If you had travelled through Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, Canada’s busiest airport, in the last couple of years, you may not know that its passenger satisfaction scores were hopelessly low just years before. Pearson was among the bottom 10% of any large airports in North America and among those with…

Mindfulness has been found to be one of the key elements to cultivating self-compassion¹. Over the last three decades, mindfulness has become mainstream in Western culture, been widely adopted in numerous therapeutic modalities, and supported by scientific evidence². Some people think that they are “not good at” mindfulness because they…

Imagine the last time you screwed up something and you felt ashamed of yourself. Did you move on to fixing the situation, or accepting it shortly, or did the incident trigger a bout of self-loathing and deep regret? Do you sometimes compare yourself to others and wish you had their…

In my last article, What We’ve Got Wrong About Self-Compassion, I wrote about how self-compassion can help us survive and thrive during difficult times and how our misunderstanding of self-compassion often prevents us from practicing it. How do we cultivate self-compassion? It is more than going to the spa or…

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum¹. Rather than disguising an object’s brokenness and the repair process, kintsugi embraces the beauty of its imperfection by highlighting its fault lines with beautiful veins of gold, as seen in the photo above. …

Celine is one of my best friends from college and probably one of the happiest, most contented people I know. She finds tremendous joy in spending time with her husband, cooking tasty meals for her loved ones, maintaining her exercise routine, and is perfectly happy with staying where she is…

Your best friend is going to grad school, and you feel that you should too, but you don’t know what to study. You don’t feel fulfilled in your job, but don’t know where to go next for a change. You’ve considered taking a few years off to stay home with…

Career reinvention can be hard if you are a curious person with many interests. It can be worse if you have a diverse background and can likely excel in quite a few of the paths that interest you as long as you put in the hard work, deliberate practice and…

Mind mapping is an effective way to facilitate ideation, note taking and project planning. It generally starts with a simple idea or topic in the centre and the user would put ideas related, or inspired by the central idea around it, and connect all the ideas with lines. The user…