If you get anxious about extra time with family and friends over the holidays, this information will help. Here are tools for getting past your fears so you can engage in the fun.

7 Secret Relationship Tools

Tool #1: Lower Your Expectations

Having unrealistic expectations of yourself and others i...

Vulnerability is required for making genuine new friends. This means you risk getting rejected, hurt, judged, or mistreated. It means that you reach out to someone without a guarantee that the outcome will be positive.

I'm often asked for advice on how to make new friends. Many people are lonely an...

Keeping a journal is an often underutilized tool that provides incredible insight when done properly and consistently. It's essential to clarify my thoughts and feelings and to identify the lies I'm believing.

I find that one of the biggest challenges to getting started with journaling (aside from ...

We all have seasons in our lives when it's very hard to be positive. I can easily view myself as the victim. Gratitude is one of the only things that can end my pity party.

Focusing on gratitude has helped me on my darkest days. It helps me get focused on what's right rather than what's wrong.

"...

A vision is a mental picture of how good your life can be in the future. It focuses on potential, opportunity, and possibility. One essential to clarifying a vision is that you make if big and idealistic. A healthy and inspiring vision is always idealistic.

People are 100 times more motivated movin...

I'm a middle child from a loud and emotionally expressive family. Growing up, everyone expressed how they felt - except me. I decided at a young age to hide my feelings and live inside my head. Not a strategy I would recommend.

From age 16 to 22, I used negative coping mechanisms to numb and attemp...

Healthy people are drawn to those who like themselves. Being around people who have confidence in their worth and abilities will build your own self-esteem.

Many believe their value comes from their performance in different areas of life (career, health, finances, marriage, etc.). When they do well...

I'm a work in progress. Recently, I realized how inflexible I can be (a topic I cover in other posts). Along with greater self-awareness, reading inspiring books has sparked major shifts in my attitude--second only to the influence of people and life experiences.

There are 2 major perspective shift...

I didn't sleep for 5 nights straight. I was consumed by worry and desperate for some rest. The guy who helps others with anxiety, the experienced mental health professional, was in a bad place. Thank God for my friends and the doctors who helped me. I was neglecting too much on the checklist below. ...

You can make great progress in just a quarter of an hour. Significant and "imperfect" progress is a product of consistently making smart 15-minute choices.

Over a decade ago, when I had our logo designed, I made the tree with 7 leaves to represent our "Make it 7" success philosophy (i.e., on a scal...

Anxiety robs us of enjoying life. It's the great thief of our time and you should view it as your enemy.

In 1998 I was on an extremely turbulent flight. What probably lasted 15 minutes seemed to go on for hours. After this experience, I thought I was fine, but I was wrong.

A few months later, I wa...

It's easy to find things to worry about and dread. Being grateful is often hard, yet ironically, our gratitude is more grounded in reality than our fears. So many things in life are outside our control, but one thing you can directly influence is your perspective.

You can focus on what's going wron...