One weekend at the local splash pad, I had a conversation with a friend and fellow mom while our kids played. When I asked about her job as an administrator at a private school, she told me that she's actually had trouble giving scholarship money away. When she offered funds to a mom with multiple children enrolled, the mom thanked her, but insisted that she couldn’t receive the funding. Surely someone else needed it more. Surely she ought to self-sacrifice. My friend sighed. She didn’t say as much, but I could sense the subtext in her words: This family needed...
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About 20 years ago this Christmas, I pretended I was fine when really I was furious. The guy I call Harley in my first book, You Don't Owe Anyone - the co-worker who begged me to go out with him - had abruptly broken things off months ago. He told me he was sorry, but he still had feelings for his ex. This was hard to hear, and harder to recover from. Since we worked together, we still saw each other every day. And we had the same friend group, so we spent time together outside of work, too. This...
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Whenever readers or coaching clients ask me about how they ought to live, I recall these lines from David Seabury's The Art of Selfishness: "No one but yourself knows what you ought to do. You discover it when you no longer fear condemnation .... The artist, Whistler, once remarked that a great painting was made by knowing what not to put upon a canvas. Successful living depends upon knowing what not to do." if you're asking, "What should I do with my life?" -- the only person who can give you a true answer is you. You are the expert...
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After years of verbal and emotional abuse - after years of constant criticism and control - this was her secret truth: "I'm waiting for my husband to die so I can begin to live." That's what a reader wrote to me years ago. It was a difficult truth, and it was brave of her to tell it. With her permission, I'm quoting it here as an excellent one-sentence emotional abuse test. Have you secretly wished that someone who was hurting you would die, so you could be free? If so, you've probably experienced emotional abuse, and perhaps physical abuse as...
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Once upon a time, a beloved friend had a pattern that drove me crazy. She'd enter into high-stress situations: working a demanding job while planning a wedding, coordinating a cross-country move with small children, or traveling with her family in a space with zero privacy. She'd confess to feeling overwhelmed and unhappy. Then she'd say, "It's OK, because once [this current insanity] is over, I'll be so happy!" Alas, that never turned out to be true. She'd dive right into the next high-stress scenario, repeating the same pattern and delaying her happiness to the future. The psychological term for this...
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Recently a dear friend sent me a sticker with a picture of a pelican on it, surrounded by these words: "Just because you PELiCAN, doesn't mean you PELiSHOULD." It made me laugh and it hit me hard, all at the same time. My friend has known me for decades; she's seen me fall into the trap of thinking that just because I'm capable of doing something, that means that I must do it. This is the snare of the insecure overachiever. What is an insecure overachiever? An insecure overachiever is someone who's accomplished and competent on the outside, all while...
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Before I had two kids in two years, I thought I had my time pretty well dialed in. Before they arrived, I would have thought, "Sure, take back your time, yup, it's great, been there, done that." After the kids came, I saw how far I had left to go. The truth is that before I became a parent, I was pushing and forcing and overworking a lot. I used to have up to 75 calls a month on my calendar! Now, in a sense, this was a privileged problem to have, being self-employed and making six figures doing work...
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Pretty much every coaching client I've ever worked with brings up the "lazy" judgment. They'll make comments such as, "I was so lazy, I just did nothing all day." Or, "What's wrong with me today, why am I so lazy? Why can't I just get things done?!" Sometimes they'll even ask me to make the judgment for them: "Caroline, am I lazy? What do YOU think?" Personally, I subscribe to the Devon Price theory of laziness, which is simple and counter-cultural: laziness does not exist. At least, not in the sense that we think it does. We talk about laziness...
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The very first challenge in my book, You Don't Owe Anyone, is to do nothing for 15 minutes. To stop all effort and simply be still, regardless of what your busy mind tells you that you "must" do instead. It's hard, yes, but it's also the cure for much of what ails us. Doing nothing is a powerful antidote for the perfectionist poison we've been swallowing since childhood. (Plus, as Dr. Martha Beck has taught me, doing nothing is a profound act of resistance in a culture that expects us to live as machines, not human animals.) So nowadays when...
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Can I get real with you right now? I did something crazy the day I had my first child. After the epic labor and birth of our baby - which I have compared to being in a street fight with my own body - I sustained a major injury and needed immediate surgery. Afterward, the nurse offered me a Motrin. The anesthetic was going to wear off, and it wasn't going to feel good. Without hesitating, I said, "No thanks!" Talk about limiting beliefs examples! On one level I knew that I was doing something foolish, yet on another level, refusing...
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