Help others.That seems obvious, but let me talk about our society. Our society has created a therapy culture and my profession is probably guiltier than any other. We think if we go and pay somebody money for fifty minutes of their time just to whine and complain, then we’ll feel better. I’ll tell you the …
I’m going to introduce to you a fundamentally different concept with a slightly different name. That concept was self-esteem. The concept I want you to get is self-efficacy. While it sounds the same, it is quite different than self-esteem. Self-efficacy is looking for evidence in your past. It’s asking yourself, “What have I done in my life that I …
I’m going to get on my soapbox here. My profession talks a lot about self-esteem. You’ve heard it. “You know you need to feel good about yourself. You’re good enough. You’re smart enough and doggone it, people like you enough to vote you as the Senator for Minnesota.” We think that self-esteem is important. Let …
What’s one of the greatest books written in the twentieth century? It’s “Man’s Search for Meaning“, by Viktor Frankl. I strongly recommend it. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jew, captured and put in Auschwitz and Dachau slave labor camps. It is his story of survival of the prison camps and it is one of the …
Do you know what SERE training is? The acronym SERE stands for: Survival/Evasion/Resistance/Escape – it is the closest thing to torture we do to our citizens. The Air Force, the Navy, and the Army all put their pilots through this training. I hated it, but I’m glad I did it. In SERE training, they set …
Adversity is the necessary ingredient for resilience. The Great Depression led immediately to the Greatest Generation. We often hear talk about the World War II generation as being the Greatest Generation in our history. Part of that formative experience was going through the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a necessary ingredient to create the …
When I was a kid I lived in India. While living there we had to boil our water. In India, there were really only two drinks that I could drink with any degree of safety outside of our home. They were hot tea (because it was boiled) and Coca Cola. When you’re nine years old, …
