This might not sound revolutionary to some, but I recently realized I’ve made great strides in my ability to say “no” to others’ requests.  A few days ago, a friend called, saying she was having a surprise party for another friend that night and she wanted me to be there.  I was planning to go [...]

Publishing journal and magazine articles used to be a stressful experience for me.  When I first started, of course, it took me much longer to prepare each piece for submission, because I wasn’t familiar with the editing process.  More importantly, however, I had a nagging guilt at the edge of my awareness about sending my [...]

Many of us are in the habit of telling ourselves we’re “not good enough.”  Whether it’s in our careers, our intimate relationships, our appearances, or some other area of our lives, we’re always convinced we don’t measure up to some standard of how we’re supposed to be.  Because it seems we can always find something [...]

A little while back, I wrote an article on the function guilt performs in our lives and the limiting ways we tend to perceive it.  Today, I want to expand on a particular point I made in that piece, which is that the amount of guilt we feel seems to depend on the time of [...]

Do you have trouble accepting compliments?  I definitely did at one time.  When someone would say something nice about me, I’d get bashful and downplay the aspect of my character or accomplishments they’d pointed out.  For instance, if someone at work said “you did a great job on this project,” I’d say something that suggested [...]

I want to tell another story about my friend, the computer programmer who wants to be an interior designer, because my conversations with her raise so many fascinating questions about the challenges surrounding career transitions and pursuing your calling.
My friend is fully ready to start her interior design business—she’s got the ambition, the capital, and [...]

Human beings have a seemingly endless capacity to feel guilty.  We can condemn and attack ourselves for the stupid, wrong or inappropriate things we’ve done, again and again.  We can even continue feeling guilty about events that happened many years ago.  From the sensations we feel in our bodies when we think about those events, [...]