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Great Work Workshop

I’m doing an informal “pre-beta testing” of the workshop below in Charlottesville at Vault Virginia on Friday, May 31, for a limited group of people. It will be very informal, casually working through a series of exercises that are currently in development. There will be no charge. I’m most interested in your input and feedback! If you are interested in participating, reach out to me directly at cannonthomas@ctpstrategies.com.

THE “GREAT WORK” WORKSHOP

Make your work — and your life — matter more

Are you a high achiever who deep down fears getting stuck on autopilot — with less meaning and purpose in your life and work than you feel it deserves? We want our hard work to unlock opportunities that allow us to grow, reaching for heights of meaning and purpose we could not have imagined at the beginning. We want to fall in love with what our work connects us to in a way that deepens with the years. Don’t let the daily grind devolve into an uninspiring slog. This interactive 3-hour workshop will equip you with a simple, practical process that can transform your pursuit of growth and fulfillment.

Some people learn and develop mastery for many years until they have achieved expertise, when many others participate for the same amount of time without improvement. Discover how to apply the principles of expertise both to identifying the opportunities that are most meaningful and fulfilling to you and to executing and building on them. If you think of your life as a story, you will learn to be more emotionally invested in your main character (you), to create vivid scenes in your life and work that leave you wanting to turn the pages, and to chart towards an adventure or arc that allows the momentum to build and deepen over time.

The process is simple. Most people don’t follow it. They become comfortable in lives and work where they are just trying to do some good, to have some fun, to move up the ladder, and to get by. They don’t really see that there is an alternative. Learn the basics of the process, and it just might change the course of your life.

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don't let easy answers get in the way of asking the hard questions

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don't let easy answers get in the way of asking the hard questions

           Some answers feel so compelling that we oversimplify the questions we really care about in order to fit them. Clear, straightforward answers are easy to process, and that ease leads to a feeling of "rightness." As a result, we end up satisfied that the issue we had cared about is resolved. Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the tricks our mind plays on us, calls the human tendency to answer hard questions with responses to simpler ones "attribute substitution." The problem is that many of the hard questions are the ones that matter most to us. We do not want to lose sight of them. 

           In a critical review in The New Yorker of Charles Duhigg’s book Smarter Faster Better: Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, Louis Menand argued that the self-help genre capitalizes on our attraction to easy answers....(read more)

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