Author name: daricha2

  I recently attained my NLP Master Practitioner certification. It’s a set of skills that, once you acquire them, you wonder how you ever got by without them. NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming.  Created more than fifty years ago, NLP is about figuring out what makes outstanding people outstanding.  The simple idea behind NLP is that once you understand how someone “does” their greatness, you can model it and achieve similar results. A popular phrase in NLP is “The map is not the territory.” This means that every person, by virtue of their unique life experience, has their own distinct map of the world.  It explains why two people, exposed to the same event, experience the event differently.  In my coaching practice, this insight also helped me understand why two people, seeking different outcomes, rely on the same belief. Coaching is about making identity-level shifts in people.  For one step in this process, people harness empowering states that they then condition until the emotional bedrock of that state becomes the new standard in their lives. Sometimes a client wants confidence for that bedrock.  Another client seeks joy.  A third wants an emotional home of courage. These clients come from different parts of the world, have varied backgrounds and experiences, and each is seeking an outcome that is distinct for them.  Yet when asked what they believe about themselves, what does each one say? They believe anything is possible. After thousands of coaching calls, I have heard this from hundreds of clients.  Unique desires and goals, common belief.  So if everyone carries a different map, then here’s the unsettling question: what map are you using when you read Scripture – and where did you get it? Most people inherit maps drawn by someone else: a childhood church they attended before they were old enough to question it.  A frightening sermon heard at exactly the wrong age.  A parent’s anxieties, passed down like a precious family heirloom.  A culture that told them what the Bible says before they ever cracked one open.  My map was partly formed by these little cartoon books that seemed to be made for kids.  I recall one suggesting I would stand before God’s throne to be judged. By the time most people form an opinion about God, they aren’t reading the territory at all.  They’re reading a map someone else sketched for them – often badly, sometimes cruelly, and almost always secondhand. This map reading comes with a cost.  People walk away from God entirely because of the map they were handed.  They never disliked the territory, because they never actually went there.  They rejected the drawing, mistaking it for the place.  It’s like refusing to visit Paris because someone gave you a smudged, ugly sketch and told you that was the city. Now here’s something I only recently learned.  That phrase – “the map is not the territory” – goes back almost one hundred years.  A man named Alfred Korzybski made his mark by analyzing how language shapes perception and coined the phrase back in 1933.  He said something else that struck me once I understood where my own work was heading. Korzybski said: the word is not the thing. It seems obvious, and the modern world eagerly agrees.  Of course the word is not the thing.  Words are labels, pointers, abstractions – they gesture at reality from a safe distance, but they’re never the reality itself.  The menu is not the meal.  The map is not the territory.  The word is not the thing. And then the Hebrew Bible walks up and overturns the apple cart. In ancient Hebrew, the word and the thing share one substance.  There’s a single term – davar – that means word, and event, and object, all at once.  When God speaks in Genesis, the speaking and the happening are one motion.  “Let there be light” is not a description of a light that then shows up separately.  The saying is the light.  The word doesn’t point at the territory.  The word lays it down. Sit for a moment with how strange that is.  If you’ve ever seen a basic contour map, you can appreciate there is a safe distance between the symbol and the thing it stands for.  A lot of squiggly lines drawn tightly together represent the mountain.  They are not the mountain. The Hebrew imagination collapses that distance to nothing.  In that world, to speak is to make.  To name is to summon.  The word and the world are not two things passing messages across a gap.  They are one substance, briefly wearing two faces. Hundreds of coaching clients, scattered across the globe, chasing wildly different dreams.  Each with the same bedrock: anything is possible.  I used to treat that as a useful mindset, a good map to steer by.  Now, I’m no longer certain it’s only a map. If the oldest understanding of language is right – if word and thing really are one substance – then what we speak over our own lives may not be describing the territory at all. It may be drawing it. That thread quietly changes everything – how a person reads Scripture, how they pray, how they speak about themselves in the private interior of their being.  The Bible wasn’t intended to be read as a map of a faraway land you might visit after life.  Read the way it was built to be read, it claims to be territory itself – living ground that forms under the feet of the person willing to walk it.  What does this mean? The words we use to describe our experience of life become our experience of life. In closing, allow me a moment of honesty.  You could rightly say that my book, Resurrection: Breathing with God is another map – that I am just one more person handing you his sketch and insisting it’s better than the one you’ve got.  It’s a fair charge. In response, one of the biggest

My daughter and I met in Toronto back in November 2024.  It was my second time seeing Taylor Swift in concert – I officially considered myself a “Swiftie.” Toronto was all-Taylor, all the time.  From the airport to the train into the city to every shop and restaurant, her music was everywhere.  The day of the concert, we headed to the aquarium.  Yes, even Toronto’s aquatic residents were being treated to the enchanting melodies of the Eras Tour.  As we left to head back to our Airbnb to relax before the show, the carefree vibe of the day was interrupted by a well-meaning young man standing on the side of the walkway. “Jesus died for your sins,” He offered.  People groaned.  My daughter was one of them. People say His name all the time as an exclamation and don’t give it a second thought.  Say it in the context of the biblical narrative outside of church?  It feels disorienting. Mention it in a way that makes people feel guilty?  You’re going to get groans. Up until the pandemic, I hadn’t spent any meaningful time reading the Bible.  When I was younger, I made a half-hearted attempt to go cover-to-cover – I might have made it through the book of Genesis. That’s a truth many people won’t say out loud – they own a Bible.  They believe, more or less, that it matters.  And they have never actually read it – not really.  Not the way you read something you’re trying to understand.  Too often, verses are dispensed like items from a menu. They hear pieces of it at weddings and funerals or see references to it at sporting events.  Maybe like me, they’ve absorbed a few stories in childhood or even gotten a running start at Genesis before the genealogies wore them down. So as well-intentioned as the young man was, he was sharing a message with people who had no framework to receive it.  The words arrived, but there was no story.  It’s like walking into a film two hours in and being told the ending is the most important part.  Of course it feels disorienting. Nearly every great religion carries two things at once.  The first is a robust and structured moral foundation – a way of ordering life, telling the truth, treating your neighbor with dignity.  The second, particularly in Christianity’s case, is harder to name.  It’s a spiritual core, an invitation into transformation, an encounter with something larger than yourself that changes who you are from the inside out. Somewhere along the way, a great deal of Christianity got these two backwards. The spiritual core quietly receded, and the stone tablets of morality moved to the forefront.  The message of transformation was replaced into a transaction – sin, pay a price, learn to behave.  When we strip away the larger story of transformation, the truth of what that young man offered is what’s left: a verdict without a relationship.  People getting the bill without ever having been invited to the meal. That’s what I experienced in the collective groan on that chilly Friday afternoon in November.  When someone leads with your misses, your body knows it’s being handed a bill.  What people were expressing had very little to do with Jesus, and everything to do with being made to feel guilty by a stranger who had skipped the entire story that gives what he said any meaning at all. If the Bible has ever felt like a foreign country to you, that disorientation is not a sign that something is wrong with you.  It’s a sign that you’ve been handed the conclusion without the narrative, the moral without the meaning.  All husk, no seed. Imagine trying to learn French by studying thirty minutes once a week.  You’d pick up a few phrases.  Maybe you can order coffee.  But you’re not dreaming in it.  You’re never catching a joke, and you’re definitely not feeling the language influence how you perceive the world. That is how most of us have approached the deepest book in human history – an hour on Sunday, a verse on a coffee mug, or a half-hearted attempt at Genesis.  We have been amateur sippers of something that asks to be fully drunk. I say this without an ounce of judgment, because I was the most amateur sipper of all.  For most of my life I assessed Christianity the way you might glance at a painting to decide whether it was hanging straight – from across the room, arms crossed, never close enough to notice the details of the painting itself. No one guilted me into believing.  I closed the distance.  I started reading – really reading – and the foreign country became a place I recognized.  The story beneath the story began to surface.  The spiritual core that all the moralizing had buried turned out to be alive and well, waiting to be found. If you’ve ever felt that disorientation – that sense that the Bible is speaking a language no one ever taught you – you’re not doing it wrong.  You’re standing too far from the painting.  You’ve got a single sentence, and not the whole story. In the weeks ahead, I’m going to invite you into a perspective on that story you’ve never considered.

As promised, I’m going to start dropping insights into my forthcoming book, Resurrection: Breathing With God.  Enjoy this first installment and stay tuned for more. 🙂   Recently, a friend of mine shared an experience she had in taking her three-year-old granddaughter to church.  During the service, the pastor railed from the pulpit about eternal damnation and the promise of fire and brimstone facing those who didn’t submit to God’s will. My friend winced at the effect the day’s sermon might have had on her granddaughter’s impressionable young mind. My next book, Resurrection: Breathing With God is for people who don’t go to church. Christianity is extraordinarily fragmented.  Today, depending on how one defines a denomination, variations number in the tens of thousands – divided over questions as basic as how a person is saved, what actually happens at the communion table, and whether hell lasts forever.  Each one is convinced that its message is the correct one.  Therein lies the challenge. What is that message? It’s a fair question, and a harder one to answer than it should be.  Ask a dozen people who grew up in church to name the heart of the Christian message, and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers.  Some might name John 3:16. Some name a destination in heaven, and the terrible place you go if you miss it.  Others go quiet, sensing the question deserves more than the answer they were handed, and they don’t have a better one to offer. The version many of us absorbed sounds a great deal like that sermon – behave, or else.  This version imagines a God who keeps careful accounts, someone who is more interested in your compliance than your transformation.  An irritable landlord with a temper, watching to see if you’ll slip. It empties pews.  It hardens hearts.  And it makes a grandmother wonder what kind of God she’s introducing her granddaughter to. I spent a good portion of my life at a polite distance from all of it.  Amidst a cocktail of guilt and shame, I was hedging my bets, all the while searching for something that I believed was outside of me.  God felt distant, and I never bothered to consider that my sense of that distance was a reflection of my own receptivity toward and expression of God’s love. So I kept my distance, the way you might keep clear of a conversation you were never invited into. What changed isn’t that someone finally won the argument.  No one did.  What changed is that I began reading for the story for myself – slowly, without a denomination whispering in my ear about what I was supposed to find.  What I found bore almost no resemblance to the fire-and-brimstone version I thought I’d left behind. Yes, there are references to that version, but as the message it is a complete distortion – something that grew louder and more anxious as our imaginations deepened and people wanted to use fear as an instrument of control.  The message was always there; the noise just got better at drowning it out. Underneath the noise is what can best be described as an invitation.  It isn’t a threat, or a ledger of debts you can never quite pay down.  This invitation comes with a strange, almost unbelievable promise about who you already are and what you were made for.  Once you actually see the promise, it reorganizes the entire story.  I suspect that’s what my friend already knew somewhere deep in her bones.  Some part of her recognized that what her granddaughter was hearing had the whole thing backwards. This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that my book has the answer that the tens of thousands of denominations missed.  I’m not going to insult your intelligence. Distilling a story that has shaped civilizations into something intimate does not come easily – and yet that is exactly what the story is intended to be; intimate. What I will say is that the central message turns out to be far better, far stranger, and far more personal than the one most of us were given – and that you don’t need to believe a single thing in advance to come and look at it for yourself. That’s the invitation of Resurrection: Breathing with God.  Come and look.  Bring your skepticism.  Bring your questions.  They’re welcome, and you’ll need them. This book is written for you if you walked away, if you never walked in, or if you’re still sitting in the pew on Sunday, wondering why something stirs in your heart even when the sermon doesn’t always land.  This book assumes that you’re curious enough to sit with the question that I began with: What is the message? I’ve come to think it’s the best news a human being can hear.  As I prepare to launch the book this Fall, I want to show you why – not by arguing you into a corner, but by walking you through a story you may think you already know and pointing out things that have been hidden in plain sight all along.  There is a promise that almost no one talks about, and I don’t say that lightly.  People have dismissed this promise with the mistaken belief that it applies only to the person who received it. There is a reason the Bible feels foreign when you open it, and that isn’t your fault.  What’s being offered is there the whole time, and it’s being offered to you specifically. For now, sit with the question that started this post.  Notice the answer that rises up in you and notice where it came from.  Was it a sermon?  A memory from childhood? I’ll be sharing more details on the book’s release soon!

  Happy Summer Solstice Eve – 2026! Ladies and gentlemen, Brad Krause is on a ROLL.  Here’s another outstanding post from him.   Thanks Brad! Next week, I’ll be providing more insights into my next book.  🙂 Busy parents juggling work and wellness, caregiving, and nonstop screens often hit a specific wall: the body feels tired, the mind feels foggy, and even “self-care” starts to feel like another task. Whimsy maxxing is a mental wellness practice that brings tiny doses of playfulness in adulthood back into everyday life, not to avoid problems, but to soften the stress response. Those small sparks can support burnout recovery by nudging dopamine activation and helping nervous system regulation feel more accessible in real time. Whimsy is a skill worth rebuilding. Why Whimsy Works (Even When You’re Tired) Whimsy maxxing is playful on purpose. It uses childlike imagination to shift your attention, signal safety, and give your system a quick emotional reset. Your nervous system control center responds to these cues, which can make calm feel more reachable. This is not about pretending life is easy. It is about giving your brain a small, repeatable reward so stress does not run the whole day. Because the brain’s reward system reinforces what helps you cope, tiny moments of delight can support steadier burnout prevention. Think of it like shaking a snow globe. The day is still the day, but your mind stops fixating on the same swirl of worries. You add one vivid detail, a silly voice, a tiny game, and your mood has somewhere else to land. With that foundation, a starter menu of playful daily habits becomes easy to try and repeat. Daily Whimsy Rituals That Stick These habits matter because consistency trains your brain to expect micro-joy, even on stressful days. Since habits are malleable, a small playful loop can become your reliable reset over time. Two-Minute “Silly Start” What it is: Begin your day with one goofy voice note or mirror pep talk. How often: Daily Why it helps: It flips you from pressure into play before inputs pile up. Pocket Wonder Hunt What it is: Collect three tiny “wow” details, like colors, shapes, or funny signs. How often: Daily Why it helps: It trains attention to find novelty instead of scanning for threats. Desk Toy Sprint What it is: Set a 60-second timer and fidget, doodle, or fold paper art. How often: 1 to 3 times daily Why it helps: Quick movement breaks can release tension and restart focus. Cue and Reward Swap What it is: Pair your usual stress cue with a deliberately and mindfully learned joy reward. How often: Per stress spike Why it helps: It rewires the moment your body expects a spiral. Weekly Whimsy Date What it is: Schedule 20 minutes for bubbles, cartoons, chalk, or a tiny craft. How often: Weekly Why it helps: Planning joy makes it more likely to happen when energy is low. Whimsy Maxxing Q&A for Stressful Days Q: What exactly is whimsy maxxing and how does it help reduce burnout? A: Whimsy maxxing is intentionally adding small, playful moments to your day to interrupt stress and refill emotional energy. It helps reduce burnout by giving your nervous system quick signals of safety and relief. Try a “minimum viable whimsy” rule: one tiny delight per day, even if it is only 30 seconds. Q: How can bringing playfulness and childlike joy into daily routines improve mental health? A: Playfulness lowers pressure and softens perfectionism, which can ease anxiety and mood dips. It also builds emotional flexibility, so hard moments feel less permanent. Pick one routine you already do and add a light twist, like a silly soundtrack while making coffee. Q: In what ways does whimsy maxxing influence the brain’s dopamine and reward systems? A: Novelty and humor can nudge dopamine, which supports motivation and helps you re-engage with tasks. The key is frequent, low-stakes rewards rather than big treats you cannot sustain. Aim for quick “wins” like a doodle break or a playful 10-breath reset. Q: Can whimsy maxxing help when feeling overwhelmed or stuck in life? A: Yes, because it creates a small sense of movement when everything feels heavy. A tiny playful action can shift your state enough to make the next step feel possible. When stuck, do one sensory micro-joy: stretch, splash cold water, or step outside and name three interesting colors. Q: How can I start incorporating whimsy maxxing if I struggle with structuring my daily activities? A: Keep it simple and external: choose one fixed anchor (waking up, lunch, or brushing teeth) and attach one playful cue to it. Use a visual prompt tool like a quick collage or image search board to spark ideas when your mind goes blank. You can even create tattoo designs with AI and treat it as another quick prompt option. Then repeat the same choice for a week before adding anything new. Small joy is not trivial; it is a daily skill you can practice. Your Daily Whimsy Maxxing Checklist This checklist turns “tiny delight” into a repeatable practice, so joy is easier to access even on low-energy days. Keep it simple and focus on fast signals of safety and rest-and-repair rather than big, perfect plans. ✔ Pick one daily anchor and attach a 30-second playful cue ✔ Set a “minimum viable whimsy” rule for tough days ✔ Add one novelty micro-break to restart motivation ✔ Use one sensory reset when overwhelmed ✔ Keep delights low-stakes and easy to repeat ✔ Track one joy moment in a single sentence nightly ✔ Repeat the same cue for seven days before upgrading Small steps count, and you just built a system for them. Turn Whimsy Maxxing Into a Daily Joy and Burnout Buffer When life runs on deadlines and obligations, it’s easy to treat joy like a luxury and wonder why burnout keeps creeping back. Whimsy maxxing offers a gentler mindset: embracing playfulness as a supportive self-care praChoose one tiny whimsy

Happy Summer!  Today’s post is coming to us from Brad Krause with some awesome insights on designing a resilient life.  As always, thanks Brad! Busy parents juggling work and caregiving, mid-career professionals, and solo earners often learn the hard way how quickly unexpected life disruptions can flip a normal week into chaos. A layoff, illness, or sudden change doesn’t just create financial emergencies; it can strain emotional resilience and expose logistical challenges that were easy to ignore when life was steady. The core tension is brutal and common: responsibility stays constant while certainty disappears, and general readers’ vulnerability can feel like a personal failure. Personal resilience is a skill that can be built on purpose. Understanding Resilience as a System Personal resilience is less about being tough and more about having supports that hold up under pressure. Instead of relying on motivation, you build structured resilience systems: simple financial frameworks, practiced emotional regulation techniques, and clear logistical organization. This shifts resilience from a personality trait to a design choice, even though research notes that resilience has double roots in psychology and broader systems. It matters because disruption is when your brain and calendar get noisy at the same time. Systems reduce decision fatigue, protect cash flow, and help you respond calmly when you would normally spiral. That steadiness comes from routines you can follow on your worst day, not your best. Think of it like a seatbelt, not a pep talk. You set it up before the crash, so it works automatically when you are shaken, tired, and short on time. With that foundation, predictable emergency cash flow becomes a practical next step. Use a Fixed-Payment Home Equity Loan as a Planned Cash Backstop When resilience is built into your finances ahead of time, you’re less likely to make desperate, expensive choices when life hits hard. For homeowners, a home equity loan can work as a pre-planned backstop that provides predictable, often lower-cost liquidity during a layoff or medical disruption. It allows you to borrow a lump sum of cash using your home’s equity as collateral, so you’re not scrambling to piece together funds at the worst possible moment. This kind of loan isn’t automatic, though. Common requirements include having enough equity in your home, good credit, stable income, and a debt-to-income ratio that meets the lender’s guidelines. If you need a home equity loan, it can help to review clear terms and eligibility expectations before you actually need the money. Build Your 3-Part Resilience System: Money, Mind, and Routines Resilience gets a lot easier when you stop relying on willpower and start relying on systems. Use these practical building blocks to create stability in your money, your emotions, and your day-to-day logistics. Define your “buffer ladder” (cash first, credit second): Start with a tiny cash cushion you can build fast, $250–$500 in a separate savings bucket, then climb to one month of core expenses. After that, decide what plannedbackstops you’ll use if the disruption is bigger than your cash, like a fixed-payment home equity loan you set up in advance so you’re not scrambling under stress. This ladder shrinks chaos because you know exactly what gets used, in what order, and what the monthly repayment would be. Create a “Bills-First” autopilot that protects your backstop: Pick 3–5 essential bills (housing, utilities, insurance, minimum debt payments) and automate them right after payday. Then run a weekly 10-minute “buffer check” to confirm your cash level and your next two due dates, especially if you’re planning around a fixed-payment backstop. The point is predictability: when life gets noisy, your baseline still runs. Use a 10-minute emotional reset you can do anywhere: When your body is revved up, your financial decisions get worse, so regulate first, then problem-solve. Schedule one short practice daily (morning or lunch) using breathing, a guided meditation, or a quiet sit; many people find 5 to 15 minutes is enough to steady attention and mood. Treat it like brushing your teeth: small, boring, and surprisingly powerful. Write a “When I’m spiraling” script (so future-you doesn’t improvise): On one note in your phone, list your top three stress signals (doom-scrolling, snapping, avoiding mail) and your first three moves (drink water, take a walk around the block, open the budget for 5 minutes). Add one sentence you’ll say to yourself, something simple and believable like “One small step counts today.” This is emotional regulation as a system: you reduce the time between trigger and recovery. Simplify your routines into two daily checklists: AM launch + PM reset: Keep each list to 5 items max. AM might be meds, quick tidy, check calendar, pack food, start laundry; PM might be dishes, set clothes out, 10-minute money/buffer check, charge devices, set tomorrow’s top 1–3 tasks. Life system simplification works because fewer decisions means fewer failure points when you’re tired. Run a weekly “resilience rehearsal” (15 minutes, same day every week): Pick one small disruption to practice: a $100 car expense, a surprise meeting, a sick day. Ask: What breaks first, cash flow, mood, or schedule, and what’s my backup plan? This resilience-building exercise turns “I hope I can handle it” into practical resilience examples you’ve already tested. Resilient Life Systems: Questions People Ask Q: What if I’m starting from zero and feel behind? A: You are not broken, you are just overloaded. Start with one tiny “win” that proves your system works: open a separate savings bucket and put in $10 today. Keep the goal embarrassingly small for two weeks, then increase by a dollar or two. Q: How much emergency money should I save before I can breathe? A: Aim for a small starter cushion first, then build upward in steps. A fast first target is $250 to $500, because it covers many common surprises without derailing everything. Once that exists, you can work toward one month of core expenses. Q: Why focus on routines when my problem is money? A: Because stability is not only about the size of your

  With thanks to Brad Krause as this week’s guest blogger, enjoy! Authors with stalled careers often recognize the same uneasy pattern: plenty of effort, fewer yeses, and a growing sense that the work isn’t moving the needle. That’s a career plateau in writing, and it usually shows up alongside creative motivation challenges like second-guessing ideas, avoiding the page, or pushing harder without feeling any clearer. The turning point isn’t more grit; it’s writing career revitalization that treats the career as something that can be reset and reintroduced with intention. This is about author professional development that brings momentum back. Create 3 Quick Videos to Reintroduce Your Author Brand Once you’ve named the plateau you’re on, a fast way to shake loose new attention is to show up on screen again, without needing a full production setup. AI-generated video tools can help you create compelling clips that act like a modern video resume: a quick book trailer to spotlight your latest work, a short author pitch that makes your voice and focus instantly clear, and a personal-story or thought-leadership clip that reminds people why you write and what you stand for. With something like Adobe Firefly’s AI video generator, you can simply enter a descriptive text prompt and the tool will generate a customized video clip. Follow a 6-Part Reset Plan for Momentum This Month When your writing life feels stuck, you don’t need a personality transplant, you need a reset you can actually schedule. Use this six-part plan for the next 30 days to rebuild momentum without burning yourself out. Pick one “North Star” goal (and make it measurable): Choose a single outcome for the month: draft 10,000 words, revise 3 chapters, query 8 agents, or sell 20 signed copies. Then break it into a weekly target and a daily “minimum” (even 200 words counts). This works because you stop renegotiating your priorities every morning, and you can win small every day. Build a 20-minute “skill snack” routine: Set a timer three times a week for one focused skill: writing stronger openings, dialogue, pacing, or scene goals. Do one tiny exercise (rewrite the first paragraph of a favorite chapter; cut 10% of a scene; write a two-page dialogue-only scene). Skill improves fastest when practice is short, specific, and repeated, especially when you’re a beginner. Use your 3 quick videos as a weekly visibility habit: If you made a short author pitch, a personal-story clip, and a simple book teaser, schedule them across the month, one per week, then reuse the best-performing one at the end. Pair each post with one clear invitation: “Want the first chapter?” or “Reply with your favorite trope.” Consistent, low-pressure posting keeps your author brand “warm” while you’re rebuilding writing progress. Do one networking “reach-out” every Tuesday: Keep it simple: one genuine message to a librarian, local bookstore staff member, book blogger, writing group organizer, or another author in your genre. Use a tiny script: “I loved your post about ___. I write ___. Would you be open to swapping newsletters/doing a short Q&A/letting me know your event guidelines?” This works because networking isn’t a talent, it’s a repeatable contact habit. Install burnout guardrails before you ramp up: Choose two non-negotiables for the month: a hard stop time (example: no writing after 9 p.m.) and one recovery block (example: Saturday is “no drafting,” only reading/walking). Track your energy for a week, if you’re dragging, reduce your daily minimum rather than quitting entirely. Burnout management in writing is about sustainable pacing, not heroic sprints. Run a “tiny experiment” to make writing fun again (and quiet self-doubt): Once a week, do a low-stakes creative experiment: write a scene from the villain’s POV, change tense, add a new setting, or write a 500-word micro-story tied to your book world. End each experiment by saving one sentence you love in a “proof folder.” Play breaks plateaus, and collecting proof gives you a practical defense against self-doubt on the days your brain insists you’re “not good enough.” Writing Plateau Q&A Authors Actually Ask Q: What if my confidence is so low I can’t tell what’s “good” anymore? A: Treat confidence like a meter, not a verdict. Pick one scene and do a single objective check, like clarity of action or strength of the first paragraph, then revise only that. If you’re too close to the draft, read aloud, discover inconsistenciesand fix what sounds confusing, not what feels “bad.” Q: How can I restart when I only have 20 minutes a day? A: Choose a tiny, repeatable task that fits inside the time, like 200 words, one paragraph edit, or five query tweaks. Keep a running list of “next micro-step” options so you never waste your session deciding. Consistency beats intensity when life is crowded. Q: How do I know which career stall solution fits me right now? A: Match the fix to the symptom: low output needs a minimum writing habit, messy drafts need one skill focus, low sales need a simple visibility routine, and isolation needs one weekly reach-out. Try one lever for two weeks, then assess with one metric you can track. Q: Can I focus on visibility if my book isn’t perfect yet? A: Yes, if the goal is connection, not hype. Share process, themes, or a short excerpt and invite responses, while you keep drafting or revising quietly. Visibility works best as a gentle drip, not a launch-only sprint. Q: When should I take a break instead of pushing through? A: If you’re skipping sleep, resenting the work, or your word counts keep dropping, that is a data point, not a failure. Shorten the workload, protect recovery time, and return with one small task you can finish in a single sitting. Build Business Basics to Stabilize Your Writing Income One longer-term way to boost your skills, and expand your career options, is earning a degree that strengthens how you plan, organize, and follow through on the work behind your writing. Because an online degree is

  I remember when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t a guy who actually came down the chimney. If I’m being honest, I’d known about it for a while – I just hadn’t processed it.  As the holiday season approached, my older brother Larry and I became professional snoops.  Whenever our parents left us alone, or in the brief window between our getting home from school and their getting home from work, we went exploring. We dug into in their closets and looked under their bed, our eyes widened by the unwrapped treasures we’ve found.  We never saw it as “ruining the surprise”…we just wanted a sneak-peak at the stuff that would be ours on Christmas Day.  When that glorious day arrived, it never occurred to me to keep track of what presents were labeled “From Santa” and which ones came from mom and dad…I was too busy reveling in the delight our snooping had provided. One Christmas…I was six or seven…we were making the four-hour drive from Hyattsville, Maryland to visit my mom’s family just outside of Pittsburgh.  Our parents asked us if we wanted the presents (they were all wrapped) in the backseat.  That’s like asking a kid if they want another piece of cake. With the presents triumphantly placed between us, it took all of thirty seconds to see the first present marked “From Santa.”  That was it.  The gig was up.  I was inconsolable for the first hour of the drive. What happened? My mind had been presented with new information.  My body was still living with the belief that Santa was real.  The grief I experienced was the translation of that new belief into my body. I appreciate that people are free to believe what they want.  I honor that.  And, if you are weighing the traditions honestly, weigh this: among all the world’s religions, only one stakes its entire claim on a dateable, embodied, witnessed conquest of the one enemy that has never lost.  Every other belief system offers wisdom about death.  Only one offers victory over it. Neuroscientists estimate that by the time most people reach adulthood, approximately 95% of who they are is not a conscious choice.  It is a set of memorized emotional programs running automatically beneath the threshold of awareness – patterns laid down through years of repetition until the body learned to run them without consulting the mind at all. Remember the first time you drove a car?  You were conscious of everything: hands, mirrors, pedals, speed, distance.  Ten years later, likely with hundreds and perhaps even thousands of hours of driving under your belt, you arrive at your destination without giving the drive itself much thought.  The body has taken over.  Through repetition, it learned to do something the mind once had to manage consciously.  In sports, we call this muscle-memory. This is how beliefs are actually formed.  It’s not the compelling argument, or the persuasive paragraph.  Even a genuinely spiritual experience won’t do the trick, although it can be a great “nudge.”  Outside of a traumatic event, where the body is flooded with cortisol and adrenalin in an instant, beliefs are formed the way driving is learned – through repetition, time, and embodied experience, until the pattern is deeper than the thought. When this happens, the body becomes the mind.  The body is the accumulated, emotional history of everything you have repeatedly felt, done, and returned to.  Every thought you think releases a cascade of neuropeptides, chemical messengers that carry the emotional signature of that thought to every cell in your body.  Over time, the body becomes a living record of what it has been told. So, what does this have to do with faith? Growing up in a church-going family, the goal of Christian life seemed to me to be oriented to intellectual assent.  This meant believing the right things about God, staying in the lanes provided by the Ten Commandments, and giving thanks.  The implicit assumption was that if you got the beliefs right in your head, transformation would follow. Here’s the catch – the New Testament isn’t about intellectual assent.  It’s about transformation.  Paul writes of being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  The Greek word is metamorphoo – the same root as metamorphosis.  The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by learning new things about butterflies.  Its entire structure reorganizes. When the pandemic began, I experienced a series of events that led me to one conclusion – God is real.  These “nudges” were more than my nervous system could handle.  After a decades-long journey searching for something, wracked with doubt, I began processing that truth.  Over the next few years, I struggled in reconciling it into my body.  My mind kept renewing.  My body experienced the transformation…and still is. What I have come to realize and embody over the past few years is this – the thing that I have been most afraid of has already been walked through, from the inside, by someone who came back. That is the essence of faith. The story of Jesus is deserving of all the gratitude, awe, and reverence His story inspires.  To quote Dr. Jordan Peterson, it is the archetypal Hero’s Journey – the story that can’t be topped. The purpose of Jesus’ story is emulation. To believe in His story is wonderful.  The real question is: where in your body does His story not yet live – and are you willing to do what it takes to get it there?

  Anyone who spends anytime with me knows I love comic books. I hit my stride with them when my family lived on the island of Okinawa, Japan back when the earth was still cooling and the dinosaurs had recently gone extinct.  It was 1979. We had access to just one American television channel and, after school, the only thing on was General Hospital.  Yes, if you’re old enough to remember the Quartermain’s, I know all about Luke and Laura.  My best friend Jason and I alternated between that and watching Star Wars, which he had on BetaMax (ask your parents).  Otherwise, we read comics – Jason was big into Spiderman.  I loved the X-Men. Superhero stories were spectacular and fueled my imagination.  Before Hugh Jackman ever drew his claws as Wolverine on the big screen, I was captivated by the storytelling that came out once a month, when a new issue of the Uncanny X-Men was released. When superhero movies first came out, the stories and special effects were reflective of the times.  Christopher Reeve’s Superman was dazzling, and he epitomized the Boy Scout Man of Steel revealed in the comics.  The stories were campy, and almost every movie was a solo film.  Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy changed things tonally, as the films gave a more serious consideration for how a vigilante like that might be experienced in the real world. The X-Men films were good, but they lived in their own world, without the likes of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, or Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. By the time the Avengers came onto the scene fifteen years ago, it was spectacular.  Things were shifting. The fact that Marvel was bringing heroes and worlds together was electrifying.  I feel no shame in admitting a tear came to my eye the first time Captain America and Iron Man shared screen time. Psychologists say life is best understood as a story. Story is the primary way humans create meaning, coherence, and identity out of seemingly random events. Through narratives, people organize experiences, link past, present, and future, and gain agency over their personal growth. Our stories are uniquely ours; no one has had your life experiences, and your skills, talents, and quirks make you distinctly “you.” This leads to a question…what story are you in? Story is how every tradition orients its people.  Like it or not, the world has been built on stories involving some kind of Creator.  To be sure, the story that we’re all here because of cosmic chance has gained popularity in recent years, as has a more “customizable” form of spirituality where people are free to believe what they want. This is easy enough to understand, given that so much of monotheism has emphasized a God who is external.  And yet, huge swaths of the planet have been shaped by the three monotheistic religions. Western civilization was founded on Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian values.  The Jewish Torah gives law and covenant – God speaking to humanity, shaping a people through sacred obligation.  The Quran gives recitation and submission – God speaking through a prophet; the divine word descending into human language.  The Bhagavad Gita gives divine counsel – God speaking alongside humanity in its moment of deepest crisis and paralysis. And then there’s the Christian Bible. The Gospel makes a significantly different claim.  In the narrative of Jesus, God enters the human story.  God takes on a body, a name, and belongs to a family.  God is a carpenter.  God experiences hunger, rejection, grief, and death.  Jesus walks the path from inside the human condition – fully God and fully human – all the way through to its darkest end and out the other side. This is what makes the Bible story unique among the world’s great narratives: it is not primarily a story about what God requires of you.  It’s a story about what God became for you – and what that becoming makes possible in you. For most of my life, the story I was in involved dying and then learning if I’d lived a good enough life to make it into heaven.  I didn’t go to church, didn’t talk much to God…I didn’t like my odds.  To be clear, much of my life had been focused on God…but I’d been searching for something – a bridge of sorts.  I had no idea where I would find it, when I would recognize it.   Through thick and thin, I believed with all my heart it was out there. It sounds dramatic to call it a quest and by most standards, my life was completely unsensational.  If value is measured in relationships, professional or financial success, I was woefully average. And then, in the first month of the pandemic, a strange thing happened. I saw what I’d spent my entire life looking for. I saw the “compelling why” that was going to lead me into the Bible story so I could figure out how to get out of the Bible story.  Growing up with the idea, the belief, that God is outside you…well, that makes it extremely difficult to participate in Jesus’ story. I realized, as much as I had observed Easter in the past, and intellectually understood the idea behind the Resurrection, I wasn’t living from inside the truth of His story. It is a far more daunting prospect to reconcile the opposing idea – that God is within you. In the weeks ahead, I’ll share more updates about my forthcoming book, Resurrection: Breathing with God due out this summer.  I’ll also be peeling back the curtain on the accompany course, Resurrection: Crowned with Christ. The story of Jesus is the promise of everlasting life. What story are you in?

Hi everyone! As many of you know, I’ve been pouring my heart into a project called Resurrection: Breathing with God. At its heart, it’s about waking up what’s already inside of you. I’ve just launched my Publishizer campaign to get this into the hands of those who need it most. If you feel moved to support or just share the link, it would mean the world to me. You can see the cover and the story here: https://publishizer.com/resurrection/ Grateful for your love and support! David Here is a sneak peek into the book’s Introduction: INTRODUCTION: The Elephant in the Church               This book is for people who don’t go to church, and this book is about resurrection.             This is not a “Bible for Dummies” translation of the Good Book; that book has already been published.  Nor is it an attempt to validate the Bible as a history textbook; for many, a story that lacks forensic exactness loses its authority.  Most importantly, this is not a defense of the historical Jesus.  I am not interested in arguing that the resurrection happened; I am interested in the implications of its truth.             There is an assumption that the reader has a general awareness of the Bible story.  In the pages ahead, we will explore an uncommon perspective of its narrative.  We do so with a very specific intent. This book is intended to resolve the Bible story by fulfilling what is its most overlooked and least understood promise.  Its omission in modern theology no doubt stems from the fact that, at first glance, this promise appears to apply to just one person.  This character’s story persists across the entirety of the Bible and is married to Jesus’ story in an unbreakable bond.  God keeps all His promises. To start with, I will stay in the convention of modern Christianity, in that I will refer to God as He…in my case, the “He” I am referring to is Jesus.  I will not however, stay in this convention long. What follows is the perspective that the Bible is a consciously engineered, covenantal narrative designed to carry consciousness across collapse, exile, and resurrection. This perspective is non-denominational, intending instead to strike at the story’s universal appeal at evolving our collective understanding of what it means to awaken. In these pages, I have attempted to be as honest as I am curious. This journey requires a willingness to stand in the tension between the majestic scope of the Divine and the raw vulnerability of being human.  As Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is the new courage.”  To explore the architecture of the soul, one must be willing to walk through its most hollow spaces.             It is not quite fair to say that I abandoned my faith over the course of my life although, if attendance at church is to serve as the benchmark by which faith is measured, I do not receive a passing grade.  It wasn’t that I abandoned my faith.             It was that I was looking for it in the smallest possible window. My life became a quest at an early age.  As a child of 4 or 5, when we don’t question the presence of “imaginary friends” capable of holding discreet conversations with us from the unseen realm of our interior, Jesus informed me that a woman would lead me back to God.             I received this message with delight, wonder, and a blossoming sense of anticipation.             Church was a regular part of weekly life in my family.  Sunday School too, for a while.  My drift away from organized religion began in high school, matured in college, and settled in as I became a Marine Corps officer.  I still believed but felt disconnected from the passivity of sitting in the pews on Sundays.   I didn’t know how to be an active participant in the story of Jesus.  And, at some unspoken level of my psyche, I didn’t believe I was going to find this woman in a church.             I stopped reading the Bible because I couldn’t understand it and, in general, had difficulty focusing.  My grades in school and my life reflected the fact that my attention was scattered.  This was likely the result of a blow to the back of my head I received when, in a fit of rage, my best friend threw a hammer, knocking me unconscious.  The incident occurred in 1975 and resulted in an out-of-body experience, where I watched his oldest brother carry my limp body to their house.  I was six.  I did not confront the memory again until the pandemic forced me to reconcile its implications in my life.             As I grew older, something felt “off” about going to church.             It was something I could never quite place a finger on.  Only recently did I come to fully appreciate the dilemma I experienced in what I expected from attending church services. Maps and Territories             In a culture trained to skim, sample, and scroll, we often encounter Scripture in fragments.  A verse here, a sermon there.  This book is not written against the church, nor against those who love it.  It is written against the subtle way righteousness can become a shield against transformation. When we treat the text as a menu, we risk consuming fragments and never encountering the story that is meant to consume us.  It’s not because the verses, dished out as portions, are untrue, but because the story they belong to is larger than any single passage can hold on its own. The Bible is a vast and demanding journey.  Its writing is sprawled across centuries.  It repeatedly tells the truth about human failure with unsettling honesty, and it speaks the truth of divine faithfulness with even greater depth.  For many, it is easier to rest in the familiar comfort of the 23rd Psalm than to descend with David in the silence of Sheol, yet only in the wholeness of his descent can we

  I am excited to share that my next book, Resurrection: Breathing with God is nearing completion. If you’re unfamiliar with the symbol on the cover, that is the Messianic Seal of Jerusalem. This book makes the case that the highest aspiration of any spiritual or religious journey is co-heirship with Christ.  In it, we explore what’s been lost in translation as the Bible evolved from Hebrew to Greek to Latin and eventually English; language plays a significant role in shaping perception.  We uncover the life-changing impact the alphabet had on the development of the human brain, and how the Bible is less a record of historical events and more of a journey of consciousness.  We dive into the wedding motif that unites the Old Testament and New, and examine what role neuroscience plays in faith.  Critically, we explore the promise made to King David, the cost he bears in breaching the covenant, and how the promise made to him is democratized for everyone. I invite you to participate in the book’s creation.  Subscribe to the campaign, and review the different options to support the book’s publication. In the coming weeks, I’ll share updates on the writing process as well as excerpts from the manuscript. https://publishizer.com/resurrection/ Thank you for your support! David