TranceBreakers Newsletter

  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...