Everybody is resilient. Resilience is hardwired into us but sometimes the software is corrupted and our brain and heart are out of sync. This is where community and friends make a difference. If you believe in the inherent strength of resilience, then it is easy to support someone who is in a shaky place by helping them discover their own inner gifts. The key to that is to be a good listener. Allowing others to explore their own thinking and...

At the Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference I spoke at last week, an important topic of conversation was about re-setting mindset. Mindset is generally considered to be a set of ideas or beliefs that we establish that guide much of our behavior. I brought this topic up in my session as a way of helping peoples change the way they currently think about stress so that they can create more of a resilient framework upon facing challenges. One...

I’m attending the 28th annual Art and Science of Health Promotion Conference in San Diego where I will be speaking on the Resilience Advantage. Conference participants are leaders in the area of health promotion. They come from business, health systems, insurance companies, and academic settings. Their commonality is a deep belief in helping people to create healthy workplaces and personal lifestyles. In my presentation, people will want me to tell them how to develop resilience in their lives but instead...

I was talking with a group of educators last week about how we address risk taking at work and at home. Someone pointed out that there are very clear formulas for taking risks around financial planning but not so much in other areas. Someone else laughingly mentioned that even when you are planning how to invest your retirement savings, financial planners talk about “financial risk tolerance,” which they often determine by how you sleep when the stock market goes down...

The apocalypse of Daylight Savings Time was upon us last Sunday morning at 2 AM The cute reminders on Facebook, in the newspaper, and by my friends helped me organize most of my clocks by 6 PM Saturday so that I wouldn’t be confused when I woke up Sunday morning and it was still dark outside. Of course, the warnings blasted out before DST kicked off were followed by concerns about how the loss of one hour of sleep would...

We can all be victims at some point in our lives. If a thief breaks into your house, you’ve been victimized. Giving out a credit card to someone posing as being from the IRS translates to being scammed (victim). Being in an abusive marriage creates a prison like setting for the person being abused (victim). We can all be victims but we don’t need to stay there any longer than necessary. Being a victim is a transient phenomenon and not...