Sitting in the car on the way home from a lovely weekend on the coast with my kid. We are stopping at Bodega Bay Oyster Company to bring home some oysters and extend our weekend a bit. I’m saying I need a snack to make it home to dinner (in a good mood).

In the oyster shack, my kid sees three kinds of snacks and shows me. I say ‘great, take one each’.

He asks ‘which one do you want?’

I reply ‘take one each’

No one likes to be judged, not by self, nor by others. And yet we do it. All the time. We are so hard on ourselves and the people around us. So so hard.

Judgment is a false narrative, the unforgiving voice in our heads telling us that we are no good, idiots, failures and not worthy of love. Most of us are walking around beating ourselves up emotionally all day long. And the worst part? We don’t even realize we are doing it! We assume it’s normal to constantly criticize ourselves.

It is not.

Lagom is a quintessential Swedish concept. There is no one word for it in English (or most other languages for that matter). It’s pronounced LAW-gom and means ‘just the right amount’ or ‘not too much or too little’. Other varieties of the translation give us ‘in moderation’, ‘in balance’, ‘just enough’, ‘ideal’. As opposed to words like ‘sufficial’ and ‘average’, which suggests a degree of lacking, ‘lagom’ is more about appropriateness, but not necessarily perfection.

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures” – F.M. Alexander

When you hear the word ‘habit’ what do you feel? All the times you’ve tried to change a habit and you didn’t make it? Getting a sense of dread? Feeling like a failure? (a quick reminder: the only way you ‘fail’ is if you don’t learn anything from whatever happened).

Human beings are pretty amazing: we have speech, we can continue to learn all our lives, we can connect deeply, we evolve and problem-solve, and we adapt. Our adaptability is one of our superpowers! We change and adapt to an ever-changing environment and circumstances.

But our capacity to adapt sometimes comes and bites us. There are times when we are too adaptable! This incredible superpower of ours is no longer serving us, it is harming us. We become the frog in the boiling pot, continuously adapting to the increasing temperature. Until we die.

There is this horrible saying ‘you can rest when you are dead’ as in, for now keep pushing, keep going. That thinking goes against how we humans are designed. We are designed for rest. We need rest. Much like a cellphone battery we need to be recharged. A ‘dead’ phone is of no use (other than as a paper weight) and we humans function much the same way.

Fika (fee-kah) is a Swedish concept. It’s a ritual, a core part of our culture, a state of mind. On the surface it’s a time for coffee and a bun (we can argue if the best bun is cinnamon or cardamom… I fall squarely in the cardamom camp) or something else small to eat. But it is more than that. There are so many layers to ‘fika’. Let me peel them back for you.

One of the first exercises I ask most of my coaching clients to do is to identify their values. And I don’t make it easy, they can only pick…

We have been equipped with 2 ears and 1 mouth and still, most of us talk at least twice as much as we listen. I mean actually listen.

Well, since many of us are working from home this is even less true now, but it’s never been true. We can’t leave life at the office door.

Benjamin Franklin almost got it right: yes, death and taxes are certain. I would argue that the one thing we experience with great regularity, and great certainty, is change.

Are you a glass half full or half empty person? I would say it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the glass is refillable! Some of us are ‘eternal optimist’ some of us are ‘more realistic’. We need both.

Name calling?... what?!? Since when is that the right thing to do? Haven’t you been told all your life that name calling is wrong? Yes, when talking about other people. No, when naming your feelings!

Last month I had the great pleasure of giving a webinar for women all over the world. I had a blast, filled with gratitude for all those to chose to show up. The topic was ‘How to Create the Life You Want’, obviously a topic relevant regardless of where you live on this planet!