Top Photo Credit: A Chosen Soul

Top Photo Credit: Getty Images

Gratitude, when we really feel it, can drive all kinds of loving and brave action.

Given

It begins with earth. 
We were given a planet of unspeakable beauty. 
We were given nourishing food to eat. 
We were given serene landscapes that calm, 
uncountable variety, vibrancy that wakes the eyes.
We were given vast oceans that feed us, 
and soothe us, and right-size us all at once, 
trees and snow and soil, 
sunsets, mountains and clouds and skies. 
We were given time in this place. 

We were given breath, movement, tenacity, rest.  
We were given laughter. 
We were given thought. 
We were given creativity and language. 
We were given hugs and hands and tears.

We were given a place to go to inside, to come back to calm. 
We were given the capacity to be comforted. 
We were given doorways to hope. 
We were given a thin telephone line to speak with God.

Earth, breath, thought, creativity, laughter.

What will we choose to do, with all we’ve been given?

– Tara Mohr

Top Photo Credit: engin akyurt

* * *

Want more questions or prompts? I love Courtney Martin’s Reflection Questions for the New Year. Here are a few of hers I especially adore:

•    What has been dormant this year that I’d like to awaken? How might I awaken or nurture this to grow?
•    What has overgrown this year that I’d like to put back to seed and/ or what have I been carrying? Is there anything I can lay down to rest?
•    What kind of rest do I need most right now? (body, heart, mind, spirit, other)?

Find more of her juicy questions here.

With reverence and love for what is emerging from each of us –

Tara

Top Photo Credit: Elle Mundus

Top Photo Credit: Mitch Mitchell

This week, many of us are gathering for holiday celebrations or planning for ones coming up. Here are some tools and reminders to help you move through yours with more intention, wellbeing, and love.  

1. Begin with remembering who’s at the table: people who carry hurts, scars, assumptions. People who carry dreams and heartfelt desires. We all show up with our limitations and our wounds. And we all show up with a core need for care and connection (even if that need is buried under a lot of other stuff). 

2. At the end of each day, notice the love or connection from that day that you could amplify. Could you send that extra thank you to someone for the special conversation? Is there someone to pay a heartfelt compliment to or express appreciation to? Give language to and build on what’s good! 

3. And, at the end of each day, notice is there anyone I owe an apology to? Am I feeling not quite right about that thing I said that came out in a rather judgemental or harsh way? Did I make a subtle dig? What about the moment when I fell back into an unkind behavior pattern? Grab your phone and write a note or make a call to say I’m sorry. 

4. When you gather in groups, or talk 1:1, use Priya Parker’s Magical Questions to spark deeper, more connecting discussions.  

5. Use the tool of Love 360. This is my tool for finding the pathway forward that’s loving to all parties involved, including yourself. When making a difficult decision, making group plans, or even when setting a boundary, ask yourself: “What would be loving 360 degrees around the circle, to all parties involved, including me?” For example, “Joe really wants to go back to our old family home and show it to the kids, and I feel like that’s just going to be too painful for me. What’s the Love 360 solution?” Or, “my mom loves to give the kids tons of sugar as a way of connecting with them, and I know it ruins their sleep and moods… what’s a Love 360 way to talk about and handle this?” Love 360 isn’t about giving everyone exactly what they want. It’s about discerning what approach is loving to all involved. 

6. Do you know the wonderfully helpful serenity prayer?

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
the courage to change the things I can, 
and the wisdom to know the difference. 

It’s a great prayer to use in relationship situations – and so many other kinds of situations too.

Join me in turning it into a journaling practice. When you are feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, blaming, or unsure what to do, grab your pen and paper and make two columns. On the left make a list of the things about the situation you cannot control (i.e. Julie’s comments. Ted’s temper.) Then in the second column make a list of things you can control. (How I respond to that. When I stay in the room and go. What I put my attention on. Taking time out to move my body.) And so on. Make both lists! After you do, see how the situation now looks or feels differently to you, and what new paths forward present themselves.

7. Again, remember that first one. It’s probably the most important of all. Here’s who is at the table: people who carry hurts, scars, assumptions, dreams and heartfelt desires. We all show up with our limitations and our wounds. And we all show up with a core need for care and connection. 

Love,
Tara

Top Photo Credit: Virginia Simionato

]]> http://www.taramohr.com/spirituality/causes-of-feeling-hurt/ Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:11:02 +0000 https://www.taramohr.com/?p=10077

What makes us feel hurt?

Psychology researchers have sought to come up with a list of the causes of feeling hurt. They created that list for further research and study on the types of hurt, but I immediately grabbed onto that list as itself a kind of personal growth tool. I find it immensely useful in my own life, and in my coaching.

The idea here is not that we always feel hurt when we experience these things. The idea is that when we do feel hurt, usually one of these is the cause.

•  Active exclusion or rejection. These are experiences of outright rejection, exclusion or ostracism that cause us to feel hurt. For example, not being invited to a friend’s small birthday gathering, or being broken up with by a partner, or being a final candidate for a job and not being the one to get it. We all know it from our own life experience – rejection or being left out can really hurt.

•  Passive exclusion or rejection. These are more subtle experiences of exclusion, or things we may interpret as rejections, for example, “They didn’t even invite me to sit down with them,” or “She stopped answering my texts – she doesn’t want to be friends.”

•  Criticism. This includes literal criticism, implied criticism, or things that we interpret as criticism.

•  Feeling unappreciated. Often not because of what others do – but what they don’t do or say. “I worked really hard to cook a beautiful dinner for my family and they didn’t even come to the table when the food was hot.” Or “You never say thank you for everything I’m doing for the family, and you’re always focused on what I’m doing wrong.”

•  Teasing. We can probably all remember a childhood hurt from some form of teasing. Maybe there’s a kind of teasing happening in your adult life that hurts too.

•  Betrayal. Whether personal or workplace, extreme or subtle, betrayals make us feel hurt.

•  Deception. When we are lied to or feel deceived – particularly if it happens with someone we trust – whether or not we know them well, deception hurts. 

So, how does this become applied, how can we use it for our own wellbeing?

One way is this: Think of a recent hurt. Then notice, what was the reason? Was it a combination of a couple of them?

Then, I invite you to do a practice. Write down a simple sentence along these lines,

“I felt hurt when Kim said she couldn’t help me, because it felt like a betrayal.”
“I felt hurt when John said I should try thinking logically sometime, it was hurtful teasing.”
“I felt hurt at the dinner when no one seemed to want to talk to me – because it felt like a rejection.”

Begin with, “I felt hurt when….” and then describe the situation in a short, summary phrase. Then add to it a “because…” phrase, identifying which of the causes of hurt from the list above feels like the best fit.

This kind of simple sentence helps us do three incredibly important things.

#1. We boil down the situation to a short phrase. When we are hurt, we tend to get really lost in all the details of the story, especially as anger, blame or shame rush in. The situation feels complex and intricate. When we boil the situation down to a short phrase, it helps us get a little less invested in our own particular argument or narrative. It helps us be a little less precious about it or attached to our take on the story. I know when I do this there’s a kind of 10,000ft view that starts to set in, “Oh right, this is just one more human situation like so many I and others experience everyday.”

#2. As you write this sentence, you are giving language to how you feel. “I was hurt. I felt hurt when…” This is huge. A host of research shows that when we can give language to our feelings, that helps us regulate them and lessen their intensity. It’s also the starting place from which we can consciously choose how we want to respond to the feeling.

Unacknowledged or unprocessed hurt is like an invisible driver in your car – one who is definitely influencing where the vehicle is going…all while you think you are in the driver’s seat. Unacknowledged hurt affects our mood. Our sense of safety with other people, and in the world. Our general emotional rigidity or flexibility, and more.

Whether you ever say “I felt hurt” to the other party is another matter for another post. But if you are feeling hurt, it is a powerful practice to name the feelings to yourself.

#3. You are saying why you were hurt. It’s illuminating to see the cause of the hurt. Hurt, like fear, causes a strong physiologic response that’s often dizzying and disorienting. We don’t see things particularly clearly, or think so precisely, when we are feeling hurt. This list gives us a way to do a kind of analysis of the situation, and to understand it better.

One qualifier. I find that this can go one of two ways. Sometimes, people’s inner wounded part grabs hold of this language and uses it to reinvest in their feelings of outrage and blame. It’s a subtle difference in tone. You can say, “I felt hurt because I was lied to” in a way that feels like an accusation, and brings a deepening of the wound. Or, you can say it with a spirit of self-compassion and more of an observer’s stance.

One thing I love about this list of causes is that it reminds me I’m far from alone in the experience of hurt. It connects, “I felt hurt, because I was lied to (or criticized, or rejected or whatever it was),” and “that is one of the universal human experiences that makes us feel hurt.”

In other words, I’m using this list of universal causes of hurt to ground myself in the truth that in being hurt for one of these reasons, I’ve had a core human experience. I’m joining billions of other humans who have felt hurt for the same reason. I’m part of something larger. It’s actually rather awe-inspiring.

So we say, “I felt hurt when this happened” as a gentle, hand on heart gesture, an “Oh honey, that was hard. It hurts to feel excluded!” Or, “oh honey, that was hard. It hurts to feel unappreciated.”

As we’ll see in a next post, we don’t dwell there. We don’t stay in that experience for the long-haul. But we do pause there to name our hurt and one of the universal human reasons for it, to honor that, and witness it with compassion. Paradoxically, that’s what allows us to move on from it.

Love,

Tara

*Vangelisti, A. L. (2001). Making sense of hurtful interactions in close relationships. In V. Manusov & J. H. Harvey (Eds.), Attribution, communication behavior, and close relationships (pp. 38–58). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Feeney, J. A. (2004). Hurt feelings in couple relationships: Towards integrative models of the negative effects of hurtful events. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 21, 487–508.
Leary, M. R., Springer, C., Negel, L., Ansell, E., & Evans, K. (1998). The causes, phenomenology, and consequences of hurt feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1225–1237. 

I was fourteen years old when a boy at school said this to me, while we were standing on the quad between classes.

I was already immersed in diet culture, trying to change my body, knowing it did not fit the mold of how girls at my school were supposed to look (skinny).

I was also a dancer, finding sanctuary and art and joy in my teacher’s dance studio most afternoons. My legs were strong and muscular. They were the one part of my body I felt comfortable with, even proud of.

In that dizzying moment, I suddenly felt wrong to be proud of them. Now, it seemed, my body was a problematic emergency.

It would have been wonderful if my younger self knew that these boys’ inappropriate judgements of others’ bodies were their problem. It would have been wonderful if that younger self had known the Unhooking from Praise and Criticism tools. But she didn’t.

She felt panic and fear and shame, but underneath all of that—harder to sense, harder to name—at the core of what she felt was hurt. Sting, pain, gut punch—hurt. The hurt of, I am not welcome, or okay, or cherished here.

I am sure you have had your own chickenlegs kind of moment.

Hurt doesn’t evaporate on its own. Research has found that quite often, hurt feelings endure, sometimes at a searing intensity, for years or decades. I can still feel my heart rate go up when I write these words thirty plus later.

That was an early hurt. Today, I sometimes feel hurt when I read a cutting comment online about something I wrote, or when a loved one says something that seems like an implied dig or criticism.

More and more, I started noticing that people brought to coaching conversations situations in which the core of the issue was an experience of being hurt. (Here, for our context, I’m speaking not about trauma, but about other important hurts.)

The hurt of feeling betrayed or abandoned by a colleague or collaborator.
The hurt of feeling criticized by a loved one.
The hurt of feeling or being excluded.
The hurt of a professional or personal rejection.

The list goes on.

I was intrigued by how frequently the kernel of what people were grappling with had to do with hurt. But something else struck me as even more interesting: the hurt was stealth.

People often weren’t aware, at first, that they were feeling hurt. They never led with, “Hey Tara, can we talk about x situation? I’m feeling really hurt about it.” Nor did they say, “I’m feeling so hurt by my good friend.”

Instead, they’d say, “I want to talk about this friend who ghosted me,” or “I have this incredibly difficult boss.” In other words, they’d share their narrative about the external situation. If they did speak to their feelings about the situation, they named emotions like anger, shock, frustration, indignation, sadness, grief, guilt, shame, sometimes fear.

But they rarely said I’m hurt.

Yet quite often, their whole physical being seemed to communicate a sense of woundedness. As we coached about the situation more, we would often uncover hurt at the core.

That got me thinking. I’ve been reading widely in the worlds of psychology and personal growth for 30 years now. I’ve read plenty on anger. Plenty on fear and anxiety. The same on shame and grief. But I can’t say the same about hurt.

It turns out, I haven’t just been missing a section of the bookshelf. In 2001, psychology professors Mark Leary and Carrie Springer published an academic chapter entitled, “Hurt feelings: The neglected emotion”. As they put it,

“Psychologists have shown considerable interest in the negative experiences and emotions that undermine the quality of human life. In particular, researchers and clinicians alike have devoted a great deal of attention to emotional reactions such as depression, anxiety, anger, loneliness, and shame, and the size and breadth of the extant literature dealing with dysphoria and dysfunction are staggering. After more than 100 years of work on such topics, one might imagine that behavioral researchers would have, by now, plumbed the depths of human unhappiness and despair. Curiously, however, one common and painful experience has virtually escaped scholarly attention—the emotional experience that people colloquially call hurt feelings.” [1]

Additional research on hurt has been done in the last twenty five years, but there’s still an enormous gap; the number of scholarly articles on anger and sadness dramatically exceeds those on hurt, for example.

One reason for this is that when late 20th century psychology scholars sought to codify the core negative human emotions, their lists did not include hurt. They all name fear, anger and sadness as the primary three; some models also add shame, disgust, contempt or despair. Yet none include hurt in that taxonomy of basic, core negative human emotions.

And you know those cute posters that teach kids (and adults) about feelings? Most of them don’t list hurt as one of the options – even those that find space for emotions like awe, proud, and bored.

This might sound shocking, but for many years there was a debate in the academic community about whether hurt was a distinct emotion, rather than just a component of emotions deemed more worthy of study—like anger, fear, guilt, and sadness. Pathbreaking researchers had to take a bold stand: that hurt was indeed a distinct feeling. [2] That was relatively recently, in the early 2000’s.

Why has hurt been so neglected in research and inner-work conversations? There are a number of potential reasons, but one is this: it’s very hard for us human beings to sit with and face hurt; it’s an incredibly vulnerable emotion. In some sense, the capacity to be hurt is the very essence of our vulnerability. We definitely avoid looking at it and talking about it in our own lives. Is it possible that collectively, we’ve avoided looking at the subject of hurt, not only in our own hearts but in the professional discourse as well?

Think of all the tremendous potential that might come from bringing hurt back into the conversation, as its own focal point. It overwhelms me a little to consider. Think of how we might be able to heal what actually needs to be healed in ourselves. Think of the more tender conversations we might be able to have with each other. Think of how we could get to the underlayer of what’s really going on in a situation, rather than dancing on the surface of anger or blame. Think of how we could have a more heartfelt discourse with each other in the collective realm, to get out of the trance of our reactions to our hurt, and to talk about the hurt itself.

Of course, that is no easy matter. But it’s a possibility worth pursuing, which is why I’m writing and thinking about hurt a lot these days.

The matter is deeply intertwined with our Playing Big. I can’t tell you how many women I see who get stopped in their tracks because of unhealed hurt from unjust or harsh feedback, or from fallings out or painful endings with team members or collaborators. So many of you have given me the honor of hearing your stories about that. But the topic of hurt is also relevant beyond our Playing Big. It’s integral to the health of our relationships and our hearts.

I’ll be sharing more about what we can do with our hurt feelings—and giving us a kind of Hurt 101—an education we all need and generally don’t receive. For today, I hope you’ll chew on this with me: how, and why, has hurt been so overlooked in our personal growth and psychology lexicon? When was the last time you were aware of your own hurt, in such a way that you could (or did) name, “That hurt.” And do a check-in to notice: what is your current toolkit for responding to the everyday kinds of hurts that come your way?

With love,

Tara

[1] Leary, M. R., & Springer, C. A. (2001). Hurt feelings: The neglected emotion. In R. M. Kowalski (Ed.), Behaving badly: Aversive behaviors in interpersonal relationships (pp. 151–175). American Psychological Association.
[2] Lemay, E. P., Jr., Overall, N. C., & Clark, M. S. (2012). Experiences and interpersonal consequences of hurt feelings and anger. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(6), 989–1017.

Top Photo credit: Zyanya Citlalli

The conversations generally started with these women sharing some sort of dilemma in their business: How do I decide whether to offer x or y? What if I hate or don’t want to support social media? Is it time to focus on this business full-time? Is it time to stop focusing on this full-time?

With my coaching hat on, I sensed that the questions they were asking didn’t seem to be their real questions. I took note of the tender and subtly hurt tone in their voices. And when we dug a little deeper, it became clear that certain past experiences were sitting within these women as painful memories, even as near secrets that they felt shame about.

Some had courageously put an offer out into the world and…no or little response.
Others had been persisting for a long while without the number of customers or level of success they hoped for.

And because of that…

Some of these women were left thinking their gifts weren’t really wanted or welcome in this world.
Others questioned if they were meant to be entrepreneurs at all.
Many were getting lost in “compare and despair” as they looked at others’ seeming success.
These thoughts and feelings were particularly demoralizing because they’d already worked to overcome such self-doubts in order to even start their businesses in the first place!

And then, with those painful experiences and the self-doubt or bewilderment they caused, many had put business projects and dreams on hold.
Some convinced themselves they needed to get training or expert advice.
Others convinced themselves the problem must be an internal block like fear or self-sabotage they had to then fix through intensive inner work.
Others concluded they had to just wait (and wait, and wait) until the universe brought them something different.

I want to offer a different perspective on these experiences.

I live in Silicon Valley, a place world-renowned as the epicenter for starting and growing successful businesses. Even in this context – in which people take themselves damn seriously as the ultimate experts in starting and growing companies, and in which companies get millions of investment dollars to recruit the best people, do paid marketing, and build the robust technologies – people still expect a very low percentage of businesses to work out. 

For example, a venture investor works to select what they feel are the most high-potential start ups, then gives those start ups ample money and guidance and support, yet expects that only about 10-20% of the companies they invest in will become big successes! And they’ve formed these expectations about their odds based on a lot of past data.

Here’s a second important thing: those 10-20% of companies that do succeed don’t get it right on the first time. In fact, tech investors expect startups to spend ~3-18 months in a process of experimentation in order to discover – via trial and error – what resonates with a group of customers. These businesses often find traction with an offering or positioning that is wildly different than the entrepreneur’s original idea.

It pains me that while (mostly male) tech entrepreneurs are embracing this ethos of experimentation and not taking failures personally, so many of the women creative and small biz entrepreneurs I speak with are in a very different situation. We haven’t been told that we are allowed to have lots of trial and error, let alone supposed to have it! We expect ourselves to get it right, right out of the gate, and we often take on so much self-criticism and shame when we don’t.

So please hear me, loud and clear.

Business struggles have nothing to do with worth. 
Often, they don’t even have much to do with talent.
Having few customers does not signify that you are less talented, unique, or less liked or loved than someone who has many. 
All it means is that you haven’t yet landed upon the combination of elements that make a product work for some particular group of customers.
That’s it. It’s actually a kind of boring, tactical problem. Nothing more and nothing less.

And one more thing: for all of you creating beautiful art, exciting innovations, or new forms of healing and personal growth work, please know that sometimes the most valuable, revolutionary work and ideas aren’t met with huge demand in the marketplace. The mainstream world’s consciousness of its actual needs – its understanding of what is actually most deeply valuable – may not be there, where you are, yet. And if that’s your situation, you don’t just have to wait or despair. There are a whole host of specific implications for how to approach your cutting edge work, as well as for how you sustain yourself financially.

Alright – so big picture, if you’ve been carrying pain or shame around these topics, I truly hope this note helps you to begin to let go of it.

And if you’d like to dive deeper into these ideas,
• to learn what experiments to run in your business, so that those experiments help you discover what will find traction with an audience
• to get off the emotional roller coaster ride, and separate confidence and self-worth from your business metrics once and for all

please join me for Trust & Traction, my entrepreneurship workshop in August.

In an intensive (and joyful!) day together, we are going to let go of myths, learn a ton, and land into a powerful reset in our businesses. Get your spot here!

With love,
Tara

Photo credit: Martin Reisch

I don’t mean the hallway that’s a little too slim or an impossible parallel parking spot downtown.

I mean the immaterial narrow places – the felt experience of being in a confined, pressured, constricting internal state.

There are many kinds of narrow places.

Living with mean, judging, self-critical thoughts in your head is a narrow place.

Avoiding what’s true is a narrow place.

Being certain that you have to trade off something that is dear to you to get something else that is dear to you is a narrow place.

Living with the shoulds or have-to thoughts holding authority over you is a narrow place.

Carrying around fiery resentment at someone is a narrow place.

There are many narrow places, but in my view, they exist in a kind of loose constellation with each other. They have a lot in common.

I’ve seen again and again that we can move out of the narrow places and back into what we might call the expanse – the inner space where we feel a sense of possibility, where possibilities abound and ideas and visions and whispers for ways forward come into our minds and hearts.

Working with people, watching them leave the internal narrow places, I’ve come to believe something a bit radical: if we’re in a narrow place, that’s not the full story. The situation at hand is not merely some cynical verdict about how things are, about the harsh reality of life. There is a different way to see it, listen to it, relate to it.

All of this has nothing to do with avoiding the harder realities of life. Sadness is not, in my experience, a narrow place. Grief is not at all a narrow place – it is vast and wide, and often it is the way out of the narrow place. This is not about turning sad to happy. It’s about moving from the internal narrow places to the expansive ones.

Often a change in perspective, narrative or beliefs ushers us quickly out of the narrow place. That’s one of my favorite moments in working with others – when a narrow place that seems so intractably confined suddenly reveals itself to have a big open doorway, or even a bright yellow waterslide that we can jump on and go down with glee. We leave the narrow place behind simply because we saw the situation in a new way… or we saw our role in a new way… or we shifted from a fearful part of us to a calm one or a loving one.

Sometimes we leave the narrow place by giving ourselves permission to do something that we haven’t given ourselves permission around before.

Sometimes we leave the narrow place simply by expressing fully how we feel, unburdening our heart to a loving ear.

Sometimes we leave the narrow place by making a new choice, taking a new action, saying a new no or a new yes.

Today I want to share some beginning steps for moving out of the narrow places.

We can each begin with noticing, “I’m in a narrow place around this.”

It’s a significant reframing. Instead of “she’s just so impossible” it’s “wow, I’m really in a narrow place in how I’m relating to her.” Instead of “my to-do list is unbelievably long and I have to get it all done by three or I will prove myself a slacker once again,” it’s “okay, I’m really in a narrow place with how I’m relating to the work on my plate.” Instead of “this family member won’t listen to me and do what’s right and safe for them and it’s driving me crazy,” it’s “I’m really in a narrow place in how I’m relating to this person I can’t control.”

We can notice when we’ve landed in a narrow place.

Second, we can take being in a narrow place as a call for us to do some inner or outer work to help move ourselves to an expansive, generative state. Being in a narrow place signals to us that there’s a need for a shift.

How might we shift out of the narrow places?

You can always place your hand on your heart and have compassion that you’re in a narrow place. That’s a powerful start.

Then, perhaps a lowering of expectations to something more realistic of what we can really get done today,

perhaps a humbling reminder that we’re all very fallible beings doing our best,

perhaps a remembering that there is no win to seek, except the win-win,

perhaps some time to heal a hurt, or dissolve a resentment, or find a creative solution instead of settling for something that doesn’t feel right,

perhaps a pause to help everyone slow down and feel a little safer and more connected before you all dive back in to tackle the problem in front of you.

Perhaps a new question. What are my points of agency here? Given that I can’t control others, what is a wise and serenity-creating response? What are the gifts or lessons in this? How is this the perfect life curriculum for me at this time? Sometimes, a powerful question is the door or window or skylight in the narrow place.

So, notice when you’ve landed in a narrow place. Let that be the signal there’s a need for a shift. And then use the tools and questions and practices that help you find the expanse again.

Thank you for reading. If this post evokes a story or thought or sentiment you want to share, please email me here. Whether or not I can respond, I will read all of your notes.

Love to you today,
Tara

Photo credit: Valilung

Writing is one of the ways we can ground ourselves, process what we’re feeling and thinking, and make a positive impact on others.

A few years ago, I wrote and shared 10 of My Convictions About Writing. Here they are, with some updates.

1.  What defines us as writers is simply that we write – frequently or rarely. We are writers in that we endeavor to put our experiences, questions, sentiments, into words on the page.

2.  Creativity exists naturally in all of us – but in most of us, it gets blocked. We often need support unblocking and unlocking our words.

That’s why creative recovery is a thing. I’ve been through my own, and am always reaching for more of that recovery. Creative recovery can happen for us.

3.  Writing heals. As we translate our lived experience into words, we metabolize and integrate it. We put what’s past more firmly in the past, and discover what’s arising in the present. We become the authors of our experience, the creators of it in some sense, in its second life on the page.

4.  For women, every act of articulation is an act of empowerment, because we are in the midst of many generations of being silenced.

5.  To unleash the flow of words, we have to write for ourselves and ourselves alone. Impact on the world or accolades may come, but only if we’ve learned to write for ourselves first.

6.  The writing work that lands most strongly in the world is born of authenticity and courage – not from polishing, perfecting, or trying to guess what readers want. That’s one of the many reasons that most of what we learned about writing in school does not give rise to the kind of writing that changes hearts and minds – others’ or our own.

7. The age of AI is demonstrating that an artificial intelligence can generate near infinite amounts of relatively logical words on a page – and, for a very long time, our own mental chattering minds have been doing that too. This is a time to discover and reground in the very different thing that makes words important, moving, and transformational – for both writer and reader.

8.  Editing and craft are merely good assistants to the more important qualities of authenticity and courage. And, they are damn good assistants!

9.  If writing feels stilted, clunky, frustrating, futile, that’s okay. We just need to dip beneath the surface in you to the place where the words are ever flowing. The flow of words is always tappable, and community, prompts, and structure can help us tap the spring.

10.  Most importantly: your story and life experience, your ideas and inquiries are enough to make for plenty to say. That’s so hard to see in ourselves sometimes, but I can promise you, it’s true.

If these ideas about writing, creativity, and sharing our voices resonate with you, please use them, post them, pass them on!

Pen and paper photo by Isaac Smith

Certainly in these times, my team and I are feeling, in a new way, the profound need to support women in their leadership and in creating full and fulfilling lives. That’s the “what” of our work. But these times have prompted my team and I to reflect on what’s important about the how of our work – meaning, the stances we take and the values that guide our work with each other and with you each day.

I want to share how we, on the Playing Big team, are showing up in relationship to these challenges this year. We aim to operate with three principles informing everything that we do. These have all long been a part of how we work, but they feel important in new ways, and we will be making them more central to our work this year.

I think of this principle as “everybody precious.” Everybody holy – everybody a piece of, a part of – the divine. This principle is foundational, it changes everything, and there is a huge assault on it in our time.

Our team lives the conviction that every person is precious in so many different ways, large and small. It shows up through the deep care we always try to treat our readers and course participants with. It shows up when a member of our team sits down and writes, by hand, the name of each person in a course before it begins, saying a quiet blessing of well wishing over each name. It shows up in my starting assumption before any coaching conversation: that I am about to experience a miraculous human being worthy of absolute cherishment. It shows up, too, when we get a tricky or difficult email from a reader, and we slow down to do the sometimes lengthy reflective and discernment work to figure out how to ethically and generously respond.

In the current context, treating people in these ways is countercultural. If the rest of your day felt like it jerked you around with harsh words and experiences, we want our space to be different. We want it to be a soft place to land.

But it’s not just that we work to hold each person as precious. It’s also that, in our courses, people come to see each other’s sacredness and humanity – often across real differences in identity of many kinds. As just one example, on a recent course call, we had participants present from Croatia, Jamaica, Canada, Poland, South Africa, Slovakia, Sweden, Bermuda, Switzerland, Australia, Colombia, Spain, Netherlands, India, UK, and more. And within the U.S. participants joined from Chicago to Houston, from the Puget Sound to Florida, from Indiana to Wisconsin, and everywhere in between.

Because of the tone we set, and because we aren’t just engaging in small talk, but instead having coaching conversations in which each person’s tender dreams and fears come forth, something amazing happens. Across our wide-ranging community, people experience each others’ essences, their stunningly bright light. They are moved by each other. In the climate of increasing dehumanization, and the misinformation about each other that is so rampant now, this is important in an entirely new way.

The second theme we are embracing this year is helping people ground in ungrounded times.

What does it mean to be grounded? It means that we are regulating our nervous systems and processing our emotions so that we can keep returning to a state of openness, centeredness, and goodwill – and then taking action from that state. This is vital, as every day we are seeing leaders take action – not out of those calmer and wiser internal spaces – but out of their own gaping unhealed wounds and harmful animosities. As they do that on the most visible stages, they are normalizing that behavior, and granting a dangerous permission for others to do the same in their own communities and homes.

All of us who are doing work to help people regulate emotionally are doing a crucial collective task: building the cohort of individuals who can act from solid emotional and mental ground. Parents, teachers, therapists, coaches, wellness support people do this work quite formally, all day long. But many of us do it more subtly through our work – by being the calm one in the room, by knowing how to help people talk through triggers or intense emotions, or by being a problem solver who can help people move forward together. I see our team’s work as also fitting in here – both in offering coaching conversations that help us shift and regulate, and in teaching self-coaching tools that give people the skills to again and again move from fear, stress and resentment, back into their calmer and loving selves.

Our third principle is about embodiment. In these times, it’s all too easy to end up living like floating heads lost in our devices. Meanwhile, AI is rapidly blurring the lines between what’s human and what’s not. And we find ourselves in relationship to a disrupted, changing earth. All of these currents threaten to pull us away from our sensory, incarnate existence. But it’s through the body, so much of the time, that we ground and source ourselves. And so often it’s through embodied human connection – voices, faces, touch, felt energies – that we find comfort and calm.

In these times, I need the solace that comes from gazing at eyes and faces. I need to hear human voices aloud. In fact, “Keep It Fleshy” is my personal motto for 2025. It makes me chuckle because it’s such a cheeky phrase, but I’m not joking about the actual meaning of it at all! I am taking darn seriously designing a life that stays rooted in felt connection and embodied day-to-day living: more voices aloud, more gatherings, more touch, more immersion in water, more physical movement, more staring at trees.

In our work as a team, Keep It Fleshy means we will be offering more opportunities for live interaction within my courses, more opportunities for participants to know each other, and for me to get to know each of you. I’ll also be doing more in-person events than I have in a long time, as well as doing smaller events, with the grassroots communities and organizations that inspire me and fill me up. Because what I know for sure is that in these tumultuous times, we need each other – and we need to connect in embodied ways.

So, those are our principles.

Everybody Precious.
Grounding in Ungrounded Times.
Keep It Fleshy!

That’s how we plan to operate within our team and with you this year. We look forward to supporting you, gathering with you, and learning from and with you.

With love,

Tara & team

Photo Credit: Natalia Blauth

There are the more obvious forms of feedback – a client’s feedback about a session, a performance review with your boss at work, some honest and tough feedback from a teenager in your life, and so on.

Then there are the more subtle forms of feedback.
Posting something on social media about a political cause that matters to you and getting tons of positive responses? Feedback.
Applying for fifty jobs and not hearing back from any? Feedback.
No sign ups to your course? Feedback.
Getting rehired by the same consulting client over a decade? Feedback.
Being asked by your community organization to run for a leadership role? Feedback too.

Every day, we find ourselves in feedback situations. That means we need an everyday toolkit for working with feedback. And particularly those of us who have been taught to be people-pleasers or to put others’ opinions before our own internal sense of authority – we need a relationship with feedback that helps us achieve our most important dreams and goals, rather than one where feedback ends up whipping us around – dramatically and erratically – in work and life.

These are the real words of women, sharing what their inner critics say, sharing the kinds of self-diminishing thoughts they live with, day in and day out. (And we all know their lives are hard and demanding enough without an added dose of self-criticism.)

When I teach a Quieting the Inner Critic workshop, I begin by asking the participants to share one thing their inner critic says to them. Answers like this stream in. A flood of self-criticism. A flood of the legacy of the sexism that lives inside us. A flood of the legacy of a civilization not yet loving enough to build people who cherish themselves and each other.

Then I ask the women present what they feel reading all those inner critic thoughts from others. Undoubtedly people say:

“It makes me so sad.”
“My heart hurts.”
“I’m crying reading these.”
“I can’t believe we do this to ourselves.”
“It’s terrible, but it makes me feel less alone.”
“Horrible but healing.”

Fifteen years ago, when I started my coaching practice, the inner critic voice was loud for every woman client I had – and they were all remarkable, capable women. At that time in my life, the inner critic was loud, invasive, and dominant in my own head, too.

I got very, very interested in how we quiet that voice – quiet it enough that it doesn’t direct our decisions, keep us silent, or hold us back from going for our dreams.

Things that I’ve found don’t work (for most people, or for very long) in quieting their inner critics:

• Trying to just say “f-you” to it, and kick it to the curb with a kind of pumped up, faux-empowerment
• Arguing with its criticisms through positive thoughts or affirmations about ourselves
• Reminding ourselves of our accomplishments or others’ praise and trying to find confidence from those

The things that do consistently work and make a real difference over the long term are subtler and softer. They include:

• Getting a kind of Inner Critic 101 training so we can recognize it for what it is and understand how it functions
• Understanding the inner critic’s protective (but misguided) motivation around safety – and seeing its intent with compassion and clarity
• Drawing on parts of us that are stronger and deeper than self-doubt, like values and the inner mentor’s voice

Altogether, the work involves a shift in orientation. It’s not about getting rid of self-doubt and becoming unfailingly, blazingly confident. It’s about having the skills to wisely respond when self-doubt arises, as it inevitably will, as we face life’s uncertainties and stressors, and as we stretch into new kinds of playing bigger.

So, today, ask yourself these key questions:

• What is my inner critic speaking up about these days? In my life? In my career? About my body? (There’s always more fresh awareness to gain here, since our inner critics often sneakily creep in.)
• What would happen if I didn’t hold those inner critic thoughts as truth, but rather as an expression of my safety instinct that’s trying desperately to scare me enough (about failure, rejection or humiliation) that I’ll shrink back into my comfort zone?

Then check out the tools in The Inner Critic chapter of Playing Big for everyday, moment-to-moment practices for quieting that self-doubting voice, so it doesn’t control your actions.

Thank you for reading and, here’s to quieting our inner critics – together.

Warmly,
Tara

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Want more support around working with your own inner critic, or working with clients, team members, or mentees around theirs? Learn more about the Playing Big programs here..

If you enjoy my work, I think you’ll love Elise’s work too. In a sea of personal growth content that’s reductive, it embraces nuance. In a landscape with too many tip– and check– lists, Elise is comfortable in the terrain of asking and exploring big questions. And, in a personal growth landscape that has evolved to have its own problematic old boys’ network, Elise is calling that out, and creating stronger women’s networks within the field.

One more thing I especially love. When I look over at my bookshelves of favorite personal growth and spirituality books, it strikes me how many of those books were published before 2010 or so. There’s a kind of book we don’t see a lot in the personal growth space anymore – it’s hard to describe, but I’d say they are books with less of a big, grabby lead idea, and more of a quieter, wise exploration of major questions. Elise highlights these foremothers and forefathers of a lot of the work happening today – people like Harriet Lerner, Riane Eisler, Llwellyn VonLee, and others. We coaches, therapists, spiritual seekers, personal growth lovers – we did not, um, fall out of a coconut tree! It can only enrich our thinking to know our lineages.

Okay, with all that said… you can listen to my episode on the show here.

Here are a few more episodes with teachers who have been important to me:

• Harriet Lerner
• Joy Harjo
• Peggy Orenstein
• Loretta Ross

Elise’s fantastic Substack is here, and you can get her book, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good here. 

Photo by Sean Sinclair on Unsplash

This physician author is a big name these days – he’s by all traditional, professional measures wildly successful, with a whole host of accomplishments and even some fame. Yet, as he shared in this conversation, he was struggling with a deep and painful sense of meaninglessness and futility. As he put it, no matter what he did in his life, no matter how much success he had, ultimately, the planets would go on spinning just the same. His own name would be forgotten in the sands of time. This – the not being permanent or even remembered, and not being able to change reality in some major, fundamental way – troubled him.

He is not alone of course. There is a particular notion of meaning that many of us have been seduced by. In this version of significance, you live on because your name is carved into the big buildings you funded, or your story is written in history books because of the power you wielded and the enormous public influence you had. Or, perhaps you win big prizes or create a technological advance that breaks into a new frontier.

Indeed, in Silicon Valley, people actually talk about wanting to make “a dent in the universe” – as if denting this unbelievably beautiful and more-intelligent-than-us miracle would somehow be a good thing. As if it needs our denting.

As I listened to this physician share about his struggle with his individual temporariness, and his ultimate individual insignificance, I couldn’t help but reflect on what I’ve lately come to think of as “the other immortality.”

We – as named selves, with edges we define by our bodies – are indeed finite and mortal. But if we don’t identify with that smaller self, and instead identify with the slightly larger selves – seeing ourselves as nurturers and givers who shape others, who in turn shape others – then the stretch of our lives looks different. We can see the truth that we, via our love, our care, our gifts, are in fact enduring. We just don’t endure in ways that are always knowable to us, easy to chart or pin down.

When I sit on the rug and read Goodnight Moon to my daughter, some things are being poured into her from me: new words she’ll go and use in who knows what ways in her own life, future memories of the comfort and happiness of snuggling with a loved one, perhaps a love for stories. When we sit there and read, we are not just passing ten minutes. We are layering in one more experience that is shaping her.

I can’t know what she will choose to do with her words in her future – comfort people, teach something, offer kindnesses to her neighbors, write some words on a page – who knows? Nor do I know what she will choose to give or create from what will hopefully become in her a deeply felt love for human beings. But I do know she will do something, because that’s how the chain of giving and receiving and giving again works for us humans. And it’s an endless chain: she will impact someone, and whoever she impacts will in turn impact others.

And so, when I read Goodnight Moon, I’m immortal.

And everyone who has shaped my capacity to read to her, to be patient with her, to extend love to her – is in that moment immortal too.

When my childhood dance teacher would gather all of us kids in a circle before class and look at us as if we were the most miraculous creatures ever created, and ask us, with rapt attention, “What did you learn at school today?,” she forever altered how we felt about ourselves. Now we are artists and therapists and activists and aunties and neighbors and teachers. Everything we do is a little bit imbued with her and her love. And so she is immortal.

Or, let me put it this way. If you have ever seen me be patient, you have met my dad. If you have ever heard me ask a searing question, you know something of my mom. If I have ever been kind and affable in a casual sidewalk conversation with you, you know my childhood neighbor Dolores, who was that way with me every single day when I passed by her front walk.

And how many of us are carrying a little of Georgia O’Keefe, or James Baldwin, or some other sage or saint of old, because of how their words and wisdom live in our heart and keep shaping us?

Life is about this miraculous and mysterious mixing of light between humans over time, over generations.

And so, to anyone who is stuck in the cold loneliness of seeking significance in their small-self’s permanence, I want to say: small-self permanence is not actually available to us humans. Permanence of name and individual impact is not here for our taking.

But we do have immortality through love. We pour the golden light of our attention and care and gifts into others. It changes who they are. It shapes the golden light they have to give, and as they give it, some part of our own light is carried forward.

We live on, eventually anonymously.
We live on, always gloriously.
We live on in beautiful ways that, if you ask me, are more than enough.

Love,
Tara

Photo Credit: tenten

Longing is, according to one official definition, a prolonged unfulfilled desire.

Do you know any humans that live without prolonged unfulfilled desires? I do not.

Longing for more success, longing for a different financial reality, longing for recognition for our work, longing for community, longing for a more harmonious family life, longing for adventure or change, longing for peace and rest. We live, we long. 

We all have different sensations associated with longing. For me, it’s an ache in the chest—an uncomfortable feeling, sometimes a subtly uncomfortable one, sometimes more intensely so. It can have a restlessness to it. It can be a fire that motivates action. It can devolve quickly into inner critic narratives if I let it, as in “uggh, this desire is still unfulfilled because I’m not doing it right, because something is wrong with me.”

I believe that longing, prolonged unfulfilled desire, is with us because it’s as inevitable a part of the human experience as breathing, or fatigue after a long day, or tears of sadness.

Longing is a core part of the human experience for the most beautiful of reasons: within each of us is an essence that longs for more love, more goodness, more gentleness, more beauty, more justice, more connection, more luminosity. What feels like home to our souls, to our deepest selves, is experiencing those qualities in full expression, everywhere and in their totality. Yet that is not what our souls find here, in the limited and imperfect realm of human experience on earth. Here, we find those qualities present in ways that are partial, more sporadic, and dimmed.

If we aren’t conscious about longing as an enduring and intrinsic part of being human, we end up being run by our longings, spending all of our time trying to end them, to fully quench the thirst they carry.

I wonder, what might happen if we seek to name the deeper spiritual layer of the longing, what it’s really for, and then let that longing be there ongoingly, a sign of something good, not a problem to solve?

Our longings for order, for beauty, for justice, for connection, for love, for ease, for liberation are important because they reveal to us the secret story of who we are. We are beings that find a sense of home in these qualities. Here on earth, where these qualities show up only in glimmers and glimpses, we are always in some sense, homesick.

Longing is our turning toward home in our homesickness and saying to Source, I miss you. I yearn for you. Longing, if we welcome it, can be a way of staying in touch.

Love,

Tara

Top photo credit: Chris Lawton

Far less frequently do we get the message from the world: Turn inward. Trust yourself. Find your own right answers. You are powerful and trustworthy.

But, remember my recent post, It Depends? Lately, I’m really interested in the exceptions to my own rules. Yes, advice is often unhelpful. It can send us down distracting rabbit holes of someone else’s agenda or projections, or leave us feeling unseen/unheard.

On the other hand, sometimes it is fantastically useful. I live in the neighborhood I live in because a friend said, “go check out that area, I think you’d like it.” And I started a blog in 2009—a blog that opened up my creativity and led to the work I do today—because after listening to me talk about my writing struggles, a friend said to me, “you should start a blog.” I mean, she even used the word “should”—a no-no word in the personal growth world! And you know what? That advice was very helpful.

And so, with the matter of giving advice, I am interested in getting more granular. When is advice helpful and when is it not? How do we get more of that magically-just-right advice, the kind my friends gave me, and less of the other, unhelpful kind?

I recently brought these questions to a discussion with a group of alumnae of one of my courses. To start, I asked the group to reflect back on their experiences and estimate: what percentage of the time has advice they’ve received actually been helpful?

The majority of the group said that of all the interactions when someone has given them advice, the advice was helpful to them only 10-25% of the time. In other words, most of the time, advice is not helpful! That alone is a really important thing for us to consider.

Then we looked at the data of our own lives, considering what distinguished helpful and unhelpful advice we’ve received. What we discovered was illuminating.

For this group, here’s what commonly characterized the times when advice was not helpful, or was even harmful:

• The advice was not asked for.
• The advice didn’t reflect careful listening to the other party.
• The advice seemed to come from fear or projections of the advice-giver.
• The advice was based in assumptions, and/or reflected blindspots related to the privilege of the advice-giver.
• The advice felt like it contained a criticism, judgment or condescension.

On the other hand, here’s what was present during times advice was truly helpful:

• Trust—they trusted the person who was giving advice.
• Permission—they asked for advice or the other person asked for their permission before giving advice.
• The person was not pushy about the advice, and was not attached to them following it.
• Often, the advice-giver was able to put the advice in the context of their own experience, and make explicit that the other party’s context/experience/goals may be different—in other words, they didn’t assume lessons from their own life would necessarily apply to the other person.
• The recipient could feel that the advice came from a place of love and caring. (Note, this is very different from the advice-giver feeling their advice comes from a place of love and caring. Here what we are talking about is that the recipient actually feels, in their own being, that the advice is coming from a place of love and caring.)
• In some cases, there was also a sense that the advice-giver saw potential, talent or possibility in them that the person did not see in themselves—and the advising was about helping them step into that potential. (In co-active coaching terminology, what we would describe as “calling forth” the other person.)

So, if we were to extrapolate some guidelines for giving more helpful advice, those might include:

• Wait to be asked for advice, or if you feel inspired to share advice without being asked, authentically and gently ask permission first.
• Listen carefully and deeply to the other party before ever moving into advising. You might want to even repeat back to them the key themes of what you heard and check with them—did I get that right? Am I hearing you?
• Start from the assumption that the other party’s experience, circumstances and goals are different from yours, not the same.  
• Start from the assumption that what worked for you in your life or career is not a universally applicable approach, but was shaped by your particular identity and forms of privilege.
• Do your own inner work to unhook from any projections or attachment to outcome that’s present in your stance toward this person or their situation. That inner work may take days or weeks! Then, after you’ve done that work, see what’s left over that you really feel moved to say.

Big picture, collectively, I continue to think we benefit from leaning much more heavily on other ways of supporting people (besides giving advice). We can draw on generous listening, asking powerful questions, championing others, and modeling/embodying positive qualities and actions via our own behavior (versus advising others about them). These are all skills I love to teach, in the Playing Big Facilitators Training and The Coaching Way.

And yet, at the same time, there are exceptions to every rule. Should we give advice? It depends. Some small percentage of situations are ones where, if we listen carefully and lovingly, we might just be able to give the piece of advice that is transformative for someone else. I think those are the rare occasions, not the usual thing. Maybe a good way to think of it is that advice isn’t the main course of how we support people, but the occasional garnish on the plate. Carefully chosen, carefully placed.

Love,
Tara

Each rabbi brings compelling arguments to support their points. And each shares examples of times they’ve used their approach, with great results.

So, how does the argument get settled? What’s the answer? I imagine that you, like me, wish we were given one! But the text ends right there, in the middle of the disagreement. It seems to be suggesting: there are two valid paths here. Both approaches have their place. I can no longer remember—and couldn’t find—the source for this text (my apologies), but it comes to mind for me frequently these days.

As someone steeped in the personal growth world, I’m much more inclined to have a kneejerk response like the first rabbi’s—to think that the way to be of support is to lend a listening ear, and just be with someone in their distress. But I can certainly think of counterexamples in my own life.

Once, when I was in the midst of a tough few months mothering a colicky baby, I called a friend in tears and shared my overwhelm and feelings of failure. That friend is a therapist. She knows and lives the value of listening to people in their tears. And she’s very comfortable doing that. But she didn’t do that on that particular day. She listened to me for about five minutes, said she was coming over, and then showed up at my front door wearing a truly ridiculous costume that can best be described as Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour Meets Rugby Playing Sesame Street Character. Then she stayed for a while, rocked the baby, and kept the energy upbeat. It was such a surprise, such a hilarity, and such an expression of love, that it completely changed my mood. It did, in fact, cheer me up. Rabbi #2 approach.

I think about this principle in my relationship with myself, too. Sometimes, the way to respond to my own sadness or angst is to open up toward it, and to unravel it through journaling or a conversation with a good friend, to really dig into it. But sometimes, I choose instead to get absorbed in a word game on my phone, or call a friend and chit chat about other things entirely. Sometimes, that also has its way of working.

But the larger point I want to make today is not about dealing with upsets. It’s about how we can get caught up in our absolutes about how to do this or that, to think some single principle always applies when it comes to wellbeing, healing, personal growth. I am a part of the personal growth / self-help field, and one thing people in my field often do is state absolutes about wellbeing, relationships, healing and so on. The absolutes are many: “Prioritize self-care.” “Feel your feelings.” “Focus on gratitude.” “When someone is upset, just be with them, don’t try to change how they feel.” “Do work you are passionate about,” and so on.

For each of these absolutes, there are counterexamples. If you have a family member who is at the end of life, maybe, for a while, self-care doesn’t get prioritized and that feels really right because it gives you more time with them. Maybe you aren’t ready to “feel your feelings” about some difficult thing just yet—and your psyche will let you know when it’s time.

Sometimes, or for some of us, focusing on gratitude is a great prescription, one that can help us find more joy and contentment. But for someone else, at another moment in time, focusing on gratitude might get mixed up with their pattern of suppressing anger or pain that deserves expression. Sometimes, doing work we are passionate about transforms our lives for the better. In other situations, doing work that feels mundane is fantastic, because it allows time for hobbies or relationships to take center stage.

It can feel a little scary—or very scary—to let go of our absolutes. Thankfully, I don’t think we need to let go of all of them. In my own life there are touchstones that I find to be pretty reliable absolutes: Find a path of love. I/we can turn toward a power greater than ourselves for support and guidance. Connection is good. But, at the same time, I think we can love ourselves and each other more wisely, more fully, if we don’t default to our old absolutes so often. Because if we really look at the data of our lives, our true lived experience, often the answer that reveals itself is: it depends.

As I get older I notice that now more and more I say: it depends. I say it more in my own life, but I especially notice I say it more in answer to questions people ask in my courses and workshops. Where I used to give a single recommendation, now I’m much more likely to say, “It depends. Sometimes, this can be a great tool/approach for that kind of situation. And other times, this very different, near opposite approach can be the way forward.” At times I have also gleaned some of the patterns about what works when, but sometimes there is a lot of mystery to that. Especially in my work, it feels like a really strong form of integrity to say, “I’m not going to pretend there is one right answer to the complex questions that we grapple with. There is not.”

Sometimes, the answer is stretching out of our comfort zones. Sometimes, the answer is shoring up in what brings us comfort.
Sometimes, the way to get to a breakthrough is to work hard on the problem. Sometimes, the way to get to a breakthrough is to rest.
Sometimes, when we are lost, we need community. Sometimes, when we are lost, we need solitude.
Sometimes, the path forward is acceptance. Sometimes, it is endeavoring to make a change.
Sometimes, growth comes with sticking it out. Sometimes, growth comes in letting it go.

Let’s let life be as surprising, as varied, as dancing-in-motion-with-us as it really is.

Love,
Tara

Top photo by: Unma Desai

1. Requests

Many of us never learned about making requests and don’t have this skill in our toolkit. It’s so important! A request sounds like, “Would you be willing to turn the music down?” or “In the future, could you give me more of a heads up when there is a change in scope to the project?” or “When I’m speaking about my day, could you be in more of a listening and empathizing mode, and not offer immediate solutions about the things I’m sharing? That would feel so much more loving to me.”  

If you are living a life in this messy world full of people, you will have some requests arising inside of you! And when we do not have comfort making requests… well, I bet you can see the problem already. You may get passive aggressive, or suppress or try to rationalize away your own needs, rather than making requests. Or, you may grow resentful because somebody did not read your mind about your requests and instinctively honor them!

Making a request dramatically increases the chances your request will be met, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee it. Lots of time, the people in our lives – whether the ones we love dearly or the ones we work with, or the ones we just briefly cross paths with – will say in response, “No, I can’t.” ”No I can’t give you more of a heads up because I don’t have time to…” or “No I can’t just listen. I need to share my thoughts!” or “No I can’t turn down the music.” Sometimes, their “no’s” may feel hurtful, uncomfortable or even infuriating to us.

When you get a yes to your request, wonderful! When you don’t, then it’s just time to decide what you want to do next. You may choose to initiate further conversation (even entering a negotiation conversation – see #2) around the issue to see if, with some further learning about each person’s desires and constraints, a good solution can be developed. In other situations, you may choose to set a boundary as your next step (#3), if appropriate, and if possible given your role in the situation.

2. Negotiation

In the Playing Big model, we define negotiation as “a process in which two or more parties with differing interests or perspectives are exploring whether they can find a mutually agreeable plan/solution.” This is a definition from negotiation coach Carrie Gallant, and I love it, for so many reasons: 

• It makes clear that a negotiation is not just what we do once a year when a salary conversation comes up with a supervisor, or if we are buying a car! No, no, no. Negotiation is an every day skill. We are in LOTS of situations with two or more parties with differing interests or perspectives – negotiating the holiday plan with relatives… negotiating who takes on the extra workload after a staffing cut at work… negotiating dishwashing duties with family members… and so on.
  
• This definition also helps us remember there’s usually not a bad guy in the negotiation but there are always multiple parties, who – understandably and inevitably – have differing aims and perspectives.
  
• And it makes clear the purpose of a negotiation: can we discover a plan/solution that is mutually
  agreeable? Where both parties’ priorities/needs are addressed? The good news is that we don’t have to get there through deception or forceful arguing – it’s actually much more likely to be effective if we approach a negotiation conversation as a focused process of first inwardly clarifying our own needs/wants, then listening and inquiring toward the other party, communicating about our needs, and creative brainstorming to find win-wins. If we discover in such a process there really isn’t a “fit”, a mutually agreeable solution, we may need to take another approach – like get more help for the conversations, or find a way to meet our needs outside of the negotiation. 

3. Boundary

A boundary is about what we will and won’t tolerate, or what we are or aren’t up for. A boundary is saying: I don’t do meetings in the morning because that’s my writing time. Or, I can make it to the meeting but I’ll have to leave right at the planned end time. Or, I’m very willing to have this conversation with you, but not when your voice is raised. I would be happy to talk about it with you when we can communicate about it calmly. A boundary comes from a quiet inward discernment of what feels loving and comfortable for us. It usually also depends on a kind of self-love and sense of deserving. And a healthy boundary doesn’t try to control what others will do, it is just a clarification of what we will do in the face of others’ behavior.

That’s a quick intro to what I see as three foundational parts of communication for our playing big, and for our well being. If much of this is feeling new to you, don’t feel badly! Most of us did not get much training or modeling around these practices. If you look at a situation now that’s been difficult, what do you notice about what requests, boundaries, or negotiation conversations could help?

Love,
Tara

Top photo credit: Susan Wilkinson