Blog Archives

Be Thankful

11/26/2014

Be Thankful
By Author Unknown

Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire.
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?
Be thankful when you don't know something,
for it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.
Be thankful for your limitations,
because they give you opportunities for improvement.
Be thankful for each new challenge,
because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes.
They will teach you valuable lessons.
Be thankful when you're tired and weary,
because it means you've made a difference.

It's easy to be thankful for the good things.
A life of rich fulfillment comes to those who
are also thankful for the setbacks.
Gratitude can turn a negative into a positive.
Find a way to be thankful for your troubles,
and they can become your blessings.

Stop Mowing Your Child's Path

11/25/2014

We read a book for book club this month with a moral, parental dilemma and it steered our topic toward how parents are raising their children today. I posted the silly picture a while back showing the 1960's parents scolding their child when he brings home a bad grade and the 2010's parents scolding the teacher for the same act. Sadly this is more accurate than we want to admit.

When did this change? When did parents become "curlers?" According to Wikipedia "Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice towards a target area which is segmented into four concentric circles. The curler can induce a curved path by causing the stone to slowly turn as it slides, and the path of the rock may be further influenced by two sweepers with brooms who accompany it as it slides down the sheet, using the brooms to alter the state of the ice in front of the stone. A great deal of strategy and teamwork go into choosing the ideal path and placement of a stone for each situation, and the skills of the curlers determine how close to the desired result the stone will achieve."

"Danish psychologist Bent Hougaard coined the term 'Curling Parent' to refer to those parents who insist on sweeping everything that may get in the way of their child, their own polished stone. Such parents are excessive hoverers, continually making sure that nothing is interfering with or negatively affecting their child. They are always sweeping. Another term that even the colleges are referring to with increased frequency are 'Lawnmower Parents.' Like the Curlers, the Lawnmower Parents look to smooth down and mow over all obstacles that could be in the young person’s path. Such parents may attempt to call the college professors about their child receiving an unsatisfactory grade."--Dr. Richard Selznick

Well wouldn't it be nice to have obstacles in our path of achievement, progress, and fulfillment removed. Or would it? What foundation would you have as an adult if you never dealt with negative situations? How would you interact with peers, co-workers, and significant others if you never had to suffer distractions, consequences, or unpleasant situations?

Why on earth would we want our children to go out into the world unprepared? This is what these curling and lawnmowing parents are doing. They are taking over their children's lives, their freedom, their accountability, and their right to make choices and learn from them, whether good or bad. And this is not a good thing, in fact it is a very, very bad thing.

The children of these type of parents are put under an enormous amount of pressure to be "perfect" in every aspect of their lives--social, sports, and academic. If they don't live up to the perfection they often become depressed, have anxiety, or worse commit suicide.

Don't smooth down the "rocky" path for your children. That path is there to give them strength, courage, and determination. Let them climb over and go around the "bumps" in their road, they will thank you later.

When Did Service Reviews Have to be Perfect?

11/21/2014

I am upset over the shooting at FSU, especially since it is where I went to college, but I decided I didn't want to write about another shooting.

Instead, I was thinking the other day, when asked to complete a customer service review, why 10 out of 10 is practically required for a survey now. When did this change?

I remember when you filled out a rating survey, whether at a restaurant, car dealer, or bank and you were supposed to be honest because what you said or how you rated the service you received was important in order to fix issues or praise staff. Now it seems, unless you put 10 out or 10, which is a perfect score, those you are scoring get in trouble or worse lose their jobs. Who came up with this type of rating? There is no such thing as a perfect score in everything, so where you might feel the service received was 10/10 in some area, maybe it was 8/10 in another, which is still an excellent rating.

According to the uspolitics.com poll, the overall presidential job approval ratings were never 10/10.

End-of-Presidency Job Approval Ratings

President                           Rating (%)

Bill Clinton
(2 terms, D, 2001)                 66

Ronald Reagan
(2 terms, R, 1989)                  63

John F. Kennedy
(partial term, D, 1963)            63

Dwight Eisenhower
(2 terms, R, 1961)                   59

George H. Bush
(1 term, R, 1993)                     56

Gerald Ford
(partial term, R, 1977)              53

Lyndon Johnson
(1+ terms, D, 1969)                  49

George W. Bush
(2 terms, R, 2009)                    34

Richard Nixon
(partial term, R, 1974)              24

And this is only showing presidents since 1961. Bill Clinton had the highest with 6/10 and that is amazing considering all the scandal during his presidency. Of course this is only one type of rating, each one has slightly different scores.

So if an approval rating for a president of 6/10 is historically the highest ever, why isn't 6/10 or 7/10 good enough for service ratings?

We have become a society of marketing not merit. It is no longer good enough to do your best and make it in your career or school based on merit alone. In order to get the 10/10 you must market yourself and if you do that well you may not have to have any merit. Look at people like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians. Have they ever really done anything noteworthy in society to earn their fortune and notoriety? No. But for some reason they have risen to the top of fame and fortune because they have turned the art of marketing and "doing nothing" into getting 10/10.

When a person feels that they must put 10/10 on a review and the employees and employer feel that only 10/10 is worthwhile than the 10/10 suddenly has no meaning. I remember when I did my teaching practice in the U.K., the teacher in-charge of my training would often comment about lessons I did and say they were brilliant. Being from the USA the word brilliant is only used when something is exemplary. I was so thrilled when I heard this word because I thought, "Wow, I have hit this lesson out of the park." What I soon learned after being there a while was that the British use the word brilliant all the time and therefore it doesn't have the same impact to them as it did to me.

What we are teaching our children by saying that a 4.0 grade point average isn't good enough or only 10/10 is worthwhile is that ratings are no longer real and don't matter. The only thing that does matter is how well you promote yourself in the media or on youtube. We are teaching our children that you don't need merit anymore, but instead you must be hypercritical, expect perfection, and be perfect. The problem? Nothing is or can be perfect and merit is actually important.

Don't expect 10/10 and be satisfied with satisfactory.

November 18th, 2014

11/18/2014

Is Your Body Sending You a Message?

11/14/2014

I often wonder as I encounter more aches and pains throughout the day . . . Is my body trying to tell me something? There is not as much helpful information out there on messages from your body as I expected there to be, but the following information I found was very interesting.

Michael J. Lincoln, PhD wrote in a book called Messages From the Body, Their Psychological Meaning, that "Illnesses and disorders are linked to beliefs and changes of beliefs about oneself, about the nature of one's relationships with others, about one's position in the social world, and about where one stands in relation to the Universe. And these, in turn, are determined by one's life experiences, by one's interventions in the world, and by one's soul history. This reference book will bring awareness from the physical into the mental!" Sounds fascinating doesn't it? The reviews are outstanding and it may be worth looking into if you can get past the price and the size.

Another person who writes about the body is Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom. Dr. Northrup shares "Your body's message to you will be in a language that best breaks through your particular barriers and speaks most specifically to the issues you need to change in your life." This message may be in the form of migraines, abdominal pain, PMS, or ongoing infections and illnesses. Take head and listen to what your body is saying. Dr. Northrup has also written Mother-Daughter Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause, all of which contain practical and useful information.

I found a great article by Kate Bartolotta on a site called "The Good Men Project." It gives simple and effective advice on listening to our bodies.

We spend so much time in our heads, we often ignore the important things our body is trying to tell us. Here are a few of the basics.

Follow the link below to read her article
—

- See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/health/the-good-life-what-your-body-is-trying-to-tell-you/#sthash.cziUbXWa.dpuf

As I was finishing writing todays blog my daughter texted me from college and told me how sick she is today. I found it synchronistic that I am writing about listening to your body and I believe hers is trying to tell her to slow down, get rest, and probably eat healthier. Get better quickly sweetie!

Veterans Day

11/11/2014

When we stand up for our rights as a nation or a people it is never a wasted effort.

Thank you to our troops, both past and present, who stand up for us as a nation.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."--Dante Alighieri

Implanting a Memory-Science or Science-Fiction?

11/7/2014

There was an amazing article by Irvin Serrano in my Smithsonian magazine this month. Two scientists, Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu, identified and manipulated brain cells to create a new "memory" of an event that never happened and implanted this memory into the brain of a mouse. The potential this scientific discovery provides is vast.

"At a time when the treatments for many serious mental illnesses are lacking, the potential clinical applications of memory modification are enticing. 'This is kind of crazy,' says Josselyn, whose work centers on Alzheimer’s disease and other memory-related disorders, 'but maybe somebody with Alzheimer’s... maybe we can figure out a treatment to just go in and do what these guys did in their papers, and sort of activate these cells artificially, boost the activation and have the memories recalled better.'In another theoretical application, PTSD might be eased by repeatedly reactivating a bad memory to show that the memory itself is not harmful, or by erasing the traumatic components of a specific bad memory, or by replacing it with a positive one. Building on Ramirez and Liu’s work, others in the Tonegawa lab did exactly that in male mice earlier this year, converting a negative memory of a foot shock into a positive memory of an encounter with a female mouse.

Ramirez, who is finishing his PhD at MIT, and Liu, who is headed to Northwestern University to start his own lab, have recently taken on another big memory question: Can we intervene in a depressed state in an animal by reactivating positive memories? The answer appears to be yes. They are studying mouse models of anhedonia, or loss of interest in pleasure, a symptom of depression. Experimental mice subjected to stress until they no longer seek pleasure (such as a sip of sugar water) recover their interest when engrams for pleasant experiences are reactivated. The success rate so far is 80 percent.

Ramirez believes that memory surgery is inevitable, though there are a great many questions to address. How could it be done safely? Noninvasively? Ethically? How would patients be selected? As painful as heartbreak usually is, most of us also recognize that it’s a natural, even healthy, part of life. A high-school boy who just broke up with his girlfriend might not be a good candidate for memory surgery. But people with dementia or severe depression—would it be inhumane not to ease their suffering if an effective, safe memory intervention were possible?"

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-two-scientists-who-implanted-false-memory-mouse-180953045/?all

Scientific intervention into medical issues of any kind are becoming more and more likely. I think the future will certainly be an interesting one.

November 06th, 2014

11/6/2014

Does Death Come in Three's?

11/5/2014

A dear friend of mine died about three weeks ago and on Sunday another friend died. It made me wonder, does death come in three's?

This is of course a superstition. According to an article on philly.com by Jenice M. Armstrong "Folklorists say the belief that good or bad things come in threes is an ancient superstition that remains a strong modern belief.

'All cultures have ritual numbers but they don't have the same ritual numbers,' explained Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of Southern California at Berkley.

He said Americans have a propensity to see things in threes. For Native Americans, it's four, and for the Chinese, it's five.

'It is very deep in our culture in terms of religion - the father, son and holy ghost,' said Dundes, whose book Interpreting Folklore has a chapter on the significance of the number three in American culture.

'It's in our names. We have three names . . . We say, It's as easy as one, two, three,' he said. 'You just take it for granted that . . . all this stuff is somehow in threes.'

Then, there are all the three-oriented phrases like 'the third time's a charm, going down for the third time, and Tic tac toe, three in a row.'

Plus, there are numerous three-worded phrases: 'win, lose or draw; we shall overcome; fat, dumb and happy, and snap, crackle and pop.'

The importance of the number three comes from many ancient sources.

But Dundes, who describes himself as a Freudian, said he believes it's sort of a subliminal symbol of male genitalia.

'It's like putting a masculine stamp on things,' he said.

Folklorist Claudia de Lys writes that it springs from the basic observation about the mystery of birth.

'If lucky, the contact of two persons brought forth life, so that three meant life or action in everything,' de Lys writes in a Treasury of American Superstitions.

She believes the concept that three bad things happen together is based on the psychological need to believe that a bad cycle will end."

The psychological need to believe bad things will end is in all of us, but how far are we willing to go to believe it?

Another theory on the superstition of three is called "three on a match" and it comes from soldiers during the time from the Peloponnesian War to World War I. "The superstition goes that if three soldiers lit their cigarettes from the same match, one of the three would be killed or that the man who was third on the match would be shot. Since then it has been considered bad luck for three people to share a light from the same match.

The belief was that when the first soldier lit his cigarette, the enemy would see the light; when the second soldier lit his cigarette from the same match, the enemy would take aim and note if the soldier was friendly or foe; when the third soldier lit his cigarette from the same match, the enemy would fire. Another explanation for this was that the first to light the match gave an enemy marksman the range to the target, the second gave the windage on the target, and the third one was shot using this information."--Wikipedia

This second story makes more sense to me because it is logical and I am a logical person. However, the older I get, the more I experience, the more spirituality and synchronicity I witness, it makes me wonder if everything doesn't have to be so logical.

The night my friend died, I had a dream that someone I knew had died. I remember feeling very sad in the dream for this tragedy. I woke up and told my husband about my dream. In the dream I thought the person's name that had died was Ross, which is a young man that my daughter dated the latter part of high school. After talking to my husband I went to the gym to work out with my friend. When I arrived I noticed his truck was not in the parking lot. I thought this was odd. When I entered the gym he was nowhere to be found which was very unusual because he was extremely punctual. I texted him with no reply. I left the gym feeling uncomfortable and worried. The next day he was found dead in his home. His name was Russ.

Life is short. Be grateful for each moment.

Book

11/4/2014

I got my first look at possible book covers today for Cutting the Soul. Very excited!