Tiny Bites of Wagaliciousness

Do you often feel guilty for things you’ve done or said in the past? Let’s talk about guilt for a minute. If you were raised to adhere to a strict moral code and you go outside that code, it can trigger feelings of guilt. If you cause harm to another person, whether you meant to or not, it can trigger feelings of guilt. If you hold yourself to a high level of performance or achievement, when you m...

Quick – think about the kind of people you gravitate towards – are they the life of the party or the quiet observers? Take your best friend – not a romantic partner, a friend. When you’re with them, who does more talking – you or your friend? Who is the person that plans where you’ll go and what you’ll do? Who is the one most likely to be noticed by the others around you? I’m a former major market...

Do you ever get impatient with where you are in your life? Maybe you think you should be farther along in your studies, or farther along in your career, or farther along in your finances. You have an imaginary yardstick you hold up for yourself and find yourself not measuring up. Stop for a moment and let’s think about the yardstick – does it even belong to you? What are you comparing yourself to...

Is there something you reallyreallyreally want that’s not happening as fast as you’d like, or maybe not happening at all? Most people – myself included – were raised to believe that if we wanted something we had to work to get it. Maybe we had to work really hard to get it. That theory falls apart in the real world, where other people influence whether or not you get what you want. Especially if i...

Have you ever thought about how you want to affect the world with your presence? People often spend time wondering what their purpose in life is, and at its most basic, each of us has the same purpose: to leave the world a little better than we found it. The details vary from person to person, and the easiest way to leave the world a little better than you found it is to leave each person you deal...

When someone is talking about you behind your back and you get upset and start defending yourself and trying to get people to see things the way you see them, not the way that other person sees them, you add fuel to their fire. Let me say that again – defending yourself against a gossip or someone who is trying to sabotage you only strengthens their position, not yours. That feels counter-intuitiv...

Is there someone in your life who makes you angry? They screw things up, or they don’t do what they say they’ll do, or they fail to please you in some other way? If there’s someone in your life who upsets you often, guess what? The two of you are dancing a dance because you’ve agreed to dance with them. Wait – I’m not telling you that you have to kick them out of your life right away! I’m saying t...

With all the emphasis on positivity, some people might get the opinion that negative emotions are bad. Negative emotions are normal. Negative emotions are human. Negative emotions are real. You just don’t want to spend your whole life feeling them, right? Things happen and we feel what we feel because of heredity, social conditioning, and societal expectations. When something hurts, it’s OK to cry...

Are you around someone who complains about almost everything? It’s exhausting, right? Nothing is ever warm enough or cold enough or soft enough or … whatever. They keep up a running commentary of not-enoughness, and if you love them you learn to tune it out. If you don’t love them, chances are you physically remove yourself from their presence as much as possible. Have you ever thought about wheth...

How do you respond when something you really wanted doesn’t happen the way you thought it would or hoped it would or wanted it to? Do you feel badly for a few minutes, put it into perspective, and move on, or do you wallow in pity and sadness for hours, days, or even weeks or years? When something disappoints you, you have no way of knowing if that’s the end of that story or just an interesting pl...

Have you ever felt like life was ganging up on you? Like there was far too much to do, far too little time, and you were far from able to manage it all? Yet you soldiered on, determined to get it all done, even if it killed you. There’s a much easier way through times like that. Is there someone else on your team or in your family that you could turn to for help? Before you say, “it’s easier if I...

Sometimes life hands us gifts we don’t think we deserve. A promotion when a co-worker has been there longer and does a good job. Winning a contest that felt more like dumb luck than skill. Attracting your ideal partner, who feels like they attracted the perfect partner, too. If you’re like most of us, there could be some mixed feelings around the receiving of those gifts – feelings of happiness, f...

Let’s talk about thinking outside the box – who put that box there, anyway? In almost every circumstance, you did. I put the box there for me, and you put the box there for you. Beliefs form the boundaries around our lives, and when what we want to do bumps up against what we think we should do based on beliefs we have, that’s when you realize that you’re living your life inside a box. That phrase...

Let’s talk about mind control. It is a thing and you can learn how to do it. As a matter of fact, most of these Tiny Bite podcasts are about mind control – your control of your own mind. This is a concept that many people resist – they believe that their brain is them and they are their brain. It’s a bit more complex than that – your brain is part of who you are, and you can control it if you’d li...

Do you strive to be the best? Many people do, and having a target to shoot for is one of the ways of staying on task and moving forward. Goals are good and it’s good to review those goals now and then to be sure they still align with who’ve you’ve grown to be. We don’t see it in ourselves because the changes happen slowly over time – we change a lot! We learn something that might cause us to have...

Are you in a new relationship? Yay, you! Make yourself a promise – you will not make excuses for misbehavior from them. What kind of misbehavior? You give them a gift and they point out what’s wrong with it. Nope – no gratitude + no compassion = no excuses. They make plans with their friends weeks ahead of time and can’t make plans with you for this weekend. Nope – not a priority is what we call a...

Have you ever owned a dog, and as it approached the end of life, you wondered how you’d know when it was time to say goodbye? If your experience was like most peoples’ you were told “you’ll know when it’s time.” That was a very unsatisfying answer, wasn’t it? You wanted something concrete, not something woo-woo. And then, it happened – you knew. Your dog told you, though not with words. Once you’v...

Are you a “why me” kind of person? Maybe you don’t even say it out loud, but regular phrases that get said inside your brain include things like, “why does bad stuff always happen to me” and “what did I do to deserve this?” If that doesn’t sound like you, then yay, you! You have the emotional maturity to understand that you’re not being picked on so you don’t focus on normal life events as if you’...

Are you satisfied with where you are in life right now? Are you living the life you want to be living, or is there something that feels missing? It’s not uncommon to just go through the days in a routine kind of way, not thinking about where you are and where you’d like to be. Today, give yourself 10 minutes to think about your life and how you would make it different than it currently is. No beat...

A dear friend had a minor incident between her new car and the garage door. Her husband was with her and had directed her to pull into the garage farther - she was pretty sure the car was in far enough. Oops. Her husband was not amused. He yelled and I told you so’d and had a meltdown over the scratches and dents in the rear bumper that the garage door kissed. It would have been easy for my friend...

We’ve talked about love before – it’s such a rich topic, let’s talk about it again. That brand-new-love feeling is downright intoxicating, right? You wake up enraptured, daydreaming about the next time you’ll be together. You check your phone 100 times a day to catch the latest text or DM or social media tag. You feel the feelings of love so much that it feels like you are love. Guess what? You ar...

Have you ever had this happen – you had a friend you thought was a friend, and suddenly they turned on you? When my marriage ended, a friend made sure I wasn’t alone on what would have been my 30th anniversary. She threw a party filled with girlfriends, food, and fun. I showed up early to help set up and prep the appetizers, brought desert, and had a lovely time. The next day she treated me like I...

Do you sometimes have little stabs of jealousy when someone has something good happen to them? Congratulations – you’re human. Because our brains have a negativity bias, if we just go where it goes, it goes to feelings of loss and lack and jealousy. In some neanderthal part of your brain, you’re feeling jealous because you think there’s not enough good for everyone, and when someone gets some, tha...

Oh, the drama that surrounds an unhappy person! Most of us learn to manage our own unhappiness – some people displace it. Instead of feeling it and dealing with it, they live by the motto, “when momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” Maybe you’ve been the target of that? A friend from the past contacted me, asking if I kept in touch with someone she met through me. The person she asked about pass...

Do you feel anxiety, depression, or a fear of rejection, either occasionally or daily? A lot of people do, and those feelings are helpful to let you know that you’re focusing on something that’s not helping you . Maybe you’re comparing your makeup to that TikTok influencer. Maybe you’re worried about a report that’s due that you haven’t started yet. Maybe you have a crush on someone and are scared...