My boys were decorating my office last week. Kyen hung up his freshly painted artwork, while Maverick wrote some wobbly, still-figuring-out-letters, first-grade handwriting notes on my white board. Here’s what they said: Think good. Be you. Be great. You rock. Hope. Love. I’ve been fine-tuning my messaging since I started coaching and writing many years ago, but I think Mav summed up the most important lessons on joy and success right there on my whiteboard. …
Being a present parent isn’t about the amount of time you spend with your children. It’s about the quality of the time you spend with them. A lot of us are physically present with our children – we are in the same room or car as them – but we are not mentally or emotionally present. We might be scrolling social media or incessantly checking our email, in our thoughts about a work problem or …
Expressing our feelings is a key contributor to our (and our children’s) emotional, mental – even physical – health. If we don’t express our feelings, they tend to come out sideways later (sometimes decades later) in the form or resentment, rage, or disease. As one of my former clients said, “As an overachiever, I’d become really effective at suppressing my feelings. When unprocessed and unacknowledged, they would resurface unproductively in my life. One of the …