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Go with the flow...
August 2007 |
Using 20+ years of life-consultation experience, I teach people how to get unstuck emotionally, so they can effectively reach their goals. I keep up on research addressing this fun, life-enhancing work, and I enjoy sharing what I've learned. Please tell others about this digest, and contact me if you have any comments, questions, or good jokes!
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Quote If
you have
some fear of pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything
you can do about it. If you can do something, there is
no need to worry about it. If you cannot, then there is
also no need to worry about it.
--Dalai Lama |
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The Who were correct: The kids are all
right!
The April/May 2007 edition
of Scientific American Mind
includes the article The Myth of the Teen
For example, Epstein cites
a 1991 study by Alice Schlegel and psychologist Herbert Barry III
that reviewed research on teens in 186 pre-industrial societies. The study found that
60% of those societies had no word for "adolescence," teens spent
almost all their time with adults, teens showed almost no signs
of emotional or psychological problems, and antisocial behavior in young men was completely
absent in more than half of the cultures
studied.
Furthermore, Epstein
cites a series of long-term studies that begin in the 1980s by
anthropologists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting. Their studies found
that teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the
introduction of Western influences, such as Western-style schools,
television, and movies. Consider this: before 1980, delinquency was not a
problem for the Intuit people of Victoria Island, Canada. TV arrived in
1980. By 1988, they had to open a new police station to deal with increased
delinquency.
The article goes on to talk about how
teen brain functioning is actually superior to adults in several ways (for
example, several types of memory), how teens are designed by evolution
to bear children and to function as adults, and how treating teens
as adults often causes them to rise to the
occasion.
One
of the most fun and important parts of my work as a life consultant
is helping people to view a situation from multiple points of view. Once these
"mental muscles" are strengthened, it becomes easier to challenge questionable-yet-popular trends, resist peer pressure, "think outside
the box," and consider multiple ways of generating solutions. Contact me for more
information about how life consultation helps teens and adults to rise to
occasions presented by every day life. |
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Be a good widdle boy and dwop the "Brainy Baby"
DVD!
Two news sources presented
very interesting research about what does and does not lead to
improved vocabulary with
babies. The June 16th edition
of the Boston Globe presented the article
Dawn of the Dad by Barbara F. Meltzs, which
discusses the effect dad's talk has on babies, and
the AP wires ran a
story about the lack of effectiveness of educational DVDs
for
babies.
The Globe article pointed
out that
although women do more talking with babies that includes baby talk ("blanky," "uppy," "birdy"),
research finds that typical father talk (often about work, sports, cars, nature) is
more correlated to learning language skills. "Fathers are more likely to talk about
things that are abstract, [which] makes a child more receptive to more
vocabulary." According to the study, the more words fathers used at
24 months, the better the child's language skills at 36 months.
"Differences themselves
aren't right or wrong," says Klyle Pruett, author of Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother
Care for your
Meanwhile, Dr. Dimitri
Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in
Seattle, stated that his research showed that for every hour a day that
babies 8 to 16 months old watch popular series such as Brainy
Baby or Baby Einstein, they knew 6 to 8 fewer words
than other kids. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends
no television for children under
24 months.)
Occasionally, someone will propose that activities such as life consultation can't work, because "what good
does talking do?" I think that these research studies show that challenging ways of talking can be quite
important when it comes to learning. Contact me to
learn more about how life consultation
teaches adult skills for living more successfully and peacefully in today's
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Every day is Thanksgiving, you
turkey!
The Summer 2007 issue of
Greater Good magazine provides a series of articles about
gratitude, which is a key component of the new Positive Psychology
movement. One article, Love, Honor, and
Here is a summary of
key points from the article:
More than half the
life-consultation work I do involves relationships, and this article
focuses on something that is key to my
approach. Society encourages people to focus almost exclusively
on falling in love as an indicator that two people should couple,
and, in my work, it has always been the failure of a couple to
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Quote We
should give as we would receive—cheerfully,
quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that
sticks to the fingers.
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca |
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Anger is the enemy of forgiveness; fear can
be a friend
The Summer 2007
issue of
The first conclusion was not
surprising: those students expressing the most anger were least able to
forgive. However, even with this
group of people, mixed-group discussions led to lower levels of
anger, more empathy, and higher levels of forgiveness.
Another finding was more of
a surprise: fear can
assist forgiveness. When both
groups feared the possibility of future violence and saw
forgiveness as a crucial step toward achieving peace, then that shared fear
correlated with levels of forgiveness.
Emotional-intelligence research
has shown that intense negative emotion hyper focuses a person on detecting negativity, predicting
negativity, and, ultimately, in furthering the negative experience. So, even though it
is not surprising that angry people have trouble forgiving, the
bigger lesson is in how difficult it is to do complex thinking and decision
making when an intense emotion is present. That's why I
focus so much of my work on helping clients
to build emotion-management skills. Contact me to discuss
the role emotion management plays in decision making, taking
strategic action, and achieving goals. |
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Taming the beast of your
family's morning routine
The Spring 2007 issue of
Going Bonkers? includes some practical tips by
Elizabeth Pantley, best selling author of parenting books,
about eliminating the
madness of the family's morning rush. Here are some of the
tips:
In my experience as a life consultant, I find that helping people to stay
positive and to develop a working plan is key to success and
happiness. Contact me
for more information about how life consultation
may benefit you. Follow this link for more
information about Going Bonkers?
magazine. |
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Quote One person
with beliefs is equal to a force of 99 who have only
interests.
--John Stuart Mill |