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There's a particular flavor of outrage that shows up in expat groups around the world, and it goes something like this: "I am NOT an immigrant. I'm an expat." Forty replies later, several people threaten to leave the group. Seriously?

You lose your power when you allow labels to trigger you.

I found this out the hard way when I landed in Peru and heard the label "gringo" used as a smear. And they said it with intense derision. Griiiiigo. Don't call me that!

Words contain energy. High-demand...

Post-religion, I was a kid in a candy store, not sure what to believe and open to everything. Study with the UU's? Worship with the evangelicals? Meditate with the Buddhists? I did it all.

Having spent most of my life inside of a high-demand religion (Mormonism) and later the evangelical side of Christianity, I was open to everything and all. I'm sharing this post to highlight what helped me most.

Enter Bob Monroe's Gateway program.

In the 1970s, a radio executive named Robert Monroe started...

We’ve all encountered difficult people, but how do you know when someone crosses the line from simply “difficult” to genuinely dangerous? I was so naive in my youth. I could not have imagined how dark some people are, which, as you might guess, exposed me to people who used, abused, and played me. Ignorance is not bliss.

In a recent interview with Dr. Kerry McAvoy, former FBI special agent and criminal profiler Joe Navarro shed light on this exact question. After years of studying criminals,...

I wrote Coach Them Out: How to Influence Someone Out of Toxic Beliefs because arguing rarely accomplishes what we hope it will.

When people feel attacked, they defend themselves. When we corner them with facts, they search for counterarguments. When we humiliate them, they may cling even more tightly to the group that tells them they are righteous, chosen and under attack.

The better approach is usually to lower defensiveness, raise curiosity and let reality do more of the persuading. Ask open...

If you're a leader seeking executive coaching that delivers value, or a person seeking counseling that delivers value, this article is for you.

There is a kind of “help” that feels good in the moment but creates no results in real life.

The conversation was warm. The coach was encouraging. The counselor understood your pain. The client felt seen. Maybe there was a breakthrough phrase, a fresh metaphor, a little emotional release. Everyone left feeling like something important had happened.

Then...

Most of us do not have a caring problem. We care plenty.

We care about our children, our work, our health, our country, our money, our aging parents, our reputation, our future, and whether the thing we are building will actually work. We care so much that we grip. We tighten. We monitor. We rehearse conversations that ended three days ago. We refresh the app, reread the text, rewrite the email, replay the meeting, and call the whole exhausting process responsibility.

But gripping is not the...

Defenders and critics alike misunderstand diversity.

Its strongest defenders sometimes talk as if diversity automatically makes everything better. Put different people in the room and, somehow, wisdom appears.

Its loudest critics often talk as if diversity means abandoning standards, ignoring competence, or choosing representation over excellence.

Both versions are too shallow.

Diversity is not magic.

It is not a substitute for ability. It is not a substitute for character. It is not a substitute...

Let’s skip the part where we pretend this is complicated. It isn’t.

When a child says they have been abused, the next step is not a forgiveness session. It is not a quiet meeting with church elders. It is not a spiritual conversation about bitterness, resentment, sin, or whether the victim has a forgiving heart.

It is a phone call to law enforcement or child protective services. Period. Got it?

ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune recently published a disturbing investigation into the Old...

The next stage of American democracy cannot be built on revenge.

And...it cannot be built on pretending nothing happened. Accountability matters.

The future of the United States cannot be built by dragging the country back into the same cage fight that got us here: left versus right, socialism versus capitalism, liberty versus equality, markets versus government.

That fight is theatrical. It is profitable. It fills cable news hours and fundraising emails. But it does not build strong...

Accountability is often misunderstood. It is not punishment, not the healthy kind.

It can include consequences. It should include consequences when people violate trust, abuse power, lie, steal, exploit, endanger others, or keep breaking commitments after every reasonable opportunity to adjust.

But accountability itself is not the firing squad. It is not revenge in a leadership costume. It is not public humiliation. It is not the strong crushing the weak because they can.

That is not...

Having experienced relationship rifts with family members, the question comes up why attempts at reconcilation rarely stick. I'm not saying, don't try, but we're dealing with an iceberg; surface issues and a whole lotta stuff waiting under the surface to poke a hole in the boat.

Here are the issues under the surface that lurk, waiting to sink your reconciliation boat.

1. The Reunion Becomes the Goal, Not the Repair

Families treat reconciliation like a destination rather than a process. The...

There's a story about a man who left a rigid fundamentalist community after twenty years. When someone asked him what finally made him walk out the door, he said, "I realized I'd met the same person in four different religions."

He wasn't talking about a specific individual. He was talking about a type.

Eric Hoffer saw it coming. In 1951, the San Francisco dockworker and self-taught philosopher published The True Believer, a slim book that remains one of the most unsettling works of social...

The honest answer from someone who loves living abroad but would not recommend it to everyone

Let’s start with the fantasy version.

You sell everything. You board the plane. You land somewhere warmer, cheaper, slower, and more beautiful than the life you left behind. Your rent drops. Your stress drops. Your blood pressure drops. You learn to drink coffee in plazas. You discover fruit you can’t pronounce. You become, in your own mind at least, a more interesting person.

That version exists.

I know...

There is a woman I know who spent the first thirty-five years of her life inside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She served in auxiliaries, raised her son in the faith, kept a year's supply of food storage in her basement, and did all the things faithful members do. Then, after a long and painful faith transition, she left.

She will tell you it was the hardest thing she ever did.

She will also tell you, if you catch her in a reflective mood, that she may have made life a little...

There's an old story; Uncle Remus, Br'er Rabbit, and a lump of tar shaped like a baby, that contains one of the most underrated pieces of wisdom ever wrapped in Southern folklore. Br'er Fox sets a tar baby in the road. Br'er Rabbit, being social and a little too proud, says hello. The tar baby doesn't answer. Rabbit takes offense and swings. Fist sticks. Swings again. Other fist sticks. Kicks. Foot sticks. And there he is, completely immobilized by something that never even talked back.

Real Consequences Are the Most Underused Leadership Tool in the Room

Let's get something straight from the start.

This isn't an article about gotcha moments. It's not about firing squads, public shaming, or the delicious revenge fantasy you've been nursing since your colleague Steve took credit for your project in front of the VP. Again.

This is about something far more powerful and far more rare.

This is about healthy accountability: the kind of consequence that actually changes behavior because...

A field guide for people who actually want to influence the unreachable

Let me tell you about my Tuesday.

I'm sitting at a restaurant in Ecuador, one of those expat-friendly spots where the menu comes in three languages and the WiFi password is taped to the wall, and within forty minutes I've encountered a man who is absolutely certain that immigrants are destroying America (while he himself is, I will note, an immigrant living in South America), and two women who have concluded, with the calm...

My jaw has been dropping for months. At what? Mostly at Trump supporters who, with complete sincerity, describe him as God-sent, brilliant, and selflessly sacrificing for his country. Give me a break.

I know exactly how to influence someone out of this rabbit hole. My book Coach Them Out works. And still ... sitting across from a true believer, I couldn't do it. I just couldn't. Not even a little bit.

The influence techniques were loaded and ready. But I couldn't pull the trigger because I had...

Trump's current approach to immigration won't last for two reasons; he won't last and few support this un-constitutional bully tactics that include concentration-type incarceration. Once the nightmare enforcement is over, we still have a broken system.

First, what would the system be designed to do? A serious immigration system has four things i must do:

1. protect the border,
2. protect due process,
3. meet labor-market...

Here is something that keeps me up at night: how the human mind takes data and creates conclusions that support their goals and beliefs.

Start with something simple and beautiful. Something that cracks people open, dismantles their fear, and points at a reality bigger than the one they’ve been handed. Then watch what happens when an institution gets hold of it. Watch the lawyers arrive. Watch the interpretive layers accumulate. Watch the original spark get surrounded by scaffolding until no...