Honestly Unorthodox

The day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, his doting wife appeared statuesque behind the Turning Point USA Podium, to a live audience, preaching the goodness of God. On the podium were the words, “May Charlie be received into the merciful arms of Jesus, our loving Savior.” With a quivering voice, she made repeated mentions of Charlie now being “home.” My eyes rolled to the back of my head. This...

“Lard ass” was the most crowd-pleasing term for overweight children in the 90’s. Genetics blessed my brother and I with lean-yet-muscular physiques with little effort, though we inherited my Dad’s affinity for sports from early on. We were never targeted as lard-asses, and I also don’t remember us calling others “lard-ass” unless they were our closest friends. Adults passively shushed those of us...

This will be a 2-part piece which lays out the 2 pillars of a better workplace: physiology as the foundation of behavior and functioning (this piece), and adjusting the “system” so that behavior follows actual, predictable feedback loops… similar to dog training (Gasp!)--- this is the next piece. In Cheyenne’s right hand is a 32-ounce Dunkin’ Donuts cup adorned with a bitten-in-several-places stra...

I once worked with a teenager who had to be padlocked in her own home from the inside. A highly aggressive kid with a knack for sprinting out of her own home to charge into the garages, locked doors, and windows of others’ houses, she was both a liability and a threat to her family and society. The police had been called on several occasions because of her relentlessly pounding on strangers’ doors...

I shared recently that I was canned from a school consulting gig that I actually very much enjoyed. As the Big Man Above would have it, I’ve since received nearly 10 different offers for work doing the exact same thing. This is one of the upsides of working in healthcare, I suppose: with America’s mental and physical health deteriorating at the rates it has, you can essentially get fired on Monday...

Pssssst: I have a link that anyone can access that shows 100 ways behavior analysis can be applied outside of the autism world if that’s what you feel trapped in (much of my audience is behavioral health staff, but I’m sure this can be of use to anyone!): 100 WAYS TO ESCAPE THE AUTISM WORK WORLD Most people think increasing their income requires one of three things: • A new degree • A new job• A c...

If you can’t prove the value you create, negotiation won’t save you. Leverage determines which negotiation strategies are available to you. Not effort, not seniority, not even competence. LEVERAGE! Thanks for reading Operation: Replace My Salary! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. If you have vivid fantasies of your company’s building burning to the ground (obviously with...

Do you know how much you need, AT A MINIMUM PER MONTH, to survive? Thanks for reading Operation: Replace My Salary! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. If you don’t, fear not. Many of us millennials have been spared the financial street smarts to understand how money moves. Even more common is the wall-to-wall fear that we’re not making enough, that we’re only “making ends...

Instagram has a chokehold on your options. Should you rely on social media alone for financial advice, you’re faced with two choices: stay miserable as a W2, or start a business. There’s technically a third arm of disillusion that is buying a business (which in theory is legit), which has young people believing they can operate a 6-figure boring business from behind their computer on a beach in Tu...

Two jobs can pay the same but feel very different. The chakra-nervous-system aligners dub this phenomenon “feeling X in your body,” or evidence that our nervous system is “fried” because of this dissonance between passion and forced labor. It is a misalignment of sorts, that’s for sure… While I tend to scoff at this sort of verbiage, along with phrases like “emotional labor”, there is some room fo...

Any brand of advice on the interwebs loves a good one-liner. Should you hope to retire by age 39, “Stop spending money on $7 lattes and do cardio!” Not sure what connection running a 6:40 mile has to drinking Folgers in the comfort of your own home, but sure, make of that what you will. One liners are for entertainment and amusement. And while I’m not against a solid mantra to get me through immed...

POV: You’re a behavior analyst who was promised vast opportunity because of your credential, but you’re stuck working as “the autism behavior person.” That sucks! Kitty corner to the endless opportunity promise is the field’s vow to provide jobs outside of children and even healthcare: Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), health and nutrition, sports coaching, sleep and habit consulting. And...

I’ve fallen into the trap of procrastination dressed up as intellectual curiosity. We all have. We purchase the trilogies of books and attend the Masterclasses and clamor to sit front and center at our favorite influencer’s conference about self-betterment… and proceed to do zilch. Listening and learning are crucial until they replace action. Herding a company’s cats to “the same page” through wor...

“He who has a why can bear almost any how.” — Nietzsche What if what you value is unimportant to others? And what if your “why” is entirely incongruent with your friend’s “why”? What helps you extract meaning from your relationships may be the very factor which plunders another. Further, how are we to decide whose values are prioritized, and under what set of conversational “rules” do we govern ou...

*THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS PIECE, SO IF YOU PLAN TO WATCH BLACK RABBIT, SAVE THIS FOR WHEN YOU’RE DONE! It was a weeknight when my family wedged ourselves into the car to pick up my brother from jail. Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Conner had served for just under a year for reasons I still don’t quite understand. He’d been ca...

My parents live deep in chitlins of my ass, even at 33 years old. Mom calls regularly at 8:07PM to remind me, with her signature flair of judgment, that I haven’t called my aunt to wish her a Happy Birthday. She knows this because she accidentally-on-purpose just happened to stumble into conversation with my aunt about whether or not Kayla has talked to you yet, have you heard from her today since...

Are we confronting violence, or simply competing to narrate it ? I need not provide examples of our culture’s mixed responses to the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska, or the wicked assassination of Charlie Kirk. Peruse through any social media platform you’re guaranteed a fit of rage, regardless of your political affiliation. Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive ne...

Railing against red flags sterilizes life to that of the Stepford Wives. Humans are irrational, contradictory, unsound oddballs. And that’s the entire point. Social exchanges aren’t draining because our “social battery is low”, or because people are hyper-sensitive to offense, or even because every person we speak with claims to be a thought leader parroting the doctrine of whatever religion they’...

I am a corpse collector of failed business ventures. I’ve tried and failed ideas across industries, interests, and even skill sets. It’s what has hardened my tolerance to rejection and made life wildly easier (and more interesting) to work through. I’m also the laziest “business owner” you’ll ever meet. Modern culture is rife with inspiration-porn. I suppose the idea of a “reel”, after all, is to...

Yes, Chef People-pleasing is a culturally-induced pathogen according to Millennials. I do tend to agree that some brands of people-pleasing, like those in which we inadvertently try to control how others respond, are unbecoming. I wrote an entire piece on people-pleasing many months ago, which you can read here . My thesis is simple: people-pleasing has little to do with appeasing another person,...

Passion is an emotional prank. At least if it’s used as a metric for declaring a major and making money. Dependence breeds resentment. And there is no force as poisonous, as potent, as the apathy born of loathing what you used to love. Many of you contacted me to share how deeply you resonated with my last piece about buying a laundromat. I figured I’d capitalize on our apathy and perform an autop...

*As a quick aside, I’m changing the format of my pieces so that they’re easier to read and are more visually pleasing. As much as I despise the idea of “dumbing down” the skill of reading comprehension, it’s worth a shot to condense things into formats better received. I’ve shortened the material as well as included numbered lists/bulleted sections to give you a better idea of what you’re getting...

I lie about my brother because I’m desperate to control how other people will respond, despite impossible conversations being central my entire shtick. Consciously, I fail to see these “people-pleasing” bids as attempts to manipulate the outcome of a conversation. Growing more aware of our deception, but choosing to deceive regardless, would render a person cruel or clinically bat-shit (or both)....

To avoid semantic arguments and/or confusion, any reference to optimist or pessimist throughout this piece will be based on the below definitions. Optimist: a person who tends to be hopeful and confident about the future or the success of something. Thanks for reading honestly unorthodox.! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Pessimist: a person who tends to see the worst a...

I take an unconventional approach to treatment. And by “unconventional”, I mean common sense, common sense which is largely condemned in mental health and behavioral health fields. When I first suggested a student with social anxiety be required to take public speaking, her treatment team responded, “Won’t that just make her anxiety like, so much worse?” This was nearly 5 years ago, right as the t...