If what you’re looking for isn’t here, it’s somewhere else.

If you feel regularly feel misunderstood or disappointed in a relationship, you might question if your expectations are too high, or whether you’re “too sensitive.”

In 2018, I was in a struggle-filled relationship (to put it mildly). It involved lots of nail biting, fury, and attempts on my part to explain simple emotions the other person perceived as personal attacks.

Although the tendency to question ourselves sometimes helps us create more granular maps of other people and/or the world, the truth is simple. Your expectations are in place for a…

How to be universally forward moving

If you’re on a personal development journey, you’ll find it easy to spot other people’s limiting beliefs. When you raise your income, heighten your concentration, or become a stronger swimmer, it’s natural to notice other people’s inconsistencies or limitations. The paradigms that motivate your friends’ thinking become firm to the touch.

Recognizing their blind spots, you’ll want to share your discoveries with people you care about. At times, you might even feel a moral obligation to do so. You might think: if this tiny tweak elevated your life, what could it do for your…

You’re not un-motivated — you’re inflamed

If you regularly feel foggy, unmotivated, and tired, you might rely on coffee, chocolate, or stimulant medication for mental clarity and concentration.

While these tools have their place, their effects are temporary. A few minutes or hours after eating a cookie or drinking coffee, you’re tense, twitchy, and/or yawning.

Plus, these are bandages, not solutions. Your fatigue isn’t simply a product of a lack of coffee. Rather, your exhaustion and lack of motivation are coordinated responses to imbalance. They’re symptoms of a larger problem, not the problem itself. They’re the alarm, not the fire.

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From an early age, most people learn to distrust their feelings. Although we respect signals of being cold or hungry, we meet many of our desires with weariness, believing that our needs for play, fun, pleasure, adventure, and self-expression are part of a flawed system that we must tame through discipline and heroic feats of will.

However, this mindset forgets that all feelings are signaling mechanisms. They contain messages intended to guide behavior.

Yes, chasing your every emotion might indeed distract or mislead you. But chronically suppressing feelings, believing they’re meant to be managed, rather than reflected upon and met…

In transformational periods, it’s easy to believe that your challenges are uniquely insurmountable.

Perhaps you’re interested in starting a podcast but have three children and a massive to-do list. Or you lose motivation while you publish blog posts out of a concern that your niche is “saturated.” Neither of these situations mean you’ll fail at what you’re doing. But if these perceptions dominate your mind, you’ll have a hard time convincing yourself otherwise.

You might resent the people who have achieved what you haven’t. They become harbingers of your absence of opportunity. You think: if only you adopted blogging earlier…

If you regularly traffic in the personal development space, you know what it’s like to get fired up over a set of good ideas. Someone speaks to your desires and reminds you there is a way to get what you want.

Yet a few hours later, the sensory world blasts you with a reminder of where you are. You’ve got seven unpaid parking tickets. Your family members converse only in the language of complaints. There’s a voice within that says you’re prone to foolhardiness.

When you outpace fear and doubt, your conscious and subconscious mind align. After you strike this…

Breathe like your mood depends on it

Anxiety is not an agreeable guest. This state, when activated, feels immovable.

You might believe that the only way to surpass anxiety is to avoid what’s making you nervous or hurry up and get it over with. The other option is to change your state with coffee, black tea, alcohol, a smoothie, the internet, or another person.

Yet you have a natural relaxation remedy built into your nervous system. You don’t need to wait for the ending of a high-stakes event or until you have a tea mug in your hands.

Modulate the…

You want success. And you know the skills needed to materialize it. However, growing these skills requires you to act, day after day.

Sometimes you feel delighted. You do your work and drop into a blissful flow. Other days, you’re frustrated by your procrastination. You’re confused about what you want.

This is resistance. And it comes in many forms. Many of them are sneaky. But what if resistance isn’t strictly a nefarious force? Resistance can encourage negative spirals, yes. Yet at its root it’s simply a messenger.

If you see resistance as the enemy, you use it against yourself. …