The Flourishing Manifesto You don’t achieve an excellent life, you live it. An excellent life emerges naturally when you create the right conditions: when you act with purpose, embrace virtue, and remain mindful of life's ordinary beauty. The…
The Four Pillars of an Excellent Life What does it really mean to live an excellent life? I'm writing this for one reason: to help you live an excellent life. Not just a good life, not just a successful life, but truly excellent life. (And yes, I'l…
What does it mean to live an excellent life? If you're like most people, you might think it's about achieving more, doing more, being more productive. I used to think that too. But today, I'm going to challenge that notion of excellence and share a …
Overview/introduction Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like stress has been in overload mode lately. Maybe you feel the same way. We all feel stressed from time to time, and we all experience stress differently. Stress is a part of life…
Overview/introduction As regular listeners have heard me say more than once, stress is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean that stress can’t be managed. After giving this a lot of thought, it occurred to me that there are three main appro…
Overview/introduction Over the last few episodes I’ve been talking about stress, what causes it and various ways to manage it. Today I want to add anger into the mix. Stress and anger are pretty closely linked in an oddly reciprocal relations…
Stress and the appraisal process There’s no getting around it, life is often stressful. So, it’s useful to understand stress. We all kind of understand what stress is at some level, but what is it exactly? Stress is a psychological and …
[This article was originally published on Medium.] My wife, Tracy, and I moved out to the country a year ago. Since moving to the country and acquiring a horse and two (very funny) goats, I’ve been listening to a lot of country music ……
Recently, I had a wide-ranging, enjoyable conversation with Todd Murat, host of the Toddcast Show. We talked about how I came to be a professor (spoiler: it was a twisty path), the current state of political discourse, the power of thoughts and the …
Today I'm bringing you the first of a new kind of article, which I'm calling 5 Minute Flourishing. These are gonna be short, focused articles. I'll release them in between the regular articles. I'm doing this because I want you to keep flour…
Well, here we are in another new year. Who knows what 2023 will bring? Regardless of what it brings, you can flourish if you see your possibilities, not your limitations. In this article, I explain why this is, and how you shift your mindset to see …
In this article I talk about the very real phenomenon of the holiday blues and offer some suggestions about how you can cope with feelings of loneliness and depression around the holidays. Holiday Season Well, it's the holiday season. Chri…
Effectively managing conflict isn’t always easy, but it’s always important. In this article, I share four useful approaches for managing conflict, and how to choose the right approach for any situation. I also provide some general tips o…
If you interact with other people, and who doesn’t, at some point, you’ll encounter conflict. In this article, I help you understand how conflict comes about, how some conflict is good and some is bad, and what the consequences of confli…
In this Live Well and Flourish article, I wrap up a three-post series on the relationship between incivility and flourishing by talking about how incivility harms not only your individual flourishing, but also our collective flourishing as a…
In the last Live Well and Flourish article, I discussed an incident of considerable incivility I witnessed recently, and talked about how incivility is fruitless. In this article I focus on how incivility in many ways is the opposite of flou…
Recently, I observed a mighty Twitter battle between monsters and snowflakes … a mighty pointless battle. Something happened, one group claimed that there were monsters in their midst, and another group mocked the first group for bein…
You’re going to face moral dilemmas. They’re inevitable and they’re hard to deal with. In this Live Well and Flourish article, practical philosopher Dr. Andrea Christelle and Dr. Craig Van Slyke share insights on how to deal with m…
Sometimes life brings us a decision for which there is no clear moral choice. In this article, practical philosopher Dr. Andrea Christelle, co-founder of Sedona Philosophy Experience and Dr. Craig Van Slyke discuss moral dilemmas -- what makes them …
Well, I finally got COVID, or should I say COVID finally got me. In this article, I discuss some things I learned from my thankfully brief bout with COVID. Despite being fully vaccinated and trying to be reasonably careful, COVID fi…
In this article I talk about how you can deal with difficult times by understanding Stoicism’s main tenet, that some things are in your control, and other things are not. Also, I relate a very personal story of a challenging time in th…
Humans are hardwired with a desire for control. In fact, one well-established view contends that the desire for control is the basic motivation for all other motives, emotions, cognitions, and social behaviors. We evolved to derive benefits from a s…
Despite my goal of being a good Stoic, two phrases that are commonly-used in online debates “OK boomer” and “snowflake generation,” usually raise my blood pressure. By the way, I know that many online forums are a cesspool of…
Many years ago, and I mean MANY years ago, I was in junior high and had a massive crush on a cheerleader. At the end of the basketball season, the coach threw a party for the team. We were allowed to invite dates, which was a very big deal. Ev…
