The New Year brings the gift of choice. How fortunate are we to be able to prioritize, to plan, to set goals? Your choices depend on your mindset. Is the world a place of abundance and possibility? Or is it a place of scarcity and limitation? Your choices depend on your beliefs.

Your outcomes depend on the combination of your beliefs and your choices. It's as simple and as complicated as that.

My New Year's wish for all of you:

May you choose to see the best in yourself this year, and do everything in your power to ensure the world gets to see your best self as well.

May you choose to be kind, and when given the chance, show compassion and humility.

May you choose to have faith, in yourself, in your fellow man, and in a purpose greater than all of us.

May you choose to be brave, and know that everything works out. Even if it doesn't!

May you choose to be resilient, and persevere in all things, even when all odds seem against you. Be stubborn in your determination, and consistent in...

With the New Year staring us down like a loaded gun, I'm personally feeling that all-too familiar pressure to figure out/or resolve how to do better in the upcoming new year.

I have been a perennial New Year's resolution maker. I have also been a consistent Spring Break quitter, (meaning I'm lucky if my resolution carries me as far as the melting snow). I'm a true believer in the power of taking stock, and revisiting what you have going on in your life, so that you can plan and make positive changes to better support your goals.

That being said, there is something trite and frankly ineffective about merely resolving to do better in a new year. Unless we have real skin in the game of improving and bettering ourselves, we lose our motivation and give up on our resolutions more quickly than we care to admit.

Instead of resolving in the new year, how about we revolt?!

I would imagine there are any number of things about 2016 that have left you feeling frustrated,...

There is nothing so easily remade as the definitions of ourselves. - Dinaw Mengetsu

“People can’t change”

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”

“You can’t change who you really are”

You’ve probably heard these more than once. But is this really true?

Are you really the same person you were 5 years ago?  Do you have the same challenges, dreams and ambitions that you did last year?

How about the way you approach life in general? Do you think the 20 year-old ‘you’ would be congruous with the current ‘you’?

Likely you have changed. The world has a way of carving new definition into us, much like water slowly (or at times dramatically) changing the face of stone. Slow currents, flash floods and light drizzle all change their landscapes, just at different tempos and in different shapes. For us, it may be burnout from our job, a divorce, a health crisis, boredom, or pretty much any aspect of the...

The thing about Joy is that it feels elusive to most of us. Joy is a word on Christmas stockings and coffee mugs. Joy is rarely something that you hear described or acknowledged on a daily basis.

Why is that?

Joy is like a lever. It has the power to change a whole room. It can elevate our experience, it can get us out of our own heads, and into the ether of life itself. Joy exists in moments, not chapters.  Joy can be fleeting and difficult to pin down. Like a golden snitch of emotion, we are constantly seeking it but don't quite know where to find it.

Joy gets us a bump of engagement in our own lives. It is a connector, a bridge to our true selves, and  to what we really want and feel.

Joy doesn't have to be the rapturous romance of novels and movies, it doesn't have to be the moment you win the lottery or marry your dream lover.

The beauty of Joy is that it is everywhere. It can be as simple as a belly laugh. It can be as obvious as a sentimental thought, or a touching...

"You disconnected your TV service? Are you crazy? I can't imagine! I've thought about it, but couldn't actually do it..."

These are some of the common exclamations I hear when I share that I've shut off my TV service. I probably would have said the same types of things until quite recently.

But, yes. I disconnected my TV and I've never been happier.

In the months and weeks leading up to the election, I began to see the toxic energy spewing from our TV as a force of evil in my house. Every time I turned it one, one or more of us would end up indignant, frustrated, sad, disgusted (you name the negative emotion). It reached a point where I realized that we were inviting this negativity into our house. It was our own fault that we chose to encourage its presence. I shouldn't feel so indignant at its negative impact when I myself pressed the buttons to allow it in!

And so, we turned it off. The day before the election.

I had resigned myself to whatever outcome was going to pass, and so...

Is there a book sitting on your coffee table or bookshelf that changed your life? A book that vibrates with power. Pure transformational energy.

There are a couple of books like that for me. One of them is The Desire Map (check it out here) by Danielle LaPorte.  A dear friend of mine shared this book with me during a very dark time in my life, and things have not been the same for me since! (Thank you Tracy!)

Before I read Danielle’s book, this is how I felt about goal setting and my life:

• I was focused on goals based on career progression and money
• My New Year's resolutions looked more like punishments than opportunities
• I was so consumed with doing the next right thing, that I hadn't thought about what really gave me joy in years!

Then, I read this book and almost overnight, big changes started to happen for me.

I realized… that by ignoring my own desires, neglecting my inner dreams and my goals of my youth, that I was depriving myself (and those I care...

 "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. 

The other is as though everything is a miracle."  - Albert Einstein

With the recent election, two very different and very distinctive world views have painfully taken their place upon the world stage. While there are clearly nuances on each side, it is the fundamental dichotomy that I find most fascinating. Is the world about hope and love? Or is it about pain and struggle? Is it a miracle? Or is it mundane and predictable?

While I acknowledge these are gross generalizations, they are useful for purposes of this discussion.

As Einstein so crisply states, 'there are only two ways to live your life'...one views the world through the rose-colored lens of possibility, of a god-touched potential that we have yet to fully explore and discover.

The other fixates on the drudgery of life that can bury us, defeat us, and snuff out our potential before we have yet to get started.

It is...

Whatever is happening TO you, is also happening FOR you.

Catchy, right? Sounds good. Seems likely to be true. And might explain so many of the things in our lives that don’t go as planned.

If the things that happen TO us, are in fact happening in order FOR us; to learn valuable lessons, flex unused emotional muscles, discover alternative narratives about ourselves, or just generally help us rediscover ourselves…then perhaps we can give ourselves a break, and not feel the need to ‘react’ in our moments of stress, hardship, or chaos.

In the world of business and policy, every action is boiled down into its relative ‘theory of change’. If this…then that. If I make this business decision, then I will ultimately reap increased profits. If we alter this practice, then our systems will function better.

So if we apply the theory of change to this rather enlightening concept, it would look something like this. If I am suffering right now, then I...

The choices we make define the quality of the life we live. These choices often defy what we know to be our own, innate wisdom. While we tend to attribute many of our trials and tribulations to things ‘beyond our control’, there is also, always a significant aspect of our own experience that is the direct and unequivocal result of our own choices.

Good choices. Bad choices. Choices of inaction. Choices made out of frustration. Unconscious choices that stem from our muscle memory of untapped, unexplored and misunderstood feelings and memories.

In the Ayruvedic tradition, these types of negative choices are known as “crimes against wisdom”, and are thought to be the source of many other imbalances we experience in our life.

In defaulting either to conscious, or unconscious options that are ultimately damaging to ourselves (booze, sex, bad relationships, passive aggressive behavior, etc), we are undermining our own happiness.

We know what feels good. We know...

There are many parallels between organizational management, leadership principles and personal development themes and concepts. One commonality relates to the ways in which individuals and organizations gravitate towards ‘busy-ness’ as a standard for productivity and success.

Busy-ness relates to workload, schedules, capacity, quality, etc. This can be measured by how full your Outlook calendar looks, how many meetings you attend, how many projects you have undertaken, how many activities you are involved in, how many widgets you are making, etc.

On the human impact - end of the spectrum you can measure things like;  how little free time you have, how poor your eating habits have become (as a result of your busy-ness), how many personal or family commitments you miss, or how hard it is to fit exercise or self-care into your day.

Where do you spend your time?

How much do you have on your plate, and how successful are you at managing and navigating those things? And...