Resilient Wednesday Weekly Memo

One of the questions I often hear about my resilience work is whether I really believe that “having a positive attitude is all it takes to overcome life’s difficulties?” Uh, no…I don’t… However having the right attitude is an important factor in how we recover and grow from adversity. Even more specifically, the power of […]

Inoculating yourself against stress is less painful than getting a shot in the arm and works just as effectively. Vaccinations are intended to challenge the body by injecting a small amount of the disease your are trying to avoid into your body and having the body respond to it by building antibodies to those viruses.

On our trip to Sweden this past month, we came across the concept of Fika, which is considered something of a social institution in that Scandinavian country. Americans might think of it as a coffee break but it is much more to the Swedes. In a country that is considered to have a low stress

While on holiday in Stockholm, we visited the Nobel Museum just off the main street in the Old District of town. It is a small museum filled with stories and artifacts from the greatest minds of the past 111 years. In one room ran a constant stream of videos from different Nobel winners describing their

We’re on our summer holiday that includes a weeklong cruise along the Norwegian Fjords. Our first day, which was a “sea day” meant that we would be going from port to port without any stops and the only activities to engage in were those on the ship. For me, that meant a day of ease.

I like to say that when we are resilient, we move through life with more grace and ease. One of the tools that help us achieve that quality is ritual and we use them to help us with everything from our morning habits to our mourning customs. My friend Lynn retired from the University and

A friend of mine recently left her sales position with a Fortune 500 company after spending 15 years with them. When I asked her why she left, she told me it was all the stress she was under. I inquired further whether it was the challenge of dealing with customers, the difficulties of closing deals,

On my flight home from 3 days with my coach Alan Weiss in beautiful Newport RI, I wound up sitting next to a woman who was a professor of nursing and an expert in health care policy. She shared with me that her husband had taken a new position in Pittsburgh and they would be

Early in my corporate career, I would, on occasion, keep my thoughts to myself even when I believed my ideas would help advance the discussion and that my contributions would make a difference. I was fearful that my ideas would be rejected or that my comments would be seen as irrelevant or even stupid. Fortunately,

I noticed my wife talking with her accountability partner, Christine the other morning. Sheila and Christine speak most mornings, checking in with each other about their accomplishments from yesterday and their objectives for today. For some reason, I stopped and listened a bit more than I usually do that morning. I noticed that not only