In ancient Greece Hippocrates defined four personality types: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic. These were based on body fluids, or humors. Today we simply use questionnaires such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, MBTI, to define sixteen basic personality types. In Nurture by Nature, Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger explain the sixteen basic Myers-Briggs types and how […]
Category Archive:
Leadership
Less Is More
Wandering around the airport bookstore looking for reading material because, alas, I had gulped through all my books on an eight hour flight, I lit on a bright green book by Marc Lesser, with an intriguing premise, Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less. Lesser, an entrepreneur and Zen teacher, asks us to examine five self-defeating […]
The Missing Element
In his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Ken Robinson, Ph.D. tells us that we each need to find that place where the things we love to do intersect with the things we know how to do well. Robinson calls this place of intersecting talent and passion “the Element.” Each person needs […]
Eat, Drink, Breathe, Think
A newspaper article written by a physician summarized a discussion on health with these words: It’s about what you eat and what you drink,What you breathe and what you think. What you eat. Putting the right food into our bodies is essential to good health, as well as physical and mental development. Today we understand […]
Five Hindrances to Enlightenment
Last week’s post discussed how seven factors in Zen Buddhist teachings might be seen as road signs to happy and healthy human development. These seven factors are universal virtues that are found in most cultures of the world, in different words and contexts, but there all the same. Mindfulness. Investigation. Energy. Joy. Tranquility. Concentration. Equanimity. […]
Seven Factors of Enlightenment
Zen Buddhist monks might be the last people you’d think would clown around. Laughing, though, is an expression of joy, and joy is one of the seven factors of enlightenment. Reading an article about a Zen Buddhist monk who teaches students to smile, laugh, and tell jokes made me curious about the other six factors […]
Holding the Paradox
Have you ever taken two magnets and tried to put like poles together? If you put the north and the south pole of a magnet together, there is attraction and attachment. Try to put two north or two south poles together, and you feel a repulsion. Push as you might, you can’t get the two […]
Slaying the Scary Green Monster
Green. Everything today is green. Cars are green. Food is green. Sports equipment is green. Kermit the Frog should be happy because he crooned that “it’s not easy being green.” Kermit was right, though. It isn’t easy being green, or even hearing about it, especially for our children. They are bombarded with images and advertising […]
John 15:13
The idea of selfless service was the theme of a story from my kindergarten days. The Sunday School lesson told of a firefighter who died saving families from a burning building. The Bible verse to memorize for the week was John 15:13, which reads, “God hath no greater love than this, that a man should […]
Beginning a Conversation
We were looking forward to spending the weekend with old friends and their eight- and ten-year-old sons, whom we had never met. As soon as quick introductions were made, the boys picked up their electronic game machines and headed toward the den. At dinner the boys made plates of food and sat at the coffee […]