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Gottman’s pioneering research identified contempt as the most serious of the four horsemen of the divorce apocalypse.  He calls it the most destructive and biggest predictor of separation.  But what about the relationship with ourselves? Because whether we’re coupled up or not, that’s the one person we still have to sleep with every night. Therefore, we must also be careful about the production of contempt in ourselves.  From mocking…

Hollywood acting coaches know the audition process is grueling, lengthy and demoralizing.  But they still encourage their clients to experience it. Not because it’s another chance to get rejected by complete strangers who wouldn’t know talent if it sat on their faces, but because auditions are a moment to act. An opportunity to perform your art and practice your craft in front of a captive audience.  Even if only…

For many years, life was about the relentless, focused effort on my career to the exclusion of everything else.  This was a highly useful strategy for growing my business and making an impact on the world.  But when it came to cultivating intimacy and community, not so much. That’s the danger with working all the time. Or doing any one thing all the time. We have all this energy…

It’s true that our stubbornness comes from a deep sense of integrity.  It’s true that our unyielding personality has served us well in many parts of our lives.  And it’s true that there is no reason to reject healthy expressions of pride just because we don’t want to appear arrogant.  But it’s also true that stubbornness can keep us lonely. When the tyranny of our individuality starts to rule…

The more that our internal narratives are governed by words like should and deserve and entitle and demand, the more that dissatisfaction courses through our veins.  Language is just that powerful of a lever. It’s the primary mechanism that pegs our sense of happiness to expectation, to the anticipation of what we think the world owes us because of who we are and how hard we worked and how…

Value comes from volume.  The best way to a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.  And so, the question is not whether we finish what we start, but whether or not we start enough things to eventually find something worth finishing.  Even if our boss complains that he can’t have every deadbeat on the payroll pestering him with their idiotic brain waves, we still can’t allow…

Although loneliness has come to be the new poverty in modern society and the most common ailment of the modern world, it wasn’t always like this.  As a species, our isolation has grown ever more pronounced with each passing decade. The shared pursuit of the public good has been replaced by the solitary quest for private goods. And the social connectedness which most powerfully determines our wellbeing has been…

Generosity that comes from a place of love actually enriches us, not just the people to whom we are generous.  It’s a potent vaccine that inoculates us against unworthiness and disconnection. Even when our gifts are not reciprocated the way we hope them to be, or at all. Nobody can hinder us from the joy and meaning we experience during the process.  Spezzano’s psychology research on the unconscious patterns…

The desire to consume is a form of lust.  It’s that psychological force producing intense wanting for some object to fulfill our emotional and existential needs.  And the problem is, the charlatanic industries that take advantage of our addiction to stuff use consumer goods to bait that lust, even though they never actually satisfy it.  Because all consumption comes with a limited ceiling of satisfaction. Otherwise it would not…

Each of us has a handful of things that are a deep part of our nature, things that are not some silly stage, things that are not going to be outgrown in a few years.  And we should honor those things. Once we discover the full offering we were born to give, our lives ought to be lived every day as a true expression of those values, with clear…