Take your time before time takes you

On Saturday, I accompanied my parents as they planted fresh geraniums at the graves of relatives. As I walked among the headstones, some of which were over 200 years old, I contemplated Americans’ complicated relationship with death. Living people spend a lot of time, money, energy, and emotion doing things for dead people. Expensive parties. … Read more

Join me at the Caregiver Café

Being a caregiver is a high-stakes job. If you don’t give it everything you’ve got, you might lose the one you’re caring for. If you do give it everything you’ve got, you might lose yourself. The statistics prove that. Allison Wyman and I talked about the solutions to that recently in her podcast, The Cozy … Read more

To achieve results, let go of the outcome

Most executives would say that if you want to achieve results, you have to have a relentless, unyielding commitment to the outcome you want. Seems reasonable, right? Focus on your goal if you want to achieve your goal. But actually, the opposite is true. Focusing too much on the outcome is what causes teams to … Read more

Avoid catastrophizing and magical thinking with these two questions

People think of catastrophizing and magical thinking as letting your imagination take control of your decision-making, either out of fear (catastrophizing) or toxic positivity (magical thinking). Often, however, catastrophizing and magical thinking stem from a failure of imagination. What gets people spiraling into irrational decision-making is an inability to think more broadly about some fact … Read more

The cost of caring

Being a caring person can have its downsides. One cost of caring is compassion fatigue, and it can hit anyone—even those trained to avoid it. I and two of my co-authors of RELIT: How to Rekindle Yourself in the Darkness of Compassion Fatigue appeared on the In Sickness podcast recently. Joining me in the interview … Read more