What do you do when your work becomes your personal life? Perhaps you spend your time helping others with substance abuse, and a family member starts abusing; or you work with grief counseling, and suddenly, you’re faced with the death of a parent, a spouse, or a child. It’s the place that Sherry Walling, a […]
Death has its tentacles around every part of life. Though we fight to release life from its grip and deny its existence, Ernest Becker explains we don’t have The Denial of Death. I’ve previously reviewed The Worm at the Core, which extends Becker’s work, and I won’t be revisiting those arguments here. Rather, I share […]
You only have two options when you’re experiencing a problem and you want to change it. You can exit the situation, or you can use your voice to try to try to change it. In 1970, Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States to explain how these […]
Grief sucks. Finding a way out from underneath the weight is the goal. That’s what David Kessler proposes in Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. How do you learn to grieve in ways that avoid suffering and allow you to find some meaning in the aftermath of loss? Kessler argues that finding meaning helps […]
Who wants to know how to grow pumpkins? The answer is a handful of people, but that’s not really what The Pumpkin Plan is about. It’s about an approach to your business that follows the pattern of the $500-per-seed great pumpkin growers. The book was a recommendation from an entrepreneurial friend who thought the fundamental […]
There’s not much that works. When it comes to suicide prevention, the list of interventions that reduce attempts is small. There’s Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention (BCBT-SP), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS). BCBT-SP is a time-limited, targeted use of CBT, which has been widely validated for several […]
Who could be against empathy? Isn’t it a good thing? Don’t we need it to relate to one another? How could someone, Paul Bloom, write a whole book about why empathy is bad? The answer is a surprising journey into what we mean when we say “empathy” and the negative side of what is seen […]
For those who work with community organizations, you’re likely to come into contact with data that contains personally identifiable information (PII). Depending upon the sensitivity of the information and how the PII is connected to the rest of the mission of the organization, you may need to deidentify the data prior to sharing more broadly. […]
If you’re going to be navigating something, it’s helpful to have a map – or even multiple maps. For navigating depression, Andrew Solomon gives us The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. A depression sufferer himself, he walks us through his personal experience, the experiences of those he interviewed, as well as a selection of […]
Disruption isn’t the goal. Growth and success are. However, the path to growth often leads through disruption. Charlene Li explains in The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail how to navigate the disruption and even encourage the right disruption to lead to the desired exponential growth. Anyone can be disruptive; it takes […]