Category: Blog Posts

Most entrepreneurs are so caught up in the passion of their enterprise that they rarely plan ahead for the wealth that accumulates. As a result, when it comes time to develop an estate plan, many entrepreneurs are at a loss for where to start.

It would seem that the logical place to start is with your attorney, CPA, investment advisor or banker. However, while all of these professionals should play a part in the development of your estate plan eventually, the first stop on the way to a successful estate plan is the psychologist’s office to deal with the soft side of the family business. Many an estate plan has been left undeveloped because the interpersonal relationships in the family were counter to the best interests of the business.

Family firms are a system of family members, in-laws, shareholders and stakeholders. These systems interact with vendors, customers, employees, and the commercial community at large. It’s a delicate balance to maintain a successful business and a successful family enterprise when the systems are integrated into a family firm. The stress on the system becomes even greater when it’s time to develop a plan for the continuity of the business and the family, and a fair apportionment of wealth. If the family doesn’t have mature and healthy interpersonal relationships, the process of estate planning can be costly, painful and unsuccessful.

Consider for example a CEO who is about to retire. He has two daughters and wants to gives each daughter an equal share. One daughter has worked with him for years. The other daughter has never worked for her father but now that he’s retiring, she and her husband want to take a more active position in the company. The first daughter feels she deserves to continue as the president of the company. And she is not pleased about her sister’s new interest. Nor does she like her father’s decision to treat them equally. Where this family once got along fine, a new problem is growing that they never had to face before. How would you are your advisors handle this “hot potato”?

To create an estate plan that truly integrates the success of the family and the firm, it’s necessary to seek the help of a psychologist who understands the soft side of families and particularly those families who are in business together. Cleaning up root interpersonal problems is essential to the development of a meaningful estate plan that doesn’t increase family conflict. For example, with the help of a psychologist, the father with two daughters learned that “fair” was more appropriate than “equal” when it came to dividing the wealth and the business with his daughters.

If you have worked hard to create an enterprise you can be proud of and want to pass a legacy onto your children and grandchildren, first evaluate the soft side of your family system for any unresolved issues. Then take these concerns to a psychologist trained to help with untangling family knots and reweaving a healthy family/business tapestry. If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment.

Back in the 90’s I made the statement

, “Women mentoring and mentoring women will undoubtedly insure a strong female leadership in the 21st century.” This has certainly proved true as more women discover the value of working with 

business coaches and life coaches to build the lives they want to live.

Women, just as men need to be wise to the politics of corporate life. They need to have professional credentials and skills if they want a good salary or to achieve that promotion. It’s just that women take things personally so those personal needs must be addressed.

My research has found that, for women, getting to know oneself in relationship to others is the foundation of life. Mentoring for them is about developing relationships and about learning as much from the protégé as from the mentor. It’s collaboration, a dialogue, an evolving and developing process leading both women into a deeper relationship as well as a more advanced stage of life.

In the past the mentor was a cherished grandmother, aunt, older sister or neighbor who took the young woman under her wings and showed her the ropes. With so many fractured families this support system isn’t always available.

If there is no woman to mentor her, no mentor to relate to her personally, a young woman may hold herself back from accomplishment because of lack of confidence or lack of a mirror to show her she’s on the right track. That’s why being a mentor, or finding one, can be the key to success.

So just what does a mentor teach? Mentoring can cover the gamut of female behavior from dressing for success to litigation tactics to canning vegetables to dating etiquette. If you’re considering mentoring, don’t limit your options to the traditional male arena. We owe it to the next generation to teach what we know. Your young protégé needs to learn how to be a woman, not just an attorney or an artist.

Principally a mentor will encourage her to believe in herself. However, young women are still in great need of learning about the career possibilities there are in the world, so if you have a unique specialty, tout it. Let young women know that there are new and exciting career realms to explore.

Please join me on my Facebook page and share your story of how a mentor helped you.

Research continues to unravel the mystery of how the brain works as they examine how physical changes occur in the brain as people undergo psychological therapy. By using brain scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.), they map areas of the brain that fire under specific conditions. What they’re learning will fascinate you.

An extensive New York Times article outlines some of these findings, which take us steps closer to understanding how the physical brain changes as people change the way they think about themselves and life around them. It also reveals how brain trauma changes personality. Below is a brief summary of some of these findings.

As Andrew J. Gerber, a psychoanalyst and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, and Bradley Peterson, a psychoanalyst, child psychiatrist and the director of the L.A. Institute for the Developing Mind at Children’s Hospital, worked together to combine psychoanalysis with neuroscience, Gerber saw a pattern in the patients who improved the most.

He noted that they didn’t improve in a linear way, that is, from worse to better as he had expected. Instead, about half way their treatment, they went through a period of swinging back and forth between extreme behaviors. Then they began to improve. To describe this process, he uses a chemistry term “annealing – the act of heating something so that all its molecules excitedly dance around and then slowly cooling it until it assumes a new and more stable state.”

Susan Andersen, a cognitive and social psychologist who studies transference at New York University began collaborating with Gerber and Peterson. They’ve found that when we’re confronted with a situation or a person that reminds of us something or someone we’ve known before, we activate regions in our brain that transfers attributes from these past experiences to our new experiences. These include the left and right insula, the motor cortex and the right caudate.

Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst, neuropsychologist and Freud scholar, has coined the phrase ‘‘neuropsychoanalysis’’, as he brings neuroscience and psychoanalysis together. Through his studies, he discerned that patients with damage to the right half of their brains often become self-absorbed and narcissistic. He discovered that the brain’s right hemisphere is where we understand or distort the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us.

Otto Kernberg, best known for tailoring psychoanalytic treatment for borderline personality disorder patients, found increased amygdala activity, as well as reduced activation in the ventro medial prefrontal cortex, a region that plays a crucial role in inhibiting behavior.

Not only is this information fascinating, it helps those of us in mental health develop better treatments for our clients. It reinforces the hope that the brain can be retrained so everyone can live a healthy and happy life. If you are ready to create healthier life choices and habits and live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment so we can tailor a program that helps you change your life for the better.

Have you ever suffered from insomnia? It doesn’t take too many sleepless nights before you feel terrible. Has it ever become so severe that you consulted with your physician? What did he prescribe? A sleeping pill? A better diet? An exercise routine? Did he also mention Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia (C.B.T.-I)? If not, he should have. You deserve to know what insomnia treatment options are available so you can make an informed decision about which is right for you.

While medication may help some people, recent comparison studies are showing that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may be the best treatment for your insomnia.

New York Times writer Austin Frakt, who battled insomnia, did a comparison by collecting data from various trails and studies. (I encourage you to read the entire article here.) His results are eye opening. Here’s a summary of his research:

“A randomized trial compared C.B.T. with the active ingredient in Restoril in patients 55 years and older, evaluating differences for up to two years. It found that C.B.T. led to larger and more durable improvements in sleep. Long-term, C.B.T. alone even outperformed the combination of C.B.T. and Restoril.

Another trial focused on 25- to 64-year-olds found that C.B.T. outperformed Ambien alone. Adding Ambien to a C.B.T. regimen did not lead to further improvements.

Yet another trial found that patients experienced greater relief from insomnia with C.B.T. than with the sleep drug zopiclone.
Another study showed patients preferred C.B.T. for insomnia over drug therapy.

The Annals of Internal Medicine published a systematic review of C.B.T. On average, treated patients fell asleep almost 20 minutes faster and were awake in the night almost half an hour less. That’s nearly 10 percent more sleep.”

Why does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy work so well? People with chronic insomnia set in motion a psychological cycle that must be broken before the sleep deprived sufferer can get relief. A bad night’s sleep leads to bad things happening during the day (low energy, lost productivity, falling asleep at the wheel, dropping off during bedtime storybook time, etc) so you dread another sleepless night. Worrying about it keeps you awake night after night.

C.B.T. for insomnia breaks that cycle by retraining the brain. It helps you establish and stick to a regular wake-up time, avoid daytime napping, and reserve bedtime only for sleeping, not watching TV, snacking, reading and so on. If insomnia has become a problem for you or a loved one, please consult with your physician. If he or she can’t find a solution to your chronic insomnia, please contact a mental health professional who can get you back on the road to optimal health. If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment.

There are so many things that Neuro Typicals (those without Autism Spectrum Disorder) take for granted. For example, it’s usually not a big thing when your spouse takes the wheel, unless he or she is a really bad driver. And even when your teen first gets behind the wheel of the car and starts driving, you may be only a little apprehensive.

But when you’re dealing with someone who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, this situation can become filled with anxiety. And when you add to the mix a divorce and your ASD ex is allowed free reign to drive your children, it can become a nightmare.

“Stick and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Like myself, you may have grown up with that nursery rhyme and later found out it’s not true. Words can really hurt. Especially when they’re said intentionally to strike our vulnerabilities or when we’re constantly barraged with subtle digs all day long.

It would be nice if we could just let every rude remark and unkind action roll off of us. Yet that’s not how we generally react. More often than not, people immediately withdraw into themselves, feeling hurt and rejected. Then they replay, rehash and relive the experience for the rest of the day, if not longer.

As people become more and more rude and intolerant, it begs us to consider: How are rudeness, incivility and bad manners affecting your long-term health and the health of your business?

Recently I read an excellent New York Times article on how rudeness is becoming an increasingly destructive influence in the workplace and in the health of the victims. Yes, I said victims. Rudeness and bad manners are forms of bullying and emotional attacks on another person’s sense of wellbeing.

For 20 years, Christine Porath an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business has been studying this subject. She’s compiled a number of studies that illustrate the damage rudeness causes. A few of her findings include:

Experiencing or just seeing uncivil incidents elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids potentially leading to health problems such as obesity and heart disease.

Rudeness stifles creativity and innovation, because people are afraid to stick their necks out for fear of becoming the next target.

It reduces the ability to concentrate and see solutions that are right in front of you.

It hampers efficiency because people are always on the alert to avoid the rude person.

It damages customer relations, because if treated badly (or if they see someone treated badly) people take their business elsewhere.

Court cases have been lost solely because the jury is appalled by a lawyer’s rudeness. Shockingly, one study showed that patients have died in hospitals where the medical staff was demoralized by the attending doctor, which resulted in fatal errors.

There are things we can do to improve our situation. Are you in a position of leadership and want to create better work environment at your business? Or are you receiving this type of demoralizing behavior and want it to stop? Many have found that consulting with a trained therapist and business coach has helped them find positive solutions. If you live near Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA please contact my office and schedule an appointment.