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I once heard an interview with a shrink who took an interesting approach to setting priorities during therapy sessions.  She would ask her patients this question.  On a scale of one to a hundred, how badly do you want to fix this problem?  And if the patient’s response was a low number, the doctor would respond by saying: Okay, well, let’s talk about something else until you get to…

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with ideas and dreams, worried that you simply must settle down, pick a lane and channel all of your creative energy into one particular project, hold on.  Because there’s no reason you can’t do everything. There’s no reason you can’t take on a number of different endeavors. And there’s no focus police that’s going to lock you up for diversifying your interests and doing more than one…

Who among us doesn’t want to be noticed, witnessed and seen?  The desire to break out of obscurity and be remembered is one of our fundamental human longings.  But the paradox about visibility is, it can actually work to our disadvantage. Because if we’re always there, nobody will have a chance to miss us. The goal is for us to become valuable in our presence, but also noticeable in our…

Our deepest fear isn’t that we will run out of money, but that we will run out of places to hide.  That we will have no choice but to hold the rawness of vulnerability in our hearts, expose our true selves to the world and be seen for who we really are. Having a low bank balance never sounded so good.  But the upside of this risk, it’s very…

Do your thing. Find your unique voice. Question the consensus reality. Navigate your own unconventional pathway. Rebel against the mindless, mainstream conventionality.  These are the modern messages of empowerment that we’re sold on a daily basis.  But what nobody warns us about is the expense of the moral horizon we choose to inhabit.  They don’t tell us that crafting a life that matches our vision of principled living comes with real…

We’re all guilty of not having a broad enough vision of what we are capable of.  And that’s okay. It’s not necessarily our fault. Grasping the full range of our capabilities is hard. There are so many layers of juicy, dripping potential have been buried and obscured by any number of forces outside our control.  And so, what we need is a crucible. A refining fire. A vessel in…

As children, we learned to align our feelings with those around us.  We learned to change our opinion to go along with others and not feel different.  And that’s okay. It’s a survival tactic. We did what we had to do. And it worked.  But as we get older and gain a more mature understanding of relationships and communication, chronic agreeableness is a skill we must unlearn.  Otherwise people…

They’re everywhere.  People who let others take advantage of them so they can resent it afterward.  People who have their grudge list memorized and camera ready to share with any audience who will listen.  People who use negative terminology to describe neutral or even positive events. People who get high on telling others how badly they have been treated. People who brag about being chipped and weathered away by…

The interesting thing about expressing joy and ambition and vulnerability and earnestness is, it intimidates some people.  It grosses them out. It triggers resentment. There’s just a certain population of the world that doesn’t want to hear about our happiness and enlightenment.  It’s like we’re holding a massive candle to their face, just so their darkness looked more pitch black in comparison.  Which we’re not, of course. It’s all…

There’s nothing wrong with feeling energized by the simple act of consciously moving toward our goal.  We just have to make sure that our goals are actually goals.  Not strategies we inherited from someone else. Not dreams borrowed from other people because they seem attractive and we think they’re going to make us whole.  That’s the reality we fail to realize. Our goals aren’t really goals, they’re strategies. Stops…