Mentally Challenged People Quotes

I'm staying," Henry said, annoyed. "Why?" "Because, if I leave, it would be like abandoning two mentally challenged people in a nuclear waste dump.

Don't live the same day over and over again and call that a life. Life is about evolving mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.

Don Quixote - the famous literary madman - fought windmills. People think he saw giants when he looked at them, but those of us who've been there know the truth. He saw windmills, just like everyone else - but he believed they were giants. The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.

I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.

There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's "I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29.

Fabulous and fucked up. Absolutely right. That’s what we all are. It’s called being human. Let’s celebrate that, not fear it. And let’s never, ever feel ashamed when the challenges of life become too overwhelming and the fucked-up part gets into the driving seat. That is called being normal.

Carol Dweck, a prominent Stanford psychologist, has found that people who believe their intelligence is fixed and unchanging have a very difficult time learning. The moment these people experience any form of difficulty or negative feedback, they mentally break and give up. Conversely, people who believe their intelligence is fluid and malleable are far more likely to grow and change. They are clay that can be transformed through experience, especially challenging and new experiences.

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

There were many pioneers who came before you that also felt a sense of hopelessness. They were judged because they were women. At times they felt helpless but that didn’t stop them from making their mark as they made changes in the world which people thought were impossible. They made themselves into believers because of their accomplishments. These pioneers did not have the technology and resources that we have today. However, they used what they were given, which was their God-given talent. “We will be heard, seen, and are untouchable.” The pioneer’s voices were rising louder, stronger, and their voices were heard as they made the impossible, possible. Their mentality was, “We will not be ignored. We are human and we should be created equally, just like men.” As they rose to the challenges they endured, their great strength of determination spoke without the need for words.

We held on to great memories. This sustains us in every moment.

Mentally tough people achieve it by purposefully investigating their psyches and developing compensatory strategies that help them deal with adversity.

Being crazy doesn't mean being mentally challenged. Maybe it just means being you...amplified a 100 times over.

Mentally challenged people were never meant to have guns.

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.

When a person internalizes a mental schema so thoroughly, and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such a violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, inter-gender, etc. expressions of belief – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable, empirical evidence that challenges the veracity of those beliefs.

People who are actually "cancelled" don't get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets... . The term "cancel culture" comes from entitlement—as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience, & one is a victim if people choose to tune them out. Odds are you're not actually cancelled, you're just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked. ― Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Impostorism causes us to overthink and second-guess. It makes us fixate on how we think others are judging us (in these fixations, we’re usually wrong), then fixate some more on how those judgments might poison our interactions. We’re scattered—worrying that we underprepared, obsessing about what we should be doing, mentally reviewing what we said five seconds earlier, fretting about what people think of us and what that will mean for us tomorrow.

No season lasts forever because all of life is a cycle of planting, reaping, resting, and renewal. Winter is not infinite: even if you’re having challenges today, you can never give up on the coming of spring. For some people, winter means hibernation; for others, it means bobsledding and downhill skiing! You can always just wait out the season, but why not make it into a time to remember?

What prompts alarm in me is how you and your government want to ruin not only the potential of this of this country, but also the path of those who are going to transition into more advanced beings in search of immortality and omnipotence, and maybe even participate in a great singularity. These advances are going to pass, one way or another. And your current second-rate moral system—your weak, pretend-God-will-take-care-of-us bullshit—is a waste for our species' possibilities. You people want to pretend that democracy, religious inspiration, and unbridled consumerism are going to last forever and carry us all to bliss; that the American Dream is right around the next corner for everyone. you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on lazy welfare recipients, on mentally challenged people, on uneducated repeat criminals, on obese second-rate citizens bankrupting our medical system, on murderous war machines fighting for oil and your oligarchy's pet projects in far off places. All so you maintain your puny forms of power and sleep better at night.

Rea­sons Why I Loved Be­ing With Jen I love what a good friend you are. You’re re­ally en­gaged with the lives of the peo­ple you love. You or­ga­nize lovely ex­pe­ri­ences for them. You make an ef­fort with them, you’re pa­tient with them, even when they’re side­tracked by their chil­dren and can’t pri­or­i­tize you in the way you pri­or­i­tize them. You’ve got a gen­er­ous heart and it ex­tends to peo­ple you’ve never even met, whereas I think that ev­ery­one is out to get me. I used to say you were naive, but re­ally I was jeal­ous that you al­ways thought the best of peo­ple. You are a bit too anx­ious about be­ing seen to be a good per­son and you def­i­nitely go a bit over­board with your left-wing pol­i­tics to prove a point to ev­ery­one. But I know you re­ally do care. I know you’d sign pe­ti­tions and help peo­ple in need and vol­un­teer at the home­less shel­ter at Christ­mas even if no one knew about it. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of us. I love how quickly you read books and how ab­sorbed you get in a good story. I love watch­ing you lie on the sofa read­ing one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other gal­axy. I love that you’re al­ways try­ing to im­prove your­self. Whether it’s running marathons or set­ting your­self chal­lenges on an app to learn French or the fact you go to ther­apy ev­ery week. You work hard to be­come a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self. I think I prob­a­bly didn’t make my ad­mi­ra­tion for this known and in­stead it came off as ir­ri­ta­tion, which I don’t re­ally feel at all. I love how ded­i­cated you are to your fam­ily, even when they’re an­noy­ing you. Your loy­alty to them wound me up some­times, but it’s only be­cause I wish I came from a big fam­ily. I love that you al­ways know what to say in con­ver­sa­tion. You ask the right ques­tions and you know ex­actly when to talk and when to lis­ten. Ev­ery­one loves talk­ing to you be­cause you make ev­ery­one feel im­por­tant. I love your style. I know you think I prob­a­bly never no­ticed what you were wear­ing or how you did your hair, but I loved see­ing how you get ready, sit­ting in front of the full-length mir­ror in our bed­room while you did your make-up, even though there was a mir­ror on the dress­ing ta­ble. I love that you’re mad enough to swim in the English sea in No­vem­ber and that you’d pick up spi­ders in the bath with your bare hands. You’re brave in a way that I’m not. I love how free you are. You’re a very free per­son, and I never gave you the sat­is­fac­tion of say­ing it, which I should have done. No one knows it about you be­cause of your bor­ing, high-pres­sure job and your stuffy up­bring­ing, but I know what an ad­ven­turer you are un­der­neath all that. I love that you got drunk at Jack­son’s chris­ten­ing and you al­ways wanted to have one more drink at the pub and you never com­plained about get­ting up early to go to work with a hang­over. Other than Avi, you are the per­son I’ve had the most fun with in my life. And even though I gave you a hard time for al­ways try­ing to for al­ways try­ing to im­press your dad, I ac­tu­ally found it very adorable be­cause it made me see the child in you and the teenager in you, and if I could time-travel to any­where in his­tory, I swear, Jen, the only place I’d want to go is to the house where you grew up and hug you and tell you how beau­ti­ful and clever and funny you are. That you are spec­tac­u­lar even with­out all your sports trophies and mu­sic cer­tifi­cates and in­cred­i­ble grades and Ox­ford ac­cep­tance. I’m sorry that I loved you so much more than I liked my­self, that must have been a lot to carry. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you the way you took care of me. And I’m sorry I didn’t take care of my­self, ei­ther. I need to work on it. I’m pleased that our break-up taught me that. I’m sorry I went so mental. I love you. I always will. I'm glad we met.

, I have experienced firsthand how easy it is for a ten year old to obtain marijuana for next to nothing, this trend seems to have been taken to a new dimension with the abuse of pharmaceutical products especially prescription medicines in schools and communities, increasing the number of mentally and emotionally challenged men and women on our streets and diverting young people from classrooms and lecture halls to prisons and drug rehabilitation centers.

When you hold a belief strongly, it is difficult to believe something that is so contrary to it, even if the evidence is undeniable and staring you in the face. When you start opening your eyes to ways the CN has controlled, manipulated, belittled, and demeaned you for years, this is a huge reality paradigm shift. You will fight hard against the evidence no matter how obvious it is. This stirs up great insecurity, confusion, and anxiety in the body. What makes it even harder is that people around you see the CN in a positive light. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most challenging components of healing and recovery. It takes enormous mental strength to look past strong beliefs you have held and be open to looking honestly at the reality that is presenting itself.

To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.

A mental illness diagnosis does not automatically sentence you to a bleak and painful life, devoid of pleasure or joy or accomplishment. I also wanted to dispel the myths held by many mental-health professionals themselves—that people with a significant thought disorder cannot live independently, cannot work at challenging jobs, cannot have true friendships, cannot be in meaningful, sexually satisfying love relationships, cannot lead lives of intellectual, spiritual, or emotional richness.

Mentally tough people know when to disentangle themselves and move on.

Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don't let these feelings stop them.

People fall victim to labeling every day — mentally-challenged people, homosexuals, people of all ethnic groups, etc. You name it; we’ve slapped a heartless, ignorant label on it.

Rise up and adopt an eagle mentality. Challenge yourself to leave environments where people have accepted mediocrity. Surround yourself with people who are going places.

In former days, people frustrated in their will to meaning would probably have turned to a pastor, priest, or rabbi. Today, they crowd clinics and offices. The psychiatrist, then, frequently finds himself in an embarrassing situation, for he now is confronted with human problems rather than with specific clinical symptoms. Man’s search for a meaning is not pathological, but rather the surest sign of being truly human. Even if this search is frustrated, it cannot be considered a sign of disease. It is spiritual distress, not mental disease.

This is what happens to the brain of those living with mental illnesses (more accurately, "brain illnesses"). The brain does not function as it should; life is out of control. The brain alters our bodies; thoughts are distorted, emotions are unregulated, and behaviors we once thought could never occur happen. One of the most challenging, exhausting, and painful phenomena we do as humans is to live and survive with these changes in our minds. The toll it takes on an individual's body and the people in their lives is, tragically, often too much to bear. -Dr. Daniel J. Reidenberg

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

Research and practice are clear. Stress inoculation doesn’t work unless you have acquired the skills to navigate the environment you will encounter. As sports psychologist Brian Zuleger told me, “Telling people to relax doesn’t work unless you’ve taught people how to actually relax. The same goes for mental strength. The historical way to develop toughness was to do something physically challenging, and you’d have a fifty-fifty shot if they thrived. You have to teach the skill before it can be applied.” Throwing people in the deep end doesn’t work unless they’ve been taught the basics of how to swim.

The Queen Anne Hospital was housed in a decaying red-brick building, and the geriatric ward could be a dark and challenging place. Watching people unravel both mentally and physically took its toll on the senses.

To most people, the sheer wall of El Capitan in Yosemite valley is just a huge chunk of featureless rock. But to the climber it is an arena offering an endlessly complex symphony of mental and physical challenges.

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

Climbing through a challenging section of rock can resemble conversation. In conversation many people stop listening to what’s being said. Their attention becomes focused on why they agree or disagree with some early remark. They plan ahead to what they’ll say next, even though their remark will probably be out of context at that time. They end up channeling their energy into defending their old set of beliefs instead of being open to the possibility of learning something new from the speaker.

His prescription to experience a deep sense of meaning, then, was remarkably pragmatic. He had three recommendations: 1. Have a project to work on, some reason to get out of bed in the morning and preferably something that serves other people. 2. Have a redemptive perspective on life’s challenges. That is, when something difficult happens, recognize the ways that difficulty also serves you. 3. Share your life with a person or people who love you unconditionally. Frankl called this treatment logotherapy, or a therapy of meaning. And surprisingly, it worked. He was put in charge of the mental-health division of the Viennese hospital system because they had lost far too many patients to suicide. When Frankl came aboard, he had more than thirty thousand suicidal patients under his care. The challenge was phenomenal. Frankl created community groups for the patients and taught counselors to identify projects the patients could contribute to, serious work the world needed that would give them a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Frankl also had the patients circle the difficult experiences they’d had and while allowing them to grieve, also asked them to list benefits that had come from their pain. The result of the program was transformational. Not one patient committed suicide on Frankl’s watch.

One of the challenges adult children of narcissistic mother’s face is the myth that every mother is giving, nurturing, and gracious. Worldwide, this is a false notion and taboo topic. For many adult children, they are scolded by our society who chides, “But it’s your MOTHER!” Despite the fact that we’ve spent a lifetime suffering chronic mental abuse, rejection, criticisms, and scapegoating by our mothers, most people don’t believe us, don’t understand us, nor have they personally experienced narcissistic abuse by their mothers.

self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness! If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma.

This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge tradition, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.

Soon you shall be landing In the battleground, ensure you have the right weapons to fight the enemy; ensure you know your enemy and what he is capable of; take them unprepared to gain the victory and stand with your head held high; show it to the world the cause you have been fighting for, deception is the key, challenge your enemy when it is least expected; break them mentally before breaking them physically. You are a soldier; your enemy is a soldier and you are facing the best, both sides have a lot of similarities only variation lies in the cause. Cause is driver for the battle; cause is binding comrades together and even if the victory is gained the cause stays undefeated. You stand defeated for your strategy, tactics and leaders but never for the cause, it’s still alive, it shall always be alive with the men who have sacrificed their lives, with the men who are still alive. They stand defeated with the physical strength but not for the cause they have believed in and you can never take it away from them. Fight for a cause and you shall stay invincible. A war story is always biased towards one side and it’s hard to narrate a true war story. We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in. If we know the cause both sides are standing for, it will become difficult to take sides. Always respect your enemy, respect for the fact they are standing neck to neck with you, respect them for the courage they have shown to defend the other side, their land, respect them for whatever you have earned the respect for from your men, from your country and from your people. Powerful strategies, tactics, weapons, leaders are allies to the war, they support but never claims victory all my themselves Greatest wars won always had the greater cause. Rebel without a cause is never a rebel just an aimless person whose fate lies in the defeat.

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesn't pay much attention to 'luck'. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with 'luck'; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you can't really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen. The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being works better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls 'contingency') that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.

Another New Year's dawned, new opportunities and difficulties are sneaking around you. To take hold of good and let go bad, face the new challenges and open the new chances to anew your life again. Everyday train your brain to solve all difficulties and transform them into opportunities, get rich mentally, physically and financially. Love your family, friends, colleagues and all folks surrounded by you. Take care of your health, children, wealth and travel new exotic places, people and enjoy good food. Life is very short, fully enjoy it. Embrace new ideas, knowledge and every opportunity. And always surround yourself with good people and avoid toxic and negative people to secure your peace of mind and dignity. I wholeheartedly and boldly set my plan as is the best year of my life for financial freedom, good health, richness, love, care and abundance. I do solemnly yearn for the folks around the world a thoroughly Peaceful, Happy and Beautiful New Year free from hunger, poverty, disease, inequality, war and conflict.

Most people’s parents did their absolute best, whether that “best” was an A-minus or a D-plus. It’s the rare parent who, however limited, deep down doesn’t want his or her child to have a good life. That doesn’t mean people can’t have feelings about their parents’ limitations (or mental-health challenges). They just need to figure out what to do with them.

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?

THE WISDOM OF SURRENDER It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will experience, so to surrender is the most important thing you can do to bring about positive change. Any action you take is secondary. No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness. To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. SURRENDER IS THE SIMPLE but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say “no” to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things “go wrong,” which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things “go wrong” quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind. Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now. For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say: “Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.” Resignation is not surrender. YOU DON'T NEED TO ACCEPT AN UNDESIRABLE OR UNPLEASANT LIFE SITUATION. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with it. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the “isness” of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the situation. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now

To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.

In general, INTJs are remarkably competent people mentally who have the potential to be high achievers. If they meet challenges in the classroom it is because they are often bored, or because they reject the detail, structure and busywork that typically accompanies the traditional education system. They may simply check out of the classroom discussions and homework because they are confident they can perform well on the exam when the time comes.

We have been seduced by sound bites. It is difficult to imagine how we are going to have an intelligent conversation around complex theopolitical issues as long as the average news consumer in America is willing to be sound-bite driven. We face a sorry state of affairs in our culture when few people seem willing to take the time for nuanced discussion on the complicated challenges we face. Politicians of all parties have been willing to foster this sound-bite mentality because it has worked for them. Most Americans work hard and are faced with too little time and too many distractions to study the issues well enough to make an informed judgment on them. As long as news consumers are willing to be manipulated by sound bites and are unwilling to commit the time to understand the complexities, we will continue to see artificial and simplistic distinctions drive too much of our conversation, resulting in divisions and disagreements that rarely get at the substantive issues.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world! If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future. If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more? Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship. If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.

There is compelling evidence that racism kills people. There is compelling evidence that living with the stress of poverty leads to a number of mental health challenges. There is compelling evidence that weight-based discrimination leads to heightened levels of stress and anxiety that suppress the function of major organs. And, there is evidence that fatphobia leads to shortened life expectancy.3 But racism, poverty, and weight-based bigotry are all social problems. It is through victim-blaming narratives that we cast these social issues as individual ones that can be solved through bootstrapping and consumerism.

No matter what you are attempting to achieve, it will not happen without sacrifice, hard work, a positive environment, a positive mental attitude, passion, determination, meditation, introspection, prayer and vision. Never use to word try, just do what you need to do to get to the next step. Don't make excuses, don't blame others, don't blame your circumstances. Take personal responsibility, surround yourself with good people and let go of anything or anyone who tries to stop you from doing what you need to do to become the best you! Watch for distractions because they are everywhere. I wish for the best for you and yours!

The man behind the counter seemed to have stopped listening to him. He slid a room key across the fake-wood-grain counter and returned to his scribbled lorem ipsums. Neethan could have gone on for hours with this guy, chatting him up about music made by mentally handicapped people and the myriad challenges of international aid organizations, but this was a person programmed to hand out room keys and swipe credit cards and engage in only the amount of conversation needed to keep such transactions rolling along smoothly. If that meant asking about a guest's gigantic celestial head, then that's just what good customer service was all about.

In a way, the human race needs to improve its mental and physical qualities if it is to deal with the increasingly complex world around it and meet new challenges like space travel. And it also needs to increase its complexity if biological systems are to keep ahead of electronic ones. At the moment computers have an advantage of speed, but they show no sign of intelligence. This is not surprising because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm, a species not noted for its intellectual powers. But computers roughly obey a version of Moore’s Law, which says that their speed and complexity double every eighteen months. It is one of these exponential growths that clearly cannot continue indefinitely, and indeed it has already begun to slow. However, the rapid pace of improvement will probably continue until computers have a similar complexity to the human brain. Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence.

I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn’t first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What is caused to ministry become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger at God. We have forgotten that pastoral ministry is war and that you will never live successfully in the pastorate if you live with the peacetime mentality. Permit me to explain. The fundamental battle of pastoral ministry is not with the shifting values of the surrounding culture. It is not the struggle with resistant people who don't seem to esteem the Gospel. It is not the fight for the success of ministries of the church. And is not the constant struggle of resources and personnel to accomplish the mission. No, the war of the pastor is a deeply personal war. It is far on the ground of the pastor’s heart. It is a war values, allegiances, and motivations. It's about the subtle desires and foundational dreams. This war is the greatest threat to every pastor. Yet it is a war that we often naïvely ignore or quickly forget in the busyness of local church ministry. When you forget the Gospel, you begin to seek from the situations, locations and relationships of ministry what you already have been given in Christ. You begin to look to ministry for identity, security, hope, well-being, meeting, and purpose. These things are already yours in Christ. In ways of which you are not always aware, your ministry is always shaped by what is in functional control of your heart. The fact of the matter is that many pastors become awe numb or awe confused, or they get awe kidnapped. Many pastors look at glory and don't seek glory anymore. Many pastors are just cranking out because they don't know what else to do. Many pastors preach a boring, uninspiring gospel that makes you wonder why people aren't sleeping their way through it. Many pastors are better at arguing fine points of doctrine than stimulating divine wonder. Many pastors see more stimulated by the next ministry, vision of the next step in strategic planning than by the stunning glory of the grand intervention of grace into sin broken hearts. The glories of being right, successful, in control, esteemed, and secure often become more influential in the way that ministry is done than the awesome realities of the presence, sovereignty, power, and love of God. Mediocrity is not a time, personnel, resource, or location problem. Mediocrity is a heart problem. We have lost our commitment to the highest levels of excellence because we have lost our awe.

Fatigue has built up after all this training, and I can’t seem to run very fast. As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it.

I discovered that the predominant effects produced by the drugs discussed in this book are positive. It didn’t matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, or psilocybin. Overwhelmingly, consumers expressed feeling more altruistic, empathetic, euphoric, focused, grateful, and tranquil. They also experienced enhanced social interactions, a greater sense of purpose and meaning, and increased sexual intimacy and performance. This constellation of findings challenged my original beliefs about drugs and their effects. I had been indoctrinated to be biased toward the negative effects of drug use. But over the past two-plus decades, I had gained a deeper, more nuanced understanding. Sure, negative effects were also possible outcomes. But they represented a minority of effects; they were predictable and readily mitigated. For example, the type of drug use described in this book should be limited to healthy, responsible adults. These individuals fulfill their responsibilities as citizens, parents, partners, and professionals. They eat healthy, exercise regularly, and get sufficient amounts of sleep. They take steps to alleviate chronic excessive stress levels. These practices ensure physical fitness and considerably reduce the likelihood of experiencing adverse effects. Equally important, I learned that people undergoing acute crises and those afflicted with psychiatric illnesses should probably avoid drug use because they may be at greater risk of experiencing unwanted effects. The vast amount of predictably favorable drug effects intrigued me, so much so that I expanded my own drug use to take advantage of the wide array of beneficial outcomes specific drugs can offer. To put this in personal terms, my position as department chairman (from 2016 to 2019) was far more detrimental to my health than my drug use ever was. Frequently, the demands of the job led to irregular exercise and poor eating and sleeping habits, which contributed to pathological stress levels. This wasn’t good for my mental or physical health. My drug use, however, has never been as disruptive or as problematic. It has, in fact, been largely protective against the negative health consequences of negotiating pathology-producing environments.

We might ask what role relational neuroscience plays in these kinds of experiences. For me, it begins with the body. Cultivating an understanding -- and most importantly a felt sense -- of these neural pathways helps us attune body to body with our people as they enter these deeper, more challenging realms. Through resonance, our capacity to attend to our bodies while remaining in a ventral state gradually becomes theirs. An indispensable support comes from our left hemisphere's deepening understanding of the particulars of the healing process. The stability this provides helps our right stay as engaged as possible in the relationship with all its emerging uncertainty. When Joshua became so suddenly depressed, Jaak Panksepp came to mind, so I could remain curious rather than scared. When Caroline entered increasingly intense states with her mother, Stephen Porges helped me remain mindful of our joined windows of tolerance and the necessity of staying in connection for co-regulation and disconfirmation to occur. The whole process of leading, following and responding rests on his statement, "Safety IS the treatment". In the broadest way, Dan Siegel's voice fosters deep acquaintance with the principles of interpersonal neurobiology, which supports hope for healing, confidence in our inherent health, and appreciation for our co-organizing brains. Each of these strands of knowledge increases our trust in the process. You may sense yourself adding to the list those that have been most helpful for you.

Original Statement by Hunger Strikers to Psychiatric Association, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General 1. A Hunger Strike to Challenge International Domination by Biopsychiatry. This fast is about human rights in mental health. The psychiatric pharmaceutical complex is heedless of its oath to “first do no harm.” Psychiatrists are able with impunity to: Incarcerate citizens who have committed crimes against neither persons nor property. Impose diagnostic labels on people that stigmatize and defame them. Induce proven neurological damage by force and coercion with powerful psychotropic drugs. Stimulate violence and suicide with drugs promoted as able to control these activities. Destroy brain cells and memories with an increasing use of electroshock (also known as electro-convulsive therapy). Employ restraint and solitary confinement—which frequently cause severe emotional trauma, humiliation, physical harm, and even death—in preference to patience and understanding. Humiliate individuals already damaged by traumatizing assaults to their self-esteem. These human rights violations and crimes against human decency must end. While the history of psychiatry offers little hope that change will arrive quickly, initial steps can and must be taken. At the very least, the public has the right to know IMMEDIATELY the evidence upon which psychiatry bases its spurious claims and treatments, and upon which it has gained and betrayed the trust and confidence of the courts, the media, and the public.21

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

Life is a crapshoot. It is also brief. No generation is invulnerable to the formidable and grave powers of creation and obliteration that time renders. All people are subject to the vagrancies of time’s steady pulse and subordinated to brute chance engendered when pulling the levers of fate found in our risk-filled environment. We can tilt the odds in our favor of living happily to a ripe old age by displaying a high degree of awareness and exercising self-control. We must rightfully display pride in our lives by claiming responsibility for ourselves and by taking on every challenge without mental equivocation. I seek to conquer personal fears and employ honest effort, energy, endurance, and enthusiasm supplemented with booster shots of intellectual integrity to become my personal master. Self-mastery, self-discipline, conscientious study, uncompromising integrity, and ethical awareness form the foundation stones of all religions and these qualities anchor every person of high character. While no personal medicine wheel is without faults and frailties, a person who exhibits an annealed temperament constantly searches inward to improve him or herself while maintaining a vigilant eye upon fulfilling their caregiver responsibilities.

when young, people develop beliefs that organize their world and give meaning to their experiences. These mental models determine the goals we pursue and the ways we go about achieving those goals. She has found that the key mental models of successful individuals are: they love learning; they seek challenges and value effort; and they persist in the face of reasonable obstacles. She calls this having a growth, as opposed to a fixed, orientation to life. When people with a fixed orientation fail at something, they believe the situation is out of their control and nothing can be done. They lose faith in their ability to perform. They shrink previous successes and in-flate failures. Anxious about failure, they abandon the effective strategies they have in their repertoire. They give up. Those with a growth orientation do not see failure as an indictment of their capacities. For those folks, a problem is just an opportunity to learn new things. Their attention is on finding strategies for learning. When they blow it, they realize that they just haven’t found the right strategy yet. They wonder how they can improve their performance the next time. They dig in and make optimistic predictions: “The harder it gets, the harder I need to try. I need to remember what I already know about this. I’ll get this soon.

They all succeed at changing both their mindset (the meaning-making system that shapes thoughts and feelings) and their behavior; rather than changing only mindset or behavior, and hoping the other will eventually follow. • They all become keen and focused observers of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and they learn to use these as information. They see the agenda that is driving them, not just the agenda they are driving. • Changes to their mindsets are always in the direction of seeing and feeling more possibilities: Spaces people had previously thought they could not or should not enter (because they were out of reach or too dangerous) are now fully accessible. • They take focused risks and build a new set of muscles and metrics around assumptions based on actual, rather than imagined, data about the consequences of their new actions. Their anxiety around the initial adaptive challenge is reduced, if not eliminated, while their experiences of pleasure significantly increase. • They experience increased mastery, more options, wider control, and greater degrees of freedom. They make progress on, or even accomplish, their column 1 commitment, and, more often than not, their accomplishments extend considerably beyond the initial aspiration. Because they have developed new mental capabilities—not just a new solution to a single problem—they can bring these capabilities to other challenges and other venues, in their work and in their personal lives.

For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.

I had a strange dream. I was carrying a bookbag on my back, and it had a lot of tools in it. However, for some reason, I couldn’t take off the backpack. In the dream, I had to continue to start over from where I started. I was so tired and frustrated. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. All I knew was that I was walking in the desert with a backpack on. Again, the dream kept repeating itself. I didn’t want to keep starting over because it was hard. However, every single time the dream started over, it was more challenging because I was hungry and thirsty. I saw a tree in the desert, but I couldn’t get any water. It started to snow, but I didn’t have shelter. I was cold, and I didn’t know how to get warm. I looked around, and there wasn’t anyone in sight. I realized that I had to walk down the path that was my own. I never had anyone to hold my hand. However, some people want people to walk in front of them, beside them, beneath, or above them. I was tired of walking the never-ending path of heavy burdens. However, my path of burdens wasn’t by choice. I was given this path, but in my dream, I had to change the direction. I was giving permission to take off my backpack. I needed water, and I noticed I had a cup in my backpack. I also had a spile (spout) that I could use to get water out of a tree. It was getting colder and colder. I needed shelter. I looked in my bag, and there were tools to make a tent. I put my tent together after I gathered some water. I dug in my bag, and I saw some sticks. I built a fire to warm up. My dream was very interesting. It brought clarity into my life. I had all of the tools I needed to start over. However, I had to make the choice to use them. I had to put my mom’s choices behind me because I cannot change what happened.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

We may not recognize how situations within our own lives are similar to what happens within an airplane cockpit. But think, for a moment, about the pressures you face each day. If you are in a meeting and the CEO suddenly asks you for an opinion, your mind is likely to snap from passive listening to active involvement—and if you’re not careful, a cognitive tunnel might prompt you to say something you regret. If you are juggling multiple conversations and tasks at once and an important email arrives, reactive thinking can cause you to type a reply before you’ve really thought out what you want to say. So what’s the solution? If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories. Narrate your life as it’s occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight inside your head will be ready to shine the right way. To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign. “You can’t delegate thinking,” de Crespigny told me. “Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.

A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than simultaneous tasks. Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task. The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include: avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.

Too often, people look at failed ventures as proof they shouldn’t accept new challenges in the future. But that’s not a helpful way to look at the situation. Just because you were rejected or you failed to meet your goal, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have tried. At the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did my willingness to accept a new challenge sharpen my skills?” Perhaps you learned more about courage, or maybe you sharpened your social skills.

People have lived through far more difficult and challenging times than those confronting you—and the best among them remained persons of virtue and courage. What excuse do you manufacture for faltering where they did not? If you are a lesser being, then your failure is as it should be. Certainly, a deficient soul cannot complain of trying times. If you are not a lesser being, then set about becoming what you are capable of being, and do not poison the world with whining about circumstance. There is no need of another simpering weakling on the surface of the planet.

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

It's not easy to recognize how to handle a mentally unstable ex-partner. Many people will tell you to walk away, but sometimes it's not that easy. There may be legal obligations or shared children and family and community ties that make it challenging to leave them. If you've experienced abuse, there is the added complication that the abusive partner will often rely on you for emotional support and material support, even after they have mistreated you.

Imagine once again that you are struggling with highly distressing mental experiences—unusual perceptions and/or beliefs that others around you do not share. This time, however, you live in a society or a community that validates your experience. Your beliefs may be challenged, but not your underlying experience. You will not be locked up against your will or forced to ingest debilitating drugs. You will not be told that you have a diseased brain with no hope of real recovery, but rather, there is the assumption that you will recover, and there is even the assumption that your experiences may eventually allow you to contribute to your community in a unique and powerful way. Your needs for choice, dignity, and respect will be held—your mind, body, and spirit will not be invaded. You find that people listen to your suffering with empathy and compassion rather than fear and judgment.

Degradation of work. Compelling the people in an organization to focus their efforts on the narrow range of what gets measured leads to a degradation of the experience of work. Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10 One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. Teachers move out of public schools to private schools and charter schools. Engineers move out of large corporations to boutique firms. Enterprising government employees become consultants. There is a healthy element in this. But surely the large-scale organizations of our society are the poorer for driving out those most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

Joey Tomlinson, in his much-needed and timely book, The Day of Trouble: Depression, Scripture, and the God Who Is Near, masterfully tackles the issues of mental health and well-being from a Christian and biblical perspective. Speaking with a pastor’s heart, Tomlinson helps his readers wrestle with the spiritually, mentally, and physically debilitating scourge of depression. In seeking to help hurting people, Tomlinson draws from years of pastoral ministry as a counsellor, as well as drawing from the Bible, current medical and pharmaceutical studies, and tried-tested-and-true insights from other godly writers, preachers, and pastors both past and present. The result is a book that gives readers a well-grounded, balanced, applicable, and effective dose of biblical wisdom, godly encouragement, and convicting exhortation. This book is extremely helpful for all Christians–whether you’re managing personal challenges with mental health or helping others in treating theirs. Tomlinson doesn’t mince words in his direct and honest dealings with the subject, but his Christ-like love for his readers is evident on every page. The Day of Trouble is a well-written, sincere, and highly practical gift to the church, a book that sheds gospel-transforming light on an often overlooked and ignored area of the Christian life. I hope and pray that it is widely read among God’s people, for I know it will be a healing balm used by the Triune God to restore Christian joy to the minds and hearts of suffering souls.

At the end of the fast, I felt physically tired, but mentally stronger. In functioning without something my body relied on, I had broken a limit that existed in my mind. I gained flexibility and adaptability and resourcefulness. That experience with fasting bled into the rest of my life. Fasting is a physical challenge driven by the intellect. Being silent for long periods of time brought up completely different issues–who was I when I detached from other people?

The mission of "Nest Village" Foundation is to support people to live a happy and fulfilling life by challenging their body, soul and mind through sports, art and science. We work on shared experiences and knowledge that contribute to the prosperity of free-spirited creators, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and digital nomads, enhancing their productivity and better their work-life balance, mental health, and overall wellness.

We would like to dedicate this book to those struggling with hoarding disorder and those who care about them. Many people must deal with life circumstances that make progress an uphill struggle. The courage of those who hoard and that of their families demonstrates that being willing to open old wounds, challenge limiting beliefs, and step forward into unfamiliar and unknown territory mentally, physically, and spiritually is genuinely humbling and inspiring to peers and professionals alike. To face one’s fear of judgment and continue to work toward success takes courage and fortitude, especially

It wasn’t until I became a parent that I could truly understand two crucial things about therapy: The purpose of inquiring about people’s parents isn’t to join them in blaming, judging, or criticizing their parents. In fact, it’s not about their parents at all. It’s solely about understanding how their early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits). Most people’s parents did their absolute best, whether that “best” was an A-minus or a D-plus. It’s the rare parent who, however limited, deep down doesn’t want his or her child to have a good life. That doesn’t mean people can’t have feelings about their parents’ limitations (or mental-health challenges). They just need to figure out what to do with them

The further we are from the results of our decisions, the easier it is to keep our current views rather than update them. When you put your hand on a hot stove, you quickly learn the natural consequence. You pay the price for your mistakes. Since you are a pain-avoiding creature, you update your view. Before you touch another stove, you check to see if it’s hot. But you don’t just learn a micro lesson that applies in one situation. Instead, you draw a general abstraction, one that tells you to check before touching anything that could potentially be hot. Organizations over a certain size often remove us from the direct consequences of our decisions. When we make decisions that other people carry out, we are one or more levels removed and may not immediately be able to update our understanding. We come a little off the ground, if you will. The further we are from the feedback of the decisions, the easier it is to convince ourselves that we are right and avoid the challenge, the pain, of updating our views. Admitting that we’re wrong is tough. It’s easier to fool ourselves that we’re right at a high level than at the micro level, because at the micro level we see and feel the immediate consequences. When we touch that hot stove, the feedback is powerful and instantaneous. At a high or macro level we are removed from the immediacy of the situation, and our ego steps in to create a narrative that suits what we want to believe, instead of what really happened.

will be tempted to opt out. They will develop a greater taste for ease and comfort; they will increasingly settle on simplified ideas of reality and conventional ways of thinking; they will fall prey to seductive formulas that offer quick and easy knowledge. They will lose a taste for developing skills that require time and a resilient ego—it can hurt our self-esteem in the initial phases of learning a skill, as we are made so aware of our awkwardness. Such people will rail against the world and blame others for their problems; they will find political justifications for opting out, when in truth they simply cannot handle the challenges of engaging with complexity. In trying to simplify their mental lives, they disconnect themselves from reality and neutralize all of the powers developed by the human brain over so many millions of years.

The beaches in Dubai are well-known for their cleanliness and tranquility. While many individuals enjoy a relaxing weekend at the beach, thrill-seekers prefer to participate in thrilling water sports. Jet skiing is one of Dubai's most popular water activities, and adventure seekers love to try it. Do you want to know what the most extraordinary Dubai marine adventures are? What is the best method to see this magnificent city? There is plenty to do in this city-state of the UAE, and we have several fun aquatic activities for you to enjoy while on vacation or to live in the Emirates! How about a Jet Ski Ride along the Dubai waterfront? It can be done with your family, as a couple, with friends, or by yourself. We jet ski around all of Dubai's most famous attractions, skyscrapers, and landmarks. All of our Jet Ski trips include a stop at the luxury Burj Al Arab hotel, which is constructed into the sea, where you can have fun and receive a photo souvenir of Dubai. Jet skiing in Dubai is unquestionably the most acceptable way to see the city and have a good time during your vacation. Dubai Yacht Rental Experience When it comes to a luxury Boat Party in Dubai for those who can afford it, the pleasure and adventure that Yachts can provide cannot be overstated. Yachting is, without a doubt, the most beautiful sport on the planet. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to splash around in the ocean's deep blue waves and lose yourself in an environment that is both soothing and calming to the soul. The sensation you get from a yacht requires a whole new set of words to explain it. It's a fantastic experience that transports people to another zone while also altering their mental state. People who have the advantage of owning private yachts go sailing to have a relaxing excursion and clear their minds whenever they feel the need. Those who cannot afford to purchase a yacht can enjoy the thrill of cruising from one coastal region to the other by renting an economical Dubai yacht. It is not a challenging task to learn to sail. Some people believe that yachting can only be done by experts, which is a ridiculous misconception. Anyone willing to acquire a few tactics and hints can master the art of yachting. READ MORE About Dubai Jet Ski: Get lost in the tranquility of blue waters while waiting to partake in action. With the instructor sitting right behind you, you’ll learn astonishing stunts and skills for riding a Jet ski. This adventure will take your excitement to a new level of adventure in the open sea. While sailing past the picturesque shorelines of the islands, take in stunning views of prominent Dubai monuments such as the Burj Al Arab and more. About the activity: Jumeirah Beach is the meeting site for this activity. You have the option of riding for 30 minutes or 60 minutes Jet Ski around the beaches while being accompanied at all times by an instructor, as your safety is our top priority. Begin your journey from the marina and proceed to the world-famous Burj-Al-Arab, a world well known hotel, for a photo shoot. where you may take as many pictures as you want

If only I could have gotten my shit together, everybody else’s lives would have been fine was the message that I was getting constantly, and so I was responsible for other people’s happiness,” he said—a difficult situation for anyone, but particularly challenging for someone diagnosed with a severe mental illness.

Master of Occupational Therapy in Orthopaedics: A Comprehensive Guide Occupational therapy (OT) is a health profession that helps people of all ages to live their lives to the fullest by enabling them to participate in the activities of daily living (ADLs) and occupations that are important to them. OTs work with people who have a variety of conditions, including physical disabilities, cognitive impairments, mental health challenges, and developmental delays.

The psychologist meets the defendant face-to-face and uses his training to nail down the right diagnosis and to comment on competency or insanity, whichever the case may be. Of course, sometimes the right diagnosis is malingering, that is, the defendant is trying to act crazy when he isn’t. Alternatively—and perhaps even more challenging and interesting—the defendant may be dissimulating, that is, trying to act well when he’s actually mentally ill. This is a lot more common than you might suspect! People with psychosis typically don’t want others to know about it. When someone starts spouting off all about their hallucinations and paranoia in the first few minutes of a meeting, I’m naturally suspicious

It is widely recognized that Indigenous peoples are often not well served by Western treatment styles and those seeking help are often confronted with more alienation and traumatization. Sones et al. point out that data regarding the mental health and wellness of Indigenous peoples is lacking "partly because of the challenges in the identification of indigenous clients, mistrust of mainstream health, frequent absence of culturally competent care, and lack of access to indigenous healing options and care. Furthermore, culturally influenced Indigenous behaviour is often misinterpreted by Western-oriented clinicians as evidence of psychopathy.

To be confident, be capable. Live out loud. Get in adventures, get lost, get found again, live your life instead of letting it happen to you like a reality show. Allow no challenge to go unconquered. CARE about how things are going to go, and then bust your ass to make them go your way. After a few years of this, there's no challenge you can face where you can't say "Well, I survived that other time, so I'll survive this too!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

was the rationale of the cowardly and selfish, those that always found a way to justify their choices and decisions afterwards. The world has always been full of people that rode on the coattails of the brave and the enterprising that made decisions in the instant of need, and the new west of the territories was no different. Many of the pilgrims that set out to pioneer the new lands would turn back because of hardships, and others would simply give up because they were unprepared, physically and mentally, to face up to the challenges of a new world. It was the few individuals that always found a way to do right and were willing to make the sacrifice necessary, no matter the circumstances, that would build a strong and free nation.

Black people suffer poor mental health as a result of the grind of surviving in a space that seems to act against you, undermining you, pushing you aside, sometimes unconsciously, making you feel as if you’re living in a different reality. Rather than listen to what Black people have to say, they are shouted down, their experience is denied, and it becomes too exhausting to address the ignorance. This may be the most ‘open and tolerant’ country, but tolerance isn’t enough when it comes to racism. People need to call it out or at the very least acknowledge its existence or we will be speaking with a completely separate set of facts. Being challenged on the existence of racism is tiresome, psychologically debilitating, and deeply depressing. I’m not surprised that so many of us break down living here in the UK.

More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. The critical challenge in a classroom setting is to foster reciprocity: truly hearing and being heard; really seeing and being seen by other people.

The world desperately needs a new kind of leader—one who puts people before outcomes, who relishes the hard stuff while savoring the sweet stuff, and who is committed to leading to a better future. A leader who is not afraid to journey into the dark forest of challenges and come out stronger on the other side, inspiring others to do the same.

I assure you with conviction that those who mock or criticize are usually those who never step into the arena themselves. People engaged in the struggle, those in the arena, rarely pass judgment on others facing similar challenges.