I recently heard an interview with Dr. Joe Vitale, contemporary spiritual and self-growth guide to the masses. (Did you know that he was homeless [but not lost] for a while and completely destitute for a decade before realizing his full potential?) Vitale spoke about intention, the act of consciously, purposefully directing your will and attention toward something you are trying to accomplish … [Read more...]
3 Essential Elements of Genuine Happiness
It’s all over the news these days. There are hundreds of TED talks on this topic. Researchers are devoting their entire careers to this theme. I’m talking about the often elusive cultivation of genuine, lasting happiness. To hopefully not bore you to happy tears, I’m going to take a slightly different angle on this topic while synthesizing some of the hugely important research on this hugely … [Read more...]
Hope For A Greater Good
It's so easy these days to be down on the world. There is so much misery and suffering, so much war and violence, so much self-righteousness, so much self-hatred. And yet… And yet, every single day there are millions of people across our planet making enormous strides for a higher and positive purpose. But we forget this. You may even forget this about yourself. You may be one of … [Read more...]
Why New Years Resolutions Fail
Happy New Year! Now that the celebrations are over, let’s talk resolutions and why so many new years resolutions fail. (According to some research, up to 90% of us don't successfully keep our resolutions). How many of those seemingly admirable resolutions have you actually kept? Really reflect on that for moment. If the answer is a wistful, “not many” or “none” or “what do you mean kept?”, then … [Read more...]
Sourcing Our Good Fortune: Making Happiness More Possible
We often log thousands of hours of our lives trying to figure out who has done us wrong and how we ended up this way. Our parents may not have given us what we really needed when we were children, peers may have bullied us on the playground, and fear may have cast a long shadow on our confidence to speak up, assert ourselves, or get what we really needed. We often attempt to trace back what … [Read more...]
Turning Schadenfreude On Its Head: Cultivating Joy for Others’ Good Fortune
The Germans have a word for delighting in the misery and misfortune of others – Schaedenfreude. We might initially react to the concept of Schaedenfreude with a resounding “Not me! That’s horrible to think about. Who would feel good about others’ feeling bad?” Well, it turns out that Schaedenfreude may not be all that foreign to us if we explore what’s going on under the surface of our everyday … [Read more...]
