Blog
Why Painting Kitchen Cupboards is Making me Feel More Balanced
We’re doing some renovations in our house, and the first phase is to paint the living room and family room. Fortunately, my father, a retired painter by trade, was generous enough to offer his time and skill and do the painting for us. It was inspiring to see...
How to Help Your Kids, and Yourself, Deal with the Unpredictable
By the time this post gets released, it will have been around two weeks since the last school shooting in Texas, and about three weeks since a racist mass shooting in Buffalo. Regardless of where or how often these kinds of tragedies occur, the reality is that...
One Day Off, But Two More Tragedies
My plan for this post was to follow up on some of the thoughts and experiences from taking a personal mental health day. "My Day Off - Part 2" is what I was going to call it. However, with the horrific events in Buffalo, NY (10 people killed in a supermarket)...
My Day Off (Part 1)
I did something crazy the other day. I scheduled a day off in the middle of the week. It was my personal Mental Health Day. Here's what happened. My wife and I went for a drive out of town, had a nice lunch together, went for a massage, then had a pleasant, relaxing...
How to Be More Empathetic, and Why It’s So Helpful
Last week (May 2-8) was Mental Health Week, and when you visit the Canadian Mental Health Association's website, you see the word "empathy" highlighted and emphasized on their landing page. I'm glad they highlighted this particular word. In my opinion, empathy...
What a Seesaw Taught Me About Relationships
When I was a kid, there was a playground just down the street from where I lived - McCormick Park. I remember the park well. The park and recreation centre of the same name was my home away from home. Every day after school, I'd run down to the park and hang out with...
How Talk Therapy Can Improve Your Relationship Skills
April 2022 is the inaugural "Counselling and Psychotherapy Month" in Canada. Since I plan on writing about relationships for the next few weeks, I thought I'd share a couple of thoughts on how psychotherapy can help develop your relationship skills. My...
How Childhood Relationships Impact You in Adulthood
During a therapy session, I'll ask specific questions about my clients' relationships with caregivers in childhood and their relationships today as an adult - both with those same caregivers and with others. The reason for paying attention to early childhood...
We All Have a Will Smith (and Chris Rock) Inside Us
After hearing and watching the infamous “slap” by Will Smith during the Oscars this year, I had quite a few thoughts rushing to my mind. But, of course, most of those thoughts have already been discussed and written about extensively in the media. But one...
How to Find Hope in Adversity
In last week’s post, I talked about how I build hope during difficult times. In summary, I try to do three things: Put effort into finding hope Spend time with hopeful people Embrace uncertainty In today’s post, I want to explore point #1 - putting...
How I Build Hope in Difficult Times
Just as people worldwide start to return to some normalcy in life, I'm coming across headlines indicating there could be another wave of COVID infections. Added to this are continued news stories about the war in Ukraine. And let's not forget about the...
Why Habits are More Important than Goals
Last week, it felt rewarding to finally announce the release of my book, The Promise Wheel. It took me a while to get the book complete and ready for publication. But now that it’s launched, the feeling of accomplishment is greater than I imagined. I mentioned...
