Picking Stories

Your inner dialogue creates your emotional environment, which in turn determines the quality of your life. Whether you feel good or bad is the result of the narrative you tell about yourself, the people around you and the world at large. Trying to understand why...

What’s In It for You?

Some experiences are so unpleasant that it’s hard to imagine how they’re ‘for you’. But everything can be. Even experiences in which you feel humiliated, hurt, angry, resentful or unjustly characterized, benefit you. If you digest them from the...

Resilience Is a Skill

Psychologists studied a group of children from the time they were very young until they were in their 30’s. They were interested in discovering why certain children managed to succeed in spite of growing up in very ‘disturbed’ circumstances. Some...

Framing Reality

The lens through which we see life is a complex, multi-layered filter that skews reality. Out of the limited slice of life that we do perceive, we tidily classify most of it to fit into our narrow and subjective belief systems. When we take a photograph, we carefully...

Labeling Is Limiting

The mind constantly organizes its perceptions in order to make sense of a complex world. It condenses massive quantities of information into classes and categories. But when we label what we see, we’re projecting what we expect instead of actually...

Says Who?

Just as the facets of a prism refract light differently, every person sees a unique reflection of the world. Though some of us do have similar points of view, there’s still an incredibly wide gulf between our individual experiences of life. That’s why no...