Think Queerly

For many people, meeting your beloved's family for the first time can be nerve-racking. This is a rite of passage that most people experience for the first time in their teens or early 20s. This is a social and familial expectation of the heteronormative status quo. But what if you experience meeting your boyfriend's / girlfriend's / partner's parents for the first time at 35 years old and as a ga...

As a gay man, when I tune into beauty I connect with the source that creates life. From that source comes my inspiration, that quality which allows me to create and bring value into the world. Following in the steps of the exploration I began in, Is Forgiveness of Homophobia a Gay Male Gift? LOP030 , today I discuss (in very sensual terms) the qualities and value that gay men bring to the betterme...

Viewing the 1964 cartoon, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer through a queer lens. As a little boy I loved the classic Christmas cartoon, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. I must’ve watched it every Christmas as a child, then as a teenager, and almost every year since. Rudolph was my first queer role model and boy was he ever fierce! Rudolph showed a strength of character at a young age. He was unafraid...

Our earliest influences that form who we become as adults start with our parents. While I am certainly not saying that my parents made me gay; how I was raised absolutely influenced my identity as a gay male. We looked up to our parents as children. We believed everything they told us to be true. They were our first leaders. We learned how to develop and exhibit our masculine and feminine characte...

Gay men can lead other people in a new model of forgiveness through their own self exploration of gay shame. We can evolve as men who understand and embrace the dichotomy of the masculine and feminine energies. As gay men we may have struggled with forgiveness when we first came out. We had to learn to forgive ourselves for the lies people, society, and institutions told us – that we were abnormal...

How do you break out of the box you’ve built up around your life that limits your potential? You start with your thoughts. It’s not about being mind-full, it’s about improving your mind-set. If your mind is full, there’s no room for new thoughts. If you re-organize and improve your sets of thoughts, behaviours, and beliefs, you will improve your mind! But you can’t just think about these things in...

Populism is on the rise in North America and elsewhere, but for the first time it seems like we’re beginning to see it’s negative effects in Canada, and specifically in Ontario where the Ontario PC Party won a majority election earlier this year. At a recent annual party convention the ON PC Party voted on a resolution that to me is a prime example of the first real step backwards for human rights...

“I’m stressed out!” On a Saturday morning two years ago I was sitting in the bath reading, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Oh, right… that's relaxing! I needed to relax, which is why I was taking a bath. I thought I would sink deep into the water and let go, except while reading my “relaxing book on productivity” I got an idea. I quickly grabbed my iPhone to dictate my idea and then got back...

Why purge? Purging will help you to let go of what’s holding you back in life, so that you can focus on what’s most important to you, and spend more of your time and energy working on what you want to accomplish in life. What is purging? It’s a process that helps to increase your, Ability to focus, thus making better use of your time; Personal motivation, and; Physical and emotional energy “If you...

Faith is passive – Trust is action oriented. Faith is an expectation that what you can't prove is true, what will come to pass, or what you believe to be true without reason or logic. When you trust in the process, when you trust in yourself, you make decisions about what you're going to do to succeed. Trust is present-moment looking towards the future past. When you trust something will happen, y...

In the Western world we are constantly striving. We are building things. We are creating things. We are solving the problems that we have created for ourselves. We are trying to outperform others. We are trying to create more than our neighbour, or to have more income than anyone else. While some of us are working to achieve balance, others are doing everything possible to increase their net worth...

What is overwhelm? It’s a state of being in which you feel total overpowered by one or more emotions, situations, or everything all at once. In truth it’s an emotional state in which you are overly identified with too many of your problems or struggles and you are stuck in your head. It’s a vicious cycle, and the problem is that you are not your problems! So how do you take back control? The first...

In this episode I speak about the challenge for gay men to forgive homophobia in their lives, be it from individuals, family, and society at large. The topic for the episode was inspired by a discussion of models of forgiveness in Raymond L. Rigolisoso’s book, “ Gay Men and The New Way Forward ” and this coaching group (which I’m a part of), “ Gay Men of Wisdom ”. http://www.gaymenofwisdom.org I d...

If you want to accomplish something that’s important to you, do you believe that setting a goal with a deadline, or making a New Year’s resolution will do the trick? Do you create lists of goals with the best intentions, but then for whatever reason, you never accomplish them? Over the years of studying personal development, goal setting systems, and personal productivity methods, I’ve discovered...

Do you think the following statement is true: People who are afraid of the future cling to the present. When I first read that sentence it hit me hard, because of my recent awareness that I have ‘apparently’ been fearful of my own future. I’ve been experiencing fears around the promise of something new and I wasn’t sure if I could make my goals – my dream – a reality. If you are fearful about the...

Have you hard the expression, “You need to fall in love with the process, not the goal”. That’s only partially correct. While it’s highly motivating to fall in love with the process, you never want to be attached to the goal. You don’t want to be emotionally dependant upon the goal. You want to fall in love with the doing, the taking action, accepting, trusting, and believing that your choices and...

Pretend that you recently accomplished a really big goal. I’m talking the big-kahuna, significant life goal: a major promotion at work; a $30,000 sales target reached; you’ve moved into your dream home; you lost over 20 pounds of body fat; or whatever you have in mind as a meaningful, impactful goal. Now that you find yourself in a much better place than you were before achieving that goal, you fe...

Have you ever said (or heard others say) something like, “Is that for me? Oh, you shouldn’t have!” Or, “I don’t deserve this.” Too often I hear this from those of us who serve others in capacities like coaching, personal training, massage, teaching, blogging, and so on. For some reason we depreciate ourselves, as if we shouldn’t be proud of our accomplishments, including our gifts, skills, talents...

If you're excited by every new idea, jumping from one project to the next, you'll never get what you want. Instead, the outcome will be many small projects, some completed, and others abandoned; or jumping one job to another. You will be no closer to achieving your goals and creating the life of your dreams. But, once you know what you want to do – with clarity and on your own terms – you can then...

One of the core steps to Live OUT the best of who you are is to keep a journal. We journal for self-awareness to work through our problems and struggles, to get clear on how to solve those problems, and to give form to our creative inspirations. When we journal regularly we stay connected with who we are. No one else has the power to assess, dream, and design our lives. Divine your own truth by yo...

ADD To Your Life How many times have you sought out someone’s opinion, or wanted someone to agree with you? Maybe you didn’t know how to resolve a difficult situation and you asked what they thought. Or perhaps you were working to solve a problem and you wanted someone to tell you that you were doing the right thing. The truth is that other people’s opinions do not matter. They are simply their op...

This past weekend I was a guest on the Shaun Proulx Show on Canada Talks on SiriusXM Canada, channel 167. Shaun and I went deep into the discussion that you are not your problems or your past stories. We talked about what you can do to reframe your problems, and how to come up with creative and empowering solutions. Enjoy this special edition of the Living OUT Podcast and be sure to check out Shau...

For many years I held onto my past. I thought about people who made me feel bad and unworthy. I reacted to how heteronormative culture boxed me in and made me feel shame for being a gay man. I felt like a loser graduating high school with a 51% average. My past became my identity and I was stuck in the drama of that tired old story. What actions can you take to let go of what’s holding you back? H...

Do you stick to the appointments you make with other people and compromise or cancel appointments that you make with yourself? What self-care habits are routine in your life? What do you do on a daily or weekly basis to take care of yourself that never appears on your calendar? What always gets done with consistency and without argument or resistance? Conversely, what appointments or habits do you...

Needing to be right is not who you are In this episode I look at why we often go on the defensive about what we believe to be right, why we attack so easily when confronted with something we don’t agree with or believe in, and what that says about who we are. Below are the key quotations I reference from the podcast, Ram Dass Here and Now , “Reality of Who We Are” , episode 86. “You only try and p...