There’s something very peaceful about the quiet of being out in a snow. That happy feeling was the catalyst for today’s Invincible Voice.

Everyone has moments or experiences or places that immediately take them to that blissful space of happiness or wellbeing. If you take some time to analyze this, you can bring into your everyday life the bliss you feel in those isolated situations.

In other words, every day can be a snow day : ).

Listen here:

Download here.

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

Have you ever noticed that rearranging the contents of even a single drawer can give you a sense of hope and possibility? That’s the tip of the iceberg of what shaping your space can do for you.

Whether it’s a corner of the kitchen, a home office or a dorm room, creating a space that’s you is an expression of your self. As a result, every time you glance at it or enter into it, it affirms who you are and supports you in becoming the person you’re striving to be.

Listen here:

Download here.

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

Thomas Leonard, considered the father of coaching, coined the term “tolerations” to refer to everything from a drippy faucet to a toxic relationship; things that bug you, but that you tolerate. Whether you’re shoving things to the back of a closet or to the back of your mind, it’s costing you. In this call, you’ll have a chance to identify what you’re currently tolerating and learn why you ought to stop.

Listen here:

Download here.

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

There’s no shortage of stress in today’s chaotic, insecure world, and that’s not something you can change.

But — we each have certain things in our lives that supply us with an immediate sense of well-being just by being present. In this Invincible Voice talk, you’ll have a chance to think deeply about what those things, people and ideas are for you. By collecting these treasures in a virtual Comfort Cabinet, you’ll have at your fingertips a source of energy and solace, and a means of reconnecting with the people and things that make you feel whole.

The bonus: Your discoveries are also the seeds for designing A Space That’s You. (Take a moment to trigger the decorator in you at the A Space That’s You blog.)

Listen here:

Download here: Keep Your Sanity — even when you’re way out of your comfort zone

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

This was an unusually big stack, and the bag sat on the dining table in the morning room for a couple of weeks. Finally, anxious to clear off the table, I emptied the bag and tossed the books on the end table by the sofa. Comprised of a sofa and two chairs, this space had felt somehow unfinished, lacking character or a central message. With the addition of the books, suddenly it was cozier, more inviting. That the books were much-read and dog-eared only served to add to the warmth of the effect.

One of the themes of the new house is to live life as if it were an ongoing vacation. Its décor and location both make it the “vacation home” in our eyes. And the summer homes we’ve rented at the ocean often have shelves of paperbacks – jewels and discards, shared by past readers, waiting to be discovered by us, welcoming us to sink into the sofa and enter new worlds, connecting us to the visitors who had preceded us.

And that is the way I wanted the new house to make our guests feel. Because that was another theme – to create a place that invited others to join me, to enter.

And what else, I asked myself as I looked at the suddenly-cozier arrangement, does that?

Puzzles.

Jigsaw puzzles!

My childhood included hours of puzzling at my aunt and uncle’s Wisconsin home on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. My visits were weeks dedicated to playing – adults playing with children. The cares and responsibilities of daily life – jobs, running a household – were somehow accomplished in secret or set aside by my aunt and my mother during this annual island of time. They sat on the floor and played cards with us – quadruple solitaire, spite & malice. When we were older, they taught us to play Mah Jongh with them. We had musical ensembles where I accompanied them on the piano as they on their violins alternated between serious effort and peals of laughter. At night we played scrabble.

And we worked puzzles. I was in awe of my aunt’s uncanny ability to pluck a single piece among hundreds and place it precisely where it fit.

But even beyond creating with my home an ongoing connection to such a positive experience from my childhood, solving jigsaw puzzles is a metaphor for my life and for my work as a therapist.

Each year, on my birthday and at Christmas, I choose a special gift for myself, just as I do for my children. It’s more of a hatching than a shopping process. An idea, amorphous at first, begins to consolidate. It goes through multiple renditions, each simpler than the last, as the extraneous elements are left behind and the pure notion emerges.

And so the puzzle table came to be. For my birthday, I purchased the coffee table that matches that end table where Cathy’s summer-reading books are stacked. My daughters and I looked through scores of jigsaw puzzles online to choose the first. My vision was of a puzzle always in the works on that coffee table, inviting people to sit down and add a piece.

Our first pick was a collage of seashells, reminiscent of our cherished trips to the ocean. Like all experienced puzzlers, we eagerly turned our energies to the frame, sorting other pieces by color as we went. Turning our heads for a moment, we were aghast to see Bailey, the puppy, chewing determinedly on a puzzle piece – and then another – scattering many more pieces to the floor.

But there was no rage over this, no compulsion to throw the puzzle out and buy another. Bailey is just the youngest member of our family – and, as such, is part of the larger tapestry of our lives together. So she was duly educated, and dog repellent was added to our puzzling supplies – along with a plexiglass table topper, cut to size by me, with little rubber feet, to protect our work between times. With no way of knowing how many pieces were missing, we picked up what we could find – including two pulpy masses that had no picture left at all, the photo apparently being the tastiest part.

My younger daughter’s boyfriend and I finished that puzzle together the other night. Not a fan of puzzles previously, he was drawn in, and we enjoyed that same industrious and easy companionship that I remembered from the summers long ago. As we worked on it, we would often find ourselves searching for the one unique piece that would fill a particular space. I would find myself saying, ‘That may be one of the missing pieces, we may never find that one.’ And I would let it go, an acceptance of a finished product with missing pieces that were gone for good, but whose existence was not in question at all.

The finished puzzle lacks two pieces. In this way, it is utterly perfect, and I think we will leave it under the plexiglass for a while. Because the finished product is a story, a memory, a record – a work of art made perfect by the two windows of table showing through. As for the lost pieces eaten up by Bailey who appreciated their flavor but not their meaning, no matter. The rest of the puzzle tells exactly what they looked like.