TranceBreakers Newsletter

 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...