Edwin's Corner

The strange thing about procrastination is that it rarely announces itself as procrastination. If it did, life would be much easier. Imagine waking up on a Tuesday morning to hear a voice announce: “Good morning. I am procrastination. I have come to sabotage your day.” At least then you would know what you are dealing with. Instead, procrastination is clever. It wears disguises. It calls itself preparation, planning, research, optimization, due diligence, productivity, and strategy. Sometimes it even calls itself wisdom. And that is how it fooled Mark for years. Not because Mark was lazy. Mark is many things. Lazy is not one of them. The man reads. Thinks. Works. Reflects. Plans. Like many capable people, he has spent a significant portion of his adult life trying to improve himself. Unfortunately, he has also spent a significant portion of his adult life postponing the things that mattered most. The proposal could wait. The application could wait. The difficult conversation could wait...

Why Awareness Alone Is Not Enough Toward the end of last Tuesday’s Clarity Room session, something fascinating happened. People began sharing new beliefs. Simple statements. Powerful statements. Statements that looked deceptively ordinary. Andrew shared: “I am good enough.” Simon offered: “My past does not define me.” Traicy reflected: “I am capable of growth.” Nyame declared: “God is within me. I will not fail.” Polly added: “Growth is always possible.” If you had joined the session at that exact moment, you might have thought we were exchanging affirmations. We were not. We were witnessing something much more important. People were challenging scripts that had quietly governed parts of their lives for years. That matters because the stories we repeatedly tell ourselves eventually become the lives we repeatedly live. Yet there is a problem. Most people stop there. They discover the belief, feel inspired, take notes, buy a journal, highlight a few sentences, and post a quote on social ...

Last Tuesday in The Clarity Room, we spent a great deal of time discussing beliefs. Not the kind of beliefs people usually argue about. Not politics, religion, or football teams. Those discussions can wait for another day. We were exploring something far more personal: the beliefs that quietly shape our lives. The beliefs we rarely question. The beliefs that operate so deeply beneath awareness that they often feel like facts. And as the conversation unfolded, a fascinating question emerged. Not from me. From the participants. If these beliefs are causing so much trouble, where did they come from? Most of us spend years fighting behaviors without ever investigating their origins. We battle procrastination, perfectionism, people-pleasing, avoidance, overthinking, low confidence, fear of failure, and fear of rejection. Yet we rarely stop to ask: “Where did I learn this?” And that question changes everything. The Child Nobody Sees One of the strange realities of adultho...

Last Tuesday evening, 46 people attended The Clarity Room for a free coaching session on Zoom, which I host every Tuesday from 7 pm to 8 pm. Some guests arrived early, while others showed up exactly on time. A few arrived fashionably late, which is a polite way of saying they intended to come at seven but were distracted by life, work, children, traffic, dinner, WhatsApp, existential dread, or a mix of these factors. It happened to be my 43rd birthday. Now, birthdays have a funny way of making a man reflective. You start to realize that recovery takes longer than it used to. Your knees occasionally send formal complaints after a run. And you begin to notice that wisdom often arrives disguised as mistakes you swore you would never make again. Perhaps that is why the evening's topic felt particularly fitting. The Hidden Scripts Running Your Life. As people settled into the Zoom room, I asked a simple question. “Where do you feel stuck?” The responses started appea...