You can live your life on purpose. It begins by creating a “Life Plan.” This won’t insulate you from life’s many adversities and unexpected twists and turns, but it will help you become an active participant in your life, intentionally shaping your own future.

Too often, business owners launch into the new year without a clear plan. Here are 6 ingredients for making an effective strategic plan.

If you’ve fallen behind on a goal you hoped to achieve, you’re in good company. You still have agency in this story. To rescue your goals, start by considering these 4 simple steps.

By casting an inspiring, practical picture of what you want for your organization, you can reap these 3 defining benefits.

Vision and strategy are both important. But there is a priority to them. Vision always comes first. Always. If you have a clear vision, you will eventually attract the right strategy.

Everyone’s heard of a to-do list. But what about a not to-do list? I know of no better way to reduce your workload than this simple tool.

We all know the physical benefits to running. However, people who don’t run, often miss the non-physical ones. Here are three.

We usually take our workplaces for granted, don’t we? But skyscrapers are colossal achievements. Architects must design them with variables like winds, earthquakes, communication, traffic, and the surrounding environment in mind. It’s impossible to imagine building one without architectural plans. But here’s the thing: The lives of everyone working inside those towers are infinitely more […]

[guestpost]Matt Perman is the former director of strategy at Desiring God and is now an author, consultant, and speaker on productivity and leadership from a faith-based perspective. He is the author of the recently released What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done. He blogs What’s Best Next and you […]

If you are anything like me, you’re already thinking about the year ahead. How will it be different than this one? What might be possible? What do I want to accomplish? It’s time to begin thinking about goal-setting for 2014.

When I speak publicly, I often ask how many people believe in the power of written goals. Every hand shoots up. Yet when I ask how many of them have written goals for this year, very few hands go up. This always surprises me, given the fact most people know intuitively (and research has proved) […]

I face a dragon named Lethargy every morning. It has three heads: spiritual, physical, and intellectual. If I don’t slay this dragon before breakfast, he usually gets the best of me.

In this short video, a classical violist is interrupted by the ring of a cell phone in the audience. Notice how he turns an obstacle into an opportunity.

One of the ways I have learned to take control of my time is by planning My Ideal Week. I then use this as a template for planning each week.

Yet, they wanted us to trust them and invest in their future as though it had already happened. … At the end of the day, you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

You don’t have to make every experience in life a WOW. If everything is a WOW, then pretty soon, nothing is a WOW. But you must be able to identify which experiences you want to make a WOW, and then have a process—or a “technology”—for creating that outcome. I call this “the how of WOW.” It involves asking five questions.

The secret to staying on top of your personal and professional life is to schedule regular times for review and reflection. You need to assess where you’ve come from and where you are going.

I have been setting goals in one form or another for years. Every now and then, I stumble across an old list of goals. I am always fascinated by how many of the things I write down come to pass. And, I must confess, it often happens despite the fact that I do nothing more than write it down.