Franklin Taggart's Blog, Podcasts, and Videos

I was a tobacco user and addicted to nicotine from when I was a teenager until September 3, 2006. As a kid growing up Mormon, I had been afraid of and entranced by smoking. The church drew a hard line against most mind-altering substances, and tobacco was at the top of the forbidden list. That just added to the allure. There was an older kid in the neighborhood who was kind of a loner we'd see walking to and from school with a spiraling cloud puffing out of his mouth. He could have been a great person, but we saw him only as a smoker, and our seven-year-old minds equated smoking with being bad. We were scared of him. My cousin was born with an endless wild streak and easily filled the role in my parent's mind of a bad influence. When we were about ten, we went to the gas station next to our aunt's hotel and bought a pack of Kools. He was a ranch kid who had been dipping snuff for several years. We all wanted to try smoking, and he always seemed to find a way for us to disco...

  Do you ever find yourself feeling jealous or envious of another person's success? They may even be someone you like and admire, but on occasion, you start to compare yourself to them and wonder why you're not having the same result as they are - even when you've been trying similar tactics. This topic has come up in three recent conversations with close friends and colleagues. I was happy to find that I wasn't alone in my experience of professional jealousy, but I also felt like I needed to poke around in the weeds around the issue to see what I could see.  Speaking only from my experience, jealousy is a painful emotion and is often the first symptom I notice when I feel stuck in some part of my life - especially my business. Jealousy is one of the emotions that I call a binder - I freeze in my tracks, and my ability to create, connect, and support is difficult, if not impossible, to access. Jealousy is an emotion that sometimes masks itself in my awareness. It's ...

One of my frequent frustrations as a performing musician was the interference of self-consciousness while playing. Specifically, what I'll describe happened most often when I played a guitar instrumental at the edge of my talent. My practices would be exceptional experiences of focus and flow. In my studio, the music came through me easily, and my awareness of time and space and my place in them would fade into the background, and there would only be music playing. It was magical. The experience in front of an audience was completely different. As soon as there were other people in the room watching me play, my tension would rise, and that part of me that cared about what other people think came barreling into my awareness. Self-consciousness would involve itself in my performance, and the sense of focus and flow I had in the practice room evaporated on the stage. A mistake would happen, and the tension would be even greater, and another mistake would follow, and many times, I woul...