The other day at my son’s Hip Hop class some of the other moms were discussing camps they were booking for their children for Summer. Summer?! It’s January. We are still in Winter. I laughed a little at their urgency around needing to get their Summer camps booked now. This event left me with two thoughts… […]
I know most New Year’s articles often start with a note of excitement and anticipation about the new possibilities ahead. I would like to start my first article of 2026 on a more sobering note. You might find it depressing, and yet, I want to invite you to consider that perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it’s the key to your liberation this year.
On the first day back to school from the holiday break, I was talking to the father of one of the kids in my son’s Kindergarten class while we were waiting for them to be dismissed for the day. I asked him how the holidays were for him, and as per usual, I got the response I seem to get a lot from people: “Busy”. How often do you find yourself responding to a question on how you are with the that one word, “busy”?
What was even more interesting, was when I asked this father what he was most excited about in the coming year, he said he didn’t know yet, because he hadn’t had a chance to catch up on emails. He shared that once he has caught up with everything he is behind on, he will have a better sense of what he wants to do this year. And this is how most of us run our lives. When… Then…
We play this endless When… Then… game with ourselves, without recognizing the three most important truths that will set you free from this endless hamster wheel… […]
A minor car accident a month ago was a wake-up call for me. It made me pause and had me face the truth of where I am right now. It’s been seven months since my father’s passing. Since then, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my father-in-law have all been ill this year. And the day before my birthday, my aunt passed away. I have felt myself reeling with shock and confusion over the past eight weeks. I wish I could tell you that I was wise and calm during these intense weeks, but I have not been wise and calm. Far from it. I have fallen into old defensive patterns in a futile attempt to make myself feel safe… […]
During the Summer I took a trip to Whistler with my family. Whistler is a town north of Vancouver, British Columbia, that’s home to Whistler Blackcomb, one of the largest ski resorts in North America. People go there to ski in the Winter, and they go there for adventure biking in the Summer. There is a cable-car (gondola) that takes you up Whistler Mountain. Additionally, there is another gondola that takes you between the two peaks of Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain. This is called the Peak-to-Peak gondola and is an epic ride up the mountain.
Once you are half-way up Whistler Mountain, there is an option to take an open chairlift to the peak of Whistler Mountain. The Peak Express chairlift is your access to the Top of the World Summit, Cloudraker Skybridge and Raven’s Eye Lookout. This chairlift ride is an exhilarating experience that takes you over top of an ancient glacier while cresting over a 100-foot vertical cliff at the top.
I have a morbid fear of falling – not heights, I’m pretty ok with being high up. I’m terrified of falling though, so I don’t like feeling like I might fall. So, going up the mountain in an open chairlift was not an option I was even considering. It was clear in my mind that that was something I could not do… […]
My father died believing he was a failure. From his perspective, he had failed, because he had been unable to secure full-time employment after losing his job during the pandemic. He lost his house and had almost no money when he died. He based a lot of his self worth on external measures of success, and he believed that he did not measure up. However, that’s now what I saw or believed… […]
Usually in January we hear a lot of talk about goals, dreams, aspirations, ways that we are going to be better and do better. This time of year tends to be a time when there is a heavy focus on self-improvement. Although, I will say that this year, I feel like the energy is different. I don’t know if it’s only on my side of the world, or whether you have experienced something similar? And I’m attributing it to all that is occurring in the world at the moment – wars, elections, wildfires. One colleague said what I was thinking. He said, “It feels like it’s the pandemic all over again…”
I will share that that is certainly where my fear-based mind went immediately, because I remember that there were these out-of-control wildfires in Australia at the beginning of 2020 just before the pandemic really hit. And if you are feeling less inspired and excited this January, I want to invite you to be gentle and compassionate with yourself. My sense is that in many ways, we are still recovering from the trauma of the pandemic, and that our nervous systems are constantly bombarded with more things to process. And it’s a lot. It really is.
And this is why I want to discuss the difference between self-improvement and self-growth… […]
I’ve been thinking about of you and about this time of year. For some, this is a joyous time of year. And for some it’s the most miserable time of the year… How you feel about the holiday season probably has a lot to do with how you grew up and what occurred during the holiday seasons… […]
These past few weeks I’ve been riddled with guilt, so much so that my guilt would wake me up in the middle of the night, and I would feel my heart beating in my chest, and my mind racing with worry. So often, my clients share how they carry their own guilt for choices they’ve made, especially when others do not approve of those choices.
Recently, I had a deep conversation with my coach about guilt, and I had a profound insight that has changed the way I see my guilt. And I want to share with you here what I’ve learnt about guilt… […]
My coach recently gifted me a book by Michael Neill called Things I’m Avoiding Doing: A four-week program to overcome procrastination and get shit done. The title of the book is misleading, because it makes it sounds like the focus of the book is to learn how to get over procrastination and get more done. In a world, where we are already overloaded with too much to do, it’s probably not surprising that we are not getting everything done. And yet, when you read the book, you’ll discover that it’s not really about getting more shit done, and that Michael Neill doesn’t believe that procrastination is actually real… […]
Just before the completion of the Coaching Leadership Mastermind I did with my coach, she invited the group to consider where, in which dimensions of our lives, we added value either to ourselves or to others in the past 24 hours. We worked through The Wheel of Life and considered which dimensions of our lives were enriched in the past 24 hours?
Then my coach invited us to reflect on the past week, and consider where in the past week we add value to either ourselves or others? Lastly, she invited us to review the whole month and consider in a deeper way where did we add value to ourselves or others over the past month? […]