“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

First, it’s ironic enough that the one who murders the grandmother is the one to make this statement. Of course the strange truth is that it speaks to the human condition. We’d all be better if we felt pressured to be, if we were literally under the gun.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also are best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best ’helpers’ are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better ‘helper’ is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously.”

It’s a powerful summary of what makes for an actualized and good human.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patterns can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviors.”

There are no quick fixes. Let’s quit chasing them in case we are. There is only one way out of bad habits, and the way is through. Yes, one day at a time, and yes habits are micro-efforts that over time lead to big results, and yes it is all a process. The hard truth: it doesn’t just take work, the outer results begin from the inner work.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.”

Changes do occur in the brain through meditation, and also through gratitude practice. We don’t yet know all the effects, but we do see the changes. Similarly, there is increasing evidence that transcendent experiences can also be chemically-induced and performed in a safe environment. Humans need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves. We need detachment and engagement.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“Where id is, there shall ego be.”

The ego is not only the ally of the id. It is also a submissive slave who courts the love of his master. The ego has to mediate the desires of the id but, at the same time, it sits between the superego and the events of the external world. When people argue that the ego should be killed, and that we’d be better off free from ego, we may be arguing semantics, but in the end, what you need is a healthy ego. You need it in its place, but you can’t rid yourself of it. It’s part of your consciousness, and always will be.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“In this way, moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments — temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation. When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.”

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a profound, but also very challenging text. Girard is trying to do nothing less than create a Copernican revolution that merges historical agency, metaphysics, psychology, and anthropology into a combined construct. ’Things Hidden’ is Girard’s most famous work on Mimetic Theory. Mimetic Theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and when that “thing” remains scarce, there is conflict. Most conflict then is not because humans want different things, but because they want the same thing. An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present oriented.”

Gratitude is actually a radical act. It is bold, not passive. There is also loads of research that shows the brain works different when active gratitude is practiced, and that it leads to deeper fulfillment. Gratitude is potent, and we’re only just beginning to truly explore what it can mean for our lives.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. Check out our gratitude challenge for the month of November at bigselfschool.com/gratitude.

“Depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both ’religious’ and ’scientific’, and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart: the deeper we go into the heart’s darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can ’straighten things out’ makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes — and when we pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.”

Parker Palmer can identify strongly with those who have undergone (or are going through) clinical depression. He went through a long period of it in his 40s, and even long after he had come out of it — and he isn’t sure why he was able to climb out of it while many are not — he wasn’t able or willing to share his experience. Depression is the “ultimate state of disconnection.” While Palmer doesn’t wish the experience on anyone, he does believe that it now marks a pivotal passage on his pilgrimage toward self-hood and vocation.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. The book Who Do You Think You Are is also available at all major e-retailers, and you can find it at bigselfschool.com/store. Check out our two-hour classes on how to build resiliency, how to discover what you want, how to like yourself more, how to find calm, how to bounce forward after failure, and many more at bigselfschool.com.

“Playing big doesn’t come from working more, pushing harder, or finding confidence. It comes from listening to the most powerful and secure part of you, not the voice of self-doubt.”

I also believe that listening to that powerful and secure part of you does increase confidence. Playing big — for women and men — means finding that inner wisdom, and that feedback from others tells us at least as much if not more about the person giving the feedback as it does about the content we’ve put out there.

This podcast focuses on self-exploration and personal identity -- to help you construct who you are, and how you want to feel, think, believe, and behave for yourself. The book Who Do You Think You Are is also available at all major e-retailers, and you can find it at bigselfschool.com/store. Check out our two-hour classes on how to build resiliency, how to discover what you want, how to like yourself more, how to find calm, how to bounce forward after failure, and many more at bigselfschool.com.