Handling The Hard Stuff

Tag: Self-Help

  • Take a Day

    My brain turned on in the middle of the night last night and wouldn’t quiet down. It was spinning with every random bit of trivia and childhood acquaintance and item on my to-do list in the next month and sleep was out of the question. Needless to say, I’m not firing on all cylinders today.…

  • Who You Are and Who You Are Not

    Know thyself. As we get older we learn who we are, but more importantly we know who we are not and do not want to be. We spend our lives learning and finding ourselves – new skills, new jobs, educations, partners. We learn who we are as parents and friends and who we are in…

  • Don’t Confuse Scary for Hard

    We often think something is too hard, requires too much effort, is insurmountable when really we just don’t know how to do it. We’re intimidated, not incapable. Scary is scary. I get it. I’ve talked myself out of a bunch of opportunities over the years because I was intimidated or just plain afraid. But that…

  • You Don’t Have to Have a Plan

    You don’t have to know everything right this minute. Sometimes life is overwhelming. There are too many places for you to focus and you’re stuck just trying to juggle everything coming at you and you can’t make progress or focus on any of them. That’s ok. We get so focused on having a direction and…

  • Honest Mistakes

    We screw up. Humans screw up. It happens and we all do it. How we respond to it, sets people apart. Certain people refuse to acknowledge their mistakes. They double down rather than admitting they were wrong. They reassert the shaky position rather than acknowledging they might have misunderstood or been incorrect. Invariably this position…

  • Don’t Expect Results for Work You Didn’t Do

    We like instant gratification. Our world is spinning faster and faster and social media is inundating us with instant kitchen transformations and hundred-pound weight loss results, without any of the process. You only see the highlights in everyone else’s life. Their process is no faster or better than yours, you just see the edited version.…

  • You May Not See the Progress

    Sometimes it’s hard, when you’re in the middle of the process, to see the actual progress you’re making. It may even be that you have no idea how the skills you’re learning will be useful in your hoped-for future. You may have to get creative to figure that out, but any new skill or piece…

  • Effort Makes Us Happy

    We are constantly fed “hacks” and “get rich quick” schemes and “pro tips” that will make us bajillions of dollars with zero effort and continue this passive income making us millionaires over night. Where will that get us though? Don’t get me wrong – if I had a million dollars overnight with no effort, I’d…

  • Embrace the Opportunities of Boredom

    We aren’t bored anymore. Something came across my feed this morning that made me stop to ponder. Without phones and the internet at our fingertips, we were forced to find ways to kill time. If we had to wait in line or stop what we were doing we spent that time observing the world or…

  • Vulnerability Doesn’t Make You Weak

    I was watching the Oscars this weekend and was struck by Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken”. I had forgotten the lyrics of the song and how focused it is on how Ken has feelings too. It’s such a trope in our society that we can’t have big feelings. We can’t talk about them,…