Triggers was alright. I had very high hopes for it and it didn't quite live up to them, but it was also entirely good. Just nothing completely revolutionary.
The author/narrator Marshall Goldsmith has been a professional executive coach for 35 years. His mission with his clients is getting them to identify their customers, then getting their customers to define success for his clients, then helping his clients meet the expectations of their customers.
The difficulty in becoming the person you want to be is typically not a matter of complex. It's usually quite simple. The problem is that simple =/= easy.
<aside> 👉 There's a difference between understanding and doing. It's not enough to understand.
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Your environment changes you. It changes who you are, how you think, how you act, what your interests are. You are not stagnant, but constantly changing to the environment you're in and the role you may take in it. It can be the Angel on your shoulder, or the Devil. In this book it is personified and treated like a character who influences you constantly.
Environment-dependent behavioral personas exist. We are one person at home by ourselves, another when we are around our coworkers, a 3rd person around our immediate family members, a 4th around our friends, and even more when we are driving/exercising/public speaking.
We have planned selves and doer selves. We suck at merging the two.
Really smart people in one environment may suck at the exact same things in another environment. Eg CEO who has not planned for his retirement.
We stuck at preserving what's working. We rarely ask ourselves "what's worth keeping?"
Ask: What should we seek, preserve, and eliminate? What do we need to accept?