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A journey of personal and professional growth

Hi! I’m Matt K Head, executive coach. I help professionals carve a fulfilling path to success. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for The Looking Glass, a weekly newsletter of timeless wisdom to ponder on your journey of growth.
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#20 - 09 Sep 2022 - Read Online​
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Hello friends,
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Thanks again for being here!

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Here’s an insight, a question, and a quote I reflected on over the last week.

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💡 Happiness vs achievement

I heard this powerful insight from Marshall Goldsmith on The Knowledge Project podcast:

Too many of us block our own happiness. We tell ourselves, “I will be happy when I achieve X.” Now “X” could be a million different things:

• Quit my job
• Start my business
• Hit $10k a month in revenue
• Travel to Europe
• Buy a home
• Get married
• Start a family

Marshall highlights this as a critique of Western culture, where we often prize achievement over our happiness.

But the insight here is powerful; you can be happy without depending on achievement.

You can probably think of someone you know who is successful but miserable. And another who is happy but hasn’t achieved much.

So why are you so hard on yourself?

Marshall recommends that instead, we should learn to love the process, do our best, connect it to a higher purpose, and achieve what we achieve.

Stated another way, enjoy the process more than the outcome.

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❔ Using regrets

Dan Pink has a new book called The Power of Regret. I haven’t read it yet, but I have added it to my list. I am intrigued by tapping into the power of our regrets. Rather than seeing our regrets as negative, we can reframe our regrets into something we can learn from. Regrets highlight what we genuinely value and guide us to where we can be better in the future.

One powerful way to use regrets is to look at what we value now and consider how we might have future regrets based on our actions.

For example: - You value kindness. But you realise you aren’t so pleasant to your colleagues. You might regret this in the future. So start being nicer today. - You value friendship. But you haven’t really kept in touch with your old friends and feel you are drifting away. You don’t want to be alone when you are older. So make an effort to catch up.

My battle of regret here is the temptation to stay in a steady, well-paid, but lacklustre salary job vs doubling down on chasing my business dream with my coaching business.

It’s easy to play it safe but hard to take the risk and start a business.

But what will I regret in, say, 30 years? I know for sure I would regret staying in a dull job for the money over pursuing my dream.

​Dan Pink’s thinking on regrets inspires today’s question:
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Are you focusing on “not failing” vs “succeeding”?
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He wisely highlights that people overwhelmingly regret not taking the chance.

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💬A Quote to Ponder – We can still be grateful for what we have
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If we keep hating on our life, we effectively train ourselves always to hate our current life. So even as we find our passion and progress to higher levels of success in the future, we will keep finding something to be unhappy about, instead of appreciating what we have.

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Cheers!

Matt K Head

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