Gardner Institute Blog

Author: Michael Josephson

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.

There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.

All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else.

Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.

Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.

So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire.

The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.

It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.

It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.

Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.

What will matter is not your success, but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught.

What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or… Continue reading →

A great question to ask yourself: When, in the last week, have you been at your best? Celebrate a strength that shows up when you think of being at your best.  Us that strength today to create another best day.

Our very own Karin Newell is running for an officer in our North Texas International Coach Federation!   Go Karin!  Susan Potter is already an officer so now we may have two people for support.  Both are big believers in the value of coaching.  If you are a coach and want to join ICF, let us know and we will offer you a free lunch to come see what it is all about!

I am planning to go on a writing retreat to Montsegur, France in March.  If you remember that is the place I visited this summer and had the spiritual experience.  I am very excited as both my daughters are writers and they are going with me. I anticipate lots of spiritual happenings to share with you while I am there.  But first I have to pay for it. Oh I know what I would tell you to do– I will just have a Mindset of high energy about it and then the money will come.

A short note today:  Did you know that a Mindset of Kindness strengthens your brain and gives you a better feeling of well-being? The highest Mindset to manifest your dreams is Gratitude. A positive Mindset gives you more friends and better health.  A high energy Mindset attracts money.  What kind of Mindset will you have today?

I love the line in Pink’s song:  “Change the voices in your head to make them love you!”  Do you hear good things about yourself every day -from yourself?

Divine Intelligence is the voice to expect to hear from when it comes to loving yourself.  Here are some of the ways DI might talk to you:  You might smile at seeing a child splash through a mud puddle.  Beautiful rays of light would be noticeable when you look through the air to the sky. Someone else gives   you a loving glance or touch. You slow down and hear a voice letting you know you are pleasing to this world.  It tells you –you are valuable, worthwhile, and brilliant. You move through your day with grace and ease and harmony.

Take time today to listen to yourself today and hear all the good things you have to tell yourself.

Last night, I attended the Daniel Siegel Seminar at TCU.  He spoke for around one hour and half to an audience of about 500 people, mostly students.

He took us through a mediation training, a mindfulness training, and what he called a workout for the mind.   He kept emphasizing his key message from his textbook:  We can train our minds to control and actually shape our brains.   He kept asking us: “What is the mind?”  He says that rarely in mental health training do we ever get a definition of the mind.  He said the mind consists of two parts: your subjective experience and your awareness.

He is one of the few neuroscientists who also integrates relationships into the study of the brain. He said that relationships are as important as brain functions.  Happiness is most predicted by healthy relationships. People who have healthy relationships live longer, are happier and healthier!  He suggested that we honor differences in relationships but that even if we honor differences and don’t link together and connect it is all for loss. Promoting linkages is the goal.

The entire attachment theory field of study could be summarized as saying that… Continue reading →

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too.

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists. Between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes — the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes.… Continue reading →