Blog

Video Summary:

I've been seeing a pattern in the clients, coworkers, and people I bump into of seeking things from people, communities, and organizations that are not able to provide them. The things being sought include being appreciated, loved, understood, accepted, or validated.

The...

Video Summary:

I want to contrast two ways of interacting with people. The first is It's looking outside of selves for validation, acceptance, and fitting into a group. Most of us were conditioned with this tendency.

This can be a challenging issue to look at in ourselves. It's getting over...

Video Summary:

I'm going to start with a story that actually happened this past week. I work at a hospital in Medford, Oregon and it is going through some serious financial challenges.

We got a new CEO in, and he is saying everything's on the table for cuts and there have been layoffs....

Video Summary:

A concept that I call contracts is very useful to understand some of the dynamics that happen in relationships. Contracts are agreements that we create with someone else in a relationship. This could be any type of close relationship including romantic, parent, child, sibling,...

Video Summary:

One of my favorite teachings is that people will always show you who they are. It's become my truth as I've noticed it over the years. People show us who they are through their actions. Even if they're being deceptive or manipulative, they’ll still show us who they are...

Video Summary:

What are your standards of interaction? One of my standards of interaction is treating other people with respect. I've done a lot of work on myself to truly respect myself and other people. I have a standard that we respect each other in the interactions that I am in.

The...

Video Summary:

I want to contrast true compassion with what I call misguided compassion. Misguided compassion has been called other things including codependency, caretaking, and enabling. But I'm going to use the term misguided compassion because it's specific and contrasts nicely with true...

Video Summary:

When people interact with you, they offer you their gift. Granted sometimes it may not feel like a gift. You could call it their offering if you prefer. It's what they offer you at that moment. My premise for this video is the gift or offering that people are offering is the...

Video Summary:

There's a tendency in relationships, especially close relationships, for us to insist people be how we need them to be rather than how they are. We all have stories, scripts, and fantasies about how various relationships should be.

We have stories about how our significant...

Video Summary:

We've been trained and educated to prepare, study for tests, and know the right answer. The rather large assumption of this right-answer approach is that there is an objectively right answer for everything. For some things such as math, grammar, or some sciences, there clearly...

Video Summary:

One of the things I prescribe to my clients in sharing circles, sessions, and retreats is a practice I call matching investment. The idea is to naturally interact with someone, notice the level of energy and investment that comes back from them, and then match it.

By...

Video Summary:

I want to talk about a concept that I called attachment to the outcome. Here I'm using attachment similarly to how Buddhism uses it. The Buddha was big on non-attachment and taught that attachment creates suffering and bondage.

Accordingly, the intention of this...