SigmaU Blog

When was the last time life blew up in your face? Like really blew up. During that time, did you think “well this is a character-building time in my life” or did you think “holy crap, get me through the next 24hours”?

If you’re anything like me, it’s the latter because it’s hard to see and appreciate the lesson during a storm. It’s often when we’re on the other side of it that we can appreciate that the situation happened to help us, develop us, or steer us on the right path.

I was listening to my coach and mentor today describe a rocky situation in his life. He had just purchased land which was to house his dream home. He sunk most of his savings into it and people told him he even overpaid for it. When he went to start developing the land, he was told that the land was no good for building. He persevered and found a developer willing to literally use dynamite to blow up the existing space so he could build his dream home. ...

Habit stacking is an incredible hack that I learned about in Atomic Habits by James Clear. He teaches the formula in which you take an existing habit and add a new habit to it to make it easier to tackle.

Examples of habit stacking that I do include:

Meditation while I’m stretching! It can be challenging for me to slow down and meditate so my hack is to meditate and do visualization while I’m stretching after a run.  I’m on my back anyhow, so why not build on it!

Getting my 10 pages of personal development read is done while I’m having my breakfast. Adding 24 oz. of water to the reading and eating helps me tackle my water consumption challenge which can trip me up. If I leave it too late in the day to get my gallon in, I’m up all night. So habit stacking at breakfast is imperative for me.

Habit stacking could be as small as saying something that you’re grateful for out loud as soon as your feet hit the floor in the morning.

There’s no...

Confession

I have a confession! I’m an internal optimist, which means that I tend to see the good and block out the bad.  It has served me well through most of my life until COVID.

See, if I’m honest, I never really spent any time thinking about what could possibly go wrong. I was always reinforcing my goals and dreams and had a deep sense of gratitude for all of the good in my life. While this is incredibly important, the biggest lesson that I’ve learned during COVID has been the importance of planning for the worst but remaining in hopeful anticipation of the best!

Knock Out!

During one of our team huddles, the speaker (I cannot remember which one) said these powerful words and it knocked me on the chin!

“It's not the thing that broke you that broke you. It's that you never even thought about the fact that you could be broken.”

Hot damn! It’s true! I never considered failing. Failing was never an option. Going backwards was a foreign idea...

What’s “the Suck?”

The suck is losing the big contract that you had your heart set on. The suck is being in quarantine with a limited lifestyle for over a year and counting. The suck is the lost friendship, broken marriage and devastating loss of trust. The suck is working on a project for four months, putting your heart and soul into it and seeing it fall completely flat before your very eyes! The suck comes in various forms and knocks us off kilter in different ways. We all experience it from time to time. Often it hits us over and over again and in business it can leave us feeling lonely and frustrated.

Why it hurts so much!

When we feel like failures and setbacks are coming at us from all sides, it can feel like our world is closing in on us. It hurts when we have finances on the line. It hurts when we show up, give our best and we get rejected. We question our competence and our resilience. I recently went through a massive failure that devastated me and so I...