I thought I was about to burst out crying, but then I sneezed. Yep, I just confused the need to sneeze with feelings of overwhelming grief. This quarantine thing is weird. “Unprecedented” (award for best overused word of the pandemic!) Intense, bizarre, just… weird. It’s a jumble of polar opposites, and this is certainly true for working parents. Whereas before we did two full-time jobs (parenting plus our paid career) in two separate shifts, we now do them simultaneously. Despite this intense double job, the pace of daily life has slowed down considerable for most. Now we sleep in (at least more than before), we wear stretchy pants all day…

Folks around the world are stuck at home for the next two to six weeks or longer. Many of us are going stir-crazy, our kids are driving us bonkers and we are spending far too much time reading memes and obsessing over the latest news updates. When faced with a tremendous external challenge (and a pandemic rates high up there), the idea that we can shape our own reality with our mindset is not to be underestimated. You cannot control a virus smaller than the eye can see that has invaded the lives of 7 billion people around the globe. You can control your own mentality and thought patterns. I…

The other night my dear cousin was reading my blog for the first time and sending me text after text of heartfelt praise. How do you find the time for this? I feel proud to be related to you. As her texts popped up on my phone, I was wasting away the precious hours of the night watching old YouTube clips of AGT and X Factor, for no apparent reason other than I love listening to talented young people sing. As the loveliest of comments flooded the top of my screen, I felt appreciative and unworthy at the same time. I’m nothing special. I’m just sitting here watching hours of…

I don’t know how I was so fortunate as to stumble into the personal development world. Yesterday I thought to myself, how would my life look different today if I hadn’t? I think one of the reasons some people are turned off by personal development is that they find it, for lack of a better description, cheesy. Surely most everyone wants to improve as a person, achieve and have a better quality of life. But we live in a society that beats cynicism into us from the time we are children. Think about it. When you were a young child, the caring adults in your life – parents, teachers –…

The best way to set yourself up for success in the new year is to start with new goals and habits in the months prior to January. Most people will do the opposite. They let everything slide in November and December – exercise, eating right, business goals, etc. – thinking it will be easier to just start fresh in the new year. The poorer the habits you form at the end of the year, however, the harder it will be to get back on track later. Instead, take advantage of the time you have left this year to propel yourself into the new year with energy and confidence. I prefer…

Some days as moms, as humans, we just feel down. We all go through rough weeks, days, moments. Though I’m an overall upbeat and optimistic person, it’s far too easy for small challenges to pull me down into the “dark place.” Something I’m slowly getting better at is being able to pull myself out of my funk quicker and more automatically. Listening to, watching or reading something uplifting or meaningful is one strategy that helps me get back on track. The catch-22 is that when we’re in that dark space, we often lose our desire to want to feel better, a very strange and sick phenomenon of human nature. I…

I’ve been thinking about this concept of mediocrity. Been mulling over it for the past year. It was almost a year ago that I found out we were expecting our second child. My son was two and a half at the time. I’d been running a financial services business “part-time” in addition to teaching middle-school Spanish full-time, with a one-plus hour commute each way. After quite inconsistently working to build my business over the previous five years, I knew exactly the time commitment and mental energy it was going to take me to reach any level of success, even on a part-time basis. Just about the moment I found out…