October 10, 2013
“Forgiveness is a lovely idea until you have someone to forgive.” C.S. Lewis I’ve thought a lot about forgiveness lately. Often when we face life’s major passages, a flood of old thoughts and feelings suddenly reappear. But I must admit that I am not at the place where I started when I began to think about the concept of forgiveness for this […]
September 12, 2013
The historian and author, Studs Terkel, famously wrote, “Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.” A few of you might be reacting to the title of this article thinking, “Hey, my work is my life,” or “My job is the most fulfilling thing in my life.” But that’s not what this article is about. Because life isn’t work. […]
September 9, 2013
“The problem with business is that it is afraid of dealing with the business of people.” W. Edwards Deming Honestly, we don’t get it. Why is business still so ignorant about the basics of human dynamics? Awareness of human psychology as it applies to work has evolved at a glacial pace while technology flies by it at the speed […]
August 29, 2013
I refuse to buy into the belief that there are more takers in the world than givers. Naïve? The media is filled with stories about the greedy, the callous and the downright meanness of some people today. Greed’s gotten so bad that we’re now applying scientific study (a good thing) to understand it better. While we recoiled when Gordon Gekko proclaimed […]
August 15, 2013
“Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body […]
April 18, 2013
Everyone gets caught in a whirlwind of contradictory feelings and wonders – how can so many potent emotions sit side by side within me? It’s easy to get lost in anxiety, sadness or even despair, when times are hard. It’s not uncommon to feel a sense of vulnerability because of the limitations of our power to effect external change. The Popular TED […]
February 28, 2013
Somewhere along the line I absorbed the nearly universal belief that hard work is a defining value of a person’s worth. Intellectually, I don’t buy into this meme – but emotionally I can feel its pull and weight for every hour “wasted” on “non-productive” work. Although the nature of work has changed dramatically since I was a child, the thinking […]
February 13, 2013
Note: In my last post, I Want to Know More About You, I referenced research that looked at the ways in which emotional repression is built into our social landscape, especially affecting men. So I decided to reprise the article below because the more I experience, the more emotional suppression I see in every type of workplace. It’s woven into […]
September 6, 2012
I’m gobsmacked (as my British friends would say) after reading the recent Wall St Journal article, Managing Mental Health at Work. If you research the issue of mental health in the workplace you’ll turn up some alarming statistics and little in the way of hopeful solutions. I’m not naïve, but honestly, I thought we’d be further along the evolutionary path […]