joyful living - the BLOG
For the stressed and the overworked!
How tired are you ending up in the same old story?
What if I told you that you could change that story and jump into a new one that brings genuine joy?
Sounds divine, doesn’t it? Follow along and feel the ease!
Category
- Agency
- Analysis Paralysis
- Anger and Depression
- Anxiety Stress & Fear
- Balance
- Burning the candle
- Burnout
- Change
- Dealing with Urgency
- Difficult Choices
- Doubt
- Drive
- Emotional awareness
- Empowerment
- Empowerment and Living
- Epigenetics
- Expectation
- Faith
- Gaining agency in your life
- Healing
- Hope
- Inspiration
- Introversion
- Leadership
- Living Your Dream
- Living with pain
- Multitasking
- Optimism
- Overcoming emotional pain
- Personal Boundaries
- Personal Strengths
- Resilience
- Self-reliance
- Shame
- Trauma
- Victim Mentality
- Vulnerability
- Worry
- avoiding conflict
- balance
- being alone
- conflict resolution
- connection
- dealing with emotions
- decluttering
- duty and guilt
- emotional eating
- emotional pain
- empathy
- energy
The Comfort of Agreement, The Courage of Disagreement
I came across 2 quotes this week that I wanted to combine. One is from David Brooks: Fighting is for fascists. Democracy is about persuasion. The other is from Emerson, and is the quote of the week below.
I heard David Brooks say the above in an interview he did with Jeffrey Goldberg. He was referring to the depressing explosion of fighting between friends and family of different political persuasions. …
Change is Inevitable. Resistance is Natural.
Fear and change. For all of us, fear and change go together. None of us like change. It’s a basic law of nature that everything moves towards inertia. But it’s also a law of nature that everything changes all the time. Maybe not a rock. But we’re not rocks.
Here are some everyday examples:
If you avoid any kind of confrontation, preferring to stew inside instead, it’s very likely because you’re afraid to confront. If you confronted instead of remained quiet, it might mean rejection, and that may not be something you want to risk. …
When Doing Less Means Choosing Yourself
When I do too much, everything suffers.
Maybe a few things get done well, but most often nothing gets done well. I am so focused on the to do list of tasks that I can – and do – miss things that are important. Often, that means disappointing people. Even when on a current task, I’m already thinking about the next one, meaning I’m not focused on the current one, which is the main reason it ends up not being done well. Then, at the end of the day, if I’ve managed to check everything off, I may feel momentarily elated, but I will always feel exhausted.
I know all of this, and …
There’s More Than One Way To Live Your Dream
Last week, I wrote about living the dream that is truly yours. I asked how you would know if it was truly yours.
There are so many reasons that the dream you had early in life might morph into something else, not because you abandoned your dream, but because of circumstances.
Here are a few possible reasons: …
Find The Dream That Is Truly Yours
I’m talking and writing a lot lately about the possibility of living your dream. But what I haven’t said much about is what that dream is.
I was speaking to someone recently who reminded me that many of the dreams we believe we want are things that society has taught us to want, …
This Is Your Life - Why Settle?
As kids, most if not all of us have big dreams about life. We may have a specific dream of what we want to be, or a less specific one, but in either case, we dream big and that dream is filled with hope and possibility.
Then, some might say, reality hits: …
The Courage To Want More
Have you ever had your ideas dismissed, or discounted? I have. And so, probably, has anyone who has had a new or different or even risky-sounding idea.
When that happened to me, it was always from someone who didn’t think or dream like me. The interesting thing for me …
Don’t Let Safety Steal Your Dream
These days, we are constantly inundated with social media messages that make us feel like we’re less than, unable to deal with the world as it is. We get the message that we should be grateful if we have a job, even if it’s uninteresting. Because it’s safe.
As a result of this depressing and defeating messaging, many of us settle for less than we could have in our lives, …
The Exhausting Illusion Of Multitasking
I used to pride myself on being able to juggle a lot at once. It meant that I was busy all day and I loved it. It was a kind of high, being that busy.
But what it really did was wear me out. Because it isn’t really multitasking. …
What Change Always Brings
Every time I see a quote on change, it reminds me how much change is about life, including our personal lives. The quote below from Robert Redford – so beautifully stated.
I recently watched Season 1 of a series …
What Rejection Is Really About
Last week, a bunch of kids were playing on my street. A fight broke out. It ended quickly. But right after, one of the kids was left behind when all the other kids went off with the victor.
I can’t count the number of times I hear about a high school mean girl experience, where some outsider gets marginalized and humiliated.
On a more (or less) adult level, …
When You Stop Following The Crowd
A big focus for me in my work is to help others reclaim their own sense of agency. Seth Godin recently published a short blog on how easy it is for us to give up our agency. As he pointed out, we work hard to have freedom of choice in our lives, then end up going along when our group – at work or socially, some cultural force in our lives – tells us to do something.
This is well studied. We all know it and all do it. …
The Words That Shape Your Next Step
I often hear that what I say to another person may impact that person in a good or even a bad way, depending on where they’re at. But what I don’t often hear is that what I say to myself does the exact same thing.
If I’m not sure about what I’m about to do, …
Optimism Is More Than Positive Thinking
I have at times been labelled an eternal optimist. I’ve thought of myself that way at times. In truth, the underlying thing that keeps me optimistic is my continued sense of purpose. The only time in my life that I had a boring job was before I turned 20. I can remember looking at the time every 5 minutes or less and vowing never to do that to myself again. I never did.
Viktor Frankl wrote that …
Every Emotion Deserves Attention—Not Every Story Does
Emotions are never worth ignoring.
I’ll clarify. For some of us, there are 2 classes of emotions – those we automatically feel, and those we manufacture and intensify with the stories we tell ourselves. I’m very familiar with both.
The second class is definitely entertaining and can prolong feelings for a very long time, but they aren’t real beyond the story, and can be harmful.
For example, …
The Milestones That Transform Us
I passed a milestone a short while ago, one that I’d been working towards achieving for a number of years. Friends would ask how it changed me. My answer is – at first – that it didn’t change me, that I felt the same. Then I began to notice how I approach challenges differently, and wondered if that is part of the change. How, I ask, can achieving a designation change me that much? …
If You Don’t Feel It, Don’t Fake It
Have you ever wondered how empathy would work for someone who didn’t know how to truly have it? I read a post a while back that, to my mind, expressed this well. In it, the author suggested it was a matter of how you looked and what you said. For instance, adopting what you believe is a kind look on your face, and saying things that acknowledge how hard what that person is going through is.
That isn’t empathy. Empathy can’t be learned like that. …
Fail To Win
I’ve been hearing lots of youtube commentators talk about how young men avoid getting possibly rejected by women by diving into video games and the like. The advice of the commentators is to try it anyway, and if they get a no, try something else.
It’s good advice, but young men are still preferring video games. …
Getting Started
This blog is about the problem of procrastination. Even though I’ve written about this topic many times, the harder things get for us, and the more unstable the world around us feels, the more many of us procrastinate. Things simply overtake us and we don’t know where to start. …
The Gift Hidden In Our Wounding
I work with people feeling wounded daily – it’s my job. I experience wounding in my own life. Who among us hasn’t experienced that.
It’s a human condition. So much so that it bears repeating that the pain we feel from the mistakes we make – or others make – is an essential part of growing into maturity and into a fulfilling life.
Every time I fail in something I’m trying to accomplish, I remind myself …