It can be easy to assume that you don’t practice leadership and cannot be influential if you’re not the formal ”leader” of some kind of project, community, or organization. However, I want to offer a different perspective…

Are you familiar with the shame spiral? Something triggers our initial feeling that we are in some way ‘wrong’. We feel small and exposed, and we turn our focus inward…

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘empowerment’ quite a bit lately. Am I empowered? Do I empower others? Intuitively the answer felt like a ‘Yes’, but I wasn’t sure so I looked deeper…

Do you ever wonder how your grandchildren will relate to you? Or what you’ll one day relate to them about the days of your youth? The year my own grandmother was born, women had not yet been declared persons in Canada. There was no such thing as antibiotics or television, and if you wanted a drink, you had to get it from the black market.

In South Africa, there is a word - Ubuntu - that has been translated as, “I am because we are.” It means, we are all connected - to the extent that we cannot be fully ourselves without the community…

Do you ever stop to consider how your own life story is being revealed to you this very moment? If your like most of us, this is probably not a thought you have very often. Just like the way we read literal stories in books, it is usually not the individual words and sentences that we pay attention to…

In this post, we’ll explore the idea of “developing an emotional vocabulary,” and we’ll use anger as an example. A good way to to start to develop this ability to to get in the habit of recognizing our emotions’ different intensity levels…

Have you ever heard the expression “the hair of the dog that bit you”? While it originated from an old wives’ tale that you could heal a dog bite by placing some of the dog’s hair in your wound, this strange concept is now commonly used to refer to the “hangover cure” of having another drink in the morning. Not surprisingly, neither of these remedies have actually received any scientific backing - but this does not discount the deeper and more powerful truth behind the idea of paradoxical cures…

Developed by Harvard Professor Chris Argyris, the Ladder of Inference is an analogy for the way we typically process information - leading all the way from observations to a decision or action. We can use the Ladder of Inference to improve our relational skills, by reflecting on and clarifying the source of our confusion, misunderstandings, or self-sabotaging beliefs…

How many kinds of insurance are you paying for right now? Car insurance? Home insurance? Health or dental insurance? There’s another kind of insurance we can pay into - without paying it to somebody else. That insurance is our emotional, mental, and spiritual resilience…

A core foundation of maintaining an authentic and meaningful connection is the ability to have difficult conversations. Of course, it’s easy to avoid communication when there’s tension or conflict. We may be afraid of the uncomfortable things we’ll have to feel, or even the potential loss of that connection…

In the realm of Authentic Relating (AR) and relational empowerment, we talk a lot about vulnerability. Yet at some point or another, you’ve probably experienced a sense of vulnerability overkill. So, how do we practice “safe” vulnerability, and avoid the vulnerability hangover?

Are you tired of hearing ‘How are you?’ - or other shallow greetings that can lead to boring and superficial conversations? If you’re wanting to have deeper and more authentic connections, one way to start is to practice different opening questions…

We all know the feeling of taking things personally. Someone says or does something upsetting, and instead of seeing the full picture, we instantly interpret their actions to be ‘about’ us or ‘because of’ us…