When my daughter is agitated and frustrated, she can be impatient and snappy with me. I’ve had to learn not to shame her for that or make her ‘show me respect.’ Her frustration is an emotion that I want her to feel, I want her to feel the complex emotionality of being...
Not all that long ago our lives weren’t created over videos, we didn’t have a soundtrack playing, and we weren’t performing reality to make it look like a movie. We understood that movies were fictional tales or biographies told in story and filmed with sound and...
It’s taken a long time for me to recognize that the challenging things that have happened (and continue to happen) in my life are designed for my benefit. For most of my life I could not see them as such, and only in this past decade have I been able to remember this...
‘The version of yourself that you had to be in order to survive through something difficult, is not the version you can now be to move forward’. Healing is a complex process of time, acceptance, releasing, forgiveness (most often of ourselves), tending to your needs,...
Apparently Gen Z has 2.7 seconds of attention span, way shorter than previous generations, a comparable is in 2004 attentions spans were 2.5 minutes. When my daughter was born, I began to lose my ability to focus. The lack of sleep made me unable to concentrate on...
In 2006 I led a three-month expedition in the Yukon and Alaska. It was a truly epic trip (and I don’t use the word ‘epic’ freely). We backpacked for the first month in the mountains, and were later met with a float plane and switched gear for a month of...
Being a warrior is not something anointed or bestowed upon you. The images of warriors we see in Hollywood films create an idea of a hero that’s unattainable for mere mortals. They’re represented as having obscene amounts of strength, heroic confidence, charisma and...
My legs were shaking. I could feel my anxiety rising and my breath tightening. I was about to sit down with a friend to have the conversation I’d wanted to have for a while, but everything in me wanted to run away. The thoughts kept coming: “Just keep the peace”,...
There are many things that challenge our ideas of success, and I would imagine that most of us don’t perceive ourselves as successful. We place a grave amount of importance on financial success, to the point that we stretch ourselves to the tip of our economic...
For the last 10 years I’ve owned and run a business and for the decade prior to that I had been in management and leadership roles. Fundamentally, communication is the most important tool and skill I have and one which I continue to grow. I make it a standard to talk...