How's Life?

"How's life?" is the introductory phrase usually spoken with the intent there will be no answer. However, let's imagine the question is genuinely asked anticipating an honest answer: "How's life...is it happy, pleasant, good, or maybe even meaningful?"

Martin Seligman in his book, Authentic Happiness, writes of three forms of happiness:

1. Pleasant Life: a life full of positive emotion about the past, present, or future

2. Good Life: a life where you are using your "signature strengths" - those things at which you are good.

3. Meaningful Life: knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying them in the service of something larger than you are.

It's worth contemplating what type of life we want and then intentionally choosing to live it.

"Clientele" - A Customer Service Verb

Management guru Tom Peter's wrote in a blog that businesses have wasted opportunities every day because they do not "clientele." He defined it: "to create a relationship-building encounter with your customer, so that the relationship with the store is better when she leaves than it was when she came in."

How is your clientele?

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What Lies Within

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It takes intentional effort to commit to the process of finding what lies within. The tyranny of the urgent will be those things which we perceive as more important and more urgent. In reality they attempt to steal from that which is truly important...what lies within us.