We spent the New Year’s weekend at Esalen Institute, a retreat center located on the Big Sur coast in California, one of the most beautiful places in the world. We attended a mindfulness and meditation workshop conducted by a Stanford professor and researcher who led us through a series of sitting and walking mindfulness exercises. Although I’ve meditated in the past, I was surprised at how easily I was able to sustain the practice of mindfulness during the elongated weekend...

Best Wishes for A Happy and Healthy New Year! © Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2016 ]]>

The sun reached its nadir this morning at 5:44 AM EDT, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and began its 6-month march to its zenith at the next moment. It’s no wonder that we are built for resilience as nature showers her experiences of recovering from the depths of winter’s darkness towards the fullness of summer’s long days like the clock that she is in our lives. At our home on the Allegheny River, we always joke about...

I’ve already made several mistakes by the time you’ve started reading this week’s memo. And there is a reasonable chance that I’ll have a failure sometime soon given my propensity to try out new ideas. Mistakes and failures are inevitable and developing greater comfort and skills in managing failure is critical for success. I’ve just recently completed a corporate workshop for a new client that we called “Raising Phoenix” for its emphasis on helping the company’s business leaders address failures...

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, the 75th anniversary of that day that lives in infamy. It would also have been my father’s 101st birthday. On that fateful day, my mother was preparing a birthday party for her fiancée. It wasn’t going to be a surprise party but there were lots of friends and family attending. The party turned out to be anything but a celebration and my dad’s enlistment happened a few weeks later. After training he was sent to...

Our focus on resilience is not just about dealing with stress and challenges more effectively but ultimately creating more happiness and joy in our lives. Today, happiness is a highly researched area and there is no doubt a top 25 list of what we should do to be happy. But perhaps it might be useful to consider a simpler approach to happiness. While visiting family for Thanksgiving in Boston, we took time to check out the John F. Kennedy Library...