So what is self-care? At the most basic level, it is about taking care of yourself and doing activities that promote your well-being. Sounds easy, right? All we need to do is find an article that lists a bunch of self-care activities that sound good and do them! Well not quite! Most self-care advice has…
Life is Precious Momento Mori, which means contemplating your own mortality, was commonly practiced by the Stoics centuries ago to remind them of how precious life was. It can be easy to lose sight of this, when we get lost in our thoughts and are dealing with the hassles and inconveniences of daily life, or…
What is the best way to change our behavior, tough love or compassion? Do we respond better to loving encouragement and correction, or harsh and disapproving judgment and correction? Tough love is treating someone harshly with the intention of motivating them to do better. It’s more than just setting and establishing boundaries and/or standards —…
Whether you know it or not, you probably have a morning routine, or a series of habits and actions you perform almost every morning when you get up. Perhaps it is something like mine used to be: Hit snooze twice Grab phone and browse Be shocked that 45 minutes have passed. Jump out of bed…
As someone who leans towards melancholy, I recently discovered that incorporating 5 minute joy breaks into my day helps me nurture a sense of peace and happiness within. Life has its ups and its downs, and it’s difficult for many of us to ignore or turn our backs on the negative. We may be told…
Build a second brain sounds catchy, but what does it actually mean? It means means freeing up our short term and long term memory by creating a system to capture meaningful information in a way that allows our future selves to easily retrieve and work with it. Decades ago, we got away with a filing…
I recently attended a workshop hosted by the personable and energetic Khy Hy of Rad Reads, where he talked about four types of work: $10 work, $100 work, $1000 work, and 10K work. These types of work fall along a matrix with leverage (high and low) on the Y axis and skill (high and low)…
The Konmari Method is Marie Kondo’s strategy for cleaning your spaces and bringing life-changing magic to your life. Sounds good to me! A clean, organized environment can be very beneficial for invoking a sense of calm and purpose before beginning a project or task. I’m a bit of a challenge, however, as I’m a…
Interstitial Journaling, a combination of time-tracking and journaling, is an excellent to develop awareness about how you spend your time. And that awareness can lead to some really positive changes in behavior. WHY DO INTERSTITIAL JOURNALING? As someone who has overcommitted to projects and tasks my entire life, I’m always on the look out for…
I was visiting a college roommate on Martha’s Vineyard, hoping for a little distraction after my very bad choices in romance had wreaked havoc on my psyche. I walked into her home deeply demoralized, and my eyes were drawn immediately to a cheerful dozen or so daffodils in a mason jar on her kitchen window…