Why I couldn’t think of a single failure (and what that told me about the life I’d been living)
I was in the shower, getting ready for a podcast interview. The show was called But First She Failed. So I knew exactly what was coming. The host was going to ask me about a time I had failed, and I wanted a good answer ready. I stood there under the hot water and went looking for one. Nothing came. So I went further back. My twenties in New York City. The wholesale travel company I managed. The parenting talks. The speeches I gave in Russia and Croatia and all over the United States. Still nothing. For about four [...]
How Four Words Ended a Lifetime of the Same Argument With My Father
“Sock it away for a rainy day.” “Debt is the worst thing in the world.” “I never go to bed owing anyone a penny.” I heard those three sentences from my father for much of my life. Morty and I were in debt, and it drove my dad nuts. So the lectures went on and on. At the dinner table. On the phone when I called just to say hello. And every single time, I came apart. I would cry. Then I would defend myself, explaining our finances to a man who had already decided what he thought about [...]
We Don’t Want More. We Want To Matter.
“Thank you so much for cleaning my room.” I said it to a woman I’d never met, holding a mop, standing in the doorway of my hospital room. I had just given birth to my daughter. I was exhausted, sore, and happier than I’d been in a long time. A hospital cleaning woman came in to do her rounds, and something in me wanted her to know I saw her. She stopped. She looked at me strangely. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I just want to thank you.” She looked at me quizzically. So [...]
How To Use The Extreme Thinking Method To Counter Upsets
The sandbox tree has thorns and poisonous fruit. Neither is why it's one of the world's most dangerous trees. The danger comes from its sound. Or rather, how it makes that sound. When the sandbox tree's fruit is ripe, it explodes, spewing seeds at up to 150 miles per hour. Most trees let birds and animals carry their seeds off gently, one bite at a time. The sandbox tree skips gentle entirely and detonates, using far more force than the job seems to need. It's the same idea behind how we dissolve unwanted meanings. You don't talk a meaning [...]
Why your mind races to the worst case first (and what to do before the spiral takes over)
I was sitting at my desk when the text arrived. I'd done a podcast interview that had gone beautifully. My friend, a podcaster with 25 million downloads, had asked all the right questions, and I’d found words I hadn’t expected to find. I remember thinking: that was the one. Then the text. “Shelly, I’m so sorry. I think the recording may have been lost.” I felt my heart drop. And then my mind did something it was very good at. It went straight to the worst case. If we do it again, it will never be as good as [...]
The Distinction Habit: How Morty Learned to Stop Getting Hurt by Our Daughter’s Worst Days
Morty kept a written account of the year Brittany could barely stand to be in a room with him, and there's one line in it I still think about. He wrote about how close they'd been before that, and then how everything changed once she hit her teens. "When she reached 13-14 years old, she changed. I joke that she was captured by aliens who left one of their own in her place, because my daughter couldn't possibly have acted the way my daughter acted between the ages of 13 and 18-19." By the time she was a freshman, Brittany [...]
The Occurring Effect: Why Good Relationships Sour And How To Heal Them
A golden poison frog contains enough toxin to kill 10 men. Yet when raised in captivity, it's completely harmless. The secret lies in its diet: the frog accumulates toxins from insects that feed on poisonous plants. Remove these insects from its diet, and the frog never develops its deadly defense. This natural phenomenon mirrors our relationships. Like the frog that becomes toxic through what it consumes, our relationships don't naturally deteriorate on their own—they gradually become poisoned by what we feed them. The sweetness of our connections often diminishes over time because we unknowingly introduce toxic elements called "occurrings." [...]
A Short Process That Can Change Your Life (And How A Few Paragraphs Inspired it)
In December of 2009, Morty read a book called The Three Laws of Performance by Dave Logan and Steve Zaffron. Just a few passages in that book inspired him to create a process that would change both our lives. “Each person assumes the way things occur for him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person.” “So what exactly does occur mean? We mean something beyond perception and subjective experience. We mean the reality that arises within and from your perspective on the situation. In fact, your perspective is itself part [...]
How a single question can dissolve six months of procrastination
Phil had been sitting on a big opportunity for six months. His mentor had invited him to put on a webinar for an email list of thousands of people. Phil is smart, experienced, and had plenty to say. The invitation was exactly the kind of thing he’d been hoping for. Six months later, the webinar still hadn’t happened. Every week it came up in his mind. And every week it moved to the following week. When Phil worked through the occurring process, the real story surfaced almost immediately. And it had nothing to do with time. When a task [...]
