Prioritizing Self-Care
Finding balance between exertion and relaxation, work and play, is good for your health. And the good news is that there are lots of ways to bring balance and more self-care into your life if you make it a priority.
resilience
Empowering people to make strengthening choices
Managing Anxiety: My Personal Story of Coping With Stress
People are experiencing higher levels of anxiety, in our society today, than ever before. So I want to offer you a powerful process for managing anxiety by sharing a personal story from early in my career. A Daunting Request I had just graduated from the University of Minnesota with my Ph.D. in counseling psychology and […]
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 […]
Predicting Resilience
I define resilience as our ability to handle hard things. It has to do with the thought and behavior patterns that we develop in the face of adversity and hardship. In my article, today, I want to share some general thoughts about the nature of adversity and then explore ways we can predict resilience and […]
The Discipline to Do Hard Things-A Key to Resilience
I realize that there is a strong connection between resilience and the discipline to do hard things. Knowing that I can do hard things gives me the inner strength to face all the challenges of my life–be they physical, social, emotional or mental. So in this post I want to share about a personal experience […]
