TranceBreakers Newsletter

  A man told me last week that he goes from zero to ten in about a second. I asked him a different question. On an ordinary day, when nothing is wrong, nobody is bothering him, no argument, no bad news, where is he? He thought about it for a while. Then he said, honestly, probably a two to four. Rarely a zero. And there it was. He was never going from zero to ten. He was starting at four and traveling six points. To everyone watching, including him, it looked like he lost his mind over something small. He didn't overreact. He started high. Most of us are working on the wrong problem. We think the issue is our temper, so we try to fix our temper. We look for the technique that will let us stay calm when someone says the thing. We read about breathing. We promise ourselves we'll handle it better next time. Then next time comes and none of it is available, because by the time we remember there was a plan, we're already past the point where plans work. Here's a more useful ...

  There's a voice in your head that judges. For a lot of us it points inward. It has opinions about how you look, what you said in that meeting, how you handled the thing with your sister, whether you're where you should be by now. For some people it barely points inward at all. It points at other people. The woman taking too long in the checkout line. Your brother-in-law. The way somebody drives. And for nearly all of us, it points at circumstance. This traffic is ridiculous. This weather is unbearable. This should not be happening to me. Different targets. Same voice. Why fighting it doesn't work Most of the advice about this voice says the same thing. Silence it. Fight it. Replace it with affirmations. Argue it down. I've watched that fail for twenty years, in other people and in myself, and I think I finally understand why. Arguing with that voice is like telling your partner not to feel angry. How has that ever gone for anyone? The moment you tell a feel...

  Everybody knows recovery groups work. What almost nobody can tell you is why. We assume it's the accountability, or the structure, or the steps. Those matter. But I think the real medicine is something quieter, and it happens in the first ten minutes, before anyone has done any work at all. You sit in a room and listen to a stranger describe the exact thing you have been carrying alone for years. And something in your chest lets go. Not because they solved it. Because it turns out you're not the only one. Shame needs you to be the only one That's the whole mechanism. Guilt says I did a bad thing. Shame says I am a bad thing. And shame can only survive if you believe the thing you did is uniquely yours. Something no decent person would have done. Something that separates you from the rest of the human family. The moment it becomes a human behavior instead of a you behavior, shame loses its grip. Not gradually. Almost immediately. That's why the room works. E...

  Somebody said something in a session recently that I have not stopped thinking about. He was explaining why he doesn't show up for certain things his partner needs. He had been at it a while. This reason, that reason, all of them fair, all of them true. Then he stopped mid-sentence and said something close to this: Actually, if I take you out of it entirely, do I do things that make me uncomfortable? For anyone? No. I don't. I don't do them, period. And the room went quiet. Because that was the whole thing. Twenty minutes of reasons, and then one sentence underneath all of them. What we think the problem is We think we have a communication problem. Or a priorities problem. Or a partner problem, or a time problem, or a boundaries problem. Most of the time what we have is a discomfort problem. Look at what's actually sitting in front of you right now. The conversation you keep not having. The apology you owe somebody. The thing you want to ask for and ...

For most of my life, I thought love meant protecting the people I cared about from uncomfortable feelings. If I thought something might make you sad... I wouldn't say it. If I thought you might become irritated... I'd soften it. If I thought you might feel disappointed... I'd try to fix it before you ever experienced it. It looked loving. It felt loving. But I'm beginning to see there was something quietly hidden underneath. I didn't trust that the people I loved could handle their own emotions. Somehow, I had unconsciously decided it was my job to manage everyone else's emotional weather. Here's what I'm learning instead. Every one of us was given the full palette. Joy. Wonder. Gratitude. Grief. Anger. Disappointment. Fear. Relief. Peace. We weren't handed a box of crayons with half the colors removed. Life intends for us to use all of them. Who am I to decide someone shouldn't experience sadness? Or frustration? Or grief? Or even be upset with ...

 We spend so much time trying to get rid of grief. We tell people to stay busy. Stay strong. Move on. Keep their chin up. We search for the right words, hoping they'll somehow lessen the pain. But what if grief isn't the enemy? What if grief is simply love…looking for somewhere to go? When we think of grief, most of us think of death. Yet grief shows up in countless forms throughout our lives. We grieve the end of a marriage. The retirement we thought we'd celebrate. A miscarriage and the future we had already begun imagining. The loss of our health. The children who grow up and leave home. The career that once gave us purpose. Even the version of ourselves we used to be. Grief isn't limited to losing someone we love. Often, we're grieving the life we expected to live. That's why every grief story is different. No one grieves correctly. No one grieves incorrectly. Every journey is uniquely human. Perhaps the greatest mistake we make is belie...

  One of life's great paradoxes is that certainty rarely comes from knowing what's going to happen. It comes from trusting who you'll be no matter what happens. Most of us spend enormous energy trying to make life predictable. We want certainty that the relationship will last. That the business will succeed. That our children will be okay. That our health will hold. That the economy will cooperate. So we try to control. We try to protect. We try to force. And eventually we discover something frustrating. Life refuses to become predictable. Transition doesn't ask us for certainty. It asks us for trust. I've been noticing something. The people who navigate life's biggest transitions most gracefully aren't the ones with the best plan. They're the ones who stop believing that uncertainty is dangerous. Fear narrows our vision. It asks, "What's the safest thing I can do?" Curiosity asks, "What else might be possible?" Innovation doesn...

  Today I taught a class on intuition to a group of coaches in training. Before we got into any theory, I gave them a little quiz. Eight everyday scenarios. Circle the answer that feels most true. Don't overthink it. Then we scored it, and something interesting happened. Almost everyone in the room landed in the same two categories. Feelers and knowers. Gut people and certainty people. Hardly anyone was a seer or a hearer. And that's when the real lesson arrived, the one I didn't have on a slide. Most of us spend years waiting for our intuition to show up in a form it never uses. We expect visions because that's what the movies show us. We wait to hear a voice because that's what the word "guidance" sounds like. And the whole time, our gut has been talking. Our knowing has been arriving, complete and quiet, and we've been dismissing it because it didn't come wrapped the way we expected. Your intuition speaks a native language. The question is wheth...

  I caught myself doing something this week that I've been teaching other people not to do for years. I was texting someone I care about, trying to be kind. I wrote, "no pressure, whenever you're ready." I wrote it half a dozen times to half a dozen different people, actually. It felt gentle. Considerate. The opposite of pushy. Then I remembered my own rule, and had to go back and rewrite every single one. Here's the thing about the mind. It doesn't process a negation the way we think it does. If I say don't think about a pink elephant, you just thought about a pink elephant. The "don't" doesn't erase the image, it just draws a circle around it first. So when you tell someone "no pressure," their mind hears pressure, then tries to cancel it. When you say "no rush," it hears rush, then tries to talk itself down. You've planted the exact feeling you were trying to remove, right at the front of their mind, and ask...

  The sensation was so ordinary I almost missed it. Just a number on a screen. A feeling in my chest that most people would never notice, let alone think twice about. But I've spent enough years paying attention to my own body that I caught it, and once I caught it, I couldn't unsee it. A doctor told me what I needed to do. He had the training. The credentials. Years of experience reading exactly this kind of situation. He looked at the evidence in front of him, weighed it against everything he'd learned, and made his recommendation with real confidence. He wasn't wrong to be confident. People like him are usually right, and that's exactly why it's so hard to disagree with them. And my body told me something different. Not once. Three times, with numbers I couldn't argue with. Every time I did what the expert recommended, I felt worse. Every time I trusted the quieter signal coming from inside my own skin, I felt better. The pattern wasn't subtle. ...

 One of the simplest things I've ever taught a couple came out of a coaching session this week. I looked at them and said, "Don't fight over feelings." Then I paused. "And honestly... it's almost always feelings." Think about the last argument you had. Maybe someone said, "I feel like you don't listen to me." "I feel alone." "I feel criticized." "I feel like I'm not enough." The natural response is to defend yourself. "That's not true." "I never said that." "You're overreacting." "You're remembering it wrong." But what if they weren't presenting evidence? What if they were simply telling you what it felt like to be them in that moment? There's nothing to prove. There's nothing to win. There's just another human being letting you see the world through their eyes. That doesn't mean their feeling is the whole story. I...

 I've been on the phone with hundreds of people over the past fifteen years who all made the same call. They wanted to come to Sedona to save their marriage. They'd done the research. They were ready to invest the time, the money, the emotional energy. They had hope. And then, near the end of the call, their voice would drop. And they'd tell me the truth. Their partner wouldn't come. Wouldn't read the book. Wouldn't try the counselor. Wouldn't take the call. Wouldn't even talk about it. And I would hear this question, sometimes spoken, sometimes just hanging in the silence between us: What do I do when I'm the only one trying? That question haunted me for years. Because I didn't have a good answer. Everything I knew about couples work assumed two willing people. Two people in the room. Two people holding the rope. And then one day I realized the rope was the whole problem. Picture a tug of war. Two people, pulling hard, leaning back, gri...

There's a kind of heartbreak that doesn't get talked about much. You're with someone you love. Someone who is genuinely good. Someone who shows up in real ways. And yet you keep walking away from conversations feeling unseen, unheard, and a little crazy. You start to wonder if you're asking too much. You're not. You're just shopping at the wrong store. Here's the picture I keep returning to. Imagine you walk into a hardware store hungry. You ask for a ham sandwich. The clerk looks at you like you've lost your mind. They don't sell sandwiches. They never have. But you keep going back, week after week, ordering the sandwich, getting more upset each time it doesn't arrive. That's what some relationships feel like. Not because the partner is bad. The hardware store is a good hardware store. He provides real things. Steadiness. Partnership. Logic. Reliability. Care expressed through fixing the leak and balancing the checkbook and showing up at eve...

  There is a question I've been sitting with lately: How do we know when we're facing a mindset challenge... and how do we know when something deeper is asking for our attention? As coaches, healers, and growth-minded people, we're trained to look inward. We ask: What belief is creating this? What fear is driving this? What story am I telling myself? What lesson is trying to emerge? These are powerful questions. But every now and then life offers a different answer. Sometimes the issue isn't a belief. Sometimes the issue isn't emotional. Sometimes the body is trying to get our attention. The Slow Fade Rarely does a person wake up one morning and announce: "Something is wrong." More often it begins quietly. The patience gets shorter. The joy feels harder to access. Small frustrations seem bigger than they used to. Things that once felt exciting now feel like obligations. Relationships become more difficult. Life starts to feel heavier. Most people assume th...

A simple practice for letting your feelings actually land. Most people don't pause long enough to let their own feelings land. We tell the story. We explain the situation. We give the context. We move quickly through the what happened and the why I'm upset and the what I should do about it . And the whole time, the feeling itself, the actual experience in the body, never gets a chance to be felt. So I've started using a phrase with my clients lately. Pause that for a second. Where do you feel that in your body? It's not stop . Stop sounds like put it away, we're done with that . Pause is different. Pause says we'll come back to the story in a minute. Right now, let's actually feel what's there. A Story About Grief That Wasn't About Death I did this with a long-term client recently. He'd been telling me about something that had been quietly bothering him for weeks. Surface story. Work frustration. Family logistics. I asked him to pause, dr...

 By Rick Reynolds | TranceBreakers  A client reached out to me recently. She's an intuitive, deeply self-aware woman who has done years of serious inner work. She had a question before booking a session. "I've already done many of these things. Is receiving it all in one document more powerful than what I've received separately over the years?" And then the real question underneath: "I'm having an internal struggle with some of the personality profiler things. I want it to be helpful, but I don't want it to put me in a box. I find some people use their behavior as an excuse — 'That's because I'm a Cancer.' Or 'I'm a Manifesting Generator so that's why I behave this way.' Do you think this is a good investment for me knowing I've done so much already?" She was right to ask. And her concern is one I hear often from the people who are most ready for this work. So let me answer it honestly — for her and for anyone ...