What do you consider an occasion worthy of celebration? Graduating college, getting a promotion, giving a good presentation? There are no rules for when it’s appropriate to party, but where you set the bar says something about how you feel about yourself and how you define success. On one extreme, there are some objectively successful people who, sadly, find it impossible to celebrate even great achievements because they are consumed by their perceived failures. On the other

It’s a simple question, and yet one that many people struggle with: “What do I want?” The challenge for some is in answering the question, because competing values or needs muddy one’s ability to decide on the way forward. But for others the difficulty begins even earlier, as they find it hard to even ask that simple question. There are two emotional barriers that may get in the way of asking yourself what you want, and learning to overcome those barriers will hopefully clear

When we think about our bad habits, our instinct may be to judge ourselves for having them and perhaps to feel ashamed of our inability to break them. We may think that piling on the guilt will motivate us to change those bad habits, but it usually just makes us feel worse and results in a deepening of the self-defeating behavior. Instead of judging ourselves, it’s often more helpful to approach our bad habits from a place of curiosity. After all, it’s confusing: why do I kee