Joshua Gold Coaching

"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. 

I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.

 It's their mistake, not my failing." Physicist Richard Feynman, on dealing with expectations. 

I know that you have heard this before. It's all about the stories that other people tell us. Other people's expectations of who we ought to be to the point we think we are supposed to be. We want to please those people, so we spend years trying to be that person. Just to wake up one day trying to figure out how I got here, feeling trapped and not knowing what to do next. If you are lucky, you are finding this out early enough in your life that you don't have the responsibilities of other people, like a wife and children, a mortgage, and car payments. College education to look forward to. You get the picture. Don't get me wrong; I am not saying that should deter you from what you want to do or who you want to be. It...

When Warren Buffet was asked the most critical thing that a person needs to succeed, his answer was Focus.

If you don’t have focus, and I will add clarity to the mix, you will be hard-pressed to have the success you desire. Of course, you can still have success in life, though not to the level that one wants.

So what does it take to have this type of focus and clarity? How to sustain it consistently throughout your life. Like life itself, there is an ebb and flow. As you are traveling through this journey, your lens will be in and out of focus. Your objective is to keep it focused for as long as you can. As it starts to get cloudy, fuzzy by circumstances arising out of your control that fog up the lens, readjust, pivot, change it so that you can get back to being productive and back to where it is focused again.

The stronger the WHY, the easier the how becomes. The stronger the WHY easier it is to Focus. To be clear as to the direction that you want to go.

Great! We have...

"I am going to stay out of my own way today, I am going to keep my Ego in check, and I am going to fight The Resistance every step of the way. "

Easier said than done for sure. So how do we do this? 

First, be aware that these are just obstacles in our lives. Remembering that obstacles are opportunities for growth. With that mindset, how can you not have a great day? A failure is only one if you don't learn from it. Any day that you know something new is a good day. So let's start from that perspective. 

I am going to stay out of my own way: 

How are we going to do that? Well, to say there is one correct answer is foolish. So I am going to just make some suggestions. Things that have worked for me in the past and are still working. Realize that as you grow and change, the actions you need to take will need to change. So be flexible. 

1. Set up your day the night before. In other words, have a good evening routine. Know what your day will look like...

Are You Deserving?

Is it a tricky question or a trick question? I've heard people say, "you are what you're committed to. " Measuring this by looking to see what you have in your life. At your relationships, at your bank account, at yourself in the mirror. What you currently have and what you see is what you are committed to. You can also say that's what you deserve. Don't mistake that for what your potential is but what you deserve. Not what you are worthy of but again, what you deserve. The work that you have put in each and every day is what you currently have in your life. So if you don't like what you see, you have can choose to change it. But you need to be brutally honest with yourself. You have to be truthful. Otherwise, nothing is going to change.

This is what I was faced with and the question, amongst many others, that I ask myself often. If things aren't going as I planned or hoped, am I deserving? Usually, the brutally honest answer is no. There are things that I...

A while back I wrote a piece called “Distraction Assassinators” and described what I considered the top 5 distractions in life and workplace and how to eliminate or in my case ASSASSINATE them ( you can get the pdf by going on my website, www.joshuagoldcoaching.com, and downloading it). It was a bit tongue and cheek with Lucy Lui as O-Ren Ishii, her character in Kill Bill, on the cover of the piece.

The other afternoon I was sitting at my desk trying to get some work done. My superpower time is before noon. So any Frogs that need to be consumed better happen then. So you can imagine that I was having a difficult time focusing on what I had wanted to do and the words came to me like an almost out-of-body experience, “quiet the noise — focus on the essential”. I imagine this is what Kevin Costner felt like when he heard a voice from afar say “ if you build it they will come”.

If I break it down, we are dealing with two very fundamentally...