Integrate!

LOL Well, yes. Sometimes something on facebook or youtube has actually made me laugh (really, laugh means out loud - it's not a laugh if you keep it in your head). But . . . There are times when I have been with friends or my family and I have really laughed OUT LOUD. I've laughed so hard it was hard to catch my breath and my stomach actually started to hurt. I've laughed so hard that I was having too much fun to stop. Has that ever really happened to you on social media?  Has it even happened on the phone, that uncontrolled, slightly crazy, fully engaged laughter? Nothing kills a good time like trying to explain humour so we won't go there.  We will go there to say that it's probably not possible for a human being to be fully engaged with a machine.  There are just so many parts of our brain that only get busy when they are in the presence of another real live human being.  We're just learning how they all work and, most importantly, how they all work t...

From time to time we all end up in situations where someone else wants us rattled.  Whether we are competing, conflicting or negotiating, sooner or later someone will want to shake us up. The first question to ask yourself is: How strong is my outcome here? Sometimes people get rattled because they have been taking a strong stand for a goal that they hold much less strongly. If you're not sure what you want, it's easy to be thrown off your game.  The answer is not to manage conflict or to generate strategies for keeping cool. The answer in this case is to discover an outcome that is so strong you are willing to keep cool to get it. Is your outcome worth keeping your cool? In a perfect world, when I want something I want it enough to stay focused through distraction. No one in a perfect world would want to rattle me, but even if they did, I would be so intent on following through to get a result, I would probably not even notice any attempt to push my buttons or throw ...

It's true that the holidays are often difficult. We have memories of other years, years when the whole family was happy and present. It's hard to match those memories. We miss people who are gone and sometimes, people who have changed. The truth is, that missing doesn't end when we go back to work in January. There is something about a Canadian winter that makes us consciously and unconsciously want a hug. We want to curl up somewhere cozy with someone who knows how to make us laugh, how to have a long conversation that drifts off into quiet, how to sit quietly when our eyes fall shut and our breathing becomes soft and even. The people we miss in the winter are the people we would want in front of the fire with us, even if we don't really have a fireplace. Sometimes they are people who have been in our lives, and sometimes they are the people we have wished were part of our lives. Real or imagined, however they have been lost, we miss them. You can wrap your arms ...