I’ve been thinking a lot about how we pay attention — and how we often miss what’s best in our kids because we have our attention trained on what we think they should be doing. Now don’t start blaming yourself… our whole approach to education teaches us to believe our kids should be other than […]
This year I discovered I could put a new twist on an old resolution: Originally I wrote this with my kids in mind. This year, though it occurred to me that much of what I’ve been working on for myself and with clients is about the (misguided) notion we’ve been given that others cause us […]
What would you guess are the four strengths found in people with the highest life satisfaction? One is enthusiasm, according to research by Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman, and colleagues. This was inspiring news to me because “Enthusiasm Makes the Difference” is the book I read at 17 that sparked my lifelong passion for positive psychology. With all the hype and stress about […]
Until today, I’ve never loved the word compassion. Is that harsh? Let me ask you this: what does compassion mean to you? For me, it’s always had an undercurrent of sympathy, pity, of understanding and relating to someone else’s (or one’s own) pain. It’s also meant to convey love, yet so often it seems to […]
“‘I was an aspiring astrophysicist and that’s how I defined myself, not by my skin color…’” — Neil deGrasse Tyson in Parade Magazine today. It’s so freeing to stop viewing yourself through other-people’s-eyes. Too often, we allow ourselves to be defined by other people’s opinions — by what they think about our behavior, our performance, […]
There are times when it doesn’t feel as if I have control of my thoughts– it’s more like my thoughts are the inmates running the asylum. That’s when I remind myself that the only thing that imprisons us is our own thinking. And when I remember that I control what matters most — my own […]
You may have heard people say, “you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child…” I try to remind myself: that’s only true when I choose to let it be. I try to remember this when my child is going through a tough time. It can feel more painful to see her suffer than to […]
Did you know that you are a storyteller? Or that you are just one story away from what you really want? Most of us don’t realize that we have a few central narratives running through our lives because the stories we tell ourselves are so familiar that we don’t even realize they are stories. […]
Besides being creative, innovative, wildly successful and new-age businesses (that weren’t even dreamed of 30 years ago), do you know what Google, Amazon, Wikipedia & Sim City have in common? The founders of these companies (two at Google) have Montessori educations, says Peter Sims in the Wall Street Journal. What is “a Montessori education?” Although […]
What Scares You? For Anna, it’s driving. Watch her learn to use imagination to make it less scary:
