What is Enough in the Face of these Horrors?
Quick Note: If you’ve been feeling uncertain about how to respond to the federal government’s ongoing cruelty and you long for a sense of clarity about how to focus your energy on creating a better world, please reach out. I’m thinking about putting together a...
When the World Seems Like it’s Ending: 2 Questions I’m Asking Myself
How’s your heart? Yes, I know that’s a big question that’s hard to answer, especially since we’re reaching out to each other through the ethers, unable to look each other in the eyes in person. As I write, though, I imagine that we’re sitting side by side, me with my...
How do we hold unmet needs for long periods of time?
How do we hold unmet needs for long periods of time? Justice for Trump and his administration's behavior may never come. What do we do? A client sent me this question the other day. Like with so many questions right now, I don’t have easy answers. So, I’ve been trying...
What to do When You Can’t Find Hope
Earlier this week, a new client wrote this to me: “Between the world's uncertainty and how long I’ve felt trapped in this cycle of knowing I want a different career but not taking action, I feel pretty disconsolate. I find myself asking, ‘what’s even the point?’” I...
I want better answers
For so many years that I forgot how many, I wrote a new love letter every week, only taking time off for vacation or illness. But several months ago, while grappling with insomnia in the run-up to last year’s elections and an incredibly full schedule, I decided to cut...
The Hidden Cost of Making It Personal: Navigating Conflict in Movement Work
My Fitbit buzzed to congratulate me for exceeding my cardio goals—though I hadn't moved from my chair. My heart was racing during a meeting in which a small group of local leaders gathered to discuss our response to threats of immigrant raids in our area. Some of us...
3 Shifts to Let Go of Perfectionism
The other day, a client in my Career Clarity Group asked this question: What are the most effective ways for me to continue to work at letting go of perfectionism? She wrote: “Perfectionism really permeates every area of my life, from the utterly mundane—making sure I...
How to Discover Your Gifts, Strengths, and Skills
Often, when my career coaching clients start working with me, they tell me that one of the things they hope to receive from our work together is a clearer understanding of their strengths. And an easier time communicating their gifts to future employers and clients....
3 Career Coaching Questions to Ask Yourself
When I started career coaching over eleven years ago, and for many years after, I told my clients that my aim was to teach them how to do everything I did for them. After a while, though, I came to understand that humans need each other. The neuroscience of how we...
The Rescue Triangle: Do you get pulled into the vortex?
Do you feel sucked into an inescapable dynamic with a loved one (or with the world) in which you overgive, overdo, overhelp, and then end up pissed off and resentful about it? So many people who care deeply about the world and their loved ones often get pulled into...
How Good Boundaries Work
When many people realize that they need to get better at saying no. It’s because their boundaries have been too permeable, too porous. They take on roles and responsibilities that belong to other people. They sign up for more than fits realistically within the...
On Finding Equanimity in Hard Times
As I’ve read the news these past few weeks and we move toward the election, I’ve felt more fear and sadness and tension in my body. As I look out from my beloved home and neighborhood onto the mounting crises and tipping points we face together, I imagine you may have...
3 Steps to Checking Your Emotional Reactions When You’re Hurt
This week, a new client wrote me this question: How do I learn to check my emotional reactions when I'm super frustrated, hurt, etc.? I ramp up so quickly that it becomes a very physical reaction. My whole body gets rigid, including my brain, and I struggle to relax...
unconscious contracts that burn us out
When I was nineteen, I traveled to Colombia to learn about US foreign policy. I visited a church where the priest was killed while giving a sermon, traveled to subsistence farms that were fumigated as part of the US-funded War on Drug, saw a person who was recently...
Why It’s Hard to Ask For What You Need
This week, a new client wrote me this question—Why is it so hard for me to ask for what I want and need? Why do I let myself get so run down? Do you have a hard time asking for what you need? And does this struggle lead you to feel run down, exhausted, and...
What I’ve Recently Learned About Grief
For the past many months, I’ve woken up most mornings with a jolt of sad anxiety in my solar plexus—the area right below the center-bottom of my ribs. This area of the body is where the adrenal glands live and pump out cortisol, the primary hormone in the body’s...
Why it Can Be So Hard to Move Out of Our Comfort Zones
If you were ridiculed when trying something new in the past, it can feel vulnerable to try new things now. Sometimes, we need healing support to leave a frozen / stuck state and feel safe opening ourselves up to trying a new thing now. And, sometimes, all we need to...
If you made a mistake at work and keep having flashbacks of the moment, this might help a bit…
This week on social media, a friend shared this question: “Have you ever made a mistake in your work and internalized it to a point where you have flashbacks and makes you question your skills? How do you handle it? What makes it better?” Their question inspired me to...
a personal update and the gift of shoulder-to-shoulder-ness
Yesterday, I received an email from a teacher I admire (one of the only people I receive newsletters from—Carmen Spagnola). In it, she shares how she’s realized that she failed her child in some big ways during their senior year of high school and that’s been going...
How to Let Your Guard Down & Let Delight in
“I’m noticing myself holding back on getting excited about this possibility. How do I allow feelings like elation, joy, thrill, and excitement to come in? How do I let my guard down and give myself permission to really feel into this thing, while knowing that it might...
Priority Needs, Story-Shifting, The Outside View & Allies
On Wednesday, we began our exploration into the ten core elements of radical discernment! To read about skills one through four, click here. Before we go on, I invite you to take a moment to practice what you’ve been learning so far: Pause and notice your body. Offer...
Moments of Choice, Tracking Glimmers, Self-Compassion & Tuning In
Radical discernment is the name I’ve given to the body of skills and practices I’ve discovered over the past decade-plus to reliably help my clients (and myself) heal and prevent burnout, nourish joy, choose priorities, and show up effectively. Radical discernment is...
10 Steps for Making Powerful and Practical Commitments to Yourself
Do you set impossibly high standards around contribution and productivity but struggle to make commitments to yourself around rest, play, or wellbeing? As a result, do you often feel like you’re letting yourself down and struggle to trust yourself? If so, this is for...
The HALT(S) Method: How to Take Better Care of Yourself
These past few weeks, I’ve been looking for a new way to guide clients to prioritize sleep and exercise. For years, I talked about physical self-care through the lens of Minimum Requirements for Self-Care. But because fatphobic dominant culture socializes most of us...
Why I Still Have Doubts About Writing How-Tos for Burned Out Changemakers
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been putting together a do-it-yourself online course called the Radical Discernment Toolkit. Writing these past few weeks have reminded me how hard it is for me to sometimes write about burnout. Books are tidy things, and healing is...
Breaking From the Double-Binds of Burnout
I invite you to recall a moment when you felt really burned out. You might feel that way right now, or it may be a time from your past. How do you feel in your body when you think about burnout? Perhaps you feel drained, exhausted, depleted, tired, frustrated, or...
The Outside View: A Key Ingredient for Wise Decisions
Have you ever made an impulsive decision and later wished you’d gathered more information first? I know I have. Too often, we changemakers make quick decisions without pausing to consider the information we need first. Often, we invest lots of energy in pursuing a...
3 Micro-Practices for Unfreezing Your Nervous System
A new client of mine who is thinking about starting a consulting business wrote me an email this week asking the following question (I share it with her consent): “A former colleague reached out yesterday to ask me to help facilitate a staff retreat. I felt excited...
Four Basic Building Blocks of a Daily Discernment Practice
How to start meeting your needs In April, I started a new round of my Changemakers’ Mentorship program, and I challenged participants to commit to a fifteen-ish minute discernment pause each day. Last week, a participant in my mentorship program wrote me this...
An Ancient Map for Navigating Uncertainty
Fourteen years ago, I began my journey mentoring people through major life transitions when I trained as a Birthing From Within doula. At the time, I was in the midst of my own personal upheaval. In the previous years, my partner had been deported to Mexico, I moved...
How to Cultivate a Healing Relationship with Yourself
One day when my son, Kai, was six, he and his friend were playing with a balloon at a birthday party. Suddenly, Kai’s friend’s three-year-old sister, let’s call her Gabi, ran crying out of the room. A few minutes later, I stood up and went to the bedroom, where she...
On Discerning Between Avoidance & Distraction
Occasionally, a client shows up to a session with a guilty look on their face. They report that they didn’t engage with the self-awareness practices they’d committed to as many times as they’d planned, and they think they failed at their homework. In response, I ask...
A Primer in Attachment Strategies
If you ever find yourself scared, stuck, or struggling when you try to figure out what steps next—or to get yourself to take the steps that you know are good for you—I want to offer you some context for why you might struggle. In today’s love letter, I’m going to...