It was a small intimate setting—50 people gathered on a Saturday night to hear a special woman speak. A woman that endured a trial few could bear—her name was Jeanne White-Ginder, the mom of Ryan White. As she began to share her story about Ryan, it all came back to me. He was one of [...]

As I approach my 45th birthday I was recently informed of my age like this, “John, you are 1.4 billion seconds, or 23.6 million minutes, or 393,412 hours old.” Yikes, I really am getting over the hill. However, there is a startling discovery from the field of behavioral psychology that I touch upon in my [...]

Electrocorticography, or ECoG, is a means of monitoring the electrical activity taking place in the human brain, a technology that has been in use since the early 1950’s. Gerwin Schalk, a researcher who studies ECoG at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center in Albany has uncovered a mechanism so profound in his [...]

Today I will share an example of communicating in an organization using the 3 M&M approach. It’s all about going from “tell and sell” to motivating people to take social action. 1st M&M: We are not hitting the numbers, we need you to work more hours and do everything possible to get those projects done—please [...]

How we communicate has enormous impact on outcomes, and today we will look at a technique to aide with this, developed by behavioral communication coach Larry Petcovic, it’s called 3 M&M’s. Most often, when we want to share information, we present the facts and data via text or a slide deck—but what if we took [...]

In our last installment about mirror neurons, did you know that how a person postures themself in front of you could alter your emotional response? Since the 1960’s numerous psychologists have studied this with the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Test of Posture (DANVA2-POS). What they have found is that how we posture ourselves has an [...]

Mirror neurons, a unique neuron of the brain that is activated in a person merely by watching another perform a movement— thus experiencing a similar emotional expression, were discovered in 1994. However, 58 years prior, a woman named Marian Chace started something that would help lead to their discovery, dance movement therapy (DM/T). Chace began [...]

I am going to detract from mirror neurons today (we’ll come back to that tomorrow) and post a special tribute to moms, but not the typical statements you might see on American Greetings cards. My message is directed to the moms that hurt when this holiday comes to pass; moms that have been dealt the [...]

Imagine spending over fifty years studying one thing—you would probably become really good at it. Well, Dr. Paul Ekman has done just that, and his topic? The human face. Dr. Ekman’s work is profound and has revealed incredible insight into how the amygdala of our brain processes what we “see” and then causes certain neurons [...]

It’s 5:30pm, your flight departs in 45 minutes and the line at the security checkpoint appears like the throngs waiting for a Justin Bieber concert.  Your heart races, you don’t think you’ll make your flight. As you finally near the machine, piling all of your belongings into those grey bins you expect the usual harsh [...]