Life is unpredictable and often – in fact, mostly – a struggle. Characterizing life as difficult is not succumbing to a “negative outlook,” as some life coaches will insist. No, admitting and fully accepting that life involves suffering is the key to controlling your own emotional and behavioral reactions to life’s twists and turns. Although…
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Nineteen
Humans ripen in 19 years. At age 19, barring biological challenges or excessively deleterious conditioning, our ferocious hormonal transformation gives rise to a strong, energized, enthusiastic pre-adult. At 19, we eat more, love more, feel more, and crave more than at any other age. At 19, we feel invincible. At 19, ego imprints genetically preprogramed…
Labels: How Mindset Determines Reality
Mindsets are our underlying beliefs about the nature and function of reality and of ourselves. These mindsets, most of which are unconscious and established during childhood, largely determine how we experience our lives. If your mindsets are fixed and negative, like “I suck at math” or “cancer is a death sentence,” then your ability to…
My Ego is Best!
Early on, our lizard brain struggled mightily to outgrow its survival obsession long enough to recognize its own reflection. As our prefrontal cortex grew, humans developed increasingly impressive ingenuity, cunning, adaptability, and awareness. Regrettably, our budding brain also begat Ego – a maladaptive byproduct of intellectual awakening that remains tied to our reptilian survival edict….
Goals Versus Aspirations
Did you start working on your New Year’s resolutions yet? Did you make those resolutions specific? Did you write them down? Did you set a time limit? Did you tell someone so that you would feel accountable? I hate to be a Negative Nelly, but surveys have indicated that about 80% of you will abandon…
Here’s to Another “Interesting” Year
Greetings, fellow Late Bloomers! I’m baaaaack… As I hope a few of you noticed, I’ve been relatively silent for much of 2021. I spent most of the year finishing a draft of my forthcoming book: Delayed Onset Living: Notes from a Late Bloomer, which I hope to launch in the coming months. I thought it…
2020: Milestones and Lessons
I’ve been alive for quite some time. And yes, 2020 was definitely a year to remember – one filled with more unexpected twists and turns than any I can recall.
The Color of Patience
“Patience is a virtue,” said every grandmother ever. Aristotle offered the tasty, “patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Gandhi used a more militant metaphor when he warned, “to lose patience is to lose the battle.” Julius Caesar, like Aristotle, highlighted the difficulty of maintaining patience with, “it is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.”
Dispassionate Compassion: How to Vote Without Going Crazy
I encourage you to ask yourself these two questions before venturing to your polling booth this Tuesday: (1) is there a candidate (among the purposefully limited options offered) who values the welfare of their constituents more than the other candidates? (If so, I encourage you to “X” accordingly); and (2) What’s for dinner?
Is it Safe?
We begin life swimming in a warm, wet womb – the archetype of safe havens. Just as our developing brains begin to appreciate the comfort and safety of our surroundings, Mom, in what must seem to us an inexplicably malevolent fit, forcibly ejects us from our sanctuary into a cold, bright, scary world. For the rest of our lives we struggle to recapture the feeling of safety so violently torn from us at birth.