Tiny Bites of Wagaliciousness

Can you not care? When someone is snarky, can you not care? When someone gossips about you, can you not care? When someone abuses your good nature, can you not care? Most people can’t, but that’s just because they haven’t practiced. It’s counter to human nature to not care about the opinions of those who are closest to us – we are a tribe of community-builders. Some people treat you poorly from ti...

Isn’t life wonderful when it’s all ironed out? No wrinkles at work, no wrinkles at home, no wrinkles in your health. Wait – I’m not sure my life’s ever been that way – has yours? Wrinkles crop up every day and they keep us on our toes, giving us opportunities to learn, grow, and lead others. Wrinkles show us where we miscalculated, and give us the chance to iron them out. It’s good to be a person...

Are you a good loser or a poor loser? Especially in a work relationship, friendship, or romantic relationship, do you feel like you have to win? Don’t answer that question too quickly – a lot of people want to be right, and it’s the tendency to fight for winning the “I’m right” battle that torpedoes relationships of all kinds. Learn to be a great loser. Seriously – practice losing well. When you l...

Does it feel like you’re in a chapter of your life that’s beating you up? Sometimes life can feel like that – like if something bad can happen, it probably will. It can be tough to stay focused on your goals when life is coming at you like that – you’re feeling like you have to react to everything instead of being proactive. There’s a lot of stress at times like that. If you’re in the middle of so...

Where do you work now? Have you been there for a while, and are you in a comfy routine with your co-workers and with your assignments? Do you remember what you felt like on your first day? I remember vividly the first time I did a radio show – my hand shook as I reached for the switch to turn the microphone on, my mouth was dry as Gold Bond powder when I tried to speak – in short, I was terrified....

Wherever you go, there you are – maybe you’ve heard that phrase before? It’s one of those deceptively simple phrases – almost nursery-rhyme in its simplicity, yet profound in it’s truth. Many people think that if something’s not going right they need to move on, whether that means a new car, a new job, or a new romantic partner. But wherever they go, there they are. If they weren’t happy about the...

Did you know that hanging out with your friends is good for your health? It’s true – it’s more than just fun to be with friends, it’s a way to reduce stress, increase endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine, and can even help you have a healthier body mass index. Spending time with friends helps you put problems in perspective, even if you don’t talk about your problems with them – just being around pe...

Have you ever taken an art class, maybe even the kind where a bunch of people paint the same object? When the class was over and everyone showed their progress, were you shocked at how different everyone’s interpretation of the same object was? It’s not just that everyone had a slightly different view of what they were painting, it’s that everyone had a different relationship to it, a different se...

Do you love going to the beach like I do? The beach holds a beautiful, wild power and a reminder that destructive powers can create beautiful things. Take the sand, for instance – the water has spent eons pounding away at rocks, coral, and shells, creating the tiny grains of sand that feel so good under our feet. The beach would be quite different if the water wasn’t relentlessly wearing down the...

Do you work hard to sustain the status quo? One of the most stressful things in life is change – humans don’t like it when situations, people, or even the weather changes. Yet change is the one thing we can always count on, because people and things are always changing and growing. If you work hard to sustain the status quo, you’re like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn in the same tiny stream w...

Do you lead a team of people? Congratulations – your company trusts you to take care of those people, nurture those people, and inspire the desire for personal and professional growth in those people. Oh, you didn’t know those things were part of your job description, too? Great leaders do those things daily for their people, and they do it with their words and attitudes. The attitude is of benevo...

Can you look at life as an endless string of days in class? Wait – you’re not tardy, you don’t need a hall pass, and you’re not in detention! You have so much you could learn every single day of your life, and since learning makes us feel alive, then learning must be good, right? Take a moment to think about what you learned yesterday that you didn’t know before yesterday – it could be something a...

Do you sometimes take things too personally? Many of us do, and there’s a good reason for it – we are the center of our world, so when something upsets us, it feels like it’s about us. A really good skill to learn is how to step back from something that upsets you and examine it to see if it’s really as personal as it feels. A friend was asked to help with something she really wanted to help with,...

Are you a good person? I bet you are, no matter what your brain tells you from time to time. You don’t have to be perfect in your ethics or religion. You don’t have to be perfect in your body mass index, your sexuality, or your hairdo and make up. You don’t have to be right on trend, right on time, or right about anything. Good people are good because of the way they treat others. Good people know...

Do you feel a connection to something greater than you? Most of us crave that feeling, finding it in spirituality, religion, or even looking at something that seems vast and endless, like the ocean or the star-filled sky. When you’re in a moment of feeling that deep connection, whatever it is for you, do you get a feeling of quiet, benevolent power? That power is your power – that is you, accessin...

Do you like to sing? I’m not asking if you’re good or not – I’m sure not, and I love to sing. I make up songs with my dogs’ names in them and sing to my dogs. If they care how bad I sound, they’re too polite to complain. Singing is a way to use your creativity in a way that connects it to your whole body. When you sing, you use your breath in a way that calms the stress hormones and eases your mus...

We’ve talked a lot about learning to forgive others, and I usually include a sentence about forgiving yourself. Today, let’s talk about you forgiving you. Can you forgive yourself for doubting your worth? Can you forgive yourself for criticizing your body or your choices? Can you forgive yourself for belittling yourself and assuming the world doesn’t need you and won’t miss you? Can you forgi...

You know things and your well of knowledge is getting bigger every day. You’ve forgotten more than many people learn in their lifetimes, and that’s perfectly OK, because the truth is, once you know something you keep that knowing, whether you remember it or not. You know good things and not-so-good things. Some things that you know, like how to read and interpret language, help you learn even more...

Have you ever seen a child get so angry and frustrated that they say something like, “you’ll miss me when I’m dead!” as they go stomping off? Feeling misunderstood, unappreciated, or unloved triggers a very primal need to be understood, appreciated and loved, and children often don’t have the nuances of language to adequately express what they’re feeling. Is there someone in your life who uses dra...

Is there someone in your life who always seems to be angry? The tiniest little thing sets them off and there’s nothing you can do to soothe their anger? How much do you know about their back story? Often someone who shows the world an angry face is simply being aggressively defensive. They’re afraid of rejection or of being hurt, or they’ve had something that left them feeling so sad and so all al...

Gossip. OMG, the horrors of gossip, and OMG, the fun of gossip. Wait – what? How can it be both fun and horrible? Human beings learn through stories. It’s been that way since the dawn of time, before the invention of the written word. Oral history was shared through storytelling, and gossip is simply malicious storytelling that some people are very, very good at. People who take a tiny kernel of t...

Does this ever happen to you – a friend or relative calls, you see the call, and you choose to let them go to voicemail? It doesn’t matter why – in that moment that wasn’t a call you wanted to take or could take? Then you feel a little guilty and when you call them back later, you feel the need to explain yourself? It’s common to assume that the other person is irritated that you didn’t answer, an...

Do you remember being a child and conjuring up an entire world in your imagination? Maybe you were creating a forest life for your stuffed animals, or maybe a fashion show with your dolls, or maybe you were a magical creature in the forest…whatever you created in your mind felt so real to you, right? As adults looking back on those times, we usually think we grew out of that kind of imagineering,...

Has your heart ever been broken? If so, welcome to the human race! We love, therefore we suffer pain when love is unreturned or the one we love decides to leave. Recovering from a failed romance is something that some people just can’t do – they stay stuck in the unfairness, the loss of the fairy tale, and the unrealized dreams they had for their future. Moving on takes time for most people, some...

How was yesterday? Was it awesome, pretty good, so so, or did it suck? When your feet hit the floor this morning, how did you feel – mired in yesterday or ready for today? Especially if yesterday was less than optimal, it’s easy to let the disappointment and bad energy of a bad day leak into the next day. Don’t let it!! You have no power at all to change what happened in the past. The past is done...