Tag Archives: risk

Personal Empowerment

Boundaries: Choosing Change

By Jim Selman | Bio

We’ve all experienced a situation—whether in a marriage, friendship or business relationship—where we find ourselves thinking about the other person and saying, “I love you, BUT…”. It’s in that moment we realize a particular behavior of theirs is not acceptable to us and has become a source of stress and resentment. For many, resentment almost always leads to a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior and the eventual destruction of the relationship.

I was coaching a friend recently who is in such a dilemma. She is and always has been the primary breadwinner in her marriage. Her husband is a charming, lovable, creative man who is prone to spending binges whenever he is traveling or working on various short-term projects. This usually leads to an ‘explosive’ encounter when the credit card bills arrive. These angry eruptions are followed by his characteristic pattern of apologies, remorse and promises followed by feelings

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Fearless Aging

Pessimist or Optimist: Who Has the Edge?

By Jim Selman | Bio

I was reading an interesting article by a prestigious think tank this morning that was saying perhaps the ‘recession’ isn’t as black or white as most of us make it out to be and that it most certainly isn’t as bad as conventional wisdom and media hype would have us believe. I noticed I felt a little better after reading it, but then I wondered why my mood shifted so easily based on only one article. Tomorrow I could read a darker scenario by another equally reputable

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Fearless Aging

Fear and Risk

By Jim Selman | Bio

Our relationship to risk and our fears is closely related. Most of our lives we’ve made decisions based on some formal or informal process for assessing ‘risk’. In our conventional way of thinking, this means trying to predict what will or will not happen and with what probabilities based on some scenario or course of action. It is a ‘forward looking’ posture and, as with all predictions, draws on historical data or experience and projects it into the future. In other words, we take our past, project it into the future and then make our choices and commitments based on what our predictions (the past) tell us will probably happen.

Anyone who is even mildly
paying attention can easily grasp that the predictions are wrong more
often than they are right. Particularly now, when the world is changing
around us so rapidly, we can no longer rely on this mode of
decision-making. At best, we maintain the status quo and, more often
than not, we are completely blindsided by something unexpected that
wasn’t taken into account when we were assessing risk and making our
decisions.

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