Start Here: An List of My Favourite Articles

Choose from a selection of self-mastery articles by category so you can dive in and benefit from my approach to personal transformation.

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Personal Evolution Process (P.E.P)

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

• A Year-End Review Personal Evolution Process (P.E.P.) for 2021 — How to establish your core value and emotional tone for how you want to feel in 2022.
• 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.

Coaching & Personal Growth

• 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(e) Heartedness

• 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.
• When Everyone Is Shouting, Whose Voice Gets Heard and Who Is Right? — 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

• Collectivism and Religion Versus Individualism and Ideology — The rise of the individual has led to the moral and existential crises we are witnessing today.
• 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

• 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

• 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!

Image credit Russell Davies