I have shared about my experiences with perfectionism before in my writing about a Perfection Detox: Learning to trust yourself and I have shared how I battle with my P Twins – i.e., Perfectionism and Pleasing – whenever I am navigating important situations or events in my life. Perfectionism isn’t just about wanting everything to be clean and neat, or orderly. Perfectionism can take different forms, and often people who are perfectionists, see their perfectionism as a moral compass or guideline to measure their personal “goodness” as a person. In other words, somewhere they internalised the message that they are only a good person, or lovable when they are perfect. This of course sets you up for a lifetime of struggle, frustration, and failure, because there is no such thing as the perfect person who always does everything right. So, you end up living in constant fear that someone will discover that you are not perfect, and that you will be ostracised from the very groups of people you are trying to belong with. […]
love
The most powerful force in the world
Recently Rich Litvin posed this question: What is the most powerful force in the world? People have so many different opinions about what the most powerful force in the world might be. What would your answer be? […]
Take this with you into the last days of 2023
Earlier this week, I sent out what I thought would be my last newsletter for this year, and then two things happened yesterday that had me feel compelled to write to you all… First, I had a conversation with a client yesterday where she shared with me the awakening and transformation she had experienced over the past two years. The second thing that happened yesterday, is that I attended a Quarrtsiluni session with a colleague who was generous enough to invite me to his event. […]
What if Perfection is not required this holiday season?
Last year, at the start of the holiday season, I asked whether you would be inviting the Twin P’s over for dinner this holiday? It seems that many of us – especially women and caregivers – turn in to control freaks during the holiday season. We become frantic and tend to experience a tremendous sense of overwhelm, because we believe it’s our job to create “the perfect holiday celebration” for our family. What that usually looks like, is we want everything to be perfect – whatever that means? – we refuse to ask for or accept help from others, and we become control freaks, so we become impossible to be around. But what if it doesn’t have to be this way? […]
How to have a good birthday
It was my birthday last week, and I had the most incredible birthday. I used to hate birthdays. I used to want to avoid my birthday at all costs. And for the past three years, I have had really amazing and joyful birthdays. So, I want to share briefly what has changed for me, and why it’s important. […]
What does it mean to celebrate?
As the holiday season approaches, life has brought me some interesting experiences that has me contemplating the value of celebration. The dictionary defines a celebration as “the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion by engaging in enjoyable, typically social, activity.” And this time of year, tends to open people up to celebration for various reasons. Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or anything in between, this time of year is mostly an invitation to celebrate.
And that got me thinking about my relationship to celebration… […]
I AM: The two most powerful words in the world
My commitment to changing the level at which I live my life, deepened about four years ago when I decided to embark on the biggest personal transformation of my life. And the most important thing about personal growth and transformation, is that you never arrive. There is never a point of completion. The deeper you go, the more you start to value and appreciate the journey. You fall in love with the process, because you realise that’s all there is.
So, as I write this, I’ve renewed my commitment to being 100% committed to the process and 0% committed to the outcome. I cannot control the outcome. So, there is no point on focusing my energy and attention there. I won’t get me what I yearn for most anyway. So, instead, I fall in love with the process of learning and growing, and I stay on the path towards mastery. I choose to be a student of life and I accept and embrace never arriving. For the rest of my days here on earth, I am a student of life, and I am here to soak up as much love, learning, joy, growth, awe, and inspiration as is available to me.
These renewed commitments stem directly from my attendance at a Game Changer Event with the ultimate mindset coach, Devon Bandison… […]
Heart-Centred Listening: It’s not a skill. It’s a mindset.
ly listening to another human being feels like a lost art these days. My great-grandmother used to say that we have one mouth and two ears so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. And she was a great listener. She seldomly spoke, so when she did, I always listened, because I knew that what she had to share would be valuable…
Today I want to talk about far more than simply listening for learning or for our own personal understanding. I want to talk about what it means to listen deeply to another in a way that has you both feeling seen, heard, and deeply connected. […]
Reflections on love and belonging
During my second year in Canada, just before I decided to become a coach, I had a conversation with a coach about life purpose. In the coaching model she was trained in, they were taught to narrow down your life purpose to ONE word that summarises what you are all about or what you are trying to create in your lifetime. A one-word life purpose sounded absurd to me. Could you really narrow it down to just one word? And of course, I was surprised when she shared what she thought my life purpose was. She observed that it sounded like mine was connection. I’ve discovered two things since then… […]
Redefining Compassion
During a specific phase of my PhD research, I conducted interviews with participants. One of the questions I would ask interviewees was, “What does compassion mean to you?” I would then follow up that question with a second question, “How do you demonstrate compassion in your own life?”
The aim was to get a sense of what compassion really means to people and how they live compassion in their daily lives. The Oxford Dictionary defines compassion as, “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.”
For me personally, that definition feels too narrow. It invites us to feel pity or concern for someone. It evokes within us this sense of feeling sorry for someone about what they are going through. And yet, pity falls short of what is needed. It simply levels compassion akin to sympathy, when my sense is that what is really needed is far more than just feeling sorry for someone. […]