There are several people I follow who talk about “choosing your pain”.  Which, in its essence, boils down decision-making to choosing which outcome and its consequences that you can best live with.  Every decision we make has an outcome, and every kind of outcome has pros and cons (and those cons include pain).  Hence…whatever choice you make, with the expected associated outcome, has pain.  So we are, therefore, choosing our pain with any given choice we make.

So I started to wonder – why do we think there is some choice that avoids pain entirely?...

Remember the days of “book reports”?  I love to read, and have since I was probably mid-elementary school, but I remember the days of having to give reports on books, and often they weren’t ones I was all that interested in.

Nowadays, though, I usually can’t shut up about whatever I am reading and what I’m learning from it.  Oh, how times have changed.

Last month, I read a philosophical book about time and how we regard it called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.  There are dozens of nuggets throughout the book that have kept me thinking since I read it, but one of them was top of mind on a recent Friday as things were winding down for the week...

Many moons ago, a mentor of mine asked me a simple question about an issue I had brought to her for counsel:

Is it a skill issue or a will issue?

I had never considered this lens before in first defining the core of an issue before problem-solving for it.

A skill issue means there is a deficit in our actual ability to do something.  A will issue means there is a deficit in our desire to do something.  Figuring out the true deficit is the most crucial first step in working through something because treating one issue like the other is not only setting us up for failure but also inviting a LOT of frustration...

Happy anniversary to me!

It’s been two years.

Two years since the last time I opened up facebook or Instagram to scroll.

(And about two months since I finally deleted the apps, well hidden in a folder, off my phone).

And I don’t miss it at all.

Make no mistake – it was hard early on...

I had a dream the other night where I was talking to the mother of my high school Spanish exchange student.  She was marveling at my Spanish language skills and how they’d grown (and we were fully having this conversation in Spanish in my dream).

(In my dreams, I am as fluent as a native Spanish speaker!)

I woke up chuckling a little to myself, how easy and fluid I felt speaking in Spanish in my dreams.  I thought back to taking Spanish in middle school and high school and even a few courses in college.  I remember signing up for those classes in college – “I should really keep up my Spanish” I thought to myself as I browsed the course catalog.

Oh that tricky word.  SHOULD...

I like to think of myself as living my best life.  I do work I love, I live in a place that feels like home, I get lots of time with the important people in my life, I get outside every day, I delight in reading and traveling…

And yet somehow, the occasional wave of yearning and disappointment sneaks in when I’m not looking.

Where does that come from?  If I am living my best life, what is that about?

My Seth Godin one-a-day calendar left me a big, beautiful hint last week...