Blog - Jen Zamzow, PhD

Getting Unstuck: How to Prioritize

August 23, 2019 by Jen Zamzow 2 Comments

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
—Warren Buffett

I recently asked my email subscribers where they were getting stuck in life. One of the most frequent responses I got was that people were getting stuck with prioritizing their overwhelming life—there’s too much to do, too many people fighting for their attention, and too many directions they’re being pulled in.

I’ve been there. We feel like we need to do it all, but we recognize that we can’t. We know we need to set some priorities. So, how do we do that?

Offering Thoughts, Prayers Can Make You Less Likely to Act (at Good Faith Media)

August 12, 2019 by Jen Zamzow Leave a Comment

The cycle has become sadly predictable. Mass shooting, followed by offers of thoughts and prayers and little else.

Many have criticized this “thoughts and prayers” response as being an empty gesture – an attempt to look good without actually doing the hard work of helping.

What Do We Owe Our Kids? (at Sojourners)

May 8, 2019 by Jen Zamzow Leave a Comment

Balancing Love of Child and Love of Neighbor in a Competition-Fueled Society

If you’re like most parents, you care more about your own kids than you do a stranger’s kids. In fact, if you didn’t, we would worry. But can we take our love for our kids too far?

Our natural parental instinct is to help our kids succeed, so we try to give them every opportunity and advantage that we can. For parents with economic privilege, this might mean enrolling our children in an expensive private school or hiring a private SAT tutor. It might mean taking them to the museum and the ballet and France. When surrounded by expendable income, the greater danger is not in giving our kids too little, but in giving them too much. As much as we love our own kids, our love and compassion are not meant to be limited to the branches on our family tree. If we give our own kids big head starts, that makes it significantly harder for other kids to keep up.

What Happens When You Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People?

April 5, 2019 by Jen Zamzow 4 Comments

He was one of the most gifted photographers I had ever met. So, when he admitted to me that he often struggled with self-doubt and questioned his own abilities, I was shocked. His talent seemed so obvious to me. He was doing something I knew I couldn’t do. While my own photography skills were limited to pointing my phone at an object and pressing the little white circle, he was a professional photographer.

But therein lies the problem. He was in a world filled with great photographers and graphic designers. When he viewed his own work, he wasn’t comparing it to my blurry photos of my kids squinting in the sun that I captured on my phone; he was comparing it to the best of the best.

But as much as I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to compare himself to other professional photographers, I couldn’t. Because I knew that I did the same thing with my own work.

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