Learning Center

As a full-time clinician and mother to 3 young children, the term “self-care” always sent me a strong message that I was too self-indulgent when I should be solely focused on the needs of my children and my clients.  So I stopped listening to advice on this subject and I stopped trying. Each time I set a goal in this ...

At a recent conference, Lisa tearfully described to me her agony as sole caregiver for her disabled husband for 33 years. Her pain hints at the burden of 34 million Americans caring for loved ones with dementia, disabilities, and other enduring illnesses. Most caregivers report significant stress, which mirrors my experience the last seven years as chief caregiver for my ...

In my last post I summarized some alarming trends and statistics reflecting our country’s epidemic of opioid addiction. I also pointed out that while research supports the effectiveness of prescribing opioids for the treatment of acute trauma, before and after surgery, cancer pain and pain associated with end of life illness, “the evidence is limited for the use of chronic ...

Next time you start feeling the unwelcome onset of stress and all of it’s debilitating symptoms, take a couple of deep cleansing breaths and apply some of the life saving techniques that astronauts have developed for staying calm in crisis situations. Astronauts have the most stressful, and dangerous, of occupations and their training is the gold standard for successfully managing ...

What happens when you have a winning product and/or business strategy but your managers have poor people skills? Lost opportunity is what happens. Failure to capitalize is what happens. Your business loses is what happens. Even the best business strategies do not implement themselves. They require communication, coordination, alignment, and efficiency. In other words, they require leaders with strong people ...

In our culture, which extols the merits of authenticity and transparency in everything from TED talks about leadership to advertisements for our food, it may seem a bit contrarian to make a case for the virtues of faking it. But I’d like to try.   Suppose you are the manager of a busy gift store at the height of the ...

People who have a persistent propensity to complain, find fault and judge others harshly can sap your energy and optimism if you are not careful. One of my EAP clients recently compared the effect of a colleague’s unrelenting negativity to a toxic cloud of second hand smoke: irritating, suffocating, and pervasive. It got me thinking about how challenging it can ...

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Abraham Joshua Heschel   Harold Ramis died last week. He cowrote and directed Groundhog Day, a ...

Last October, I had an opportunity to ask 25,000 strangers five questions concerning their attitudes and feelings about work. Today’s post reviews some of the responses I received to one of those questions: “What are your strategies for balancing the demands of work with those of your personal life?” As you might expect, there is great variability in how people ...

I am concerned about the escalating lack of civility that surrounds us in our everyday life. Incivility at work has many different forms. We see everything from the gossiping coworker to the intimidating bully. Then there are the supervisors who take credit for your work but never give credit and the managers who are dismissive and rude and will not ...

“If management stopped demotivating their employees then they wouldn’t have to worry so much about motivating them.” W. Edwards Deming If you read my blog post last week you know that I was the winner of The Listserve email lottery and as a result had the opportunity to ask 5 questions to a diverse group of 25,000 strangers. This week ...

What would you want to say if you had the chance to send an email to 25,000 strangers dispersed across planet earth? That’s the question that faced me last week and I had 48 hours to decide what to do with this opportunity. The Listserve is an email lottery. One person every day has a chance to broadcast a message ...

Mindfulness 2.0? In case you haven’t noticed the meditation practice of mindfulness has rapidly been gaining popularity. Once the purview of meditation halls and Eastern religious practice, mindfulness training is now a component in many successful corporate environments. This renaissance of mindfulness, informed by research in neurophysiology, organizational leadership, education and technology, has created an exciting intersection which can be ...

Did you hear the story about the fellow who was walking through the Broadway theater district in New York and was accosted by a frantic stage manager? The stage manager told him that he needed to find a replacement for an actor that had suddenly come down with a case of laryngitis. The curtain was going up in 10 minutes ...

It’s not your imagination. It’s a hard cold fact. Researchers at Texas A&M, after collecting data on auto speeds on most major roads every 15 minutes every day of the year, have concluded in their 2012 Annual Urban Mobility Report that traffic congestion is wicked bad. To be more precise, the average commuter loses 38 hours – nearly a week ...