What great things have you already gotten done this week and how are you acknowledging your victories? Most of us fall back on our modesty and humility and don’t want to be seen as being braggadocios and tooting your own horn. Building confidence in our ability to get things done and persevere through the tough stuff is built on our successes and not failures and owning them builds our hardiness and faith. So this week, I am going to brag...

I had the pleasure the other day to talk with a newly retired Air Force Colonel who had spent 25 years in the military and had flown missions all around the world. He was most excited, however, about his transition to civilian life and his new job with a large family owned company where he would be leading the charge to help the company transition from their “family owned mindset” to developing a more “corporate business mindset.” He told me...

We’ve just come back from Tucson, AZ where we spent a fantastic week with family celebrating the wedding of my niece Caity and her new husband Andrew. I’ve been to the Sonoran Desert many times and if there is one place that represents the importance of resilience, it must be that unforgiving desert. I’ve always been intrigued by the special relationship between the Palo Verde Tree and the Saguaro Cactus. Most people immediately recognize the Saguaro by its tall upright...

A story in this week’s New York Time Magazine discussed the history of mindfulness education in America and points out that it has its origins from the 1880s where a British judge translated the term from the Buddhist concept of sati into our word for attention. Mindfulness, as a brand, took root during the 1960s and under the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn has reached all the way into hospitals, executive c-suites, professional sports teams, and even into public education. Prospect...

One of my former bosses use to ask us during times of high stress, “why do you think they call it work?” He believed that by asking that question it would give us a perspective that our work is hard, but what it mostly did was to demoralize people to expect that nothing better could be expected from our work. Instead of motivating us to excel, his efforts pushed us towards mediocrity. In a recent research piece, the Gallup Organization...

Keeping our immune system strong is great for being resilient so that we have “energy reserves” when we have to face the next stressor of the day. This makes sense because if our bodies are not battling inside they can better handle what is happening outside. This internal battle can create inflammation at the cellular level. Inflammation is an autoimmune response that our bodies put into play when they have to respond to some crisis. While some inflammation situations are...