Positivity

Life doesn’t arrive in a box with a bow, with neat little labels explaining the show. It tumbles in sideways with whistles and squeaks, with glorious mornings and plumbing that leaks. Each dawn, tell your slippers, “A fresh day! Let’s start! I’ll listen more closely to what’s in my heart. Whatever comes knocking, whatever rolls through…

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to create a Personal Life Timeline. Once you create it, you’ll see clues from your life story that will help you to make changes, empowering you to create a better future. You’ll see before you a bird’s eye view of how your past was shaped. The ability to see themes, patterns, and connections…

Nothing seemed to be going right. My Internet gave up in the middle of a Zoom meeting, my dog – a rescue mutt still learning the house rules – peed on a freshly washed towel hanging over a chair, and the work gig I was so confident…

Everyone is motivated by different things. I tend to be a low-achiever/perfectionist with a tendency to second guess myself into a tailspin before taking on a new project. Surprisingly, though, this has not stopped me from writing best-selling nonfiction books, starting and running a 24-hour Catholic AM radio station, and leaving different “fairly successful” occupations when the situation no longer fit…

Why do we suddenly have the blues when yesterday we felt wonderful about life? How could we write three chapters in our novel in two days, and the next week just stare at a blank page? Why do we suddenly have no interest in going out with our best friends, when last weekend we had the greatest time ever with them?

As I age, I feel my brain slowing down. I don’t always have my snappy comebacks anymore. I know exactly what I want to say, but the word won’t be delivered to my brain. Especially those nouns! Oh, the nouns. And don’t get me started on proper nouns! Toward the end of my teaching career, my students started supplying me with the word they thought was going to be next in my sentence. Sometimes they were right…

How do you create a lifestyle after 60 that is sensual, vibrant, fulfilling, and on your own terms and not someone else’s? What if I said the answer is healing from the traumatic effects of people pleasing? If this is true, where do you begin to identify the effects of people pleasing? And how do you start to genuinely heal from them?

A man once told me, during one of my seminars, about a thought that used to make him laugh at himself. In his 20s, he loved going to concerts. Whenever he spotted people over 50 in the crowd, he’d think: What are these old codgers doing here? He’s over 50 now. The music still moves him…

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!”

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. […]