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Imagine you are 18, a bomb goes off on the humvee you are driving in Iraq. A million thoughts are going through your head. You aren’t even supposed to be here. You are supposed to be a football star. You watch as your hand melts unrecognizably. You are brought to the hospital to treat burn injuries with more than 30 reconstructive surgeries. Your face will never look the same. Everything has changed, and you have no say in it. That’s exactly what happened to JR Martinez. He c

Every day we create narratives around events that happen to us. If they are bad, the tapes that run through are mind are usually, Oh my gosh, this is so tough; why does this have to be so complicated; or Ugh, Why do they have to be so annoying? When we encounter problems, it’s easy to create doomsday stories to go along with them. These stories make up a large part of our experience. The only problem is that our stories create attitudes that, unless we’re careful, affect how

Optimism People are afraid of optimism. They know the value of it, but don’t want to get their hopes up too much, just in case things don’t work out. Expecting the worst makes it a nice surprise if you succeeded, and if it doesn’t it wouldn’t be a disappointment, right? Strangely enough, we feel like we somehow have more control if we expect the worst. Yet, according to Martin Seligman in his book, Learned Optimism, it is the optimist who has the most power, while the pessimi