Daily Gratitude: I recommend a book by David Brooks (“How To Know a Person”). It is excellent and is a great way to start learning to harmonize with others. This is something sorely needed at this time of our lives. It seems there is total disharmony abd whether that’s your thing or not, it a danger to the human race. We are a tribal people. Disharmony is not conducive to survival for our species. I think that we use labels to depersonalize people. It’s “easier” to call someone a name than it is to provide evidence to support your position. How do you argue a label such as “you’re a jerk”? How do you refute “you’re an a*hoe”? Or even more – how do you argue “you don’t know what you’re talking about?” without being given specifics.? It’s too bad we can’t just discuss facts without getting so emotional. But the mere nature of some of these discussions means there’s a winner or a loser and no one wants to he the loser. What steps can you take to foster harmony in your family, your work or in any gathering you’re involved with ?

Daily Gratitude: You can spend days, weeks and even years wishing things were “different”. But as you’re doing that, you are cultivating negative vibrations. Huh? Wishing things were different means you’re not happy with the way they were. Instead we should just look at how things are as building blocks. Ignore the past for awhile and decide what you want to be and how you want your life to be. Then comes the most important task – start visualizing exactly what you wish to become and how you want things to be. Get it down to the smallest details. Keep doing the visualization. You hear of olympic athletes using visualization all their lives. They actually see themselves doing the exact moves and skills they need to do with each activity. You should be doing that also. Every day. Many times a day. It really does work

Daily Gratitude: Isn’t this so true? When something goes well, we spend little to no time assessing the small details. You can see this in race reports and debriefings. When things don’t go as well as planned or even as we thought it should, we pay much more time trying to analyze why. That magic word, “why”. And this is a good thing. Analysis requires looking at everything that happened because you know that “a” affected “b” and so on down the line. I think that’s a problem with all that’s going on in the world today. People don’t seem to consider the second and third order effects of massive, sweeping changes. That’s why, even though we often make fun of nerds, the data collectors and statistic geeks are the MVPs when an organization wants to make change. And since you are part of the human race organization and head your own department (if you understand internal family systems), you have to know how changing one “part” in your IFS will impact another “part” or group of parts. Even if you’re not into IFS, your organization can be your family, your school, your neighborhood, etc. instead of getting upset maybe we can stop for 90 seconds to let those stress chemicals dissipate and then start seeing if you can figure out what made you upset and what you can do to change it- or change your response. Here’s where “what if” is helpful. Once again think about your home. If something in your foundation wasn’t attended to properly, how secure is it? A few missing shingles on your roof? So what? Well, you know what. Think of that next time you’re too upset or too busy to do a thorough analysis of something.