Guidelines

To hear does not necessarily mean to understand. To gain understanding you have to recognize and distinguish between the speaker’s similarities to and differences from, yourself. To do so you must apply two principles essential for understanding: the principles of similarity and of differentness. The principle of similarity states that nothing in the other is […]

Success is when you can go from one failure to another without losing your enthusiasm. Someone said that in a forgettable movie I recently watched. That really spoke to me. What if personal success were less about results and more about attitude, less about achievement and more about perseverance through failure? That might render more […]

Talking about something helps. Just talking about it may not seem to have much power to change our life situation for the better, but words are all we have. Do not underrate or underestimate the positive effect of simply talking through something with a trusted other. My life can be viewed as a series of […]

Loving and controlling are at odds with each other. In fact, love is a letting go, not a controlling of loved ones. We seek to control more from fear and frustration than love. Love and fear do not work well together, either; they cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Love demands a […]

Do not underrate the value of optimism, especially during these dark and tenuous days. An optimist has been defined as one who believes things cannot get worse. I don’t like that definition, for being a short-termed pessimist but long-term optimist, that definition would render me a fool, and optimism foolish. And optimism is anything but […]

Love is all that really matters. That is something we are all surely feeling with our heightened concern for the well-being of loved ones. And that is what I told a high school student some time back in a memorable exchange, which began when she asked me an intriguing question out of the blue. The […]