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The flip side of failure

Hope Perlman

No Bad Parts: Key to Success

I suspect it is difficult for many of us to believe we have a whole, undamaged Self because we are so used to feeling that we are flawed at the core; so used to striving.

Success in AP2: It's More Than Coping, but Coping Is Great

Rest can be as accessible as a sigh. At any time, a deep breath provides an instant of rest. It’s not necessary to wait for a vacation to rest. Rest a little bit every day.

Musings on Uncertainty and the Anxiety-Worry Habit

Anxiety and worry create a feedback loop that can be broken. It is not necessary to worry.

Old mug, new Moominbowl

How to Cope With Life's Impermanence

Attachment is what relationships are made of, but so are change and impermanence. To successfully navigate life, we have to come to terms with this paradox.

A Bigger Umbrella Than This One

Have We Resolved Social Work's Identity Crisis?

How ironic I find it that after my personal professional identity crisis, I have joined a profession going through it. Except I just don't think it's true, despite what they say.

Social Work's Identity Crisis, and Mine

Tikkun Olan. This is a Jewish value: Make the world a little better any way you can. Maybe by becoming a therapist, I will help.

Pantone Color of 2021

Tips for Success From the Color of the Year

It takes strength and optimism to crawl forward in the dark and believe in the light at the end, and it takes strength and optimism to look at what’s in the tunnel, too.

2009-2020

Recollecting Impermanence Is the Doorway to Contentment

My earring fell down the drain and it made me think about impermanence. Life has a way of forcing you to contemplate this truth, but we resist knowing it in a bone-deep way.

What Does Success Mean When the World Is Full of Suffering?

What do I do when my circle of concern is ever-expanding and my circle of influence seems like a pinhead? Well, a pinhead can be just enough space.

Annals of a Pandemic: Success Is About What We Can Control

During the pandemic, it feels important right now to focus on what I can control. This is part of Stephen Covey's first habit of highly effective people: be proactive. Choose.

Good, Better, Perfect: Annals of a Type B Guru

Better can be the enemy of good, too. Even if you’re wise enough to know perfection is impossible, better is always possible. I truly believe in better. But sometimes good is best.

Kindness is Key to Success

I was a little disappointed to find spirituality at the bottom of that list. Almost as disappointed to find that there as I was surprised to find kindness in the top five.

Failure Is Not the Opposite of Success

One of the most important things I've learned is that success is inseparable from failure, because success is about rising to challenges, and challenges require practice to meet.

Quarterly Check-In, Part Two. Goals, Again. Risk or Gain?

Clever Readers, these orientations are basically pessimistic and optimistic. Some goals lend themselves more to a promotion strategy, and some to a prevention strategy.

Stephen Covey's Four Quadrants, interpreted

Tips on Getting Stuff Done, and How Not To

Is life admin getting you down? How about your New Year's goals? Priority-setting, scheduling, and making a plan are three things that make me want to pull the covers over my head.

recipe from www.smittenkitchen.com

Happy New Year, Resolutions, and Foibles

If I can free myself of regret and fear, well, then I will be golden. Failing that, if I can accept regret and fear, then I’ll be pretty good. Silver, I suppose.

Wish Fulfillment: Fantasy and Strategy

There is a more complex form of visualization that is also helpful. It is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting is visualizing one’s goal and also visualizing the obstacles

The Rotating Drill Bit: Family Vacation Drama

It's summer, which means traveling with family, sometimes sharing vacation time with more than one family within a family. And that means--drama. Dreaded family drama. How to deal?

Manners and Courtesy for All Is a Step Forward

Lately, I have been reading etiquette books. I'm afraid I need to bone up. Maybe we all should.

Why Standing Up to a Bully Is Hard for a Bystander

I was at the gym on a recent Saturday on the weight machines, maintaining muscle mass. So were a skinny, blonde, teenaged girl and a macho weight-lifter bully.

Getting Grit, a Q & A with Caroline Adams Miller, Pt. 2

When women’s backs are to the wall, they really discover resourcefulness and strength and courage, and I think that we’re in that time frame right now. Our backs are to the wall.

Getting Grit, Q & A with Caroline Adams Miller, Part I

I’m always intrigued by something that I learned in Overeaters Anonymous, which was, ‘Fake it till you make it’. Act like you're in recovery before you're in recovery.

Tips on Building Self-Esteem, From a Master Coach

Now, I have a teensie problem with self-esteem. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. I hope you haven’t. Well, I have an exercise to help me with this problem, and it can help you.

Self-Efficacy and Success

This reminds me of an incident with the plumber the other week. I called the plumber. You know plumbers, they charge you $100 to step over your threshold.

Center Yourself

It seems like a good day to reiterate one of the planks of my scaffolding of success: centering. As in, remember what’s in your control and what’s not.

Grit, Grittier 2

Grit is what you think it is: tenacity. But this new definition of grit adds the element of passion. So grit is perseverance in pursuit of something of intrinsic interest to you.

Grit, Grittier

What is grit? Is grit muscling through weekend traffic on 495 and 95 to and from visiting your rising 10th grader at her theater camp's performance day? Sadly, no. That's different

Act Local

The other weekend my next door neighbor dropped dead. He was a grandfather, in his seventies, and had heart problems. Strange as it may seem, I never met him. I knew his wife.

How to Podium: A Person Wants to Be Helpful

According to Martin Seligman, anxiety and depression spring from having “a bleak view of the future.” Not from past traumas nor how they feel about what is happening at present.

Use the Scaffolding of Success to Deal with Distraction

Current events are inconveniencing me, Readers. They are preventing me from splashing happily in my bath. They are keeping me from focusing with laser-like concentration on work.

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