L.I.V.E. Life Inspired Views for Everyday

Send us Fan Mail Tis the Season! The holiday seasons during this time of year have become some of the most wondrous and yet intense of times. Expectations are  key...nostalgia fuels expectations, traditions fuel expectations, relationships fuel expectations, hence intense. How can we maintain a perspective that will allow us to engage so we can enjoy and cherish the time and memories made? I came...

Send us Fan Mail Has anyone said to you or have you said, "You have my word?" We take the power of words for granted, don't we? They can bring people together, tear relationships apart, make people laugh, start wars, teach the fundamentals of life, bring entertainment...it goes on and on. They truly hold power! But this week I want to encourage you to think about their ability to le...

Send us Fan Mail We have a painting in our home by Canadian Artist Ron Christiansen called, Sunset. It depicts four members of the Ojibwe tribe sitting in a circle in a grassy field at sunset. It's rich in color and line. What I like about it is that you can tell that the artist intended to depict a group in conversation with each other. They sit as they must have sat many times simply visiti...

Send us Fan Mail When I have counseled people who have had struggles with communicating with someone who is angry with them, I often suggest that when they are at an impasse and neither is listening to the other, that they ask the other person, "What do you need most to hear from me?"   We are in the days of "post election." We all scan the news feeds or listen to the reporters...

Send us Fan Mail During this election season, we have all had to mentally reframe what it would be like if one or the other presidential candidate was elected. It's been a tense time. But as I often do, I lean into a powerful quote by Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl who said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any gi...

Send us Fan Mail These are intense times for our country. I often turn to the wisdom of people who have lived and led through times like these with love and grace. One of those people is Desmond Tutu, who led South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, after Apartheid ended. In the book, Believe , that shares many of his inspiring messages, I found this quote, "A time of crisis i...

Send us Fan Mail Our daughter, Maria, and I have ongoing descriptions of our differences in certain areas. When it comes to experiences, Maria reminds me that she holds no expectations so that she is never disappointed and only pleasantly surprised. In life, she says, she strives for contentment, but that I strive for euphoria. We laugh, but it is probably true. Though I look for the best and posi...

Send us Fan Mail There is a Yiddish verb for complaining, kvetch. Its literal meaning is, to squeeze or to crush. When I think of the definition in reference to a person who is chronically complaining, or kvetching, it really fits, because a chronic complainer always squeezes joy out of the moment, crushes someone's spirit, wears on people listening, or simply makes others decide not to spend...

Send us Fan Mail How do you deal with things that you cannot understand? Things that are a mystery. It can be fairly frustrating in this day and age when we can get answers at the tips of our fingers...via the internet. However, we are also faced with the conundrum of inaccurate answers, too. Much like folklore...answers were often made up to help people contend with the great mysteries in their e...

Send us Fan Mail I have a book entitled,  Wisdom from The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Whohlleben .  In the page on "Patience," he writes: "Acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large 'mother trees.' Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fun...

Send us Fan Mail I love telling the story about a mouse sitting with a dove in a fir tree during a blizzard. The mouse asks the dove what the weight of a snowflake is, to which the dove replies, "Nothing." Then the mouse tells the dove a story about a time when he was sitting on a branch during a blizzard and decided to count the snowflakes as they fell to the branch. When the number rea...

Send us Fan Mail For many years I taught piano based on the Suzuki Method, developed by Shinichi Suzuki. Its basis is repetition with little steps at a time. The process allows the learner to build one skill at a time by repeating and repeating the step until it is mastered. The beautiful thing that I learned in studying the Suzuki Method is that it is based on love of the child first because then...

Send us Fan Mail A long time ago, I found a book in my Dad's library by Elbert Hubbard called,  White Hyacinths (1907). In the front flap of the book was this verse, "If I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one of them, and buy White Hyacinths to feed my soul." When I told my friend, Bill Hamm, that verse, he immediately recited, "If of fortune be bereft, And in thy stor...

Send us Fan Mail Starting in my late 30s, I seemed to collect a variety of groups that I spent time with. I had a coffee group, The Java Sisters, which included teachers who met at a bookstore for coffee after school. Then there was the Planning Committee, who planned nothing but got together to talk about leadership and entrepreneurship over a bit of red wine. The Card Club stopped playing cards...

Send us Fan Mail To introduce today's podcast, I searched the word, "sounds," on the internet. I found a 12 minute YouTube recording of all sorts of sounds. Quite fascinating. I remembered a sound I forgot to include in my podcast, the sound of a baby nestled on your shoulder, and remembered with awe, the sound of a baby's breath close to your ear and those wee sounds they make...

Send us Fan Mail Making mistakes feels pretty bad sometimes. One often wonders what good can come from them. I remember a big mistake I made many years ago. I was in a musical ensemble and another member urged me to share their opinion that the ensemble really was not sounding good at all. I did just that, even though it was not my own, and I ended up embarrassing and hurting the director terribly...

Send us Fan Mail People have often asked why I can always be so happy. I tell them that I live by two philosophies of life. One is that every day I look forward to something. It can be as simple as my morning cup of coffee. The second is that when I'm 108 years old, I don't want to look back on my life and say, "Why didn't I?" I don't want to regret. So, when given an...

Send us Fan Mail I love scrolling quotes in Pinterest because I am so inspired by simple sentences that encourage me to live better, be kinder, learn more, and seek wisdom. Simplicity is usually the most lasting mode of sustaining an important message or concept. Similar to "Occam's Razor," which tells us the simplest is often encouraged over the complex. Recently, I discovered a ne...

Send us Fan Mail Remember when Dorothy was clicking her ruby slippers together and softly repeating, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home...?" And then, remember when she woke up in Kansas and was so relieved and excited to see her Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, the farm hands, and the circus man she'd met? They were people close to her, in the environment s...

Send us Fan Mail Winston Churchill said, "Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision." He was right. Each one of us is living proof of his statement. They pair together whenever we face a scary situation. I didn't know how to dive until I was in my late 30's because I was so afraid of going headfirst into the water. Finally the day came and I decided to do it. It took courage. O...

Send us Fan Mail When I taught in China we learned it was important in Chinese culture not to lose face or take face. When our group of teachers would be brought to various companies to tour and talk to the administration, I always had so many questions. One day, I became concerned that I was perhaps causing them to lose face with all my questions about their practices. Finally at one of our compa...

Send us Fan Mail In one of the texts I used when teaching Family Counseling, the author, Robert Taibbi, states that, "People are always doing the best that they can." He goes on to expand on this point saying, "If you believe that people are doing the best they can in the moment, not only is it a more optimistic view of life, but then it is possible to be compassionate to others rat...

Send us Fan Mail In the book, "Humankind: A Hopeful History," the author, Rutger Bregman, tells a story about a young social worker who was mugged on his way to a restaurant. He gave the thief his wallet and as the thief was running away, the social worker offered him his coat. This made the thief stop and ask him what he was doing that for. The social worker replied, "I figured tha...

Send us Fan Mail My Grandma used to say, "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it behooves us all not to talk about the rest of us."  Isn't that like a lot of things we do in our lives. Some things have both good and not so good within them; like social media and other things we indulge in. The challenge is learning to temper ourselves or maybe...

Send us Fan Mail I taught CPR for many years. We teach CPR by repeating and repeating the necessary steps so they can become almost an automatic response when the need arises to perform it on someone whose heart has stopped.  It seems our minds remember things best when a process is laid out in several specific steps. Today's podcast explores the necessity of forgiveness in coming to peace wh...