Hey friend,

Suppose I want to talk to you about shame. I can tell you very specific scenarios and walk you through the experience.

For example, it's 9:09AM on Tuesday and you've been eyeing the messenger screen since yesterday night.
You need to ask your coworker something, and it's just one message away. But your fingers hover over the keyboard over and over.
You write a message, delete it, write it again, then delete it. Every attempt you try to make it sound less stupid.
Because in your mind, you should know this by now. It is dumb of you to ask this.

Hundreds of keystrokes later its 3PM and you still haven't sent the message.
Your team meeting is in 30 minutes and you still don't have the answer.
And for some reason you find yourself mid-scroll, even in the midst of this.
The clock ticks, 3:28PM, 3:29PM. Your heart races as you click the "Enter meeting" button.

Ok, so the above is an example of how shame prevents you from taking an action and makes you procrastinate. Cool.
Compare the above paragraphs to this sentence: "Do you feel shame in your day to day?".
The paragraphs place you in the situation and has you vicariously live it, instead of asking you a yes/no question.

I could do something similar for being a people pleaser. Or being too quick to anger. Or give into a craving.
I write these examples to get you to identify into that specific kind of suffering, so I can walk you through relieving it.
This is how I do a lot of my written coaching.

Now, there's a particular topic I talk about all the time but it is very, very difficult to put specifically into words.
And it's "Accepting". So, let's start with the ineffective version first: Do you have a hard time accepting yourself?
How about accepting compliments? How about accepting reality?
You kinda have a sense of what these would be like, but it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly the experience of acceptance.

Suppose I give you a gift card of $50. What does it mean to accept the gift card? To use it in a store?
Suppose I gave you a constructive criticism. What does it mean to accept it? Not be affected by it emotionally?
Suppose I gave you a personal boundary. What does it mean to accept it? To never trigger that boundary?

Physical things are a bit easier to accept or reject. If you don't want my gift card, you wouldn't take possession of it.
But when it comes to intangible things, acceptance / rejection is blurry.
I tell you, "I think you have a tendency to be a bit sloppy in your work".
This is qualitatively no different from "I think milk chocolate is the best kind of chocolate".
As in, they are both my opinions. I have lots of opinions about lots of different things.

Can you accept my chocolate preference? What about my opinion of your work?
I made this example so it's a no-brainer to accept my chocolate preference, but maybe you have a very strong opinion about best chocolates.
That's interesting. So it seems that the more we have opinions about something, and we're presented with something else,
​we have a difficult time accepting it.

Unfortunately this isn't a "suppose" scenario. I'm suspecting my dog is nearing the end of his days.
The thing is, he's 14 and about to turn 15 in a few months. That's like, super old in dog years.
With age, OF COURSE health problems are going to be more common.
I know my dog is not immortal. Even before I got a dog, I already knew that dogs die.

Since I know of my dog's eventual demise, did I accept his death?
I know my dog knows how to bark, because (much to my dismay) he barked all his life.
So if he barks today, I accept that he barks. If he lives today, hey that's great; I accept that.
But if he died in the next 5 minutes, do I accept that?
What is the difference?

It's not exactly giving up, because I'm not withholding all medical care for my dog.
It's not exactly attaching and suffering, because that's sort of the opposite of accepting it:
​suffering against it.
Somewhere between there lies the experience of accepting something.

When we don't accept our life, we keep suffering against it.
We keep arguing with the indifferently progressing reality based on what we believe the world should be.
I am a human being capable of failure and errors.
My acceptance of it, after nearly 40 years, has freed me from constant second-guessing of myself.
Had I not accepted it, I'll still be fighting with the illusory idea of "I am a perfect being who's good at everything".

Do you accept yourself? To truly understand and accept yourself, you must see how you came to be from the past.
Re-walking the past line, seeing things you didn't see before like watching a movie for the second time.
With that understanding and acceptance of yourself, you get to see what you are capable of in the future;
while accepting the difficulties and challenges that can come with that pursuit of the future line.

Join me for my timeline seminar, completely free and available to everyone and anyone.

Next Saturday, 10/10/2026 at 8AM Pacific Time. E-mail me to be notified one day and 30 minutes before the event!