Willie Nelson apparently once said “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.” It’s somewhat bubble-gum psychology and hardly advice that will light the world on fire.
But it’s Willie Nelson, what’s not to love about Willie!
Although we know this, it’s so hard to actively practice thinking positively.
Alessandro Michele took over as the creative director of Gucci in 2015. A relative unknown in the fashion world, he has injected a fire in Gucci that hasn’t been seen since Tom Ford’s days at the label. In these days of the celebrity fashion-director, it was unusual for an unknown to get the job and it was also unusual how he got the job.
For the last year and a half I have been eating a plant-based diet. This means I don’t eat any animal products, also known as ‘being vegan’. People have two reactions when I tell them my food preferences. A small minority are really interested and ask me a bunch of questions about what I eat and how I feel. The majority of people react to it like I am personally offending them by my food choices. The more hilarious people respond with the highly original joke “How do you know if someone is a vegan? They will tell you!”.
I've talked about Marie Kondo before: with her best-selling book 'The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up' and now a Netflix show, she's somewhat sweeping the nation. Her KonMari t-shirt folding technique changed my life. I mean, maybe not changed changed, but this self-confessed neat freak sure gets a lot of joy sparked from beautifully folded t-shirts all lined up in a row.
I’ve just finished reading ‘Molecules of Emotion’: the science behind mind-body medicine. This book is incredible, I’ve had it on my shelf for a while now and I should have read it sooner. Published in 1997, it still feels very progressive except for her recommendation to eat the very estrogen-laden soy.
My favorite advice to give people, especially young people, is "embrace your weirdness". I’m not suggesting you necessarily rock up to a job interview with blue lipstick, though in certain contexts that could work. More, I am suggesting that you do all those things you feel drawn to doing without first calculating whether it’s normal. Normal is boring. In a cluttered and crowded world ‘normal’ will not help you stand out.
I’m a huge fan of Allbirds sneakers. They are an easy company to support and support them I have. I think collectively we have ten pairs at the house and I recommend them to anyone that will listen. One friend who recently stayed with us went home and bought four pairs - he’s one of those “I shop once a year” guys, usually when he comes to visit me.
In 2018 my word for the year was CALM. I have always felt like the proverbial duck: seemingly serene and calm to others while frantically paddling under the water. I believe deeply that the best outcomes result from being truly present to my circumstances and my goal was to feel in that zone on a daily basis. Like Neo seeing through the Matrix, I wanted to unplug from the machine.
New Year, possibly time for a new gig? I have had the pleasure of working with a number of fabulous people in search of their next career squiggle, so I thought it was time to dust off my notes and share some thoughts on how to ace your interview. I will write separately on how to get an interview but first, what do you do once you are in the hot seat?
That thought “what if I did XYZ” occurs to all of us at some point. That idea to move, whether job, city or country or to start a business or? These are all things that, when acted on, have the ability to change our lives.
We know these big ideas when we have them. Your body feels different, you have immense clarity of thought, maybe your heart quickens?
Dandelions annoy me. They infest my lawn, multiplying before my eyes, with roots so deep they take serious effort to eradicate. Their yellow flowers are eye-catching, a bold and constant reminder of their existence. And they cleverly evolve into a wind-enabled, self-seeding weapon of mass lawn destruction.
I was recently asked for some tips on how to do a good on-camera interview. I am by no means an expert. But I have been doing it a while and I have learnt a lot by trial and error. Being comfortable in front of the camera is fast becoming a necessary life skill, so how do we make it look like we are having a good time?
Years ago I trained myself not to say the word ‘um’ when speaking. It’s a hard habit to break. What I learned in the process is that the critical first step was to start hearing myself saying the word. As a largely unconscious habit, I had to make it conscious before I could make a change. What I also learned was that making it conscious was all I really had to do, after that my brain largely re-wired itself.
