Self-Coaching

Today’s Self-Coaching episode addresses the crucial role that optimism and pessimism have on your liberation from emotional struggle. Although I’ll be talking about optimism in next week’s podcast, I felt it was crucial to first address what happens when we identify with pessimism, “I’ll never get better,” “life’s too hard, I just can’t handle it.” This is the voice of pessimism, which has become...

Perhaps the best way to describe Responsive Living would be the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) phrase Let go, let god. The simplicity of this adage may escape you,// but trust me, it’s quite profound. In AA parlance, it has to do with letting go of compulsive, destructive thinking and handing yourself over to a higher power. From a secularized, Self-Coaching standpoint, Responsive Living is learning to...

Releasing yourself from struggle You’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. When you get caught up in the incessant chatter of insecurity-driven thinking, having a simple picture in your mind can be far more useful than a thousand words of analyzing or trying to understand the “whys” of your suffering. In this Self-Coaching episode, I provide two compelling, fail-safe visualiza...

How exactly do you stop allowing yourself to be manipulated by neurotic thinking? The simple answer to this question is best summed up by something my grandmother was fond of saying: You can’t stop a bird from flying into your hair, but you don’t have to help it build a nest. You may not be able to stop neurotic thoughts from percolating up into consciousness, but you don’t have to passively allow...

If you do nothing about your thinking, nothing will change. If you do something about your thinking, you will change. In this Self-Coaching podcast, I will introduce you to the first of four steps involved in Mind-Talk. Mind-Talk is my unique technique for ensuring liberation from anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggles. Today's episode with teach you two critical exercises: Detached Mind...

It’s critical for you to understand that when it comes to your awareness, your conscious thoughts are not alone. With conscious awareness, you can, for example, be totally conscious and aware of your compulsive, worrisome ruminations: What if I get sick? What will happen to my job? What if I lose my job? What if...? but equally unconscious of the reflexive insecurity that spawns these neurotically...

In today’s Self-Coaching podcast I want to introduce you to my technique of Mind Talk. Mind Talk is a four-step program that will allow you to assert the full power of your conscious mind in order to neutralize the distorted, neurotic thinking that sustains anxiety, depression, and all emotional struggle. This technique is the core of my philosophy of Self-Coaching and will require a series of pod...

If you’ve been listening to my recent podcasts, you would have heard me say that the reason you struggle emotionally is that you have become a passive victim of old, insecurity-driven habits. And make no mistake, a passive mind will always be susceptible to manipulation by insecurity. Essentially, a passive mind, one that capitulates to the doubts, fears, and negativity of insecurity, insists that...

In today’s Self-Coaching podcast, I talk about decontaminating and neutralizing the destructive, reflexive habits of the past that operate just beneath your level of consciousness. These less-than-conscious influences, which I call part of your shadow personality, are the reason why we struggle. Keep in mind that these habits are less than conscious, not unconscious! Using my Self-Coaching techniq...

We all have what I call a ‘shadow personality.’ Although a non-nurturing parental environment can be a major contributor to the shadow personality, any disruptive developmental challenges that all children face—fear, poverty, separations, loss, illness, and so on, can result in feelings of vulnerability and insecurity. These influences comprise the shadow of your here-and-now personality. Like the...

Let me wind up my Self-Coaching series on the non-nurturing parental environment with a discussion of the indifferent parent and the defective, abusive parent. Although these examples represent extreme forms of defective parenting, to a greater or lesser extent, they play a part in the lives of many who suffer emotionally as adults. Essentially, the indifferent parent is one whose life and persona...

Last week’s podcast dealt with the overcontrolling, anxious parent. In this Self-Coaching podcast, I distinguish between the overcontrolling parent and the co-dependent parent. Whereas the overcontrolling parent is invested in controlling and protecting every aspect of a child’s life, the co-dependent parent lives vicariously through the child to compensate for their own shortcomings. Because of t...

Back around 1969, overly anxious, controlling parents began to be called “helicopter parents.” Helicopter parents have a tendency to hover over their children—helicopter-like—micromanaging every aspect of a child’s life, saying, “Watch out!” “Don’t pet that dog!” “Don’t eat that.” The child becomes merely an extension of the parent’s anxieties, fears, and insecurities. In an attempt to stay one st...

In the Self-Coaching episode, you’ll learn that by recognizing the similarities between your present-day insecurities and the nurturing/non-nurturing environment provided by your parents (as well as other significant shaping influences) during your early developmental years, you give yourself an important edge. You gain the ability to step apart from your own personal mental congestion and recogni...

In this Self-Coaching episode, I ask the question: is it possible for therapy to become…addictive? No question that receiving professional guidance and perspective can be appropriate in times of intense stress or duress, but over time, ongoing palliative therapy can easily morph into a dependency. Especially when you begin to believe that you don’t have to deal with your day-to-day struggles; I’ll...

I’ve been a psychologist since 1977; in my many years of private practice, I’ve come to see that there are seven thinking traps that most people who suffer from anxiety, depression, or emotional struggle have in common. So, if you're frustrated with your life or your lack of happiness, I can’t tell you how important it is for you to be aware of these tendencies. In this Self-Coaching episode, you’...

Join me in a rather embarrassing disclosure from my early days of innocence. It all began in seventh grade when Father Devine, my parish priest, gave the boys in my class an ominous admonition, one that altered my behavior for decades to follow. The problem wasn’t what Father Devine said, it was my misinterpretation that led to my problem. All kids try to make sense of information that is often la...

In this Self-Coaching episode, I discuss lying--the good kind, the bad kind, and the ugly kind. Simply put, lying is the willful substitution of fiction for fact. Not all lying is bad. In fact, what we typically call white lying can actually be considered beneficial. Call it what you like, being diplomatic, kind, or generous, it’s all the same thing: choosing to filter our true feelings in order t...

In this Self-Coaching episode, I reveal my secret for successfully helping people liberate themselves from emotional struggle. Whether you’re experiencing anxiety, depression, panic, compulsion, or other emotional struggles, there is only one question you need to answer if you want to liberate yourself to a life of what I call psychological spontaneity. It’s really not that complicated. It’s like...

In this Self-Coaching episode, the focus isn’t on the transient weight loss associated with dieting but on a lifelong goal of liberating yourself from destructive eating. It may help to keep in mind a saying derived from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “Know your enemy.” To avoid being victimized by impulses, cravings, misperceptions, or mindless destructive patterns, it’s imperative to know and appreci...

In this Self-Coaching episode, I want to help you demystify your thoughts, especially the neurotic, torturous thoughts that lead to emotional struggle. It begins by depersonalizing your insecurity-driven thinking, understanding that these aren’t your thoughts—well, not consciously intended thoughts—they’re nothing more than iterations of the same-old-same-old promptings of your habit of insecurity...

If you tell someone that you’re feeling depressed, they’ll no doubt understand what you’re talking about. Feeling empty, sad, down-in-the-dumps, worthless, or just plain blah is often commonly experienced with depression. The dictionary generically defines depression as a “pressing down,” which is precisely what the emotions associated with depression feel like—a weight on your shoulders, an overw...

Everyone worries, right? If so, are we, in fact, genetically programmed to “worry” about threatening future events? If so, then by extension, are we doomed, to a greater or lesser degree, to be anxious? The answer is yes. We seem to be programmed to worry, and yes, we seem to be programmed to get anxious. But there is a caveat. Both worrying and anxiety can be either perfectly normal or terribly n...

We are all creatures of habit. Whether it’s brushing your teeth, taking your daily shower, or jogging every day, clearly, not all habits are destructive. However, when habits are driven by insecurity and a need to escape emotional vulnerability, they can become neurotic, even addictive attempts to kick the here-and-now discomfort down the road by escaping it. This is called denial. But how do you...

If you’re like most people who have tried to understand why your life has become so twisted and tormented, you’ve probably spent most of your time scouring the weeds of your past looking for clues as to “Why?”And you’ve likely come out of those weeds still feeling stuck. You may have tried therapy (formal or self-help bibliotherapy) yet, you’re still struggling. In my estimation, whether it’s form...