I’ve been doing a lot of speaking recently to groups of job-seeking professionals (one reason I’ve been MIA on the internet for two weeks), and predictably I tend to get questions about dealing with job interview anxiety.
But if I get the chance to explore the issue more deeply with people, I often find that they’re [...]

In the last post in this series, we talked about how developing the ability to say “no,” and protect our time, is important for making the kind of progress we want in our creative work.
In this post, I’ll discuss how it can help our creativity to set another kind of boundary — to stop blaming ourselves [...]

Just wanted to keep you all updated on the state of play here at Edgar HQ and on Edgar Force One — I can’t say which one I’m at right now for national security reasons: 
New Bay Area Meetup
I’ve started a Meetup group in San Jose, California, which I’m using to offer free evening [...]

If someone told you that a piece you wrote is garbage and you’re a moron for writing it, could you object to their behavior?
When I work with people who are having trouble starting a project, this is often an area where they feel blocked.  They don’t trust their ability to protect themselves against mistreatment.  They [...]

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be holding a full-day workshop, which I’m calling the Inner Productivity Intensive, in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, June 12, 2010.
This will be an intimate, small-group affair, limited to ten people, where we’ll be deeply exploring the challenges each participant is facing in their work, and how mindfulness [...]

If you’re a blogger, or you do any other kind of writing, I’ll bet you’re familiar with the nagging worry that you “don’t have the right” to say what you’re saying.  Perhaps you’ve been writing a piece about happiness, for instance, and started wondering if it was okay for you to write it without a [...]

Recently, I told a distant relative about the career change I’d made, the book I just released, and a few other things I’ve been up to.  “I would have been too scared to do all that,” she said.  “You must be a pretty courageous person.”
This conversation got me thinking:  am I courageous?  If being courageous [...]

Most of the writing I do here is in service of my mission to help people find more peace and joy in their work.  If I do say so myself, I think I’ve written some valuable stuff over the two years this blog has been around, and I also get the sense that sometimes my relentless focus on my [...]

Do you think you need anxiety to get motivated at work?  Several people I talked to recently told me as much.  If they didn’t worry about finishing their project on time, what others might say about their work, and so on, they think they’d never get anything done.  They’d just kick back on the couch, grab [...]

As some of you know, I recently released a book called Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work.  While most productivity books are about techniques for rearranging your outer circumstances, like making to-do lists and organizing your inbox, Inner Productivity is about dealing with obstacles to getting work done that [...]