Gratitude for my Mentors

I want to speak to the power of having gratitude for good Mentors in your life.  The impact of a good mentor can be a real game-changer for the trajectory of the path you take.

Today, I’m going to speak to five lessons I learned from five mentors who’ve given me some amazing gifts. I’m hoping that these gifts, these lessons, will inspire you to identify your mentors, and to think of ways you too can be a mentor for the people in your life. Also, to keep looking and learning from new mentors along the way. We are never too old for learning from people. 

1.  You can do anything you put your mind to

This lesson came from my grandmother.  We were really close growing up. She had a gift for always seeing the good in people, and I have her to thank for seeing the good in me – even when I made mistakes – and I made some pretty big ones while growing up. Even through the mistakes, she loved me the best anyway....

Anxiety and Politics

Today, I want to speak to you about anxiety and politics.  I want speak to the collective anxiety most of us have been feeling towards this year’s presidential election, the outcome, and how this year has felt different than any other year for most of us who can remember presidential elections over the decades. Yes, decades. I’ve been alive for four decades now, almost five, and I feel like this election year has been like no other.

Whether you follow politics closely, or whether you choose not to, and no matter which way you wanted this election to go, I’m going to address the anxiety that I’ve been helping many of my clients work through, especially the young adults I work with. I can see that our younger generations, our teens and young adults, are looking the older generation, for answers.  I want to give you some ideas of how to help your loved ones deal with anxiety and politics right now.

What do we do when the...

Cultivating Hope In Uncertainty

How self-awareness matters

Self-awareness if the foundation of a solid mental health strategy. Taking care of your brain.  Your mental health really matters.  So taking care of your brain is so important.  When I think of the opposite of mental health, it’s mental illness.  Mental health can affect every part of a persons life and the lives of those around them.  Mental health can get in the way of peoples abilities to connect with other people.  Most of us go through life unaware of how to heal those parts of us that need some care and loving attention.  I’m here to help you heal yourself.  I’ve devoted most of my own adult life to my own healing journey and I love sharing what I’ve learned.  

Anxiety amongst the circumstances of 2020

It’s fall of 2020 and we are still dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.  I’m seeing a lot of anxiety. I’m seeing a...

My music students have asked me over the course of years I’ve taught music lessons how to cultivate motivation to practice when they don’t feel like it. I love it when they ask me this because it means they’re ready to ‘level up’ in their musical abilities.

Many of you know I'm a classically trained pianist. I used to practice for three to four and sometimes upwards of six hours a day while studying piano performance in college on scholarship.

I didn't want to practice, but did it anyway out of sheer grit.

And then I burned out. And I burned out hard.

When my students ask me about motivation, I usually ask them some form of the question, “how do you want to feel about your music?” They almost always say, “I don’t know,” which to me is never a suitable answer.

I then follow up and say, “Don’t you want to be really good? Isn’t that what you’re going for by taking lessons from...