Relationships can get complicated. And communication fumbles can further complicate them. I know. I’ve complicated mine more times than I want to admit. But the good news is that effective, even intimate, communication can be learned, broken relationships healed, happiness returned and love restored.

To attack corporate greed while living in your own world of personal greed is to throw stones at a giant for doing on a large scale what you’re doing on a smaller one. The difference is in degree, not kind. First, remove yourself from the problem to have the credibility to call others to action.

Honesty, of the “my-word-is-my-bond” variety, seems to be an endangered species. But it shouldn’t be. It should be protected more actively than any species on the brink of extinction. Here’s why…

Would you consider yourself a loyal friend? If so, to what are you loyal? To the friendship? Or to the person you are friends with? Do you see the difference?

Circumstances less often create the person as they reveal who we already are. Certainly, they help shape us over time. But at any particular moment, trying circumstances show us a truer mirror than we may want to peer into. This is why…

If we protect our computer systems with spam filters and virus protection and firewalls and the like, why do we so quickly download such awful garbage into the most important memory storage system we will ever own?

Too often, our words get drowned in the noise of our own behavior. We tell others to live one way and yet fall woefully short ourselves. This is inevitable because we are all imperfect beings. The problem is less our inconsistency and more our lack of humility.

The truth of the matter is that the mind records all it experiences. Add sharp emotion to the experience, and you have a recipe for an elephant-like memory of the nitty gritty. So can forgetting the acts of others against us truly be forgotten? Not likely. So what could the admonition to forgive and forget really mean then?

It’s my birthday today and was going to post another installment of “Things you don’t know about me” when I decided on a whim to share my personal happiness story with you instead. Here are 22 reasons I’m happy.

It’s been said that courage is the point at which all other virtues are tested. And indeed, there are not many virtues that will not be tested at some point and in some way. Our patience, trust, kindness, compassion, perseverance, and other personal virtues will hit that wall, push up against that moment, that set of conditions or that person who will push you to the edge.

Guilt is a tool or mechanism that a well-working conscience uses to communicate to the heart. When we don’t live up to our values, our hearts are pricked with guilt, shame and regret. But we’re not supposed to stay there, letting the guilt settle in and take up residency. It’s a warning signal in the dark of our choices that sends the message to course correct.

Does your moral compass point true north? Or is it a little askew? And how would you know? There are, of course, people now and through history who thought they were doing right when everyone else knew otherwise. So how do you know where your moral compass is pointing?

Have you heard of the parable of the long spoons? It goes something like this: A man was once taken on a tour of hell and was surprised by what he saw …

Martin Luther King led a movement not merely by virtue of his character or charisma, but because he was able to get others to catch the vision he regularly articulated. He was thereby able to convince the nation that his dream was not only worth fighting for, but was the only dream worthy of having.

Ideas are powerful things that can take on a life of their own, digging like roots deep into our hearts and souls and branching out into the circumstances of our lives as we nourish and tend to the germinating seed of thought. Come see my top 10 favorite ideas captured in picture quotes, ready for bite-sized consumption!

It’s been said that when we assume, we make an “ass” out of “u” and “me” (ass+u+me). But are we to assume nothing in life? I believe some assumptions are helpful, even essential to a happy life. Come see if you agree with these seven assumptions I make every single day.

“Who you want to be is irrelevant to who you are if who you daily choose to be is different than who you wish you were.” Who we are and who we believe we should be are not always one and the same. Your Ideal You is likely somewhat higher than your Actual You. And so we read posts like this one looking for inspiration to nudge us down that path. Come see three areas we can improve on to become better people.

There are 2 complementary ways to learn how to do anything, whether it’s driving, playing a sport, a musical instrument, starting a business or becoming happy. One way is to learn what to do and how to do it. The other is to learn what not to do and how to avoid it. This is a sort of anti-map to happiness. A map that identify the potholes and detours and debris along the path to a happier life.

Why do we take the whole of humanity and carve them up into distinct categories of subdivided, semi-related, subgroups, sorted and classified as separate clusters of generalized identities, all tagged and marked for racial and lingual and socioeconomic distinction, subsectioned into demarcated and clearly separated differences? Why not think of others the way my son does?

Does happiness truly matter? Does your happiness really make a difference? I contend it does. As a matter of fact, there is little in life more important than how happy you are. I would even add that happiness is the very object and design of your existence. This is not as far-fetched as you may think. See why.