Tag Archives: life lessons
How many of you are good at giving compliments? How many of you are good at graciously accepting them? If you’re like most people, it’s easier for you to give a compliment than it is to receive one. Know this: when you minimize or refuse to accept a compliment, you are insulting the giver and telling yourself that you are not worthy. Am I being harsh? Nope. As a writer, I love words. I love how words convey meaning, mood…..
Every day, I log at least five miles of walking. In addition to helping with stress relief, I also mentally compose a lot of posts in my head during my daily constitutional. From this, as I sat down to peck out today’s post, two ideas kept filtering to the top of my consciousness: “To thine own self be true.” — Wm. Shakespeare from Hamlet and “I wanna tell you a little secret; being ‘The One’ is just like being in…..
Now that the temperature is beginning to drop into the 40s, I make sure to get at least five miles in during walks around my neighborhood while it’s still relatively warm. Winters in Chicago are usually pretty soul crushing and claustrophobic, but the pandemic has ratcheted my despair levels to eleven. During my walks, I encounter families, dogs, hipsters, teenagers and other people like me who enjoy stretching their legs for some exercise. There are those I encounter regularly, as…..
As someone who works in media and publishing, I literally get paid to be online. Immersed in the sea of toots, updates and hashtags, I marinate in bits, bytes and bon mots (and mal mots?) each day. It can be difficult for me to disengage my brain from the firehose of data that streams past me every day. However, I have found that it’s bad for my mental health to spend too much time in the digital realm. Since social…..
When I first moved to Chicago, I tried online dating. It had been an effective method of meeting people in years prior (generating a husband, who is now an ex), so I felt comfortable using the internet once again to search for my next boyfriend-potential-husband. The sheer population difference of a metro area the size of Chicago in comparison to where I had lived in Iowa meant that I had a chance to meet not only a larger number of…..
For most of us, we’ve experienced over two years of some version of lockdown. It has been a period of trauma and uncertainty. Even with the vaccine rollouts, there will be months, if not years of recalibration ahead of us. Early on during Quarantine Life, I sent out a message in response to a “hustle porn” tweet that essentially said if you don’t emerge from lockdown without having mastered a second language, launching your next company etc., you were a…..
I have news for you perfectionists out there: You’re going to fail. You’re going to disappoint someone. You’re going to get something all wrong. …And you’re going to learn and move on. At these “failure junctions” in your life, you will lose friends. Your network will change. It is supposed to. Through the learning of your lesson, your polarity will change, and you will fall out of alignment with some of your friends (maybe even family). This changing polarity will…..
Pillow talk: this throw pillow cost $38. I know what you’re thinking: big whoop-dee-doo. You may have dropped thirty-eight bucks on a good port at dinner today. But when I was eking by on absolutely nothing as a nonprofit founder, my scarcity mindset thought that spending $38 for a silly pillow was a stupid and a frivolous expense. So I returned to Crate and Barrel multiple times, checking to see if it was still available, thinking to myself, “If it’s…..
A common mistake that creators make is to set their asking price for their services or skill at what they think the market will bear (usually asking too little). The paradox is that when you set your value, the market meets you. As a writer and artist, I’ve been conditioned to donate my gifts or discount my rates for as long as I can remember. • Part of it is because I can tap into the well of creativity and…..
One day, I was taking a pizza out of the oven and caught my forearm on the inside of the door. I flinched and drew my arm away from the hot metal, but the damage was already done: within minutes, an angry weal had formed where my arm had touched the oven. I immediately took steps to clean and treat the wound and went on with my day. A few days later while I was brushing my teeth, I noticed…..