Take your instinct by the reins You'd better best to rearrange What we want and what we need Has been confused, been confused It's wild to me how often, when we meet new people, one of the first questions we ask is, "What do you do?" As an experiment, I often avoid asking that question just to see how long a conversation can go before work comes up. It's surprisingly difficult. When people don't ask me what I do, I notice myself relax a little. It's a subtle shift that remind

I'll be honest with you, I am not a country music person. So when I first heard Hailey Whitters' Heartland, I wasn't expecting it to stop me in my tracks. But it did because of one word she kept repeating in the opening verse: Should. "I should be married by now. Two kids in a paid-for house." Oh. Oh. There it is. "Should" Is the Ultimate Stress Activator In the world of stress management, we talk a lot about cognitive distortions — the mental habits that quietly fuel our

It was the fall of 1998 when a new acoustic version of Born in the USA was released. It was a resurgence of a song written in 1982 in the shadow of Vietnam and its aftermath. Returning veterans who came home not to parades but to silence, unemployment, and a country that had moved on - leaving them behind. The narrator in Springsteen's song is not celebrating America. He's asking, with a kind of desperate irony, what exactly being born here got him. But you'd never know that