Handling The Hard Stuff

Category: Personal Development

  • Fighting Right

    Navigating conflict is one of the biggest challenges in a relationship. You each come with your own baggage and your own interpretations of other people’s statements and perspectives. And you each come with your own personality and sensitivity. That makes turning mole-hills into mountains a really easy thing. I struggle with this in my personal…

  • You Deserve Respect

    I read a quote recently that just hit me hard. “Stop trying to prove you love someone by how much you can endure.” Oof. That resonated way too much with me. Moreso in my younger days, but even sometimes now, I have spent a lot of my life putting on a happy face and being…

  • Incremental Steps

    I get overwhelmed by a lot of “major life change” plans. And I get distracted and forget that I’m making “major life changes” a lot. This has happened with diets and exercise plans and investing strategies and a bunch of other things that I plan to change forever and just wind up going back to…

  • Low Hanging Fruit

    I find it really easy to get bogged down in the nitty gritty details of things. I want to learn the perfect caloric deficit to lose weight effectively. I want to know the exact amount I should be putting in my retirement to retire early. I pay attention to the minutia so much that I…

  • Be Curious

    You don’t stumble on passion. It’s not like a meet-cute and you just pick up a paintbrush and poof you’re a painter. You have to try things. You have to expand your horizons. You have to learn what you like and don’t like. Trying things as an adult is haaaard. A lot of us decided…

  • Making

    I find it frustrating sometimes that I don’t have anything tangible to show for my work. I help people sort out problems, but I’m not building anything or making a mark on the world in a physical way and it’s hard to mark your success and contribution when it’s not visible. I have recently become…

  • Neutral

    There are a lot of things we deal with that we consider bad or good, that really aren’t inherently anything. They’re neutral until we give them meaning or a response. For instance, Change is neutral. Some people love change and some people cringe away from it. But change in itself isn’t good or bad. It…

  • Find the Fun

    Adulting isn’t a lot of fun. There’s a lot of responsibility and pressure and mundanity. It doesn’t always have to be this way though. We can balance the boring with the fun. If you’re anything like me, you’ve lost your sparkle at times as you go through the responsible and adult activities of day to…

  • Test your Mettle

    I like my comfort zone. Even when I’m challenging myself, I’m very careful and have a strong sense of self-preservation. I’m not the one you’ll see finishing a race barely able to stand up. I’ll walk way before that. I’m not someone who applies for jobs I only have some of the requirements for. It…

  • Is it Worth Forcing it?

    I can think of a bunch of times in life when I hit a wall or barrier that made me stop and think about my path. Almost fifteen years ago this week I failed the bar exam. It was my worst nightmare come true. All the time and money I’d spent, the public nature of…