First Post -- Why This Blog and Who Is The Author?

Welcome to Success Under Pressure! I thought I would use this first post to let you know a little bit about why I am creating this blog and what I hope the blog can do for you. I also want to share a little bit about me, the author of the blog.

Why this blog—what do I hope to offer you?

Now, I hesitate to say that I’d like the focus of this blog to be “success.” That word has so many prescribed meanings like financial success or power or whatever. Those prescribed ideas can really get us into trouble. Even when we’re successful at reaching our goals, those fixed ideas of success is or should be can continue to create a lot of negative internal pressure (i.e. stress) , make us feel like we’ve never got enough, that we’re not enough. That’s not the kind of life I deserve, and you neither.

If you look up the word “success” in a dictionary, you’ll see it’s really just (according to American Heritage Dictionary): “The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.” Success is knowing what you want and then going after and getting it. (OK, easier said than done, but I’m committed to helping you in this area.)

To me, success is about going after things that matter, and doing the “going after” in ways that feel good while you’re “going along.” I’d like our version of success to be about strategies for getting focused and clear about you really want, and refreshing that continuously as you learn and life changes. Knowing what you truly want professionally and what you want personally and having strategies to reduce the noise, the pressure. Let’s learn to enjoy the process of building your life toward those successful results.

About the author—the engineer who decided to focus on people instead

I have always been interested in personal development and success. I have worked in the success field for almost 10 years. I regularly deliver seminars on a number of topics like time management, personal effectiveness, leading and working with others. I also coach individual clients and enjoy working them to help them get great results and achieve success on their terms.

I’m committed to talking, yes, about the big questions and big picture stuff of success. But I’m also committed to giving you something you can immediately wrap your arms around and start using as a process to get results from now. I believe, when it comes to teaching, you’ve got to meet people where they are. These days, I meet a lot of people that want the simple, the practical, the tactical. Things that will help them to alleviate some of the pressure that they’re feeling right now. I promise to make sure we have plenty of that in this blog.

I started my career as an engineer (I still get into trouble around the house trying to fix things that I think I can fix but am technically not qualified to fix). Starting as an engineer, and retaining that mindset as I’ve moved through other careers, I’ve always enjoyed looking at things systematically. I believe that a lot of the results we get today have much to do with the systems we have in place. By changing the things we do every day in small, but significant ways, we can get wildly different results. wildly different results. I promise.

My life isn’t wild (or crazy), but it does look wildly different, and more importantly, it feels wildly different, than it did even a few years ago. Building our lives in a positive direction is fun, and very useful. As the pressure continues to grow in our lives, building our lives will become even more necessary.

If you don’t have a strategy, as the futurist Alvin Toffler said, you become part of someone else’s strategy. That’s especially true as the pressure grows in our lives. I’ll talk in my next post (a continuation of this one) about how I believe the pressure is growing, and growing, and growing, and – well you get the idea – in our daily lives.