Smart Living Is...

When one of my clients asked me, “Where is all of this written down?” and I realized that the answer was, “Nowhere,” “Smart Living Is…” was born. “This” is a reference to the concepts and tools I’ve shared with clients over the years which they tell me have helped them. And very often these are not the concepts and tools that have been the central piece of our work together, but the “in-between” concepts and tools; the pieces that I don’t typically write down, put in print, put in visual materials; the “oh, yes, and you may want to try this.” These are the small pieces that wind up leading to large results. As I write this, I am sitting on a plane. The woman next to me just commented, “It’s the little things”— something we’ve all heard, perhaps said, many times. As I look at my work with clients all over the world, I have found this to be consistently true: that very often, the difference between success and failure in an endeavor is not a great change. It is a small change—the right change—that turns the key and transforms a situation, a person, a relationship, a career, a life. I have seen examples of all of these.

When my client asked where these things were written down, it was not a new question for me; it simply came on a day when I realized I needed to do something about it. The question itself has come in so many forms (“Can I take you with me to talk to my customer, my boss, my spouse, my boy-scout troop?” “Why don’t they teach these things in schools?” “Where were you last week when I was having that tough conversation with ____?”), and from so many people over the years. I have spent the better part of the last two decades as a consultant for people and organizations that are raising their aim higher than they have before; whose goal it is to become more successful in their particular space by increasing their personal and corporate effectiveness, and improving how they engage with customers, vendors, partners and anyone else, for that matter. My work has taken me around the globe, and allowed me to work with people from CEOs to production line personnel, at organizations as diverse in size and sphere as Microsoft, Tiffany & Co., Sony Pictures Entertainment, JP Morgan Chase and social service agencies. And wherever I have gone, and with whomever I have worked, this “small changes for large results” concept has remained a consistent principle.

“Smart Living Is…” is a curated collection of concepts and tools that I have seen become the keys for so many people’s movement forward, onward, upward. Of course, not every approach works in every situation—hence a “gallery” of approaches. Read/view an entry, think it through, consider its appropriateness to your situation. If it doesn’t seem to be a fit, keep reading. Find another approach. It is my hope that you might find something small that, for you, might yield something quite large.