Have you ever had a friend or co-worker fill the air with complaints? Do you catch yourself complaining too much? Or has negative thinking become a bad habit?

Life can feel like we're scrambling to escape an avalanche of demands and a series of endless to-do lists. And when we're stressed, it's easy to find fault or pinpoint what's wrong, but if we get in the habit of complaining, it starts to create a dark cloud around us and our lives. And did you know that complaints wire our brains to favor negativity and negative self-talk, which then increases the likelihood of more of the same?

Valentine's Day is a perfect opportunity to revel in our love of one another. The celebration itself can create a rekindling of the fires of loving our partner.

You owe it to yourself to flex the muscles required to create lasting happiness. Strengthening your relationship by applying love's keys are just as important as planning your wedding. Your honeymoon doesn’t have to last only for a season!

All of us have habits. We speak of good habits and bad habits, but most often we associate habits with something negative. (Think smoking, watching too much TV, unhealthy snacking between meals, yelling at the kids...) The truth is that anything we do repeatedly—whether negative or positive, unhealthy or healthy—becomes a habit. Isn't it time to use positive, healthy habits to create the life you want? But how long does it take to break a habit?

The answer to this question varies and depends on who you ask. Breaking bad habits or forming healthy habits can depend on several elements and [...]

When my son was only two, he and I had just picked up a vanilla sponge cake from the bakery, a special order for a friend’s surprise birthday party. I carefully tucked the square white box on the floor between the two front seats of our family minivan. Parking in our driveway, I unhooked the quick-release on my son’s car seat so he could climb down, and I got out of the van to help him out.

Opening the sliding door, I was shocked to find him sitting proudly on the cake box with a big grin on his face. With his adorable toddler sweetness, he squealed, “It’s a perfect size seat for me, Mom!” [...]

People pleasing was a way of life for me. Pleasing others convinced me that I was a kind and giving person. Then one evening, I was brainstorming with my daughter topics for a school paper. I loved helping and enjoyed brainstorming, but as quickly as my ideas popped out of my mouth, she shot them down for one reason or another. After a few minutes of feeling rejected, I said to her, “If every idea I suggest meets with rejection, what’s the point of me giving ideas?” Her reply: “Do you only give ideas to get approval?”

Ouch! This little interchange impacted me deeply. My daughter’s poignant [...]

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.” ~ J.K. Rowling

At one stage or another, we have all experienced failure. It often invokes a negative emotion which connotes feelings and ideas of defeat, frustration, and disappointment. Failure is subjective and it really depends on what you classify as failing. Most likely, your idea of failure may vary greatly from your parents, your [...]