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Got Anxiety? If not, why not? (with lessons from Inside Out 2)
One great takeaway from Inside Out 2, Pixar’s summer blockbuster, is that we are all entitled to a full range of emotions—from the ones that feel great to the ones we’d rather avoid. I know one of the starring emotions in
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Stumbling in the land of too-much-ness
While we’ve kept our national attention on Covid-19 and its variants, another pandemic has slipped into town: too-much-ness. You can see it in the faces of your friends when they look overwhelmed by life. You feel it when you look
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What’s growing now (a pause)
What’s growing in your garden? Not just in your outside garden, which I hope is flourishing, but in your inner garden as well—the land of hopes, dreams, possibilities, compromises, and creations. This year in the northwest, winter felt long, and then
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Letting life “cure” us
Every day, life burnishes and “cures” us —sometimes by the unexpected and dramatic, sometimes by the routine and ordinary. We feel, we love, we celebrate, we grieve, and we grow. I walk to the paddock each morning and see cycles
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An Unlikely Path to Humility and Mindfulness
When I taught several groups of Japanese managers near Tokyo, one of the qualities I most admired was their humility and consideration of others. It felt like a refreshing change from the US cult of the individual—with its encouragement to
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Have you taken the AI challenge
(Hint: It helps to be human) The rapid advance of AI technology feels dizzying, exciting, and terrifying. New technology is outpacing our capacity to understand its consequences. Moral reasoning, unfortunately, cannot be rushed into production. Neither, alas, can human caring.
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A Gift from an Unusual Source
What if you could strengthen the qualities you need by feeling your connections with friends who have died? I know this may sound a little weird, but hang with me. You don’t need to believe in the afterlife, or really anything,
Sparking creativity with curiosity and joy
Words from a creative genius Maybe the essence of creativity isn’t complicated. Or maybe we should replace the word “creative” (to help those who doubt that they are creative) with more accessible words like “radically curious” and “passionately playful.” This