The Wellness Compass Podcast

Growth Begins At The Edge of Our Comfort Zone Many of us know someone who is graduating this spring. Perhaps you have been invited to a party to celebrate the graduate's achievement. Graduation is a rite of passage that merits celebrating an individual's perseverance in achieving their goals. Graduation is also a transition and rite of passage for loved ones closest to the graduate as they face a...

Mental Health Awareness Month May is Mental Health Awareness month. Because we are both mental health professionals who co-direct a foundation that creates materials to support mental health, we often get invited to offer programs this month. Usually, these gatherings are for organizations that want to acknowledge and promote the importance of mental health, either for their employees or the peopl...

Family of Origin, Family of Creation As we prepare to celebrate Mother's Day, it seems like a good time to reflect on the two concepts of family of origin, and family of creation, topics that we talk about a great deal with people in our work as marriage and family therapists. Our family of origin is the constellation of relationships in which we were raised. One way to think about it is that it i...

Be an Encourager   With the weather turning warmer, we got our bikes out of the garage this week to go for a ride. We were so excited to get going that it wasn't until we were a few blocks from home that we realized that our tires needed air. We returned home, pumped up the tires, and wow, what a difference it made both in comfort and ease of effort.     Because we are both family therapists and w...

Hope Amidst the Mud   We live in Wisconsin, and like other places with northern climates, we have five seasons each year. Our fifth occurs between winter and spring and is known as the "mud season." If we need an image of the name for this extra season, we need only look at our mud-caked hiking shoes inside our back door, removed and left there to dry after a walk in the woods this past weekend. O...

We invite you to bring to mind a person who creates positive and life-giving energy for you. This could be a person from your present life or your past; a friend, a family member, a classmate, or a colleague. The person might be living or may have passed away. Bring that person to mind and pause for a moment to experience what it feels like to remember that person. Today we are focusing on the con...

Life is a dance of letting go and holding on, a lesson I (Holly) learned again recently when my "second mom," Judy or Mom, passed away peacefully at the age of 91. I call her my second mom because my creation mom passed away from cancer when I was eight, and Judy came into my life a year later when she married my dad. After all these years, I have come to realize that no matter how many times, and...

The quote above dreams of a time when we finally come to recognize that the power of love is greater than the love of power. With the horror of what's going on in Ukraine right now, this reality may seem far off. And yet, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, we still believe that the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward love, justice, and peace.   Many of us are privileged to ha...

A Disney movie was the last place we expected to find powerful and profound insight about what happens when families avoid having difficult conversations. And yet that is just what we discovered when we recently sat down and watched their latest movie entitled, "Encanto."  
 We promise not to share too many details about the movie, in case you haven't watched it yet. Even if you haven't seen the m...

What You Appreciate, Appreciates 
      A few weeks ago, we wrote about several specific things we can do to strengthen any relationship. One of the things we mentioned was the simple practice of showing appreciation. This week we want to expand a little more on this because we know that, while simple, it is easy to forget the importance of offering appreciation regularly and freely. 
   It is wor...

The Gift of Listening Last week's column talked about the importance of nurturing our relationships on a regular basis, remembering that the "grass is always greener where we water it." We talked about three specific ways to strengthen any relationship: listening, expressing appreciation, and making time to play and have fun together. This week's column focuses on the gift of listening. Listening...

The Grass is Greener Where We Water It With Valentine's Day approaching, it is only natural to reflect on the relationships in our lives, and not just romantic relationships, but on all of our life-nurturing connections. As marriage and family therapists, we talk with people regularly about repairing and strengthening their connections with others, and we know that few things impact the quality of...

I In this episode, we complete our six-part series on understanding the process of growth and change by reflecting on a paraphrase of the opening words of the Serenity Prayer, written by Reinhold Niebuhr.   
 "Seek the serenity to accept the things you cannot change,  the courage to change the things you can,  and the wisdom to know the difference." 
 The first five columns in this series (and acc...

(This is the fourth column in our six-part series on Understanding the Process of Growth and Change. If you missed one, you can find all of them HERE.) 
   In early 2020 I, (Scott) distinctly remember saying to my work team that I could not ever see myself embracing the idea of working remotely. Being together at the office every day was my comfort zone. It was how I had worked for over thirty yea...

Stages of Change Have you ever been unsuccessful in an attempt to create some kind of change in your life? Have you ever been frustrated in your attempt to lead a group of people through a process of change? If you are like us, you can think of many times when your answer to these questions would be, "Of course!"   If you, too, have been disappointed in your ability to create or lead change, you m...

  Find Your Why and You'll Find Your Way   This column is part two of a six-part series on growth and change. While the timing of these columns is related to the beginning of a new year—a time when many people take stock and seek to make a change—what we are writing about here is timeless and applies to any kind of change, whether personal, relational, or organizational.     Most attempts to make...

  Listening for a Change   Whether or not we make New Year's resolutions, many of us do take stock of our lives this time of year, pausing to reflect on whether there are any changes we want to make. Apart from it being the start of a new year, the pandemic has disrupted all of our lives, sometimes forcing change upon us and other times clarifying for us a change we want or need to make.       One...

Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let It Begin with Me.   Do you ever find yourself discouraged by the amount of conflict and hostility in the world, wishing there was more peace on earth? Or perhaps you wish for more peace in your community. And as families connect around the holidays, maybe you wish for more peace in your own family. When we find ourselves longing for more peace, the words of a s...

The Gift of Presence One of the highlights of Christmas for me as a child was my grandmother coming to visit and staying with us for a week. She lived far away, so a visit from her was always a special occasion. All this was magnified when she visited over the holidays. My sister and I would gather on the couch with her for hours, watching all the classic holiday movies. As I write this now, I viv...

Episode 10 of the Wellness Compass Podcast   "To acknowledge our grief is to acknowledge that we have loved and that we have been loved."  To Acknowledge Our Grief is To Acknowledge Our Love   Grief has many faces and presents itself in a myriad of ways. We are familiar with grief when it shows up as sadness, loneliness, or feelings of emptiness. It may be less evident that grief is commonly the f...

Sharpening Our Saws "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." Anne Lamott A story is told about two loggers who have been working all day cutting down large trees using an old-fashioned two-person hand saw, one of them on each end pulling back and forth. In the morning, they made significant progress in cutting down many trees. As the day went on, they...