August 18, 2016
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas Is kindness “compassion in action?” While there are distinctions made between kindness, empathy, compassion and altruism, most people experience kindness as action. With kindness we take our cognitive experience of […]
June 11, 2016
How we respond to others is largely a function of habit. Many small, repetitive, automatic responses that grow over a long period of time form habits. Mostly, these reactions are outside of our conscious awareness. They’re built on foundations formed by our beliefs, and in most cases, they stayed fixed, usually reinforcing old beliefs and naturally – old habits. Charles […]
February 1, 2016
“If we are lucky, we mourn our losses.” Miriam Greenspan Language and culture shape how we interpret and define our emotions. We tend to forget that, but it is particularly enlightening when it comes to understanding more about grief. All emotions are experienced through the lens of culture, and grief is a feeling many cultures dread or are, at […]
January 11, 2016
Do you know about the marshmallow test? No, it’s not about seeing how many marshmallows you can toast and eat by the fire. It’s the classic Marshmallow Study conducted in 1968 at Stanford University by clinical psychologist Walter Mischel that became one of the longest running experiments in psychology. The initial study examined 600 children to see how they would […]
December 3, 2015
If we are living in a so-called Age of Empathy – what does that mean? What does it mean for an individual, a co-worker, an employer, a neighbor, a city or a world society to live with empathy in the face of such harsh daily realities? What will we do differently in our personal and social lives? What kind of […]
October 31, 2015
I’ve often written about the slow death of the authoritarian leader – envisioning the demise of command and control thinking as the prevailing force in organizational life. It is slow going – isn’t it? At least it feels that way to me – even as an “observer” in my role as a consultant. The power issue hangs over us. Although […]
October 18, 2015
No one can harm you , not even your own worst enemy, as much as your own mind untrained. And no one can help you, not even your most loving mother and father, as much as your own mind well-trained. The Buddha Before we begin, let me ask you an important question – what makes your world? I know it’s a […]
August 25, 2015
You have a mental dialogue going on in your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of it turns out to be true? […]
August 18, 2015
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels us to unfold our powers.” Erich Fromm Most of us would agree that whatever we do, we cannot predict the future. Yet, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time trying to control the uncontrollable. This is a waste of our time and although […]