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This is the third part of my three-part series on my most important tools for life, which is learning to keep the focus on myself. If you missed the previous two,…

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This is part two of my series about the top three tools for managing life that I gained from 12-step recovery. If you missed part one of “Mastering the Art of Pausing” you can…

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This is part one of my series about the top three tools I learned about in 12-step recovery. Mind you, I have an entire tool shed of tools now, thanks to recovery. But these three have…

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Since doing the 12-step recovery, I now have the ability to look back at my life before recovery and see it with crystal clarity in a way that was just not possible before. I’m frequently able to look back at various situations and see: here's what I was…

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Seek and ye shall find. We all know this is true. When we look for happy joyful things, we find them. When we look for evidence that there is evil all around us, we find it. Same world, but our lens is different.

This is…

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In my boundaries coaching business, I coach some pretty high-powered women. There's an enormous toll on them personally, professionally, physically, psychologically, emotionally and financially. There are many factors that lead to this, but it’s mainly because…

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We have certain instincts that we’re born with. They’re natural and are supposed to be there. These are things like security, self-esteem, and personal relationships. But what happens for many of us is that these…

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Yesterday a client told me her soon-to-be ex-wife called her “juvenile.” I wrote back “projection.” This was in response to my client asking to have their child’s car seat set up in her ex’s car according to the safety…

Photo Credit: Andrej Lisakov

Spoiler alert! People usually get offended when you set boundaries with them because they don't have healthy boundaries themselves!! That means if you're getting offended when other…

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I’ve always thought of myself as a very positive and optimistic person. When I got into recovery, I realized that I had a lot of negative thinking. Sometimes, it was ruminating about the past, but more often it was catastrophizing about the future.…

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For some reason, most of the people I work with are super concerned about not being selfish. People (especially women) act like being selfish is one of the…

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When I went through the process to stop gossiping, I realized a lot of things about myself. The realization that I gossiped was pretty astonishing, but there was so much more! Among other things, I realized…

• I was…

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If you’ve ever felt like you keep trying to get to balance but are not able to get there because you keep getting thrown off, this essay is for you.

When we think about balance in our lives, we tend to think it means getting to a certain state or set of…

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One of the insights I gained early in my recovery journey was that I'd been expecting people to read my mind my whole life—well, at least subconsciously. If you had asked me, "Are you expecting people to read your mind?" I probably would have said no.

As I talked with others on my recovery journey with…

There are two kinds of “uncomfortable.” The first might come up if you grew up in a chaotic and dysfunctional family like I did. That means you learned to put up with difficulty and discomfort. It could have been emotional, psychological, or physical discomfort. When our lives are like that, we come to accept that life is difficult and…

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Emotional pain sucks. Sometimes, it's worse than physical pain. I’ve got some ways for you to reduce the amount and frequency of your emotional pain. I’ll share those at the end after sharing the ways I prolonged and increased my emotional pain before I got into…

One of the most important things that 12-step recovery taught me was acceptance: how to accept things I previously considered…

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What’s interesting to me is that when presented with the same set of circumstances, some people will feel envious whereas others will feel inspired.

For example, when some people hear that I’m in a loving, healthy romantic relationship that started when I was 55 and he was 60, they…

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So many of us try to step in and prevent or buffer those we love from experiencing the negative effects of their negative behaviors. If you do this once in a while, that’s fine. But if it’s a pattern, it’s unhealthy. Not only does it make it much more difficult for you, but it prevents the other person…

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If you’ve been giving advice to somebody over and over and over again and they never take it, this essay is for you. We do this in an effort to fix, rescue, and protect other people.

I was once told when I did this that I was “being helpful to be controlling.” I was aghast! I…