The Unlikely Artist

The technique of interviewing your feelings is one of the most useful practices I’ve discovered during my years of coaching. This technique can have an immediate and transformational impact on your life. And it can lead to quantum leaps in your own self acceptance and feeling of wellbeing. In this episode I share exactly how this process works and how to do it yourself. For fun, I’m offering a fre...

Adult mayflies live only a day. Clouds, too, have a fleeting existence. We wonder, “What is the point of something so ephemeral? How do we connect with the idea of having no past or future?” Join me as I ponder mayflies and clouds and discover a deeper truth about the meaning of life. During the episode, I mention two New York time bestselling books I’d recommend to anyone who wants to explore how...

We can look at pretty much any collection of facts about ourselves and decide we’re not measuring up. For a lot of us, this has become a habit. Many of us subconsciously believe we need to criticize ourselves in order to improve. We worry that if we were less harsh with ourselves, our personal evolution would stop. The opposite is true. A habit of self-criticism impedes our growth. In this episode...

A harmonious life happens when the parts of your life combine into a pleasing whole. When you’re in a state of peaceful existence and agreement. When you’re taking action that feels congruent. In this episode we address 4 ways you might be creating disharmony in your life and how to fix them: (1) You have a scattered focus on too many things all at once. 2) You ignore important parts of your life....

Tune in for a delightfully honest and far-ranging interview with lawyer and life coach, Angela Han. We talk about the real reasons Angela went into law and later left her law practice to coach full time, the importance of humour, how Angela has worked on overcoming the cultural forces that historically encouraged her silence, the devotional practices that have catapulted her to become well known o...

You don’t need to make a big leap to improve your life. A series of small leaps will take you where you want to go. This episode is about how decide whether to take a leap, big or small. Each time you’re at a crossroads, you’ll face two questions: (i) Is this the time to take a leap? (ii) Is this the right leap? We talk about when to pay attention to the inevitable fears that will come along for t...

There are times we each feel submerged in the overwhelm and complexity our lives. Our problems strike us as complicated and difficult to resolve. We often miss the simple solutions available to us.   When we face too many decisions and too many options, we can become frozen in inaction.   This is the perfect episode to listen to and think about before you set your goals for the...

Before you set your goals for next year, there’s one question I’d recommend you ask yourself. This question will reveal answers, possibly surprising answers, about what’s most important to you. Your answers will provide useful guidance for your decisions about what you want in 2023.   In this episode, I reveal the question, and then I ask it of myself.   Before I recorded this,...

“I’m SOOOO busy.” My guess is you’ll hear yourself – and the people around you - saying this A LOT over the next few weeks. Perhaps this is a constant refrain for you all year long. Let’s face it, there’s a part of us that secretly believes it’s a good thing to be busy. Our commitment to being busy has a lot of benefits, and those benefits drive us to keep creating overly busy lives. In this episo...

Nature helps us discover a depth of beauty in our surroundings that connects us with who we are. In this episode, I share the reason I’m spending more time in nature, how doing that is elevating the way I think and feel, and how more time in nature can do that for you too. Nature evokes a sense of, “Yes, THIS is it” more than any other experience I can think of. That’s because nature resonates wit...

If you doggedly stay within the role you’re playing, you’ll miss out. And the people around you will miss out on your full genius. All the different roles you play in various contexts have one thing in common – you! When you stick only to actions you judge as fitting within your role, there will be times you don’t share something useful you learned in a different context. There will be times you d...

In this super fun episode, my amazing, wise and entertaining peer coach and lawyer friend, Angela Han, interviews me on her podcast, Fit to Practice . Angela has kindly let me share her recording on The Unlikely Artist . I think you’ll enjoy this episode because you get to hear what it’s like when I’m the one in the hot seat. Plus we laugh a lot. Angela and I talk about mystical experiences and co...

We can get over-coached, over-instructed, over-advised. Even if our coaches, mentors, teachers and instructors are the best in their fields and have valuable ideas to share with us. Our desire to learn and grow, to keep getting better at what we do, to accomplish personal and professional objectives, can cause us to become too much the good student. All that learning from others can help build our...

A commitment to stick to your plan is not a prescription for a happy life. When you try to plan as if you knew ahead of time exactly where you’re going, you might feel more in control. Unfortunately, the control’s not real. You can’t predict what you’ll be like or even what you’ll want next month, next year, or a decade from now. That’s because as you live your life, you learn and grow and become...

When we slow down and ditch our impatience for things to be different, our world opens. Our best ideas surface when we stop rushing. When we allow ourselves time to breathe. When our cortisol levels drop and we lose the stress associated with our belief that everything’s urgent. When our minds are quiet and not preoccupied with our quest for answers. Far too many of us pursue a dream and when we m...

We tend to secretly believe that our perfectionism is a good thing. We believe it means we have excellent standards. That’s why we feel proud when we share with someone, “I’m a perfectionist”. In this episode, I want to make you aware of some of the ways this thinking can limit you. The desire to be perfect can cause you to miss: - a fuller range of engaging activities; - a greater capacity to lov...

The same obstacle that impedes an artist’s creativity will also dull your shine, even if you’re a person with no creative aspirations. In this episode, I describe 4 situations where an artist’s creativity was challenged by this obstacle. I diagnose the common mistake and share how a similar pattern of thinking can dramatically and detrimentally affect how you show up, no matter what your area of f...

Sit back and enjoy this interview with Jeff Madoff as he shares his wisdom about creative careers and business. There’s lots of relevant information in this episode for you to digest, whether you’re pursuing a creative career or not. Our discussion covers: Why so many people shut themselves down creatively. How to create a safe space to encourage people to share their full creative expression and...

You don’t need mystical visions, like my own story about the visions of me painting, for your life to take a magical turn. You just need to develop the skill of listening for the stories the silenced parts of you want to tell you. Once you develop that skill of listening and start paying attention to what you hear, you’ll discover everything you need to know about how to make your life feel better...

In this episode I share how being pickpocketed in Italy (See episode 70) catapulted me into a search for joy in my coaching business and art and led to me making some major decisions. Joy and happiness are sometimes used interchangeably. I’d argue they’re not the same thing at all. I love this way of putting it: “Joy is in the heart. Happiness is in the face.” (from www.compassion.com.) Tune in to...

This episode is about the feeling of bittersweet – sadness and happiness mixed up together. The stuff of life. For me, bittersweet is a signal I’m fully experiencing life. I’m putting myself out there. I’m vulnerably connecting. I’m allowing all of life to be there and I’m allowing myself to experience all of it. There are cracks in all our lives. We can pretend those cracks aren’t there. That our...

Beauty calls to all of us in some way. It beckons us with its promise that things are alright. The world’s alright. The world’s magical. Beauty helps us fall into a feeling of awe, wonder and gratitude. Life really sucks sometimes. A sudden moment of beauty can help you forget your problems, stop the loop of negative thinking that’s been keeping you stuck, create space for possibility and open por...

If you obsess about your goals and are constantly anxious about achieving them, your life isn’t as fun now as it could be. This episode offers you a way to stop striving and feel good now. I got the idea for this episode as I walked around my 8 ½ acres and thought about how I’d intentionally developed a relationship of loving stewardship with it this summer. And how I’d used the same approach to d...

Part of being human is having a brain that predisposes you to negative thinking. No matter how much self development you do, that’s always going to be the case. The negative chatter in your brain will still be there. That’s because your negativity is there for a reason – to help you survive. It also gives you the impetus to grow and evolve. Which leads us to question the point of continuing your s...

In today’s episode, we tackle all the ways that pretending can hurt you, and why so many of us crave the ability to show up more authentically. Pretending to be different than you are creates so much internal stress that it alters your body language and signals your deceit to the people around you. You feel “off” to both them and to you. Pretending not only feels terrible, but it cuts off your abi...