If you go to a good friend and tell them that you feel really guilty about something you did, most friends try to tell you not to feel guilty. While well-meaning, I think that’s frequently bad advice.

You should feel guilty about certain things! That’s a calibrated moral compass at work, trying to steer you to make amends. You shouldn’t wallow in your guilt. You should take action to reverse whatever you’ve done to cause you to feel this way, if indeed it’s something you should feel guilty about.

Too often we try so many ways to stop feeling guilty other than fixing the issue. But getting into that habit is also a great way to calibrate that moral sense. If the only way to undo the thing that made you feel guilty is to take an action that you don’t agree with, then you feel false guilt. For example, some people feel guilty for taking their own PTO time. So run that through the test: are you willing to permanently give up your PTO in order to not feel guilt? Hopefully not! So that means that’s false guilt, and you shouldn’t feel it. But if you feel guilty because you lied about a friend in order to gain some social status, then you can fix that by coming clean and making amends. Since you should do that, the guilt you feel is real.

Guilt is a guide, if trained correctly. Don’t suppress it; engage with it as a trusted advisor.

Wind did some damage to my property. Got a flat tire, too. A little bit of bad news at work. Tired from a long week.

Smoke, ephemeral, fleeting.

My children hugged me, eager to tell me about their days at school and doubly eager to play games with me.

A shining edifice, beautiful and everlasting.

Talking solves problems. I mean actually talking – phone or in person. Not email, not texting. Those can solve problems sometimes too; any communication is better than none. But the number of times I’ve gotten a “no” over email but turned it into a “yes” by talking to someone live is too high to count.

You need that back-and-forth, the solutioning that happens in real conversation, to solve problems and find unorthodox paths. When you try to have that level of engagement in text form, it becomes a slog. The barrage of messages becomes annoying and exhausting rather than productive.

Pick up the phone or, even better, go visit. Talk it through, and use that magic that only the weaving of words can bring. Turn those walls into doors.

While teaching a course today, I told the group I could see they were eager for an upcoming exercise, describing them as “champing at the bit.” This phrase is very commonly phrased incorrectly as “chomping at the bit.” It’s easy to understand why, since “chomping” generally means “biting down on something.” But the horse-specific term is “champing,” and that’s the correct use of the idiom.

Since everyone understands perfectly well what you mean when you say “chomping at the bit,” you might think: who cares?

After the course was over, one of the participants came up to specifically thank me for using the correct “champing” phrase. He also told me that it made him take me more seriously!

And that’s the point. If someone doesn’t know the correct phrase, you lose nothing by using the incorrect one. But occasionally you will lose people if you offer too many mistakes in your speech, especially in a role where you’re trying to educate or persuade. 99% of the time, they won’t tell you. But you’ll lose them anyway.

That doesn’t mean you should become obsessive or paranoid about every word you say. What it does mean is that if someone informs you of something along those lines, you shouldn’t scoff and dismiss it as pedantic. You should be grateful that they opened the door for you to reach more people!

It’s a simple lesson, but worth repeating: Whenever you want to know how to handle a situation with another person, ask that person.

Here’s your template: “I think we both want to resolve this, and I want to be as respectful as I can. What’s the best way I can help us solve this problem? What would work best for you?”

That works in 99.99% of situations, but it’s frequently the last thing people try, if they try it at all. Not sure what would make your partner feel appreciated? Tell them you care, and ask them. Having difficulty with a coworker? Tell them you want to work well together, and ask them how. Friend upset at you, and you can’t figure out why? Let them know you value them, and ask them how they’d like you to show it.

Always start with the ask.

I’m surprised at how often in the workplace someone will say that they were asked to do something, and in the same breath claim they didn’t have the choice to say no.

Then they weren’t asking, were they?

Or – more likely – they were asking, and the person who didn’t let you say no is in the mirror.

Don’t create unreasonable expectations that don’t actually exist.

The senses are linked in weird ways. You can change the way things taste by holding your nose when you eat them, because those senses work together to form the actual profile of what you’re eating in your brain.

I’m always wowed by the way sight contributes to those things. Want to know why putting a band-aid on a kid’s bruised finger makes them feel better, even though that makes no sense? “Pain” is just a signal from your body to your brain that something is damaged and you need to do something about it. But sight does that, too! If you see a big bruise on your arm, it will hurt more than the same bruise if you can’t see it.

Visual cues can make us calm or anxious, angry or happy – even hungry or hurt. If you put a snack on your desk while you work, you’ll get hungry and want that snack sooner than if you didn’t.

Which means, ultimately: control your vision. Put things in front of you that are visual cues to the behaviors and attitudes you want, as often as you can control such things. And put the other stuff far, far out of sight.

My eldest daughter is a few weeks into her high school journey. She’s having a marvelous time.

When she researched this school, applied, and got accepted all on her own, I was partially excited and partially relieved. High school was an abysmal time for me, overall. It had its bright moments, of course – my childhood in general was good, so naturally those years weren’t all bad. But the time spent in school specifically was miserable. It was a prison – one I barely escaped from. I worried for a long time about my children repeating that experience, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to prepare them for it.

But here’s my eldest, my Beanstalk, and she’s already made a dozen friends. She’s landing smoothly in her academics, and she’s a delightfully social creature; she’s much more like I am now as opposed to being like how I was then. She’s planning a birthday party for one of her new friends as I write.

She’s a perfect example of something so often hard to remember: Children are people. From the moment they can walk and talk, they’re living their own lives. You, as a parent, are a big part of those lives, but you’re far from the only part. They aren’t clones of you, no matter how much of you they inherit.

Be a stable base for them, and they’ll be so, so much better.

One of the greatest feelings in the world is when the training wheels come off. You needed them to get started, but now that you’re past them, you expect it to be harder – only to find that you’re more powerful than you could have imagined. You squeaked along, and now you can fly.

We don’t have to be great at everything ourselves. Everyone is great at something, and for every “something,” there’s someone who’s great at it. And those people share! They demonstrate and model.

Take that within. If you find yourself being bad at small talk, think to yourself, “Who’s the person I know that’s best at small talk?” Then ask yourself why you think of that person as good at it. You can probably list two or three things you’ve observed about their behavior – and if you can’t, go chat with them.

There you go; now you have a model of how to be at least a little better at small talk. You don’t have to figure it all out yourself, you just have to ask yourself that specific series of questions.