Want to Feel Better? Face Your Negative Feelings
We want to run from our negative feelings and yet by facing them, we grow in resilience and emotional intelligence.
Personal Growth
Empowering people to make strengthening choices
Small and Simple Decisions that Make a Big Difference
It is a Saturday evening around 5:30 and I’m facing a decision. It’s not a life-changing decision but rather a little decision about how I’ll handle the evening. Relatively minor, in the big scheme of things, but one which has consequences. I feel pretty lousy. Although normally healthy, I’ve been assaulted by cold and flu-like […]
A Story of Gratitude
In my studies of gratitude, I came across a beautiful story of gratitude told by Maureen Deuterma. It offers a perspective of what matter most. Email from a Friend I received an email from a friend of mine today sharing the good news that he had been promoted to vice president in a prestigious company. […]
How to Change Your Mental State
I remember a Peanuts cartoon from years back. Here’s Charlie Brown, shoulders slumped, head down and arms at his side as Lucy approached. He says to Lucy, “This is my depressed stance. When you’re depressed it makes a lot of difference in how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and […]
The Goal of Managing Stress—Accessing Your Wise Mind
I my last article I talked about how our brains and bodies respond to stress. Today I want to explore the goal of stress management which is achieving an optimal state of arousal in the middle of a threat. As you can see from this diagram, the mind can be in optimal arousal (necessary to […]
The Stress Response: How the Brain Works
Stress is our natural response to a situation or event that we perceive as challenging, even threatening. Stress is good insofar as it motivates us to take positive action or prompts us to adapt to a threat. But it can become harmful when we lack the confidence or ability to adapt in a healthy way. […]
How Resilient are You? Take the Resilience Survey to Find Out
How Resilient Are You? If you’ve been following me then you know that I’ve been writing about resilience. So today, I’m offering you a resilience survey to do a self-assessment on four dimensions of resilience. As you do the assessment, you are establishing a baseline for not only thinking about resilience but measuring your growth […]
