Sometimes we’re scared to pursue our goals and dreams. Sometimes we even have the thought that maybe its selfish or self-centered to pursue what we want. Sometimes we can think that pursuing our own wants and desire is indulgent and that with all the trouble in the world, maybe what we want isn’t important and we shouldn’t be concentrating on it. But I want you to notice something…everything you love and appreciate in your life is there because someone followed their own desires. In today’s podc...
Nov 24, 2022•29 min•Ep. 186
You don’t have to love everybody. But you can if you want to. We are about to enter the time of year when we have lots of get-togethers with our families and friends. That’s a lot of human brains (who all think differently!) sharing the same space and gathering around the same table. That also means there are also going to be plenty of opportunities to have all kinds of thoughts and feelings about these other humans. Your brain doesn’t want to choose love. Your brain is only interested in what’s...
Nov 17, 2022•34 min•Ep. 185
All of us want to be happier. But that’s actually part of the problem. Our constant desire for happiness, pleasure, ease, and contentment and our easy-access to dopamine-triggering activities and substances is causing most of us to end up in a dopamine deficit. This means that the more we pursue pleasure, the more pain we end up feeling. In today’s podcast episode, I explain how your brain’s dopamine response works and how our pleasure is directly related to our pain. I’ll show you how trying to...
Nov 10, 2022•38 min•Ep. 184
We’ve all had the experience of deciding to change something in our lives or work on a new goal or pursue a dream, only to find ourselves “not wanting to do it” when the time comes to actually get to work and do it. Our brains are really good at thinking “I don’t want to,” and even though it doesn’t seem like a very important or significant thought, it is probably the thought that prevents most of our goals and dreams from happening. In this week’s podcast episode, I’m explaining why “I don’t wa...
Nov 03, 2022•30 min•Ep. 183
It’s easy to think that we should always be happy and, given the relative and ease and comfort of our lives, we also think that happiness should be easy to get and easy to sustain. But the truth is that our human experience is a full of highs and lows. All of our lives are made up of contrasting emotional experiences, and we are here on earth to feel the full spectrum of human emotion. This means that we will all have times in our life where it feels like a fight to be happy. In today’s podcast ...
Oct 27, 2022•36 min•Ep. 182
The lessons I got from completing the 29029 ultra-endurance event just keep coming. In this final episode, recapping and recounting the things I learned through this experience, I am sharing what I learned on the mountain on a spiritual level. On that mountain I came to know more about me and more about God and more about my relationship with him than ever before. And I hope these thoughts will help you think about love and sacrifice and suffering and endurance in new ways. Whatever challenges y...
Oct 20, 2022•37 min•Ep. 181
I recently completed 29029, an ultra-endurance event in which participants climb the equivalent height of Mount Everest in 36 hours. Even though I had prepared for nine months for the event, I learned pretty quickly that preparation alone wasn’t going to be enough to get me to the finish line. 29029 was so much harder than I thought it would be. It required so much more out of me than I anticipated, but through this experience I also figured out that was stronger than I ever thought I was. I was...
Oct 13, 2022•28 min•Ep. 180
I recently completed the 29029 Everesting event, an ultra-endurance event in which participants climb the equivalent height of Mount Everest in 36 hours. This was the most challenging physical event I’ve ever participated in and I learned lots of mental and emotional lessons along the way. In this episode of the podcast, I’m breaking down my experience of the 29029 event on Whistler mountain and sharing all the things that I learned about myself, about my brain, and about our ability to achieve ...
Oct 06, 2022•42 min•Ep. 179
Queen Elizabeth once gave a speech and speaking of our life experience, she said: "We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.” This is such a powerfully simple statement about the purpose of our lives. We have all been given the gift of life. You are here. And all that is left is to decide how you are going to spend your visit. In today’s episode of the podcast, I want to encour...
Sep 29, 2022•24 min•Ep. 178
Over the last nine months I have been training for a big endurance event called 29029, in which the participants climb the equivalent height of Mount Everest (29,029 feet) in 36 hours. Before I started training for this event, I couldn’t climb more than a few hundred feet, but over time, I have increased both my physical and mental endurance and learned some powerful lessons about overcoming my brain as I have worked toward this goal. I have never been an athlete, but over time my body has chang...
Sep 22, 2022•38 min•Ep. 177
What would it be like to be your biggest fan? To scream and cheer and applaud and approve of yourself and the things you do? For most of us, because we have a brain, approving of ourselves isn’t easy or natural. In fact, it usually feels necessary and important to criticize ourselves. Noticing where we’re failing and how we’re coming up short seems like the best way to change and get where we want to be. But the truth is that approval is the most powerful creative force in the world and cheering...
Sep 15, 2022•30 min•Ep. 176
How do you know the things you believe about yourself are true? Is it because you’ve always believed them? Is it because it’s what your parents told you about yourself or because it’s what everyone else thinks? Does it just “feel true?” When we go to believe new things about ourselves, we can feel a lot of resistance to the new thoughts (even if they are amazing thoughts!) because our brain often prioritizes and validates our original thoughts and hates being wrong. And while it’s true that we g...
Sep 08, 2022•35 min•Ep. 175
Most of us realize how precious our life is, we know how lucky we are to be alive, and we want to do something important with the time we’ve been given. But life is busy. We have lots of obligations and expectations and a lot of our time gets used up unconsciously. When we think about all that we want to do in comparison to all that we have to do, it can create a lot of stress and overwhelm and make us think that we’re wasting our life or squandering our time. How do we balance it all and make t...
Sep 01, 2022•30 min•Ep. 174
Feeling scared and hopeless is a normal part of the human experience. We are all going to have moments when our inadequacies and our deficiencies are going to feel overwhelming in comparison with what is required of us and our brains are going to tell us that we don’t have what it takes, that we can’t possibly do it, and we should just give up. But the real problem isn’t our inadequacies. The real problem is our expectations. We all have expectations (which are really just made-up thoughts) abou...
Aug 25, 2022•35 min•Ep. 173
Our feelings are always created by our thoughts. So when we feel bad and we want to change that and feel better, we do that by changing our thoughts. However, this can be easier said than done. Sometimes it can be hard to shift our heavy, negative thoughts and it can feel impossible to find new thoughts to think. But there are some ways to make this easier. In today’s podcast I’m sharing six shortcuts to feeling better. These actions don’t in and of themselves make us feel better (only our thoug...
Aug 18, 2022•34 min•Ep. 172
Most of us get married and have a family so that we can have more happiness and feel more love in our lives. But the reality is that it’s just as hard to choose happiness in love in family life as it is anywhere else in our lives. A family is really just a bunch of human brains (all of which are programmed to find the negative and notice what’s gone wrong) that are all living together, sharing the same space, and having lots and lots chances to interact and have thoughts about each other. You’ve...
Aug 11, 2022•33 min•Ep. 171
In today’s podcast episode I’m answering a few questions that I’ve received recently: Once you become aware of what’s happening in your brain, shouldn’t it get easier to resolve the conflict between your brain and your spirit? If life is really 50/50, why does it seem like my brain only gives me 100% negative thoughts? What happens if agency (either the way I use mine or the way someone else uses theirs) messes up God’s plan or goes against his will? I think the answers I share will help you thi...
Aug 04, 2022•25 min•Ep. 170
When it comes to the story of your life, your brain is the most unreliable narrator there is. It wants to tell you that you did it wrong in the past, that it’s too hard in the present, and that you can’t have what you want in the future. But it turns out your brain is wrong about all of this. Your brain is programmed to find what’s wrong with you, help you avoid feeling pain and spending energy, and notify you of any and all possible dangers. This means your brain is very good at keeping you ali...
Jul 28, 2022•27 min•Ep. 169
You make thousands of choices every day—when you get up, what you eat, how you move your body, who you love, how you treat people, how happy you are—all just optional ways to live your life. Nothing you choose makes you better or worse, but each choice takes you somewhere specific. When you understand that your own choices (and nothing else) determine your destination, and that you have the power to go anywhere you want to go, then all that’s left is to figure out how to manage your brain to mak...
Jul 25, 2022•18 min
Othering is a way of putting distance between yourself and others. It often involves seeing others as different than you in negative and insufficient ways. But we can also “other” ourselves by telling ourselves that we aren’t like other people, that we can’t be like them, that we can’t create what they have, that we are more limited than other people, and that this means that we are lacking, inadequate, or less than other people. Our brains love to tell us that we are different in all the wrong ...
Jul 21, 2022•28 min•Ep. 168
Whether we know it or not, we are all deciding our lives. Every decision we make, one at time, moment by moment, add up to create the reality of our lives. This means that we are never stuck where we are. If we are always deciding our life, that means that we always also have the power to decide something else anytime we want to. When you realize that you are a creator even with your unintentional decisions, it can inspire you to see what’s possible to create when you start making intentional on...
Jul 14, 2022•31 min•Ep. 167
You are good. You aren’t good because of what you do. You aren’t good because of the results you create in your life. You aren’t good because of your habits, your choices, or your behaviors. I mean you are good. Fundamentally. And as a human with a brain, it’s really easy to forget this. Our brains almost universally tell us that we are bad, that we are wrong, that we aren’t enough. And when our brain is telling us these things, one of two things can happen: either we wear ourselves out in an en...
Jul 07, 2022•27 min•Ep. 166
Every area of our life is created by the thoughts we think—including our sexual experience. If we think thoughts that create shame or frustration or guilt or resentment, that’s going to make an impact on the kind of experience we are having. If we nurture thoughts that create hope, curiosity, compassion, fun, joy, or excitement, those thoughts are going to create something entirely different. Most of the thoughts we have about sex have been given to us by others. We receive message from our pare...
Jun 30, 2022•28 min•Ep. 165
One of the relationships we have the most conflict in is the one we have with our own inner critic. Sometimes it feels like no matter what we do, our brain is going to have something negative to say about it. While having a brain (and therefore an active inner critic) is just part of being a human, we have more power than we know to quiet, diminish, and silence that critical inner voice and heal the ongoing conflict we have inside ourselves. In today’s podcast episode, I give you practical, acti...
Jun 23, 2022•32 min•Ep. 164
Most of us have a list of things we wanted to do this year. A lot of us were determined to finally stop making excuses, get on top of things, and create the life we really want to be living. But somehow, just getting through the day keeps getting in the way and it feels easier to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. Join me for the MID-YEAR RESET! A two-day event where I will show you how to stop doing the things you wish you didn’t do, start doing all the things you want to be doin...
Jun 20, 2022•8 min
I teach my clients that no matter what change they want to make in their lives, it is a simple three step process: awareness, acceptance, and adjustment. Of these steps, acceptance can be the hardest principle to understand and apply because usually the very fact that we want to change something means that there is a part of us that doesn’t like how things are and doesn’t want to accept it. So how do we do this? How do we accept where we are while we are simultaneously trying to get somewhere el...
Jun 16, 2022•30 min•Ep. 163
We live in a world where everybody has the right to choose actions that impact everyone else and we also live in a world that works according to natural law. These two realities mean that tragedy, accidents, injustice, crime, catastrophe, and disaster are an inherent part of your human experience. And sometimes this is terrifying. Sometimes it feels like there is too much pain and too much uncertainty, too much unpredictability and too much vulnerability to handle. In today’s podcast episode, I ...
Jun 09, 2022•25 min•Ep. 162
It’s really easy for our brains to associate negative emotion with things that are bad or things that we should avoid. So what do we do when we feel bad at church? Isn’t church the place where you are supposed to feel love, supported, included, not judged, welcome, needed, and uplifted? What do you do when you feel burdened, angry, lonely, judged, or condemned in the place that is supposed to help and heal you? The truth is that church is no different than any other part of our mortal lives…it i...
Jun 02, 2022•33 min•Ep. 161
In the early 90’s, Gatorade ran an ad campaign called “Be Like Mike.” The idea was that if you wanted to have the skills and the experiences that Michael Jordan had, all you had to do was drink Gatorade like he did. All of us have people in our lives that we admire and want to be more like. And if being like them was as easy as making one choice the same way they make that one choice, more of us would probably be able to do it. But the truth is that who we are, and the skills we develop, and the...
May 26, 2022•35 min•Ep. 160
Most of us have a deep, biologic instinct to please other people. Not only does people pleasing feel necessary to maintain good relationships, sometimes we even think that it is altruistic and noble and good to put someone else’s opinions, needs, and preferences above our own. But the truth is that people pleasing creates resentful, inauthentic relationships that are based on pretending and lying. This not only creates tension between us and the people in our lives, it also erodes our relationsh...
May 19, 2022•33 min•Ep. 159
