10 Reasons to Stop Blaming Parents Blaming parents is a favorite mind game — and not just with teens. The media and other professionals often find it fun to blame parents for everything that they think is “wrong” with the younger generation. As the fall semester comes to a close, here are my Top 10 […]
Hero mindset
This year I discovered I could put a new twist on an old resolution: Originally I wrote this with my kids in mind. This year, though it occurred to me that much of what I’ve been working on for myself and with clients is about the (misguided) notion we’ve been given that others cause us […]
What would you guess are the four strengths found in people with the highest life satisfaction? One is enthusiasm, according to research by Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman, and colleagues. This was inspiring news to me because “Enthusiasm Makes the Difference” is the book I read at 17 that sparked my lifelong passion for positive psychology. With all the hype and stress about […]
Until today, I’ve never loved the word compassion. Is that harsh? Let me ask you this: what does compassion mean to you? For me, it’s always had an undercurrent of sympathy, pity, of understanding and relating to someone else’s (or one’s own) pain. It’s also meant to convey love, yet so often it seems to […]
“‘I was an aspiring astrophysicist and that’s how I defined myself, not by my skin color…’” — Neil deGrasse Tyson in Parade Magazine today. It’s so freeing to stop viewing yourself through other-people’s-eyes. Too often, we allow ourselves to be defined by other people’s opinions — by what they think about our behavior, our performance, […]
There are times when it doesn’t feel as if I have control of my thoughts– it’s more like my thoughts are the inmates running the asylum. That’s when I remind myself that the only thing that imprisons us is our own thinking. And when I remember that I control what matters most — my own […]
Have you ever found yourself trying to think more positively about something but in your gut or your chest you feel a clenching that says, “I don’t really believe this” ? If so, you’re not alone. Sometimes when we try thinking positively about a difficult topic, not only do we not feel better, we may even […]
Besides being creative, innovative, wildly successful and new-age businesses (that weren’t even dreamed of 30 years ago), do you know what Google, Amazon, Wikipedia & Sim City have in common? The founders of these companies (two at Google) have Montessori educations, says Peter Sims in the Wall Street Journal. What is “a Montessori education?” Although […]
I sometimes wonder why so much of what is considered “good literature” for ourselves and for students has to be dark, depressing, or unhappy. I’m not against stories in which something bad happens, but knowing that bad news seizes and clings, while good news slides right off us, I like to prime myself with uplifting […]
Successful. Entrepreneur. Prime Minister. Nobel Prize Winner. Scientist. Leader. What words come to mind when you think of people described by this list? Underachievers? Learning disabled? Unmotivated? These probably weren’t your first thoughts, but many people with these job titles weren’t good students. In fact, A BBC-study found that a “significant majority” of self-made millionaires […]