Forgive people. Even if they do not deserve your forgiveness, you deserve to be free of resentment, sadness, and anger.

These negative emotions feel bad—to you. They are appropriate, at times, but carrying them around forever will degrade your life. Your negative feelings might have no effect on the person with whom you are upset, but they will certainly enslave you to the harm that was done to you in the past.

Each time you think of your anger, sadness, or resentment, you inflict that painful emotion on yourself. Someone else might have inflicted that pain upon you initially, but you are one who continues to inflict it on yourself.

Why keep punishing yourself for what someone else did to you?

Choose a more powerful path. Feel your negative emotions. Acknowledge them. Accept them.

Then, when you are ready, allow them to be a voice of your needs by asking yourself: “What do I need to feel better, and what can I do to get that need met?”

Another good question is:...

No two people are alike. Everyone has a unique combination of strengths, interests, and values.

Resilient people believe that they (along with everyone else) have the potential for greatness. After all, if no one else is like them, they have something unique and valuable to offer the world.

Be developing their personal strengths, pursuing their interests, and living in alignment with their personal values, they own their potential and live up to it. 

The problem is, people often spend more time comparing themselves to others and trying to be something they’re not than they do developing the things they are naturally good at and the things they are actually interested in.

Instead of deciding for themselves what kind of greatness they want to be, they spend their time trying to measure up to someone else’s standards of greatness.

When your kids realize that the things that make them unique are the very things that will propel them to...

Why is it that our children, the people we love the most in the world, can trigger us so easily?

We all have hot buttons—situations or events or even words our kids say to which we react strongly, or even overreact. One second, we feel calm and at peace. The next, we are flooded with emotions and spinning out of control.

Often, we feel ourselves behaving in a way that is irrational. The triggers might even seem absurd. We cannot pinpoint exactly why we feel so angry over seemingly trivial things that our children do or say, but nonetheless, our emotions are hot.

Other times, our triggers feel justified. We can support and justify our anger with example after example. Nonetheless, we dislike feeling so angry and out of control and would rather respond to our children calmly.

Why is this? Why can things our children say and do make us overreact? And what can we do about it?

Fortunately, when we understand why triggers occur, we can take steps to eliminate them so that we can...

Do you revisit conflict when tempers have cooled?

Or, when you child has a giant emotional meltdown, do you breathe a sigh of relief after it passes and go about your business?

Don't poke a bear, right?

The truth is, the gold is in the second half.

When you and your child resist a conflict with clear heads, you can find solutions.

This is where growth happens, and where skills are learned.

It is where you and your child can begin to appreciate each other's perspectives, and it is where you can find solutions absent the flood of emotions that were couding your thoughts in round one.

In our parent community, Resilience-Based Parenting,™ we help kids develop a strategy called “floating.” 

This strategy is equally as valuable for adults as it is for kids, so in today’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we encourage you to be a floater. 

Being a floater means that you float amongst various social groups. You have friends from work, friends from college, and friends from the rock-climbing gym. 

This resilience skill helps kids avoid friendship drama and adjust when friendship dynamics become difficult or unpleasant, or when certain friends simply are not available. 

By the time we are adults, the friendship drama is (hopefully) resolved. But being a floater is helpful for adults for other reasons. 

First, different friends “match” different parts of our personalities. You might have friends who love to exercise, and this encourages the part of you that wants to stay healthy. You might have friends who are highly...

We are all put in situations in which we lack confidence. Perhaps we are taking up a new hobby, meeting a new group of people, or embarking on a new career. 

In today’s Self-Care Sunday tip, we take a look at how we can show up as empowered, positive versions of ourselves, even when we feel uncomfortable. After all, how we show up in these situations can determine whether we ultimately enjoy the experience or walk away feeling awkward and even embarrassed. 

Showing up as our best possible selves is a skill, one that we teach in our Resilience-Based Parenting™ course, and one that all adults and children can benefit from learning. 

Consider, for instance, what people look like when they do not have this skill. They can come across as combative or defensive, when really they are just feeling insecure. Oftentimes, they laugh at themselves, but not in a good way. Rather, their self-deprecation makes people around them feel uncomfortable. 

The good news...

It’s hard for anyone—much less a child—to take constructive feedback when flooded with negative emotions.

This is because our thoughts and our emotions always match: You cannot think positive, constructive thoughts when you are overwhelmed with negative, destructive emotions.  

So, if your child is angry or frustrated, hold off on initiating “teachable moment” conversations or attempting to shift your child’s perspective.

Wait until they have had time to regroup emotionally.

Save the discussions about your expectations, the child’s questionable behavior, or the child’s bad attitude for later when they might actually be able to hear you.

When your children are upset, your best bet is to meet them with patience. If the situation calls for you to set boundaries, do so, but remain steadfast and calm in your word choice, demeanor, and tone of voice.

Let your child know you are listening and patient by saying things...

The next time you find yourself upset about something—really triggered and overwhelmed by an emotion—try this ...

See if you can describe what the emotion looks like.

What color is it?

What shape is it?

What texture is it?

How big is it?

Does it have a surname?

Get as many details as possible about your anger or sadness or frustration as you possibly can.

When you shift your mind into this analytical place of trying to describe what the emotion looks like, you put a little air between you and the emotion.

You let off the steam, and without even realizing it, you calm down.

It’s not possible to be swept away by a negative emotion when you are engaging your analytical mind.

In today's Self-Care Sunday tip, we encourage you to consciously move in the direction of what you desire rather than away from what you fear.

When making decisions, we have a tendency to either move toward desire or away from fear.

Moving toward desire can be scary.

After all, if you do not achieve your desires, you might feel embarrassed or rejected.

And yet, leaning in the direction of what you want is the only way to achieve your dreams.

If you are constantly moving away from something out of fear, you will almost certainly never get what it is that you actually want.

Moving toward a desire is always the path for an authentic life.

Moving away from fear is always the path for a life of unspoken and unrealized dreams.

So many people talk themselves out of their dreams because they think it feels better to not want them than to want them and not achieve them.

But this is not actually true. Pretending like we don't want things only makes us feel disempowered and apathetic about...

Plenty of adults know the feeling of having a big emotional burst of anger, only to later regret their words or actions. Most of aren’t taught skills for navigating these big emotions, so even though we later feel shame, we struggle to “control” our anger well into our adult years. 

Anger is a big emotion. It is always accompanied with tension, so when it bursts, it can be a flood. And while anger is not a bad emotion (after all, it is appropriate to feel anger when we are mistreated), I think we can all agree that life would be a bit better if we didn’t unintentionally hurt people due to explosive words or behaviors. 

Teaching kids how to stay in control, even when they are angry, is a big task, particularly because most adults are not taught this skill. It requires more than just one or two conversations, and it is usually a years-long work-in-progress. 

We can start, though, by asking them to reflect back on how the build-up feels. If...