Category: Blog Posts

People usually either have a natural leadership ability or they don’t, and you can see the quality almost from birth. But that doesn’t mean all people born with this quality become leaders. The quality needs to be nurtured for it to grow and flourish. Just as soccer camp and piano lessons nurture the young athlete and young musician, so must parents help their young leader find experiences to help her to hone this skill.

In one psychology study a number of years ago, participants were asked to describe the qualities of a male leader. They listed such qualities as strong, decisive, charismatic, aggressive, goal oriented, tall and so forth. When a separate group was shown this list of characteristics and told that this described a woman, the participants considered her unfeminine, unlikable, angry and manipulative.

The big difference I’ve noticed between male and female leaders is mostly in how those characteristics were acquired. In other words, women business leaders develop their leadership from quite different life experiences than their male counterparts. And these life experiences do distinguish leadership styles and qualities.

I’m thankful that more and more women leaders are being acknowledged and welcomed as unique human beings who bring their own particular personality to the organization they lead. So many women of my generation grew up feeling like an odd ball. We were told we were too aggressive or unfeminine. Now women are at the helm of multi-billion dollar corporations, like Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, or run for major political office, like Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have.

For girls to grow up to be successful women business leaders they must conquer the fear of being unfeminine, being willing to break the rules. They need to continue to rise above the negative female stereotypes. It requires:

• Pride in independent thinking
• Fearless determination to accomplish your goals.
• Willingness to create opportunities where others see limitations.

As entrepreneurs or business leaders both women and men are achievers, driven, tenacious, and independent. They’re unafraid of hard work. They strive for excellence in whatever they undertake. They can be impatient with the insecurities of others because these insecurities slow down the process. On the other hand, these leaders are very good at encouraging excellence in others, because they have a powerful belief in their cause. Leaders also believe in their abilities to accomplish whatever they put their minds to. This is probably the defining characteristic of leaders. Strong belief creates charisma and charisma creates followers.

Do you see leadership qualities in your daughter and would like expert advice on how to nurture it while caring for her emotional, psychological and spiritual needs? If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment.

Read more on my website: Gifted Children.

Working long hours, working out of your home, or working and living with your spouse/business partner twenty-four hours a day leaves little time to recuperate inner strength. As the stress increases and the opportunity for recuperation diminishes, many entrepreneurial couples fall victim to stress related illnesses, mental or emotional problems, chemical dependency, and spiritual despair.

The process of losing your health (physical, psychological, interpersonal or otherwise) begins long before symptoms develop. The stress process begins the moment you allow any part of your life to be out of alignment. If one system (such as your body, your marriage, or your work) is unattended or allowed to stay out of healthy alignment for too long, it affects the other systems, which in turn produce stress and deterioration.

If you are going to manage the excessive stresses of entrepreneurial life you actually need more stamina than the average person. To combat the pressures caused by the competing demands of love and work and to build the necessary stamina for this complex lifestyle, you must build a power plan to maintain and enhance your health not just physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.

How can you develop a spiritual plan for your entrepreneurial lifestyle?

Spirit or spirituality is not synonymous with religion or religious. Rather the spirit is the part of us that defines us and yet connects us to others. It has long been known that a strong healthy spirit will guide us successfully through adversity, whereas a conquered spirit will succumb to illness and death. Therefore, keeping spirit or life force healthy is essential to the process of achieving healthy balance in any life. For entrepreneurial couples especially, the key to effective stress management is the proper alignment and interaction of a healthy mind, a healthy body, and a healthy spirit.

Even if your life has led you in one of these stressful directions, don’t despair. Make meaning of the experience and put the disaster into the context of your life. Then reorient that life to meet your values.

If one of those values is a belief in God, yet you are not attending to that spiritual relationship, the balance in your life is compromised and will inevitably lead you to some form of personal or interpersonal dysfunction. On the other hand, if you develop a stronger sense of self as belonging to something larger than just this earthly existence, and you make a commitment to that higher self (i.e. through prayer or inner contemplation), even when you have suffering, you will have a meaningful and prosperous life to share with the ones you love and work with.

If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment. If you live elsewhere, you can schedule a remote education session, and then we can discuss how to make your business/home life thrive.

Read more: Spiritual Component Essential to Healthy Entrepreneurial Life.

It’s exciting to report that we are significantly closer to understanding what causes schizophrenia. More than two million Americans are diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusional thinking, hallucinations, and speech and behavioral disorganization. The New York Times recently reported on a landmark study that pieces together the steps by which overactive genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia.

The researchers found that the risk of schizophrenia is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning. As a person matures from adolescence and early adulthood, the prefrontal cortex of the brain (the section where thinking and planning skills are centered) prunes or removes weak or redundant connections between neurons. According to this study, people who are at risk for developing schizophrenia carry overactive C4-A genes that tag too many of the connections for pruning, resulting in fewer neural connections and thinner prefrontal layers, which is associated with schizophrenia.

Since the schizophrenic’s loss of frontal lobe activity is where executive functions develop, this study explains why schizophrenic adolescents have difficulty defining and adopting adult thinking. Researchers hope that completing this at-risk genetic profile will lead to clarifying a better prognosis for these people.

The more that is learned of mental disorders, the closer we are to knowing how to treat them effectively. For now, medication can blunt some of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Also psychotherapy is an effective treatment for mental disorders.

As a psychologist with over 30 years of experience in counseling families, I also see the importance of providing therapy for family members who have the ongoing stress of caring for someone with a serious mental disorder. If this describes you and you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA, please contact my office and schedule an appointment to get the support and understanding that you need and deserve.

Can you believe it’s been seven years? The free Asperger Syndrome Partners & Family of Adults with ASD Meetup was founded on April 5, 2009. And I’ve been offering the free international teleconference for two years now! Our first teleconference was held on February 21, 2014, and the worldwide response has been phenomenal! People are signing up months in advance.

There’s so little support for families with children on the Autism Spectrum. And there’s next to nothing for partners and families with adults on the Spectrum. This Meetup group and my books are really filling that gap.

If you’re a member of the Asperger Syndrome: Partners & Family of Adults with ASD Meetup group, you know about the monthly free international teleconference and the paid video conferences.

Here’s what one of our participants said about a recent Video Conference:

“This group has been a lifeline to me and I can see it is for so many others as well. Even though we were not in the same room, and even though we didn’t have time to say very much; seeing each other’s faces and expressions and interest level – on top of the fact that we “get” each other – was a monumentally positive experience. Very encouraging and uplifting, and the information learned was vital.”

However, there are many other resources within the Meetup dashboard that you may not know about…

When you’re a member of the group, you can listen to past teleconferences. Go to Discussions Tab, scroll down the page and click on Teleconference Meetups folder. Select the topic you wish to hear. Or login and click on this link to take you to the index of topics. Note: The more intimate video conferences are not recorded!

When you become a member of the group, you can also join ongoing discussions around informational, inspirational and fun topics.

If you’re cautious about preserving your anonymity, you can use a pseudonym. However, we’ve made this a safe place to express yourself freely, so most members feel very comfortable with simply using their first name. Remember, this is a group for Neurotypical family members to get the support they need in dealing with the craziness of living with someone on the Spectrum. If that describes your situation, feel free to join us today.

It’s said that we all carry scars – scars from past emotional and physical wounds that shape who we are today. How you remember a past, painful occurrence will determine your present ability to experience emotional health.If you’ve properly processed the negative past and extinguished it, it won’t present itself as a problem for you now. Oftentimes, however, if the original conditioning event is not processed correctly, you’ll experience a physiological response each time you experience that event.

For example, physiologist Pavlov conditioned dogs to associate the sound of a bell with the sight and smell of meat. So each time the dogs heard the bell, they would salivate. They were conditioned to respond in that specific way because of their memory of what the bell represented.

When clients are asked to re-experience a past emotion, such as anger or fear, they’re being asked to go back and relive a memory. By reliving that memory, they produce a feeling. And that feeling can be used by a NET Practioner to help a client overcome a phobia, resolve life-altering stresses, and heal mental disorders.

Scientific research is connecting the dots between painful events, stress, and the physiological changes to the brain. As the Dec 2015 study “Could Stress Contribute to Pain-Related Fear in Chronic Pain” stated:

“A difference between acute and chronic stress is supported by data outside of the pain field: Early adversity as well as chronic stress has been linked to structural alterations in the brain causing a hyperactive amygdala and impaired prefrontal inhibition. These alterations could underlie the extinction impairments observed in several mental disorders, which is interesting in the context of chronic pain given the high comorbidity between chronic pain and affective disorders. Finally, effects of acute stress on pain-related memory retrieval may be fundamentally different in normals and patients with chronic pain. While stress-induced effects in normals are adaptive, they may be altered and in fact maladaptive and in patients with chronic pain. For example in patients with PTSD, cortisol enhanced rather than impaired memory retrieval.”

Paradoxically, we can use the power of past, negative events to help us heal our present. The job of a NET practitioner is to gently help a client go to that place of unresolved negativity so he or she can complete a process that allows them to move forward from that painful place.

If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment. As a NET practitioner, I will help you remove the block, so your body can repair itself naturally.

Read more on my website: Releasing Unresolved Stress.