Making Merry on Demand
It is a good time of year to review how depression affects people.
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Merry Listmas!
Did you know that if you have anxiety in almost any form, list making is your friend? Anxiety in its purist form is about loss of control. It is that feeling that you cannot control the outcome you so desperately wish to do. And what better way to harness a little of the feeling of being […]
How can a label torpedo something useful?
The good thing about labels is they help us identify what is being discussed. The bad thing about labels is they immediately (read that as stigmatize) identify what is being discussed. Hypnosis carries baggage as a label. Labels, as most would agree, can stigmatize an individual faster than than the letter “A” did to Hester Prynne […]
What’s new?
More and more I realize that there is nothing new under the sun, but how it is said is what makes it new. How you hear it makes it new, and when you hear it makes it new. Whether or not your antenna is up makes it new… or not. Often that reception is problematic.
What is the magic ratio?
Your children are like so much wet cement according to Time Magazine, in that they are impressionable at an early age. Your words and actions make impressions that will ‘harden’ over time and guide their sense of identity. A large portion of our job as parents is to guide, correct and discipline them. While this […]
Why do I love places you can eat with your eyes?
What do you like to do when you travel? My favorite thing on the planet is to visit open air markets in other countries. Sometimes they are primarily food, while others will incorporate crafts and household goods. Recently I visited both a neighborhood market in Hamburg, Germany, and a huge fish market on their harbor.
Who among you gets tired of expectations?
Sometimes I am so tired of the self-help industry and the imposed expectations it places on us. While reading an interesting article about the differences in shamanic treatments for mental illness that are radically different from the Westernized way, my senses were heightened about the level of expectations in this culture. It is exhausting.
Why retire when you can rewire?
It’s never too late to reinvent yourself. Jonathan Evison, author of This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!, rites about a time he lived in a trailer park because his grandmother needed a caregiver. He reported being amazed at how these widows would, with great flexibility, adapt to entirely different points of view after their husbands’ […]
Why is kaizen a helpful path to change?
Earlier I my life I lived and worked in Japan. I taught English to a group of young men at one of Honda’s subsidiaries, Keihin Seiki, where they produced Honda’s carburetors. It was from these young factory workers that I gained an understanding of how change is slowly and incrementally effected from the bottom up […]
Why do things always seem to go my way?
I bet you wish you could say that and mean it. I say it many times a day, because that is where I work to place my focus.