It happened again. I taught a class one evening this week, and it was a presentation I’ve been preparing for and looking forward to for quite a while. But two nights before the program, I had a dream in which the class was about to begin, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any of my notes or materials with me. In a moment of panic, I briefly considered driving home and returning with everything I needed, but I didn’t have enough time to [...]
If you were asked to list some of the different areas of your life, what categories would you use to describe them? They could be as basic as “personal” and “professional.” Or you might include family, friends, and faith. Leisure activities, hobbies, or travel. Or health and well-being – physically, financially, mentally, or spiritually. There’s really no end to the number or names of categories you can choose to catalog the events and activities of your life. This exercise is something I often do with [...]
“Anything can happen if you let it.” There are a few different ways you could interpret that. One is as a cautionary warning, a reminder to set firm limits and boundaries, and to stay disciplined, focused, and attentive. Because if you’re not, if you loosen up a bit or get a little careless, you never know what awful things might occur. I prefer to take it in the other direction, however – the one in which you wander and explore. Having an idea, certainly, of [...]
Imagine that you buy a lottery ticket every week, and that one day you hit the jackpot and win fifty million dollars. But you never cash in, and the windfall doesn’t do you any good. Why? Because you never check the numbers, you just keep on buying tickets. I read a blog post recently that used a slight variation of this as an analogy, and the first thing I did was shake my head, chuckling and rolling my eyes at the thought. Who would do [...]
Three things. There seems to be something magical about three things – at least when it comes to getting things done. Like many people, I make daily To-Do lists, and I have a love/hate relationship with them. They help me plan and organize my day, but they often seem like an albatross around my neck, weighing me down with too much to do, not enough time to do it, and the guilt and frustration of not getting everything on my list done by the end [...]
I did a radio interview last week that focused on the coaching I do to help people achieve their dreams. After we finished recording, the host and I had a conversation that started out about dreams and goals, then progressed to the subject of nighttime dreams, and finally to recurring nightmares. Like when you’re running away from something and you keep falling down, or you’re making an emergency phone call and you keep misdialing. I mentioned that when I have upcoming speaking events, I often [...]
One of the things I find most rewarding and gratifying about writing is when someone tells me that something I’ve written has helped them or inspired them or changed their life in some way. It’s also rewarding when something I write leads to a discovery of my own that helps me or inspires me or changes my life in some way. It happened again a few days ago, as I was journaling about different projects I’m working on that seem to be going nowhere at [...]
What is your dream? That was the theme of the meeting and of my presentation at GROW last week. GROW stands for “God Renewing Our Women,” and it’s a new women’s ministry that was started at my parish last September. Because of my background and experience in helping people achieve their dreams, I was asked last August if I could do a presentation on the subject. I still remember the day I received the request. It came in an email I received while I was [...]
A few months ago, I attended a speech contest in which one of the contestants spoke about dreaming small. She said early on that that’s what her parents always encouraged her to do. At first I thought it was a set-up for a punch line, or that she’d be talking about how she had to overcome a “think small” mindset in order to dream big and achieve great things. And since I teach, preach, and coach people about dreaming big and achieving their dreams, this [...]