Growing up, my mother continually re-inforced that I could be  anything I wanted to be.  Absolutely anything.  Armed with this certainty that only parents know how to infuse, and the natural defiance many first-borns tend to develop, I happily experimented  in the years preceding university, searching for my “calling”.
Safe in the knowledge that I could be anything, I confidently offered up my opinions to anyone who would listen and aspired to solve the world’s biggest and most complex problems.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was slowly …

I recently wrote about listening, really listening.  In conquering that difficult skill myself, I was amazed at how much I was missing, how much I was really not “getting”, and especially about people I thought I knew well.
With the know-it-all judgemental filter off, not only did I get to discover some wonderfully quirky aspects of friends and co-workers, I learned new ways of having fun, new reasons to laugh and new ways to care.
Listening and staying in the moment, I discovered a new game: catching them in the act of …

Much of how we behave is obviously influenced by what we think of ourselves.  Not so much in terms of our skills, likes or dislikes, but more like how we see ourselves.  As our own most critical judge, we label and categorize ourselves even as we proclaim how wrong it is to stereotype people.
“I’m not really an exercise person”, we might say, or “I have two left feet”, or in my case, “I kill all plants I come into contact with”.  Once we have labelled ourselves, it is becomes extremely …