Part 3 – A reflection exercise for friends and family In this three-part series, I’ve provided personal questions for you and prompts for your team to help you take an essential year-end pause for reflection and future planning. In this final installment, I’m giving you an exercise I find especially useful with friends and family….

Part 1 – A reflection exercise for you Every year, I encourage my clients to answer a series of questions that help them pause and reflect. Regularly pausing, reflecting, and planning is essential for our mental well-being, personal fulfillment, and goal setting—especially this time of year when we have the benefit of reviewing a year…

Radical acceptance: accepting reality as it is, without judgment or resistance. Acceptance of all of it: not partial or conditional. I was having a conversation with a dear client yesterday who shared that he was practicing radical acceptance with a recent experience. Two hours earlier at my yoga class, someone said to another student, “I’m…

In a recent LinkedIn post, I wrote about how anxiety and stress often come in waves, making it challenging for me to manage. I find that containing it is often necessary so I can work, but “stuffing it” ends up forming cracks and leaks that cause “flooding.” And when we flood, the nervous system is on…

Did you know that children laugh eight times more frequently when they are with another child than when they’re watching a cartoon on their own? That’s the case even if they thought the cartoon was just as funny in both instances. One study reports that children laugh on average three hundred times a day. I’m…

I don’t know about you, but I regularly struggle with setting boundaries for myself. I say yes before I even think about the impact of taking on that work or responsibility. I go along to get along, even though there’s often a toll on me, and I can “silver-line” everything to stay positive and focus…

Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” A common sentiment, especially when you’re stuck before you’ve even begun. We’ve all been there. So much so that we’ve named the dilemma. Writers get blocked, athletes have the yips, and creatives often lack inspiration. What can we do to get unstuck? I recently…

I’ve been working with teams and organizations for almost my entire career, and I can’t remember a time when helping leaders work through their self-awareness, self-regulation, and resilience-building capabilities was more important. The pressure to do more with less and continue to meet targets while everyone tries to recover physically, mentally, and psychologically from the…

We have an outdated understanding of our life stages, according to The Happiness Curve author Jonathan Rauch. Most of us think we grow and learn during childhood and adolescence, enjoy our twenties and thirties, experience a midlife crisis in our forties, and then begin a slow decline during our fifties and beyond. In reality, new…

You might be familiar with a documentary called Stutz, which was produced by actor, comedian, and filmmaker Jonah Hill. He was intent on telling the story about the life-changing impact that his therapist had on his life, and reviews say Stutz heartwarmingly underscores the importance of an active focus on your mental health. The subject…