Belonging is not simply a luxury. It is a core need that shapes our mental, emotional, and physical health.

You have the power to change your perspective. When you replace the words "should," "must," and "have to" with "choose to," "want to," or "get to," you regain control over your life.

To show up as our best selves, we must be able to EXPRESS OUR EXPERIENCE of life with someone else. Being truly seen, heard, and known is essential to happiness. This means that we must be able to honestly express our past hurt, our current pain, our joy, our concern, our frustration, our confusion, our love, and every other experience we encounter in our lives. We must have someone to see, hear, and know us – our true authentic us.

The problem is, when happiness is our destination, we can very easily – and most of us DO – continually move the goalposts: We keep adding to our list of I’ll-be-happy-whens and concentrate more often on our many reasons why, “I can’t be happy because . . .”

Whether in our professional or personal lives, most of us have experienced coming to a crossroads - where we must choose between honoring our own boundaries and values or choosing against ourselves.

We are two lucky ladies . . . Not only do we have all of you in our lives, but we get to witness all the hard work you do to create lives that are meaningful and bring you joy! We are incredibility inspired by the perseverance and determination with which many of you approach life. When you overcome obstacles, face difficult decisions, and don’t give up, you are doing what we call Staying in the Game.

Yesterday, after Sundays with Annette and Ada (which was wonderful!), we made a quick stop at the grocery store to buy Valentine flowers for Don before heading off to our next adventure. As we were checking out, our cashier just happened to mention that her previous customer had purchased real, official gluten free, dairy free Oreo cookies.

Yesterday, during our Sunday talk, we asked everyone to think of what people, situations, and events have been their greatest teachers. That is something for all of us to consider. None of us have gone through life alone, and each of us has been impacted by different people, situations, and circumstances.