Self-Help

This group of essays is written to provide a series of suggestions to Native people who seek to deal with alcoholism from the perspective of their unique heritages and with an understanding that the pressures to which Native traditions and societies have been subjected may trigger dysfunctional behavior, such as excessive drinking.

The Personal Balanced Scorecard (PBSC) is a journey into the inner self, where values, hopes, dreams and aspirations lie quietly waiting to be discovered. Taking the journey as an individual allows you to view your life objectively and authentically as a whole person and provides a roadmap of your dreams and aspirations translated into manageable and measurable milestones. As a part of the Total Performance Scorecard (TPS) process which I introduced in 2003 in Total Performance Scorecard: Redefining Management to Achieve Performance with Integrity, and which has been translated into more than 20 languages, the Personal Balanced Scorecard can also be an effective way for managers to coach others to achieve integrity and alignment between work and life. The benefit comes from changing individual behavior in order to drive organizational effectiveness, enhance performance, and increase self-awareness, personal responsibility and motivation. PBSC is an integral part of this organic and holistic Total Performance Scorecard process, which is an organizational and cultural change tool and a method for ongoing effectiveness. Its uniqueness lies in aligning and a combination of Personal and Organizational goals to result in Individual Performance Plans for each employee. The focus of this book is the PBSC portion, which comprises a search for self-knowledge, self-discovery and self-mastery.

The Transformational Odyssey was written to help those individuals who are facing difficult life transitions, and who are attempting to successfully navigate tough life decisions and engage in deep self-discovery. Unlike other self-help books that attempt to provide readers with homespun advice for addressing difficult life challenges, The Transformational Odyssey shows readers how to take charge of their self-growth and development. It does this by providing readers with several applied techniques for engaging in deep self-learning in a more profound and fundamentally life-changing way. The title, The Transformational Odyssey, reflects the book’s integrative metaphor of transformational learning as a personal odyssey of self-discovery. The word “odyssey” connotes a long, and sometimes arduous and meandering journey. Although an odyssey may present the traveler with unexpected trials and challenges, in the end it may yield increased wisdom and knowledge. Building on this metaphor, The Transformational Odyssey introduces readers to eight passages that they will inevitably encounter during their own personal odysseys of self-discovery. Each of these passages involves a uniquely different learning challenge that, as it is successfully navigated, increases the reader’s capacity for self-growth. The Transformational Odyssey is written in a conversational style, as if the author were sitting down next to the reader to share my forty-plus years of experience as a personal coach and life transition counselor. Since different people learn in different ways, this book incorporates a variety of different learning methods, including actual cases, exercises, suggested actions, famous quotes, and metaphors. For those readers to would like to dig deeper on a given topic, at the end of each chapter the author has included a separate section that introduces readers to related cutting-edge research in the field of human psychology. The topics included in these sections cover such areas as mindfulness, meditation, narratives, and future selves.

This book is intended to help you enhance your common sense (your intuitive decision making skills) as well as your critical thinking skills (your rational planning and decision-making skills). A big claim, to be certain, but undoubtedly a valid one. As you are aware, your common sense, and with it your ability to make many decisions almost intuitively with minimum thought, is vastly better today than it was when you were a teenager. Experience and learning that translated itself into better judgment and reasoning ability, accounts for this change. More precisely, new knowledge led to thought habits that became so solid that you spend hardly a moment on decisions to which they apply. That is how common sense and judgment mature. Practicing the relatively simple formula that this book offers, and developing the habit to apply it regularly, will help you take another quantum step toward a higher level of common sense and intuitive reasoning when you develop plans and make decisions. At the same time, the book will provide you with tools that will sharpen your ability to think about work and personal decisions you are facing from a more comprehensive perspective than you are probably doing now. In addition to helping with plans and decisions, the book will show you how to be an more effective leader. If you manage anything, with or without staff, are preparing for managerial responsibities as a college student, or if you seek to take a managerial career track, this book can be of significant use to you. It does not matter whether your career is in business, non-profit organization, or government, in health care, retail, engineering, or transportation, just to name a few. The concept presented here addresses decisions on matters which, directly or indirectly, involve people. If you are, or expect to be a manager with a small or a large staff, this book will not only help you make better managerial decisions, it will also help you become a better leader. However, even if you are on a professional track where you manage a function, but do not, or will not have anyone reporting to you, your work still has impact on people. In these professional positions the leadership aspects of your managerial responsibilities may just be of smaller impact, overall, on your plans and decisions. You will, nevertheless bring better results if you consider many of the thoughts and concepts discussed here. Moreover, most professionals are frequently in positions on teams or projects where they are likely to assume leadership responsibilities. In these situations, the concepts discussed in this book can be most useful. Even where your leadership and management responsibilities, and decisions, involve family affairs, most of the sections of this book can be valuable. They address key issues for decision-making and interpersonal relations, and they do it from a unique and comprehensive perspective.

Ornamented Lives is a theoretical synthesis of cultural psychology, aesthetics, and philosophy of meaning construction. It is an extension of the author’s theory of Semiotic Dynamics (Culture in Minds and Societies, 2007) to the field of ornaments. Ornaments are not merely “decorations” but play the important role of guiding the affective depths of the human minds. This is done by capturing the whole fields of perceivable peripheral spaces and filling them with highly recursive forms. The book concentrates on the visual ornaments of various kinds, indicating in them the tensions between basic forms—linear and curvilinear. This tension is present in human construction of environments—natural growth involves curvilinear forms while human constructions introduce linearity. The basic tension between linear and curvilinear infinities is expressed in the use of spiral forms in art and architecture. The book builds a theoretical account of human beings constantly creating sublime life occasions that give them affective charge for dramatizations of ordinary living. Episodically the sublime acquires new quality—becomes aesthetic. The coverage in this book links the aesthetic, the sublime, and the mundane into one theoretical scheme within cultural psychology.

“Know thyself” is something that has been advocated by great philosophers, psychologists, and religious leaders since the beginning of recorded history. The principal aim of this book is to promote greater self-awareness through a deeper understanding of how your mind works and by cultivating your ability to observe your own mind in action. Most of the chapters contain simple exercises that are designed to enhance your ability to understand and control your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Since your emotional reactions to life events are largely shaped by your beliefs, many of these exercises are designed to help you get in closer touch with your beliefs and, if necessary, to change some of these beliefs. Each of us has the ability—right now in this conscious moment—to begin reshaping our life’s experience through a better understanding of how the mind works. The book is thus intended for people who feel that they worry too much, or are dissatisfied with their jobs or their relationships with others, or always feel rushed because there are too many things that they have to do. It’s for people who want less frustration, guilt, irritability, boredom, or unhappiness and more love, joy, adventure, and sense of control over their lives.

This volume aims at further articulating and developing the cultural psychological interest in community. It focuses on the processes through which individuals constitute communities and the processes that restrain or enable moving forward with others. This interest is necessary especially now that the world is on the move. Economic crises, political crises and ecological crises have led to reinforced migration patterns, a rise in authoritarianism and xenophobia, and have become a threat to the survival of the world as we know it, particularly to minorities and indigenous communities. At the same time, we are witnessing the birth of new networks, dialogues and actions, generated by people within, between and among communities. Therefore, this volume collects interdisciplinary theoretical, empirical and applied contributions enabling engagement with communities in cultural psychology. This involves both reflections on meaning-making processes and projections on how they feed into social transformation, in exchange with community psychology, anthropology and sociology. People vitally depend on community to effectively negotiate or resist in complex intercultural or intergroup settings. In the wake of human rights violations or to prevent further damage to the environment a community is needed to undertake action. From feminist movements and disability activism to the otherwise marginalized: how do people constitute communities? How do they resist as a community? How can cultural psychology contribute not only to understand meaning-making processes, but also connect them to processes of social transformation? Migration, moving through and connecting to different communities can affect meaning making in significant ways. People consider themselves as members of one or another community, but they also increasingly enter into new settings of social practice with new means for action. How might creative meaning-making build bridges between communities? How might new community arise in between or with others? How can cultural psychology deal with intercultural processes without reifying different cultures? These are the central questions that the, mostly emerging, scholars from many corners of the world address in this book. Their research addresses different institutional settings that are resisted and transformed from within, in dialogue with others. From social work, NGOs and municipal activity to university talent mobility and art projects for youth. Other settings are newly inhabited, from the public square and the social media to a foreign city and neighborhood church. Thus, more communities appear on the map of cultural psychology.

This is a book about recovery. Not recovery from drugs, alcohol, or surgery, but recovery from the numerous and relentless demands we face in handling our everyday obligations. These demands take a toll on us. Regardless of whether they come from paid employment, caring for young children, looking after elderly parents, or trying to get through graduate school, our daily obligations weigh heavily on us. They deplete our energy. They drain us of motivation. They leave us feeling weary and exhausted. If you tend to feel worn out and want to know how to replenish yourself, this book is for you. We should be able to recover from our daily obligations during our downtime. But many of us don’t. In this book we will explain why downtime is inadequate for helping us recharge our batteries, and present you with an effective alternative. Recent scientific developments from around the globe have shed light on the processes that reverse the draining effects of our obligations and help us successfully recover in our leisure time. Not only that, research also reveals that when effective recovery occurs it not only recharges our batteries, but makes us feel happier, makes us healthier, and makes us better at handling the demands that drained us in the first place. We call this boosting to reflect the multi-pronged benefits of successful recovery. In this book we draw on the most cutting-edge science to explain how to transform our ineffective downtime into valuable uptime. Uptime is the time away from our obligations that successfully satisfies the factors that lead us to feel replenished, recharged, recovered, and gives us a boost.

The notion of microfoundations has received growing interest in neo-institutional theory (NIT) along with an increasing interest in microfoundational research in disciplines such as strategic management and organizational economics. However, despite reference to the same term, there are decisive differences in how microfoundations have been addressed across different disciplines. 

In North America, 64% of adults and 25% of children are overweight or obese. We are bombarded by food; it is everywhere we turn. People with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) are an untapped expertise in combatting this problem. People with this genetic disorder gain approximately 20-30% more weight on 50% less calories, and are driven to eat. The traditional approach to this syndrome was to lock up all food, and control, restrict, and supervise all activity. While people with PWS were kept alive, they had no quality of life. Today, there are leaders within the PWS community who are taking cutting-edge approaches to combating both health and quality of life issues. Their secrets are revealed within this book. It is a must-read for anyone seeking: a new approach to societal health and wellness; an answer to weight maintenance for themselves or someone they love, and/or; a means of supporting persons with disabling conditions such as PWS and beyond to achieve meaningful, healthy lives. This book explores health and wellness, with an emphasis on food drive, as well as disability culture, through the voices of self-advocates with PWS and families. It should be read by: • Parents of all children (disabled and not) who want to instill positive, healthy food practices. • Adults who have attempted diets and still not lost the weight. Adults who are seeking an alternate approach. • Doctors and other medical professionals who seek continuing education. • Teachers who are negotiating the balance between organic and teachable conditions. • Self-advocates with disabling conditions who want to explore their own personal voice through the voices of others experiencing stigma and oppression. • Family members of persons with disabling conditions who want to affirm their experiences and interpretations and learn how to navigate the systems. • Government administrators who want to inform their funding allocation. • Extended family, friends, and the public-at-large who want to understand disability and reexamine their attitudes. • Human service workers who want to know how best to support persons with disabling conditions and how to listen to families. • Anyone who wants to know about Prader-Willi Syndrome.