It is Mental Health Awareness Month. That is insane. We’re just gladhanding one another, while avoiding the real diagnosis: We’ve been so pathetically behind bringing people up to speed on recognizing and treating scourges like depression and anxiety that there is a massive epidemic of suicide gripping the nation, while hospitals and outpatient clinics remain […]
We all know it: There’s cruising along and then there’s truly going for it. And it takes an actual decision to switch gears and engage all 12 cylinders of your mental engine. The cruising along mindset is the way you feel, mindset-wise, when you’re attending a meeting, and you know that you’re really not the […]
Before I had published my novels, I was lucky to hire a writing coach named Gary Provost. One of Gary’s powerful pieces of advice was to begin at the last possible moment. By this, he meant that novels shouldn’t begin with meandering paragraphs talking about rolling hills, the weather or even the main character’s profession. […]
Since I started www.pain-2-power.com, many people have asked me whether there are parallels between God’s teachings and the field of psychiatry psychology. In the end, I believe the two things are very nearly one, but I understand why the question would be raised. Psychiatry, in its late 20th and 21st century incarnations, has focused a […]
Psychological principles are the key to understanding any story—whether the story of a person, a business or a new technology. In the piece that follows, I use them to address product development and deployment in the arena of military equipment where form and function are optimized by the same psychological calculus as products of every […]
It is a remarkable quality of human beings that our strength is only visible when required. The human mind and soul isn’t like the human body. We don’t, of course, develop emotional muscles that telegraph to others (or reflect back to ourselves) how powerful we might be amidst adversity. The evidence for that only comes […]
We are afraid of too much. One of the things we fear is our own pain—so much of it rooted in early chapters of our life stories. So we run from it. And in running away, we experience anxiety. We trip. We fall. We become despondent. All those emotions make us panic more, so we […]
When clouds gather and life seems uncertain, there are lots of words that might come to mind, including, “Oh, no,” or “Oh, my God,” or “This can’t be happening.” Left to its own devices, the mind wanders and can settle on alarmist language that creates more negative energy—in the form of anxiety, for instance—that adds […]
The late philosopher Marshall McLuhan was famous for saying “The medium is the message,” meaning that the technology used to convey ideas is more important, from a cultural standpoint, than the ideas themselves. McLuhan used a lightbulb as an example of how the medium of technology could message a whole culture or even a whole […]
How many stories have we all told that include the line, “Then, this completely amazing thing happened.” There are variations, of course: “Then, you won’t believe what happened;” or “Then, everything changed, out of the blue.” Life surprises us—often with a great turn of events. We couldn’t see it coming, yet it must have been […]