Tiny Bites of Wagaliciousness

Did you know that you can choose not to react to things that normally upset you? The primitive part of your brain has a 1 to 3 second head start, and it reacts quickly and strongly to things that have upset you in the past, as well as to things that seem life-threatening, like a car backfiring. Take a breath – take control of the primitive part of your brain and tell it to relax while the frontal...

It’s been a while since we talked about “going to MSU” so let’s revisit that. Our brains like to group events together and weave a story from them. It’s part of how we learn so well, and it’s also how we miscommunicate so well. Going to MSU means that your brain is making stuff up – making up a story that might or might not be true, based on the evidence it’s picked up over time. Someone was grump...

Give the gift of grace, just as you’d like everyone to give you grace. When someone doesn’t know something, give the gift of teaching without condescending. When someone makes a mistake, give the gift of gently reminding them what a better path would have been. When someone lashes out in anger, give them the gift of love, because that’s when they need it most. We’re all human and we all do stupid...

Is something bothering you? Is it something you can do something about? If you’re not fixing something that’s bothering you, you are choosing to continue to be bothered by it. I know – it’s easy and tempting to hope that by ignoring something irritating, it will go away. Nope – it’ll just irritate you more and more as time goes by. If you have the power to fix it, fix it. If you don’t have the pow...

Humans have emotions and we’re meant to feel them. Sometimes it’s impossible not to feel them, and very annoying to have other people try to help by saying things like, “This happened for a reason and you just need to move on” when your heart is breaking over a break-up. It is perfectly ok to be sad. When you feel sad, you don’t have to spend energy to put on a show for anyone. Feel what you feel,...

Has someone been unkind to you today? Has someone tried to manipulate you today? Has someone lied to you today? Since you’re dealing with human beings, you’ve probably experienced some level of all of those behaviors today, unless you’re hearing this right after waking up. You can’t control how other people behave, even those who are related to you. You can control what you’ll put up with in your...

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” Mark Twain was known much more for his warm, folksy humor than for writing scary stories, though one of his masterworks is A Ghost Story. He takes readers on a trip through an abandoned old hotel, haunted by a spirt at first frightening and then pitiful. The idea of fear being normal and something to gain control of is illustra...

Over half of Americans don’t use all of their vacation time. Are you in that group? You earned your time off, you use some of it and at the end of the year, you give some of it back. Would you give back your salary? I don’t think so, so why do you give back your sanity? Time away from work to do something soul-satisfying is one of the very best ways to gain and retain the work/life balance many pe...

My friend and colleague, Chad Hymas, is a very wise man. He said, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”  Chad is a fabulous example of the importance of who you are, not what you’ve done or what you have. Pursuing goals is one of the keystone habits that successful people share – not achieving the goal, but pursuing it. It’s the...

OK – stop. Listen to this with your whole self, because it’s important to your success in life. You can cause yourself to feel however you’ve decided to feel. Hear that again – you can cause yourself to feel however you’ve DECIDED to feel. This is neuroplasticity at it’s most powerful, and you are in complete control. For instance, when I see a picture of Mom, who died way too young of metastatic...

Be patient with yourself…you are still growing. Like a tomato plant from the garden center, you have your spine and what you think you will do with your life. And like a tomato plant, that can look different from one day to the next. One day it may have 8 leaves and a dream, and you might have an unreliable car and a job across town. Be patient with yourself. One day, like that tomato plant, you’l...

Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Sure, it’s good to have a method, logic and evidence to back up actions – it’s also good to notice how something makes you feel and either do more of it or move on. When your intuition tells you that someone is up to...

Plato said, “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” He didn’t say it exactly that way – translations differ so that’s an English-language distillation of a two-sentence section of his Apology speech. When you find yourself in the company of people who flatter and praise to someone’s face and then whisper behind their back, you are among people who aren’t worthy of your friendship or e...

Do you blame your parents for problems you have now? Maybe they didn’t love you the way you wanted and needed to be loved. Maybe they were absent more than you would have preferred. Maybe they were even mentally or physically abusive, and so you believe that the life you’re living now is because of what they did to you. Parents are human. They can only do what they know how to do, which often is w...

Happiness isn’t possible 100% of the time. Yes, my company is the Center for Workplace Happiness and you heard that right – 100% happiness isn’t possible. That’s OK, though, because it doesn’t need to be. Contentment is the baseline of happiness, as measured by researchers at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge and other universities with neuroplasticity studies. When you’re feeling frightened or stressed or...

Has someone ever come to you with a problem, wanting you to help them solve it? And you talk it out with them, help them see their options and then they ask you what to do? And then don’t do it, so they stay stuck in their problem? What other people do with your input is not your business. Well, ok, if they’re employed by you and your input for them has to do with the work they do for you, then th...

Want to feel better about yourself? Look for what’s right in the people around you. Look for their conscientiousness, their competence and their kindness. Look for evidence of their heart shining through their work and their interactions with others. Look for their faith in themselves and their trust of others. When you look for the best aspects of the people around you, you shine that same light...

It is human nature to believe that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. We are living our condition, warts and all, and see someone else living what looks like a much better life. Do you ever get stuck in that sort of not-enough feeling? Stop, and think about what’s right about what you’re living. Remember where you were, and how exciting it was while you were on the way to where y...

When you believe you’re beautiful, you are. When you believe you’re worthy, you are. When you believe you can do it, you can. This isn’t just psycho-babble from some happiness nut, it’s grounded in neuroscience and human behavior. You probably know at least one person whose looks are fairly average and yet people mention her beauty. You probably know at least one person who went to school on schol...

No one can stop you. No one. I saw a man once wearing a shirt that said, “No one can stop me. No One!” Feeling playful, I got in front of him on the sidewalk and said, “Sir, wait – just wait a minute!” Puzzled, he stopped. And I celebrated. And we both laughed at how easy he was to stop, and then we went on with our lives. But really – no one can stop you except you. Think of the things you’d like...

Are you holding a grudge? Telling the story of pain someone caused you years ago? Avoiding someone because just being around them makes you feel sick to your stomach with dread? Forgiveness to the rescue! Forgiveness is HUGE and it’s not that hard to do, when you realize that all those bad feelings aren’t hurting the other person at all. They don’t care that you’re beating yourself up, and if they...

Want to feel better about yourself? Look for what’s right in the people around you. Look for their conscientiousness, their competence and their kindness. Look for evidence of their heart shining through their work and their interactions with others. Look for their faith in themselves and their trust of others. When you look for the best aspects of the people around you, you shine that same light...

Are there people who have abused your good nature in the past? Maybe you loved them and they betrayed you? Many people, in a circumstance like that, beat themselves up for loving someone who didn’t return that love. May I give you a different, more powerful way to think about it? You gave love. You have love inside you and you shared it with another human being. What they did with the love you gav...

Notice how you feel. This sounds weird, I know – we’re so used to our own feelings that often we forget to feel them. The fundamentals of creating more success and happiness in your life is to actually recognize how you’re feeling, moment to moment. It matters to notice what you’re feeling as you feel it because so many of our feelings are patterns we’ve gotten in to that don’t serve us very well....

When you feel happy, you are aware of more happiness around you. When you feel healthy, you are aware of the healthy opportunities around you. When you feel satisfied, you’ll see more things to be satisfied about. Are you sensing a trend here? The flip side of the coin is also true – when you feel sad, more things make you sad. When you feel pain in your body, you focus on the pain in your body. W...