Dr. Constant Mouton | How professionals can build community and stay mentally healthy during the pandemic

The benefits of building community have been well proven, but often, we feel we don’t have time to do so outside our work and family obligations.

But there are serious mental health risks associated with not-disconnecting from work according to psychiatrist and addiction recovery specialist Dr. Constant Mouton. 

 "If work and/or family are your only community, then you get into trouble with things like burnouts," Mouton says. Family and work are important but they can't meet all of our social needs. If we rely too much on family or colleagues, we will miss out on opportunities for personal and professional growth. 

Burnout occurs when the feeling of overwhelm, emotional drain, inability to meet constant demands continues for six months or more and we begin to lose interest and motivation in certain roles that we took on in the first place. 

In the Netherlands, where Mouton works, people who have been experiencing serious stress for less than six months can apply for sick leave and are asked to participate in various coaching activities, including finding activities in communities.

“In the Netherlands, much is focused on self care, wellbeing, finding balance and finding communities that lighten your spirits and lighten your burden - like a counterforce to work,” he says.

Mouton’s lectures on the neurobiology of addiction and burnout are quite similar. "I can just as well use that same lecture for burnout because the biological ways and the roots are very similar to burnout. It's all sympathetic overload, you have to work with your parasympathetic nervous system. You have to do a lot of winding down and calming down, mindfulness."

Community outside of work and family is a choice and it provides us with—what Mouton refers to as—collective resilience. 

“The real difference is that family is a group of people who are closely related to one another by blood or marriage or adoption, or nowadays also by choice,” he says. “Community is often a choice.”

“By building these communities, in the same way that we build family relationships, we can actually access that collective resilience and strength in everything we do and all the work we do to overcome adversity, trauma, loss, discrimination, all of those things,” he says. “Both families and communities have a lot in common. They support us in finding connection with others and that helps us grow and develop and also heal. Families and communities are really an abundant resource for stories and shared beliefs. And that makes us understand our process in a current situation.”

Dr. Mouton is certified in a unique kind of interventions, working long-term and with total transparency, with families whose members suffer from addictions and various mental health issues. In his work, he uses a "5 to 1" ratio. It takes five care professionals to replace one family member. And the equivalent of a minimum of 3.3 family members are needed for successful outcomes during such interventions.

"If you help people find communities that can support them, that will help them process things and aid the recovery as well,” he says.

“The function of a community is about that connection, mutual support, social participation, cooperation, and it’s usually towards a certain goal,” Mouton says. 

“I just love the African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” says the South African native.

Mouton recommends joining three different types of communities that are aimed at higher goals. "In finding them, look for groups that meet up with your core beliefs, but that also add something to your life in terms of what you like or what you aspire to be." Do something for your body, your mind, and your soul.

• Body-wise: running club, a gym or fitness or a judo, karate or whatever you're into.

• Mind: take up a hobby that kind of sparks your imagination, like art class or writing or something creative

• Spiritual: like yoga or meditation

“This way you cover all bases. It’s quite nice because you combine self-development with community,” he says. The rest and relaxation helps to disconnect from work and other obligations.

What if it feels like no one in your area has your interests, goals, norms, and values? 

A traditional community would be referred to as a collection of people within a geographical area, but Mouton says there that today thanks to technology, the community can be online.

"The community doesn't have to be local. You can also find things online. There's also more out there than you think. The first step is to always dare to be vulnerable and to look for the others that don't fit the mold. The internet is a wonderful resource for those kinds of things. Nowadays with modern technology, things like Zoom and platforms, you don't need to be limited by your geography.” 

Does one start with interests or values?

"You might start with interests and then work out the norms and values amongst each other. I think if you're an outsider who wants to join a community that's already there because the community has a life of its own. It's also an entity of its own. The norms and the values are there already.

"You find communities that have a common goal. It can be one that is trying to overcome a potential threat, like discrimination, "which is in the media of late." 

What if we are expats?

If you live in a foreign country, and depending on the cultural boundaries, you could ask for recommendations at work. “If you're an expat, it is best to start with expat communities and branch off from there.”

What if we are older than 29?

The older we get the more difficult it seems to make friends. When we are young we are "less inhibited" and that's got to do with the brain and prefrontal cortex development. "In our 40s, we become more reserved as we get older. We know ourselves better... So in a way, we get more particular with whom we want to be friends or not."

What if we are single?

Single people need not despair. It is a good thing to be individualistic and do your own thing whether you are single or in a relationship. 

"In the Netherlands, people often go out with friends and leave their partners at home and say, well, this is a friends' evening and I'll see you later. This is quite acceptable."

So join a running or a yoga club, take up a hobby, and something creative that you can do. All of this can help you live a richer, more resilient life and help you in both burnout prevention and cure. The basic resilience is there already. 

Constance Dierickx, PhD | 9 flags to look out for when onboarding new clients to save you money

As coaches, mentors, or consultants, we’ve all experienced those clients. You know, the ones we have to chase for payment, who send us War-and-Peace-length emails, cancel sessions at the last minute, try to micromanage our process, resist any real work in (and in between) sessions, or who—citing a lack of real friends—try to pressure us to attend virtual one-on-one coffee chats. 

Don’t you wish you had that magic toolbox to triage clients, separating out good prospects you can truly help from those who need clinical assistance?

That’s why screening prospective clients is key before onboarding them, according to Constance Dierickx, author, clinical psychologist and executive coach. But how? “I have a framework in my head,” Dierickx says, which she says is embedded now after years of clinical practice. Referred to as the “Uber-coach” or the “corporate secret weapon,” or The Decision Doctor®, Dierickx is used to pressure-cooker scenarios such as high-stakes decisions, transitions, and crises. 

As coaches, we don’t all have a PhD in psychology—like Dierickx has—to help us weed out those bad clients, but she says there are some behaviors to look out for. 

Saying no to income is hard for any coach, and takes courage. But here are 9 red flags that could save you time, money, and aggravation.

1. Self-proclaimed experts

It’s a simple but powerful truth: if your client isn’t willing to learn, your coaching engagement won’t go well. Recently, Dierickx decided against working with a very successful entrepreneur, because that person showed “a pattern of behavior wherein she could not give up being the expert.” This person had to prove to herself that all her learning came from her own choices about whom to talk to, what environment to be in, what decisions she made. She had to give herself all the credit for learning anything. “And I think it's very antithetical to learning,” Dierickx says. “I think one of the wonderful things about great leaders that I've worked with is that they can say, ‘I didn't know that. Tell me more.’ And so they're doing more than one thing at a time. One, they're learning. Two, they're reinforcing the behavior of someone else to share what they know. And three, if they do it in public, they're saying, without saying, to a group of people: “This is a learning environment. This is an environment where we're going to continuously learn and grow.’”

When leaders say they are learning from others but don’t demonstrate it, it shows a lack of integrity. “It's just the worst possible scenario because the leader is showing people that they're saying one thing and doing another,” she says. “Learn in public. Wander around and learn in public.”

“I will tell you that some of the worst people to try to coach are people who think that they're coaches,” she says. “And the same is true if somebody has a PhD or a law degree or whatever, and every five minutes, they're telling you that.”

Such clients have what Dierickx calls “cognitive rigidity” or the inability to think about something in a different way. “They are so defended that they can’t tolerate a new idea,” she says.

2. Potential rescue missions

During our coaching development, we learn to identify good prospects by their willingness to change. Dierickx takes it further. Being willing isn’t enough.

“It's beyond willingness, it's ability,” she says.

The way to determine a prospect’s ability to change is to explore his or her past changes. This determines whether they are not only open and willing to change, as well as whether they can change at all. The key is to ask them to tell you about something that they changed about themselves or their circumstances that they feel proud about. 

“I ask: ‘What's something you're proud of that took a lot of effort on your part to go from what was, to what it is now?’” she says.

They need to have actually changed something about themselves. If that prospective client can’t give good examples of prior change, then decline working with them. Any work with this client will become a rescue mission. They may change their behavior in the short term, or on a surface-level, and get a promotion, but the change will only last a few months. 

Ask provocative questions. Some clients—whom you may have been hired to help retain—are already hell-bent on leaving a company. You can save a lot of time and energy by finding out what they really want on the front end.

3. That ‘ick feeling’ 

Many people talk about the importance of heeding ‘gut feelings.’ But that’s only half the battle, Dierickx says. “So when someone says to me, ‘it was gut instinct,’ get it out of your gut and put it in your brain and analyze what’s going on because that’s going to help you more,” Dierickx advises. 

She tells the story of the CEO who came to her and asked her to work with a woman whom Dierickx later found out was ‘a train wreck’. “…this senior executive starts talking to me and just wants to be my best friend in 90 seconds. And my radar is going [off].” 

Although the woman was charming, enthusiastic, attractive, executive was well put together, and exhibited very high verbal ability, the interaction was “Too much, too fast, and too personal,” Dierickx says. 

“Going around saying, ‘I did it by gut,’ you’re depriving yourself of learning what we call pattern recognition. I took that feeling of ick about this person who had a very senior job and I moved it up to my brain and asked myself, so what made it ick? Too fast, too personal, effusive, high emotionality.”

“Pattern recognition for a coach is gold,” Dierickx adds. 

Such personalities can be seductive, and there’s nothing wrong with us if we get sucked in once in a while. Even the most rational types are human beings too and can be candidates for seduction.

Dierickx remembers a patient years ago who kept getting seduced by the wrong men. She cried in her office and was convinced there was something wrong with herself. Dierickx looked at her and said it was her radar—or detection system—of that particular thing that was the problem. It was too slow. Working on her radar and strengthening it to become more sensitive helped her and gave her a needed sense of control to make better decisions. 

4. Our own too-rapid judgments

When we form too-rapid judgments about potential clients and don’t examine them,  that can lead to taking on the wrong clients too quickly. We are all prone to making inaccurate judgments about people based on our distorted views or on incomplete information. Just because someone is able to cry about their mothers, doesn’t mean they are empathetic. They may be crying about themselves.

“I'm trying to avoid a cognitive bias, which is really hard to do because we're all human and we have these,” Dierickx says. “And the reason I'm doing it is I don't want to get sucked in, and I know I can get sucked in. I'm not so grand about my ability that I think I can't get sucked in.”

“If somebody tells you, you're a horse's ass, that's just their opinion. If two people tell you, it's a coincidence. If three people tell you, buy a saddle,” says Dierickx. 

We should always be looking for data pieces that hang together. It’s a screening process that ensures we are “not simply looking for confirmatory data.”

 “And this is where adopting the mind of a scientist is incredibly useful,” Dierickx says. She goes on to explain the following methodology when she is trying to decide whether or not to work with somebody or if she is doing an assessment for a client. 

She listens, watches for, and captures data.  She writes “HO” for hypothesis, followed by whatever her head gives her, such as “controlling or unwilling to learn” or whatever her hypothesis is. 

“And then I force myself to come up with evidence for and against,” says Dierickx.

She goes back to the example of the effusive executive who gave her all those compliments. “Up to a point they were pretty pleasant. And then when she asked me to turn around, then it became unpleasant,” she says.

5. Loose boundaries

If someone is too effusive, too fast, too personal, too charming, that’s a red flag, such as when a potential client says: “I trust you. I trusted you from the moment we met.” “I'm thinking to myself: ‘You're going to hate me in about 90 days or less,” Dierickx says. The problem is that the person likely runs too hot, then too cold. 

Dierickx says this example is blatant. But what if the loose boundary is wrapped in charm and is more subtle?

Sometimes the “ick” feeling isn’t there. So what do we do then?

“Boundaries is it. Boundaries is a huge thing,” Dierickx says. We have to watch for signs.

6. Rate balkers and quibblers

Hiring a coach, consultant, or mentor is an investment. Dierickx advises us to drop prospective clients who argue about our rates. 

“You don't work with somebody and invest your intelligence and your experience and your goodwill and your hopes for them, you don't invest in them until they've invested in themselves,” Dierickx says. Interestingly, the self-proclaimed expert mentioned above had asked Dierickx to cut her fee in half. 

Dierickx counsels coaches to change peer consulting groups, if they find themselves being told to lower their fees. “Get a new group, because the problem isn't what the market will bear,” Dierickx says. “The problem is how we feel about ourselves and articulate our value.” 

People who quibble about the terms of the engagement. They may ask for eight references, giving the excuse they’re really analytical. But they are really showing a reluctance to commit to the engagement.

7. Control patterns

Coaching a micromanager or someone who is being controlling is possible, if the client can come to see the connections to other parts of their lives, according to Dierickx. If such a change isn’t possible, such a person might need a therapeutic intervention.

“As a coach, you're not responsible for that. That's their little red wagon, but you want to be able to detect it so you can make the decision, but it doesn't have to be no,” Dierickx says.

Identifying potential clients who might turn out to be the ones who try to micromanage every minute of working together is possible through the mind body connection. Typical  body sensations we feel when somebody is trying to control us include a feeling of constriction and flinching, according to Dierickx. The feeling may be intense. The key is to take that physical reaction, realize that it’s healthy and good, and ask ourselves what it is trying to tell us. If we try to verbalize what we are feeling physically, then we can do something about it rather than leaving it in the gut. The gut is the warning system, or “the sentry” that alerts us that something is wrong.“So what happens when a person is controlling is, they start showing you that very early,” says Dierickx.” They'll say things like: ‘Here's my number. Call me at the appointed time.’” 

Dierickx calls this data. That person is immediately assigning the caller role to us. 

Or controlling patterns will show in the form of questions or the following interaction:

"Well, how many times are we going to meet? What's your hourly rate?" 

"I don't work like that." 

"Well, you have to work like that because your fee has to be based on time." 

"It doesn't. And it isn't." 

"No, but you must have, at some point in time, figured out your time."

 "No, I don't."

 "Oh, come on." 

“And they just keep at you,” Dierickx says. “So I get that question about fee and time, because my fees aren't based on time. They haven't been for 12 years. I'm not pivoting to satisfy somebody who wants to implant their template on me about how I'm supposed to work.”

8. Going against advice from peers

“If you're struggling with whether or not someone's going to be a good client for you and you call a peer colleague and you ask for advice and they tell you not to do it. And you argue with them, you better look at yourself,” she said.

9. Quoting others 

If a prospect starts to quote other people when asking questions, be careful. 

That prospect may say a friend or a spouse told them to ask us a certain question. That friend or spouse is not the client in the room, so bringing them into the discussion changes the relationship from a dyad to a triad. You can’t work with someone who isn’t actually showing up. 

Dierickx had a prospect once who quoted her husband during an introductory meeting, to which she asked her whether her husband was in business with her and found out that the husband ran his own consulting firm and was not doing very well.

As Maya Angelou said, “be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” And in this case, the naked person isn’t even in the room.

Every coach or consultant wants to work with clients they can genuinely help. So we need to practice detecting behavior patterns and collecting data to help determine who will be a great client - and who won’t be. If in doubt, refer out to a therapist or psychologist or someone with a set of clinical tools. Who knows, that prospect may be able to change whatever it is that’s holding them back and return to you in a healthier, coach-able state of mind.

Dr. Judith Landau and Daria Tolstoy | 5 compassionate strategies any leader can use to to combat family challenges

Dr. Judith Landau

Drama at home can derail any leader in his or her effort to be present, aware, selfless, and compassionate at work and in life.

Take the following two case studies, for example.

Daria Tolstoy

A congresswoman—working on key legislation—learns that her drug-addicted brother has conned their elderly father into loaning him yet another sum. Or, the CEO—closing a deal while on a business trip—learns that his 11-year old son used a hammer to destroy the kitchen countertops and now threatens his mother, because she confiscated the video game controls and sweets.

Whether biological or chosen, our families are important. They provide a sense of belonging and of being loved. Research shows that people in strong families are healthier, get their needs met and express their values more often than people in struggling families. People in strong families are less likely to be filled with self-doubt. Knowing our family is there gives us the courage to take calculated risks needed to succeed professionally and personally. 

 During difficult times, such as when there is illness, estrangement, abuse, divorce or death, the whole family suffers.

For any leader who wants to address the family challenges that may be holding them back, personally and professionally, here are five strategies that can help.  

1. Find our own meaning

 The best way to deal with a difficult family member who may have hurt us, says Dr. Judith Landau, world-renowned child, family and community neuropsychiatrist, is “by finding our own meaning and purpose in life, and by resolving whatever it is.”

The work of restoring—if possible—any relationships with our spouse, our parents, or our relatives and fixing anything unresolved or negative with our children is only possible if we focus on our purpose.

There are many forms of purpose besides the altruistic kind, including survival, religion, accumulating wealth and fame, personal and spiritual development and creativity. 

 Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about purpose in his book Man’s Search for Meaning and observed that those fellow inmates who survived were those who felt they had a purpose. He concluded that meaning or purpose can be found in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".

 To do the work of finding one’s purpose, Laudau advises asking the help of a therapist, a pastor, a philosopher, or a spiritual guide. 

2. Choose our language wisely

Words matter. They can be wise, or they can be weaponized. And within the family, diplomacy is preferable to warfare. When talking about family members and other people, it is crucial that we choose our language wisely.

Landau says:

“Negative words are static, not mobile. When one uses the word ‘toxic,’ how do you recover from that? Isn’t it better to use ‘someone who’s survived trauma’? This gives room for change. Even ‘dysfunctional’ is better as it implies that that person has the capacity to drop the ‘dys’ under different circumstances.”

Landau is weary of the popular use of the term narcissist. “People usually use those terms because they don’t like somebody or they don’t like their behavior. It’s a diagnosis and shouldn’t be used loosely. Some people who behave in a narcissistic way are simply deeply injured. Their maturity may have been compromised. They are acting as smaller children, or more immature people,” she says. 

3. Understand where they’re coming from

Restoring difficult family relationships can be hard. Family members are human beings who are, by their nature, imperfect. Coming to terms may just be enough.

“It may require taking a broader perspective and understanding why that person became abusive,” Landau says. 

Understanding the origin of the abusive behavior is necessary.

“Sometimes the origin of behavior is just sheer wicked. I am thinking of people who are really egocentric… Every bully and liar I have ever treated has had to lie to an unforgiving parent because they did not accept them as they were, which could have been because they didn’t have the intellectual capacity or they weren’t able to play a sport or they had learning challenges. They learned to cover up and to bully to gain control and to lie to please the parent. If we can get to the core meaning of that behavior and it’s there, rather than a sociopath with horrible intentions, for the most part one can understand and forgive. Forgiveness is so much at the heart of moving forward.”

But what if we’ve got someone in the family who is a sociopath? 

“You have to get to a point of acceptance and distancing,” Landau advises. “Find whether there is anything of meaning within the relationship and if it’s a family member, do they have any redeeming qualities that you can enjoy or not?” 

Does it mean cutting them out entirely? 

“It’s not realistic with family,” Landau says. “We can’t move beyond. We have to find a way of coming to terms, even if it’s just forgiveness. Yes, he’s a sociopath; he behaves abominably. I make a choice. I will not participate in bad behavior. I will not participate in wrongdoing, but there is a blood connection. There is a part of him that still cares for his mother or his child, and I will only interact with him around this good quality. It’s not even forgiveness. It’s developing the capacity for tolerance and understanding.” 

According to Landau, we need to separate the person from the behavior, and we need to start doing it with our children when they are young. For instance, saying the following is crucial: “I love you, but I do not like what you just did.”

“We start with our kids when they are very little to separate out the core of the human from the behavior. We have to do this with ‘badly behaved’ family members,” Landau says.

How do we support and love a family member who is struggling? 

“You just love and support them. It’s a huge question. That’s all you can do! Let them know you love them but you don’t love their behavior,” she says. 

4. Set boundaries

Setting boundaries “is absolutely essential to being able to live with other people,” says Landau.“We need boundaries at every level of our lives to feel safe.”

Landau often sees young children who become increasingly violent due to over-permissive parenting and lack of boundaries. Examples she gives are the 10-14-year old patients she has treated who have done thousands of dollars of damage to their homes because they were never told: “This is the limit.” 

“We all have to know what is our limit,” Landau says. “If you think of a cardboard box, and little kids start pushing against those walls, if they fall down, they will feel unsafe and they will push further and further.”

Landau sees this in people who occupy positions of power, such as dictators or CEOs, who continue unchallenged and unstopped.

 5. Pass on the right behaviors to our kids

For any leader who has had a difficult upbringing, a central question emerges when they decide to have kids of their own: how can we avoid replicating past patterns and passing on dysfunction to our own children? 

“When there is conflict, it's never in isolation, says Daria Tolstoy, a systemic therapist and executive coach working in Lausanne, Switzerland. “When something in the family is not functioning right, the child will show it. Children are often stigmatized. If the couple has problems, the child will start to act out." 

According to Tolstoy, fixing things and making sure that we are passing the right behaviors on to our kids requires an attitude of choice rather than obligation.

 “Otherwise our kids will doubt our love,” Tolstoy says.

“Give the children love, more love and still more love – and the common sense will come by itself,” says Tolstoy, quoting author Astrid Lingreen, author of Pippi Longstocking.  “I really like that. Often, parents love their children, but struggle to show it. Often there are double binds. Kids start to ask themselves, ‘do my parents really love me?’ It is more important to love for just being, rather than doing. Parents can be too anxious. Let children live. There's a balance. Constantly have a natural connection with your children. I don't agree with the quality over quantity. You can't squeeze quality into a small amount of time. Parents need to walk the talk.”

Being the loving parent and the disciplinarian is key. Landau adds that if discipline is part of loving in child raising, “you never have the dichotomy and the extreme discipline needed.”  

But what if discipline didn’t begin when they were young? “You need family therapy and parenting classes,” Landau says.

Disciplining children is about being assertive. Tolstoy advises saying: “You know the rules in the family. This is what I want." (Don't focus on what you don't want.)

How do we deal with distractions and detractors, such as kids playing too many video games? Tolstoy says: “Gaming addiction is linked to pleasure. There are other pleasures. Young girls, who are anorexic, are another example. There is no pleasure in their lives. Invite them to come along to something else that gives pleasure.”

“Take things step-by-step over a long time and think long term,” Tolstoy says. “We are so tired and fed-up, we want to fix things now, but just because you've dealt with something for 10 years, doesn’t mean it will go away overnight but it will not take 10 years to fix it.”

In order to be effective, leaders need to be mindful of their personal relationship dynamics and how that is shaping them. Seeking out the help of experts is key if one is to strengthen one’s family.  

Dr. Paul Hokemeyer | What are the 3 barriers to living a ‘good life’ for the rich and powerful?

Each and every one of us has thought about what we would do if we were to win the lottery. Would we quit work? Would we give most of it away to charity? Would we build a house for our parents? Would we hang out on beaches and drink pina coladas all day?

There are many stories of individuals who—after a windfall—have either piddled away their fortunes or continued working, amassing even more money. Interestingly, both of these groups have similarities as you will read ahead.

We know that money doesn’t bring happiness, but a certain amount does. A few years ago, researchers at Purdue University and the University of Virginia did a study that concluded that $95,000 was the ideal income for individuals, and $60,000 to $75,000 was necessary for emotional well-being. 

So why aren’t those richer than $95,000 happier with the added cash? 

We asked psychotherapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, aka “Dr. Paul,” what he thinks, as he is specialized in treating people on both ends of the economic and power spectrum. 

Dr Paul started off his career working in a free clinic in Los Angeles, where he treated marginalized populations, including the underprivileged and LGBT. He moved to NYC, where he began working with a polar opposite folk: the rich and famous. Soon, he saw a commonality in the extremes. Both the very poor and the very rich were stigmatized and held in contempt by society. He witnessed how this attitude permeated even the helping professions, impacting the neutrality of clinicians treating both “cultural” groups.

In his recent book Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough, Dr. Paul shows examples of clinicians who lack the knowledge and compassion to help the moneyed and powerful cultural group. He also identifies three cultural “markers” or things that all individuals in this group have in common.

These are: 1) isolation, 2) suspiciousness of strangers, and 3) hyper-agency. Dr. Paul defines hyper-agency as the “mastery in manipulating one’s life to avoid discomfort.”

So if avoiding discomfort isn’t good or healthy in life, then what is? We sent Dr. Paul some questions and the following are his answers.

Q: Why is breaking out of isolation and trusting strangers so important for healing?

Human beings are built for connection. It’s hard wired into our DNA. We come out of the womb completely dependent on another human being's love, nurturance and protection for our survival. While this complete dependence wanes over time, we remain dependent on other people’s emotional support our entire lives. I don’t, however, believe in trusting strangers absolutely. To be healing, our vulnerability must be given to people who are worthy of our trust. In my work, I refer to this as ‘strategic vulnerability’. It involves pushing ourselves through our resistance to be intimate, but intentionally and with supports in place to protect us. This is especially true for people who have experienced any type of trauma in their developmental path. Through the practice of strategic vulnerability, we are able to challenge ourselves to connect our humanness with the humanness of others and in the process evolve and repair.  

Q: Could using one’s wealth to avoid discomfort lead to a life void of meaning and hence, less “happiness”?

We’ve been taught that money is a panacea for any challenges that may come our way. While certainly, money is important, it’s not a panacea and believing it is can lead to a host of challenges and limitations to our evolution and repair. The purpose of life is to learn and grow. We must adapt to the constant changes that are at the heart of life. If we don’t, we will stagnate and drown in toxicity. Money—its worship, its stewardship and its pursuit—cannot be the primary focus of our lives. They need to be secondary considerations of a life that is dynamic, constantly changing and in search of meaning and purpose. 

Q: It has often been said that it takes one generation to make money and one to lose it. What do you think about the theory that perhaps the generation that made money indulged its progeny, making it weak and unable to cope with discomfort?

Money is an energetic. It’s like electricity. It can create wonderful things when properly channeled but if misapplied, it can lead to destruction, destitution and death. In cases where I’ve been called in to help alter a family course following the later trajectory, I observe family dynamics where money has come to be used as a vehicle of expression. In these families money is used to convey approval or disapproval, respect or rejection, control or permission. To alter this relational dynamic, I help families see how they are using money to communicate and interact, what meaning it holds for them and what messages they are conveying to their family members. Once these messages become clear, we then create strategies to communicate and interact more effectively.   

Q: How do we grow as individuals, if we can learn to cope with our discomfort?

Human beings are genetically wired to move in a healing direction. Because we are possessed of the most developed, rational brains of any mammals, we have the gift of reflection. We analyze the past and strategize for the future. Discomfort is an integral part of this process. Through it, we find the motivation to push ourselves towards higher, more evolved, reparative states of being.  

Q: So what is “living a good life” then, if avoiding discomfort isn’t such a good thing?

Living a good life means living a life that’s intentional and diversified. Intentional means we pursue opportunities that reflect our individual values, add value to our families and the communities, and respect and steward the planet we have the privilege of occupying. Diversification means we need to strive for balance between the quantitative and qualitative aspects of our lives. We must work to find security in the quantitative, material realms of life while simultaneously striving to maximize the qualitative, relational aspects of it.