100% Awesome Podcast

While there are never feelings that you should or should not feel, there might be feelings that you WANT to feel more of—and maybe gratitude is one of those for you.

Not only can gratitude be one of the most enjoyable emotions to feel in and of itself, it can also be used to soften and ameliorate painful emotions like stress and grief. 

Today on the podcast, I’m sharing a small but powerful tool that you can use to immediately incr...

My brother recently ran his third 100-mile ultramarathon and I wanted to know all about it!

WHY did he run it? HOW did he run it? And WHAT does he do to keep going when things get hard? We talk about all of it in this latest episode of the podcast. 

This is an episode packed with tons of insights and a-ha moments to help all of us who want to do hard things but don’t know how to keep going when our brain is telling us to stop. 

We ...

One of the greatest gifts we have down here on earth is the ability to talk to God. But just like anything else in life, sometimes our thoughts get in the way of us using this gift the way we want to.

For many of us, there are a lot of thoughts that can get in the way of our conversations with God, that prevent us from opening up to him, that make us feel guilty and self-conscious, and stop us from making him a trusted confidant th...

It’s easy to feel heavy and overwhelmed by the suffering and devastation happening in our world right now. It seems like there is no end to the pain caused by living in the world or to the pain that can be caused by the choices of other people. 

In today’s podcast episode, I am sharing a recent conversation I had with grief coach, Kelly Norton, who shared some powerful thoughts about how to handle and manage the grief of the world ...

A spell is defined as a series of words that has magical powers. But there’s nothing mystical or supernatural about the fact that the words in our head (our thoughts) are powerfully, unconsciously, almost “magically” creating our lives. 

And if we think about the metaphor of casting spells to allow you to alter or control reality, nowhere is that a more useful skill to have than in your own mind. The words you choose to think are l...

Our brains can be kind of tricky sometimes. They often like to give us thoughts that sound nice, but which can actually be harmful and cause us pain. In fact, some of our most poisonous thoughts walk around our minds disguised as helpful, useful, reasonable, and sometimes even “positive” thoughts.

Today on the podcast I’ll show you how three thoughts (that your brain probably gives you on a daily or weekly basis) might be causing y...

There are lots of times in our lives when we’re going to feel discouraged and, as the prefix indicates, to have moments where we literally feel separated from our courage. 

When this happens to us or to the people we love, what do we do? How do we effectively help and encourage when we or others need it the most?

This week I received an audio message from my son that was so encouraging that it made me wonder what characteristics ma...

The seasons are changing and I think it’s time to change the way we see ourselves as well. It’s time for a season of self-compassion.

I talk a lot on the podcast about self-development, but none of us can truly grow and develop and reach our potential without having a high degree of love and compassion for ourselves. Without it, our quest for self-actualization can easily become an exercise...

One of the things that can keep us stuck and discouraged and not pursuing our dreams is the fear of failure. 

It’s easy to be scared of failure because almost every day our brain points out the ways that it sees us failing. Our brains are good at noticing where we aren’t measuring up, where we’re falling behind, and where we’ve failed to meet our own expectations—and it feels terrible.

But what if you can’t fail? What if there’s ac...

We are in a transition time of the year, moving from summer to fall. And every time we come to a transition moment in life, there is an opportunity to check in with yourself and ask yourself if you want to keep creating the things you’ve been creating or if you want to make a change.
This periodic evaluation can allow us to live a life of intention rather than a life by default.

In today’s podcast, I ask two important questions: 
W...

Dread is suffering your brain creates ahead of time. It’s the pain we feel because our brain is trying to avoid a possibly painful experience ahead of us. 

And dread can be such an intense emotion that when we feel it, it can be easy to make excuses for ourselves and talk ourselves out of doing the things we want to do. 

What if what is really between you and the life you want is just a feeling? What if it’s just the feeling of dre...

Last week, my son, Caleb and I competed in our very first SwimRun competition, in which we ran nearly 16 miles up and down the hills and trails of Mackinac Island and swam over 3 miles in the cold water of Lake Huron. It was an awesome experience that neither of us will ever forget.

As with any goal, along the way, we learned lots about ourselves, our capacity, and our brains and we think the lessons we learned will help you as you...

Whenever we start a new goal, we feel motivated and excited and determined. And we’re pretty familiar with the end of a goal as well, when we either achieve what we want or we don’t.

But what happens in the middle?

While we all recognize the determined beginning and the satisfying achievement or disappointing failure at the end of a goal, there are parts in the middle that nobody talks about. 

We live in a world of opposition. For every one of us, the fact that we are alive means that we will someday die. And when we choose to love someone, it means that we are inevitably also choosing loss and grief. This is what it means to be human.

Our lives contain the possibility for so much joy and happiness and connection, but all of these experiences are really only available because the possibility of loss also exists. How do w...

Our brain like to tell us that we don’t have enough. They point out that we don’t have enough time or money or energy or love. They are constantly scared about running out and not having what we need.

But what if we can’t actually run out of the things we need? What if there is always more not just available to us but always coming to us? What if abundance is the truth and scarcity is the lie? 

In today’s podcast, I’m giving a new ...

Right now, in the physical health space, there’s a big push to improve and increase mobility. The idea is that the more mobility you have, the more ability you have to do the things you want to do with your body. If you can’t move your body the way you want to, it can create limitations. 

In the same way, the more mobility we can develop in our emotional lives—the more strength and flexibility and ability to feel and move with our ...

One of the hardest things to come by these days is quiet, especially inside our own heads. We live in a world where it’s now possible to have a nearly constant stream of other voices, entertainment, distraction, and noise vying for our attention and taking up the space in our minds.

This leaves very little time or space to listen to own thoughts and process our human experience. Over time this impacts our mental fitness, makes us m...

My daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks and as I have anticipated this big event in her life and the creation of her new family, I have thought a lot about the things that make an awesome marriage and the things I wish I would have known when I got married.

Every marriage (and every relationship) requires work to be happy and successful, but for the most part, most of us are trying to make our marriages better by doing ...

For most of us, transforming and changing our lives can feel impossible and out of reach. But that’s only because when we think about transformation, we tend to focus our attention on big changes that are made in a very small amount of time. 

But it turns out that the smallest changes that often go overlooked are the ones that make the biggest impact in transforming our lives. 

In today’s podc...