by dmackinnon | Jul 23, 2019 | Whole Healer
One of the stories that has haunted me since medical school didn’t even happen to me. It happened to my good friend Ben, a tall man with a sweet smile and a gentle manner. We were doing our surgery rotation at a private hospital in Brooklyn and the chief resident, Dr....
by dmackinnon | Jun 28, 2019 | Healing Choices, Process
I read a great post by Seth Godin earlier this year; in it he said if something is important, you create a system for it.
Right after I read that blog post, there was a morning when I got my son to school late. I realized we didn’t really have a good system for...
by dmackinnon | May 15, 2019 | Healing Choices, Process
A friend who has been seeing a therapist recently told me she wanted to change her appointments with her therapist to once a month but the therapist “talked her into” changing to every other week. When she said that, it reminded me of a time when I hired a therapist...
by dmackinnon | Apr 24, 2019 | Healing Choices, Mindset
I think I’ve finally learned that when I screw up, it doesn’t mean “quit,” or “I can’t do it,” it just means, “try again.” When I go to my Toastmasters meetings, I usually volunteer for Table Topics. That means you volunteer to speak, get up in front of...
by dmackinnon | Mar 26, 2019 | Healing Choices, Thought Work
No one can set boundaries for you. It’s like work: your boss is not going to call you one day and tell you you’re working too hard and you should take a vacation. No one in your life is going to say, “You really go above and beyond, you need to start taking care of...
by dmackinnon | Feb 28, 2019 | Healing Choices, Mindset
Once we’ve established a boundary, (see Boundaries, Part 1,) how do we honor it? For some people, this is not difficult, but for many of us, it is very hard to do in the moment. For example, if you are raising children and working, you may have decided to set a...
by dmackinnon | Feb 3, 2019 | Healing Choices, Healthy Habits
What is a boundary? Just as we have property lines to show the boundaries between what is ours and what is our neighbor’s, boundaries in relationships let people know what is ours and what is theirs. When someone walks up our driveway to the front door and knocks;...
by dmackinnon | Jan 7, 2019 | Healing Choices, Mindset
On Christmas Day my husband and I hosted 18 people for dinner. Dinner was scheduled for 2 PM. At just after noon, when the potatoes were boiling on the stove and I was just starting to cook the green beans and carrots, my husband and I checked the two turkeys we’d...
by dmackinnon | Dec 3, 2018 | Healing Choices, Process
Want to get stuck or stay stuck? Tell yourself “I don’t know.” No matter what the problem is, telling yourself “I don’t know,” just about guarantees you will not solve the problem. The human brain is very concrete: if I tell myself “I don’t know,” my brain will stop...
by dmackinnon | Nov 1, 2018 | Healing Choices, Process
Recently, one of my clients called me to say that she was having a lot of anxiety and she didn’t know why. Just a day earlier, during our coaching session, we’d talked about an incident involving her mother. As everyone gathered in the kitchen during a family event,...
