"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time." Anna Freud
So I picked up a copy of Strengthsfinder 2.0 and took the code from the book and did the online assessment. It seemed like a lot of questions but it did not take long to answer them. It came back with my assessment of my 5 key strengths:
The book and online aids give out some great information on the strengths it finds you reveal in your answers - and the list of possible strengths is a long one. The answers you pick in combination are used in some complex matrix to come up with the key 5. The way to use them in your teams, work environments, and probably relationships looks to be pretty interesting.
Here's what the expanded explanations were for mine:
Good news folks! While it fell off my radar for quite some time, I just finished upgrading the site and fixing some of the elements that had broken the site during the previous upgrade.
Please feel free to catch up on any old posts. I will begin writing again and posting to the site more regularly now that it is up and running again.
As always, your feedback is both appreciated and desired!
“The Dilbert Principle: People are idiots.” - Scott Adams
My mentors have been drumming one particular item into my head for the past 14 years - Rule Number 1: "There is no dealing with idiocy". I now know why this rule has been their number one mantra.
When you cannot have a decent conversation without someone interjecting and ascribing words or meanings to you that you neither said nor intended - that is idiocy and when faced with it, you must remember the axiom. Ignore the person and the commentary and go about your business as usual.
If you do anything else you end up a victim to that force which keep the universe expanding at an accelerated rate. You end up being sucked into the black hole through which energy exits the universe.
I rarely write poetry or prose anymore, it's been so many years that when I found this particular piece in some files I decided to put it up on the site. I wrote it near the summer of 2006.
"Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do." - Bertrand Russell
After listening to one of the most infurating statements I have heard in more than a decade I decided do some research via informal discussions and some reading. To be fair I was as irritated over the statement as I was for why it was made in the first place, but that's irrelevant for this entry, I suppose. Just know that it upset me enough that I ended up spending countless hours over the last week double-checking data before sitting down to write this article.
It isn't because I questioned the incredulous nature of the statement - that was never in question - I did it because of the alarming message hidden within the statement itself. As it turns out the seriousness of the problem I recognized is much deeper than just one person's seriously deficient understanding about the real world. No, instead, it seems there is a specific ignorance relating to a very real life or death situation that is systemic to Generation Y.
I am dumbfounded about how we have made a long-lived national issue out of reproductive rights; yet we have really forgotten in the few short years between the emergence of Generation X and Generation Y that there are worse things that can happen to a person as a result of sexual activity than an unwanted pregnancy [1]. What the hell has happened in this country? Have we seriously propagated an ignorance that will cause our youth to kill themselves and others before they can comprehend the magnitude of the consequences of a compounding negligence?
I need to make something excruciatingly clear to every reader of this blog: wanting something to be true, even believing something to be true, does not make it true. If you are going to assume anything - you need to assume not that there is monogamy within your relationship but that there is not.
This isn't about trust or the lack thereof. This is about health - yours and your partner's. Care enough to know the facts because not knowing can end up causing you to unwittingly commit murder or suicide.