Start Here: A Selection of My Best Self-Improvement and Thought Leadership Articles by Category

(Last updated September 28, 2022)

Image credit Russell Davies

Over the years, I’ve published well over 500 articles — Ain’t nobody got time for that!

So, to make accessing my content easier for you, I’ve selected what I believe to be my best practical self-improvement and thought leadership articles. Everything is sorted by category so you can dive in and read what intrigues you.

Personal Evolution Processes (P.E.P)

Get clarity, focus, and direction with these processes based on the neuroscience of transformational coaching.

• What Are the Character Traits that Ground Who You Are — Good and Bad? — A Personal Evolution Process (PEP) to discover your dominant attitudes and behaviours.
• When You’re Stuck Between Two Difficult Choices, How Do You Decide? — A Personal Evolution Process (PEP) to help you make the most emotionally aligned decision around a difficult situation.
• What Can You Control in Your Life to Experience More Love, Happiness, and Freedom? — How to get clarity about what you can influence in your own life and why that matters.
• What Problem is Creating the Greatest Amount of Stress and Frustration in Your Life — And Why? — A simple Personal Evolution Process to get clarity about your most pressing challenge — and what you can do about it.
• How to Stop Red-Lining Into the Negative and Destructive Emotions You Want to Avoid — Learn how to create emotional recipes for how you want to feel.
• Are Your Life Decisions In Alignment with What’s Most Important to You? — A Personal Evolution Process to get clarity about what’s most important in your life — and why.
• As a Gay Man, What Do You Believe About Sex, Love, and Relationships? — How gay shame intersects with your ability to feel acceptance, connection, and care — in other words, love.
• How to Define, Refine, and Re-Align Your Failures as Successes — A Personal Evolution Practice to reframe failure and to move forward with direction and certainty on your goals and dreams.
• What To Do When You Can’t Figure Out Why You’re Not Doing What You Want — A Personal Evolution Process to get unstuck and create a simple strategy to easily do what you want and need to get done.
• You Can’t Expect Others to Make You Feel the Way You Want to Feel — A Personal Evolution Practice (PEP) to get clarity on how you want to be loved and respected.
• 4 Questions to Help You Let Go of What’s Holding You Back — A Personal Evolution Practice to get the clarity you need to eliminate distractions and spend more time doing what you love.
• What’s Out of Your Control, Right Now? — A Personal Evolution Practice (PEP) to manage prediction and response in disruptive times.

Self-Improvement & Personal Development

• Self-Esteem Is Not Earned or Deserved — It Is Foundational to Your Human Nature and Inherent Dignity. A contrarian approach to an unquestioned capitalistic concept that harms self-worth.
• If You’re Missing Any One of These 3 Essentials to Maximize Your Productivity as a Creator, You’ll Crash and Burn. The 3 elements of highly efficient and humane productivity.
• 4 Efficient Productivity Frameworks to Manage Your Energy and Focus — Instead of Surrendering Control of Your Time (and Life) to Someone Else. Self-Mastery 101: How time management makes aspiring creators, change-makers, and thought leaders less effective.
• Why Positive Thinking Is a Waste of Your Time — Positive thinking does nothing to improve physical and emotional wellbeing.
• 3 Simple Self-Actualization Questions that Connect to Your True Purpose—Why boredom leads to an unfulfilled, unhealthy, and unhappy life — and what to do about it.
• Owning the Powerful Distinction: ‘It’s Not About Me, It’s About the Product.’ — A Think Queerly Podcast IDEA(tion) Coaching session with queer creator, Jon Carl Lewis .
• What’s the Point of Pursuing Your Purpose If It Doesn’t Bring You Freedom, Peace of Mind, and Joy? — Something is missing if your purpose doesn’t inspire and compel you to make a difference in the lives of others.
• On Staying Insecure and Embracing Imposter Syndrome — What limits our potential is thinking that we’re not enough.
• Self-Sabotage is the Shame-Filled Mistake of Personal Development — How to Expand Your Comfort Zone and Improve Your Life by Using this Simple Process.
• How to Create Trust and Certainty in Challenging Times — The Covid-19 pandemic is social disruption like we’ve never seen before.
• How Expectations Limit Creativity and Personal Liberation — When we expect something to happen or someone to do something, we create resistance to the natural flow of infinite possibilities.
• Owning the Problem Is the Nature of Personal Responsibility — If we don’t work on ourselves to understand our true nature, we will never understand human nature in others.
• What Should You Do When You Don’t Feel Competent Enough? — How and why you need to be curious.
• Your Relationship with Your Mind (the Ego) and the Other — Changing the Structure of Self-Criticism.
• If You’re Missing this ONE Thing Then You’ll Fail at Achieving Your Goals — Want to achieve a goal that really means something to you?

Leadership & Human Heartedness

• Cultivating Leadership That Cares About its Employees — The Role of Neuroscience in Diversity, Equity, and LGBTQ+ Inclusion.
• Human(e) Thought Leadership: How to Be the Change for the Common Good Through Self-Mastery — A single person can make a difference in the world, but they can’t do it alone without a community of ‘thoughtful’ leaders.
• We Don’t Need to Blindly Follow a Guru, Religion, or an Ideology To Be Moral — We need a practice of human heartedness that starts with human(e) thought leadership for the common good.
• From Silence to the Deafening Disturbance of Difference — Silence offers the value of witnessing, noticing, and allowing for time to consider one’s response.
• What Happens When You Don’t Participate in Arguments or Controversy? — Practicing the Principle of Non-Contention to Cultivate a More Loving Humanity.
• What Is Human-Hearted Leadership and Why Does it Matter? — Introduction to the 6 Principles for Cultivating Open-Hearted Personal Leadership.
• Humanity’s Tipping Point — Without a Return to Compassion, We’re Finished — Human Liberation, Planetary Respect, and the Dissolution of Power Inequality.
• Queer Rage is Valid But Weakens LGBTQ Leadership — Our in-fighting strengthens those who seek to silence us.
• If Fear Is the Mind Killer What Is Its Opposite? — The fewer fears we have the more open-minded and accepting we are of possibilities and variations in all aspects of life and humanity.

Society & Humanity

• The Threat of Religious Extremism and Radicalized Individuals to the Common Good. — The lack of critical thinking skills, open-mindedness, and prejudice leads to inhumane behaviour.
• Collectivism and Religion Versus Individualism and Ideology — The rise of the individual has led to the moral and existential crises we are witnessing today.
• LGBTQ+ People Are Uniquely Self-Aware and Can Teach Respect and Compassion for a Common Humanity. Not causing harm: How self-examination is the foundation of mindfulness and queer wellbeing
• Queerness, Horror, Memoir, and Toronto LGBTQ History in “RED X” — a New Novel by David Demchuk — A Think Queerly Podcast Interview with award-winning author, David Demchuk.
• Why Are Rightwing Extremist Groups So Secretive? — What have they got to hide? On the discontentment and tragedy of not knowing one’s connection with humanity.
• Some Thoughts on the Issues to Consider for Leaving Facebook — The benefits of staying versus compromising one’s personal values and supporting a possibly harmful business.
• Can Written or Spoken Words Be Considered Violence and Therefore Responsible for Violent Acts? — A semantic analysis and follow-up to my article, “Words Themselves Are Not Violence — Only Physical Acts of Aggression Are.”
• Universal Human Dignity: Human Love and Self-Expression Must be Free — Every human being deserves the freedom to express who they are and to love whomever they love without prejudice.
• Too Many Gender Identifying Pronouns: The Decision Fatigue Paradox — The nature and economy of language provide clues about which pronouns will endure in the Queer Community.
• Does Your Moral Character Commune Understanding and Respect for Human Dignity? — Where you stand in live requires understanding the moral myths that organize society.
• Remaking Manhood and #MeToo with Mark Greene — Mark Greene is an Emmy Winning animator, author, speaker, parent and Senior Editor at The Good Men Project.
• How We Treat Each Other Reflects Who We Are — Values, communication, and respect in the dark ages of Trump.

LGBTQ — Diversity, Equality, Inclusion

• The Power of Self-Mastery for Queer Individuals to Strive Higher for the Common Good. Think Queerly Interview with Leadership and Organizational Development Coach, Jeremy Long
• Small Town Pride: An Intimate Documentary About the Joys and Challenges of Being Queer in Canadian Small Towns. Think Queerly Podcast Interview with Co-Director, Chelle Turingan
• An Intergenerational Conversation With Gay Activist Ken Popert. —Think Queerly Podcast Leadership Interview with Co-Host, Jeff Iovannone
• Freddie Lewis On Using Music and Poetry to Share His Journey of Finding Self-Love as a Queer Person — Think Queerly Podcast interview with gentle poet and transgender pop star, Freddie Lewis.
• Michael Bach — Internationally Recognized Thought Leader in Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility — “Inclusion is about taking all the unique characteristics that people bring with them to work and making sure you have a workplace where everyone can succeed because of, and in spite of, those unique qualities.”
• Banned From California — Jim Foshee’s Life of Persecution, Redemption, Liberation, and the Gay Civil Rights Movement — Think Queerly Podcast interview with Robert C. Steele, author of “Banned from California.”
• What is Pride, and Why Should We Celebrate 2SLGBTQ+? — Personal reflections about Pride in 2021 and previous observations that bear repeating.
• HIV/AIDS in Contrast with the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons in History — What are the similarities and differences between the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics? Is it offensive or “triggering” to those who survived the HIV/AIDS pandemic to compare COVID-19 to this period in time?
• Interview with the Authors of “Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada” — Authors Craig Jennex & Nisha Eswaran on the Think Queerly Podcast In this deep-dive interview with the authors of “Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada.”
• How the Murder of a 12-Year Old Boy Shaped My Queerness — The Story of Emanuel Jaques and Me.
• Deconstructing the Myth of Stonewall and its Influence on Mainstream Society — In this special “Pride” episode, we discuss the “Stonewall origin myth” and why the mainstream assumption that “gay liberation” started with Stonewall is both problematic and harmful.
• LGBTQ Diversity Demonstrates that Dualities Are Artificial Constructs — If we continue to argue against each other from completely opposite ends of the spectrum, we will be forever stuck, unable to affect progressive, evolutionary change to social diversity and LGBTQ equality.
• Deconstructing the Ideal Gay Male Body — Living OUT Leadership Interview Series with Jeffry Iovannone.
• Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer Is a Queer Hero’s Journey — Viewing the 1964 cartoon through a queer lens.

Tao Te Ching

• You Are Not a Rock — You Are Changeable By Your Very Nature — The Tao Te Ching shows how our potential as human beings lives in the possibility of emptiness.
• Beauty Is Judgement In the Eye of the Beholder — Dualities create unconscious belief systems that foster prejudice.
• Radical Humility: An Antidote to Donald Trump’s Arrogance and Self-Importance — Lessons from the Tao Te Ching — Verse 24.
• Know That You Do Not Know — What you believe you know can be questioned. What you are certain you know may be a mistake; a fault of logic.
• The Way of No Contention — One of the 6 Principles of Human-Hearted Leadership.
• An Invitation to Experience Things As They Are in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic — “Tranquillity in Disturbance Means Perfection.”
• Timeless Wisdom in a Pandemic: Give Up the Need for Control — A Meditation on Verse 29 of the “Tao Te Ching” — what it can tell us about the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Coming Out & Gay Shame

• I Knew I Was Gay When I Was Five Years Old. A Queering Self-Mastery & Think Queerly Podcast Cross-Over Episode
• The 10 Commandments for Being a Respectable Gay Man — Behold! The 10 Commandments of heteronormativity for gay men who want to fit in, fall in line, and be respectable.
• Why I’m Not Good Enough: My Dirty Gay Secret — There’s a lot of gay shame that runs as an undercurrent in my life.
• Have You Left The Best Parts Of You In The Closet? — There are two examples from my life when I was living fully out, gay and proud, and expressing who I was.
• From Sissy Boys to Straight-Acting Gay Men — Forgiveness and Self-Acceptance Start with Understanding Our Gay Shame.
• Is Forgiveness of Homophobia a Gay Male Gift? — In this episode, I speak about the challenge for gay men to forgive homophobia in their lives — be it from individuals, family, and society at large.
• What I Learned About Loving My Body As A Gay Man — Everyone has a story about their body.

Mindset & Well-Being

• “A Wistful Yearning for the Past.” What Are the Lessons of Nostalgia? — The longing for a distant place involves a separation in time and a connection with deeply held emotions.
• Kelly Walker on Celebrating Life with Grace and Delight Because It’s Good to Be Alive — A Think Queerly Podcast discussion with Canadian author, speaker, musician, and former Dominican Prior, Kelly Walker.
• What’s in a Name? The Importance of Being Queer — What’s most important to you as an LGBTQ person?
• The Cute Little Joys My Gay Boyfriend Brings — Happy Valentine’s Day, 2019!

What Is Your Life Like, Right Now?

I help (queer) thought leaders, creatives, and change-makers become more skillful in all areas of their lives to enjoy more happiness, freedom, and contentment.

If you’re currently blocked by over-thinking, over-analyzing, or feeling like an imposter, let’s talk. You will leave our conversation with renewed clarity, focus, and direction that takes you from struggle to progress. Request a free discovery session with me.