A lot of modern literature is heavily focused on behavioural changes, hacks and shortcuts, and while they do provide some short term benefits, they rarely address the root cause and complicate things in the long term.

When I coach others I often come back to the classic, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. While the title suggests he is teaching habits, in actual fact he is all about principles. Stephen uses an elegant analogy of a compass vs a map. We are frequently trained to follow a map of processes and procedures which are rarely entirely effective and are quickly outdated, but when you have a compass then you can always be confident which direction is north, you can engineer the processes and procedures most appropriate for the situation.

Principles, by definition, never change and can be applied broadly, while processes and procedures are usually limited to a specific time and place. If I am successful, the principles that we explore here will still hold true long after these words were written.