The Invitation and the Ask
Why giving feels safe, receiving feels like debt, and how to offer your work without shame “I hate asking people for money,” she said through clenched teeth. “In fact, I hate money altogether. Why can’t we just have a society that operates without money?” This was a real conversation I had recently. She’s brilliant at…
You Don’t Have One Problem, You Have FIVE
What looks like one problem is often hiding something deeper. Six weeks into his promotion, his boss scheduled a one-on-one. He walked in expecting to talk strategy. He walked out with a very different message. His team had been talking. They said he’d changed since the promotion. They didn’t trust his leadership. Some were questioning…
Sydney! I can only change myself. How is this going to change my life??
How changing your life changes everyone else around you too “I can only change me.” I hear it almost every week. Sometimes it is accompanied by a shrug, other times it is said with a sigh of relief. Sometimes, I suspect it is said as a quiet reason not to begin. “Better known as resistance,”…
The Losses Nobody Brings Casseroles For
On grief, change, and the difference between feeling it and falling back When someone dies, people know what to do. They bring casseroles. They send cards. They show up in dark clothes and hold your hand and say they’re so sorry. Nobody brings a casserole when the diagnosis comes back. Or when your youngest loads…
Maybe You’re Not Afraid Of Change
You may be afraid of becoming the person who chose it She wanted out of the relationship. It was toxic. And I don’t mean toxic in a psychobabble, join-the-“toxic marriage” club kind of way. This relationship fit the definition. Constant fighting, competing, manipulation, accusations…all of it. But she didn’t leave. For the longest time, I…
How To Find The Exit
On getting unstuck, changing the question, and seeing what you couldn’t see before ]Last week I wrote about what happens when we feel trapped. Our field of vision narrows. We search harder. We become exhausted. Eventually the world can start looking like a collection of increasingly impossible choices. I promised I would write about how…
Feeling Trapped, Losing Options
On narrowed perception, impossible choices, and the exits we stop seeing Something interesting happens when we feel trapped. It starts with our perception. It narrows while our attention contracts. We become hyperfocused on the threat and the need to find a way out. This makes complete sense if you are in the woods and encounter…
The Spirituality of Not Knowing
On suffering, certainty, and the things I no longer need to explain There is an enormous amount of spirituality organized around the following clichés: Everything happens for a reason. Trust the universe. What’s meant for you won’t miss you. Your thoughts create your reality. There are no accidents. You chose this before you arrived. Those…
The High Cost of Refusing to Quit
There is a word I refused to acknowledge for the first 50 years of my life. That word was “unsustainable.” I refused to acknowledge—ever—that something couldn’t continue. That something needed to end. I was resilient, tenacious, driven, ambitious and more. What I wasn’t open to was the possibility of failure. This is not something I’m writing…
You Don’t Have to Choose Change
The strange freedom in knowing that change is coming anyway I had two conversations this week that were remarkably similar. One was with a physician. The other was with a founder whose company was in crisis. Different lives, different circumstances, but the same problem. Both felt trapped. They knew something needed to change, but every…
Work Self vs. Caregiver Self
The disorienting shift from professional mastery to caring for an aging parent You can run a casualty drill at the hospital, restructure a division, create a performance improvement plan, or sit across from a board and defend a number down to the decimal. You can walk into a crisis meeting and be the calmest person…
Burnout Is Decreasing. So Why Do So Many Physicians Want Out?
Maybe we’re measuring the wrong problem Yet another weekend spent staring at the screen: refilling prescriptions, approving prior-authorization requests, making specialist referrals, charting, reviewing faxes (aren’t those supposed to be gone by now?), and finally spending some time reviewing test results. By Sunday evening, she felt like she’d worked an entire week. Only to arrive…
From The Outside-In
What almost getting hacked taught me about AI, human experience, and what it means to understand I am fairly new to Substack and love it! I have naively scrolled and typed and restacked and made notes. I’ve been happy. Then one day I came across someone, Derek Hughes, an expert who helps with writing. And,…
So I Changed the Situation. Why Is the Pattern Still Here?
Why awareness alone isn’t enough. So I Changed the Situation. Why Is the Pattern Still Here? People often contact me with issues around their relationship with money. Maybe they were raised in an environment of scarcity and don’t quite know how to develop a different relationship to earning, spending, saving, or simply having enough. They’ve…
When the Truth Becomes Too Expensive
The hidden cost of maintaining a reality that is no longer true What happens to us when the truth, the unvarnished truth, becomes socially, professionally, relationally, or psychologically too expensive to tell? Justin was out on the golf course with some friends as one of his buddies shared the latest and greatest achievement his wife…
The Impossible Life You’re Trying To Lead
When every choice feels like the wrong one Someone shared a quote with me the other day: “Never give up your right to do the next right thing, for this is how we find home.” It sounds lovely, right? But I think many of us abandoned the idea of simply finding our way home a long time ago.…
The Return
And why getting back to normal may be the wrong goal I took some time away this week to honor an important anniversary. And this morning, I found myself thinking about how we return to “normal.” To our sense of self and the rhythm of those around us. To our routines. After grief, illness, disappointment,…
The New Double Bind of AI: “Use It. But Not Like That.”
I’m noticing something interesting with the professionals I work with. There are ongoing anxieties about using AI, but those anxieties are shifting. The anxiety is no longer only about whether we should use AI. It’s increasingly about whether we’re using it correctly, acceptably, transparently, legally, ethically, and according to rules that are still being written. You’ve heard…
Nobody’s Marriage Begins With Divorce
Every Life Cycle Has a Beginning Leah contacted me because she was concerned about her marriage. She couldn’t easily pinpoint what had happened, but she was filled with resentment, and she didn’t like the feeling. There was no explosive argument, no affair, no single moment she could point to and say, “This is where it went…
The Dog Days of Disappointment
What my dogs taught me about resentment I’m a dog person and have been all my life. One of the things my dogs have taught me is that they carry expectations just like we do. Grab a leash or mention a walk and my dogs will jump, wag, yip in the happy expectation that we…
The Always/Never Trap
What our strongest words are trying to tell us We weren’t five minutes into the call before I heard about the business partner who never shows up for meetings, always avoids conflict, and who everybody distrusts. I hear this almost every day. I call it the Always/Never Trap. All-or-nothing language creates contrast. It widens distance. It tells the nervous system that the…
The Hidden Grief Of Becoming Someone Else
A few months ago, I wrote about the thousand tiny goodbyes we never acknowledge: the client who leaves, the business that changes, the future that quietly disappears. I wrote about how important it is to pause long enough to acknowledge those losses before rushing into the next pivot. More recently, I’ve been writing about the…
The Life That Survival Built
I was raised to be an overfunctioner. Rural settings, constant moves, and instability created a parentified child who grew into a hyper-empathetic, overfunctioning adult. In every relationship and every career setting, I showed up as the door prize…the unexpected dynamo who quietly won everyone over. “I just want to be a receptionist,” a partner teased me…
The Difference Was Never the Problem
I just had a conversation with a client that highlighted something I see often. A relationship that was once energized by differences had become contentious over those very same contrasts. The qualities that once created attraction, balance, and possibility had slowly become the source of frustration, resentment, and conflict. It left me thinking about how…
When The Costume Changes, But The Operating System Doesn’t
Congruent Reinvention The personal development world has turned reinvention into another performance. Become your highest self, your future self, your 2.0 self, your most successful self. We are obsessed with optimizing, scaling, upgrading, reinventing. But most people reinvent from the very survival patterns they are unhappy with and trying to escape. They simply reinvent their…
Best Self or True Self
We spend a great deal of our lives trying to become stronger, smarter, more disciplined, more successful, more resilient. Becoming our best self becomes the obsession. But after a couple of decades working in the trenches, I’ve begun to wonder if that’s the wrong pursuit. Perhaps the deeper invitation is not to become our best…
The Agreements You Never Made But Keep Showing Up For
The Unspoken Agreements That Are Running Your Life You are living, right now, inside an agreement you may not even acknowledge exists. It’s not a real contract. It’s not a conversation you remember having. It’s an agreement that was never spoken out loud, never negotiated, never signed and yet it is shaping how you show…
The Doctor Who Disappeared
He’d been working for hours and it was only 6 a.m. Reviewing messages, going to do rounds, checking the schedule, returning a couple of calls. He felt the exhaustion creeping in already and there were hours to go…There is a version of tired, all too familiar, that has nothing to do with hours worked. It’s…
The Intimacy We Forgot to Scale
You wanted to be seen. You wanted eyes on your craft, your creation, your expertise, the uniqueness of your concept. Everyone does. It’s the first hunger, the one that gets you to sketch out your idea on a napkin, share your original idea with peers, expand into public introductions/demonstrations, then proceed to launch. Many of…
The Third Job Nobody Pays You For
You clocked out but nobody told your nervous system. The last team member has left the chat. The last patient has been seen. The final decision made. The team has gone home. By every external measure the workday is over. And then you walk through your front door into the night job that is harder…