Here is something I published last week on the idea of skills being part of us regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. Personality is extremely stable. (This does not mean we can never change. It’s just that changes are difficult. This fact is not as discouraging as you might think. People can still [...]
Category Archives: Life
Citius, Altius, Fortius
The olympics and I go way back. I was in the 1976 games in Montreal. Well…more like “at” the games rather than “in.” I was 17 and my summer job was to work in crowd control. We were all hired for six weeks even though the games took place over the last two. For the [...]
Vacations from heaven (or hell); They’re all good!
Just before going on vacation I decided to write something light for Métro. I thought about the annual media requests for quotes about vacations from an “expert.” I am not aware of any profound research in the area (although there probably is) and of course there are no graduate courses on the topic. Nevertheless, an [...]
A great life revisited
Sadly, Randy Pausch’s inspirational battle with cancer ended on July 25. If you are one of the few who haven’t seen it, watch his now famous “Last Lecture,” which I posted in this blog last February (“a great attitude, a great life“). It is the full length version. The shorter version given on the Oprah [...]
The hard worker and the smart worker
I am in a fairly unique position at the Douglas. I’m a manager, yet I have no actual staff. My role is that of providing professional development. The professionals work directly for their programs instead of for the psychology department. What this implies is that both staff and management feel equally comfortable talking to me [...]
A great attitude…a great life
A friend of mine sent me a link to a site that she thought I might like (especially since I wrote a post on a similar topic on October 29, 2007). It is a video of a lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University given by Dr. Randy Pausch, a professor who has only a few [...]
The tsunami and the raindrop
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a traffic jam where I argued that little gestures can have big impacts when cumulative effects are taken into account. This week, I wrote a column on a similar theme.I first got the idea after speaking to a fairly young client who was frustrated by the fact that [...]
Christmas memories and the symbols that evoke them
I was struggling with what to write this week. Last year I wrote something called My Christmas Wishes and I thought I could come up with a new list. Well, nothing came. I then thought I’d try to address the idea of managing Christmas stress, a topic that comes up every year (media outlets always [...]
Prolonging life: Attitude and cancer
In tomorrow morning’s column (October 30), I wrote about a study that made the front page of the Montreal Gazette last week. It reported on a study by James Coyne that showed that cancer survival was not affected by attitude. I had the topic in the back of my mind for a while since this [...]
Reasonable accommodation
With yesterday’s news came the report on a recent poll about Quebecer’s attitudes about the accommodation of religious groups. I thought the timing was quite good since I had written a column on the related issue of immigration that was to appear in Metro the same day (a lucky coincidence). Unfortunately, I got bumped (it [...]
