Author: Elizabeth

How the Light Gets In

A psychiatrist once told me that when people reach a breaking point with a mental health issue, they tend to deal with it in one of three ways: The religion part was the surprise punchline but after a few beats it made sense. If a […]

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The Anatomy of a Panic Attack

This is a story about a panic attack that threw a top-level, high-performing, rock-solid leader for a loop. For decades she’d been the person — at work and home alike – everyone turned to for steadiness, for staying power, for perspective, for answers. I will […]

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What would nature do?

If we were just starting out at the beginning of time and didn’t know much about how to thrive, we would need to look no further than nature for instruction according to Janine Benyus*. Just by looking closely, we would see that nature, among many […]

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A thousand tiny humble things

When I was younger, I was overtaken by premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in a way that sometimes made me nervous to get in the car for fear I might do something impulsive when PMS was behind the wheel. I made an appointment with my OB/GYN but […]

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Super Slow

A natural response to an urgent call to action – be it in our minds or real — is to bring the energy of that frenzy into our body and go turbo fast. And if you are already high-twitch, well, we can go from zero […]

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A Blessing for the Lives We Actually Have

“Blessing” is one of those words I avoided for the longest time. I would never say, “Bless you,” when someone sneezed because, for one, I didn’t really know what it meant, and for another, my family didn’t do that. We didn’t say anything at all […]

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Lonely But Not Alone

Leo Bird knows what it’s like to walk into a cafeteria and be faced with what might seem like a mild dilemma: where to sit. Except it’s not mild, not mild at all. Leo, the college student son of one of my longtime/lifetime friends, was […]

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Remember Why You Like Me?

After a long job-seeking rejection streak, one of organizational psychologist Robert Cialdini’s clients started asking one simple question at the beginning of a job interview which immediately ended his rejection streak. This person went on to get better jobs in his next three interviews by […]

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