Hey Reader! For a brief, glorious year, I worked overseas as a performer/corporate trainer at a comedy theater in Amsterdam. In addition to a dozen American cast-mates, there were several Dutch office workers, bar, and front-of-house staff to know. The foreignness of their names and my porous memory meant it took longer than normal to remember who was whom. Embarrassed, I sought to overcome that by spending more time chit-chatting with people than I was inclined to, which led to an...
11 days ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader! If you’ve ever broken up with a friend, you know how gut-wrenching it can be. After all, friends keep our confidences. With our truest friends, we put aside our masks and feel safe being who we really are. We go to them with our hopes and fears. We trust their advice. Friends are our most intimate companions. That’s what makes breaking up with them so painful. Friends become even more precious as we get older. When we grow into adulthood and begin focusing on career, romance,...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader! It’s so hard not to be swept away—by enthusiasm or despair. But your peace of mind depends on resisting the extremes. If you give in to pure enthusiasm, you’re likely to keep chasing that dopamine rush to newer and bigger thrills. If you succumb to despair, there’s no limit to how anxious or paranoid you might feel. What’s the alternative? Anchor yourself in yourself. Root yourself in your truth. Turn off the noise and the commentary. Tune out the empty praise and ego-stroking....
25 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! One of my earliest mentors was a brilliant editor. Under her tutelage, my writing bloomed. Despite authoring thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, what she really wanted to write was a book. “When I retire, I’ll hole away in the mountains and write,” she’d say. “Finally write my novel.” About a month after she retired, I asked how her novel was going. It wasn’t. A decade later, it still isn’t. Often we romanticize creativity. It’s something that we’d indulge in if we only...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! How we show up matters. And how we show up consistently reflects to the world who we are. Sometimes, when we let ourselves run down, we forget who we are and how we want to show up in the world. Our resistance is low when we're tired, hungry, or scared. In that state, it's easy to become overwhelmed by stress or anxiety. In a moment of frustration, we may lash out at someone or give in to the impulse to rage. When we recover our cool, we may say: "That wasn't like me; I don't know...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! What are the two most powerful words you can say to someone? Tell me . . . Then what is the most powerful thing you can do? Listen. Without interrupting. Without talking over. Without guessing where the story is going. Without sharing how it relates to something you experienced once. Just listening. Your challenge this week is to understand when someone needs to share something and to say to them, “Tell me.” Then simply be still and hear. Let me know how it goes! Share your...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! Life has a way of piling on. It’s not that you just get a flat tire and that’s it. Oh no. You’ll miss an important business meeting, get grease on your outfit, the spare will be flat, the phone will die before you can call for help, and then you’ll remember you forgot to eat breakfast. And you’ll have to pee. Life can be absurd like that. Just when you think you can’t handle another thing, life smacks you in the face with a dead fish. It’s super easy to maintain balance and be...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! It’s a popular trope that to be an artist, you have to suffer. Centuries of books, movies and songs about tragic, creative people reinforce this myth that to be a creative artist, you must endure poverty, addiction, and/or mental illness in order to create great art. That kind of redemption arc certainly is dramatic, but it’s not the only way to live creatively. Being miserable doesn’t make you better at art, music, poetry or performing arts. It just makes you miserable. Which is...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader! There are people who mean so much to me that I tear up thinking about how much I love them. Yet I don’t talk to them regularly. Some I may not have spoken to for years. I think I need to change that pattern of behavior. A friend’s brother passed away last night. He was way too young. He was way too healthy to go so soon. There’s no reason he didn’t wake up this morning. We don’t get to choose when we say our goodbyes to people. That’s one of the reasons I always tell my friends I...
2 months ago • 1 min read