January 21, 2017

You are Hard-Wired for Altruism

Through the tragic events and natural disasters of the past decades we’ve seen  extraordinary outpourings of help and compassion for neighbors – and most important, strangers. Tragic events seem to galvanize our empathy and evoke great acts of kindness in response. In the past decade we have also been the beneficiaries of valuable findings from research to better understand the motives […]
December 5, 2016

Empathy Killers

In doing some research on empathy I came across this article and found myself  so “hooked” by it that I sat down to write this piece. Nicholas Kristof’s compelling New York Times article, Where is the Love, discusses the pushback he’s received from many readers on food stamp recipients, prison inmates and the uninsured.  Writing about hungry children, Kristof shares […]
November 21, 2016

Creating a Culture of Gratitude in the Workplace

We seem to get the “gratitude spirit” during the end of year holiday season. We hear the heart-felt stories about kindness and giving start to appear.  Tis’ the season, so to speak.   It’s a time when even the busiest and most cynical among us pause (even if only for a short time) and reflect.   But too often, the feelings of […]
October 17, 2016

Switching on Compassion: News from Neuroscience

There’s lots of compelling information emerging from neuroscience about compassion. That’s good news because, frankly, we need it. You see, the really good news is that we’re hard-wired for compassion. Speaking at a conference in Telluride, Colorado, The Science of Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions, sponsored by Stanford University Medical School’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, Stephen Porges, Ph.D. presented the following […]
August 18, 2016

Seeking Human Kindness

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas Is kindness “compassion in action?” While there are distinctions made between kindness, empathy, compassion and altruism, most people experience kindness as action. With kindness we take our cognitive experience of […]
June 17, 2016

People at Work ~ I Want To Know More About You

Ask me what is most important. And I will reply, It is people, It is people, It is people Maori Proverb You read a lot these days about the need for new workplace models. There is a growing consensus that decades of rigid, bottom line, often authoritarian management structures kill the culture necessary for real collaborative relationships.  The old models […]
June 11, 2016

The 5 Habits of an Empathetic Communicator

How we respond to others is largely a function of habit. Many small, repetitive, automatic responses that grow over a long period of time form habits. Mostly, these reactions are outside of our conscious awareness. They’re built on foundations formed by our beliefs, and in most cases, they stayed fixed, usually reinforcing old beliefs and naturally – old habits. Charles […]
May 5, 2016

Self-Compassion is Just the Beginning

Every so often something I read goes right to the heart of what I need. So it was when I discovered this post by author Katrina Kenison titled, Bucket List  (not a term I use or gravitate towards normally) that contained some wonderful gems and a very important question that resonated with me deeply, “Have I loved my life enough?” Suddenly […]
January 11, 2016

11 Ways to Be More Mindful in Your Work Relationships

Do you know about the marshmallow test? No, it’s not about seeing how many marshmallows you can toast and eat by the fire. It’s the classic Marshmallow Study conducted in 1968 at Stanford University by clinical psychologist Walter Mischel that became one of the longest running experiments in psychology. The initial study examined 600 children to see how they would […]