March 14, 2016
Writing in The New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope wrote in (Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Suggests) “Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family? That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion – how kindly people view themselves. The research suggests that giving […]
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 […]
October 12, 2015
Why is so little self-knowledge taught in most schools? Sure, there’s the Life Sciences curriculum where you’ll get some information on anatomy and communicable diseases, but mostly what we learn in school is focused on the externals. With rare exceptions, most children graduate high school with little information about how their bodies, minds and especially their emotions, work. Most of […]
September 24, 2015
Developing more patience has been a long-time personal pursuit. There’s no formula I can recommend. It takes diligence. It takes commitment. It takes attention. Mostly it takes remembering. Lately, I noticed I’ve been sliding back into some old habits of impatience. On closer examination, they’re predictable. I’ve often written about the power of patience because I have experienced that impatience […]
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 […]
June 11, 2015
I once heard someone say that if we overheard a conversation at the next table in a restaurant with people talking to each other the way we talk to ourselves – we’d get up and leave. Know what I mean? This statement has stayed with me for a long time, especially when I am judging myself harshly or listening to […]
April 28, 2015
“I now realize I have been working with my eyes closed. I appreciate even more a professor with whom I work occasionally: he always makes the point that leaders, managers — everyone in fact — should never underestimate the importance of kindness at work.” Gill Corkindale, Harvard Business Review An article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) by author Gill Corkindale, “The […]