Today, I am in my hotel getting ready to go to work at the FEMA Call Center in Denton, Tx where I am detailed for a couple of weeks to work as a Stress Counselor. These people are on the phone 10 hours a day, seven days a week talking to survivors, helping people get their applications for FEMA support filled out correctly to get the callers what they need. I sincerely appreciate these folks, who have compassionate hearts. It is an honor to work with them. As the images of Irma flood out televisions […]

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Perseverance and tenacity are two of the most important, least discussed, aspects of building and maintaining a long-term marriage. I should know, my wife, Angie and I recently celebrated our 45th anniversary. This year we took an anniversary trip to the Grand Canyon by train. We left Albuquerque on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief and got off the train at Williams Junction. The next day we took the Grand Canyon Railroad to the Canyon. We had a wonderful, memorable time celebrating this milestone, with great conversations, fun memories and moments of relaxation. Over the years, young people […]

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In 2007, Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft stated, “There is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No Chance!” He was off just a little bit. Today we are going to take a look at the fourth pillar of resilience, decisiveness and taking personal responsibility. Lee Iacocca, the former president of both Ford and Chrysler, said, “The one word that makes a great leader/manager is decisiveness. While working on my new book, The No Fear Entrepreneur, I did a survey of over 1500 entrepreneurs, the most surprising results […]

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I am so excited to share this important principle with you. To be a resilient person, an individual who is moving forward with their lives is connected.  Recently I was tasked to write, produce and lead a webinar for a large DoD agency’s civilian employees call Surviving Stress. In my research, I was able to identify six primary qualities of resilient people. I am very grateful for Dr. George Everly’s book Resilient Leadership and some of the fresh insight I gained into leadership. Hopefully; you can apply some of what I am sharing with yourself […]

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  I am glad that you are making a choice to read by blog, my hope is to enrich your life by some of the lessons that I have learned along the way. In the first piece on resilience, we talked about the top 6 characteristics of resilient people. Let’s take just a second to review a definition of resilience. Resilience is the ability to resist the manifestations of clinical distress, impairment, or dysfunction that are often associated with critical incidents, acts of terror, mass disasters, and personal trauma. Dr. George Everly,  Psychological Body Armor. […]

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This will be the first Father’s Day that we will not be able to talk. He left this earth just a few weeks after my momma passed away. My Dad,  J.H. (Howdy) Thurman died on January 11, 2017. Being the first born to my family, Dad and I had a long, rewarding relationship. Through my crazy teen years even up to the week before he died, Dad was always filled with encouragement and a good story.A few weeks after returning from his funeral in Fort Valley, Georgia, a pastor friend of mine asked what I […]

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What makes people move through tough times? In my last post, I talked about resilience and its importance in being an overcome in life. Resilient, tenacious people make things happen. My friend and mentor, Dr. George Evelry has made it his life mission to understand resilience and the impact it has on people. In his first book Resilient Child (2009), he looked at factors which influenced children on the road to resilience. In 2012, his book Resilient Leadership (Everly, Strouse,& Everly), he was able to identify and explain leadership factors which build resilience in their […]

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Resilience began to show up in the workplace and in popular culture in the early 2000’s.  I had the joy of having published an article in Christianity Today’s Woman in 2008, called Bounce Back, which was about applying resilience to relationships Since the term resilience is a relatively refreshed word in our culture, I want to give you a baseline definition of the term. Resilience is defined as the ability to withstand, adapt, or rebound from extreme challenges or adversity. Developing this characteristic will help you have a definite edge in your daily living.  Resilience […]

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Angie and I in Israel 2014. ​ For the past few weeks, I have been up to my eyeballs in finishing up my soon to be released the second book, Get a Grip on Fear: A Primer for Entrepreneurs, that is the major reason that I have not posted anything since Holy Week.I have been thinking about my relationship with my wife Angie for the past few weeks, in light of the loss of my parents as well as some of the exciting growth that we as a couple are experiencing I wanted to take […]

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  Holy Week 2017 is here, and what a start. As I am writing, the networks are sharing a breaking news story about two attacks on two Egyptian Coptic churches on this Palm Sunday. ISIS (Daesh) is taking credit for the horror. It seems that horror is never far away from you in the Holy Land. In the interest of full disclosure, this will be a different type of blog from me this week. When Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, the Jews were under the Roman Empire’s heel. Zealots […]

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