Tag Archives: resilience
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…..
I wonder how many people reading this watched the original television series MacGyver when it originally aired? Aside from being Selma and Patty Bouvier’s celluloid object of desire and the inspiration for SNL’s Will Forte creation MacGruber, this TV character is that rare proper noun that has been “verbed.” To MacGyver something is to bootstrap and/or apply a life hack that transforms something from nothing to save the day. If you are starting anything from scratch, be it a business,…..
When you factor in all of the social expectations of motherhood, types of motherhood, women who have lost children due to miscarriage or other reasons, and those women who do not wish to have children (and who are sometimes made to feel “less than” for that choice), Mother’s Day can represent an emotional series of land mines. In one of the first pictures taken of me at the hospital, you can see my mother: a 22-year-old woman, peering into a…..
Early on, when I first established a nonprofit to provide cars to women in transition, I had an opportunity to explain a central tenet of the organization. One of our first recipients was a single mother of seven children. She was 29 years old. The only reason I mention these statistics (especially as it relates to the quantity of her children) is because these facts about her circumstances were used by some as a cudgel against her and given as…..
I want to thank you for reading my blog. Among other things, it serves as a mechanism for helping me to write my next book. When I established a nonprofit to help women in transition, I knew that I was consciously taking my life into an entirely new direction. Through its dissolution, I learned even more lessons that I’ll be incorporating into my next book. There are lessons learned from failure that were extremely beneficial to me when viewed in…..
Periodically on this blog, I’ll share a journaling prompt designed to help you dig through the mental matter bouncing around your head. Not all of these exercises may seem applicable, but chances are good they will. I’ll repeat the following introduction before each exercise, because there may be people joining the process at different points of the process. INTRO: Journaling is a way to engage the subconscious mind and to allow your inner wisdom to float to the surface of…..
Did you know: Happiness is a state of being that you can adjust, like a thermostat on your wall. Everyone is born with a pre-determined Happiness Set Point®. Some of us have a higher setting, while some of us are natural-born Eeyores. The good news is that you have the power to change yours, regardless of the external circumstances in your life. About four and a half years ago, I got my heart broken, but good. It took me three…..
Oh happy day—my feather lampshade arrived today! I spray-painted the base of a lamp I’ve had for over 10 years and updated the look with a gorgeous shade covered with multi-colored feathers. It sits in the direct path of my line of sight when I step into my apartment. Want to change your life? Add happiness to each day? Make sure that you are seeding your environment with things that make you smile. Every time I see this lampshade, I…..
Today’s post is a brain dump toward my next book—a work in progress. One day, while walking to my neighborhood Starbucks, I happened to pass a man walking his dog. He resembled the stereotypical “Chic-kah-go” guy from the SNL “da Bears” skit featuring George Wendt and the late Chris Farley. As he walked, I was able to overhear his end of the conversation in snippets: “Yeah, well it ends in September and then they’ll have to go back to work.”…..
One fateful Friday the 13th, it was a day like any other: I was hip deep in performing a competitive analysis for a client, determining their place in the social media landscape… checking sentiment ratios, analytics from their site and other digital minutiae … when I was called into the agency principal’s office at 11:30 a.m. The president of the firm was blessedly direct when he said to me: “I have to let you go. I feel terrible about this,…..