When one year is ending and a new one is about to begin, most people feel full of optimism and hope. They may reflect back on all the good things that happened to them in the previous 365 days or they may feel motivated to set new year's resolutions and actually stick to them for the 365 days that are about to follow. It's a time of change and transition as we shift years and in this case, shift decades. 

But what if your year...sucked? What if it was such a bad year that thinking ahead to the new year to come doesn't make you feel anything except hopeless and down? What if you're really struggling to find something to look forward to, let alone something to make a resolution about? What then? 

I'll be honest: 2019 was one of the best years of my life. I got married. I made big strides forward in my business. I had a wonderful year. So why am I writing a blog about 2019 being awful? Well, because I kno ...

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As human beings, we are designed to tell stories. It's how we make sense of the world. Stories teach us lessons. Stories entertain us. Stories educate us. Stories are incredibly important and without them, we would lose a big part of what makes us human. Stories are beautiful. I am not talking in this blog about the kinds of stories we see in books or hear while we sit around a campfire. I'm talking about the story of our life that we are often told to "write" from a young age. This is the kind of story we try desperately to write and it can do more harm than good. 

From a young age, children are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" It is considered healthy to have goals and aspirations; and for the most part, it is. Without even realizing it, we are given messages from our families and from society at large for what our life story is supposed to look like. What career we're supposed to have. How we're supposed to look as ...

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Inspired by Halloween, I started thinking about how so often we "dress up" or conceal our true selves in our relationship and our lives. It's all too easy to "put on a mask", so to speak, instead of being authentic and vulnerable with our partner and ourselves. Typically, we learn to wear these masks early in life and they're essential to helping us survive different situations, such as unhealthy family dynamics, school, etc. Eventually, we can lose awareness of the mask that we're wearing and put it on without being consciously aware of what we're hiding. I will be talking about just a few of the common masks that I see people wear (myself included at times). There are many more than just these few examples, which means you may wear a mask that looks very different from these. Consider which masks you've been wearing: 

The Peacekeeper 
If you've been wearing the mask of the peacekeeper, you m ...

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