Back in 2008 when I first opened my private psychotherapy practice, I had one clear objective; to serve adolescents in acute crisis. It’s no secret I love working with kids and the adolescent years are 100% my jam. There is enormous creativity, passion, exploration, and vulnerability during these years. Everything is on the precipice and that is exciting, hard, and also tremendously inspiring. Teens are wild and weird. And that's perfect. As I struggled with how to market the fact that I had officially hung up my shingle, I received some really great advice from my mentor. “Know the population you want to serve, but also, notice who finds you,” he said. And this has been a piece of...
I’m currently working through a fascinating Human Design continuing education course and my teacher suggested as we do a deep dive on specific aspects of our chart over the next few months that we relax logic and let creativity lead. And while I’m usually not into vision boards, putting logic to the side for a while sounded good. So I pulled together a stack of the only magazine we have in the house, Thrasher and got to work on a collage about parts of my chart. Turns out for better or worse, my vision board was going to have a very specific theme. I was surprised to find the process easier than I thought and I was reminded of...
FULL GRATITUDE It’s okay to have felt big things this past week. Thanksgiving is complex. Or not. How complex is it really? It depends upon who you ask. The history of the day seems straightforward. Perhaps it’s the emotional piece that feels so complex. Gratitude is big. And we often assign it an expectation that no emotion can meet. To exist in the singular. Detached from any other feeling. Yet this is not how emotion manifests. No feeling exists in a vacuum. To my daughter Thanksgiving lacks complexity. She has never been exposed to the very much inflated Pilgrim story of Thanksgiving and wonders exactly what there is to celebrate about a group of White European Puritans claiming to...
Thanks to everyone who wrote in with a request for last week's podcast transcript. You have helped illuminate that there is an interest in sharing my essays on FEEDBACK in particular with your friends and colleagues outside of this mighty newsletter crew. I am still organizing my future ARCHIVES - which will allow us to have a home for all these little things like newsletter archives and podcast transcripts but in the meantime what follows is the requested transcript from WHY FEEDBACK IS LIKE SPAGHETTI. You can also listen to it here. WHY FEEDBACK IS LIKE SPAGHETTI PSYCHOLOGY AND SEEING WHAT STICKS. This past weekend marked a real milestone for me in skateboarding. I was finally able to...
This week’s essay is a little addition to the brand new JOY THEORY episode. Start with the episode. Then read this. It will make a lot more sense. Part of improving my skateboarding this summer, particularly my kickturn, has been being open to feedback. As I mentioned in the JOY episode, skateboarding is kind of a feedback unicorn. Feedback here exists in the Safe+ Useful quadrant and runs smoothly, fostering improvement within the community. It’s magical as fuck and somehting I hope to be able to really dissect and replicate in other environments. Not everyone wants to skateboard, but can we all participate in feedback like someone who skates off a 73 foot ramp, right? The feedback I received...
