The Lifeworks Group, Inc.

 By: Brian Murray, LMHC, NCC Anxiety is a natural fear response that is designed to protect us from danger. It’s a signal that comes from our subconscious mind that danger is near, and we need to prepare ourselves for fight or flight. Our brains are very powerful and can conceptualize danger even if it’s not present. This creates a problem as we can feel anxious about something that truly does not exist. This hovering anxiety is a type of generalized anxiety as it has no identifiable root cause. Anxiety is very common in the United States and is one of the leading causes of mental health treatment concerns. Over the past year, U.S. prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax and Klonopin increased from 8.8 million in March 2019 to 9.7 million in March 2020 according to health-research firm IQVIA. Medication is a common first line defense for anxiety, however long term it has been shown not to be effective for treating anxiety. History of anxiety medication treatm...

Brian M. Murray, MS, IMH It’s okay to be gentle with ourselves when we’re going through change and grief. Yes, we want to maintain the dis­ciplines of recovery. But we can be compassionate with our­selves. We do not have to expect more from ourselves than we can deliver during this time. We do not even have to ex­pect as much from ourselves as we would normally and seasonably expect. -Melody Beattie Recovery from addiction does not have to be a grandstand transformational performance. When a person is going through recovery they may feel as if they are on display in front of friends, family, co-workers and others. Basically, they may feel like they are being watched by everyone in their community. This feeling of being watched can leave a person feeling intimated, vulnerable and subjected to other people’s expectations and judgments of how the recovery is supposed to be. Stress, anxiety and fear of failure often result as the feeling of being watched begins to become ...

By Chris Hammond, MS, IMH He was the responsible one, the one everyone depended on because they knew he would come through.   He was determined, focused, ambitious, reliable, detail-oriented and motivated yet here he sits having to make one of the hardest decisions in his life, one that would forever tarnish his reputation.   It is the decision to file for bankruptcy.   There is a part of him that intellectually knows it must be done as the numbers don’t allow for any other alternative yet there is another part of him that is not willing to admit failure.   And that is exactly how he sees it, as failure and a blemish to his name which will never be forgotten.   No amount of mutual bankruptcy filers including various famous or successful people seem to calm his anxiety or set him further at ease.   No amount of verbal encouragement from a variety of friends and family seem to lift his spirits.   And no amount of logical detailed analysis se...

by Master Coach Jim Rohn Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices. To put it more simply, failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated every day. Now why would someone make an error in judgment and then be so foolish as to repeat it every day? The answer is because he or she does not think that it matters. On their own, our daily acts do not seem that important. A minor oversight, a poor decision, or a wasted hour generally doesn't result in an instant and measurable impact. More often than not, we escape from any immediate consequences of our deeds. If we have not bothered to read a single book in the past ninety days, this lack of discipline does not seem to have any immediate impact on our lives. And since nothing drastic happened to us after the first ninety days, we repeat this error in judgment for another ninety days, and on and on it goes. Why...

Empowered or Entitled? What Are We Teaching Our Kids? Let me begin by asking a simple question… What the HECK is going on?????? Whew…that felt good. I’ve wanted to scream that question (and dozens like it) ever since I began teaching in public education several years ago. Honestly, I almost feel like I fell into a coma over the past fifteen years, only to awaken to an educational system and to a society that gives adolescents the idea that they are entitled to everything whether they have earned it or not. Where was I when this shift occurred? It’s not as if I spent the last dozen years in isolation, living alone in a cave somewhere. Truthfully, I have never stopped working with adults and teenagers alike as a pastor, coach, and counselor. I don’t think I fell asleep at the wheel and yet I feel like the driver who opens his sleepy eyes to find that he has drifted onto the wrong side of the highway, in oncoming traffic. I am seriously concerned about...

by Jim Rohn Now, here's the second law that changed my life forever to understand sales and marketing. I learned the law of sowing and reaping. And in the law of sowing and reaping is also the story of the law of averages. Jot this down…the story of the sower. It comes from the Bible. I am an amateur on the Bible, but this is such a useful story. Here's what the story says, and take notes, because the drama's in the details. The sower was ambitious. Evidently, he was ambitious. When you read the whole story you'll conclude yes, this was an ambitious sower. Here was number two. He had excellent seed. The sower who sowed the seed had excellent seed. And the excellent seed could be an excellent opportunity, an excellent product, an excellent story. So we've got an ambitious sower with excellent seed. But now here are the rest of the details of the story. For your information, for the drama of your life, so you can understand things better, learning some of this is ho...

4 key factors to guide unmotivated students toward academic success By C. Dwight Bain, Nationally Certified Counselor & Certified Life Coach Have you ever wondered why so many students get close to the ‘finish line’ of a semester or even graduation and then fail to finish? Parents, teachers, guidance counselors and tutors can be cheering for a student to push forward to finish strong and sometimes they just sit down and give up. You’ve probably seen it. A bright young person starts out with promise and potential and then halfway through a semester they literally run out of gas and ‘check out’ as it’s called because they completely lose the motivation to finish school. Academic Atomic Bombs When a student ‘checks out’ it isn’t because they don’t know what to do. You can tell them continually that they should be doing their homework, turning in class work, completing reports and playing by the rules to get good grades and move forward with their academic career. Yet they won’t do it...