Category
Stuff To Read
These are a collection of blogs to explain various aspects of how our minds work and how we can better deal with the challenges of our daily lives.
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Which Step Do I Need Right Now?
Knowing the four steps and knowing which one you need today are different things. Four questions that tell you where the process is stuck,…
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Open and Allowing
Discomfort runs on resistance. Stop pushing at it and it runs out of fuel. The least intuitive move in the method, and one of…
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Skewed Thinking
Thinking goes off track in a small number of predictable ways. Catastrophizing, mind reading, discounting the positive. Naming the pattern is most of the…
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The 5-Whys
The belief causing the trouble is rarely the first one you find. Ask why four or five times in a row and you arrive…
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What Your Brain Is Optimized For
Your brain was built to keep you alive, not to make you happy. Criticism sticks, praise slides off, and rest feels unearned. That is…
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Why Anxiety Feeds on Itself
Sometimes the alarm will not turn off because the thing setting off the alarm is the alarm itself. How a normal stress response turns…
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Nothing Is Broken
Anxiety is not evidence of a defect. It is evidence of a system running correctly on inaccurate information, and information can be corrected. Why…
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The Three Themes: Trust, Value, and Acceptance
Every difficult emotion, however complicated it feels, comes back to trust, value, or acceptance. Fear points to a lack of trust, shame to a…
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What Your Emotions Are Telling You
Your emotions are a readout of where your well-being currently stands. A difficult one is not a malfunction, it is a signal, and the…
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Feelings and Emotions Are Not the Same Thing
A feeling is a body sensation. An emotion is that sensation with a meaning attached. Two people with the same racing heartbeat can be…
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Mindfulness Return on Investment (ROI)
The usual return-on-investment calculation for workplace mindfulness does not survive scrutiny. Here is what the evidence actually supports, and the one variable that decides…
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A Guide to Mindfulness at Work
Mindfulness initiatives fail in a predictable way: a course gets delivered and nothing changes. Here are the seven components that determine whether it takes,…
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Diversity and Inclusion
Salesforce audited its own pay and found a gap it had actively tried to prevent. Bias is not usually a failure of intent. It…
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Mindful and Compassionate Leadership
Google studied 180 teams to find what makes them effective. The answer was not who was on the team. It was whether people could…
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Relationship and Social Management
How you manage a relationship depends on beliefs you hold about yourself at least as much as beliefs about the other person. Other people’s…
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Self-Management
Self-management is usually described as regulating your reactions. That points at the wrong end of the chain. What you are actually managing is the…
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Compassion
Compassion is not in the 4-Steps™ because kindness is pleasant. It is there because awareness without kindness just gives your inner critic better material.…
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Self-Awareness
There is a part of you that can watch you think, feel, and react. It has been there your whole life. Knowing it is…
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Mindfulness and Teamwork
Google expected team performance to come down to who was on the team. It did not. What mattered most was whether people could speak…
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The Science of Mindfulness
What the research actually supports about mindfulness, compassion, and belief change, why the order of the four skills is grounded in evidence, and where…