I grew up being told not to judge. Maybe you did too. In my house it came with a Bible verse attached – the way we heard it, judge not, lest ye be judged – and somewhere along the way I turned that into a simple instruction: the judging itself was the sin. A good person doesn’t size people up. A good person gives everyone the benefit of the doubt…

When the summer of 1969 rolled around, I had just turned 15. I vividly remember the day my mother came into my room and handed me a round ticket to Lausanne, Switzerland, to spend a summer at their International Teen Camp.

“There will be teens from all over the world,” she told me, “It will be good for you to get out of the city.”

I’m not sure if it was turning 70, surviving cancer or simply having lived enough life to understand that there is nothing worth sacrificing your peace and well-being over. Through the years, I have done what most people (especially women) have done. I’ve taken care of everyone else, until there was nothing left for me…

Somewhere around my late 50s, I noticed a pattern in nearly every woman I knew, including myself: we were remarkably good at giving other people permission to live boldly, and remarkably bad at extending that same permission to ourselves. We’d tell our friends, “Go ahead and take that trip, you’ve earned it.” We’d tell our daughters…

The people who irritate us most are often the unpaid teachers we never would have hired.
There once was Miss Cranklepants, Mayor of Sigh Town, Who wore her complaints like a glittering crown. “That fellow’s too noisy! That lady’s too loud! And don’t get me started on That Smirking Crowd!”

A woman shared something with me recently that I suspect many women quietly feel. She smiled and said, “I spent most of my life taking care of everyone else. Now that it’s finally my turn, I don’t quite know how.” Her words stayed with me. Not because they were unusual. Because they were so familiar…

There’s a question I’ve been carrying around with me lately. What if joy isn’t something we find? What if it’s something we become available to? For most of my life, I believed joy was largely a matter of circumstance. It arrived with good news, vacations, falling in love, a new home – things like that. […]

This article is not perfect. I hope it’s good, interesting, informative, and maybe even a little thought-provoking, but it’s not perfect. And that’s a great thing. Because for most of my life, I was a consummate perfectionist. Had I written this article even 10 years ago, I would have rewritten it three times, edited it 10, changed it entirely, and then asked other people’s opinions to make sure it was okay…

Most of us know that we can choose what we eat, what we wear, where we go, and how we spend our money. But we often forget one of the most important choices we make every day: We can choose what we think about. This is the idea behind a book I am currently writing, called Thought Selection…

By the time most of us reach our 60s, we’ve gotten very good at letting go of things we’re told to let go of. We’ve let go of unrealistic expectations about our adult children’s choices. We’ve let go of relationships that no longer serve us. We’ve let go of the exhausting belief that we have to hold every family crisis together with our own two hands…