The Difficulty: Creativity, Meaning & the Hard Work of a Life

Remember the days when we were dreaming of the opportunity to work from home?  The workplace can be full of distractions, empty time, needless meetings and interpersonal drama. At home you have flexibility, autonomy, and the comfort of working in your own space. Pre-pandemic, it was clear that in many cases you could simply get more done.  But now that it is forced upon us, and the days and weeks...

Back by popular demand: the Learning Curve where Shelley and Chad dish on what they’ve been learning during this pandemic while we’re all still trying to flatten the curve. Shelley dishes on what we’ve been learning about trust. She’s got this really cool equation for how you can know just how well you build and establish trust in all your relationships, and how well you receive it. We call it the...

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” — Charles Darwin The American Psychological Association (APA) defines adaptability as “the capacity to make appropriate responses to changed or changing situations; the ability to modify or adjust one's behavior in meeting different circumstances or different people.” On this week's episode we...

“Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.” — Parker Palmer The term “self-care” has been used and abused, and seems to be generally misunderstood. It’s become a...

Your ego and your “calling” in life can look surprisingly similar. Both pull you toward the realization of your desires. Ego assembles your personality. It manages your fragile identity while you figure out who you are. It protects you from the onslaught of societal expectations and motivates you to work hard and achieve things. But ego alone can also skew you toward thinking that hard work and ac...

You asked and we listened! On this week's episode Chad takes the bull by the horns on his own and answers one of the questions from our community: How can you find your purpose and prevent burnout? Chad discusses the beginning point questions for answering the question: What is my purpose? Also, what is the difference between meaning and purpose? He offers some great questions to ask yourself to f...

Today’s episode takes us to our origin story. We learn as we go and the Big Self School has been slowly evolving and the evolution has sped up and things are happening fast. One of the questions we get asked a lot besides What is the Big Self School, is Who is it for?  We challenge you to ask yourself three BIG questions that can produce BIG results in your life if you take the time to track your...

On this week's episode we shine a bright spotlight on the shadow side that would rather lurk behind the scenes of our personalities. Do our shadows want to be left alone, or are they begging to be heard and leak out in uncomfortable ways? We ask: How can you completely and wholeheartedly accept who you are if there are sides of yourself that you’re too afraid to explore? The keyword here is “integ...

On this week's episode, Chad and Shelley explore empathy. Why is it on the decline when it was a trendy topic throughout the past decade? Why should we practice empathy in the first place? What gets in the way of us building empathy, even when it's something we say we want? We explore these questions and more from our home studio in quarantine. As always, thanks for tuning in, subscribing, and lea...

We sit down with change-maker, Marco Perez, and discuss the need for our students to have equal access to quality education. We discuss a community's obligation to each other, and how we lift up everyone when help those in greater need. How do we rally as a community? We look for our lanes. We look to educate ourselves, and we look for authentic leadership and what that means. Marco Perez is runni...

Sabrina Moon joins us to talk about what she means by “embracing the suck.” But why is it so hard? Is it a fear of losing control? A need for a positive spin on things? If we embrace the suck, are we somehow giving in to it?  We know that shame is not an effective tool for changing people’s behaviors. In this strange time of shared vulnerability and shared accountability people are operating from...

Charlie dishes on inner discipline, maintaining work-life balance, and not burning out on ambition. Charlie has been cooking professionally for over 20 years. He began his love for cooking at the age of 6, always wanting to help his mother, grandmother, and Aunties in the kitchen. As he grew older, Charlie found his passion for learning about food maturing. Next he found work at a fast food fried...

It's the weekend edition of the Big Self School, a segment we call the Learning Curve, where Shelley and Chad discuss the big and small questions they're having. Chad and Shelley first consider what the literature says on whether or not we have a true self. Most people believe we have a true self, and that it is a moral core. But perhaps more importantly how does that inner voice of your speak to...

Being an observer of your experience Camille Kennard is a Certified Health and Wellness Coach. She began her career as a social worker for a decade, counseling people with chronic medical conditions and providing grief counseling to patients and families. The inspiration for her business Flourish Wellness came from her desire to help people avoid chronic disease and illness through learning to nur...

It's the weekend edition of the Big Self School, a segment we call the Learning Curve, where Shelley and Chad discuss the big and small questions they're having. This week we're learning about authenticity, and how we're seeing it more with the people we engage with. There's less outer props for validation for one thing. More people are seeking guidance for another. Chad's been working on a short...

This week we shine the Big Self spotlight on Jena Beise. Jena is a doctor of Physical Therapy and a women’s health specialist. She’s been a Physical Therapist for the better part of a decade now in outpatient orthopedics. She is also certified in Dry Needling, and is the cofounder of Heal at Home Moms . Jena talks about trying to change the postpartum psychology, how to form good habits that comba...

It's the weekend edition of the Big Self School, a segment we call the Learning Curve, where Shelley and Chad discuss the big and small questions they're having. This week Shelley is thinking about the senseless killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and dealing with people's emotional responses on a number of different levels. She shares some aspirational ideas about how we can "grow ourselves up." Chad is th...

Kim Shumpert talks with us this week about a new model of female leadership. Kim was selected to serve as the Executive Director for Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Institute (CWLI) in May 2018. Kim twice served as an executive director working with underserved women and children. And she reminds us that when women thrive, everyone thrives. There has been such a tremendous amount of suffering eithe...

It's the weekend edition of the Big Self School, a segment we call the Learning Curve, where Shelley and Chad discuss the big and small questions they're having. This week Shelley is thinking about the life skill of adaptability and how the happiest people she knows have developed their adaptive muscle well. She discusses an approach to bringing fears into consciousness, and how in times of stress...

What had at first started as just a big trip slowly -- drip by drip -- got bigger and bigger until it snowballed into a six-continent trip.  How did that trip turn into all seven? Angela tells us how it works for them. When you start to learn that people are pretty much the same wherever you go, then you’ve probably been a lot of places. You may come to the same conclusion by going nowhere, but it...

It's the weekend edition of the Big Self School, a segment we call the Learning Curve, where Shelley and Chad discuss the big and small questions they're having. This week Chad is seeing COVID-19 as nothing less than a plague--and is drawing parallels and conclusions between how we're responding now and how people have responded to epidemics in the past. Is there anything we can learn from the pas...

Kristi Angevine, MD is an Ob/Gyn and Physician Life Coach. She specializes helping physicians change unhelpful habits into intentional ones. Whether it’s overdrinking, overeating, overworking, excess screen time, procrastinating or simply chronically feeling overwhelmed and like there’s always something to fix, she targets unpacking old or compulsive habits to create permanent transformation. Kris...

How do people find purpose? What is Counsel Creative all about? What’s it like to start a business with your spouse? Was it a calling? What was the leap that started building something from nothing? We have questions. Kenny Morgan has some of the answers. At least for how it’s worked for him so far. From falling in with the cool kids in the music industry to pivoting to marketing and design and br...

Tom Heffner consults with businesses and organizations across many different industries, including consulting, banking, education, product development, law firms, Dept of Defense (DoD), and the military. He specializes in helping them to build their own innovation capabilities and to solve complex and multidisciplinary problems.  If you or your organization is struggling to think creatively, to bu...

Making the mind body connection helps us literally connect with ourselves, but what does that mean?  Yoga leader Allison Foster tells us how connecting breathing with your thinking and feeling can be like an incarnate experience, being fully present in the person that you are in the present moment. It may be one thing to slow your body -- like going to sleep or taking a nap -- but there isn’t as c...