Do you ever feel as if your life is just one big struggle? I know I do.
In her book, End the Struggle and Dance with Life
, Susan Jeffers focuses on what it means to have a successful life. She takes issue with how goal oriented we are – often at the expense of the rest of our lives. In great big bold type she declares:
GOALS ARE NOT OUR LIFE. NOW IS OUR LIFE.
In even bigger type she shouts: Continue reading » Struggle Less

Wait… Can you? Will you?
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
— Tao Te Ching
Do I have the patience to wait until the mud settles? Me?? Not a chance. I’ll be the one stomping and splashing about in my murky, muddy mental puddle.
I guess you’d call me a wader not a waiter. I want, I NEED to move, to take action. Waiting frustrates me. I want to “do” something. Something more. Something else. Something completely different. Something soothing. Something mind-numbing. Something brash. Something bold. Something.
Authors Charlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom (The Power of Flow
) seem to support my inclination toward action… or so I thought when I was sucked in with one of their techniques for increasing the power of flow: Continue reading » Wait Until the Mud Clears

The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.
— Don Williams, Jr.
In a recent blog post, Terry Hershey, inspirational speaker, humorist and author, wrote, “Someone very wise once said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. This is all heart-warming and reassuring. Until you realize that no one ever tells you anything about the second step.”
Lately that seems very true to me. Often as we are setting out for a new destination, we plan our journey; but like a battle, the plan doesn’t survive the first encounter with reality.
When I first started working in Corporate America, I had two reactions: one – I couldn’t believe that I had actually set a goal and achieved it and; two – I couldn’t understand why I was so depressed.
Sure, I expected that I would graduate from college – after all, I’d graduated from grammar school and high school. College wasn’t that different. What I never really believed would happen is Continue reading » Where To From Here??

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
— Friedrick Nietzsche
The odds that any of us will be successful in achieving a goal are directly proportional to our commitment to figuring out our path to success. Often success is the result of us continuing in the face of small successes or no successes until we reach our goal. It’s not about how “smart” we are. It’s not about who we know. It’s about the ability to be flexibly stubborn in pursuit of our dream.
Stubborn. You probably don’t think of stubbornness as being a positive quality. Certainly when your two year old is stomping her foot at you in an attempt to get what she wants, it isn’t. But stubborn is just another word for Continue reading » Stubborn

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Every Sunday, after I go to Mass, I meet a friend for lunch. She has two sons, both of whom have struggled with addiction issues. Both have also been trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The younger son, Rhett, has tried to find a career of sorts but he’s struggled because he did some not-so-smart stuff a few years back. Because of his record, he finds it hard to find a job with a future and is waiting for these items to “fall off” his record. Even then, finding a job he’ll like is a challenge.
Recently, Rhett has been showing signs of moving forward. First, he decided that even though it may be difficult to succeed in this overcrowded field, he would enroll in a film study certificate program at a local junior college. (As a graduate of a junior college system, I can only say, “Thank heavens for junior colleges!”)
To get started, he enrolled in six units during the summer semester. For someone starting out cold, summer semester is a huge challenge. The same amount of study material is squeezed into Continue reading » A Story of Personal Power

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