Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

Sometimes changing your circumstances isn’t possible, or simply not possible soon enough. You can’t get to a new job in an instant. You can’t make someone else change against his or her will. And you certainly can’t erase the past.  So what options do you have left?

Change your perception, belief or opinion about your circumstances. Doing so will help you change your attitude and ultimately allow you to grow beyond the struggles you can’t control.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus said it perfectly more than 2,000 years ago: “People are disturbed, not by (more…)

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
—Thomas Jefferson

This short article was inspired by an email we received today from a reader of the blog:

Dear Marc and Angel,

In one of your articles last week you asked your readers to think about a weakness they’d like to change. Mine is telling lies. Although they’re usually just little lies, I’ve gotten carried away. I lie about things all the darn time mostly to just make myself appear better than I am… because I want to impress people. But it’s getting harder! I feel like every little lie leads to another one, and it’s wearing on me. I’m sick of my own dishonesty! Please help me break this habit. I need some motivation to make a change once and for all. Your thoughts on this topic would be appreciated.

Sincerely,
A Dishonest Reader

Our reply (an open reply to everyone who lies to impress people):

Dear Dishonest Reader,

It’s time for a quick story about life…

Once upon a time, an aging king knew the end of his life was nearing, and he decided it was time to designate a successor. Since he had sadly lost his wife and children in a terrible accident, he chose to pass the throne on to (more…)

Twenty years ago he walked into my dorm room on the verge of tears.

“I can’t take it anymore!” he groaned. “I’m just running in place. I aim. I sprint. And I fall every time. I’m getting nowhere! Nowhere!”

His desperate eyes stared into mine, hoping and searching for an answer…

His Story of Procrastination

He has dreamed of pursuing a (more…)

There’s a big difference between empty fatigue and gratifying exhaustion.

Before you know it you will be asking, “How did it get so late so soon?” Perhaps you can already relate. So take time to reflect. Take time to realize what you want and need in the days and weeks ahead. Take time to take calculated risks. Take time to love, laugh, learn, cry, and forgive. Life is so much shorter than it often seems.

In our line of work we speak with people on a daily basis who have been forced to wake up to life’s fleeting nature. Consider these two small excerpts from people’s stories that we recently received in our email (more…)

Ten years from now, it won’t really matter what shoes you wore today, how your hair looked, or what brand of clothes you wore. What will matter is how you lived, how you loved, and what you learned along the way.

Deep down you know that already, right?

Yet today, just like the majority of us, you keep getting distracted by the insignificant.

You give too much of your time to meaningless time-wasters.

You take your important relationships for granted.

You get caught up in hurtful drama.

You give in to your doubts.

And the list goes on.

But why?

Why do you follow these stressful and regretful patterns of behavior?

Because (more…)

Here are some hard things worth reflecting on. They’re hard because they force you to check yourself. It’s all about challenging yourself to keep the right thoughts at the top of your mind, so they’re readily available on those inevitable days when you need them most.

Some people call them affirmations, or quotes, or convictions, but in any case these reminders have the ability to keep us on track by keeping calm, peaceful, productive thoughts and perspectives at the top of our minds, even when life gets messy. So challenge yourself to choose one of these reminders every morning or evening, and then sit for a moment or two while repeating it silently in your mind. See how doing so gradually changes the way you (more…)

A good morning, and thus a good day, aren’t experiences that magically happen — they are created consciously.

Most of us are distracted from the get-go every morning. Trivial activities like checking social media, watching TV, and worrying about things we can’t control often set the tone of the day. And that means we waste our most well-rested time on things that don’t matter, while gradually losing touch with the significant, controllable parts of our lives that actually do matter.

We simply forget that the morning hours are enormously important — they form the foundation from which the day is built. We forget that how we choose to spend these hours can be used to predict the kind of days we’re going to have, and ultimately the kind of lives we’re going to live. So if you feel like you’ve been getting a rough start lately, and stumbling through your days with diminished intention and focus, it’s time to consider (more…)

This morning I was reading a book outside my favorite beachside coffee shop when an 18-year-old kid sat down next to me and said, “That’s a great read, ain’t it?” So we started chatting.

He told me he graduated from high school earlier this summer and starts his college career in a few weeks. “But I really have no idea what I want to do with my life yet,” he said. “Right now I’m just going with the flow.”

And then, with eager eyes, he began asking me one question after the next:

• “What do you do for a living?”
• “When and how did you decide what to do?”
• “What do you wish you had done differently?”
• etc.

I answered his questions as best as I could, and tried to give decent advice with the time I had. And after a half-hour conversation, he thanked me and we parted ways.

But on the walk home I realized the conversation I had with that 18-year-old was actually quite nostalgic. He reminded me (more…)

The worst kind of heartache is often the kind you inflict onto yourself.

If you don’t want to break your own heart, then don’t…

1. Let people invalidate or minimize how you feel.

If you feel something, you feel it and it’s real to you. Nothing anyone says has the power to invalidate that, ever. No one else lives in your body, or sees life through your eyes. No one else has lived through your exact experiences. And so, no one else has the right to dictate or unfairly judge how you feel. Your feelings are important. Don’t let anyone lead you to believe otherwise.

2. Regret every mistake you’ve ever made.

If you regret some of the decisions you’ve made in the past, (more…)

You ultimately become what you habitually do. If your habits aren’t moving you forward, they’re holding you back. Here are four prevalent examples of the latter that keep holding the best of us back in life, and some strategies for turning things around…

1. We hold on too tight.

Twenty years ago, when Angel and I were just undergrads in college, our psychology professor taught us a lesson we’ve never forgotten. On the last day of class before graduation, she walked up on stage to teach one final lesson, (more…)

Love is great when spoken, but greatest when shown. Do little things daily to show your loved ones you care.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on a park bench in the early afternoon when an elderly couple pulled their car up under a nearby oak tree. They rolled down the windows and turned up some jazz music on the car stereo. Then the man got out of the car, walked around to the passenger side, opened the door for the woman, took her hand and guided her about ten feet away from the car, and they slow danced to a song under the oak tree. It was such a beautiful moment to witness.

This morning when I opened my laptop to write, the elderly couple immediately came to mind. I spent a few minutes daydreaming about them, wondering how (more…)

Each prompt below contains a quote and question to think about. I have personally used each of these prompts countless times in the past to nudge myself into self-reflection, and I continue to revisit them regularly. They bring awareness to the subconscious attachments and assumptions we all have. And they can help you think and move through situations, big and small, so you can let go, find clarity, and make better decisions going forward.

Challenge yourself to read and reflect on one prompt a day for the next few weeks…

1.

Forgive yourself for the bad decisions you’ve made, for the times you lacked understanding, for the choices that hurt others and yourself. Forgive yourself, for being young and reckless. These are all vital lessons. And what matters most right now is your willingness to grow from them.

What specifically do you (more…)

As human beings, we subconsciously tell ourselves stories pretty much every waking minute of our lives. And these stories don’t just change how we feel, they actually change what we see, what we experience, and what we know to be true. This is one of the primary reasons multiple people can go through the same experience but interpret it differently. Each of us may enter a shared experience with a different story echoing through our mind, and our unique story — our inner dialog — alters the way we feel. So each of us exits this shared experience with a different perspective on what just happened. And sometimes these differences literally make (more…)

Opportunities are like sunrises. If we wait too long, we miss them.

Too often we waste our time waiting for the ideal path to appear. But it never does of course. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting. Let this be your wake-up call today!

If you always sit around until you feel 100 percent ready for the journey, you’ll likely be sitting around for the rest of your life. Most of the time you just have to get up and go for it. And no, you shouldn’t feel any more confident before you take the next step. Taking the next step is what gradually builds your confidence.

Today is the day and now is the time! Thus, it’s finally time to admit that… (more…)

The goal each and every day of your life is to gradually grow stronger on the inside, so that less and less on the outside can affect your inner wellness without your conscious permission.

Truth be told, how you cope with unexpected problems and frustrations can easily be the difference between living a good life and living an unhealthy one. If you choose unhealthy coping mechanisms like avoidance or denial, for example, you can quickly turn a tough situation into a tragic one. And sadly, this is a common mistake many people make.

When you find yourself facing a disheartening reality, your first reaction might be to (more…)

As we all look forward to the next step in life, I know many of us are yearning for a simpler and selective range of experiences — the happy days, the normal times, the settings and events that make us feel more comfortable. And yet, the full range of our reality often brings something very different. The days in front of us will inevitably provide an extensive array of experiences that evoke feelings ranging from sadness and struggle to growth and pride, and more.

So we have a choice starting today. We can revolt against reality — the reality of having to deal with discomfort, of having to cope with uncertainty, of having to feel upset sometimes. Or we can (more…)

You can’t lift a thousand pounds all at once, yet you can easily lift one pound a thousand times. Little repeated efforts will get you there.

I have witnessed people reinventing themselves at all ages — 48-year-olds starting families, 57-year-olds graduating from college for the first time, 71-year-olds starting successful businesses, and more. How did they all do it? In a nutshell, they started being more mindful about making progress in their lives, step by step. And by doing so they changed the trajectory of their lives.

What you need to remember most right now is that it isn’t too early or too late to start making positive changes in your life. Your future is always affected by what you start doing today. Yet so many people wait around for some arbitrary date and time, like tomorrow, to take action. Don’t be one of them! Make yourself a bigger priority starting now. It’s time to…

1. Insist on embracing your humanness.

“Human” is the only real label we are born with, yet we forget so easily. To become attached to a loaded label of (more…)

The truth doesn’t disappear when it is forgotten or ignored.

You know how you can hear something a hundred times in a bunch of different ways before it finally gets through to you? The ten truths listed here fall firmly into that category — timeless lessons most of us likely learned years ago, and have been reminded of since, but for whatever reason we haven’t fully grasped them yet.

This, my friends, is my attempt at helping all of us, myself included, “get it” and “remember it” once and for all…

1. The average human life is relatively short.

We know deep down that life is short, and that death will (more…)

“You only live once, but if you do it right once is enough.”
— Mae West

Twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to witness the humble, elegant, peaceful passing of my 89-year-old grandfather. As I sat quietly in his hospice room alongside my grandma and other family members, his nurse smiled softly and said, “I can see he lived well. People his age often pass just the way they lived.”

And as I drove home that evening a couple questions kept cycling through my mind…

“Am I living well?”

“What do I want to be able to smile about on the inside when I’m close to the end?”

These questions are tough, especially the second one. At the time, I struggled to fully accept my own mortality — just thinking about it stressed me out. So I simply avoided the question and the soul-searching it demanded of me. I distracted myself for a few more years until I found myself back in a hospice room with my grandma on her 90th birthday (more…)

You’d like Michelle a lot. Most people do. She’s the kind of person who listens when you talk, who smiles often, and who says things that make the people around her smile. She’s incredibly intelligent, but in a way that makes others feel comfortable. It’s the way she expresses herself in simple terms you can understand — almost like she’s articulating the thoughts you already have in your head, but haven’t quite found the right words to say aloud.

And it doesn’t matter who you are either. Michelle always has a way of relating to you. Because, in a way, she’s been there with you all along. She can think like you, so she understands you. It’s truly a special gift. So many of us have limitations in our perceptions. We understand the soldiers but not the politics governing the wars. We understand the people who go to the movies but not the ones who (more…)