Home and Family

It was not an easy decision for his parents to let Blake leave high school and it continues to be a hard choice. They are attacked by critics —most of whom they’ve never met. If the Peebles had taken the expected path and insisted that their son stay in school, no one would be giving them flack – even if their son was bored, depressed or learning less. Many would tell them they were doing the right thing.

When clients come to us, whether in a coaching or counseling relationship, we assume they are ready to change. But what if you find they don’t yet appear ready for change. What can you do to get your client to talk more about change? There is a counseling approach called Motivational Interviewing (MI) that can be defined as a “client-centered, directive method for enhancing intrinsic motivation to change…”

Turns out it’s not enough to be pretty and witty–we now have to be gritty. Grit is getting some hot press at the moment, suggesting that if we want to be truly successful in life, we ain’t gonna achieve it without grit.

When did we start calling kids “self-motivated” if they responded to someone or something outside themselves? Doesn’t the word “self” mean that it comes from the individual himself? Is someone truly self-motivated if they are doing something to get a reward from someone else? Teens who are not top students may appear to be unmotivated when we look only at their school performance.

Remember the game “hot potato” that you played as a kid? Blame is like that. No one wants to be left holding it, since you might get burned. …All of us have times when we are clueless, and we, too, pass the blame to keep from feeling shame or embarrassment. Do you find yourself using the passive voice, saying, “Well, yes, mistakes were made.” But by whom?

I have had the good fortune of being born into a large, Italian family, for which I am utterly and completely grateful…. Communitas is a ritual-building process that inspires and revitalizes while reaffirming relationships within a community, state University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. According to Anthropologist Victor Turner, building communitas is an essential step to activating a community to healthy family functioning, healthy child development, and other dimensions of well-being.

I look forward to the day when the word “positive” is no longer needed to describe psychology or psychotherapy because the association will automatically be there. How is the field of psychotherapy integrating with the positive psychology movement to re-gain its original focus on helping people to achieve their potential?

We swim in the soup of constant discourse. The content and meaning of that discourse flavors our lives. Say you are driving your child to school, and I cut you…

Meditation practice may still be viewed by some as a relic of 1960’s counter-culture or a sequestered religious practice to attain “enlightenment.” But scientists now seriously study mindfulness practices, and report a wide range of interesting findings. How does meditation work, and how best can coaches bring this research to our clients?

In a recent study, I found that a child’s gifts may actually be at odds with the way he is expected to learn: the very gifts that will help him in life, hurt him in school. The conflict between teens’ gifts and school demands is a good reason to question whether our approach to education is best for teens. Yet there is an even more fundamental reason to re-think this myth.

It is possible to achieve a great deal of contentment and peace with your spouse if you practice mindfulness in your relationship. What does this look like? In my last article, I stated that mindfulness is “attending nonjudgmentally to all stimuli in the internal and external environments,” and it turns out that this is arguably the greatest pathway to satisfaction in relationships.

To understand love, those usually helpful resources—the ancient Greeks, the poets, the psychologists, even Cupid—all fail us. Too readily, these experts become preoccupied with lust and forget about lasting attachment. And the Buddha, too, lets us down; for he was too preoccupied with compassion to appreciate lasting attachment. True, love is compassionate; but compassion is not always love. Real love is attached, selective and enduring. Mature mammalian, not just human, love involves enduring, remarkably unselfish limbic attachment.

We all want the best for our kids. So when we urge a teen to be the best possible student, it’s often because we know this will get him into the “best” colleges—and we assume this will lead to the best life. On the flip side, we assume that if you’re not a top student, you won’t have a wonderful life. We assume wrong.

When we change ourselves, it is important that we invite those in our spheres of influence into the new possibility we have created for ourselves. This invitation comes with energetic and joyful dialogue with others about our visions, hopes, needs, values, and desires.

On the back of a holiday photo I received recently was a troubling note that belied the lovely smiling faces of the melded family on the other side. In the…

As the mother of a soon-to-be six year old, I’ve become increasingly interested in all aspects of child development: how to foster children’s well-being and self-efficacy in ways that enable…