JOEL A. GARFINKLE is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world's leading companies. He is the author of seven books, including

According to a survey conducted by U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in 2010, approximately 18% of corporate directors are women and 14.5% are minorities. To put this into perspective, the number of women and minorities on corporate boards is less than half what would be expected based on their proportion of the general population.

The fact that there is a discrepancy is indisputable, but the reason for the shortfall is not so clear. Is it blatant discrimination, or is there something else at work here? The answer is probably a combination of both.

I have worked with many women and minorities in my executive coaching business and I have found that when they apply the principles of perception, visibility, and influence—what I refer to as the PVI model—they are able to advance their careers faster and further than they previously thought possible.  They do this by earning the respect of their colleagues and bosses, becoming known throughout the company as someone who can be depended on to solve problems and deliver quality work, and learning how to exert their influence at all levels of the organization.

Many of the challenges faced by women and minorities in the workplace can be attributed to cultural differences and differences in the way boys and girls are raised. These challenges can be overcome if you are aware of them and adapt your behavior to change the way you are perceived.

Here are three challenges women and minorities might face, along with strategies you can use to overcome them.

1.  Not Getting the Respect You Deserve

People may perceive you differently just because you are a woman, or just because of the color of your skin. Yes, it’s unfair. But if you want to keep climbing the career ladder, you’ve got to do what you can to replace any negative perceptions related to your gender or ethnicity with positive ones.

To do this, ask your boss and peers for honest feedback about how they perceive you.  Then create a plan to change those perceptions. Asking for feedback first is essential. Without it, you’ll never know if you’re on the right track with your perception management plan.

You may not agree with the feedback, but if people perceive you in a certain way, their perception is their reality regardless of whether you feel it accurately represents you. Find out why you are perceived the way you are and take steps to correct the problem. For example, if you never speak up at meetings, you might be perceived as someone who is not a team player or who has no ideas to contribute. You can change this perception by preparing what you want to say ahead of time and looking for opportunities to be a more active participant.

2.  Going Unnoticed

Girls are often told to be quiet and keep their opinions to themselves. A similar challenge is faced by people who come from different cultural backgrounds. For example, in India, people are taught not to bring attention to themselves. Japanese employees come from a culture where it is considered rude to say no or to appear disagreeable. All of these employees will have trouble getting noticed at work, and if no one knows about their successes, they won’t get credit for them when it comes time for a review. So even if it is uncomfortable, you must take steps to make sure your contributions are recognized.

One way to ensure that you get credit for the work you have done is to point it out to your boss and your boss’s boss. Send regular e-mail updates to keep your superiors apprised of the progress you have made. If you can, quantify your results by determining how much money was saved or revenue earned as a result of your efforts.

Doing great work and making sure your boss knows about it is a start, but you need to make sure that other people in the company know how great you are too. In many companies, promotions are given only after an inter-departmental meeting in which each manager tries to sell his or her candidate as the right one for the job. Your chances for promotion will be much greater if every manager at that meeting knows who you are.

To become visible in other departments, look for opportunities to get involved with interdepartmental projects. Ask your boss to help you identify projects that will help you stand out and increase your visibility with other managers. Also look for reasons to copy other managers and executives on the e-mail updates you send to your boss each week. If you just found a way to save 16 percent on a certain component used in the manufacturing process, for example, the purchasing manager might appreciate being copied on this accomplishment.

3.  Being Treated Unfairly

Women often find they have a hard time speaking up at meetings—not because they have nothing to contribute, but because the guys get favored when it comes to floor time. Often, if a man and a woman start speaking at the same time, it is the man who is given permission to speak first. In situations like this, be proactive and request a meeting of your own with the person who runs the meetings. He probably doesn’t even realize what he is doing. Express your desire to contribute more during these sessions and ask for his help to make sure you get a chance to talk when you have something to say.

Do you find yourself being completely excluded from meetings or after-work activities? This may be intentional or just an oversight. It is possible that no one tells you about the meeting because they think it is outside the scope of your position. In that case, getting yourself included may be as simple as mentioning to the person in charge that you want to be involved. If that doesn’t work, try talking to your boss about the situation. Be prepared to give convincing reasons why you need to be at that meeting.

After-work activities are an entirely different matter. These social engagements are technically not part of the work day, but being invited along—or not—can make or break you. Being left out of the discussions that take place at these events can be a huge disadvantage if you want to climb to the next level in your career.

If you are missing out on social engagements that are important to your career, try to find a way to get yourself included. Build relationships with the participants and express your interest in joining them. Once they get to know you better, they might decide they want you to be part of their group.

When it comes to social gatherings, recruit an advocate within the group who is willing to help you. Ask someone who has some clout to speak up on your behalf and try to get you invited along next time.

Perception, Visibility, and Influence

These are just a few of the career-building strategies you’ll find in Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. By applying the three key principles of the PVI model—perception, visibility, and influence—you’ll be able to improve the way you are perceived at work, increase your visibility in the organization, and learn how to exert influence at every level of your company—regardless of your position, race or gender.

In her new book Brilliance by Design, my friend Vicki Halsey shares that helping someone discover his or her own unique brilliance may be the greatest legacy you can leave, whether you are a leader, parent, friend, teacher, or coach. But we may be missing the opportunity to help others find and claim their brilliance in our efforts to be the brilliant one.

Use the following tips to build synergistic relationships by unleashing the brilliance in others.

1. Learn about people’s passions. You can’t connect with others if you don’t know anything about them. So, who are they? Ask lots of questions. What inspires or drives them? What are their goals? What have they learned recently?
2. Get over yourself. Flip your focus from yourself to the other person. When you say to yourself, “He hates me” or “She thinks I’m stupid,” you are making someone else’s behavior about you. Change your perspective. For instance, if you are thinking, “I want her to think I’m smart” flip your focus to “I want her to be smart.”
3. Listen to their stories. Stories help people relate to our collective wisdom and remember ideas. Tell your own stories and listen carefully to theirs.
4. Make connections. When interacting with small groups, be a “connector” by calling out each person’s unique talents or strengths. Help people connect the dots and see that two or more heads really are better than one.
5. Avoid assumptions. Avoid making judgments or assumptions about people, and concentrate instead on learning more about them and caring about their success. Take the learner path, not the judger path.
6. Set people up to win and to BE smart. Everyone has something to offer, so give others the chance to shine. Throughout your interaction, ask questions that spotlight the other person’s knowledge and skills. If you are teaching them something, help people to “get it right” in their own unique way.

To contact Vicki Halsey, or to order her book, please go to www.kenblanchard.com.

Does how we perceive our own intelligence and abilities determine our success?

Meghna heads up the High Impact Teams consulting practice at Ferrazzi Greenlight with Keith. She is based in New York City. If you have questions or want to increase your team's impact, contact her at mmajmudar at ferrazzigreenlight dot com.

In the past week, I’ve asked a couple of close friends for a very difficult piece of feedback: Why am I having such a hard time meeting someone special? What could I be doing differently?

I wanted the truth - and boy did they give it to me!

And it stung. However, about 3 seconds after hearing the feedback, the sting wore off and I knew what I had to do differently. It would have been hard to swallow the feedback if ... well, if it wasn’t so right. I implemented some changes immediately and saw results.

I've asked for this kind of feedback before, but this is the first time I got real feedback, not feel-good cliches. What did I do differently?

1. I sought feedback without pre-judging the answer: Some of the feedback I had heard before, but this time I didn’t try to deny it. I just accepted it as objectively true, though my experience may have felt different. When we coach our clients on listening to difficult feedback, we tell them that the only correct answer is thank you and then you decide whether to act on what was said

2. I created an environment where candid feedback could be shared: I asked the question with an action-oriented mindset. I let it be known that I was going to move on their advice quickly, and I would not breakdown - so they felt comfortable giving me the real deal.

3. I chose people who are as committed to my success as I am: These were friends who want the same thing for me as I do – they won’t let me fail and I know they totally have my back! So I felt safe to really hear their advice, and act.

Have you recently received good feedback, acted on it, and got results?

Here's part of a Tip we sent out a while back address just this question. It's an exercise called "Dial Up/Dial Down" that we use at FG and in corporate engagements. It's effective!

* * *

At my company we have an exercise we call "Dial Up/Dial Down." We use it to push each other to constantly develop our strengths and improve on our weaknesses. We introduce it to clients too. You can use in your own office, in your family, with a buddy, or in any kind of group that cares about each other's success. You can do it alone, of course, but it's not nearly as effective when there's no one to hold you accountable.

Here's how it works: We create a chart on a giant Post-It ® page, with all of our names, plus columns for "Dial Up" and "Dial Down."

The "Dial Up" column is for skills or behaviors an individual wants to put into action more often. These could be strengths the person already has but needs to push more to the fore, or areas where improvement or learning is needed.

The "Dial Down" column is for negative or unconstructive habits and personality traits that someone wants to cut back.

We go around the room and team members each volunteer a dial-up and a dial-down that they plan to work on. If they have trouble deciding, they can call on the group for help. Sometimes examples help inform people's thinking, so at the bottom of this email I've listed some common dial ups and downs.

Everyone's commitments go in writing on the chart, which hangs in our conference room as a reminder to the person, and to everyone else, of the change they plan to make.

At the next staff meeting, we self-evaluate on a 0-5 scale how well we each did. If your team's relationships are strong enough -- and that should certainly be a goal to work toward -- you can also have peers offer up their evaluations. Believe me, opening the floor to that feedback keeps the process honest like nothing else. But it requires that your team is tight enough to feel safe giving and receiving candor.

Does your office have any weekly accountability in place around behavioral change?

I had many people help me in unexpected ways: an Intel executive I met in business school, the managing partner of my old firm, and even a couple of ex-clients. They didn’t offer me answers, instead they shared knowledge and gave input based on their experience. They didn’t have a magical key to unlock the door to my next job …but they felt along the wall with me, until I found the right door and unlocked it myself.

From this experience, I learned the following lessons:

1.    Mentorship starts with generosity…and vulnerability. Yes, there is the gift of time from the mentor, but equally important is being vulnerable and sharing where you really need help.

2.   Be specific about the feedback and input you want. Don’t just ask the mentor to “help” you, share the specific questions you are struggling with so that the advice you receive is immediately useful.

3.   Stay in touch. Let your mentor know how things are going from time to time. I try to stay in touch every with an e-mail or hand-written card every 2-3 months – this way, if you need their help again, you won’t feel awkward or have to catch them up on everything!

Any tips you’ve found helpful for finding and keeping mentors?

Waldo’s got an incredible story to tell that also has the benefit of getting a great message across: A committed Wingman – a.k.a. Lifeline, in my WGYB terminology – can change your life. In fact, in Waldo’s case, a wingman can save your life. Below, Waldo’s post, drawn from Never Fly Solo – go here to buy and to download all his free bonus resources (including one from me). Also, give him a shout out in the comments and ask questions - I'll make sure he stops by to respond!

Check Six: How to Get the Mutual Support You Need to Thrive at Work
By Lt Col Rob “Waldo” Waldman

My wingman screamed over the radio “Break Right, Break Right! Missile launch, your 3 O’clock!”

I looked to my right and saw two SAM’s (surface to air missiles) skyrocketing towards my aircraft at twice the speed of sound.  My radar warning receiver was blaring which meant I was being locked up by enemy radar. If I didn’t maneuver my aircraft immediately, I would get shot down.  There was no time to think.

I lowered the nose, went to full power, banked the aircraft aggressively to the right and performed my best missile defense maneuver.  Then I heard my wingman (call sign “Pigpen”) yell “Magnum” over the radio. This meant he was shooting an anti-radiation missile at the radar site that was tracking on me. Within several seconds my radar turned off and the missiles lost track of my aircraft and exploded only a ½ mile away from me!

I survived.

Pigpen was my wingman over the skies of Yugoslavia that night and he possibly saved my life. His job on this mission (and every mission) was to provide mutual support to the formation. How did I know this? Because on every mission fighter pilots back each other up and cross check our most vulnerable position – directly behind us. It's where most of the threats come from. We call it the “six o’clock” position and when we’re strapped into the cramped cockpit of the F-16, it’s the location we can’t see on our own.

Fighter pilots train in an environment of mutual support and always check each other’s six for unseen threats.  And when our wingmen call out “break right/left” to avoid the missiles, we never question their judgment.  We take action because we trust each other.  It’s what we’re trained to do.

We survive solo, but win together.

In the heat of battle in business, it’s easy to get channelized and inadvertently blow off your cross check (i.e. sales processes, budget, customer courtesy, critical appointments, etc.) You may be way too focused on the task at hand, overwhelmed or stressed out. You become what fighter pilots call "task saturated."

When this happens, you can lose sight of the big picture and your cross check can suffer. This is when you leave yourself vulnerable to the unseen enemy and can get shot down (i.e. lose the sale, alienate a co-worker, miss a critical appointment, etc.) To avoid this, you need your wingmen to check your six and provide mutual support during these stressful times.

Here are five WingTips to facilitate a “check six” culture in your organization.

1. Start by asking others for 1-1 intimate feedback on your performance
   1. Request that they sit in on a sales call or have them review a proposal.
   2. Ask these two questions: “What did I miss? “How can I Improve?”
   3. Avoid being defensive.  Then, thank them.
2. If you’re a formal leader, openly reward employees who demonstrate mutual support and who encourage others to succeed.
3. Be willing to say "I don’t know" or "I messed up"
   1. When the boss publicly admits a mistake and fesses up to it, others will too (especially the new hire who may be scared an intimidated by your organization.)
4. Set expectations during a daily/weekly briefing to highlight performance expectations, delegate responsibilities, and contingency plan emergencies. Let your team know that you expect them to tell you if you're messing up.
5. Be willing to give extra support to a wingman who may be experiencing a challenging situation at work or even at home.

In fast-paced, high-risk environments, close coordination is required among team members to accomplish a mission and avoid errors.  Creating a check six environment with your wingmen is critical to mitigate risk and ensure the missiles of adversity, change and fear don’t shoot you down. It also helps to break down communication barriers so that all members of a team feel empowered to speak up, ask questions, and call out missiles.

When mutual support is part of your culture, team members become more trusting and engaged, while leaders benefit from the improved flow of vital information up and down the organizational hierarchy. Your customers and prospects will also see a big difference in the quality of their service. Finally, having an extra set of eyes looking out for you (like “Pigpen” did for me) will allow you to function more productively and with less stress during those challenging missions.

Never Fly Solo,

Lt Col Rob “Waldo” Waldman

Lt. Col. Rob “Waldo” Waldman, the Wingman, is a former combat decorated fighter pilot and the author of Never Fly Solo - Lead with Courage, Build Trusting Partnerships, and Reach New Heights in Business. A professional leadership speaker and consultant, his clients include Aflac, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, New York Life, Marriott, and Home Depot. To purchase his book, visit www.NeverFlySolo.com. He can be reached at info@yourwingman.com.

Watch the recorded video of Keith's live webcast here:

There were so many great questions during the webcast. We couldn't answer them all, so please ask your questions here! You'll be able to view Keith's answers to your questions in our upcoming Q&A Archive exclusively for Academy Members. You can sign up to be an advance Adademy Member by completing the "FREE MEMBERSHIP" form in the right sidebar!

Thanks! Look forward to your questions!

Sara

Three Ways to Become More Successful, Today
By Kim Ann Curtin, CPCC, ACC

As a life and business coach, I see people limit their potential with fear of failure, limiting beliefs, and lack of perspective. Recognizing those feelings, bringing them out of the shadow and into the light, is the first step in creating a new paradigm for yourself. We need to learn how to “be" with them and forgive ourselves for having them. Once you’re there, creating new belief systems help us to rid ourselves of the old. Below are three behaviors that those that are living the life they want to really live practice regularly. They are at the top of my “Three Ways to Become More Successful” list.

• Be Willing to Strike Out And that means publicly. Have you ever seen a batter be so overly cautious that he doesn’t even swing? The only way to get a home run is to take a crack. Yes, striking out is embarrassing, but you are here to take that risk. My friend James really wanted to see the last Yankees game played at the old stadium and in spite of not having a ticket he flew in from Cali, stood outside the stadium and held a sign that said, “I need a miracle!” Without his willingness to fail, be ignored and not see the game, he never would have found himself standing behind home plate watching all the greats legends of baseball celebrated. And he got that ticket for 100 bucks!

• Don’t Be Stopped By No Sounds simple but this is where most people drop the ball. Do you get scared when you hear no? We learn at an early age that if we don’t heed the word, we experience unpleasant consequences. It’s time to re-wire that belief system. You are the authority of your life. You’re the one who says “no” or “yes.” So don’t get shut down by someone else’s red light. There’s always someone else to ask or another time to re-ask the same person. Keep asking until you get your yes - you only need one.

• Be “Over There” Focus your attention “over there,” on the other person’s needs and experience. It will set you apart from every one else. Years ago when I was a TV producer for a non-profit cable show I was asked to try and get an “impossible” interview with the much sought after then-editor of the Daily News, Pete Hamill. His first book out since his best seller, A Drinking Life, had just been released and every talk show wanted him. We had stiff competition and no budget to even send him a car. When I called his office his assistant put me on hold at least five times! I could hear her overwhelm. I put my focus “over there” so instead of telling her what I needed when she finally could talk, I asked, “Are you having a rough day?” After 10 minutes of me patiently listening to her vent, she put my interview at the top of her request list, above Good Morning America and The Today Show. Two weeks later we were taping the “impossible” interview.

We are the creators of our own success. Usually anytime you’re “stuck” it’s because you are lost in a perspective. Walk around it, get on top of it, and burrow below it. The solution lies in a different mindset than the one you have now. It’s up to you – with some help of trusted others – to create it!

Kim Ann Curtin, CPCC, ACC, is The Wall Street Coach. She coaches individuals and corporate teams from Wall Street to Main Street who want solutions and clarity.

The final piece of the system? RENEW! Today’s challenge helps manage Goal Drift. Reassessing your goals (and the relationships you need to achieve them) over time is essential. Goal drift isn’t necessarily bad; as you devote yourself to outreach, you take in new information, your horizons expand, and as a result, your goals often shift. But that's why it’s important to renew and refine those goals and your Relationship Action Plan on a regular basis - and at least quarterly.

The Renew step is best accomplished with one or several trusted sparring partners – preferably lifeline relationships, but most importantly someone you respect and who will be honest. The idea is to engage in a no-holds-barred discussion of your goals from top to bottom. Are they the right ones? Are they overly ambitious or too tentative? Have you missed someone obvious on your outreach list? Once you’ve sparred with your partner, you should find another two or three and repeat the process. As your thinking develops, you'll amend your strategy.

Today's challenge: Make a date to spar over goals with someone close to you who's interested in doing the same - or just willing to help! Share your goals in writing before the session, so you and your partner have each had time to think and perhaps even research the issues at hand.

Hope you enjoyed the Challenge! I'd love to hear your feedback if you participated in all or any days - what happened?

Today’s challenge has to do with Goal Drift – reassessing your goals (and the relationships you need to achieve them) over time. Goal drift isn’t necessarily bad; as you devote yourself to outreach, you take in new information, your horizons expand, and as a result, your goals often shift. But that's why it’s important to renew and refine those goals and your Relationship Action Plan on a regular basis - and at least quarterly.

The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get mired in psychological warfare between our creative and reactionary aspects.

The key idea here is that the very idea of “potential” is created in our minds.  The limits to that potential are created in the very same place. WE are the biggest thing holding us back from greatness. Not only do I agree with that, I’ve experienced it on a profoundly personal level, part of the story I told in Who’s Got Your Back. 

As the following exclusive excerpt from The Leap illustrates, it is our willingness to tackle head on the forces that hold us in place that allows us to achieve our greatest potential. Rick dispels the myths that hold us back, and challenges us to once again dream big. Enjoy!

Excerpt from The Leap:  How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel your Career from Good to Great, by Rick Smith

At first glance, we humans would seem to be built for innovation and entrepreneurship. We’re the species that dreams big things, the one that imagines a different future for ourselves, and it all begins with our neural architecture.

For 500 million years, the human brain (and the proto-human one that preceded it) did little more than poke along, not changing materially in size or shape. Then, beginning about 2 to 3 million years ago, our gray matter started to explode. Today, in what amounts to a wink in geological time, we have doubled our average brain volume from that benchmark break point.

But volume is the least of it. Cranial studies and other evidence show conclusively that what grew most dramatically in the brain over the last several million years was the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us to visualize the future and anticipate coming events.

Today, we spend on average 12 percent of our time—3 hours each day, or roughly 10 years in an 80-year life span—contemplating what is to come. This is what makes us different from every other living thing: We live in the present but keep a foot in the past and the future.

Put another way, a cheetah or a great white shark or even our close DNA cousin the orangutan has to prove itself every day. We don’t. We store up canned goods and water in case the power goes out; buy homes on time, via mortgages, in anticipation of rising values and future earning power; save money for our kids’ college education so they can have a better a life than us; and invest in IRAs, Keoghs, and 401(k)s to help feather our own old age.

Torn Between Opposites
The planning-dreaming-poet side of the brain, the part that’s ready to leap toward wherever opportunity might wait, is one facet. But there’s another, older, survival-driven part of the brain that works in almost exact opposition.

Encouraged by our huge new frontal lobe, we envision big things to come, but when push comes to shove, our older brain fights like mad to defend the current state of our lives. We court risk in our imagination, then run from it in our daily lives. We are almost compelled to plot out alternative story lines for our lives and careers and families, but we are compelled even more powerfully to avoid what we imagine. That’s the great irony of humankind: we are at once the animal capable of dreaming and the one that holds itself back from achieving its dreams. True, we are wired to think about the future, but in critical ways, we are wired to think about it incorrectly.

Stuck in the present, we fret over how far up the corporate ladder we can climb, whether we will ever make VP of Sales, or what our compensation will be a dozen years out, when we really need to be asking ourselves is what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. If we’re not fulfilled, if we’re not in touch with what we intuit our potential to be, the rest—titles, offices, salary—is all window dressing and empty calories.

The frontal lobe speaks loudly enough in our private daily counsels that we all know this to be true to some extent. We long for the change that will make us fully in touch with out essential selves. We ache for work that will leave us fulfilled and content. But the rest of our brain, conditioned by millions of years of human and prehuman experience, anticipates failure, not success. And because it does, it sends a very different message: The upside of dramatic change isn’t worth the effort and exposure involved.

In effect, we imagine the future not so we can embrace it, but so we can avoid it.

Buying into Your Own Status Quo
In effect, you have created a status quo and bought into it; studies have consistently shown that the bigger the bet and the more you fretted over it, the more certain you are that your reasoning is sound and the outcome you have predicted highly likely. That’s the way the brain works. It makes us sweat and strain over our decisions like a crew of ditchdiggers; then, once the decision is made, the brain invokes a psychological defense clause that says, Well, that sounds like a great bet to me. I’ll stick with it through thick and thin.

So it is with jobs and careers and even life patterns. We often invest so heavily in them, and buy into the logic of our investment and decision making so thoroughly, that we see abandoning them at the one extreme as a kind of psychological suicide and at the other as an unnecessary dare, given that the future (as our flawed brains paint it) is so likely to re-create the present. Rather than face up to the potential of positive, dramatic change, we silence the argument within ourselves, and in doing so, we spare ourselves the pain both of a difficult contemplation and of potentially realizing that our assumptions about the future have been fundamentally flawed.

In various branches of science, this is known as a closed system. In more everyday terms, it’s like walking into a dead-end alley. Maybe we should think of it as the “Now Trap.” What is closes in around us. What could be seems impossibly distant. And the space between them appears far too risky to navigate. No wonder our personal ruts seem so hard to escape—they are, in fact, Now Traps every one.

The Roads Not Taken
These are the pranks the brain plays on us. This is the way it builds the Now Trap that holds us in the ruts of our lives and careers. The brain provides us with a massive frontal lobe to imagine the future, then tricks us into believing that whatever lies out there for us will not be all that different than the present. The brain gifts each of us with enormous potential, then convinces us that the risk of pursuing our potential is greater than the reward of achieving it. It allows us to envision what we might become, then tells us we lack the talent and skills to get there.

We can’t help longing after the choices not made, the roads not taken, more than the choices we do make and the roads we do take. That again is part of what being a human being is all about. We’re the decision-making, decision-regretting animal; we have the capacity to rue as well as to anticipate and to envision alternative futures for ourselves. But unlike the poet Robert Frost, we can’t quite bring ourselves to take those roads less traveled, the ones that make, in Frost’s words, “all the difference.”

Our psychological immune system is poised to jump. It wants us to make the Leap. It can deal far more easily with too much courage than with too much cowardice. It’s more comfortable with our stumbling forward than with our hedging our bets. But the brain won’t let us do that without a fight that most of us are not prepared to make.

Thus we wage psychological warfare on ourselves. But—and this is the critical point—we don’t have to. The Now Trap is formidable, but it’s not Houdini proof. We simply have to start looking at life through a different lens. The fact is, the woods are full of ordinary people, everyday Joes and Janes, who have broken free from the Now Trap and transformed rut-stuck careers into deeply fulfilling callings—work that not only has brought them great personal satisfaction but has also had a great and lasting impact on others.

Above all else, remember this: whatever traps we may feel stuck in are largely of our own making. What we have built we can also undo. What we can dream we can achieve.

Question: What fears are stopping you from achieving your full potential -- and to what degree can our relationships help us escape the Now Trap?