Experts Blogs

The best people I’ve ever interviewed such as Andy Grove, Bill Bradley and Steve Case, all believe in three fundamental truths about everyone’s life:   1. Everything is changing, always (which is why you must look at every day with fresh eyes) 2. Reality always intrudes 3. Every person can have a profound effect on his/her own destiny.    It’s a belief in what poets call the symmetry of our actions, that the chickens do come home to roost, that what goes around does come around, that Karma is real, that there is always a day of reckoning.  Or as the great...

Pain is a gift and is often essential to our personal evolution. Without it we may travel largely through life unconscious. Those who are interested in an evolution of the self understand that oftentimes pain is essential to waking us up and living life more fully.  Pain invites us to ask really important questions and to spiritually grow up. Pain invites us to evaluate what we believe to be true, important, and hard.  Pain invites us to check our boundaries, our wounds and to change something.  These situations have us mute the outside world for a bit, so that we can...

Many of us act as though we all see the same reality, yet the truth is we don't. Human Beings have cognitive biases or blind spots. Blind spots are ways that our mind becomes blocked from seeing reality as it is - blinding us from seeing the real truth about ourselves in relation to others. Once we form a conclusion, we become blind to alternatives, even if they are right in front of their eyes. Emily Pronin, a social psychologist, along with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, created the term "blind spots."  The bias...

WE ALL SEEM to feel the shifts of uncertainty that are occurring at multiple levels in our lives, including our spirit. Acknowledging these feelings about how we approach our daily our lives will hopefully open up an opportunity to stop and reflect about our behavior patterns, prompting us to ask questions. Ask yourself: Are you stuck in denial, apathy, self-doubt or blame? If these few samples of obstacles to everyday courage resonate with you, then you're stuck in the past unable to embrace the major transitions going on in our culture for the past several years. Please know that it...

A key component to moving into a strength focus begins with the first of 4 UNFEAR practices that I share in my book. Accept what is real. Unless and until we accept the circumstances of a given situation, we are reacting from fear and through fear based behaviors.  Forward movement is limited or impossible without first giving acceptance. To operate from a place of strength, it is necessary to first accept our talents, our desires, our natural propensities, our weaknesses, our deficiencies, our circumstances, as well as the demands being placed on us.  If we dwell on what's not working, we...

"...significant, lasting change begins inside individuals and emanates outward, not the other way around. Systems change when groups of people together tap their resilience and change from the insideout." - Kathy Marshall, National Resilience Resource Center, University of Minnesota In the days since March 11, 2011, the world has witnessed the Japanese people struggle with unimaginable devastation caused by circumstances beyond mankind's ability to foresee or control. The after effects of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated so much of that country and which continue to compound, have far reaching consequences and offer  lessons in resilience that are worth studying. ...

Can you see in yourself what others see in you, or do you see in others what you don't see in yourself? As a Ph.D. student at UCLA in the 70s, I had a self-image of being 'hip.' I believed I was involved in discovering deeper human understanding,self-actualization, and profound wisdom. Early in my Ph.D. program, I was a student in a class with 12 other people led by a wise teacher, Dr. Bob Tannenbaum. Bob had invented 'sensitivity training', published a popular article in the Harvard Business Review, and was a full professor. In Bob's class, we could discuss...