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Response flexibility is the habit that enables us put a temporal and mental space between stimulus and response, and between impulse and action. Siegel’s research showed that widening our window of tolerance is what broadens the span of arousal within which we can function adaptively. Think of it as the clinical version of the best mindfulness advice our parents and teachers ever gave us. Sweetheart, take a breath. Now,…

Who has let you down in the past month? Maybe it was a friend who bailed on the concert at the last minute. Or a coworker who didn’t meet your project deadline. Perhaps a public figure who accidentally said something offensive during a press conference. Or maybe the barista at the coffee shop put the wrong kind of milk in your drink. The list goes on and on. There…

Whyte, the poet master general, explained that his work is only a career looking back. Looking forward, it’s a frontier, he says. He just tries to keep an integrity and groundedness, while keeping his eyes on his voice dedicated towards the horizon. This sounds eerily familiar to me. My professional life resembles that trajectory as well. It’s like, one day you look around and realize that your current mix…

The most rewarding thing we can do is update our definition of humility. We accept that it’s not a strategy, program, goal, posture or technique. It’s not something we try to be. Nobody wakes up in the morning and just resolves to be humbler. We can’t slip on humility like a pair of wool socks. We can’t whip or will ourselves into a state of modesty like an ascetic…

There’s a difference between getting out of your comfort zone and jumping off a cliff. One is a useful exercise that involves healthy risk, stretches you in new directions and stimulates growth. The other is an exhausting, frustrating, wasteful effort that doesn’t play to your strengths. Drucker, in his bestselling book on managing yourself, wrote: it takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve…

Nothing seems crazy when you’re used to it. Whether it’s an abusive relationship, a toxic workplace, a compulsive habit, or some other harmful circumstance, you never realize how bad it was until you walk away and heal from it all. It’s only when you get to the other side and find the happiness you didn’t know you could feel, that you see your past with straight eyes. But that’s…

Death isn’t a tragedy for the person who dies. What do they care? They’re already gone. It’s lights out. They’re not even around when people mourn them, so what’s all the fuss about? Seinfeld summarized it best: Dying is going to be fantastic, think of all things you’re done with. Seems to me, that the cruelest punishment is not the end of our own lives, but the death of…

Intimacy is the human catalyst for the experience of oneness. Multiple studies have shown that young people are having less sex than previous generations. The exact reasons for this trend are debatable, but one thing’s for sure. Sex isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. What’s more concerning is our culture’s broader withdrawal from physical and emotional intimacy. And it’s hard not to appreciate the allure. Why waste our time…

Doubt can be a nagging, frustrating emotion that’s just big enough to matter, but just small enough not to kill you. Descartes once said that doubt pulls the rug out from under whatever certainty you think you just got hold of. It’s the wrecking ball that swings into action and knocks the poorly founded belief aside. Couldn’t agree more. For example, here’s a career doubt that sometimes pops into…

When people complain about how they don’t have time do things, it perplexes me. They act as if all these tasks and obligations cosmically forced themselves onto their to do lists, and now they are helplessly stuck with them. But the fact is, everything they committed to was a choice they made. Or didn’t make. And so, time isn’t their problem. Time is the artificial human construct they’ve decided…