THE BRAVELY BALANCED BLOG
For the overachiever and the overworked!
How exhausted are you? I know the feeling!
Does being exhausted serve you? What if I told you that you could have it all without subjecting yourself to hustle culture?
Sounds divine, doesn’t it? Follow along and feel the ease!
Category
- Anger and Depression
- Anxiety Stress & Fear
- Balance
- Burning the candle
- Burnout
- Change
- Dealing with Urgency
- Emotional awareness
- Empowerment and Living
- Epigenetics
- Expectation
- Healing
- Hope
- Introversion
- Leadership
- Personal Boundaries
- Resilience
- Self-reliance
- Shame
- Trauma
- Victim Mentality
- Vulnerability
- Worry
- avoiding conflict
- balance
- conflict resolution
- connection
- emotional eating
- empathy
- imposter syndrome
- intentions
- mindfulness
- perfectionism
- procrastination
- regret
- visibility
Navigating The Illusion Of Urgency In Unstable Times
I have written about the topic of urgency probably two or three times over the past few years, and it never seems to be enough. Why? Perhaps because the world seems so unstable right now that everything feels urgent.
If a situation is urgent, it means that it is potentially dangerous and needs to be addressed immediately. That’s the objective view. …
Be Calm, Be Powerful
There is a meditation I was given by 2 colleagues and friends, Victor and Kooch Daniels that helps me whenever I feel anxious, or can’t get a worrying thought out of my head. It’s one of a number of meditations in their book they gifted me Matrix Meditations. I think of it as the 10 times 10 meditation. I’ll share it with you …
Understanding Victim Mentality: How to Reclaim Your Agency
It was rush hour after work. I was on a fully packed bus trying to zone out so that I didn’t feel the push of bodies against me. When I got home, my wallet was missing. I called the police, who suggested I list all documents that were in there and get them replaced immediately. They also said it was very unlikely I’d find that wallet.
That bitter feeling of being victimized took a long time to leave my body. …
You have way more than you think
I decided to clean out my tea cupboard. In it, I found 5 unopened boxes of Bengali Spice tea. It isn’t as if these tea boxes are tiny and easy to miss, but miss them I did, over and over again. The reason I kept not seeing them was not only because my tea cupboard was a mess, but that I was afraid I’n eventually run out – and be without!
As a result, I ended up with this ridiculous overabundance of Bengali Spice tea. …
Setting Intentions
I led a workshop a few years ago on setting intentions. I offered this for a personally selfish reasons: my habit every January would be to look at what I didn’t like about myself and resolve to make changes in concrete ways. I would begin the year carrying those actions out, and they would work until some time in February. Sure, it felt good for a week. Then it became an increasingly burdensome chore until the burden was great enough for me to stop doing them. …
How Inherited Trauma Can Lead To Increased Resilience
January is the season of dieting, especially for those of us who gain weight too easily. This tendency to gain weight runs in families, especially on the female side, and can be due to Epigenetics.
Epigenetics explains how a woman who is pregnant during a famine can pass down an increased capacity to metabolize food to her baby born out of that experience. I am a result of such an experience …
The Transformative Power of Perspective: A Step to the Side
I was with a friend a few weeks ago. We were talking randomly as friends do when suddenly she said seemingly out of the blue about another mutual friend “I hate that man!”.
Have you ever found yourself saying or thinking that about another person? I have. Hate is such a strong word: filled with emotion and anger, maybe also fear. But unless that person has done something seriously bad…
The Best Time is Now: Turning Regret into Resolve
Have you ever regretted doing something, even long after you did it, and can never undo it? Then, not only regret the action, but also the amount of time you spent not doing anything about it. Yes, the best time to have corrected your mistake might be just after it happened, but for any number of reasons, that didn’t happen.
I still remember …
Rethinking Trust in Politics: The Appeal of the Outsider
I hear a lot about why populist-type people are popular and are winning most of the political races just now. I hear a lot about how they relate to those who vote for them, even if the populist in question has never lived in the same circumstances as the person saying this. Some say it’s because the populist feels authentic.
I understand this reason. I
How Failing Can Help You Succeed
I spoke with someone recently who believed he’s failed whenever he finds himself falling into an old, familiar, unproductive pattern. Yes, you could say he failed to move away from the pattern. That’s true. But then we took a closer look.
What he discovered i
Growing Through Tension
I’m in a meeting full of people intent on their own unspoken agendas, vying with each other to get their wants through. If I’m chairing that meeting, I can feel the tension it creates. How successfully I work with it is the measure of my ability to chair.
Emotional Honesty: The Gift of Vulnerability
I watched John Oliver on his weekly show last night. After seeing a few of them, I began to wonder if his desk beating is a way for him to gain energy to a fever pitch that he can then use to energize himself and his audience. I know Tony Robins spends 5 minutes running and jumping in place before presentations to do that. It’s their way of bringing a positive – albeit hyped up - energy with them.
I intentionally bring a calming energy
Beyond Intelligence: The Value of Emotional Awareness
I listened to an interview with David Brooks recently. It was on what he terms elite meritocracy. He was contrasting our current educational system of requiring high mental intelligence with other kinds of living, and finding that our dependence on intelligence as defined by high IQ or SAT scores is not getting us to any sense of collective happiness or fulfillment, …
Finding Balance: Moving Beyond the Worry That Follows Joy
“I just got my dream job, and felt wonderful for about an hour, until I began to dread what bad thing might come on its tail.”
If you’ve never felt this, or heard your friends and family say it and believe it, then you’re not a worrier or associated with worriers.
I’m a worrier, …
Trapped with Shame
A person can feel trapped into going along with something they don’t agree with. It could be because they don’t want to be singled out, or embarrassed, or shamed.
Sometimes, people who don’t like being singled out would rather not take the chance of being “wrong” and judged in public.
Choosing What Matters: Strategies for Prioritizing Life’s Tough Problems
Problems come in so many ways every day that I thought I’d write about them. Positive Psychology likes to term them “challenges” because that makes them sound less scary. However you want to call them, they are things all of us encounter repeatedly, and daily.
There are problems
Connection and Interaction
What if you could be a fly on the wall and overhear a difficult discussion between 2 people you didn’t know?
It might be that you heard
Never Waste a Good Hair Day
A colleague asked me the other day when I thought I could do a video recording… it had been on my list of to do’s for a while. Because I’d been so swamped with work, she was certain I hadn’t done it yet.
But she assumed incorrectly:
Sugar and Spice
A dear friend had a dream a few weeks ago. It wasn’t much of a dream: it was an image actually, of a large soup bowl filled to the brim. Exactly half of the bowl was filled with a nourishing soup, while the other half was filled with Crème Brule. The soup and sweet weren’t intermixing or ruining one another. They simply occupied half of the brimming bowl each.
So different from my friend’s life.
Empathy and Impact
I wonder if you’ve ever experienced the following: you’re listening to someone you don’t know at all go on at length about something incredibly personal; it begins to grate on you. Or, you’re having coffee with a friend who is going through tough times. After listening attentively for an hour, you begin to wonder when they will finish and find yourself judging your friend.
I’ve experienced both situations.