Empathy vs. sympathy
A lot of people confuse the terms empathy and sympathy. The main difference lays with how we respond to others, particularly in tough situations. Brene Brown does an excellent job at explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Evwgu369JwVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Brené Brown on Empathy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Evwgu369Jw)
Looking for happiness in all the wrong places.
Lots of people believe that success, achievement, and material possessions make them happy. While these may improve their quality of living, the pleasure of acquiring them comes with a fear of loss, and with it, pain. If this is so, what we experience when this happens is a form of conditional contentment…fleeting and ephemeris. The truth is, our definition of happiness is not really ours. We learn other peoples’ idea of happiness and drag it with us all throughout our lives, never putting it under the microscope or challenging it in any way. Our parents and their parents’ parents taught us everything about life BUT how to be ourselves, to…