There is a lot of talk in our society about finding balance in life. For me, sometimes, it seems like there is so much pressure and focus on this topic that I have to have everything in perfect balance every moment of every day and, if I don’t, I’m failing. Often, this perceived failure causes me to end up even more out of balance as I try to drop what I’m doing to fix the imbalance which, inherently, causes more imbalance. If you’ve ever seen the I Love Lucy episode where they are working on the factory line, yep, sometimes it feels just like that!

Thinking Outside of the Box is a phrase often used but rarely done. It can be easy for us to say we want to or are thinking outside of the box but the very fact that we are still thinking about the box indicates that we are still constrained by that box. The idea, however, remains important as the practice of out of the box thinking is critical to the health and growth of individuals and organizations. If we don’t figure out how to master thinking outside of the box, how can we have breakthrough innovations and ideas?

Earlier this year, in a blog titled Here’s to the Crazy Ones, I talked about how we approach failure and our attitude towards it. Recently, I came across a video from Simon Sinek where he is talking about how you train your mind to perform under pressure and I wanted to share that.

Five weeks ago, I sent out my first blog of the year with a statement that I was planning to hold a rhythm of adding a blog article every one to two weeks. This is the second blog of the year. I almost ran out of fingers on one hand by the time I figured out that I completely and utterly failed to meet this goal! So, why set goals at all? How do we handle failure? How do we avoid failure…or is that even the right question?

Growth is a really interesting concept. On one hand, you could call this one of the most obvious values to have. On the other hand, it is a value that many organizations easily overlook but spend a lot of time figuring out how to achieve.

For us, growth is not a goal in and of itself as much as it is an outcome. We believe that when we are doing the right things for the right people and for the right reasons our actions will help them grow which will cause us to grow as well. To this end, growth is an outcome but a very necessary outcome.

We all have things that are important to us but it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle of everyday life and forget what’s important. We can either completely forget our values or, at the very least, end up making small compromises that end up getting us far off of our path. I struggle with this as well.