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Two of my good friends are moving away from Chicago. One is going to England, and one is going to South Carolina. I just heard a third is moving too, but at least she’s staying local.

I’m going to miss the friends who are moving far away. It won’t be the same. But they...

We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic. 

– Susan Jeffers

The bias toward the negative is all over the place. The media… friends… coworkers… even family… are more likely to talk about and...

A friend of mine took her son to college orientation this week. She told us that everything went perfectly. He got all the classes he wanted, he got the living arrangements he wanted, and he got a roommate who has the same major as he does. They went through the whole process efficiently, and the...

Last week I was thinking about habits or patterns of behavior. This week I ran across a discussion of habits of thought.

I subscribe to Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday email, and this week he posted a link to a short article about how ideas behave in the mind. This is the part that...

I have been introduced to the system called Human Design, and I am starting to learn about it. Human Design is a system that combines elements of astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah, the chakra system, and quantum physics to define a person’s energetic “design”. It’s...

I’ve been talking about new projects and new ideas the past few weeks. Ideas can come at any time, any place. The key is to stay alert for them. When a new idea comes, it is still small and fragile. If you’re not careful, you may lose track of it and it can slip through your fingers.

When my divorce became final and I moved out of the house, I entered a new stage in my life. I took some time to just enjoy the quiet and to decompress from all the stress we had all been living under. After a while, I started to think “what’s next?” for me.

As a wife and...

I was taking an online challenge this week, and the instructor spoke about self-criticism. She pointed out how we can criticize ourselves for not being further along in our goals than we are.

She used a wonderful metaphor of a seed. An acorn has the potential for growing into a large,...

Some things change. Some things don’t. Sometimes we try to make the same change several times, and it doesn’t work.

Back in the days when budgets at work were a bit looser, we used to have food at large committee meetings. We frequently ordered sub sandwiches. The subs came...

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. 

– John Maynard Keynes

The struggle between old ideas and new ideas was the biggest factor in any change...

The following is a real and true conversation between me and myself a few years after my divorce:

Me: “I don’t like my life the way it is.”

Myself: “Then change.”

Me: (after a pause) “But it’s familiar…”

Myself: “That’s...

This quote caught my attention this week:

What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.  – Henry David Thoreau

It’s so easy to get caught up in...