Wellbeing Wisdom Tiny Bites

Do you enjoy the feeling of regret? OK, that’s kind of a dumb question, right?

What is regret, anyway? Regrets are nearly always about the choice not taken. The simple version is we wish we’d gotten chocolate instead of vanilla ice cream.

In everyone’s life there are more complex versions – words we’d like to take back, a bad career move, or a relationship we jettisoned and now, in hindsight, think maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

No one enjoys the feelings of regret, yet when you pay attention to...

Have you ever faced the end of a pet’s life?

If you’ve ever had a pet, chances are you have, and the more physical interaction you had with that pet, the more it hurt to watch their life slip away. And the anguish of making the loving decision to put an end to their suffering is pain some people never want to repeat.

Pets are wonderful additions to our lives. They give us so many opportunities for fun and learning and growth, yet their lives are so much shorter than ours that we walk...

Do you want a sure-fire way to lower your stress level while you build your leadership skills? Build creativity into each day.

It doesn’t matter what kind of creativity, and yes, being more creative will help you be a better leader and also be less stressed. Creativity is just your playful nature coming out where you can see it, and when you allow yourself to be creative, you super-charge your problem-solving skills.

Curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving are all controlled in the same area of the brain, so when you make time for creativity each da...

Think about the person you like and admire most. It could be anyone in your life besides you – who do you hold in high esteem?

Take a few minutes today to write down all the positive attributes you can come up with about that person. Write until you can’t think of even one more thing. Then, make a separate list of all the negative attributes they have.

Compare the lists – I’m guessing that their positive aspects outweigh the negatives, right?

Do you see words like “smart” “wise” “loving” “kind” “wise” “helpful” on the positive list? Most peopl...

Have you ever heard the phrase, “wherever you go, there you are”? It may sound absurdly simple, yet it’s one of the most complex lessons we must learn, and there are a lot of people who never actually learn it.

Maybe you’ve seen someone who keeps changing jobs – they’re excited about each new job at the beginning, yet within a few months they’re complaining about co-workers or their boss, and you’ve heard it all before.

It’s not that every job they go to has the same type of badly-behaved people, it’s that...

This morning a friend and I were talking about the clutter in our lives. She has lifetimes of paperwork, photographs, and ephemera from parents and grandparents to wade through, and I have lifetimes of collectable objects, and some paperwork and photographs, too.

Does any of this sound like you, too?

My friend and I talked about how giving things up can feel like losing the person who loved it or wrote it or is pictured all over again. Here’s a way to honor the memories while clearing out the clutter that’s easier on your...

Do you ever feel like you’re having an argument with yourself and that you’re losing? You might not ever have thought of it that way, and that internal tug-of-war can show up in a lot of ways.

There have been times in my life that I did something because I thought I was supposed to do it, not because I wanted to do it. Not only was there no joy in the doing of the thing, I often accidentally injured myself in the process!

Maybe your inner self is more subtle than mine – I sure...

Have you ever lost something and been frantic to find it?

You can’t, right? The harder you look, the more frantic you feel, and that makes you look even more furiously, tossing things out of the way as you desperately search for what’s missing. And then, chances are, you’ve said something that nearly every human has said, too: “Why is it always in the last place I look?”

The smart-aleck answer is “because you found it so there’s no need to look anywhere else” and I won’t insult you with that.

When...

Can you manage your own disappointment?

One of the toughest things for most people to do is to find a way to be OK with a non-optimal outcome. It seems like it should be easier for us, because non-optimal outcomes happen all the time.

You walk across the room and stub your toe on the table leg. You park your car at the grocery store, come out after shopping and see that a shopping cart has dented the side door. You fall in love, think it’s forever, and find out it’s not.

When I wa...

Do you ever feel like the bit-player puppet in some bizarre show starring every other puppet but you? Does it feel like the puppeteer is letting the rest of the puppets have way more fun than you?

Do you know where those feelings come from? They come from you comparing your life to the lives of others.

Not only is this kind of comparison unfair to you, it’s unfair to the others, too. It’s unfair because you know for sure what you’re living and you have no idea what’s going on in the o...