Anna Gibson

Depression and bipolar disorder was a way of life for me. When I wasn’t feeling too much, it was as if I wasn’t feeling anything, and the world around me felt grey.
Existing was a struggle, yet somehow I managed to keep a smile on my face. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t thriving, I was surviving. Soon, that began to change.
I remember the day I first read Marcus’s words. Aurelius was on the frontlines. He was a ruler and an emperor. We are all rulers of our lives and emperors of our sphere of...

Sensitivity as Superpower: Thriving in the Workplace and in Life
A Snap Shot of the State of Sensitivity
Anna Gibson
May 23
I was sitting in a park, watching the people. There was a homeless man named Glenn on the corner nearby. He was shaking his hat at people with a beer in one hand asking for money. No one would look at him. If they did they would glance at him with disgust. People would purposely avoid eye contact. They didn’t want to be bothered. They didn’t want to be burdened with his ...

Introspective Inquiries
Apr 4
How To Overcome Negative Emotions: Meditation and Facing the Demons Within
“Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and prejudices and stereotypes. I want to understand the true nature of life. I want to know what this experience of being alive really is. I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life, and I don’t want to just accept somebody else’s explanation. I want to see it for myself.”
- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Tricycle, a p...

The Ends Justify the Means: A Moral Praxis for Getting Things Done in Business and in Life
Introspective Inquiries
Mar 18
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. All you need to do is look at the reviews of these books to show how the topic of power polarizes people:
Here are positive reviews of the 48 Laws of Power:
Here’s a negative review:
The devil? Clearly, people are passionate about their views. The methods outlined in these ...

Superpower: The Power of Vulnerability in Personal Branding
Introspective Inquiries
Mar 15
Personal branding is more important now than ever. We live in a world where your persona, the part of you that you extends outward into the world, is routinely scrutinized. Your employers look at your Facebook and Twitter and comb your Instagram. You are ALWAYS being scrutinized by people who want to know whether or not you should represent them. If people are always watching, why not control how you po...

Rejection is a fact of life if you’re a writer. You’ll experience all manner of rejection. Some will be useful. Some not so useful. Check out the ‘constructive criticism’ I received below on one of my articles:
So how do you deal with rejection? The Buddha had an amazing quote that I put on my desk and look at every day:
“As a solid mass of rock is not stirred by the wind,
So a sage is not moved by praise and blame.
As a deep lake is clear and undisturbed,
So a sage becomes clear upon hearing...

I stared at the screen in utter confusion. I was taking a coding course with Udacity and I couldn’t get this problem out of my head. I was supposed to make this using code:
And I had no idea how to do it. The coding problems before this seemed so simple. Yet here I was, pondering my brains out trying to figure out a way to work it out. Then I remembered a key tenant of deliberate practice. If I couldn’t master a sticky problem, step back and look over the fundamentals before moving forward. I...

Writing tools make the writer. Without the proper environment, writing can become a tedious process. It can’t be denied that Google Docs and Microsoft Word have their place. Yet, the cluttered interface and the stark theme is harsh on both the eyes and writing process. There are no built-in outlining features and no integrations. Creating chapters in Microsoft Word becomes a chore as it isn't built for that.
I was in the same boat as a lot of writers. I was a staunch user of Google Docs with ...

Nightmare: Surviving and Thriving in a Negative Workplace
Introspective Inquiries
Mar 6
Workplace bullying is an epidemic. In 2017, The Workplace Bullying Institute did a survey that estimates that 19 percent of Americans are bullied. Sixty-one percent were aware of the bullying, yet did nothing about it. To make matters worse, 61 percent of bullies are bosses. So who are these bullies? How do you protect yourself from them? To understand how to deal with them, we first have to know who they ...

Tapping into the Force: Finding your Passion and Letting it Guide You
Introspective Inquiries
Feb 28
The piano was broken and I was completely focused on it. I remember my small hands grasping at it. I was turning it this way and that. I couldn’t have been more than eight. “Look at this girl!” My mother smiled into her voice. “She loves putting stuff together and taking it apart!” She leaned forward and held me tight. “My little engineer”. Little did she know, nineteen years later, I would ma...

Eat Your Dreams For Dinner: The How of Healthy Hustle
Introspective Inquiries
Feb 28
“I just wanna be happy, don’t you want to be happy?”
-Gary Vee
I woke up at 3:30am on a Saturday. I hate waking up early-especially on my off days- but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d been coding the night before. I was working on a particularly knotty programming problem. I fell asleep, exhausted, after staring at a pale screen for four hours that evening. Finally, I had an answer to my problem and beg...

Pain. That’s what I was feeling when I walked into a black-tie event in business casual clothing. I had on a bright purple shirt and black khakis. So maybe I was halfway there? Everybody was looking at me when I walked into the room. Okay. Well, I guess it was time for me to mingle
I met a woman who invited me to this event at my job. She was an acquaintance, but I wanted to try something new. She looked a little taken back at my attire, but she introduced me to her friends anyway. I was grat...

Enough: Let Go of the Past and Reclaim Your Life
Introspective Inquiries
Feb 19
“Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come — dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of th...

Against Dogma: How Blending Spiritually and Critical Thinking Can Improve Your Quality of Life
Introspective Inquiries
Feb 19
Introduction
She looked down at my small form and smiled.
“Just believe Anna. It’s that simple. God got you. You don’t need to think so hard.”
This is the point, at eight years of age, that I began to doubt Christianity. I was never one to ‘believe what I was told’. I was the kid who would sneak mythology books home from the library when my parents forbade it. At my Lu...

Ding. I’d been waiting on that notification. I was sitting with bated breath. Today I laugh at how ridiculous that was. Editors take a few days to a week to get back to you (if at all) but I was excited. This was the first article I’d ever pitched to any publication. The Metro Times was a famous Detroit newspaper and getting this byline under my belt was going to be huge.
I checked the notification. When I saw re: Metro Times Pitch I immediately jumped to open it. This was the editor’s respon...