Even My Car Judges Me, Or, How Apps Help Turn Your Most Valued Goals Into Action

 

Photo by Judith Tutin

Post-divorce we're typically trying to get into action. Do something. Move on. Move forward. This piece is about turning goals into action. Here's how it starts.

My car often lets me know I have excellent study driving. It also often admonishes me to use hybrid system indicator to improve. Recently, my car did not scold me, which is when I realized I had finally achieved hybrid excellence, a 90 on the eco score. That’s when I realized that I actually care about my car’s judgment.

 Why is my car’s declaration so important? It’s precisely the point. We are a competitive people. I want to do better, even than myself. I see the message and I try to improve next time. Read more here...

Six Steps To A Decluttered Home

 

Sometimes after a divorce you feel the need to rid yourself of the detritus of the marriage. This piece is about decluttering the easy way. It starts like this:

Despite recent evidence suggesting that a cluttered desk leads to a creative (not cluttered) mind, I'm determined to declutter. It's difficult to be creative when you can't find your ideas buried in piles of articles, legal pads, and journals, or elsewhere on tiny scraps of paper and sticky notes. Not that you could tell by looking, but I prefer the aesthetic of a neat, organized workspace.

Maintaining a clean and organized space doesn't have to be a multiple-hour ordeal that ends with a sore body. The secret lies in creating a simplified routine that works best for you and avoids overwhelming you.

Read more here...

Could Pickleball Be Your post-Divorce Happiness Hack?

 

 Photo by Aleksander Saks on Unsplash

If you're like me, you were looking for social things to do post-divorce. This is the beginning of my piece about pickleball, happiness and well-being:

When an announcement for a beginner’s pickleball class appeared in my inbox I wondered if it might be just the opportunity I needed. It could be a chance to replace the casual social connections I’d lost during covid, when my yoga and running buddies fell by the wayside for various reasons. The absence of those social connections created a happiness and well-being deficit. The conversations we have, sharing little snippets of life, sometimes over the course of years, don’t seem like much, until they’re gone. This is especially true if, like me, you work from home.

Read more here...

How To Get Your Daily Dose Of Awe

Anyone going through the divorce process knows you need the full range of stress reduction tools at our disposal. Tapping into awe is one of those tools I've recently written about. The article starts like this:

On my travels one day, I saw a skunk. Not one dead by the side of the road. Not one scurrying in the dark. It was a medium sized guy ambling across a campus road just after dawn. There were no other cars or people, so I had the opportunity to stop and watch. It had a clean and shiny coat. It didn’t seem to have a care in the word, pausing to sniff, then moving on. Also sharing this space with me were some squirrels, deer and geese.

It's hard to describe what I felt. Wonder. Peace. Community. Part of a larger world that included all these other beings. It all adds up to awe.

Read more here...

 

A Few Tips for Friends of the Divorced

Jancee Dunn has some really good tips for friends of divorced people. It includes some that are perhaps obvious, like invite your friend to do things. There are others that aren't so obvious, like don't trash the ex.

 It's worth a read here...

Before Offering Advice To Adult Children Consider This One Question

 

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels

Now that you're divorced and parenting on your own, here are some tips for dealing with grown children.

When I decided to marry at the ripe old age of 19, I did not seek my parents’ advice. They thought it was a terrible idea (spoiler alert: they were right) but they did not let on. Had they, I would not have listened. And I would have been angry. I knew what I was doing.

At a certain age, we all become experts. We have advice for friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and, of course, our adult children. Whether married, divorced, remarried or never-married, we believe we know what everyone else should do on these matters, and myriad others, from work, to end-of-life choices.

Do we have a crystal ball in which we can see the future? I think not. Do we believe we’re right? Yes, we do. Are we right? That’s open to debate. 

Continue reading here...

What You Need To Know About Lying to Your Therapist

 

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

Divorce leads many people to therapy as they try to make sense of the past and move forward into the future. 

Clearly seeing reality is a waystation toward the goal of enhancing your wellbeing. As you might imagine, lying to your therapist impairs both your and your therapist’s ability to see that reality. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably lied to your therapist.

In their book, Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, the authors report that between 84 and 93% of clients lie to their therapists, often about multiple things. This isn’t terribly surprising since research has shown that the average person lies once or twice a day.

Consider your honesty on a first date. Odds are, you may be less than totally truthful. You may paint your job in a more positive light, talk about relationships with your children in a slightly more glowing way, or tell an anecdote about something, embellishing the details to make it more humorous or interesting. 

These are all normal lies told for the sake of impression management, to make us look a little better, appear somewhat more accomplished or take a conversation from merely interesting to scintillating.

Read more here…