Steve's Blog

My 50th Birthday and My Decision to Live in Gratitude As I sit here on January 6, 2019, and begin to write, I realize how grateful I am for so many things — people, places, relationships, memories, opportunities, success and more. This includes the pain, suffering and perceived failures in my life of which there have been…

9 Impactful Ways to Start 2019 Great A New Year is always a sign of promise — a new day, a fresh start, and brand-new opportunity to take on things that may have been a challenge in the past. I wanted to start 2019 by sharing some ways I’m learning to find strength and begin each year — and each…

A Face of Poverty We Don’t Always See The LA Times is publishing a four-part series on poverty and how it affects children. Its impact is astounding. Volunteering at the LA Mission, I’ve seen poverty up close. But typically, the people I interact with are adults. The first article in this series describes how in the…

Turning Shame into Acceptance and Peace Shame is a silent emotion we feel and carry with us. It makes us feel flawed in some way. There are all kinds of shaming in the public eye that goes on today (too heavy, too thin, too short, too tall, too slow, too lazy, too smart, too dumb, the…

Don’t Take It Personally I’m starting this blog with an excerpt from my journaling exercise. “I have often wondered (painfully at times) as to why people didn’t always respond the way I had hoped or wanted them to. When they did respond favorably to my efforts, I would feel elevated in status (social) and confident…

When Mental Illness and Substance Abuse Go Together An issue I’m exploring more and more in my studies is mental illness, and how so often it coincides with substance abuse and addiction. I’ve found that the two possess several similarities, both in how they present and how they should be addressed. Both carry a stigma and…

Dear “Little Me”… Recently I have been working with a life coach whose primary role is to inspire, motivate, and support me getting out of my comfort zone, giving myself permission to dream again, and continuing my work as it relates to shame (see last month’s blog). Shame is something I treat every day through mindset…

5 Ways to Help Someone in Recovery If you know someone struggling with addiction or in a stage of recovery, it’s common to feel overwhelmed. You want to help, but you’re not sure what they’re going through. You’re worried that you’ll say the wrong thing. You’ll come off wrong, or be taken the wrong way. Still,…

Amid Homelessness, there are Stories of Hope Despite modest decreases in the number of homeless people in the city and county of Los Angeles, homelessness remains at critical levels, and Los Angeles continues to have the second largest homeless population of any region in the US. With news so bleak, I think to Believe in Big…

6 Things to Know about Addiction Whether people believe they can or can’t control it, experts agree that addiction is a disease: Specifically, “a complex disease of the brain and body that involves compulsive use of one or more substances, despite serious health and social consequences.” While we all probably know what that means technically,…