Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I try hard at everything. Sometimes I try hard too much. <start advice> Slow down. Back away. Breathe. Drink a cup of coffee. Relax. Take a nap. Find your own little zen thing that helps you to not try so hard. <end advice>

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by Dwayne Phillips Competence evaporates when we are upset. There are some things we can do to work our way back to competence, but they are not easy. I recently watched a group of otherwise competent people behave in a most incompetent manner. They had an excellent excuse as they were under great emotional stress. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Give yourself permission to not be involved with an argument, especially an argument between another person and yourself. I have often seen people argue. The vast majority of the time, I told myself: I won’t become involved in that argument. In essense, I give myself permission to stay out of a discussion […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sick people are harder to heal than healthy people. That sure makes everything more difficult, but that seems to be reality. Have you ever noticed that sick people are harder to heal than people who are well? Sick people have many problems. Those problems interact with one another in complex and often […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Can you measure a manager’s good-ness by the weight of the people being managed? I contend that you can. First, a little story: I was eating lunch with Rob. Now that he had moved to a new job, he ate lunch in the cafeteria everyday. In his previous job, he rarely ate […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems odd that to purchase alcohol a person must show they have a license to operate a motor vehicle. There are things in society that seem odd to me. One is the relationship we have established between obtaining alcohol and having a license to operate a motor vehicle. If you want […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Don’t believe things at first. Be skeptical, but maintain your health. I haven’t blogged on this topic before, and that is sort of surprise.  I used to have a job where I told people that being a healthy skeptic was one of the better things you could be. In that job, people […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In the hall, in the dark corners that cannot be seen by humans, lurks a monster. We, or us, know the monster. It goes by the name “they” or “them.” I suppose this post goes under the category of “something that happens almost daily when ‘we’ talk about our problems.” Someone is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some simple life advice: eat, rest, work – in that order. Fatigue is a killer to accomplishing anything; hunger is a killer to accomplishing anything. Trying to accomplish anything while tired and hungry? Not much chance of accomplishing anything positive while a very high chance of accomplishing a mess. When I am tired, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips An experience with high self-esteem, congruent communication, and buying a car. A few years ago, my wife and I bought a new van. Our old van was ten years old, and one of our sons was about to start college. We would need a third vehicle and decided to buy a new […]

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