Self-Intimidation

I would guess that all of us, at one time or another, have encountered a person we’ve found to be emotionally or intellectually intimidating. We say, “She scares the daylights out of me.”
It’s a very unpleasant feeling. It’s as if that other person has power over us in some way.
H. B. Karp, in his book [...]

Shared Spirit and Your Own Dreams

 
A familiar line in science fiction movies, when aliens from another galaxy appear, is “Who are they and what do they want?”
The entire story line of the movie hinges on the answer to that question, right?…”Who are they and what do they want?”
In the same way, the entire story line of your life hinges on [...]

What to Do About Mean People

As I see it, meanness can live only in people. It doesn’t just float around in the air waiting to attack. It lives only in, grows only in, and comes only out of people.
And meanness is usually made up of two elements: hurt, which is too painful a feeling to hold on to, so it [...]

Lesson from a Hostage

Terry Waite, a British clergyman, arrived in Beirut in 1987 to negotiate the release of the hostages held in Lebanon by a faction of Shiite Muslims. Instead, he became a hostage himself…for five years, almost four of them in solitary confinement.
How could we even begin to imagine the fear, the physical testing, the deprivation and [...]

A Subset of the Universe

The late Buckminster Fuller—American physicist, poet, inventor, genius, lover of humanity—would tell you that every group is a sub-system of a larger sub-system (the Spaceship we know as Planet Earth) which is part of a larger system we call Universe. This is a synergetic system, which means that the characteristics of the whole system cannot [...]

Inferred Shared Spirit

For twenty-six years—from 1966 to 1992–I was on the radio in our local community six days a week. That 15-minute daily program lasted twenty years, seventeen of those years while I was working full-time in hospital administration. It consisted of my playing old standards and showtunes on my keyboards and talking about the food and [...]

Break the Pattern!

If you’re having negative feelings toward another person on the team—you're sure some other person in your group is the cause of your problems—you’re just falling into a pattern that many of us—me included—fall into. I’m sorry to have to break it to you: It’s a pattern of stupidity. It’s a pattern that keeps us [...]

Sick Building Syndrome or Sick Spirit?

Having worked with individuals whose physical health was severely affected by "bad air" in their workplaces, I would certainly not discount the seriousness of so-called "sick building syndrome." Nonetheless, the results of a recent study reported in the British journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, are worth noting.
The study showed that the psychosocial elements of the [...]

Even the Unmovable Can Be Moved

Several years ago, I served as one of the facilitators for a large, statewide effort to come to agreement on strategies for managing the deer herd. Most of the people involved were men, and many were hunters and/or outdoorsmen with a penchant for individualism and very little patience for group process. Their major concern was [...]

Pollyanna-ish? Uh-uh.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Eleanor Hodgman Porter created a character named Pollyanna, an orphan girl known for her undeterred optimism and her amazing ability to cheer others up. Over the years, those with a cynical bent–or, as they would put it, a realistic view of the world–have appropriated "Pollyanna" as a scornful [...]