“No crying on the yacht”  is what I overhead a mother tell her teenage daughter shopping in a clothing store.   While a hilarious and abrupt way to identify corrosive self-pity, it can keep the spirit of thanksgiving with us all year-round.  A healthy outside starts from the inside. Being kind and compassionate are a natural...Read More

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious — Albert Einstein Our health care system is strongly oriented to “fixing” what is broken and categorizes over 36,000 ways the human body can go wrong. Rather than ask what’s wrong in our lives we can pay more attention to what is working well…. to...Read More

Consult Your Teenage Self to Find Your Power The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.  —Carl Jung Having power is having integrity of the soul. This requires that you regularly express your best self.  If something is getting in the way of that integrity, ask yourself, if I met my...Read More

Divide and Conquer. A military metaphor: in order to rule [the self] don’t allow alliances of your enemies [unfulfilled or unspecified needs].   Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is —Nadine Gordimer, South African Nobel Prize Novelist The overweight epidemic continues to skyrocket, with more than 2/3rds of us overweight. Most of us...Read More

Set up a life that does not need escaping from —Seth Godin Earlier this month we celebrated Independence Day, the idea of liberty and what it means to be really free.  Since we live in the land of liberty, why are so many feeling imprisoned and lack a sense of freedom in our lives?  Feeling stressed-out,...Read More

There is a dramatic difference between knowing and doing. We all have places that we may be stuck. There may be something in our lives that we know we want to change; yet we don’t. A major reason we often fail is that we succumb to the willpower trap. Lasting change often fails because we...Read More

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. —Aristotle Since at least Aristotle’s time (384 BC), we humans have known that having a positive outlook can have a profound impact on ones capacity to live a deeply satisfying life. There is a growing evidence-base on learned optimism and...Read More

There is an old story about campers who set a pot of water on their campfire and went into the forest to collect more wood.   On their return, they found a bear clutching the boiling pot of water.  As the bear’s distress increased, so did its tight grip.  Applying the only tool he knew of, his...Read More