I never thought of myself as irresponsible. It felt like I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders. After all, I was responsible for finding new business, making money, keeping employees busy and customers happy. Every day was an obstacle course.

I never liked the term “people pleaser” because it sounds like a weakness and I was glad I didn’t have it. But I’ve recently had a sobering realization.  I’m an approval seeker. And it’s the same thing, just a different name. I’ve enrolled

Every day you choose who you’re going to be. You do it by interpreting the world around you and deciding who you are in relation to it. It’s almost instantaneous. A prospect avoids you. An employee lets you down. A contractor ghosts you.

I had the capability to make money before I had the capacity to keep it.  Money signified freedom to me, and owning a business made me feel important, so I was willing to do whatever I could to succeed.  I took risks, made

Last week I wrote about how we don’t perceive reality as it is.  Plato took that idea much further 2,400 years ago. In his Allegory of the Cave, he tells the story of people who spend their lives facing a cave wall. The

We all have blind spots. Literally. There’s one in each eye, where the optic nerve connects to the retina. We don’t perceive this hole in our vision because the brain automatically fills in the gaps. It predicts what should be there based on

You’re not doing it on purpose. That’s the thing about automatic patterns. You’re not dumb, lazy, or weak.  You’re doing what we do instinctively under pressure: looking for the fastest exit from an uncomfortable feeling. The problem is the exit has a toll.

A client came to me convinced she was too combative. Her team told her so, her husband told her so, and she’d spent three years trying to fix it.  What she didn’t know was that same quality helped her build a $15M business

Some founders learn to manage teams and end up loving it. Others don’t. I didn’t realize which one I was for years. I just thought something was wrong with me. Most service businesses are started by people with expertise. That was me and