I’m about halfway through "Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom" by William Glasser, MD. Dr. Glasser believes that problems can be solved mostly by making choices about how our future will go and testing those choices. In his counseling, he doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the past. The past does not determine our future, but our current choices do.
He has some interesting models of human behavior that I am trying to learn.
The first is the concept of the five basic needs of people: Survival, Love and Belonging, Power, Freedom, and Fun (also equated with Learning). Every person has a "genetic" makeup of how deeply they feel these needs. For example, a person may have a high need for security (survival) and a low need for power.
We’ve made a lot of progress on bluebarb. The main structure of the site is up and the instructional article is written. I’m not liking the web template. I tried to turn on the widgets and I don’t like the way they look and they’re interfering with the text. I may still have to get the images shrunk down a bit but even with that I’m not sure this template is going to make it.
There are so many good Wordpress web templates out there but so many of them have some clever part about them or an image that is so unique to a niche that I would have to redo a lot of it just to get it to work.
On the other end of the spectrum is paying for a template according to my own design, and somewhere in the middle is building my own, something I can do from the technical perspective but which never looks good from the graphic design perspective.
This week I’ve relaunched the Bluebarb website. I reworked it to use WordPress as the backend (previously it was pages created on Dreamweaver) and I’ve put a temporary homepage in place that lists the Google gadgets.
A friend is working on a tutorial that will help non-techie users add Bluebarb gadgets to their iGoogle pages. I’ll add that as a WordPress page.
You can add power to your life by learning to evaluate other people’s criticisms. Often they go straight to our nature (for example, "you aren’t being very nice") instead of dealing directly with the issue at hand ("I want you to give me a ride to the airport and you’re not doing it").
People tend to criticize you based on your strengths. If you really were not a nice person, then there would be no impact of somebody accusing you of that. It’s because you’re nice that it does sting.
But your "niceness" should be evaluated by you, not others.
Imagine yourself trying to walk on a two-by-four laying on the floor without falling off. Are you afraid of failing?
Now imagine that same board stretched between the 38th-floor windows of two adjacent buildings. The odds of failing are the same. However, I would certainly be afraid to make that walk. But is that a fear of failure? Or a fear of falling? A fear of falling or a fear of hitting the ground? Or a fear of pain or death?
By bundling up fears like that in the term "fear of failure," we tend to avoid facing what it is that we are really afraid of.
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Bluebarb is a set of iGoogle widgets that a friend and I coded up. These widgets simplify ordering Amazon products and keep users up to date on hot new items.
You’ve been developing a website for some time and you’re getting close to launch date. You’ve decided to contract out to somebody to write the user’s manual. But now that the task of specifying what you want is coming up, you’re starting to have doubts.
You think "By the time I spec it out, I’ll have put in almost the same work as writing it myself." Or: "They may not even do a good enough job, and I’ll have to send it back and ask for a rewrite. That’s more trouble than doing it myself."
I’m about halfway through "Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom" by William Glasser, MD. Dr. Glasser believes that problems can be solved mostly by making choices about how our future will go and testing those choices. In his counseling, he doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the past. The past does not determine our future, but our current choices do.
We’ve made a lot of progress on bluebarb. The main structure of the site is up and the 
