Tiny Bites of Wagaliciousness

Do you have people in your life that get on your last nerve. Maybe just the thought of them makes your skin crawl, or makes you want to avoid them. Maybe you feel like they don’t deserve your good thoughts or your friendship or your love. Maybe you even think they’re bad or evil and so you are justified in vilifying them. They may truly not deserve your good thoughts, but you do. You deserve your...

Today is a brand new day. Yesterday only comes into your mind and your decisions if you choose to bring it along. Tomorrow isn’t here yet and you can’t do anything in your tomorrow today. Today is where all of your possibilities lie. What do you want your tomorrow to include? What changes would you like to see as you move forward through this week or month or year or life? Today is the day you can...

Do you care about someone who seems to self-sabotage? Maybe they’re a co-worker or employee, or maybe they’re a family member or a friend. You, as a caring person, want to help them. You, as a caring person, might help out in every way you can think of, only to see that person make the same poor choices, and it breaks your heart because you’re a caring person. You might not want to hear this, and...

Are you a mirror or a candle? What the heck do I mean by that?? Mirrors can be used in a lot of wonderful ways – they allow us to see ourselves, they can make a room look bigger, and those are good things. But mirrors simply reflect what’s around them. Candles can also be used in a lot of wonderful ways – they light the way, light another candle and help others feel more stable and less frightened...

I ran across this quote from Pema Chodron – “You are the sky. Everything else is the weather.” Do you love that as much as I do? It’s a great reminder of your vastness, your calmness, your value and your beauty. It’s also a reminder that, just like the weather, difficulties will pass and you can remain vast, calm, valuable and beautiful. Whether or not you recognize your vastness, your calmness, y...

Are there special things you see that mean something to you? Maybe it’s matching numbers like 333 or 1111. Maybe it’s a butterfly, or a hummingbird or a rainbow or any of a million possibilities. Those little happenstances can be called godwinks or coincidences or synchronicity – no matter what you call them, notice and appreciate when they show up in your day. Smile and use that moment to remembe...

When things get tense, find something to laugh about. This is especially important for people who work closely together in stressful situations, like veterinary hospitals. Having an inside joke – one that’s not at the expense of anyone – can quickly ease a tense moment. One of the veterinary teams I worked with used the phrase “and your Aunt Mary, too!” to lighten things up. Aunt Mary was what the...

Johnathan Swift, the satirist from the 1700’s, wrote, “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” Need an example of a visionary? Nikola Tesla, who dreamed and then created alternating current, the concept of the electric power grid and even wireless communications, though he ran out of funding before completing that work. What is your vision? What do you see that others can’t, and maybe...

Are you big? I spent a big part of my life trying to fit in, to adapt, to be part of…whatever. And then I discovered that we were never meant to do that. People who cared about us taught us to adapt and fit in because that’s what they’d been taught to do. When we do that, we limit our own bigness. We were born big – full of wonder and love and possibilities. Remember how that felt, before you bega...

Gratitude is different than appreciation. Nice is different than good. Right is different than fair. And words intended to solve a problem can be the very way a problem gets way out of hand. Those three sets of words – gratitude and appreciation, nice and good, right and fair – are often used as synonyms and can mean wildly different things to different people. If you’re in conflict with someone,...

Remember the problems you had in elementary school? You have different problems now than you did then, so why do you repeat the same behavior patterns now that you did then? That’s easy to answer – it’s because those behavior patterns were formed when you were a young child, and your brain is a pattern-running machine. The human brain’s ability to learn new things is driven by its ability to recog...

“All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadows.” Leo Tolstoy said that and if you’ve read any of his work, you know he valued the shadows of life as much as the light. Without shadows, the world around us would appear flat and featureless. And without the challenges that life throws at us sometimes, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to grow and learn. If you’re having a tough day, remember...

Human beings are creatures of habit. Have you ever watched helplessly as your best friend picked the same type of bad-for-her relationship partner? That happens because we’re innately drawn to patterns of behavior that fit a pattern we’re used to. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good pattern or a bad pattern – it’s a pattern that feels familiar, and therefore our brains flood our bodies with oxytocin...

Do you have team members who play the blame game? When something happens, their default response is to point a finger at someone else so that they won’t be blamed for it. This is so harmful to team dynamics and to the hospital culture, so this person is ripe for education and the opportunity for personal growth. Take them aside and help them see that blaming others makes them look bad. Nobody like...

Have you let your imagination come out to play at work? Maybe you have a difficult surgery on your schedule – what if you let your imagination do the surgery before you actually do it? Imagine the steps through the process, imagine the best possible outcome and imagine the potential problems that could arise. Let your imagination work on the surgery first, and once you get started in reality, it w...

The kindest, most loving, most supportive thing you can do for others is to set a great example. When you show someone that success is possible, that happiness is possible, that living life on your terms is possible, you give them a huge gift. They see your life and, no matter what’s going on in theirs, they can see the possibilities for themselves. You don’t have to do anything concrete for that...

How often do you appreciate? Appreciate a person, a pretty day, an unexpected break in a busy schedule – how often do you take a moment to notice the tiny gifts each day brings? Appreciation is a skill most children have, and most of us, as we get older, learn to take things for granted instead of being almost in awe of them. Try to bring the appreciative child in you along with you through your d...

Do you sometimes…or maybe often…fret about what others think about you, or how they perceive you? Taking that a step further, do you try to shape your behavior to look better to others? In other words, you choose your behavior in a certain situation based on what you think someone else will think about your decision. You aren’t inside the other person’s head and you have NO way to predict their th...

Is there something in your body that hurts? For most of us, there’s an ouchie place or two that gets our attention on a daily basis. When you focus on it, you give it more airtime and power in your life. When you can joke about it, you lessen its impact. After sitting down for a period of time, I’m getting a bit slow to get up. Ouchies! If someone asks what’s wrong, I usually just say that like a...

What is happening to you right now is temporary. No matter what’s going on in your life, good or bad, it’s only temporary. The wonderful, magical thing about life is that it keeps moving and everything keeps changing. Enjoy the good-filled now when that’s happening, and tolerate the not-so-good-filled now when it shows up in your life, secure in the knowledge that it’s temporary. It’s all temporar...

Are you worrying about something that’ll happen in the future? In addition to flooding yourself with stress hormones right now, you have no way of knowing that what you’re worrying about will even happen. Heck, you have no way of knowing that the future will even happen! Worrying is an indulgence of the brain that makes us feel like we’re doing something productive, when in reality what we’re doin...

Agreement is good…and not essential. One of the things that keeps life interesting is that we all have different points of view. That means we bring our own life experiences to whatever is going on right now, and often it’s those life experiences that can cause friction. Because no two people have the same experiences, no two people interpret situations exactly the same way. You see something one...

Should is a punishment. There, I said it – when you should on yourself or when others should on you, punishment is involved. When you say, “I should have gone to the gym today,” you’re wagging an imaginary finger at yourself, blaming yourself for laziness or distractedness or an inability to manage your time. None of that is productive. If you want to go to the gym each day, shoulding on yourself...

How do you react when there’s a big problem in your family or at work? You know, the kind where it’s the only topic of conversation and everyone focuses on what’s wrong…the injustice…the unfairness. In the power and swirl of a big problem, it feels like you’re getting something done by talking about it with others. In reality, all you’re doing is training your brain to be more negative and notice...

How do you feel about a liar? What if I told you that most of the time, someone who lies to you has decent motives for it – would you feel better about that person? Think about a time in your life when you told a lie – didn’t you do it to make the other person feel better than they would have felt if you’d told the truth? Or maybe you did it because, in that moment, you were feeling a little insec...