We are on vacation in Southern California recently with a few of our kids and grandbabies.  It’s a trip we’ve been so looking forward to since we booked it months ago, and so far we are having a great time! 

But knowing that our experience is going to be 50% good and 50% bad, helps me keep a good perspective and roll through the bumps with much more calm.

In life, so many of us have the expectation that we should just be happy all of the time.  That if we can just choose the right thoughts, things should always be perfect.

We should always be madly in love with our spouse, we should always be having fun and feeling amazing.  But here’s the truth, in order to experience the full scope of human emotion, life is supposed to be 50/50.

Consider this, if we spent 100% of our lives in positive emotion, everyone would be happy, thin, lottery winners… and we wouldn’t even know we were happy. 

There would be no contrast.

We...

This is something I’ve been doing a lot of coaching on lately, so I thought I’d share.

Our opinions really matter to us.  Most of us feel very strongly about a lot of things, and it makes us feel bad when others don’t agree with us.

But wait a minute… does IT make us feel bad?  Or is it what we make it mean, that makes us feel bad?

When you are arguing with your spouse (or anyone else for that matter), do you find yourself digging in?  Do you feel the need to defend your position? Do you make being wrong a character flaw?

Consider this, -perhaps you are both right? He sees a lantern and you see flowers. Both are true and correct. What if you could just get curious about why he sees the lantern?

Was the way your family raised you best? 

Did you celebrate holidays in all the right ways, and his family just didn’t?

Do you have the right ideas about how to raise the kids, load the dishwasher, plan a vacation or install the toilet paper...

When I was fourteen years old, our family was making a move from Arizona to Utah.  My dad was driving the big old moving truck and my mom drove our family van, which meant that my brother Eric, who had recently turned 16, needed to drive one of our cars.

He and his friend and our Collie, Trina, were in the car ahead of us on a two lane highway.  I was sitting in the passenger seat of the van, and to our horror, we watched as my brother’s car drifted into the oncoming lane, barely missing a large semi truck, and then off the other side of the road and rolled several times.

I remember my mom screaming and honking the horn, but was powerless to help. 

We pulled over as quickly as we could and then I remember running as fast as I could to get to the car… and then realizing that I might see something horrific,  and slowing down, not sure what to do! 

The car was resting on its roof, and miraculously, we watched as both of them crawled out of the...