Sven Erlandson’s Badass Counseling Insights & Reflections

Wisdom Sven Erlandson Wisdom Sven Erlandson

Is the Greatest Fear in Life the Fear of the Unknown?

"Change will not occur, until the pain gets bad enough." For it is only pain that has the power to force a change in your core belief system. The old belief system -- about life, about yourself, about people, about God/deity, about family, about what is important, about the world, etc -- has to become so confining, so painful, so suffocating, so debilitating as to drive the person away from it, as to give the person the courage to both cut it away and pursue something new and terrifyingly unknown.

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Sven Erlandson Sven Erlandson

The Zen-like Trick to Maximum Results

The only way to get to the place of letting go of what society is pressuring you to want is to go through the pain of realizing that what everyone and everything external to you wants for you no longer feels good, and that you no longer have interest in pursuing it. But, setting that aside, not that you really can (or assuming you are on your real path that is most authentic to who you really are), the real way to get to the place of power that is living in the pursuing/not-pursuing tension is to ultimately be okay with never having that which you are convinced you most want.

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Sven Erlandson Sven Erlandson

Over Coffee: A Holocaust Survivor

These aren't just stories; this was a man's life, a man who was sitting across a table from me drinking his Starbucks, a man who at one point wiped his lips after taking a sip and part of his napkin stuck to his lip when he pulled his hand away, as it might on any of us. A man like any one of us, yet a man who had been to hell and lived it for six years....and a lifetime since.

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