It is a remarkable quality of human beings that our strength is only visible when required. The human mind and soul isn’t like the human body. We don’t, of course, develop emotional muscles that telegraph to others (or reflect back to ourselves) how powerful we might be amidst adversity. The evidence for that only comes […]
In my view, being human means having the capacity to experience and to give love (often, through a miracle called human empathy) and to reason and make choices. It also means having the opportunity to embrace the truth about oneself, including one’s life story, back to its early chapters, in order to make sense of […]
Knowing oneself is said to be the work of a lifetime, but there are ways to accelerate the process. First, let’s define our terms and the quest. It happens to be the case that there is a core self and that there is a surface self. The core self contains your truest interests, talents, capacity […]
Going back home has a nice ring to it. Most of us feel nostalgia for the places and people who populated the early years of our life stories. This is true in such a vast percentage of people that it is clear it applies even to those who had complex, possibly very painful experiences with […]
I have a single, simple message for you today: I want you to be on the lookout for moments when you feel seen, heard, understood and, therefore, honored as a human being. You might think that we humans know how to identify these moments and know to pause and honor them, but, too often, I […]
Somehow, the idea of talking to yourself got a bad reputation as a sign of mental instability. Think of the television stereotype of the afflicted fellow mumbling to himself at the bus stop. But the truth is that talking to yourself—with intention—can be a very powerful way to fight anxiety and depression and set the […]
I like the Stoic philosophers a lot. One of the Stoic mantras that has been popularized of late (by author Ryan Holiday) comes from Marcus Aurelius, who said, “The obstacle is the way.” By that, the Roman emperor and philosopher was exhorting those who might be stymied by challenges to understand that those challenges represented […]
On November 23, 1984, the day I turned 23-years-old, Doug Flutie, the diminutive quarterback for the Boston College Eagles, taught me a lesson that I never forgot. It was literally during the last second of the football game between the Eagles and their arch rival the Miami Hurricanes. Boston College was down 45-41. Boston College […]
I chose the word deciding as the first in the title of this blog because I think you can make that decision and make it stick. Deciding to move forward with a whole new level of energy and optimism isn’t supposed to be “a thing,” as teenagers and twenty-somethings now put it. It isn’t convention […]
I settled on the four words above as a prescription, of sorts, for our times. Why? Because we are threatened, as never before, with a loss of our authentic selves, along with incentives to remain passive and ineffective as individuals. The combination is a perfect storm that can dissolve the self and pave the way […]