School of Positive Transformation

10/14/2026

If you are in my line of work, then you frequently listen to people you care about. It might be a client, a student, a friend on the phone, or your own child. And perhaps somewhere behind your kind heart and your nodding, a thought slips in: I'm so tired.

Almost right away, a second feeling shows up to punish the first. That feeling is shame. What kind of teacher, coach, parent, or friend thinks that?

It usually happens to me at the end of the day. We tuck our kids into bed, and it’s probably the best time of the day for me. Reading books together while feeling my kids’ bodies close to mine, smelling their fresh shampoo, and noticing the weight of their head on my chest. And then, somewhere around the 4th request for “just another chapter daddy“ it hits me: deep exhaustion. I am beyond tired. It triggers impatience and frustration. That’s it, I've been pushed beyond my edge.

In 1949, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott published a paper with a startling title: "Hate in the Counter-Transference." He wrote that therapists will sometimes have strong negative feelings toward the people they treat. Even more boldly, he said mothers have them too, toward babies they deeply love. He saw these feelings as part of any real relationship, and he located the danger in pretending they aren't there. A feeling we can't admit doesn't disappear. It leaks out as a sigh, a clipped answer, or a small pulling back of warmth that the other person can sense even when we can't.

So I suggest a different relationship with these moments: When irritation or boredom shows up, pause and ask yourself: What is this feeling pointing to?

Sometimes it points to a limit I've crossed without noticing. Sometimes I've been carrying something the other person could carry themselves. Sometimes I'm simply depleted, and the kindest thing for everyone is to disengage and rest. And sometimes boredom tells me the conversation has been going in circles and something truer needs to be said.

None of this means acting on the feeling. It means making room for it.

Contemplative traditions often describe compassion as a circle wide enough to include the person offering it.

So the next time a "wrong" feeling arrives while you're helping, you don't have to banish it or confess it. You can quietly say to yourself, Ah, this too. Then keep listening (or choose to let go of the interaction), a little more honestly than before.

Do moments like this show up in your life?

10/14/2026

Hear from our student, Sarah Morphew, about her experience with our ACIC training! 💛 She loved the flexibility of learning online at her own pace, allowing her to fit her studies around her daily life. She also enjoyed learning from our school and exploring different perspectives, experiences, and insights shared by our coaches along the way. 🌿

Every learning journey is unique, and it’s lovely to hear how our students make the most of their experience. 😊 What do you enjoy most about learning something new?

10/13/2026

Mindfulness looks different for everyone. ✨ Find the practices that move you, calm your mind, and work best for you. 🧘‍♀️💛

Explore your mindfulness journey with us today! 🌿

10/12/2026

Every great coaching journey starts with a first step! Discover how Carolyn Freyer started her coaching practice and turned her passion for helping others into meaningful work. 💛

09/23/2026

During the last five years of her life, every visit with my grandmother
was an internal goodbye ceremony for me. I vividly remember standing at the bottom of the stairs as she waved at me, while I savored her and the
feeling of her hug. I can still close my eyes and relive that moment.

I knew it might be the last visit, so I looked at her more carefully. I smelled her unique grandma smell (I swear I can still smell it in my memory). I tried to absorb every detail that would normally disappear without my noticing. I left her home carrying the sadness of losing her, even though she was still alive. And only now I realize how helpful it has been for my mental health.

We tend to imagine goodbye as one definitive moment: the final conversation, the last embrace, the closing of a door. But emotionally, goodbye is rarely a single event. It often begins long before someone leaves and continues long after they are gone.

In Psychology, there is a name for the strange experience of grieving someone who is still here: Anticipatory Grief. You feel grateful for their presence, while another part of you is already mourning their absence. You hold them, yet imagine the time when you will no longer be able to hold them.

Anticipatory grief asks the heart to perform an impossible task: to keep someone close while slowly preparing to release them.

Perhaps, during those visits, some part of me believed that if I paid enough attention, I could preserve my grandmother. If I said goodbye properly, I might have fewer regrets. If I began grieving early, perhaps the final loss would hurt less.

But love cannot be paid for in advance. Grieving someone before they die does not exempt us from grieving after their death.

These internal goodbyes also carry a danger. We can become so occupied with preserving a moment that we stop inhabiting it. The visit becomes a future memory before it has finished being a present experience. There is a delicate difference between knowing that someone will be gone and treating them as though they are already gone.

A healthy goodbye does something different. It does not ask us to leave the relationship early. It returns us more fully to the person who is still here.
Awareness of limited time can remind us to listen with greater patience, ask the questions we have postponed, express our gratitude, and notice the ordinary details of someone’s presence. It encourages us to stop waiting for a “better time” to say what matters.

This reminds me of the idea of positive mortality (I'll write about it some other time), where we embrace our mortality so we can live fully.

I do not know whether those internal ceremonies prepared me to lose my grandmother. I suspect that nothing could have prepared me. But they taught me to notice her more carefully.

Years later, I can close my eyes and find myself standing at the bottom of those stairs again. She is still there, waving.

09/09/2026

Parents, this one is for you - you might not know it was the last time...

Psychology Today

Personal Perspective: The ordinary moments with your child that you believe will happen again are often the ones you miss most. Learn how to notice them now.

09/09/2026

We have 3 kids, and our little one is six. Yesterday I saw him playing with Lego by himself while narrating the game out loud – voicing the different characters. He was so absorbed in the game; it was joyful to watch. My other two children are older – they have left this way of playing behind - and I suddenly realized something: this might have been the last time I saw one of my children play in this way.

When something ends with a formal ceremony, we clearly recognize the ending. High school graduation is a good example: formally marking the end of childhood and the beginning of a new stage in life. The same applies to retirement ceremonies and funerals, they formally acknowledge that something significant has ended.

But most of life’s endings arrive unannounced. Silent.

How was I supposed to know last month that it was the last time my child asked me to carry him in my arms? This is a bittersweet ending – my kids are growing up, which is beautiful, and at the same time many things that I loved are ending. And I need to let go, whether I want it or not.

The last time your child reaches for your hand while crossing the road.

The last bedtime story.

The last spontaneous visit from a certain friend.

The last time your entire family sits around the same table.

The last time your body can do something effortlessly.

The last conversation before a relationship slowly fades.

As they happen, these moments rarely feel significant. Only later do we realize how special they were. It’s natural; the mind quickly turns repeated experiences into background scenery. Familiarity creates an assumption of continuation: if something happened yesterday and today, we expect it to happen tomorrow.

We neglect ordinary moments because we believe they are unlimited.

Think of Jaime Kurtz’s study on perceived temporal scarcity. She took two groups of college students and encouraged them to think of their graduation as being close or far into the future. Those who thought their graduation was coming up soon were more engaged in their college experiences and reported higher levels of well-being.

In other words, being aware that the ending might be coming soon can help us appreciate the experience and participate more fully.

And so, when I notice my child playing or asking to hold my hand, I pause and internally embrace the moment. Realizing that the end might be near makes me more present and more involved in the experience.

What meaningful “last time” did you recognize only afterward?

09/01/2026

I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in personal development. I have explored countless modalities, activities, and interventions. In many ways, I have been a walking, breathing experimenter in my own personal experiment of growth.

As my career grew, I began sharing the practices that had been most impactful for me with my students. Many found them meaningful and transformative, but I also noticed that for some people, these practices seemed to reinforce the idea that they were somehow inadequate - that something was wrong with them and needed to be fixed.

This made me realize that we can approach self-improvement from two very different places.
The first is self-care:
I want to grow because I care about myself.
Growth then becomes an act of self-kindness - a way of supporting ourselves and creating a more fulfilling life.
The second begins with inadequacy:
Something is wrong with me.
I am not good enough as I am.
From this place, self-improvement becomes an attempt to repair an imagined defect.

Imagine two people beginning exactly the same journey. They may have the same goal and follow the same path, but they carry very different backpacks.
One backpack is filled with encouragement, curiosity, self-care, and the excitement of possibility.
The other is filled with self-doubt, shame, and the heavy belief that the person carrying it is not good enough.
Same journey. Very different weight impact.

Self-improvement is everywhere. We want to become healthier, calmer, more successful, more confident, more productive, or more mindful. There is nothing inherently wrong with these desires (in fact, they are wonderful). The wish to develop ourselves can be a beautiful and meaningful part of being human.
But beneath the question
What do I want to change?
there may be an even more important question:
Why do I want to change it?

Two people can pursue exactly the same goal: lose weight, meditate more, become more confident, improve a relationship - and psychologically be doing something completely different.
One may be moving toward something they value.
The other may be trying to move away from themselves.

When self-improvement is rooted in inadequacy, every goal can quietly become a condition for self-acceptance:

I’ll feel good about myself when I lose the weight.
I’ll accept myself when I become more confident.
I’ll be satisfied with myself when I become successful.
I’ll finally be okay when I stop struggling with this part of myself.

The difficulty is that the finish line has an extraordinary ability to move.
We achieve something, experience satisfaction for a while, and then another imperfection appears. Another goal. Another version of ourselves we believe we should become.

Psychology describes this as contingent self-worth: when our sense of worth becomes dependent on achievement, appearance, productivity, approval, or even emotional control.
This is one of the paradoxes of self-improvement.
Something intended to help us flourish can become another sophisticated way of telling ourselves that who we are today is insufficient.

Growth rooted in self-care feels very different from growth rooted in self-rejection. One expands who we are; the other attempts to erase us.

What is the foundation of your self-growth?

08/26/2026

I’ve always been an unusual mindfulness teacher.

I’m super energetic, full of zest, creativity, and vitality – things that people don’t usually associate with someone who teaches meditation.



When I arrive to teach a workshop, participants often expect a peaceful, softly spoken, slow-speaking teacher. Instead, they find this lively guy who doesn’t quite match the image.



That gap between expectation and reality has made me wonder if this goes beyond meditation. Seeing that expectation made me wonder if we sometimes confuse calmness with wellbeing itself.



But is that really true?



What if the healthiest person isn’t the calmest one? What if it’s the one who can move through emotions without getting stuck?

Someone who can feel anger and listen to what it’s protecting.

Feel sadness and acknowledge what was lost.

Feel fear and take wise precautions.



In that sense, wellbeing isn't about staying in one emotional state. It’s developing the capacity to move through our emotional life with awareness and wisdom.



From a psychological perspective, this has a name: psychological flexibility.

Rather than defining mental health as feeling good - or feeling calm - all the time, psychology points to the ability to experience emotions as they arise while still choosing how we want to respond.



It’s not about having less fear, less sadness, or less anger. It’s about experiencing those emotions without handing them the steering wheel.



Paradoxically, trying not to feel something often gives it more influence over us. Making room for our emotions, while staying connected to what truly matters, tends to give us more freedom, not less.



And this is where mindfulness enters in a different way.

The more I teach mindfulness, the less I think it’s about becoming calm.

The more I think it’s about becoming present.



Mindfulness doesn’t ask us to remain permanently serene. It helps us cultivate the capacity to stay present with whatever is within us. It gives us a steadier place inside from which to meet our experience.

Calmness will come and go like any other emotional state.

Presence is different.

Presence can hold the full weather of our lives.



So maybe the real question after practice isn’t:

“Am I calm?”

But:

“Am I more present with my life than I was 10 minutes ago?”

08/18/2026

We like the idea that our self is stable and consistent, something that feels reliable. In reality, different parts of us emerge depending on who we are with.

One of my therapy clients described this fluctuation: There are people around whom I become funnier. Others make me quieter. Around some people, I find myself apologizing before I have done anything wrong. Around others, I speak with a confidence I didn’t know I have.

For years he believed that his personality belonged entirely to him. Through our work together, he began noticing that different people seemed to summon entirely different versions of him.

Think of the person around whom you feel most like yourself. Now think of someone around whom you become smaller, more careful, or less recognizable. Perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask about a relationship is not simply, ‘Do I love this person?’ It is, ‘Who do I become when I am with them?’

We do not carry one fixed personality unchanged from room to room. Different relationships awaken different memories, expectations, defenses, and possibilities within us.

Others’ expectations can shape our sense of self and our behavior. People who have known us for a long time may unintentionally continue relating to us as our old self. In their presence, we can find ourselves returning to an old role long after we have outgrown it.

This leads to a more challenging insight about relationships: we can love someone deeply and still dislike the person we repeatedly become around them. Evaluating a relationship may require us to look not only at how we feel about the other person, but also at how they shape our own way of being.

In psychology, we call it the Michelangelo phenomenon: close relationships “sculpt” us toward - or away from - our ideal self. People who recognize and support the person you hope to become can make that version of you easier to find and express.

This is not about blaming other people for the versions of ourselves that emerge around them. Relationships are co-created, shaped by both people’s histories, expectations, fears, and patterns. Still, the person we repeatedly become in a relationship is important information.

Every relationship is a room with its own emotional climate. In some rooms we stretch out and breathe deeply; in others we instinctively make ourselves smaller.

We may not choose every relationship in our lives, but we can become more conscious within each one. Sometimes, simply noticing who we become is the first step toward choosing a different way of being.

Which relationships allow more of you to exist?