Life

10 Things to Remember When Everything You Want is Out of Reach

01.05.2021 by Angel Chernoff // 63 Comments

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your hope.

That’s the super-short version of my advice for those moments when nothing seems to be going as planned in the days and weeks ahead—when everything you want seems out of reach.

Yes, just be right where you are, with an open mind.

Let go of what you think your life is supposed to look like and sincerely appreciate it for everything that it is.

Easier said than done of course, especially when tragedy strikes. And although Marc and I have coped and grown through our fair share of real tragedies (including the recent pandemic), let’s be honest about something: 98% of the time we create tragedy in our daily lives out of fairly minor incidents. Something doesn’t go exactly as planned, but rather than learn from the experience, we freak out about it and let stress become us.

My challenge for you today is [Read more…]

12 Daily Reminders We Need to Read Every Morning for the Rest of the Year

01.01.2021 by Marc Chernoff // 45 Comments

Where you ultimately end up this year is dependent on your daily attitude and response.

This morning one of our coaching clients, Monica—a recovering victim of a fairly recent and debilitating car accident—was smiling from ear to ear the minute our FaceTime coaching session began. “What has you in such good spirits today?” I asked her. “I’m thinking differently about things…about how lucky I am to be alive,” she replied. “I thought the injuries I sustained in that accident last year signified the end of life as I know it, but now I realize they signify the beginning.”

All details aside, Monica decided to begin again, in her mind first and then in her life. It’s taken her several months of healing and practice, but she has consciously let go of the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” attachments in her head about her circumstances, and she has stepped forward with grace and determination. Her new beginning has nothing to do with the recent New Year, and everything to do with a new way of thinking.

Truth be told, today is really the beginning, for all of us. And we can prevent the wrong thoughts and beliefs from getting the best of us as we move forward with our lives in 2021. We can train our minds to make the very best of the present moment, even when our circumstances are far less than ideal. All it takes is practice.

The mind is like a muscle, and just like every muscle in the human body, it needs to be exercised to gain strength. It needs to be trained daily to grow and develop gradually over time. If you haven’t pushed your mind in a dozen little, positive ways over the course of time, of course it’ll crumble on the inevitable days that get overwhelmingly stressful.

The easiest way to begin strengthening the mind? [Read more…]

21 Tiny Changes You Can Make in Your Home to Make Life Simpler in 2021

12.30.2020 by Angel Chernoff // 186 Comments

by Joshua Becker, author of The Minimalist Home

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
—Hans Hofmann

Have incredible stories to tell by the end of 2021, not incredible clutter stuffed in your closets. I sincerely wish this for my family, and yours, in the year ahead.

So, let me start off here by asking you…

Does your home serve you—or do you serve your home?
Will your home afford you the necessary space to create happy, healthy memories and stories in the year ahead?

These are not questions most of us ask ourselves, but we should. After all, our homes are meant to serve a distinct purpose in our lives—to be both the space we come back to, and the space we go out from each day. Our homes are, in essence, the foundation of our daily lives. This has been especially true over the past year, while we’ve lived through COVID-19.

And as we enter the New Year, it’s a great time to check in with yourself…

If your home is serving you well, it is [Read more…]

5 Year-End Mantras that Will Move Your Life Forward in 2021

12.28.2020 by Marc Chernoff // 37 Comments

Let’s end this crazy year with a quick story about life…

Tragedy strikes a woman who isn’t yet old. A minivan traveling toward her on a dark mountain highway hits her car nearly head-on just after sunset. She grips her steering wheel as hard as she can and veers into the rocky mountainside until her car screeches to a halt. The minivan flips onto its side and skids in the other direction off a cliff, plummeting nearly 500 feet to the ground below. Inside, a young family of five on their way to grandma’s house for New Year’s Eve.

The woman doesn’t recall the events that followed during the next several days. She doesn’t recall the three eye witnesses who comforted her and assured her that it wasn’t her fault—that the other driver had swerved into her lane. She doesn’t recall how she got to the emergency room or the fact that she stayed there for over a week, well into the New Year, to treat a [Read more…]

12 “Notes to Self” You Should Memorize Before the New Year Begins

12.11.2020 by Marc Chernoff // 55 Comments

As 2020 winds down, I know many of us are yearning for a very small and selective range of life experiences—the happy holidays, the normal times, the settings and experiences that make us feel comfortable. And yet, the full range of our present reality is quite different. This year continues to give us an extensive array of experiences that evoke feelings ranging from sadness to struggle to pride to anger to love to loneliness… to happiness to hope and more. These feelings are all part of being a living, breathing human being, regardless of the season of our lives.

So, we can revolt against the unfairness of life—the unfairness of having to deal with pain, having to cope with uncertainty, having to feel lonely and uneasy and upset. Or we can [Read more…]