What It Means to Praise the Process

Praise can have damaging effects. To a coworker, “Wow, you learned that new software fast. You’re a genius.” To your boss, “Great sales pitch, you’re a natural at working the room.” To your daughter, “Way to go Casey. You’re so smart you got an A on that math test.”  To your wife, “You look beautiful in that dress, all done up.” What is wrong with praise like this?
 
The research of Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindsets: The New Psychology of Success, finds that praise centered on a person or his/her ability may actually sabotage performance.
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3 Tactics to Corral Nervousness and ACE Your Next Performance

If you are trying to be great at something, pursue excellence and fulfill your potential, chances are you’ve experienced the feeling of being nervous. Leading up to your big sales pitch, before briefing the board on last quarter’s numbers, before the first game of the season, preparing to give that speech – many of us have been there. The interesting thing about nervousness is that we only experience it when we want to be awesome.
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Should You Keep Your Goals A Secret?

In 2006, I announced to my friends and family that I was going to attend graduate school. Indeed, in 2007 my dad and I drove my overstuffed car of belongings nearly 2,000 miles from Virginia to Arizona where I started my graduate program. In 2010 I announced to my wife and family that I was going to start my own business. That’s exactly what I did in 2011. However, some say we shouldn’t tell a soul the things we wish to achieve.
 
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4 Powerful Lessons About Pursuing Our Potential from America’s Olympians

Over the past two weeks, I have enjoyed the athletic displays of excellence that characterize the Olympics. Sochi 2014 has been no exception. Truly there were so many great moments, performances, once-in-a-lifetime experiences and terrific stories. Among the American delegation, the stories of four athletes caught my attention because they teach us about pursuing our own potential.
 
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How The Practice of ACR Can Help You Build Stronger Relationships And Teams

 
The highest performing teams in sports and business are built on shared purpose, collective effort and strong relationships. All three are needed to achieve excellence. Let’s focus on the need for strong relationships. For team members to perform at their best, they need connectedness within the team. That is built on trust, knowing others have your back and commitment to one another. When teams aren’t operating on all cylinders, performance suffers.
 
 
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Retrain Your Resistance: 3 Steps to More Productive Thinking

Listen. Do you hear that? Do you hear that voice inside your head holding you back, telling you why you will fail and why you don’t have what it takes? Steven Pressfield calls this Resistance. You aren’t in this alone. As it turns out, we all hear voices. Most of the time our inner thoughts simmer in and out of our awareness throughout the day like a spotty radio station.
 
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3 Myths That May Be Suffocating Your Potential

As a kid, I was never the smartest in the class, the most athletic, the most…anything, really. I went with the flow, but if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t truly happy. Something just didn’t feel right. I wanted to be great and achieve more. Looking back I now realize what was going on. I was being misled and sabotaged by my own thinking. I felt unsatisfied, disappointed and unfulfilled.
 
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Mental Rehearsal: From Saving Lives to Winning at Work

While on vacation in Alaska, my wife Laura and I stopped off for a hike at Russian River Falls, a great place to see salmon running upriver. Perfect! At the trail-head, there was a sign warning of wildlife and reminding each passerby of the proper responses – something we had seen nearly everyday during our vacation.  A couple of miles into the hike, we came around a blind curve in the trail. Suddenly, silently, I felt Laura grab my right arm, as she directed my attention down the trail ahead of us. There, 40 yards away, around a slight bend in the trail, were one immense brown bear and two large cubs.
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Strengths: No Longer a Secret Sauce

In setting goals or targeting our own personal development, we typically focus on our shortcomings and weaknesses. However, refining the things we struggle with doesn’t exactly reveal our best or our greatest potential. Instead, I along with many others, propose you focus more on your strengths. When we are working, playing, and living in our strengths, we not only perform better, but we’re happier too.
 
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5:00 AM: Up And At ‘Em (How Incremental Change Made It Happen)

In 2011, I came face to face with a reality that all hard charging achievers encounter: there are only 24 hours in each day. Like many of you, I struggled to find an answer to the question, “How can I fit my ambitious expectations into those 24 hours?” The task seemed impossible. It was then that I decided the only solution was to get up earlier and rethink my morning routine in order to focus on key priority areas (thanks to Michael Hyatt and others). The next step was to figure out how to make that possible.