Five Steps to Discover Your Life Word and Purpose

Eager to live a life that really matters instead of just making it through each day? Authors Dan Britton, Jimmy Page, and Jon Gordon say that living an inspired life of purpose, passion, and power comes down to just one small word that carries tremendous possibility.

As the dawn of a new year approaches, you’re most likely busy thinking about all the things you would like to change right now to create a better life for yourself. What you may not be thinking about is your legacy—the impact you will leave on others after you die. Yes, Jon Gordon, Dan Britton, and Jimmy Page say getting clear on your legacy—clear enough that you can summarize it in a single word—is the key to crafting an amazing life.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in the responsibility, stress, and busyness of life,” says Gordon, coauthor along with Britton and Page of Life Word: Discover Your One Word to Leave a Legacy (Wiley, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-119-35145-0, $20.00, www.getoneword.com/lifeword) as well as One Word That Will Change Your Life, Expanded Edition (Wiley, 2013, 978-1-118-80942-6, $20.00, www.getoneword.com). “Over time we lose focus on what’s possible and what we are passionate about. If we’re not careful, we can end up living our whole lives this way.”

“As counterintuitive as it sounds, thinking about your funeral actually helps you understand your trajectory and how it relates to the present,” says Britton. “Asking yourself, What do I want to be remembered for? is a tremendous motivator in honing your purpose. It’s not at all about worrying about the end. It’s about living in the moment with the end in mind.” [Read more…]

By Stan Goldberg, Ph.D.

Supporting a loved one with cancer involves a balance of reality and hope. Too much reality can cast a dark cloud over treatment stages or whatever time your loved one has left. Too much hope could lead him or her to delay preparing for a possible decline in health.

Support for a friend or family member with cancer doesn’t always have to be in the form of hope for a cure. Try to find middle ground between frivolous hope and crushing reality. We all hope for the best, but sometimes the most meaningful action is the quiet acceptance of what the cancer patient is going through.

Consider these five suggestions for balancing hope and reality in your efforts to ease the path your loved one is traveling.  [Read more…]

By Nancy D. O’Reilly, PsyD

Making meaningful connections with other women can change your life (not to mention the world). Problem is, many of us don’t know how—or where—to do it. Here, I offer 11 tips to help you improve your connecting skills.

Competing with other women is out. Connecting with other women to share ideas, work together on projects, and offer support is in. The changes brought about by the global economy have made collaboration and innovation “must-have” skills, and the great news is that women tend to be naturals at them. And that is why the women-helping-women movement is really picking up steam.

We’re making a shift to what I call “Connecting 2.0.” It’s more meaningful than the “mile-wide and inch-deep” type of connecting we associate with social media. It’s based on sharing and co-creating, not self-interest. It’s authentic, it feels good, and it works.

  This deeper approach to connecting works so well, in fact, that we are creating an ever-expanding network of resources offering expertise and support to women in business, government, education, philanthropy, and other fields. The idea is not just to advance our careers and make money, but to make life itself richer, more exciting, and more creative.

[Read more…]

By Melissa (Missy) Bradley

Although I have traveled all around the US and Canada teaching about resilience, the last eighteen months I have been on my own journey that goes beyond the world of being a road warrior and I would be remiss not to put it within the context of the heroic journey. The fact that someone teaches resilience, doesn’t mean they get to opt out of initiations and double initiations experiencing the same aspects of struggle, exhaustion and doubts. Knowing the framework of the journey thoroughly did allow me to be more present in the painful lessons, more intentional about the choices I made and gave me the knowingness that I would prevail…even when I simply wanted to run away to Scotland and become a barmaid (my running joke with friends).

Eighteen months ago, I received a series of herald calls which began to change the trajectory of my personal and professional life. In fact, I had the first herald call of this journey WHILE TEACHING THE HEROIC JOURNEY AND TALKING ABOUT THE HERALD CALLS IN OUR LIFE. To protect the privacy of others, I am not able to give specific details about that particular herald call without violating confidentiality, but I clearly and undoubtedly began to receive a series of options of how to choose the next life steps. Like most herald calls, it required me to transcend my greatest fears, some long-held beliefs and to take definitive steps in a new direction.

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By Daniel Casciato

Ellen Gerst’s widowhood came suddenly when her husband committed suicide. She was married just short of 20 years when her first husband died. According to Ellen, her husband was the sanest and most rational man she knew and this was purely a permanent solution to a temporary problem.  Suicide brought up complicated grief issues for her because she also had to work through her survivor guilt before she could even address the myriad of “normal” grief issues.

“In general, a survivor attempts to apply logic to this event, or look for a cause-and-effect, because that is how we, as humans, understand and bring order to our world. Herein lies the dilemma, and the root of the guilt, of the survivor,” she says. “It is virtually impossible to successfully apply logic to an illogical situation and expect to arrive at a satisfactory answer. In truth, there are very few good explanations of why someone would choose death as a solution to a problem. When logic fails to supply any answers, guilt and self blame are always there as alternatives. The survivor continues to berate herself for missing the signs and stopping the fatal act.”

Ellen adds that it’s so easy to recognize clues in retrospect, but life can only be lived going forward and decisions made with the information in front of you at the time. Eventually, the survivor needs to have her emotional mind and rational mind travel concurrently (which is not always an easy task), eventually merge and come to a resolution.

“The resolution is that responsibility for the act lies solely on the shoulders of the person who completed the suicide,” she says. “After much soul searching, I came to accept this fact. It was then I could start to heal.”

Today, Ellen is a grief and relationship coach, author and speaker, now living in Phoenix, Arizona, and has two sons from her first marriage. Nine years ago, she remarried.  She recently responded to a list of questions we had for her via email in our ongoing Q&A series.

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