A Short Guide to Being a Good Friend in a Crisis

Your friend is in a really hard place. It could be heartbreak, a cancer diagnosis, a betrayal, a child is sick, a parent is dying, a legal mess, or they made a painful mistake. Whatever the reason, it is causing deep suffering.

What do you do?

When I received a terminal diagnosis, my family and friends pulled me through the unimaginable. Every person’s journey is different, but what all crises have in common is that they are made lighter, together.

7 Steps to Overcome Cultural Perfectionism

We are born with only two fears: the fear of falling and of loud noises. As we grow, our fears grow too. We worry about what we might lose, instead of what we might gain. We don’t think of ourselves as perfectionists, but we’re scared to try things that don’t guarantee us a positive outcome. As Brené Brown writes in Dare to Lead, “Healthy striving is self-focused. How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused: What will people think? Perfectionism is a hustle.” The good news is that once we identify our kind of perfectionism, and see it as a lousy shield between us and the world, we can drop it. It helps to remember that our innate selves are brave. When we take risks, we actually start to feel more like ourselves.

How to Thrive in a Crisis

When a huge storm of change and uncertainty approaches, it’s almost impossible to know how to respond. If we are still standing, call it a success. But then what? We can resist the challenge before us or we can accept it and change the only thing in our control: our response. Once we see the problem before us as necessary, uncomfortable, but also potentially transformative, the way forward becomes clear. We don’t have to know what to do before we begin. We only have to be open and curious.

6 Steps to Reclaim Your Voice

With the diagnosis, I worried, When will I lose my voice? But the real question became, When did I let it go? We unapologetically express ourselves when we are really young. Then we start lying. We lie to hide our struggles or we lie to please others. We lie when we pretend to be someone we are not. We lie when we curate our lives on social media.

Gradually, by constantly lying, or at least not telling our inner truth, we lose touch with who we are. Have you ever held back in a discussion, not saying what you strongly felt? If you share that thing with just one person, even now, you’ll feel better. You’ll feel more you.