Living through difficult life circumstances in not an excuse for passing trauma onto someone else.

One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.

We would all benefit by shifting our focus from seeing pain as bad to seeing pain as motivation to change.

The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.

I cannot overemphasize the impact our childhood has on our ability to be honest because we live out what we learned as children in our adult relationships.

When you are not aware that you are bringing old learning to your current relationships, you will want to lie about where it is coming from.

We lie to reflect the aspirational goals that we unconsciously know we will not uphold.

Perhaps the most tragic way that self-deception harms us is that we start believing our lies and we teach them to others.

In fact, lying to ourselves may be the most dangerous thing in the world because we live our truth whether we are honest about it or not.

It is actually a good survival strategy to manipulate twist, and reorganize the truth in a way that is more consistent with what we can psychologically tolerate.

At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false -- or -- not believing something that is true.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

An Appreciative inquiry Conversation is the catalyst for strengths based innovation.

Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.

Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.

No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.

Transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives.

I put all of my time into art because I couldn't go back to Jersey and work at Starbucks.

MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was four years old!