One of my clients has a passion and expertise for parrots (yet another reason I love coaching—you meet people with incredibly diverse interests).

The other day we were talking about her desire to educate people with pet parrots about how to properly care for them, when she started dropping some facts that made me go, "Wait, hold up. Say that again."

Here's what she told me:

"Parrots are highly sociable animals programmed to live in a group. They're also meant to fly dozens of miles a day (some species, like Macaws, fly up to 100 miles a day). They spend an enormous amount of physical energy doing this, as well as emotional energy in search of food, foraging, finding appropriate nest sites, and building and carving out those nests, as well as the energy it takes to raise young. They have voices meant to be heard up to 3 miles away so they can keep in constant contact with their flock.

Then humans put them in a cage, left alone and fed an inappropriate diet. They're devoid of those things they are meant to do and eat, and oftentimes they suffer psychological and physical issues—like obsessively walking in circles, self-harming, and obesity—because of it."

It's obvious to us that birds aren't meant to live in cages. And I bet as you read that, it made sense to you why a creature that's meant to fly free might suffer when forced into a life that isn't natural.

I'm guessing you weren't like, "What's wrong with you?! Suck it up, you dumb bird! You're being overly dramatic. Your life is fine. This is just how it is." Like me, you probably felt a pang of sadness and empathy for them.

But clearly our empathy doesn't extend to ourselves. Because the thing that fascinates me most about these facts is how much they remind me of the human experience.

In this week's blog I'm getting into our messed-up tendency to blame ourselves for everything that feels "wrong" in our lives, and why we shouldn't be doing that.

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