When I was younger, I believed the good guys would win. I believed hard work mattered. Integrity mattered. Kindness mattered. I assumed honesty would eventually rise to the top and that people who tried to do the right thing would somehow come out ahead.

Then life happened. Phenomenal, but for a few genetic rip tides. I never loved school, but I loved learning how to break unhealthy generational cycles. To evolve.

I watched decent people struggle while manipulative people prospered. I watched institutions disappoint us. I watched image outperform substance, charisma outperform character, and luck quietly shape outcomes far more than most people want to admit.

Somewhere along the way, many of us become realists. But I have learned over the years that sometimes realism is simply disappointment wearing a suit.

And now, I am learning to embrace the beauty of an interior life. It’s like cultivating a garden and living in a desert.

A lush, green field after Sunday Mass

I spent my early childhood in a suburb outside Boston, not far from Concord, Massachusetts. Something about that town stirred me even as a child. I could not have explained it then.

I only remember a feeling. It was a strange mix of curiosity, awe, and quiet reverence. The old homes. The trees. The stillness. A sense that humans had asked important questions long before I arrived—evergreen standing against the backdrop of astonishing blue skies.

Around the time I was eight or nine, my family moved north to Laconia, New Hampshire, where my father had taken a partner role in a hospitality business. One Sunday after morning Mass, I found myself sitting beside him in a lush, green field near our home.

The mountains rose around us, dotted with majestic rows of pines. Lake Winnipesaukee shimmered in the morning light, a glacier lake in forever glory. Puffy white clouds floated above us, the way they do in late summer before the leaves change color.

As we sat there looking up, I asked my father how he knew there was a God. I was confused, the way kids get confused when faith and the world refuse to line up neatly. Of my two parents, he was the one I could ask anything. (One out of two isn’t bad for an insatiably curious kid.)

He thought for a moment, and then he said, quietly, the way he said most things: “Clifford, I don’t know for sure. But I have a good sense of it when I think about my love for you, your sister, brother, and mother. And when I look at those white pines, and the lake down there, and those clouds.”

My father was a good man. He worked hard, trusted people, and tried to build something honorable in business. He was, in the language of Dostoevsky, something of an Idiot. This version of "idiot" is not foolish but open-hearted in a world that rarely rewards open hearts without also breaking them.

Soft in a hard world.

Yet, my father was my first human hero. He always will be. And like many decent men, he often found himself outmatched by rogue players, bad timing, and a world less fair than he hoped it would be.

It pained me in my later years to see him suffer. He was an idealist who learned, slowly and at some cost, to become a realist too. Watching him do that shaped everything that followed for me.

Brook Farm and the beautiful dream

Years later, after raising a family, chasing my entrepreneurial and creative whims through business, setbacks, disappointment, psychology, metaphysics, and the long search for meaning, I finally began to understand why Concord had stayed with me.

It’s the same reason I’m attracted to the great writers and thinkers. The early Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Putnam, and Frederic Henry Hedge, were wrestling with questions that started at a very young age, even before I could talk with my father.

This curiosity, seeking, would quietly follow me for the rest of my life. Today, here, now, I found what I needed to know, which isn’t much. But it’s everything to me: the real me, true self.

What makes a meaningful life? Can human beings grow beyond suffering? How do we remain fully human in a world that often rewards ambition more than integrity?

They found the answers not only in institutions, but within. Nature mattered. Solitude mattered. Reflection mattered. The soul mattered. External success meant very little if a person lost themselves along the way.

Then, an experiment happened

One of the most fascinating expressions of this philosophy was Brook Farm, an idealistic social experiment founded outside Boston in 1841. Influenced by the Transcendentalists, its founders believed that human beings, given the right conditions, might become better versions of themselves.

It was a community in which meaningful work, education, equality, and cooperation could replace competition and social climbing. It was a beautiful dream. And like many beautiful dreams, it collided with reality.

Money problems surfaced. Personality conflicts emerged. Human ego entered the room. Eventually, Brook Farm collapsed. We’ve witnessed countless attempts to live in paradise fail. But that is not all.

In my early years, I would have viewed that story only through the lens of failure. I see it differently now. Brook Farm may have failed economically, but it succeeded philosophically. Its founders asked questions that still matter. Can human beings grow? Can we build lives rooted in meaning instead of status?

Most of us wrestle with those same questions, whether we admit it or not. These were humans who, hundreds of years ago, showed us the way to the interior life.

The shadow of realism

I know I have wrestled with the big questions. For decades, I trusted too easily. Wanted to believe the best in people. Assumed sincerity mattered more than strategy. Believed competence and integrity would eventually rise to the surface.

Sometimes they did. Often they did not.

There were countless moments when disappointment tempted me toward cynicism. Cynicism, like revenge, feels intelligent after betrayal. Safe after loss. Protective as a result of too much broken trust. You stop expecting much from people. You stop getting hurt. You call it realism.

But realism has a shadow. Too much of it quietly hardens into bitterness. And bitterness, in my experience, is wounded idealism that never healed. I catch myself becoming bitter now, and I can more easily shift into the higher gear of acceptance.

My conclusion is this. Bad things happen to everyone, but it’s the good people who have the hardest time accepting that. In the end, goodness, love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, gratitude, and the One always know and win.

What compounds quietly

The older I get, the more I believe wisdom lives somewhere in the middle. I can now easily summarize my philosophy:

“Not too high, not too low. Not too left, not too right. The middle way is the best way to go.”

A realistic idealist sees the world clearly without surrendering hope. Understands human flaws but still believes growth is possible. We know institutions fail, markets fluctuate, and some people manipulate and take shortcuts. Yet still chooses integrity, not because integrity guarantees success, but because character matters. They trust, but verify. Care deeply, but notice patterns. Remain hopeful, but not naïve.

I learned something the Transcendentalists understood long ago. The interior life matters. I referred to it earlier. It’s simpler and quieter. Peaceful, serene.

My many roles, titles, and attachments are gone. I clearly see how external success fluctuates. Money comes and goes. Material becomes meaningless. Fortunes fall.

Bad things happened to my father, a very good man. It took me a lifetime to understand the purpose of the struggle, the suffering.

It’s to love. To let go. Forgive. Serve. Rest. Heal. Rejoice.

When that shift happens within us, the interior life quietly compounds. The ability to sit in solitude and love it. To remain curious. To deepen spiritually. To understand yourself.

To become emotionally mature. Nothing can trigger you. You’ve been triggered too much. You’ve done the inner work. Your faith leads the way. That’s how we become less reactive, less resentful, more forgiving.

To walk in nature and feel awe. To paint, draw, read, relax. Flow state stuff.

No rogue player can take that from you. No recession can erase it. No betrayal can bankrupt it.

Finishing as best you can

Maybe that is what it means to finish strong. It’s not competing against all odds, finishing first, winning every battle, or escaping disappointment. But arriving later in life with your integrity intact, your spirit still alive, and an inner life richer than anything the outer world could ever offer.

At this stage of life, whenever that might be for each of us, our greatest wealth is few wants and no regrets. We stop competing, knowing we have and are enough. We focus on cooperating and being true to ourselves.

Wealth beyond measure. We know we’ve done our best, and that most of what happened was far beyond your conscious control at the time. Despite the challenges we endure, we seek a sustainable serenity, inner peace, and the knowing that we are souls living in a school called life.

Oddly enough, never loving school, I’ve learned to love the school of life even though I don’t like what I see by virtue of the rampant collective insanity. The good news is, goodness wins, and beneath the dreary headlines is a great awakening in the following generations.

It is what it is

These days, I no longer expect life to be fair. But I still believe civility, mutual respect, and kindness matter. I still believe integrity compounds quietly over time and is more valuable than wealth on paper.

And while the good guys may not always finish first, I have learned something better. If they cultivate the interior life, the way my father did in that field, without quite knowing that’s what he was doing, they can still finish strong.

Thanks for reposting this article if you found it helpful.

I was the kid who needed the cool kids to need him back. I’m not sure what “cool” meant to me then, somewhere between the kid who could throw a spiral and the one whose family had a ski pass. But I chased it hard.

Football on the playground. Tennis with my dad. Skiing from age six. These weren’t just things I did. They were proof I belonged somewhere. To someone. In some version of the world that mattered to me at the time.

Here’s the painful truth about being young: None of us knows who we are yet. So we borrow identity from the people we’re drawn to. You see something in them you want to see in yourself. A psychologist named John Bowlby spent years studying why this happens. His conclusion was simple and a little heartbreaking.

From the time we’re very small, we need to feel like we’re okay just as we are. (How’d that go for you?) When that feeling is shaky, we spend years looking for it in other people’s eyes. Their approval becomes the mirror we use to check if we’re still there.

For a lot of us, that mirror became a habit we couldn’t put down. When we seek approval in the wrong ways, things can go terribly wrong, such as early substance abuse, self-harm, and other mental health issues.

Carl Jung called the mask we wear for the world the persona. In adolescence, the persona isn’t vanity. It’s survival. The problem is that some of us keep wearing it long after we’ve left the cafeteria. We say and do things we don’t mean to stay liked. To stay safe. I know the consequences of that personally. Dumb things have a long shelf life.

A researcher named Susan Cain wrote a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Her finding was straightforward: roughly a third to a half of all people recharge by being alone rather than by being around others. Not because something is wrong with them.

Because that’s how they’re wired.

But we live in a culture that treats stillness like a warning sign. The quiet kid gets asked if something’s wrong. The person who’d rather stay home gets called antisocial. We’ve confused solitude with loneliness for so long that many people are ashamed of needing silence.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Not even close. It took me decades to figure this out. It was like a slow shift in my consciousness and in the way I saw myself. I noticed I was always okay alone, and as a child, I loved to wander alone through the woods for hours.

When I learned this psychology insight, it immediately helped me realize what I’d been up against my entire life as a competitive athlete, entrepreneur, and later in life, a better writer and visual artist. I was trying to be a hitter in the business world. I never believed I had a choice. It was hustle or die, back to a day job.

I hope you find yourself sooner than I found the real me. It’s brutal wearing the many masks I chose to play the game of life. Now, I get to be the real me. I never really loved that person before.

And even though I’m happily married and blessed with a wonderful and healthy family, I spend most of my time practicing the art of solitude. That rocket burner that used to launch new marketing campaigns, pound more cold calls in a day than most mortals, win the new business, and celebrate at the club is gone.

I let go of needing to belong, and that made all the difference.

My shift in recent years has created much more time later in life to do the things I truly love. Think about what you absolutely love to do, but you put off because you’re “too busy” chasing the dream.

How often do you make time to be alone, and what does that look like? Many of us can’t stand to be alone with ourselves, especially with the many tech devices and digital noise hijacking our attention spans.

For example, there is a quality of quiet available on a long solo ride that I haven’t found anywhere else. The first 20 minutes are usually lingering static in my mind, whatever is unfinished, whatever is not okay that day.

But somewhere past the first hill, something lets go. The body takes over. Autopilot kicks in. My breathing becomes the focus without focusing. My mind goes still, and I’m moving up to 40 miles per hour.

That stillness can happen at speed with my body fully occupied, or while sitting on a bench in the local park. In that magnificent stillness, something underneath the noise becomes audible.

I didn’t have words for it then. I do now.

Carl Jung said the second half of life is an inward journey. Less about building yourself up in the world’s eyes, more about finding out who you actually are underneath all that effort. The people who move through midlife with the most peace, he observed, are the ones who stopped performing and started listening.

What were they listening for? Themselves. The version underneath. The mystics got there first. And they said it better.

Rumi wrote about the silence between the notes being the music itself. Thomas Merton, a monk who chose to live alone in the Kentucky woods, said that solitude wasn’t about escaping people. It was about finding the ground from which real love of others becomes possible. For many reasons, he’s one of my heroes.

You can’t give from an empty vase. Teresa of Ávila wrote about the soul as an interior castle, many rooms, many distractions, but at the very center, a stillness that nothing outside can touch.

What the mystics understood, and what psychology is slowly catching up to, is the difference between what some traditions call the lower self and the higher self.

The lower self isn’t evil. It’s just scared.

It’s the part of us that needed the cool kids. The part that says and does dumb things to stay visible. The part that confuses being alone with being abandoned. It’s our inner poser showing up to get what the ego wants.

The higher self is quieter. It’s the part of you that can watch the anxiety without becoming it. It’s the same part that remembers to breathe when you forget.

It’s the dreamer that dreams. The watcher that watches. That part of you and me can sit with not-okay and know, somewhere underneath the noise, that okay is still there.

We need to believe so. Believe me, belief matters. There’s an entire science about it called Epigenetics. It’s known as the “biology of belief.” Believe you have experienced solitude, and you can find it again. We had it when we were kids, before school, at the playground, at dance recitals, and at tryouts. All of those experiences were a purposeful journey for your soul—a soul with a seat in the school of life.

Believe and feel your way through the shift. Let go of the negative self-talk. Permit yourself to shift into solitude, never feeling alone. Smile often.

If I could sit down with that kid on the playground and say one thing, it would be this: “The restlessness you’re trying to outrun with other people’s approval will follow you until you stop running or pedaling.”

Not because something is wrong with you or me. Because there's something right between you and me that we haven’t found yet, the true self.

The people who have made real peace with solitude aren’t people who gave up on others. They’re people who found, usually through suffering, loss, age, or some hard stretch of life, that the most important relationship they could build was with their own interior life.

From that place, connection with others becomes a choice instead of a need. You stop showing up as needy, always wanting, with hungry ghosts behind your eyes.

You show up to be present. Content. Accepting.

I still have days when I’m not okay, or when I think I may need to get back into a new consulting gig, or dive deeper into the business of selling my art. But if I am unsure about what I need to do, I’m okay waiting, even though patience wasn’t my virtue.

The lower self doesn’t retire. It just gets less airtime. If it knocks on my front door, I greet it with a smile and ask it to move on.

I know where to go. I sit or lie down in silence. Or, if I feel like riding, I clip in, spin through the early miles, and wait for the shift within. That’s when I always thank my higher power. Sometimes I experience tears of joy for no reason other than just being happy to be here.

Serenity shows us. It always comes. But we have to do the inner work. We must believe. You must believe in your higher self, not the lower self, because the highest power of all loves us dearly, especially when we can’t.

Being alone and being lonely are separated by exactly one thing: whether you’ve learned to be good company for yourself.

It’s a choice. You have to choose to shift.

There was a season in my early forties when anxiety didn’t knock. It just moved in, took the best chair, and started telling me what was going to happen next. None of it was good.

I had sold a small business to someone I shouldn’t have trusted. A lawsuit loomed. A decade of savings was evaporating. Every morning, I woke up already exhausted from whatever my brain had been doing while I slept. The hangover from drinking the night before never helped.

My chest was tight before my feet hit the floor. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating right. I was white-knuckling my way through every conversation that required something from me I didn’t have.

The picture you see above? That was a very bad day when a family tragedy hit. Fear and anxiety showed up, and this time, I had a way to shift through it.

Even though I’m not a therapist, I’m an expert when it comes to managing my fear, anxiety, and anger. It’s why I freely offer my way of taking on my toxic emotions.

If you learn nothing else, just know that self-help isn’t selfish.

That’s what anxiety does at its worst

Same with fear. It doesn’t just make you nervous. It makes you a stranger to yourself.

It’s a war we wage within ourselves. And most of us hate war.

Here’s the part nobody tells you: the anxiety about the anxiety is almost worse than the original thing. You start monitoring yourself. Am I okay right now? Why can’t I calm down?

It compounds. It becomes its own problem stacked on top of the problem that started it.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I went broke. I won’t dress that up. And somewhere in the wreckage of that emotional disaster, not because I was wise, but because I had run out of other options, I started paying attention to what was actually happening inside me instead of just reacting to it.

I dove deep into group therapy and fellowship with others struggling. It was all local, sitting in rooms talking through our head trash and problems. Writing helped me process what I was going through. And eventually, I formalized the process that worked for me and started teaching and sharing it with anyone willing to try it out.

I eventually named the process The Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method™. Not born in a boardroom and not pulled from a book. Built in the middle of a mess, I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.

Today, I don’t suffer from fear, anxiety, or anger the way I once did. That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

And I want to walk you through the reason why.

Start here now, wherever you are

If something is weighing on you, and if you’re reading this, something probably is, I want you to stop, just for a moment. Put the problem down like a bag you’ve been carrying too long.

It’ll still be there in five minutes. Right now, stop.

Breathe. Not a polite little breath. A real one. Fill your belly like there’s a balloon in there. Let it expand. Hold it one beat. Then let it go, slowly.

Do it again.

And once more.

Keep going, close your eyes, and imagine a happy place that warms your heart.

Smile.

Be still, observing yourself and the sounds and smells around you. Take it all in with each breath, and let the oxygen do its magic.

Did anything shift? Not the situation. But something in you, a few degrees. That’s not nothing. That’s the gateway to higher consciousness.

Now you’re ready. If not, keep reading and believing that you can help yourself face the anxiety that is trying to tell you something big.

The first step is called Self-Awareness

It begins with the simplest, hardest thing: noticing what’s actually happening inside you. You already started that step.

It’s called being present. Observing and asking, listening. Write your notes in a journal if you feel like it.

What are you telling yourself right now? What are you feeling, and where do you feel it: your chest, your throat, your gut? What’s the story running in the background, the one you’ve been half-listening to all day?

Don’t judge it. Don’t fix it. Just name it. Anxiety lives in the shadows. The moment you shine a light on it and say this is what’s happening inside me right now, it loses a little of its power.

Not all of it. Just enough.

From there, we move into Higher Understanding

This step is about seeing the bigger picture beyond the fog of the feeling.

Ask yourself this: what do you actually know to be real right now, based on your current perception?

Be honest.

Not the worst-case scenario your mind has been rehearsing. Not the catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet. What is verifiably, honestly real in this moment?

When I did this during my own meltdown, the picture was still hard to see. But it was a picture. Something I could stand in front of and look at clearly.

Anxiety was calling me. But in that place, that moment, I could ask myself what values or principles apply here.

How can I see this from a higher, more honest perspective than fear is offering me right now?

That question alone changes everything because we are shifting our consciousness, our point of view, to a much higher perspective where we can see the situation differently.

The third step is Introspection

It’s where the real work lives. You begin to search inside yourself. Again, pause where you are unless it’s in the middle of a road.

You don’t need to be a monk to do this. Just be willing to practice wherever you go, actually.

You’re working on yourself by going within yourself. You’re learning to ask and be with your higher self. We all have that part of us; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to talk to ourselves, would we?

What beliefs, fears, or old patterns are driving what you’re feeling? Because anxiety rarely arrives alone. It travels with old stories. Fear of losing everything. Fear of not being enough. Fear that the ground you built your life on was never as solid as you told yourself it was.

I had known fear and anxiety for my entire life. And until I shone an introspective light on it, it held a fierce grip on me.

What do you need to let go of to feel better about your situation? What are you trying to control that is absolutely impossible to control, which is pretty much everything other than your perspective?

And here’s the quieter, harder question underneath that one: can you begin to see the outcome you want most as already possible, even now, even here?

It’s about knowing what you want by knowing what you don’t want. That takes lots of practice. Over time, you no longer let fear and anxiety own you.

That question leads us directly into Focused Intention

Here’s the fourth of five steps. What outcome do you want, and by when? Not vaguely. Specifically, as it relates to you, the person, place, or thing that sets off your fear and anxiety.

Because anxiety thrives in vagueness, clarity is its natural enemy. It’s the ultimate peaceful warrior that defends you against your lower self; that’s the part of you that tells you that you suck.

That’s just a story. You can change the story. Imagine that.

What new story can you begin telling yourself? Not a lie, not toxic positivity, but an honest, forward-facing script you can practice morning and night.

How can you begin weaving that into the ordinary fabric of your days, so that over time, the new story becomes louder than the old one?

Your intention is where transformation stops being a concept and starts being a practice.

You begin to have faith in yourself and your ability to shift, to change the one thing you can change: yourself, and in turn, you treat yourself and the world around you with compassion.

Because the world is your mirror, it reflects to you what you show it.

Here’s the fifth step

Transformation. A daily transformation of yourself by aligning with your higher self, such that your lower self doesn’t suck the life out of you.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

What will you actually do, starting today, to overcome the old beliefs, the old scripts and untrue stories, the old patterns that anxiety has been feeding on? How will you know you’ve shifted? What will be different about the way you move through the world?

And maybe most importantly: who benefits when you do?

Because this was never just about you, the people in your life, the ones who need you present, steady, and real, see and feel the difference when you shift.

Your anxiety costs them something, too. Your transformation gives something back. You align with your higher self.

Anxiety doesn’t check credentials

It finds the gap between who you are and who you’re afraid you might actually be, and it moves right in.

I’m almost 65. I work with executives, founders, and professionals who have built remarkable things by every external measure and still lie awake at three in the morning wondering when it’s all going to fall apart.

What I tell them is what I’ll tell you. Practice this method daily.

Not when a crisis hits, by then you’re already behind. Build the muscle quietly and steadily before the meltdown comes.

Five minutes in the morning before the noise starts. Breathe. Move through the steps. Ask the honest questions.

Five minutes sitting anywhere, you find yourself feeling fear or anxiety knocking on your door. You can open that door, and when you do, you now have a way to let your emotions know you’re in charge.

That’s the power of the higher power within you; your higher self

The people who shift aren’t the ones who had it easier. They’re the ones who kept showing up to the practice when nothing seemed to be working.

I no longer wake up with my chest already tight. I no longer white-knuckle my way through the day. I haven’t needed to chug a small bucket of beer to take the edge off life at night.

Fear, anxiety, anger, they visit sometimes, the way the weather passes through. But they don’t live here anymore.

That didn’t happen because life got easier. It happened because I built something that works.

Daily progress. Not perfection.

That’s all this is.

If you’re stuck in the business of life, start your shift here.

Digital watercolor rendering of the Pacific Ocean from Cross Hill by the author

It was 75 degrees and bright in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, when Enrique Morales asked us the question. We were standing at the foot of Cross Hill, a legendary, steep, unforgiving pile of rock that rises above the Cabo marina, daring you to hurt yourself.

There were maybe forty of us, plus at least thirty-five dogs. Enrique owns a local dog training camp at the base of the hill. He is one of those people whose love for what he does radiates off him before he says a word. Before we started the climb, he stopped the group, looked around at all of us, and asked: What is the only real thing?

Nobody answered right away. I wanted to guess, but it was too early to sound stupid. Then he told us. The now. This moment. Nothing before it, nothing after it. Just this.

The now. We’ve all heard the reference before, but living it, feeling it, being it is the entire purpose of it. Letting go.

I’m 64 years old. I’ve heard some version of that idea a hundred times. But something about hearing it from a super-fit man surrounded by dogs at the base of a hill I wasn’t sure I could climb, on the morning of our 40th anniversary, in a place my wife had dreamed about for years. It landed differently this time.

It landed like something I’d finally earned the right to understand.

We celebrated our 40th anniversary late

We’d planned it for October, and life moved it to now, which felt appropriate once we got here. Janice has wanted to come to Cabo for as long as I can remember. I’m more of a homebody; the idea of an all-inclusive resort, the crowds, the noise, and the organized fun.

It’s not my domain. But within twenty-four hours, something shifted. And I don’t use that word casually.

I sat with my coffee the morning after we arrived and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not productivity. Not a purpose in the professional sense. Just presence. The water. The light. My wife is deservedly resting, the complete absence of anything I had to be by nine o’clock.

A year ago, a decade ago, that feeling would have unnerved me.

The reason I’m telling you all of this is that when we got back to our resort room, I read an article about a tragic trend for older men. I was reading about myself, my father, and all of my buddies who are older than I am.

The news for men isn’t good

A geriatric psychiatrist recently published something that stopped me mid-scroll. She’s spent decades sitting across from older men in crisis. Not the dramatic kind, not the kind that announces itself, but the slow, quiet, desperate kind.

When you ask not what is wrong with older men but what we have lost as we age, four things consistently surface: autonomy, belonging, dignity, and meaning. Lose one, and the structure wobbles. Lose two or three in close succession, which retirement, illness, and life transitions have a way of doing, and something more fundamental gives way.

Because I recognized all four. Not abstractly. Personally.

Within the last year or two, I let go of past identities I’d been carrying for decades, the need to compete, scale, grow, win, earn, promote, hustle, network, and sell my consulting solutions. It left me almost as fast as my brief obsession with becoming a national Pickleball champion. What replaced it wasn’t emptiness, exactly.

It was more like the beautiful silence at sunrise. You don’t know whether to jump for joy or sprint up the empty beach chasing seagulls, or sit grounded in the sand, breathing, basking in the glory of a Creator we struggle to understand.

My father went through his version of this in his mid-seventies. Oh, how I love and miss that beautiful man. My first hero. A man who had been a leader in his business community, whose identity fused with what he did and who knew him for it, found himself on the other side of all that. He was still the same man, but without the scaffolding that had been proving it.

The last time I flew to Florida to see him, in 2012 or so, I watched him describe that slippery slope he was on. Shorter off the tee box. Less of a desire to be among the popular crowd at his golf club and an inability to be relevant in the business community.

I didn’t fully understand it then. I do now, ten years younger than dad was, sitting in Cabo with nowhere I have to be.

The losses men experience are real

But they’re not the end of the story. And the reason I’m writing about men is that I’m not qualified to write about the experience of women.

The needs of men don’t disappear when the scaffolding of business life and career comes down. They go underground. They become the ache that doesn’t yet have a name. And they can be met in different forms, through different structures. But if you feel you are slipping, you’ve got to be willing to let go and shift your perspective before the old ones have been gone too long.

That willingness starts with one thing. Honesty. Not the kind you perform for other people. It’s the kind you look in the mirror, asking what is actually real right now. Not where you want to be. Not where you were. Where are you actually?

Most men I know, myself included, for most of my adult life, are far quicker to troubleshoot a problem in their business than to sit with the question of whether they feel like they belong somewhere anymore.

Men are wired to fix, not to feel. “Honey, let’s solve this problem!” That training carried us a long way. In this season of life, our later years, it’s the thing most likely to get in our way.

Enrique led us up Cross Hill, a man clear on his mission

He was at the front. His alpha dog is beside him. Forty people and thirty-five dogs scrambling up loose rock in the Cabo sun, nobody entirely sure what they were doing up there, all of us doing it anyway.

At the top, the marina spread out below us. The water caught the light. Boats and a cruise ship passed by. I stood there breathing hard, Janice beside me, and I thought about my father. About the men I mentor, younger guys, half my age, building businesses and chasing the same things I once chased. About the research sitting on my phone. About Thursday afternoons with nothing scheduled.

And I thought: this is the work. Not the climbing. The willingness to stop at the top and actually look.

And to wait for what’s next, if anything. For me, not knowing what was next felt normal. One of my mentors taught me the power of not knowing, being okay not knowing, waiting, being patient, until knowing what’s next is crystal clear. That’s clarity. When clarity is radical, something within us lights up, and that becomes the beacon for our next calling: to serve others. Every day we are blessed to be here in a school called life.

If you had asked me one or two years ago what I’m up to, I would have said, “Not much. Void. Winding down the consulting. Chilling out. Riding bikes. Letting money work for me instead of the other way around.”

Out of the void emerged a new way of helping myself shift my perspective on what really matters at this stage of life. Any stage of life. We shift all through life, different seasons, different bodies and minds, whether we are willing to train them or not.

I have a five-step method. It helps me stay present. To shift my perspective on when a person, place, or thing begins to set me off, agitate me. I tested it on myself for a few years and played with the concept. I wrote about it. Then, I started sharing the method with others. It helped some of them, only the willing. You have to be willing to shift yourself.

It feels like riding a bicycle with a tailwind once you get it

The first step is S — Self-Awareness. You stop and ask the hardest question most men avoid: What is your reality right now? Not where you want to be, not where you were — where are you actually when you look in the mirror?

From there, H — Higher Understanding. You deliberately lift your perspective above the noise, the fear, the story you’ve been telling yourself, and look at the situation from a wider view.

Then I — Introspection. You go inward quietly, honestly, without judgment, and ask what this moment is asking of you.

Next, F — Focused Intention. You choose your next move with clarity. What outcome do you want, and by when? You stop drifting and get intentional — writing a new script, a new affirmation, a new way of seeing yourself that you can practice morning and night until it becomes the story you actually live.

And then T — Transformation. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet, durable kind that happens when a man stops fighting what is real and starts building toward what could be — and finds himself, almost without trying, back in the only place any of it is possible, the now.

That’s not self-help. That’s self-honesty. And once you’ve done it once, you know exactly how to find the tailwind again.

I built it because I needed it. I share it because I keep meeting men who need it too and don’t know yet that what they’re feeling has a name, and that the name isn’t failure.

It’s a transition. And transition, when you stop running from it, is the beginning of something.

The psychiatrist ended her piece with a simple image

A man in a chair, hands on his knees, describing the void that lies ahead of him on Thursday afternoon. The clock reads 10:43 in the morning. He sits there reflecting in my mind, practicing the five steps, finding the now, inner peace, and serenity.

That is, in fact, the beginning of something very real. It is presence, the ultimate gift and ageless wisdom.

I know that man sitting in the chair. I’ve been that man, wondering what’s next. I am here, present, writing this for you from Cabo on our anniversary morning.

What I know now, having returned from the pinnacle of Cross Hill, is that the question Enrique asked at the bottom wasn’t rhetorical. It was an invitation.

If you’re still with me, consider yourself invited to the now. That’s when you become part of the solution.

If you’re stuck in the business of life, start your shift here.

- Janice Miller Jones, 1985, our first car together, a red Subaru, by the author

In the summer of 1983, I was twenty-two years old, dead broke, and completely convinced I was going to marry a woman who thought of me as a spring fling. My self-view was not terribly good: skinny, insecure, naive, and didn’t know the difference between infatuation and true love.

Her name was Janice Miller. She lived in Philadelphia with college roommates. I lived on a farm three hours north, digging fence post holes for $3.50 an hour in the Pennsylvania heat. I did not own a car. I did not have money in the bank. What I had was a borrowed 1966 Dodge Dart, a grandmother who felt sorry for me, and a plan held together entirely by hope.

Every weekend I could manage, I drove to see her. And every Sunday night, I drove back, alone, rehearsing the same question in my head: How do you make a woman stay when you have nothing to offer but yourself?

I didn’t have an answer. But one weekend, scanning the Philadelphia classifieds, I found what I thought was one.

Wanted: Male Escort. $8.50 an hour.

I showed Janice the ad. She leaned over, read it, and said, “Wow. That’s pretty good money. What’s an escort?”

Neither of us knew.

I called the number. A man answered, gruff and quick. “Come in for an interview, kid. You know how to find us?”

I did not. But I found a gas station map, talked Janice into coming along as co-pilot, and off we went across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. We got lost twice. We eventually found the address — a squat industrial building in a part of Jersey that looked like a movie set for a mob story.

That’s when I saw the guard tower.

It sat in the center of the parking lot, rising like something that had no business being there on a Saturday afternoon. There were maybe four other cars because it was mid-morning on a Saturday. The lot was quiet in a way that made noise feel dangerous. I parked the Dart and opened my door, and before my second foot hit the pavement, a voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the tower.

“You can’t leave the woman in the car.”

Not a suggestion. A command. Stopped me dead in my tracks.

I looked at Janice. She looked at me. I told her to take the car, drive around, and come back in thirty minutes. She pulled away, and I stood there alone in that parking lot, in my one interview suit, holding a cheap briefcase my dad had given me, walking toward a door I had no business walking toward.

Every step, my stomach tightened. Looking down at my dress shoes, I saw the one my dog had chewed. I thought about turning around, but there was nowhere to go. By the time I reached the door, I felt the way I had felt watching The Exorcist as a twelve-year-old — that specific dread of knowing something is wrong and not being able to stop yourself from finding out how wrong.

Inside, a man waved me over from the dark. The floor stuck to my shoes. The air smelled like cigarettes and something I couldn’t name—a dark, human stench.

“Do you even know what an escort does?” he said.

“No,” I said. “But if it pays $8.50 an hour, I’d like to find out.”

He handed me a few tokens and told me to look around.

I lasted about ninety seconds. I had landed in a parallel universe.

I walked back out into the daylight, blinked hard, and started moving toward the parking lot exit at a pace that I hoped looked like confidence and felt like pure escape. I was certain the tower guard had a rifle. Too many bang-bang movies, perhaps. I have always had an active imagination.

Waiting for Janice felt like an eternity. She finally picked me up twenty minutes later, having gotten lost herself. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t think I’m going to get the job,” I said. I hopped into the driver's seat as Janice slid over. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

That night, at the party Janice’s roommates threw — their weekend ritual — I made the mistake of telling one of the older guys what had happened. He laughed so hard he nearly lost his beer. Then he turned and announced it to the entire room. Might have been something to do with the pile of cocaine.

My shame was immediate and total. An Irish Catholic dork drowning in guilt, now soaking in it publicly. I drank more than I should have to get through the rest of the night. Passing out often seemed better than trying to process feelings.

The next morning, Janice and I hiked in the local park. I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember the way it felt to be next to her — that pull, like gravity had a preference. And I remember dreading the drive back.

I left at three in the morning to make it to the farm by six. The highway was empty. I had no radio station decent enough to fill the void. Just me, the Dart, and the slow understanding that I was twenty-two, clueless, and apparently incapable of knowing what an escort was.

But I was still going back. Every week. For Janice. I was a boy on a mission, having vowed to myself, my parents, and the universe, “I’m going to marry Janice Miller.” Mom and Dad thought I was nuts, but I was madly in love.

Forty-plus years later, Janice Miller Jones is my wife and my best friend. She has loved me when I forgot how. Honestly, I think my curious, naive, inner child is one of the reasons she kept me around.

A man willing to walk into a New Jersey strip club in his only suit, carrying a briefcase, looking for honest work — that’s either deeply foolish or deeply devoted.

Looking back, I think it was both. And now I know the difference between infatuation and true, lasting, unconditional love. The former fades while the latter grows.

Image credit author, my father, Clifford Jones, Jr.

I was about twelve when my mother found out about my father’s affair. We lived in a small New England town. I wasn’t the only one who knew.

Mother did not whisper her disappointment. She screamed it. She was pissed, wounded, betrayed, and convinced he had sinned.

Dad screwed himself.

Home was never the same. He never had a chance to redeem himself or find forgiveness, let alone from my mother.

That screw-up was my first real lesson in sin — not from a priest, not from scripture, not from some polished sermon about temptation or eternal fire. I learned it in the kitchen, or the living room, or wherever the emotional shrapnel landed that day.

I am the firstborn son of three children, born to parents who confused infatuation with true, lasting love. I say that with compassion now. They did their best. But their marriage failed long before the divorce decree made it official.

For a long time, I thought my father’s sin was the one thing I would never repeat. And I didn’t. I married my college sweetheart at twenty-four. Falling madly in love with my wife was the best thing that ever happened to me.

But that does not mean I was innocent.

My sins were different. Probably more numerous than my dad’s. More scattered. More reckless.

I miss my loving father dearly. He was a far greater man than his sins would lead others to believe.

Sin sucks because of how we feel afterward

It’s like I got addicted to sinning as a kid. Born bad. Damaged goods.

The cycle of fear, self-loathing, shame, and guilt began around the same time I started going to church. I was raised around strong Catholic values, even though I didn’t fully understand the theology beneath them. I needed to know:

Why am I here? Why do we fight? Why are we going to hell if we just got here?

I did my best to play the game everyone else was playing. Work, money, marriage, kids, house. But I kept searching for my fortune in the wrong places.

I was a dumb little shit. It was all about me.

I fell madly in love in college and got married young. Had kids when I was still figuring myself out. Made it pretty big. Then, I lost it all — mental health, business, income, all of our money, and my faith. But not my wife, who stuck by my side when most wives would have run me over with a car.

I got sick of suffering

In my early forties, it occurred to me that everything that sucked in my life had a purpose. I knew I needed to change or die.

I started therapy. I started going to self-help group meetings. I started shifting the way I see myself. Toxic habits fell away. Fear loosened its grip. Anger melted. It’s as if a large cosmic burden of guilt and shame burned away like fog once the sun shines bright enough.

People saw changes in me before I saw them myself. That’s always a good sign.

The meaning of sin in a different light

Around that same time, I was reading books about all the world’s religions, including ancient texts like the Nag Hammadi — a collection of 13 ancient leather-bound papyrus codices containing over 50 Gnostic Christian texts, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945.

I found a definition for “sin” that changed everything.

In biblical Hebrew, one word translated as "sin" is chata (חָטָא) — meaning to miss, fail, or go astray. According to Strong's Hebrew Lexicon, the root carries the literal sense of missing a mark or target, not simply committing a moral wrong. The Greek equivalent, hamartia, carries the same weight — as noted in this discussion of Romans 3:23: an archer releasing an arrow wide of the target. He's not going to hell. He's going to try again.

In Greek, hamartia carries the same sense — failure, error, missing the mark. According to Wikipedia's entry on Hamartia, the word spans a wide range of failures, from moral fault to innocent mistake. And as explored in Hamartia in Aristotle's Poetics, the notion resists a single clean definition — which is exactly the point. Sin was not only about being bad. It was about being misdirected, out of alignment, unaware of the damage I was causing myself and others.

That does not make sin harmless. Betrayal still hurts. Lies still break trust. Addiction still destroys families. Anger still burns the house down from the inside.

But now I understand: remorse can change how we see ourselves. Our consciousness shifts. We stop seeing ourselves as bad, broken, or doomed. We begin to see ourselves as souls on a journey in a school called life.

Pain can punish us, or it can wake us up

My father’s affair wounded my mother. It wounded our family. It also shaped me — don’t do that to your wife or kids.

In Exodus 20:5, God speaks of visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Modern trauma research echoes this. As therapist Terry Real writes, “Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation,” unless someone becomes conscious enough to stop passing it on.

But Ezekiel makes the moral responsibility clear: “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.”

I am not guilty of my father’s choices. My children are not guilty of mine. What we refuse to heal, we hand down. That is why self-awareness matters. Why forgiveness matters. Why grace matters.

What freedom looks like

My emotional freedom did not come from theory. It came from wreckage — from looking honestly at my life and asking: What am I not seeing? What am I repeating? What am I ready to change?

Freedom begins when we can say, "This happened. It hurt. It shaped me. But it does not own me.”

The deadly sins of a father or mother do not have to become the destiny of the son or daughter.

Forget the wrongs of the past? Maybe not completely.

But forgive, yes.

Love it all, including the stuff we hate? That may take a lifetime. Or more.

But that, I believe, is the mark worth aiming for — because love is all.

Cliff Jones is an author, artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Digital watercolor paintings of our grandchildren, Penelope, Aiden, and Ford

Even though I never liked school, I always loved learning what I’m most curious about. Early in my life, I pegged my identity to being an athlete. I was mostly obsessed with playing tennis. But I also played baseball and soccer and skied as a kid growing up in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire.

Since the pandemic, I’ve poured my attention into becoming a better photographer and artist. I scaled back the consulting business focus and wrote a new book, Shift Yourself, Change Your Career: A Practical Guide for Finding Clarity, Purpose, and Prosperity at Work, to help people with their careers.

And even though I sold a bunch of art, I immediately realized the art business is a drag. Same with books, movies, and everything else in the material world.

Why tell you this? Because I’ve been stuck over the last year. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life, and since I’m not the only one, I’m going to share some insight into my process for figuring out what’s next.

Look, not knowing what’s next can be rough. But it doesn’t have to be when you learn that not knowing is normal. Being okay not knowing is like being okay with not sleeping. Don’t sweat it. Find a process to help yourself be okay, and tap into the infinite power of your subconscious mind to find your way.

Making the most of time

Time is our greatest asset, but most of us let it blow by without being super aware of how to use it well. I know I did until I got older. I have become more intentional about how I use my time and with whom I spend it.

Life is much simpler now. It’s all about cultivating greater self-awareness. For example, ChatGPT tells me I have another 700 to 1,100 weekends to live. That will get your attention if you let it sink in. Time here is precious. It’s a gift. But we blow a lot of it, not knowing what’s next.

How about you? Are you aware and intentional of how you use your time? If not, what’s missing? Do you have a process for thinking through the big questions you’re facing?

If not, I’ll share the process I use for myself and with the few coaching clients I take on.

People can and do change with time

If you feel stuck, it’s okay. I have seen enough people make dramatic changes in their lives to believe some of us can shift ourselves into a higher dimension of consciousness. But we have to become students of the mind, our supercomputer running on autopilot about 90 percent of the time.

Suffering is typically the springboard to change. Suffering can wake us up, motivating us to shift gears with our self-awareness, Intention, and how we invest, not spend, our time.

We learn who we are by learning who we are not

If psychologists are right about how humans think, most of us are on autopilot, driven by cultural programming and mental conditioning. We call it life. We call it success. We call it being responsible.

But a lot of it is the matrix.

Not the science-fiction version with machines and black leather coats. I mean the invisible system of beliefs, fears, expectations, and rewards that tells us who to be, what to want, how to measure ourselves, and when we are allowed to feel successful.

Make more money.

Build the bigger thing.

Get the title.

Grow the audience.

Be impressive.

Stay relevant.

Win.

I bought into plenty of that. I still catch myself buying into it. But I’m less fooled by it now.

For example, I have learned I am not my business. I am not my bank account. I am not my LinkedIn profile. I am not my subscriber count. I am not my past success. I am not my failures either.

I am also not the scared kid trying to prove himself through sports, sales, writing, consulting, coaching, or any other form of achievement.

I am a man trying to become more conscious before the weekends run out.

Anyone can make the shift, given the desire to find their way

Without a process to find our way and some faith, it’s really easy to get lost. I’ve been stuck plenty of times. It’s not fun.

Knowing who we are is the key to knowing what is next. But that requires courage to try different things in life. And to have a process you can count on.

That’s where my Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method™ has helped me process what I’m feeling, thinking, and choosing. Figuring out what’s next happens at various stages of life for all of us. It works for people, teams, and entire organizations seeking alignment and direction.

Here’s a snapshot of my five steps to shift and find answers to the big questions like, “What do I want to do next with my life?”

• Self-Awareness asks, “What is really happening inside me?”

• Higher Understanding asks, “What is the bigger truth I may not be seeing?”

• Introspection asks, “What am I attached to, afraid of, or avoiding?”

• Focused Intention asks, “Who am I choosing to become now?”

• Transformation asks, “What is the next honest action?”

That process has become less of a business framework for me and more of a way to live.

When I slow down enough to use it, I can see my attachments more clearly. I can see when ambition is healthy and when it becomes hunger. I can see when I’m creating from love and when I’m trying to earn approval from people who may never care.

That’s a hard truth

But the hard truth is usually where freedom begins.

A rich life, at least to me now, is not measured first by money. Money matters. Freedom matters. Security matters. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But the older I get, the more I believe we measure wealth by the quality use of time. Let’s look at it as the art of life.

Time with my wife.

Time with my children and grandchildren.

Time in good health.

Time walking, riding my bike, reading, praying, writing, learning, serving, laughing, and being fully present with the people I love.

Time not spent chasing some false finish line.

That may be the point of life as I understand it today.

To know who we are by knowing who we are not.

To become intentional about who we are becoming.

To break free from the conditioning that keeps us performing instead of living.

To use our remaining time wisely.

To love well.

To stay healthy enough to enjoy the gift.

To keep learning.

To keep letting go.

To keep shifting.

I don’t have all this figured out. I’m still in the middle of it. Maybe that’s the point, too.

Therein lies the purpose of life

The purpose of life may not be to arrive at some final answer. It’s love life, even though it’s hard for all of us. It’s to wake up, one layer at a time, until we can finally tell the difference between what the world told us to want and what our soul actually came here to do.

How about you?

I’m an author, artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Image, Canva

Once in a while, a concerned mother, foster parent, or volunteer asks me to mentor a young man who is struggling. Most are between 17 and 35. Many come from broken homes, hard streets, or the foster system. Most have learned not to trust anyone.

Eye contact is rare at first. So is honesty. Trust has to be earned.

I recently met one I’ll call Jake. We met at a coffee shop near the group home where he was living in Mesa, Arizona. He looked half asleep even though it was only 10:30 in the morning. His foster mother came with him and quietly sat nearby during our first meeting. She struck me as one of those rare people who keep showing up for kids who have every reason to believe nobody will. Saintly.

When I meet young men like Jake, I do not start by giving advice. I start by listening. I ask about school, work, interests, goals, and what they think is holding them back. I try to understand the person before I say much about change. In my experience, truth usually follows trust, not the other way around.

Many of these young men have no stable role models, no clear goals, and no real sense that life can improve. Some are heavily medicated for anxiety, depression, anger, or trauma. Many seem to move through life in a haze. My mission is to help them believe they are more than what happened to them. To be a guiding light.

By the end of my first meeting with Jake, I learned he had stolen more than a hundred cars before the age of 17. That stopped me for a second. His father and mother separated long ago. His father was deported. His mother lives far away.

I don’t take notes. I listen and try to hear what is not being said. After hearing what Jake told me, I said, “Jake, that tells me something important. You never need to doubt that you can get very good at whatever you put your mind to. The real question is whether you’ll use that ability to destroy your life or build one.”

He smiled, and we made a deal

Once he got his phone back after a school suspension, we would get to work on better habits, better influences, and a better path. We had built a bond of trust and set the stage for making progress.

A week later, I called him at the group home. We talked for nearly an hour. It sounded positive. That same evening, I got a call saying the Department of Corrections had picked him up and taken him to jail.

One question kept hitting me. Why do human beings do things that so clearly work against their own best interests? Why do we destroy relationships, careers, health, money, trust, and peace of mind, even when part of us knows better?

Jake is not the exception. He is the example. He did what many of us do. He repeated a pattern that was hurting him because, somewhere deep inside, that pattern felt familiar. That may be one of the hardest truths about human behavior.

What looks like self-destruction is often self-protection in disguise

Human beings are not wired first for happiness. We are wired first for survival. That matters more than most people realize. Long before we had careers, social media, retirement plans, and modern stress, we had one main job: stay alive.

The human brain evolved to detect threats, avoid pain, and protect us from danger. The trouble is that the brain does not always do a great job of distinguishing between physical danger and emotional pain. The National Institute of Mental Health offers a useful foundation for understanding how the brain responds to stress, fear, and threat.

To the nervous system, rejection can feel like danger. Shame can feel like danger. Uncertainty can feel like danger. Abandonment, financial fear, divorce, humiliation, and loss of identity can all trigger the same basic alarm system. The American Psychological Association has published extensive material on trauma, stress, and coping that helps explain why people often respond to emotional pain in ways that appear irrational from the outside.

Pain is where a lot of self-destructive behavior begins

Being human is hard. A person drinks to numb anxiety. Someone stays in a toxic relationship because loneliness feels worse. A high achiever works themselves into exhaustion because slowing down feels unsafe. A young man steals cars because power, risk, and control feel better than helplessness.

What looks irrational from the outside often makes a strange kind of sense from the inside. That does not excuse destructive behavior. But it does help explain it.

I know this because I have lived my own version of it. When I was younger, I used alcohol the same way many people use distraction, work, anger, or control. I used it to numb pain. I used it to escape insecurity. I used it because I did not know what else to do with the discomfort I carried around. Back then, my friends and I jokingly called it “beer muscles.” It felt like confidence, until it didn’t.

Looking back, I can see that much of what I did was not freedom. It was compensation. It was a survival strategy. Early instability at home had taught me to overcontrol life, overreact to stress, and run from pain rather than understand it. Daniel Kahneman’s work on fast, automatic thinking helps explain why so much of human behavior runs on old patterns before reason ever gets a vote.

That is how these loops work

The mind confuses what is familiar with what is safe. If fear, chaos, shame, or emotional distance shaped us early on, we may unconsciously recreate those conditions later, not because they are good for us, but because they are familiar.

Our brains love patterns. The body keeps score of trauma. The more often we think, feel, and behave in certain ways, the more automatic those ways become. Bessel van der Kolk’s work has helped bring this reality into mainstream conversation by showing how trauma can shape the body, brain, and behavior long after the original pain has passed.

Carl Jung put it plainly: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

That line has stayed with me because it explains so much about my choices and how I perceive the world around me. Most people do not wake up intending to damage their own lives. They act from wounds they have not fully seen, named, or healed.

Jung’s collected works remain deeply useful if you want to understand shadow, projection, and the hidden forces that shape behavior. A child grows up in chaos and becomes an adult who recreates chaos. A person learns that they must earn love and spends decades trying to prove their worth. Someone who felt powerless early in life becomes controlling later on.

Different story, same pattern

And this is not just personal. It is collective too. The same forces that distort individuals also distort families, communities, and nations: fear, tribalism, short-term thinking, shame, and the need for certainty.

History is full of examples of human beings choosing what feels emotionally safe in the moment over what is wise in the long run. That is why self-destruction can show up everywhere, from a private addiction to public madness.

Still, there is good news in all this

Awareness changes the equation. We can change for the better once we desire to stop suffering. The goal is not self-condemnation. It is understanding.

The moment a person stops asking, “What is wrong with me?” and starts asking, “What happened to me?” something begins to soften. The pattern becomes visible. We break the cycle. And when we can clearly see a pattern, we have a chance to interrupt it.

That is where real change begins. Not with shame. Not with force. Not with pretending. With awareness.

It’s not selfish to self-reflect

That is why honest conversation matters. That is why therapy, journaling, coaching, faith, and inner work matter. Human beings can change, but usually not by being bullied into it. Change starts when truth becomes clear enough that we can no longer hide from it.

We shift when we get tired of suffering. We can unlearn what we learned. We can rewire our brains given the desire. What once looked like fate can become a conscious choice. That does not mean life becomes easy. It means we become more awake.

As we wake up, we pause sooner. We see the trigger before the reaction. We stop running over ourselves. We stop calling old survival habits our personality. We stop mistaking pain for identity.

Humans may seem self-destructive, and often we are. But beneath much of that behavior is something deeper, pain trying to protect itself. Once you understand that, you start to see people differently. You also start to see yourself differently.

That may be where healing begins. It begins when two people from different worlds come together because of a shared love for life and a power embedded within all of us: light.

I’m an author, artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- Self-Reflection, 2022 by author

If you have ever sat in a room full of people and felt like an alien, this is for you.

If you have ever wondered why other people seem to love things that leave you cold, sports, crowds, parties, and group rituals, this may help.

I could be the only human being who walked out of a Super Bowl game thinking to myself, How boring and stupid is this? True story. It was Super Bowl XXX, hosted in Tempe, Arizona, in 1996.

Everyone who knew about my Super Bowl stunt thought I was stupid. As if, Dude, what’s wrong with you?

For most of my life, I asked myself the same question

Was something wrong with me, considering I always had an aversion to spectator sports, group activities, and cruise ships? Not broken in some dramatic, obvious way. Just off. Different in a way that made ordinary social life feel unnatural, and at times, downright absurd.

I used to feel so out of place that my exit strategy was to hammer as much beer as I could and get drunk enough not to care about walking out.

Was it possible God made me with the intent to completely suck at belonging, spectating, and doing “normal human stuff”?

Or maybe it was something else

Here is what made it more confusing. I have been an athlete most of my life. I love sport when I am learning it, doing it, chasing mastery through it.

As a kid, I watched professional tennis players, Nordic skiers, alpine skiers, swimmers, and cyclists because I wanted to study them. That’s all. Playing sports was the identity that kept the agony of adolescence tolerable, but barely.

By the time I left for college, I was the small-town “star” in tennis. Later in life, I did the same with archery and pickleball. I watched to learn. I watched to improve. I watched because I wanted to win the gold, stand on the podium, and for one shining instant feel like a superhero.

I had a desperate need to be seen, heard, and win, rivaled only by my need for other people’s approval.

But I routinely felt like I sucked at belonging, until I didn’t.

Age helped. So did suffering. So did paying attention.

Life gets better when we let go of the ego

As I’ve gotten older, the need to compete and win is practically gone. For decades, I hustled, hawked, and marketed my way through building a couple of successful small businesses. But these days, I’m sick of promoting myself and have no need to be on a podium. It’s as if my ego did its thing and now sits way back in my psyche.

And I’m pretty much done arguing with reality. I let go of any delusion that I can control the uncontrollable.

I’m living proof that people change

But we have to work on ourselves to understand and manage the inner game of being a social animal. Suffering can change us if we let it. It only requires being sick of it, owning your part, and shifting your mindset to replace lame habits.

But back to the sports thing. What I finally came to understand is that many people do not love sports because of the sports themselves. They love what the sport gives them.

Belonging. Identity. Ritual. Tribe. A ready-made way to say, These are my people.

That helped me understand something about myself.

My problem was never that I hated sports. My problem was that I spent too many years assuming that because I did not respond to the tribe the way others did, something was wrong with me.

It wasn’t. I hadn’t found my way yet, because I didn’t know enough about who I am.

I was simply not wired for borrowed identity. I liked participation, not spectatorship. I liked mastery, not noise. I liked learning, not ritual. I liked direct experience, not emotional secondhand smoke from a stadium full of strangers or a living room full of men yelling at a screen.

That difference matters.

Some people come alive in crowds, some do not. I do not. I prefer solitude, reflection, and one-on-one connection. That is the real me.

Maybe you do too. If so, neither is right nor wrong. It simply means human beings are wired differently.

What Jung said about finding yourself

In Carl Jung’s thought, finding your true self is not about inventing a new identity. It is about becoming conscious of what is already within you but has been buried, denied, or left undeveloped. The way to find out who you are is often to learn who you are not.

Your aversions will tell you a lot about who you are, if you pay attention.

Looking back, I can see three things were going on in me at once. First, I had a deep need to achieve. Second, I had a deep need for approval. Third, I was never comfortable with mass behavior.

Whatever the cause, the result was the same. I spent much of my life feeling like an outsider looking in.

That feeling can mess with your head

When you do not fit smoothly into what everybody else calls normal, you start to question your own nature. You wonder if you are defective, antisocial, too serious, too intense, too independent, too weird.

That is the real pain of not belonging. It is not only loneliness. It is self-doubt.

But age has a way of burning off illusions.

What I see now is that I was never damaged goods. I was never less-than. I was never missing some key ingredient of manhood or humanity because I would rather talk to the women, hang out with the kids, or disappear into my own thoughts than watch a football game with a bunch of grown men.

I was just different.

Being okay being different

Being different is not a diagnosis. It is data. It is useful information about who you are, what feeds you, what drains you, and which social rituals make you feel like you are betraying yourself.

Real peace comes when you stop arguing with your own nature. So if you have felt this same alien feeling your whole life, maybe the answer is nothing.

Maybe you are not broken. And if you are, let the teacher within guide you. To do that, you need to surrender to win.

Maybe you were just built for a different path. Your path. Your way.

Maybe your life was never meant to be lived from the outside in. Maybe it was always meant to be lived from the inside out. And if my experience helps you stop apologizing for your nature, then it has served a purpose.

Go with the flow today.

I’m an author, strategic consultant, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- Janice, Cliff, grandchildren

It’s been a brutal stretch these past six months. The image you see is my wife and me with our three grandchildren. Here we are in our happy zone, in the eye of a recent storm.

Most of my energy has gone into helping a family member through a crisis I would not wish on anyone. Coaching, writing, painting, photography, all of it stopped. I sat down to write more times than I can count, only to come up empty.

The fact that you are reading this now means something finally came through, and it feels honest.

Enjoy.

The crisis

Three years ago, a close family member was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Over time, the full weight of that injury became clear.

What started as recovery turned into serious behavioral health issues. We entered a system akin to a black hole. We were not looking for surface-level solutions. We needed care that matched what brain scans were showing.

I can’t tell the full story. I won’t use names. Here is my side of it with a few key lessons.

Staying strong under extreme stress

There’s good stress and the kind that slowly crushes us. I’ve attracted buckets of both. I’m grateful for all of the past and present, now.

I’ve spent a lifetime leaning into stress as an athlete, entrepreneur, builder, and creative. I know how to push. I know how to endure.

But when life hits, it slams my face into the ground, and staying calm is hard. Sometimes it feels impossible. Yet, I’m finding my way.

Being human is about making spiritual progress

Spiritual work and mental health work are not separate. They move together. I’m steadier than I used to be, even when everything around me feels unstable.

As the family patriarch, I need to show up for my family, especially my wife. Not perfectly. But consistently. With acceptance, compassion, and love.

Steadfastness, not reaction.

Even when a marriage may not survive. Even when there are no clear answers.

There is still a way to find gratitude in the middle of it. “Thank you, God.”

The way is grace

We’ve grown a lot as a family over the last six months. Faith and grace carried us when nothing else did.

Finding the right help was harder than expected. When someone does not fit cleanly into the system, you feel it fast. We spoke with doctors, specialists, and providers. We made countless calls.

We found some answers, but mostly resistance. Insurance helped very little. Many providers do not accept it. The real solutions often require paying out of pocket.

That’s the reality.

The storm has eased a bit in recent weeks, thanks to family, close friends, and a few professionals who stepped in.

Every crisis teaches something, whether you want it to or not

Suffering strips life down to what is real.

You either fight reality or accept it and ask what it’s here to teach.

I’ve learned to say, this is hard, step up, let’s find a way.

The best way I’ve learned to deal with fear is to focus on the present and to be grateful for everything, including the hardest lessons. The present is one of the greatest gifts we receive.

We don’t get what we want until we are grateful for what we already have.

Everyone processes the crisis differently

That’s why presence matters.

We are still working to find the right support, and we are not stopping.

At the same time, everyone in the family needs care, not just the person in crisis.

We talk openly. No matter how uncomfortable it gets.

We are in this together, even though one of the units is breaking apart

Therapy matters. Support matters. No one carries this alone.

I meet people where they are, not where I want them to be. I listen. I hug. I reassure.

When anger and rage showed up due to the brain injury, I had to remind myself that this is the wounded part of an otherwise good man.

We cannot control others. We can only control how we respond.

Stay calm. Stay grounded. Stay grateful.

Family is first

Family is first for me because I know what it feels like when it breaks.

My wife and I have built a 40-year marriage. That unity matters now more than ever.

Sometimes family is the only thread holding things together. It’s not clean. It’s not easy.

It takes intention.

Mental health is not an event

It’s a process. There is no quick fix. Real healing takes time, effort, and community.

Stress and trauma can shut down logic. When that happens, people act in ways that don’t make sense.

Understanding that helped me stay grounded.

Life is hard. Family is hard. Accept it. Expect it. Learn from it.

There is a purpose in suffering

You learn patience. Compassion. Forgiveness. Strength. Love.

But only if you’re willing. That starts with ownership. Every person in the family has a role. It’s to be accountable and respectful to all.

No one becomes willing until they are tired of suffering.

Without struggle, growth doesn’t happen. I believe that we are here to evolve in how we love.

You see it everywhere, even in the worst conditions. Love still shows up.

Learning emotional maturity is one of the keys to happiness

I don’t surf in the ocean, but I’ve learned to surf my emotions. Prayer, breathing, movement, and focus keep me steady.

Reading, journaling, and simplifying matter more than ever.

Gratitude changes everything. It shifts your focus. It calms the mind. It softens the edges.

Life gets better when you let it

My life has improved with age. That’s true for many people.

But we live in a world that pulls our attention in every direction. You have to rise above the noise. You have to find stillness.

You have to choose meaning, even in crisis.

Suffering will change you. The question is how and when. Let it go by letting go.

Together, we are learning to be okay even when we’re not

Acceptance of what is becomes the springboard to serenity. We are healing. Not perfectly. Not completely. But we are moving forward.

Communication is open. Respect is growing. We are more united than we were. The hard truth is, there may still be a divorce ahead. That may be the deepest wound.

But one thing will not change. I will love my family unconditionally.

Because learning acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness are the rungs on the ladder to unconditional love and inner peace.

And in the end, that’s why we are here.

I’m an author, strategic consultant, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Image credit author

In the mid-1990s, most Americans believed millionaires lived in big houses, drove luxury cars, and wore designer labels. They were wrong. Very wrong.

Published in 1996, The Millionaire Next Door quietly dismantled the American myth of wealth. Nearly 30 years later, its findings are still quoted, debated, and misunderstood.

The question is not whether Stanley was right. He was. The real question is what has changed since then, and what still hasn’t.

By the end of my article, you’ll see what it takes to be wealthy.

The Premise That Upset a Culture

The Millionaire Next Door offers a simple idea: study people who actually became wealthy, not those who look wealthy.

The authors found that most millionaires were self-made, lived below their means, avoided status spending, and built wealth slowly over decades. They were teachers, engineers, small business owners, and middle managers. Not celebrities. Not hedge fund stars.

Wealth, they discovered, was a behavior, not an income level.

Turns out, when it comes to wealth, mindset matters.

The Authors Behind the Research

Thomas J. Stanley was a PhD researcher and professor who spent decades studying wealth accumulation. He was not a motivational speaker or financial entertainer. He was a data guy. He passed away in 2015, leaving behind a significant legacy and body of work.

William D. Danko, his co-author, brought statistical rigor and academic discipline to the work. Together, they conducted surveys and interviews with thousands of millionaires over multiple decades.

Standley didn’t deal in theory. It was behavioral economics before the term was fashionable—hard data.

Stanley later expanded on the research in books such as The Millionaire Mind and Stop Acting Rich.

The Core Findings That Still Hold

The data produced several insights that remain uncomfortable today.

• Most millionaires did not inherit their wealth

• High income did not guarantee wealth

• Frugality mattered more than intelligence or prestige

• Small, consistent investing beats big, flashy wins

• Financial independence mattered more than social approval

A Term for Rich Posers

Stanley coined a term for people who look rich but are not, UAWs, Under Accumulators of Wealth. Many high earners fell into this category because spending rose faster than savings.

Keeping up with the Joneses comes at a cost. I am one.

What Has Changed Since Then

A lot, and not much. Let’s take a look at a few of the current economic and social dynamics that may seem obvious to you.

1. Housing and education costs have exploded. Home prices, college tuition, and healthcare costs have grown far faster than wages. This has made early wealth accumulation harder, especially for younger generations.

2. The rise of visible wealth. Social media has turned lifestyle into performance. Stanley studied people who avoided attention. Today’s culture rewards conspicuous consumption, even when funded by debt.

3. Income inequality is wider. Top earners now capture a larger share of income, and asset ownership is more concentrated. That does not invalidate Stanley’s findings, but it raises the bar for discipline and patience.

4. Access to investing has improved. Low-cost index funds, automated investing, and financial education are more accessible than ever. The tools are better. The behavior problem remains.

5. Time horizons have shortened. Stanley’s millionaires thought in decades. Today’s culture thinks in quarters, clicks, and trends.

What Has Not Changed At All

Wealth still comes from margin, not magic.

Margin is simply the gap between what you earn and what you spend. That gap is where wealth grows. Magic is the idea that more income, a big win, or a clever investment will do the work for you.

In the real world, people build wealth by keeping some of what they make, every month, for years. Those who spend it all, no matter how much they earn, stay stuck.

The math is boring. The results are not.

Wealthy Habits

Here are the habits of wealthy people:

• Spend less than they earn

• Invest consistently

• Avoid lifestyle inflation

• Value freedom over image

• Play the long game

Those principles are boring. That is why they work.

How do we develop these habits? Mindset.

Change yourself, shift your life by doing the work to build the money muscle memory it takes to liberate yourself.

What would it look like for you when you no longer have to work for money? Seriously. Think about it. Stop and see if you can visualize what that might be. What it would feel like.

See, feel, and believe. These are the keys to transformation—the shift from within.

The Takeaway for Today

The Millionaire Next Door was never about becoming rich. It was about becoming free.

That message matters more now. Look at us. Any of us who grew up in the 70s or 80s remembers the first wave of high inflation. Heck, there was even a time when our government decided to grab all the gold from Americans.

So, here we are. Clearly, we learn little from past mistakes. But some of us, even a numnut from New Hampshire like me, can live freely in the middle class, so can anyone, given the right mindset, habits, and, at least for me, divine intervention.

Financial illiteracy, money trauma and anxiety, debt loads that suffocate us, and our mindset are the obstacles. We have to commit to becoming wealthy if we can agree that true wealth is having the spiritual, psychological, and physical well-being, and the family, friends, and connections that lead to an authentic, fulfilling line of work, financial security, and ultimately, the kind of freedom I get to enjoy in my mid-60s, is possible.

There is Hope

As long as you believe in yourself. Self-help, self-development, self-discovery, self-awareness, self-actualization, and self-individuation are all words for investing in and creating a more authentic, healthy, wealthy, you.

It’s not selfish to invest in yourself.

You, Inc., have hope in yourself. Lean on your higher power—curate faith. Learn. Train your mind. Take action. See what happens.

Adapt as you go. Never stop.

Stanley documented one of the few proven paths to financial independence. The environment is tougher. The distractions are louder. But the math has not changed.

Build wealth the same way. Slowly. Intentionally. And often invisibly.

True, sustainable wealth is about more than money.

I’m an author, strategic consultant, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, small business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- Dragonfly, 2022

What happens when a person gets to the end of their career without knowing their higher purpose? Or how to reinvent themselves? And use their time for the second half of life?

Stuck. Lost. Kind of like falling into a black hole.

For example, all based on a true story...

• A partner at a law firm loses his season tickets and parking space. (I know, first-world problem.)

• An influential, 7-figure CEO no longer has his board.

• A world-famous author loses his fame and his private jet.

• A retired, divorced banker gets sick of playing golf with his buddies and starts day drinking and calling his broker every other hour.

I call it “wealth without purpose.” Emotional bankruptcy. Lots of money. Too much time.

Limited self-awareness. No purpose. Bad combo.

The business of life is bigger than money and material. If you have time, money, and no purpose, it’s tough to know what to do.

It’s a heck of a lot easier to reinvent yourself when you know who you are and what you want. That takes lots of time and experience for most of us.

Ultimately, it’s about purpose. Follow it, and you’ll be good.

True self. There’s only one of you, really.

Clarity follows purpose.

Here’s how it works ...

You start wondering why something feels off. But you’re not sure what. You start thinking, “Hmmm, what’s this all about?”

Boom. Ask, and you shall ... start listening to yourself. That higher part of you deep inside and all around us.

A voice that whispers in the middle of the night, “Wake up, it’s time to shift.”

Finally, you’re ready to answer the call.

Your job is to be curious, ask questions, recognize the gap in meaning, the void in purpose, and the toll it takes on your energy.

Keep asking ...

“Where do I feel the most alive? How can I make a difference in my community? How do I get my health back, or stay healthy, even better?”

“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”

— Dale Carnegie

Acceptance is the gateway to serenity. It’s a great place!

Reinventing yourself is much easier when you know yourself, what you want, and how to invest your free time.

And you don’t have to wait to reinvent yourself. If you’re having a tough go of it right now, know this ...

All the tough stuff you go through will be worth it when you look back from your 50s or 60s and beyond. (If you do the inner work.)

Just answer the call! After that...

• You won’t sweat the silly stuff as much.

• You will let go of any regrets from the past.

• You will start forgiving yourself. That’s the springboard to forgiving others.

That’s how we stay young. Virtue, not vice.

“Purpose is the fountain of youth.” (Did I just make that up?)

During the process of reinventing ourselves, we notice the overactive ego melts away.

Remaining fears lose their grip. Acceptance, compassion, and patience take over. If you’re stuck, ask for help. Do your best. Finish strong.

Be the real you. That’s the art of life.

I’m an author, strategic coach, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, small business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Self-portrait by the author

Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Only a writer could relate. I started writing when I was 13. I was pissed about inflation in 1974. It crushed my dad’s business. My family struggled financially. Mom and Dad started fighting.

Fear is a bitch. What follows is a fun-to-write rant and story about my history as a writer and my later learning to be an artist.

Back to inflation-from-hell in the early 70s. It sucked for everyone. Gas prices went through the roof. My dad’s hotel business started to crash. Fear gripped America as if we were all falling into a black hole.

So I decided to write a Letter to the Editor for our small-town paper. Everyone who can read reads the local paper in 1974.

Writing that letter was fun. Getting a dose of whoop ass from my parents was not.

Screenshot by author

Fast forward to college.

My writing evolved to journaling. I still have the journal I kept while living in France for a year as a college student.

Today, when I read that journal, I see a creative, outlying, misfit who would and could never last for long in corporate America.

“You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

I wanted freedom. Creative freedom. Time freedom. Making money definitely helps.

Until I crossed the line from teenager side jobs like raking leaves and shoveling snow to early adulthood.

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

So I did the best I could, just like the rest of us. Learning was fun, even if nobody read my stuff.

No, I didn’t identify as a writer until I hacked one of the world’s crappiest books with a bunch of other naive consultants and coaches who didn’t know how bogus “Chapter Books” are.

Image credit author, Mount Humphreys, Flagstaff, Arizona

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison

I write for fun.

Over several decades of pounding on my keyboards, I found ways to make money; sales letters, seminar invitations, slide decks, investor pitches, sales pitches, proposals, website copy, email copy, blog copy, and a shit ton of money made not as a writer, but as a consultant who could write and get top-ten search engine results before AI ruined SEO for everyone.

So, for me, doing what I loved led to making money. That’s money well-earned. Work doesn’t feel like work.

Imagine that.

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain

Image credit author, - Scottsdale Landing @ Sunset, Scottsale, Arizona

It doesn’t matter what I write because everything I write is fueled by inspiration. I’m a seat-of-the-pants wordsmith. I can type faster than anyone I know.

And no, I don’t look at the keyboard. I own that thing.

The hard part about writing is the editing. But less than $200 a year for Grammarly solves that problem. And it beats hiring an editor like the old days.

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.” — Octavia E. Butler

I still crank out thousands of words, documents, articles, and other forms of content that get deleted before they're closed into a saved folder or sent to my printer. As with photography, an artist learns to be more discriminating in their art.

Over time, with practice, we learn. We find our zone. Our sweet spot. Our style. Just like writers find their voice.

We find our way to be creative. Doing what we love.

That’s wisdom in action.

Image credit author, - Dragonfly

In closing, here’s what I’ve learned about myself after writing for all of these years. I love it. I hate it.

And I like photography and painting much better.

Why?

Because if a picture is worth 1,000 words, it’s 10,000 times easier to knock out a great image or painting after practicing these other art forms.

And people notice my artwork far more than my writing. I could be; my writing sucks that badly, or so I think.

Head trash is a bitch, too. But every decent artist learns to deal with that.

Remember: You are an artist here to create the life of your dreams. That’s why I’m telling you all of this. If you don’t believe me, think back to how creative and playful you were as a kid.

I’m an author, strategic coach, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, small business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- Self-portrait, me at 64.5 years young

Retirement is sold as a finish line. Work hard. Save enough. Stop working. Enjoy life.

That story is incomplete—and for many people, it’s harmful.

That’s why I recently decided to create a new body of work addressing the massive fear, anxiety, and suffering we experience over money, work, and retirement. My premise is that as soon as we are willing to shift our mindset about all of this, the easier it is to reduce the struggle of being human.

Heck, it’s already hard enough down here. But the truth is, most of us beat the crap out of ourselves mentally, and it takes a terrible toll on our health and quality of life.

Here’s a short history of retirement in America

Retirement is not a reward. It is a major life transition built on systems and assumptions that no longer align with how long we live, how we work, or how we stay healthy and fulfilled. To understand why so many retirees struggle financially and emotionally, we have to look at where retirement came from, what it does to the human mind, and what actually works instead.

Modern retirement began in the 1930s. When the Social Security Administration was created in 1935, the United States’ life expectancy was about 61 years. Full retirement age was set at 65. In other words, retirement was never designed to last decades. Many people never collected benefits at all, and those who did often relied on them briefly.

After World War II, employer pensions expanded. Workers traded loyalty for guaranteed income. Careers were stable. Lifespans were shorter. The system worked—for a while.

Then pensions declined. The rise of the 401(k) shifted risk from companies to individuals. Most people were never taught how to manage long-term investing, market volatility, or the psychological stress of funding 20 to 30 years without earned income.

Social Security, which was never meant to be a primary source of income, became exactly that for millions of retirees. The system didn’t collapse. It quietly became outdated.

At the same time, the conversation about retirement focused almost entirely on money. What it ignored was something just as important: the human need for purpose. I call this the “inner game.” I developed five simple steps, a process, for anyone to shift their mindset to solve almost any problem.

A process for shifting your mindset

The Clarity Shift Method™ is what I use to teach and coach. It’s all about changing what we can and letting go of trying to control what we can’t.

Here are the five steps I teach for shifting your mindset:

1. Self-awareness. This includes a realistic view of your situational awareness. We all become a byproduct of the environment we live in. Become the observer of yourself. Learn to be authentic. No B.S.

2. Higher understanding. Step back. Take a deep breath. Pause when upset or frustrated. Change your perspective on any person, place, or thing that bothers you.

3. Introspection. Search within yourself to find clarity about your values, desires, needs, and the suffering that holds you back.

4. Focused intention. What do you want next, and what will it take to get it? Focus on one thing at a time. Be super intentional. See, feel, and believe as if you’re receiving what you asked for.

5. Transformation. It’s not a burning bush kind of transformation for most of us. It’s a gradual realization that day by day, you are enjoying your life and doing the best you can to maintain peace of mind. It’s a shift in awareness.

I know it’s real because I’ve been living this way, self-employed, loving my work, in a position to retire now that I’m almost 65. But I have no desire to “stop working.” That’s what retirement means, literally.

Here’s the truth about work

Work does more than provide a paycheck. It gives structure to the day, identity to the individual, social connection, and a sense of contribution. When work ends abruptly, those things often disappear overnight.

This is why retirement is not a steady emotional state. It unfolds in stages. Research and lived experience show a predictable pattern, clearly described by Dr. Riley Moynes.

Here’s a quick summary of his four stages that address the emotional aspects of retirement psychology.

• Phase 1: The early phase feels like a vacation—freedom, novelty, relief. Eventually, that fades.

• Phase 2: What often follows is loss: boredom, restlessness, identity erosion, and anxiety that catches people off guard.

• Phase 3: Many then move into a trial-and-error phase, experimenting with activities, roles, or part-time work in search of meaning.

• Phase 4: Those who thrive eventually reach reinvention, where purpose is rebuilt around something new.

Here’s the critical insight: many people never reach reinvention because they were taught the wrong goal.

Why shifting your mindset is the best place to start

The core problem with modern retirement thinking is the belief that leaving the workforce leads to fulfillment. Humans are not wired that way. People are wired to contribute. Purpose is not optional. Without it, mental and physical health decline—often faster than finances.

Instead of dwelling too much on the problems we face, let’s focus on a common-sense approach to improving your life and any semblance of retirement you choose to pursue. The real solution is not just saving more money or delaying retirement by a few years. The real solution is a mindset shift.

First, the old concept of retirement has to be discarded. Retirement should not mean stopping. It should mean shifting. The question is no longer “When do I stop working?” but “How do I want to contribute without burning out?” The goal is not leisure. The goal is engagement without exhaustion.

That shift requires honesty—something most people avoid. Retirement forces uncomfortable questions. Who am I without my title? What do I actually enjoy doing when no one is paying me? What drains me? What gives me energy? What do people naturally come to me for?

Pretending leads to empty busyness. Honesty leads to alignment.

How to thrive in life

Thriving later in life is not about age. It’s about design. People who do well intentionally build their days around a sense of purpose. That purpose usually sits at the intersection of their unique abilities, genuine interests, natural gifts, and activities that create value for others.

This does not require full-time work. It may look like mentoring, teaching, consulting, creative work, community leadership, service, or small, flexible businesses. What matters is contribution and structure, not the number of hours.

Money still matters, but in a way most people don’t think. Freedom doesn’t come from maximum spending. It comes from sustainability. People who thrive in later life tend to simplify. They reduce unnecessary expenses, step off the status treadmill, and design a lifestyle that fits their values. Living within your means is not about deprivation. It’s about control. Financial stress destroys freedom faster than aging ever will.

Age is a state of mind

The final piece is staying young—not in appearance, but in mind and body. Decades of longevity research point to the same conclusion: people who live longest don’t retire from life.

Communities studied by the Blue Zones Project don’t have a word for retirement. People remain active, socially connected, mentally engaged, and useful to others well into later life. They move daily, maintain relationships, contribute to their community, and wake up with a reason to get out of bed.

They don’t chase leisure. They live with purpose.

The retirement crisis is not just financial. It’s conceptual. We built systems for shorter lives and told people the goal was to stop. Longer lives demand something different. Identity must evolve.

Contribution must continue. Money must support life—not replace it.

The truth about retirement is uncomfortable but empowering. If you shift your mindset, get honest with yourself, and design a life around purpose, unique abilities, and sustainable living, retirement stops being a risk. It becomes a reinvention.

I’m an author, strategic coach, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving your career, small business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- Sonoran Sunset by yours truly. (It’s a desert, an oasis.)

Worried about money, your job, or whether you’ll ever be able to retire? You’re not alone. Millions of Americans feel trapped—working jobs they don’t love, running businesses that drain them, and quietly worrying about what happens if the paycheck stops.

Let me offer some peace of mind.

Retirement, as most people imagine it, is largely a myth.

Now, if you’re a financial advisor, let me explain myself before you grab the bat.

I’m not saying people don’t retire. Many do. Some love it. But the idea of retirement—the finish line where stress disappears and meaning magically appears—was invented for a different world.

An industrial world. One that no longer exists.

The modern concept of retirement showed up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when factory work physically broke people down and life expectancy was much shorter. Retirement was designed as an exit ramp for worn-out bodies, not fulfilled lives.

Fast forward to today. We’re living longer, working less physically demanding jobs, and being sold a dream that fewer and fewer people can afford.

Most Americans are nowhere near financially prepared for retirement. Federal Reserve data makes that clear. And here’s the part that rarely gets talked about: even among those who retire comfortably, many report boredom, loss of identity, depression, or a dull sense of emptiness within a few years.

So they go back to work.
Or they volunteer.
Or they drift.

I know this because I’m 64.5 and living it. And because a hunch I had 30 years ago has now proven itself.

Solving for retirement isn’t the real problem. Finding meaningful, sustainable work is.

Look at people in the so-called Blue Zones. They don’t even have a word for retirement. According to research popularized by Blue Zones, wealth is measured by purpose, not portfolio size. Work doesn’t end. It evolves.

Work isn’t the enemy. Meaningless work is.

I see this every day with my coaching clients—most of whom are half my age. They want purpose and meaning more than money. They want a quality of life that doesn’t grind them down before 50.

I learned this the hard way. Slowly. Over decades.

In my early 30s, I worked as an independent retirement planner and later at Merrill Lynch. I was successful. I built trust. I did right by my clients. I understood sales. I understood systems. I had more hair.

What I didn’t understand was life.

I was working for money and purpose while constantly worrying I wasn’t good enough, rich enough, happy enough, or successful enough. Fear was my fuel.

Being motivated by fear instead of love is a slippery slope into a dark abyss. Unfortunately, fear controls most of us until we wake up.

Most of my clients who wanted to retire didn’t love their work. Many were twice my age. I was helping them prepare for a future I hadn’t lived yet.

The real education came two years after they retired.

The call usually sounded like this:

“Hey, Cliff, we need to come see you. Retirement’s been great… but Johnny’s bored playing golf. He’s sitting around the house pouting. We’ve traveled enough. We need a new plan. Oh—and we could use some more income.”

Those calls fueled my hunch: retirement felt unreal. Like an oasis in a scorching desert—beautiful from afar, but often a mirage up close.

Now, in my mid-60s, I know that hunch was right.

We’re being sold an illusion by a massive wealth-management marketing machine. Fear is profitable. Anxiety sells. The promise is simple: work hard now, suffer through decades you don’t enjoy, and someday you’ll be free.

But free to do what, exactly?

Free to do what you want, when you want, within the limits of your lifestyle. To afford a life you actually enjoy.

If retirement simply means “stop working,” what replaces the structure, identity, social connection, and sense of contribution that work provides?

That’s the question the glossy brochures never answer. Where’s the purpose?

Some of the most successful people alive rejected the idea outright. Actor Clint Eastwood put it plainly: “The idea of retiring is absurd.” Investor Warren Buffett said for years he’d keep doing what he loved as long as he could—and largely did.

This isn’t about glorifying hustle or denying rest. It’s about realism.

If you love your work, why would you stop—unless your health forces the issue or the job physically breaks you down?

The real problem isn’t retirement. It’s a culture that disconnects people from meaningful work. But once you understand the rules of the school of life, you can stop blaming the culture and start choosing differently.

Americans are taught to chase income, attention, fame, and fortune first—purpose later, if ever. This mindset is reinforced by Wall Street, private equity, and financial institutions that profit from fear-based planning.

Here’s a simpler, more durable solution:

Know yourself.
Know your values.
Be aware you have a purpose.
Find work you enjoy and can adapt over time.
Spend less than you make.
Save and invest the difference.
Never stop evolving.

Do that, and retirement anxiety largely disappears.

You’re no longer dependent on politicians or the long-term solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. You stop counting the days until escape. You build a life that works now—and later.

Real wealth isn’t a number in an account.

It’s knowing yourself.
It’s understanding your unique gifts.
It’s having something meaningful to wake up for.

That’s freedom without illusion.

I’ve lived this way since 1991, when I quit my corporate job at 30.

Retirement isn’t a destination. It’s a story we were sold.

The truth is simpler: retirement promises freedom.
So why wait until you’re old to claim it?

That’s when fear finally loses its grip.

I’m an author, strategic coach, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving yourself, your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Photo by ketan rajput on Unsplash

There’s a kind of understanding that only shows up with time. You can’t download it. You can’t rush it. It comes from years of pushing yourself to fit, wondering why life feels harder than it seems to others, and slowly realizing that the problem was never about effort or intelligence. It was a mismatch between who you are and how you were taught to operate.

Looking back over more than sixty-four years, the real work for me wasn’t becoming tougher or less sensitive. It was learning how to work with my nervous system instead of fighting it. Once that relationship changed, my experience of work, relationships, and even conflict began to shift in measurable ways.

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Many highly sensitive people grow up believing they’re flawed, fragile, or somehow behind. By the end of this article, I hope that you’ll understand why that belief is wrong.

With that, you’ll be better equipped to get along with yourself in case you’re like most of us; you say things to yourself you wouldn’t let others tell you.

In my experience, when that relationship improves, the rest of the world becomes easier to navigate as well.

Understanding highly sensitive humans

Many of us who identify as Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) grew up believing something was wrong with us. We heard they were “too emotional,” “too slow,” or “too intense.”

For me, it was, “Grow up,” and “Don’t be so immature.” The words used to cut me like a knife. The good news is, I was blessed with great parents and a childhood, even though I had to navigate a few gene-pool riptides, like most of us.

A psychologist’s perspective

Here’s the deal. Over time, messages like this don’t fade. In the worst-case scenarios, they became internal voices. In Chapter 3 of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine N. Aron explains that healing often begins when the “adult self” learns to listen to the inner child instead of overriding it.

Psychologists often describe three functional ego states operating within each of us.

• The child state carries emotion, instinct, and unmet needs shaped early in life.

• The parent state carries internalized rules, expectations, and learned judgments, often borrowed from authority figures.

• The adult state is the regulator. It interprets reality, evaluates options, and decides how to respond in the present.

Problems arise when the parent state exerts pressure or criticism, and the child state reacts with overwhelm or withdrawal. Healing begins when the adult state steps in, not to silence either one, but to listen, interpret, and respond with discernment.

As a parent for nearly forty years, I’ve learned a lot. The following quote resonated with me as soon as I saw it:

“The main task of the parent part of the psyche is to protect the child, not to push or shame it into performing.” — Elaine N. Aron, The Highly Sensitive Person

We’re born this way

Aron’s is not symbolic language for its own sake. She is describing a nervous system shaped early in life. Roughly 15–20% of people are born with heightened sensitivity to stimulation.

This trait is biological, not learned.

I remember the agony of feeling “unseen” and “unheard,” while my sister and brother saw much of our childhood in a different light. That’s typical for siblings. After all, each of us is different.

When the environment, such as the home, does not support that sensitivity, the child adapts by suppressing needs. The cost often appears later as anxiety, burnout, people-pleasing, or chronic self-doubt.

The inner child of an HSP carries clear messages. When we ignore or block those messages, the nervous system stays on alert. When we observe, feel, honor, and process these teachers, the inner child settles.

What follows is not self-indulgence. It is learning self-regulation.

Ask your inner child, be still, and listen

Here is what that inner child is often asking for — and why it matters in adult life, work, and relationships. I’ve extracted these insights from Aron’s book, and I suggest you read it if you see yourself as a highly sensitive person easily prone to burnout.

Suggestion: Observe yourself, be conscious of your breathing, relax, and notice what you feel as you read the following attributes of your inner child. Imagine your inner child is talking to your parent and a rational adult. (As a parent, you can also be aware of these attributes when raising your children.)

1. The sensitive child asks for protection from overstimulation. Loud noise, rushed schedules, conflict, and constant demands overload the HSP’s nervous system faster than average. Without protection, the body remains in a state of fight-or-flight. Over time, this leads to exhaustion, irritability, and emotional shutdown.

2. The child asks for rest without guilt. HSPs process information deeply. That depth requires recovery time. Rest is not laziness; it is neurological maintenance. When we deny ourselves sufficient rest, performance drops and health suffers.

3. The child asks for gentleness around strong emotions. Criticism, anger, or rejection can feel overwhelming, even when unintended. The sensitive nervous system reacts more intensely. Emotional safety is not a preference — it is a requirement for consistent functioning.

4. The child asks not to be shamed for feeling deeply. Sensitivity increases empathy, creativity, and moral awareness. When we label feelings as weakness, the HSP learns to mistrust their own experience and instincts. (Our culture shames feelings, especially at work.)

5. The child asks for time to think. HSPs often reflect before acting. In fast-paced cultures, this is mistaken for hesitation. In reality, it is careful decision-making. Rushing an HSP frequently leads to poorer outcomes, not better ones.

6. The child asks not to be compared to others. (Like on all social media!) A different nervous system needs different strategies. Comparison to less sensitive people creates unrealistic expectations and fuels unnecessary self-criticism.

7. The child asks for trust in subtle awareness. HSPs notice details others miss — tone changes, environmental shifts, emotional undercurrents. This sensitivity often prevents problems from escalating, especially in leadership and relationship contexts.

   These needs do not disappear in adulthood. They show up at work, in families, and in how people respond to pressure. Burnout often occurs not because HSPs are doing too little, but because they are doing too much without the conditions they require to recover.

8. The child asks for kinder self-talk. Internal criticism hits HSPs harder because the brain processes it similarly to an external threat. Harsh inner language increases stress rather than motivation.

9. The child asks for emotional safety to perform well. Research shows that HSPs thrive in supportive environments and underperform in harsh ones. HSPs are not fragile; they are highly responsive to their environment.

10. The child asks for permission to withdraw when needed. Pulling back is how the nervous system resets. It is recovery, not avoidance.

11. The child asks for respect for intuition. HSPs often integrate information unconsciously and arrive at accurate “gut” feelings. These insights may not be immediate, but they are frequently reliable.

12. Finally, the child asks for advocacy. Many HSPs did not have someone protecting their limits early in life. As adults, they must learn to do that themselves by setting boundaries, choosing environments wisely, and saying no without apology.

Become more aware of your feelings

Aron’s message is direct: ignoring sensitivity does not make it go away. Instead, pay attention, direct your awareness to feel everything within you.

Ignoring or numbing feelings only drives them underground, where they surface as stress, resentment, and self-blame. What actually helps is not pushing harder, but aligning behavior with biology.

When the adult self responds with protection instead of pressure, the nervous system calms. From that place, clarity improves, energy returns, and sustainable success becomes possible.

In closing, ask yourself two questions. Which of these needs did you learn to ignore? And what would change if you stopped?

I’m an author, photographer, visual artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving yourself, your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Based on my current life expectancy and actuaries, I might have about 1,200 Saturdays left, give or take. Depressing? Nope. Because I live in the now, and I’m here to share something that’s dawned on me in later years.

It’s about energy. Mine. Yours. And in general. What you’re about to read is about the art of life. I’ve been far more focused on my photography and digital artwork than writing lately. And it’s all good because I’m energized as heck.

Time

Most of us are glued to a calendar; life, work, and what little else. Time. “Oh no, I’m going to be late.”

But a calendar does not make a life. It is one way to track time. It sure beats a sundial.

Energy is beyond time. It simply changes form, like my face and everything else that’s aging in my 6-foot-1-inch frame. When we shift to thinking about life as energy and attention, we have the opportunity to discover the ultimate gift, the best present of all.

The here, and now.

Awareness

Some people are more aware of this than others.

Highly sensitive, bright, and often introverted people tend to notice energy shifts early. Psychologist Elaine Aron, Ph.D., who coined the term Highly Sensitive Person, found that roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population processes sensory and emotional information more deeply.

Guess what? I used to be so highly sensitive that I believed something was seriously wrong with me.

However, that has consequences. And consequences for me led me to do tons of inner work, which partly explains why I read and write about psychology and metaphysics.

Arousal

Let’s talk about what you notice the most. Psychologists call it arousal.

Do noise, light, emotional tone, loud sirens, conflict, and overstimulation register quickly, sometimes instantly, for you? If so, your body knows before your mind can explain what’s going on.

It’s as if you have a sixth sense more developed than most. The real you inside is not fragile. It’s light. It is sensitivity paired with awareness.

Aron’s research shows that highly sensitive people are often more attuned to what drains them and what sustains them, especially with age. Many learn this the hard way. I know I did.

The Shift

I’ve experienced this shift in my energy awareness the most over the last 15 years. 60+ years in the school of life offers a few lessons for any willing student. How you develop your awareness of energy is up to you.

You have to be intentional.

Ignore energy long enough, and it shows up as burnout, illness, irritability, or quiet disengagement. Pay attention, and something else happens. Life becomes more sustainable. Choices become clearer.

Even if you do not identify as highly sensitive, experience teaches a similar lesson. Longevity, physical and psychological, depends on self-awareness. You begin to notice patterns. What fuels you? What costs you more than you want to admit? What environments support you, and which ones quietly wear you down?

Asking

Ask, and you shall receive more insight into who the heck you genuinely are. (Warning: Requires believing in something far bigger than us.) This kind of awareness is not indulgent.

It is sacred wisdom.

The early Greek philosophers understood this long before modern neuroscience gave us language for it. The Stoics primarily wrestled with the same existential questions we still face. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing with this limited time?

Seneca cut straight to the point: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.”

Boundaries, Energy Efficiency

Waste does not always look like idleness. People pleasers often sacrifice their most precious energy, giving it away. Same with do-gooders and perfectionists. Think of all the tension of their energy.

Boundaries created huge efficiency for me over the years. That required being more self-aware, OK, and confident in who I am vs. who I am not.

It seems like overcommitment. It looks like saying yes too often. It looks like pouring energy into work, relationships, and habits that no longer align with who you are becoming.

And you are drained. That’s not the real you.

Marcus Aurelius framed the internal side of the equation: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

That insight sits at the heart of energy management. You cannot control most external circumstances. Trust me, as a recovering control freak, one of the fastest ways to drain your energy is to argue with reality.

Shifting Yourself

You have to shift yourself into a higher gear of self-awareness. You find the “real you.” That requires looking in the wrong places and facing some tough lessons.

Consequences. Suffering. Change.

Change yourself, how you see yourself, and the world around you. You can get to the point where people, places, and things don’t bother you like they once did.

You can learn how to better observe, filter, interpret, how long you carry thoughts and certain feelings, and how much energy you allow them to consume. Over time, that discipline becomes a form of freedom.

When you see life as eternal, infinite energy working through your mind and body, and learn to work with it rather than against it, life becomes nearly effortless.

Life

Oscar Wilde captured what happens when this awareness never develops: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

Existing is easy. Living well takes attention. Better yet, it takes intention.

Energy shows up everywhere. Again, I ask you to ask …

Does your work give you more energy as the day unfolds, or less? Are there people who leave you calmer and clearer, and others who leave you tense and depleted?

Think about this stuff, but don’t overthink it.

What you read, watch, eat, and scroll through all register in the nervous system. The body keeps score long before the mind catches up.

Physics tells us that energy is never destroyed; it is only transformed. Human beings are no exception. Burnout is rarely caused solely by effort. More often, it comes from prolonged misalignment, giving energy to things that do not nourish meaning or growth.

Age Benefits

I love this stage of life. If life is hard for you right now, believe that your life will get better.

With age, if we are paying attention, we get better at this. We simplify. We protect our attention. We choose environments more carefully. We learn when to engage fully and when to rest without guilt.

It’s not withdrawal from life. It is a more skillful way of participating in it.

When work, relationships, and creative practices energize you, something shifts. Time feels less oppressive. Effort feels cleaner. You may still get tired, but you are not empty. That difference matters more than most productivity advice will ever admit.

The art of life is not about squeezing more into fewer hours. It is about aligning limited time with what sustains your energy and deepens your awareness. That alignment is what allows a life to feel long, meaningful, and fully lived.

Like when I create new art.

For now, I will leave you with the wisdom of our Dog. He’s stretched out in the sun, recharging his seventy-three-year-old dog body without apology or hurry. He understands something many humans forget.

He observes all. Rest is not wasted time. It is how wisdom keeps the lights on. It’s like Under Dog basking in the glory of the light.

Follow the light in your heart.

I’m an author, photographer, visual artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving yourself, your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

Image credit Canva Pro with edits by author

It’s been weeks since I had time to sit and write. Part of it has been family matters that require my attention, as well as my evolving photography and visual art business. It’s been both draining in terms of emotions and the family health matter, and energizing because my dog photography and art business is taking off.

I’ve also been reading. I recently started reading The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. After getting through most of it, now I know why I cry so often.

I’m a highly emotional person. You could be, too. That’s what the rest of this article is about.

Feeling Too Much?

From a young age, I always felt like I felt too much. Almost as if, no, as if, something was or is wrong with me. Like damaged goods.

After 64 years of trying to solve the great mystery in my head, I’ve learned a few things about myself, my sensitivities and values, how to get along with people from all walks of life by meeting everyone where they are, and so on.

Because of understanding my emotional nature, I’m okay, you’re OK, and everything’s OK even when it’s not. Because acceptance is the springboard to serenity. And finding that takes lots of ongoing, daily practice.

Being a Kid Has Always Been Brutal

Let’s get back to what I’ve learned in the book that may apply to you, especially if you and others think you’re “too sensitive.” Let’s dive into how our sensitivities and programming start.

One of my coaching clients told me he has social anxiety. I asked him, “You mean like when we were kids?” He said, “Yeah, like that.” I told him, “Everyone deals with that, and some of us learn to work through it sooner than others.”

Another client, while working through his life issues, said, “Cliff, I don’t really know if I experienced much trauma. I had a great childhood.” I replied, “Being born into this world is traumatic, and all families carry some level of intergenerational trauma. We all deal with emotions we never learned to process, but we carry them at different levels.”

We learn to manage our emotions from a very young age, some better than others.

Toxic Culture: Byproduct of the Environment

If you see American culture as our macro environment, it’s easy to agree that it’s toxic in many ways. As a result, we have a mental health epidemic. Social media and the erosion of core family values make it even harder to be a kid these days. It’s brutal for all of us.

If I had social media when I was 11, my highly sensitive self might have turned out much differently. Comparing yourself to a false ideal is a fast track to feeling not OK.

What’s more, we all become products of our environment until we learn to shift our awareness and adopt healthy habits. Managing our energy, health, and emotions is an essential habit. There’s no getting around that humans can be sensitive, and not. But how we manage our emotions makes all the difference.

Look for Similarities, Honor Differences

Everyone has some level of sensitivity, with narcissists being close to the bottom of the scale. Yet, highly sensitive people are different from those who move through life with thicker emotional armor and little empathy.

We feel more, notice more, and react more deeply to the world around us. This trait is called sensory processing sensitivity. It exists on a spectrum. We see it in about a third of the population. If you recognize yourself in the descriptions below, you might fall on the higher end of that spectrum.

How to Know If You’re a Highly Sensitive Person

Being highly sensitive makes being human even harder. So, let’s figure out if you can relate. See how many of the following traits have your name on them. Read through them, listen to your heart, and take notes accordingly.

You can find a free, online assessment and lots of resources on Dr. Aron’s website.

1. You notice things other people miss. Highly sensitive people pay close attention to small details. You hate it when someone moves your stuff. You can quickly sense a change in someone’s tone. You notice subtle shifts in the weather. And energy. The simple fact is your brain processes information more deeply. It is not a choice. It is how you are. Many people with this trait also notice seasonal changes before others or pick up on delicate scents, textures, and sounds without effort.

2. You absorb the emotional tone of a room. If someone is frustrated, tense, or sad, you feel it fast. High sensitivity often comes with strong emotional awareness. You might understand what another person thinks before they say a word. You can be a steady friend, a compassionate leader, or the person others lean on. The challenge is learning how not to carry everyone else’s emotions as your own.

3. You react strongly to life, both the good and the bad. Sensitive people feel their experiences deeply. Praise can lift you higher. Criticism can hit harder. A beautiful song can move you. A chaotic scene can drain you. Reactivity is a key part of the trait. It does not mean you are fragile. It means your emotional and physiological systems are more responsive to what happens around you.

4. You process everything on a deeper level. Many highly sensitive people think about decisions from multiple angles. They ask more questions. They reflect before acting. They want to understand what something means rather than rushing past it. Your depth of processing can look like overthinking, but it is actually careful, deliberate thinking. It often leads to strong insights and better judgment.

5. You get overstimulated when too much is happening. Bright lights, loud noise, crowded rooms, and fast-moving environments can overwhelm sensitive people. When there is too much incoming information, the nervous system becomes overloaded. You can become irritable, fatigued, or need to pull away and reset. It is not a weakness. It is a normal response for someone whose system takes in more data than average.

6. You appreciate art and beauty more than most. Music, paintings, nature, poetry, or meaningful conversations can move you deeply. Many people with this trait report feeling connected, inspired, or even changed by these experiences.

   Your sensitivity to positive stimuli is just as crucial as your sensitivity to stress. It is one reason many highly sensitive people thrive in creative work or environments that value meaning.

7. You reflect on life’s big questions. Philosophical thinking is common among sensitive people. You may find yourself wondering about purpose, values, identity, or the meaning behind events. It’s part of the deeper cognitive processing that defines the trait. You are not content with surface-level answers. You want clarity. You want understanding. You want things to make sense.

8. You can read people well, even without trying. Social sensitivity is another hallmark of the trait. You might pick up on someone’s discomfort before others notice. You might sense unspoken tension or understand how a situation could make someone feel. You are skilled at connection and empathy. It often leads people to trust you, open up to you, or seek your guidance.

9. Positive experiences lift you more than most people. High sensitivity is not only about challenges. Research shows that sensitive people benefit more from supportive environments. Encouragement, kindness, and positive surroundings have a more substantial impact. When you are in the right place, with the right people, you grow fast. You thrive. You become your strongest self.

10. You need more time to recover after overwhelm. Negative experiences, people, places, and things likely drain you. Because you take in more information, you often need more time to decompress—quiet time, rest, and space to think help your system reset. It’s not avoidance. It is self-regulation. Sensitive people do best when they build regular pauses into their schedules, giving their minds and bodies the chance to calm down.

11. You enjoy meaningful conversations more than small talk. Talk about the weather? Boring! You might prefer honest, deep conversations over meaningless banter, gossip, and the like. Many highly sensitive people value a connection that feels real. They want to talk about experiences, ideas, purpose, or growth. You desire depth and meaning in life, relationships, and work. The older and wiser you grow, the easier it becomes to hold boundaries.

We Are Not “Damaged Goods”

There you have it. That’s the essence of what I learned from the book. I highly recommend buying a copy and reading it. Because here’s the deal.

You’re as OK as you can be right now. Same with me. If we’re doing our best, we’re doing our best. Being a highly sensitive person is not a flaw. For most of my life, I held a self-view that a part of me was broken, not good enough, not OK.

Not anymore.

A highly sensitive nature carries traits with calm waters and rip tides. It can help us become great thinkers, strong leaders, creative artists, or caring partners. It can also lead to stress or overwhelm if not understood.

Shifting Self-Awareness

The key to understanding yourself is self-awareness. When you know you are wired as highly emotional, you can shape your life so you are supported rather than drained. You can create healthy boundaries for yourself and buffer stress.

“Learning to value your sensitivity rather than hide it is perhaps the most important journey an HSP can undertake. It is the journey toward self-acceptance, authenticity, and peace.” — Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.

I’m learning that sensitivity is one of the many ways the human brain adapts to the world. Some of us are built to respond fast. Others are built to notice, reflect, and think before they act.

Both patterns have value. Both roles matter. That partly explains why my wife and I have made such well-aligned best friends and are married for life.

If you recognize yourself in these traits, you are not weak, broken, or “too much.” You are wired differently. That wiring gives you strengths the world needs more than ever. Cherish your empathy, awareness, depth, and insight.

When you understand your sensitivity and work with it instead of against it, you don’t just cope. You find your flow state, which is when you can get through the most challenging lessons life delivers.

I’m an author, photographer, visual artist, and mentor. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving yourself, your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.

- The Cage, image credit author

How different are you when you’re working compared to the real you? The one your family knows, or the one who laughs with friends when no one’s judging? How much of your energy goes into keeping up the act that pays your bills?

Before I started working for myself, I felt like I was trapped in a cage. I wore a suit to the office every day and a mask I couldn’t take off. On the outside, I was confident, sharp, and driven. Inside, I was anxious, unsure, and trying to prove that I belonged.

Like many professionals early in their careers, I thought success meant playing the part—looking the part—at any cost. I didn’t realize how much energy it took to maintain that image. I spent years performing instead of living.

I battled Imposter Syndrome. I worried constantly about being “found out.” I compared myself to others, chased titles, and worked harder than everyone around me to feel safe. I told myself I was ambitious, but the truth is, I was afraid.

The stress never let up. I tried to please bosses, coworkers, and clients while ignoring my own needs. I became skilled at adapting to others' expectations, but I lost touch with who I truly was.

By my late twenties, I was burned out and disconnected. I had the appearance of success but none of the peace. That’s when I knew something had to change.

That’s when I began to shift my perspective and find the time and creative freedom I always wanted by going into business for myself.

I was only 30, and today, my shift made all the difference.

S – Self-Awareness

The first step was realizing that my stress wasn’t random. It was feedback. I was living out of alignment with my true self. I began to notice the discrepancy between how I behaved at work and who I was at home. That awareness was uncomfortable, but it was the beginning of freedom.

H – Higher Understanding

Next, I began to see that every struggle had meaning. My frustration, exhaustion, and disconnection weren’t signs of failure—they were signs that my soul was calling for something more. I stopped blaming my job or my bosses and began looking at what life was trying to teach me.

I – Introspection

I slowed down. I began reading self-help books, writing, journaling, meditating, and asking more profound questions. Who am I when I’m not trying to prove myself? What do I truly value? What kind of work feels like a natural expression of my gifts? This inner work helped me reconnect with the purpose I had buried under layers of ambition and fear.

F – Focused Intention

Once I gained clarity, I decided to live and work in a different way. I set the intention to follow my curiosity, use my creativity, and build a life that felt authentic. That decision led me to start my first business. It was scary, but it was also liberating.

T – Transformation and Trust

Transformation begins when you step into the unknown and trust that you’ll grow through it. The early years of self-employment were challenging. I faced new types of stress, but this time, the stress had meaning. It fueled growth instead of burnout. I was building something real, something aligned with my purpose.

“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not.” - Dr. Hans Selye, the father of stress research

That was my life before I shifted—pretending to be who I thought I had to be instead of embracing who I really was.

When I stopped acting and started aligning, everything changed. The pressure didn’t disappear, but it transformed. Instead of crushing me, it shaped me. My work no longer drained me. Work energized me.

That’s what the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® was born from—my own journey of self-awareness, higher understanding, introspection, focused intention, and transformation.

Loving My Work Guiding Others

It’s why I love guiding the younger versions of myself today: the driven, high-performing professionals who are silently struggling behind polished LinkedIn profiles and polite smiles. I help them peel off the mask, reconnect with their purpose, and rediscover the freedom that comes from being their true selves.

Because I know what it feels like to fake it to make a living. I know what it’s like to wake up successful on the outside but empty on the inside. And I know the courage it takes to stop pretending and start living with purpose.

When you finally choose authenticity over approval, your entire life shifts. Your work becomes an expression of who you are, not a performance of who you think you should be. Your stress becomes a signal for growth, not a sentence of exhaustion.

The truth is, freedom doesn’t come from quitting your job or running your own business. It comes from being true to yourself wherever you are.

If you’re tired of wearing the mask, maybe it’s time to S.H.I.F.T.

Because when you do, your work—and your life—stop feeling like an act and start feeling like the truth.

I mentor motivated Millennial and Gen Z leaders to escape soul-sucking careers and become purpose-driven founders, creators, and successful entrepreneurs. Learn more at www.CliffordJones.com.

Image credit, Alexander Jones

This weekend, my wife, Janice, and I celebrated 40 years of marriage. We had a low-key celebration with our children and grandchildren, and it was perfect.

We met during our freshman year in college. For me, it was infatuation at first sight. A long-term loving marriage wasn’t on the radar back then, but as destiny would have it, I was able to court and marry the woman of my dreams within two years of graduation.

Looking back, I see marriage, parenting, and everything else as a lifelong classroom. I was never more than a C student in school, but I feel like I’ve earned an A+ in life.

At my worst, most women would have tossed me over the edge of the Grand Canyon for a portrait gone bad. But, because Janice chose to stay the course, our love grows deeper and beyond words, even for a pretty decent wordsmith.

What follows are several of the most important lessons I’ve learned, knowing that life’s tests never stop. Reflecting on the many joys, challenges, and moments of grace we’ve shared, let me assure you that Janice will always be the more mature of the two of us.

I was one of the children.

We married when we were kids, full of dreams, energy, and naive idealism. Neither of us had any idea that Janice would have three children to raise. The first two were our sons, Chris and Alex. I was the third.

I was never great at math, but if I had to guess, I had the emotional maturity of a man a decade younger than my real age.

Trust me when I tell you that it is the woman in most marriages who decides if the marriage will last. That was the case for us when I imploded in my late 30s.

True love is unconditional.

Trust me, infatuation wears off fast. What follows lust is either a train wreck or lasting love, depending on your fate. True love isn’t based on performance or perfection. It’s forged over decades through the toughest of trials.

Show up even when you don’t feel like it. Stay even when it’s hard. Forgive, not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary for the bond to survive.

And keep your vows. Love that lasts isn’t built on infatuation or endless excitement.

It’s built on the daily decision to care, to listen, to give grace, and to keep the commitment.

Unity takes practice.

Marriage isn’t about finding the right person. Sure, that helps. But how many of us truly know what the hell we’re doing when lust hacks the brain? Success in a long-term relationship is about growth and becoming the right partner.

Unity requires faith, trust, loyalty, accountability, time, and divine intervention.

There were years of joy and years of indescribable stress. But each time life tested us, we found a way to return to center, and to remember why we chose each other in the first place.

That’s where faith comes in. Faith in God, faith in the process, faith in each other, and faith in the possibility of renewal.

Friction is part of the design.

When two people from different families and belief systems come together, sparks will fly. That friction can break you apart, or it can polish you like stones in a river.

“If two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary.” — Unknown

We had to learn to handle differences with humility, to speak truth without blame, and to see each other’s perspective without losing our own. The quicker we learned to admit mistakes, forgive, and move on, the stronger our unity became.

Today, we live as one. We’ve endured the tests of time.

Forgiveness is a superpower.

Pride destroys more relationships than betrayal ever could. With time, our egos faded into the past, and we chose love over being right; peace between us emerged.

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” — C.S. Lewis

There were times I failed as a husband, especially when work, ambition, excessive play, and way too many motorcycle expenses and adventures took their toll. But forgiveness, both given and received, helped us heal and start again.

Pause when agitated, forgive fast, and grow up as best you can.

Family is the real fortune.

Forty years later, I can say that Janice has been my greatest blessing. I tell our kids so they can tell their kids, “Our priorities are God, family, and everything else.”

Together, we raised two wonderful sons and now watch three grandchildren grow up. Even though our role as parents has changed, we’re learning what it means to be the patriarch and matriarch of a growing family here in Arizona.

We’ve shared laughter and tears, victories and defeats, setbacks and comebacks. Through it all, Janice has been my anchor, my confidant, and my best friend.

If I’m the rock of the family, Janice is the glue. Rocks crumble. Glue binds.

Marrying Janice is the best decision of my life. Sure, the incessant love notes, my hot, persistent pursuit, and lots of love notes helped. But she believed in me when I doubted myself. She stood by me through every reinvention, every new idea, every risk I took as an entrepreneur.

I could never have built or sustained my small businesses without her love and support. And our home equity. Behind every small success and every failure I’ve learned from, there’s been her quiet strength and unwavering faith.

Love is the miracle.

A lasting marriage isn’t luck or chemistry. It’s two people choosing each other again and again, through every season of life. Love matures, deepens, and becomes sacred; it is a spiritual partnership that is part of human evolution.

Regardless of time, I’m pretty sure that all women wonder if they married the right person.

After forty years, I’ve learned that love is less about finding happiness and more about honoring the sacred nature of two souls striving for unity. The opportunity is learning to love as God loves, freely, fully, and without condition.

For example, no matter how many parents may dislike what their children do, there is always the power of unconditional love behind them. When you catch even a glimpse of that kind of love, you realize how precious it is.

And therein lies the opportunity to keep trudging when most couples would part ways and head for the hills.

So we didn’t simply celebrate an anniversary this year. We’re celebrating a journey of faith, growth, and grace with the woman who taught me what love truly means.

I’m an author, career, and executive coach. Discover the power of the Clarity S.H.I.F.T. Method® for improving yourself, your career, business, and life at www.CliffordJones.com.