These Shoes Are Too Tight!

These Shoes Are Too Tight!

Sometimes when we are at the window looking into someone else’s life, it’s easy to pass judgment based on what we see at that particular moment. I’ve always been told to believe none of what I hear and only half of what I see and frankly, I think maybe half is too much. I say this because for a long time, I was the person standing at the window looking in-passing judgment on other people simply because they looked or behaved a certain way.

At the age of nineteen, I was carefree and single. I had been in one relationship that was basically puppy love. I was happy go lucky, and very self-righteous. I couldn’t understand how a young lady could find herself pregnant without a husband and I was very vocal about it. Guess what happened to my self-righteous behind? In a span of 5 years I fell in love two times and became a single mother not one or two times, but three. And to add insult to injury, my children were fathered by different men.

Taking a short journey in someone else’s shoes is one of the most surefire ways for me to stay balanced and honest. I’ve stepped into a dancer’s shoes when I was tempted to judge her –not knowing she had children to feed. I’ve stepped into a disabled person’s shoes more often than I can remember [Read more]

Twenty-Eight Hours

Have you ever spent twenty-eight hours with somebody and it felt like one minute? Twenty-eight hours in which the conversation never ceased to stop? Twenty-eight hours in which the excitement kept building and where the connection kept getting stronger as each minute passed?

Life is a gift. It’s time all of you started accepting the gift of life, because when you do what will happen is that you will actually start to meet people who are going to blow you away. When you’re open and you’re being honest, that is when you’re going to find someone who is also open and honest and then life is just going to seem to mesh.

You will be on the same page with this person about everything you think and feel. It’s amazing when you spend twenty-eight hours with somebody, and when they leave all you want to do is start another twenty-eight hours with them all over again. You don’t want that person to leave. You just want them to stay [Read more]

One Real Change Beats a Thousand Daydreams

Successful change requires taking action, handling the problem in a different way than you have in the past. Thinking about it, wishing, daydreaming, repeating old behaviors, none of that works. Only an actual change in your behavior will move you in a new direction to fix the problem.

But if you’re like most of us, much as you may want to change, when the time comes to actually do things differently, negative feelings get in the way. Everybody wants to feel ready to change before they get going. “As soon as I lose 20 pounds, I’ll try to find a guy.” “When I don’t feel so depressed, I’m definitely going to look for a job.

”Or sometimes when people’s feelings resist change, they decide change is totally impossible for them. “It’s my nature to be shy. There’s nothing I can do about that.” “It would make me too nervous to give up cigarettes.” “AA can’t help. My father was alcoholic and so was my grandfather. It’s genetic.

”Wanting to feel ready to change before taking action is exactly backwards. As a clinical psychologist who has spent many years helping people successfully change, I know that if you wait to feel ready to make your move, you could wait forever. But the good news is, with the right roadmap, it’s perfectly possible to move yourself forward without feeling ready. We don’t like to go against our own feelings, but in the situations I’m talking about, it isn’t dangerous to do so, just uncomfortable. And there are techniques you can learn to handle that discomfort and move forward anyway [Read more]

Will Shopping Save the Economy

Shopping is our real national pastime, but it comes, as he warns, at a price that is not advertised in the malls:

The idyllic wonderland of consumer credit too often belies a reality of unknown sacrifices and enduring debt… the credit card industry is playing a crucial role in transforming American consumer attitudes. The promotion of “immediate gratification” ruptures the cognitive connection between earnings/saving and credit/debt that has traditionally shaped consumer behavior. It is this “cognitive disconnect,” with its siren song “Buy, buy, buy. It could be free, free, free” that constitutes the cornerstone of the Credit Card Nation.

And so it is not surprising that holidays are used or created as national events to spur consumption. They have become rituals of shopping. None is as important as the first day after Thanksgiving, itself a day set aside for overindulgence at the kitchen table. That day now has a name, Black Friday, so called because it is supposed to be the day when the whole retail sector goes into the black financially. (This may not have been such a wise use of language since the Wall Street crash of l929, ushering in the Great Depression, started on a “Black Thursday.”) [Read more]