A while back I asked my sister if she was exhibiting any weird behaviors that could be associated with the pandemic. She gave it some fair thought and said not really. Like many folks here,* she’s a leader in a healthcare system and has been […]
All posts filed under: self help
Respectable you
I went to work on Monday, March 16th. About 2 o’clock that afternoon my manager called to say it’s happening; pack up your laptop and go home. In the span of about a minute I became an instant remote employee along with many other people. […]
What’s really going on in our mind
I have bipolar. However, what I’m really having a harder time reconciling about myself is being one of those people with bad allergies. Honestly, I just finished coughing my way through the last 8 weeks because I wasn’t going to be a person with allergies […]
Wisdom from the couch
As my sister says, “You go to therapy so I don’t have to.” As I always say, “Jokes on you because therapy rules!” And that’s especially handy right now when we are all at risk for developing a level of post-traumatic stress by the time […]
The next thing
When a friend’s engineer husband decided to go back to school to become a lawyer, for some reason I couldn’t get over his decision to dive into three grueling years. This sounded just awful to me — they had two young kids at home. And […]
Some good news
There was one sad winter when even the sound of a siren would bring tears to my eyes just thinking about the tragic mission that emergency vehicle might be on. But that was also the winter I discovered The Office, the legendary sitcom series set […]
Advice from a strange place
A hypochondriac might not be the first person you’d go to for advice about managing anxiety in a pandemic, but a recovering hypochondriac…now that’s a different story. They’ve figured out how to look their own fear in the face and not freak out. For that […]
What can you do when there is no way out?
One of the hard moments in my life as a mother was when my distraught teenage daughter pleaded with me to fix one of life’s bad situations. “Mom, make it go away,” she pleaded. While I can no longer remember what was wrong, two things […]
Be cool
She fell a little too much in love with me so I had to dump her, but it could just as easily have been me falling in love with her. This story is about what it takes for us to do what we do. Oh […]
The shape we take
Personality has always seemed a solid thing to me, as part of the original package as our genes. After all, who we are certainly couldn’t be developed as haphazardly as a bad habit we pick up. And yet as Lao Tzu maps it out, there […]
Full-body immersion
I read a memoir once about a high-level executive who lost her job, sending her into a downward spiral. Her recovery involved a lot of therapy and soul searching from which she learned a great deal about herself. As she went through the process of […]
Scene 6 — the playbook
I’ve been promising the steps of a self-leadership playbook for thousands upon thousands of words now, spanning across 7 long stories. In an act of unprecedented brevity, here they are in 4 numbers and 4 words: Anchor Identify Integrate Act Logically progressive. Beautifully efficient. And […]
