Blog

Empathy is what gives us another window into the experience of living.  It’s the bell of awareness that humbly reminds us that other people are just as important to themselves as we are to ours. And anytime anyone is unpleasant, the appropriate response is compassion.  As such, before we freak out and start silently name calling strangers inside of our anxious heads, we can make the empathetic leap by…

Hiring managers and human resources professionals are trained to ask commitment questions during job interviews.  It’s how they understand the applicant’s expectations for giving loyalty and cooperation to their organization. They want to make sure you’re not just headhunter bait who will leap to another job when an offer appears.  Which makes perfect sense. In a marketplace where employer turnover is high and talented employees are difficult to hang…

Each of us must to be very smart and intentional about our relationship to meaning.  After all, how we construe meaning dictates how we live our life. It’s the biggest thing there is. In an objective world where there are no moments of intrinsic significance which form a framework of meaning around any given experience, except the ones that we create, the onus is on us to make something…

The brain might be competent, but it still doesn’t understand context.  It has no idea which of our thoughts are appropriate, depraved, healthy or bizarre. It just churns them out. Tens of thousands of thoughts every single day until we die.  For that reason, it’s important not to judge ourselves for whatever weird movies our brain may be playing. Because those thoughts are not who we are. They are…

Despite living in a post binary world, it can be a useful exercise to create one to improve our decision making process.  Imagine the corporate hiring manager. Every week she receives hundreds of applications and resumes, conducts dozens of phone and video interviews and spends the majority of her days sitting across the table from prospective team members.  And all things being equal, assuming every candidate who makes it…

Few things cause more emotional distress than the thoughts we think.  In fact, the guilt we have about those thoughts can be even more damaging than the thoughts themselves. As if our mind was the most ruthless prosecutor in the world, and unless we have a strong and robust defense team, it will make its case and defeat us every time.  If the glove fits, you must submit.  Buddhists…

Campbell said that along our hero’s journey, each of us must give up the life we planned in order to have the life that is waiting for us.  This is a romantic and inspiring notion, but it’s also a daunting and difficult task.  Ask anyone who went to an out of state college. There’s a part of us that knows staying at home, while cheaper and painless and in…

Consider this frequently quoted scripture: Labor not for the meat which perishes, but for the bread which endures to everlasting life.  Religious disciples interpret this passage as a reminder that this world is only given to us to prepare for the hereafter. That all our longings for the meat, all our ambitions for that which is so vapid and unproductive, hold not a candle to the glory that awaits…

Once we identify our talents learn how to use our talents properly, we can start beautifying and contributing to the world in ways that nobody else can.  It’s the stuff real fulfillment is made of. The satisfaction of knowing that our gifts contributed to a larger effort, few things make us sleep better at night.  But having a clear sense of our own capacities and desires and how they…

My favorite definition of anxiety is the following: Emptiness and disconnection from self and other.  It’s when we forget that we actually do have a calm center, that peace is always a possibility, and that those things can be accessed both individually and interpersonally, anytime we want.  But when we notice that we’re anxious, we don’t immediately make a sufficient effort to change our situation, do we? Most people don’t. They…