Yesterday I talked about the three levels of thinking and how they effect life. I promised to talk about this woman and the parenting style of shame and fear. Then the conversation had some great questions about how exactly does it look to discipline with an eye toward teaching moral reasoning versus just punishment. I’d…
Someone once wrote that feelings cannot be disputed because they are experiences. Whereas beliefs can be disputed because they are how we interpret our experiences. I completely agree with this sentiment. I believe its very important to understand the distinction before we try to understand life, we must first seek to understand how we make…
“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to…
So often we allow our thoughts to run unexamined through our brain. Often those thoughts lead to negative behaviors. Below is a list of 8 limited thinking patterns that I will often explore with clients. They are taken from the book Thoughts & Feelings by Matthew McKay, Martha Davis and Patrick Fanning. It is a…
One of the things that I am constantly pondering is my inner dialogue and the inner dialogue of those around me. Depending on who you read, it is estimated that we have somewhere near 60,000 thoughts a day. Some suggests that almost 80% of those are negative. If that’s true, that means we have almost…
There’s a guy. I sort of knew him in college. A few months ago (much to my surprise) he friended me on Facebook. Then came Christmas. We disagreed on a certain expression of our faith. He became very upset. He and a few friends let me know that my eternal destination was somewhere other than…
Yesterday I wrote about the fact that we are telling a story with our life. We are producing a movie in real time. Sometimes that story is not so good. Sometimes we tell a bad story. We get caught in things that do not matter or plot lines that are toxic, corrosive and destructive. In…
Tonight I'll be talking to a group of men about being a man. There are so many things I could talk about. There are some scary statistics out there about us guys. But I don't want this to be a "Hey, guys suck and there's nothing we can do about it" type of night. I…
One of the truths of being a parent, is that you get to see a lot of movies you would not normally see. Most of the time I am ambivalent to this as the win for me is the time spent with my family. Then of course there is the first four minutes of Up….
In August of 2011 I went to a funeral of a dear lady. She was a sweet Italian lady who reminded me of my own mother. She would do things like my mom did and she would wear these house gowns that both my mom and my grandma wore. This is amusing to me because…
