Doc’s Thoughts Given my interest in growth and change, the New Year offers a natural segue for reflection. This year, my thinking about change centers on curiosity and experimentation. When we notice a gap between where we are and where we would like to be, the problem is rarely a lack of information. We generally know what to do. The difficulty lies in closing that gap—making time, setting priorities, finding the courage to face our fears, or even naming them in the first place. One way to...
8 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts This time of year, injunctions to be joyful are everywhere—on cards, lawn decorations, storefronts, and signs. We seem to treat joy as a switch to turn on– we were not so into it in October, and we’ll be over it come January, but now ‘tis the season. And yet joy often feels elusive. The irony is that this elusiveness is not a failure of effort, planning, or even intention. It is a consequence of how we relate to joy in the first place. The problem is not that we want joy, but...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Last week I wrote about love. Another sentiment that reliably surfaces this time of year is peace. Like love, peace is a word we use often and define loosely, carrying weight but not precision. As I’ve written about before, how we define peace depends heavily on how we define the opposite of peace. If we define the opposite of peace as war, then peace becomes the absence of armed conflict. If we define peace as the opposite as torment, it becomes tranquility, quiet, or rest....
22 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts We talk about love a lot during the holidays. We think about it in the context of our families—our parents, siblings, children, and extended relatives. We think about love in the context of our shared humanity, and the connection between love and generosity. For many, love is one of the key emotions of the season. We often think of it as a positive force, and something to cultivate (it is both!), but we rarely stop to consider what love actually is. For something so widely...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts We often think about the importance of having—and being—a positive role model. We make choices we hope our children will emulate and try to surround ourselves with people we admire. Positive influences matter for all kinds of reasons, and many of us put real effort into cultivating them. But not everyone in our life is a great model. Family members, coworkers, neighbors, people in our social circle—there are always a few whose choices and patterns make us think, yikes, not...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Gratitude is a funny thing. It’s a terribly helpful corrective to our human tendency to see problems. It has the ability to get us out of a difficult headspace, or shift our perspective when we are feeling like nothing is going our way. Gratitude can move our attention from what’s missing to what’s present, interrupt negative thought spirals and help us recover faster from setbacks. It...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When I sat down to write this, I was struggling with ideas. I stared at the blinking cursor, feeling it mock me from the screen, and wracked my brain for something—anything—to hold onto. Several half-formed ideas raced around my head, but grabbing one, and actually putting it down into words, proved elusive. Feeling progressively more stuck, I got up, put on my coat, and took a walk....
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts This past weekend, I overheard a neighbor talking about getting her groceries delivered. “I’ve already put in my Costco and Target order.” As a way of getting food to the house, this is highly efficient. It might take half an hour to put the order together, but it's much less time than driving to the stores and picking everything up. Later that day, my wife and I walked to a local...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Most of the problems we face in our life do not have simple solutions. For someone struggling with weight, for example, there are likely a multitude of challenges: lack of time to prepare food, lack of time/desire/ability to exercise, stress from work/home life/kids, complicated feelings about food, challenges about who will eat certain foods within the household, grocery shopping,...
2 months ago • 4 min read