I recently came across a piece called “Mark Twain’s Top 9 Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life,” and one insight struck me as especially timely during this season of giving: “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.” It’s simple, wise, and deeply ...

  It’s worth exploring how our memories and stories about people and events stay locked in our minds and how we use them to justify current actions and to judge others. I recently read “The Sense of An Ending” by Julian Barnes. Briefly, it is a story about a man’s ...

  As we approach the end of a year and beginning of the next year, it’s a great time to think about what changes we might like to make in our behavior. The first word that comes to my mind is “patience.” I’m not very patient. When I begin a ...

  Let’s take a look at how to respond rather than react. When we respond to a situation, there is an element of thought behind the process. We take some time to think about what we want to say or do beforehand. When we react, we simply act from whatever ...

This week’s challenge is about managing people’s perceptions. The following blog post by Robert Curtiss, actor and psychotherapist, is from www.backstage.com. It got me thinking about how people perceive one another. “How What You Do Affects How You’re Perceived “Behavior is a mirror in which everyone shows his own image.” ...

I often have clients who have trouble sleeping.  This has inspired me to do research about how to sleep better and ways to get more of it. Here’s an article entitled,  “Get Some Sleep and Wake Up the GDP,” which I read in The New York Times by Sendhil Mullainathan, ...

  I often observe how being certain of someone or something is comforting.  At the same time, I think it’s a healthy practice to consider that certainty can be dangerous as well. A close friend of mine sent me a New York Times article ― “The Dangers of Certainty: A ...

Here is a poem my husband wrote when his mother died.  She was a modern woman who lived her 93 years with grit and humor. She left a legacy of many years of community service, a successful career in the insurance industry, and a healthy family with lots of grand ...

  Let’s consider the physical and psychological benefits of keeping what we need and shedding the rest.  I’ve spent the last two weekends helping others do just that. I recall the year that my mother-in-law and my mother passed away within months of each other. Both events involved a process ...

  Back in the day when people from the Gen Y generation were in their 20’s, I read an article about best ways to manage millennials. Many of the managers I was coaching managed people in this age group so I was researching good suggestions for how to understand and ...