Lives In Progress

Make your partner look good," a guiding principle of improvisation, was abundantly on display the night I attended a meeting of the  New York Rgional Applied Improvisation Network co-facilitated by Zohar Adner and Caitlin McClure, both professional trainers in corporate settings whose game plan for the evening transformed 25 strangers into a working group. Within the first 20 minutes, a positive, dynamic energy connected us, making the event a real-time expression of the philosophy and skill set that both trainers believe and practice in their personal and working lives, e.g., "work at the top of your intelligence; we are all supporting players; avoid judging what occurs, focus on what you can contribute," to quote the Patron Saint of Improv, Del Close.      "This is a foundational mindset and way of looking at the world that opens up possibilities and collaboration - two things the world really needs now," Zohar states. "Every cause gets stronger when peo…

The 2010 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March was a marathon of consciousness-raising led by Networker editor Rich Simon and his first-class panel of keynote speakers, who leveraged the not-so-good-news about the social, environmental and global problems we face with evidence-based recommendations about what we can do to turn things around. One thing was clear: complacency is not an option. Dan Goleman  -author of Emotional Intelligence, among other books, and whose writing for the Science section of the New York Times I long admired - talked about why the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a Texas-sized sort of island of plastic items out in the ocean – which the Wall Street Journal argues is maybe not really that big and even if it is that big, but what’s the big deal – should matter to psychotherapists. Because it is just one of many signs of world-class problems that we can all do something about if we expand our focus. Psychotherapy as a field is often disconnected from thes…