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First of all, I’m sure you realize that you’re not going to change your family of origin.  You’ve been witnessing and living this negativity your whole life and that may be the reason you’re focused on keeping things positive with your own children.  Kudos to you!  It’s never too late to change negative patterns!

Depending on the ages of your children, you have a few options here.  When they’re small you can probably distract them away from the grown-up conversations.  As they get older, they may choose to join in on the adult conversation, which means they will get an earful of negativity.  The good thing about older kids is that they are aware enough, and mature enough, to understand the differences in the way people act, and re-act, around others.  This can be a good opportunity to teach your older children that, in life, we all have to learn how to deal with negative people.  We have to develop strategies for either minimizing our time with them or minimizing the impact they have on our lives.  Others may choose to be negative, but we always have the choice of how to act, and how to re-act.  The choice is ours and within our control.  To quote from the film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…”Choose Wisely!”.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What life lessons can you teach your children as they witness the exchange of negativity in your family?
• Is there a way to stay connected to family but minimize your time with them?
• How can you minimize, or “shake off”, the negativity from when you’re around them?
• How can this experience help you grow as a person and as a parent?

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Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

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Take your pick of things you can say and do in this situation. Use the “Direct” approach:
• That’s rude ! Who taught you manners?
• Are you going to text all through dinner?
• I don’t like it when people text through dinner.
• Could you please hold your texting until after dinner?
• I guess I don’t count here since you’re ignoring me?
• Does that text you’re sending matter more to you than spending time with me?
• Do you know that I refuse to go on a second date with someone who texts while we’re out?

Or, you can use the “Passive” approach:
• Ignore their texting
• Don’t bother confronting it if it really doesn’t bother you

Or, you can use the “Indirect, Passive Aggressive” approach:
• Do more texting than they are
• Make sure they have to wait for you to finish texting to get your attention

I don’t recommend the Passive Aggressive approach, but do what makes sense to you. In some groups, such as teenagers, texting when out together is the norm and to be expected. Only you can decide how to handle this situation! Text me when you figure it out!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~
• What approach makes sense to you?
• Are you willing to gracefully accept the consequences of which ever approach you take?
• What is the standard for the group you hang out with? Texting or no texting?
• What are your personal standards for when you’re out alone with someone?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

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Balance.  That’s the first word that came to mind when I read your question.  I’m a big believer in that we all need our leisure activities, our friends and hobbies, but if the balance of time we spend with others really does neglect our family…or is perceived to be neglecting our family…then we have a problem.  Maintaining a good relationship requires good negotiation skills.  Both parties need to get their needs met, but they should not look solely to their partner to meet those needs.  This is where negotiating with your husband for what you want and need comes in to play.

First, I suggest that you honor him by accepting his passion for golf.  Let him know that you support him in spending time with activities that make him happy.  If that sounds like a hard thing for you to do, start by looking at the things you do that he’s not crazy about but has to accept in relationship with you.  You know, girlfriend, that he’s got his list too!!  Also, make sure that you are living your best life and not depending on him to satisfy something that you feel is missing inside you or in your life.  That said, if he is not being a true partner to you, bring on your Power Woman and go after what you need.  Get it?  Got it!  Good!!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How do you show your husband that you honor his independence and leisure time away from you and the kids?
• Only you know what works with your husband…how are you going to convey to him that you either need or want more time from him?
• Can you embrace approaching this with a mindset geared toward flexibility, compromise and not having to completely get your way (part of any successful negotiation)?
• Can you accept a small victory in this area for now, understanding that the two of you can address this again in the future if your current agreement isn’t working for both of you?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

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Hospice of Salina, Hassman Termite and Pest Control, Martinelli’s Little Italy, Girls Scouts, Dignity Care Home, Protandim, LifeVantage, Bennington State Bank, George Jerkovich Photography, Circles of the Heartland

Listen to the Podcast “Horrors of Late Term Abortion” about the Abortion Doctor Kermit Gosnell’s Trial at joanjerkovich.com

Images of Aborted Fetuses from Priests for Life:  http://www.priestsforlife.org/resources/photosassorted/index2.htm

Images of Abortion Instruments from Human Life International, Pro-Life Missionaries to the World:  http://www.hli.org/cloning/201?task=view

No one likes to feel left out, but your friends’ behavior does sound juvenile.  If she persists in talking about all the fun she’s having where you weren’t invited have you tried changing the subject?  Or telling her that you don’t want to hear about her partying?  Or minimizing the time you spend with this friend?  Most people instinctively take cues from others in conversation, but this person seems to lack basic social awareness.  That, or she is so self-absorbed that she always has to be the center of attention.  True friends are people we enjoy hanging out with, not those who leave us feeling upset.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What does this friendship mean to you?
• How does this friendship fulfill you and make you happy?
• How comfortable are you with your social life?
• Have you thought that you should expand your circle of friends and social activities?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

Life just isn’t fair is it?  It seems that we can expand that saying of, “all the good ones are married” to “all the good ones are gay!”  Both are, of course, exaggerations! You ask if you should tell him about your crush, yet, don’t you think he already knows this? He may be gay but he’s still a guy and I’m sure you aren’t the first girl to crush on him or at least flirt with him.  Right?  The problem with being a Fag Hag is that you’re into guys…but so is he!  Soooo, of course you’re going to react to his cuteness and coolness and think he’s perfect~but it will never work to come on to him in a sexual or romantic way~and it may destroy the good friendship you do have.  Enjoy your one-of-a-kind special friendship.  Many women would love to have a gay bestie…myself included!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What would be gained in your relationship if you tell him about your crush?
• How do you nurture the unrealistic fantasy that you are “THE Woman” who can change your friend’s sexual preferences?
• How does that fantasy serve you; or not serve you?
• Does crushing on your gay friend keep you from finding real love?

Copied from urbandictionary.com:

You Are A True Fag Hag If… 

-You are a straight girl who has a best friend who is gay and spends a lot of time together
-You would rather go to a gay club than a straight club
-Your fag gave you your own drag name
-You know all the gay guys at the local gay bar
-You fag takes you shopping for mac makeup and then puts it on you
-Your hair and makeup are always flawless
-You dress up in his drag gear on Saturday night or dress in drag together
-You even dance with all the fags on stage when Britney Spears comes on
-You learned to vogue from watching your fag
-You fall in love with your fag (which is a bad thing)
-You try to convert your fag (this will only ruin your relationship with him)
And lastly… you find your self not being able to live without him because you have so much fun with him.

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Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

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This question was paraphrased from one of my Life Coaching radio show callers; so listen to the call for additional ideas on growing a business. -LINK HERE-

Every business needs an investment of capital (money) to grow to its full potential.  The old saying, “It takes money to make money” holds true in the business arena.  Entrepreneurs who are trying to launch their business from a grass roots level, from their garage or kitchen table (so to speak), don’t always realize that even multimillion dollar companies frequently have to go back to their investors for an infusion of money to grow.  In the realm of big business raising capital is as slick as it sounds involving “Venture Capitalists”, “Private Equity”, “Seed Funding” and “Angel Investing”…big names for the ways big businesses find funding.  Take a note from the big company playbooks and consider ways to raise the “seed” money to nurture your sapling of a business…draw up a professional, well-researched business plan and present it to potential investors. (Be mindful of The US Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.)  Find the people who believe in your vision for your company and want to be a part of it!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How is your business conducive to raising money from outsiders?
• What proven track record, for business success, can you present to potential investors to assure them that you are a serious businessperson?
• Before your drag other people on board, how willing are you to personally “go down with the ship” if you fail?
• How much of your own money (I call it “skin in the game”) are you willing to invest and potentially lose on this business venture?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

Ariel Castro, 52 years old, abducted three women, all in the same manner, ten years ago by offering each one of them rides… Michelle Knight, now 32, was offered a ride home by Castro in August of 2002.  Instead, Castro took Michelle to his own house in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Cleveland. Amanda Berry, now 27, was offered a ride to work by Castro and taken captive as well.  Gina Dejesus, the youngest abductee, now 23, knew Castro’s own daughter at the time (she was only fourteen) and felt that it was okay for her to get inside of the vehicle with him.  She had no reason to think otherwise and Castro promised her that they were, in fact, going to his house so that she could meet up with his daughter there…

During their captivity, all three women were initially chained to Castro’s basement walls.  Eventually, he “freed” the women from the basement, moving them to separate rooms on the second floor of his two-story house, where they were kept completely isolated from one another.  Michelle, the oldest abductee, was impregnated at least five times by Castro, who reportedly starved her and punched her in the stomach until she miscarried.  Amanda was impregnated by Castro and forced to deliver her baby, Jocelyn, in a plastic pool inside of the house. Castro made Michelle help deliver Amanda’s daughter and told her that if the baby died, so would she…

According to authorities, the three women were only let outside of Castro’s house twice in the ten years that they were held captive there.  Still, it’s hard to believe that no calls or reports were ever made to law enforcement to investigate any suspicious activity on the property. Castro’s neighbors talk about having “backyard barbecues” with him and how he would give kids in the neighborhood rides on the back of his motorcycle.  He was also a musician in a local band and some of his neighbors had played gigs with him before.  From this “viewpoint,” it would seem that Castro was living a fairly unassuming and, by all accounts, pretty normal life…  This is probably one of the most disturbing qualities about these abusers/abductors; how they can so easily put on a façade and publically hide who they really are, even from their own neighbors.

Be sure to check out this week’s podcast where I go into further detail about these abductions, including the short and long-term effects on these victims, and what preventative measures (if any) we, as a society, can take to help protect ourselves and our children and hopefully, keep this from happening… yet again.

-Hostage and abuse Podcast-

Editorial content by Kim Matchette

I’ve had to deal with this from both a co-worker and a management position so I’m going to give my opinion on how to handle this situation from both perspectives.

If you’re having this problem with a co-worker, try and remove yourself from the gossip and in-fighting by disengaging.  Don’t be a willing audience to the gossip; don’t listen to it.  Turn a deaf ear to it, ignore it, or walk away from it if you have to.  Don’t join in with the gossip; keep your mouth shut.  Refrain from entering into a gossipy conversation about your other co-workers, go somewhere else to take your break if you need to.  Finally, don’t repeat the gossip or share it with others.  Let it die a natural death.  If it gets too bad, report the source of the gossip to your supervisor.  It’s their job to help make your workplace conducive to performing the work you’re hired to do.

If you’re a manager who sees the poison gossip creates among the staff you supervise, keep your focus on the person who instigates problems and stirs up drama.  One thing these types like to do is pit people against each other.  Often, the accusations that are slung about are not even true, which makes your job of managing difficult if problems do need to be addressed.   The best way to discover the truth is to sit all the involved employees down together and confront them as a group.  When the gossip is asked to openly voice their complaints in front of management and the person they are gossiping about, they will either back down or the truth will be uncovered for you to address.  Worst-case scenario, gossipers can destroy employee morale and decrease productivity and you may need to consider terminating them.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How can you prep for your Oscar-worthy performance of ignoring, not hearing and not being affected by the gossip?
• What work and personal standards do you have for reporting problems at work to your supervisor?
• How long has this gossip been causing problems at work?
• What has been tried to resolve the gossiping issue?
• Have those methods been effective?
• If not, at what point do you as the employee ask for help from management or you as manager terminate the errant employee?

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Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

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First, list all the things you need help with.  If the primary thing you need help with is to fill orders, this is not the job of a business partner; this is the job of an employee.  If you would like to subspecialize within your business, then you may want to consider bringing on a partner.  The business partnerships that work the best are the ones that compliment each other, such as, you like managing the production and distribution side of things and your partner likes managing the administrative and sales side of the business.

That said, you should carefully consider how your two personalities mesh.  A business partnership is akin to a marriage in the complexity and commitment it takes to keep it running smoothly.  Also, a true business partnership takes both of you having some “skin in the game”, meaning, you both invest capital monies toward expenses, equipment etc.  I’ve had more than one person want to “partner” with me in business that had no intention of bringing any money to the table; and they wanted to take home a regular paycheck to boot!  I call those people employees, not partners.  Finally, if you do go in to partnership with your good friend, be prepared to lose the friendship if things go sour.  It can happen…

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• List all of the things you need help with in your business.
• Which of these tasks would you be willing to let someone else handle?
• How do you feel about bringing a partner on after you have done the hard work of getting your business off the ground?
• Do you work well in partnerships or are you more of a lone ranger?
• What vision do you have for how you want to run your company and does it include having a partner?
• Is this a friendship you are willing to risk losing?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

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Tee Hee…haven’t women been doing this forever?  Haven’t we all gone on dates with guys we really weren’t that into (isn’t there a book by that name?) just to have a nice dinner out or see the latest movie at their expense?  Listen, the way I see it, he gets to enjoy your lovely company for the evening!  Besides, I can make you a list a mile long of women I know who dated a guy FOREVER (I’m talking 5-10 years) hoping that he would marry her.  Then, when she finally breaks up with him, in a matter or days, he’s bedding someone else and sometimes even getting married to the new chick?!?  I say to have your fun for a while, but don’t crush the poor guy by leading him on for too long.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How will you know when it’s time to level with the guy and tell him, “I’m just not that into you”?
• Or…If you like going out with him are you really more into him than you want to admit?
• What are your personal standards for treating another person with decency and respect while also respecting yourself in relationship?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

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Have you tried the communication style of just straight out telling her how you feel?  No games, no strings attached, no beating around the bush; but just telling her openly and honestly that you have feelings for her?  The tricky part here would seem to be that you saw her out with this other guy.  Did it look like they were on a date, or just friends?  Either way, you will have to decide for yourself if your feelings for her are strong enough to weather a possible rejection, or move forward with a relationship.  Either prospect can be scary. If she does decide to go out with you again you may want to define your relationship.  Is this just a “friends with benefits” pairing or do you both agree to move forward in an exclusive relationship?  Having “The Talk” sooner versus later seems to be in order.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• Are your feelings for this person strong enough to warrant taking the steps to define your relationship?
• How will you make a plan for telling her how you feel?
• What will your response be if she rejects you?
• How will you move your relationship forward if she wants to date?
• How can you improve the communication you have in relationships?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

This can be really tough on moms, and some dads have a real tough time with this as well.  You will get through this, even if it means having a good cry each day for a while!  Give yourself the space and time to process this change.  As you let go be mindful that your college student will let you know how much support they need from you their first year away from home.  Listen for their cues; some want to hear from you every day and others will tell you to quit calling so often.  Continue to support them as you always have, but give them their independence if they’re ready.

Approach this change with a positive outlook! Look at this transition as a time to re-create yourself and your life.  Use this opportunity to focus on that hobby you set aside, or take that class you always wanted to take.  Marriages are often revitalized once the last child leaves home.  I know of many couples that see this as their opportunity to travel.  I had a friend send me flowers with the simple note “Enjoy” when our youngest left home.  After the initial unrest subsides, I expect that you will come to enjoy your newfound freedom!  Enjoy!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What can you do to show kindness and empathy toward yourself (yes!~yourself!) as you go through this difficult time?
• What helps you deal with stressful events?
• What activities can you plan to get involved in to help you “let go” of your primary mothering job?
• What have you been neglecting doing for yourself, your friends, your health, your outside interests?
• How will you incorporate some of these neglected items back in to your life?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

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People are pretty quick to spot the “blow hard” in conversation. The person who does a lot of talking but has little to say and what they do say is of questionable truth. Those people usually get tuned out in conversation. When you say people think you’re a know-it-all, I’m going to assume that you do know what you’re talking about and do have a vast knowledge on many different subjects. Personally, I like having conversations with people like you. On occasion, I join a group at our local coffee shop that hosts one Grand Master “blow hard” conversationalist and one know-it-all who really does know a lot about everything and was even a contestant on Jeopardy!. They both get chided for their conversation styles but neither is dissuaded from sharing in the group. Both are confident in who they are. Confidence comes from within, and when you bolster it you will more easily accept the differences you see in yourself and those you see in others.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What do you assume other people think of you as a conversationalist?
• What have others said to you about being a know-it-all?
• How will you separate the facts of what people have said about you and the fiction you may be creating in your head?
• How can you monitor your self-talk and assumptions when you get the feeling that people are judging you?
• What activities bolster your confidence and how can you incorporate more of those in to your life?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at -THIS LINK-

In the Boston Marathon bombing, most of the trauma was to the lower extremities or the legs, yet people who’ve also had some sort of illness or injury or war injury that’s taken the arms as well, are often so much more challenged with getting back to normal life than someone who lost a leg. When we look at those people, who have successfully accomplished and achieved working with a prosthesis, like the Olympian that ran in the first Olympics with a prosthetic leg, we can’t quite fully grasp the unique and individual struggles that have been met to do so.

I wanted to share with my listeners this morning some of what it really takes for these people to go through this process. I found an interesting article written by Oren Dorell, for USA Today, that was talking about how many of the veterans who lost their limbs in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, went on a trip to Boston to provide support and information to those who were injured in the Boston bombings. As we know, at least 15 people have lost their lower limbs in this bombing to date. This added up to the highest number of civilians who’ve had this kind of multiple traumatic injuries in our country. The article said that these veterans showed up in Boston to talk to these patients and they found them all just sitting there, looking so dejected, and feeling like their whole world, their whole lives, had been turned upside down; but within a half an hour later, many of them were laughing and didn’t want the veterans to leave. They were there to give the kind of support you can only get from those who’ve been through exactly what they’re (the Boston bombing amputees) experiencing right now?

The Veterans said that some common questions these patients had were, “How do you shower? How are you able to get back to doing the things that you love or like doing? How are we going to go on the beach or ride a bicycle? How about driving a car or going to work?” Their biggest concerns are always going to be about not being able to live their life the way they want after this traumatic injury. One of the servicemen was quoted as saying, “Accepting the injury and moving on is crucial. You figure out what you need to do to get back to a normal life and you do it.”

These war veterans traveled to Boston representing the Semper Fi fund, which is raising money for these victims. They want to help them with these prosthetic devices, which I was shocked to hear, can run as high as $100,000 dollars. What you need to realize is that the prosthetic devices are unique to the types of activities you do. You may need one to go back to being a jogger. You may need a different one for something related to your specific work. There are specialized prosthetics for swimming and all types of activities. If just one of those costs $100,000 dollars, you can imagine the challenges these amputees have ahead of them, not to mention the emotional trauma they’re going through.

You know, while these victims of the Boston bombings come to mind, these 15 victims, we cannot turn our backs on the numbers of amputees coming back from war in Iraq and Afghanistan, which total almost 600. But where those numbers seem astronomical to me, there is a much smaller group of our war veterans that fall into the categories that they call, “the quadruple amputee.” There are only five of those. Then they also have the “triple amputees” and there are 40 of those. Of course, quadruple amputees are the ones who’ve lost both arms and both legs. Can you imagine?

An article by CNN writer, Steve Almasy, in October 2012, which of course was before the Boston bombings, talked about the actor, Gary Sinise. We all remember Gary’s character from “Forrest Gump” as the double amputee. In real life, Gary Sinise is involved with helping amputees raise money for the very specialized homes that they need to function fully in their lives. In this article, the point was made, that years ago, in wars, these amputees would not have survived on the battlefield. No one that had their arms and legs blown off would have ever survived the loss of blood. Advances in the battlefield medical treatment and the immediate treatment of the soldiers, has helped prolong their lives. Also, they say the body armor that they wear today on the battlefield, has quite a bit to do with the survival rate.

The serviceman pictured with Gary Sinise, in this article, was Todd Nicely. He was in Afghanistan when an explosion from a pressure plate on a roadside bomb was triggered. He didn’t even realize at the time that he had lost his legs and needed to have amputations, even of his arms. It seems that they (the soldiers) can have such adrenaline flowing during wartime, that they don’t even recognize that they’ve had this traumatic injury until after the fact. I’m sure this is a similar scenario with the Boston marathon bombings that happened with those people on the sidelines and the runners who were taken by surprise. Corporal Nicely talked about how, in another wartime, he would’ve died on the battlefield. But once again, the body armor we talked about, the helicopter arriving in just six minutes to pick him up, and the quick reactions he credited to his fellow Marines, all helped him to live and become just the second quadruple amputee to ever survive battlefield injury wounds.

The first quadruple amputee that was wounded and survived was Brendan Marrocco, 22 years old. Thanks to the efforts of actor Gary Sinise, and a foundation called “Tunnel to Towers,” Brendan lives in a specially equipped home that has special features like stoves and sinks that move up and down. The home has elevators in areas that most of us wouldn’t think of and a heated outdoor wheelchair ramp, because he needs to melt the snow so he can get around. It also has appliances that are all controlled by computers. Keep this foundation in mind. It’s called, “Tunnel to Towers” and they’ve agreed to build 11 more homes, hopefully in this year for other quadruple amputees or even for the triple amputees.

I’d like to bring this closer to home and put out some information on the realities of what it’s like to have an amputation and to rehabilitate from that. Right after being carted off the streets of Boston from this bombing these victims probably very soon woke up after having surgery to amputate their legs, and most of these, again, were lower leg amputations. They’d wake up and have a big bandage on, they’d have a cast on, and they’d have a drainage tube in. When you read stories about people who’ve had this and they just wake up to that realization that, “I don’t have my leg anymore” or “I don’t have my legs anymore…” I can’t even imagine what that would be like. Then it takes a good 3 to 4 weeks for the actual wounds from the surgery to heal.

I’d watched one of the surgeons interviewed right after this and he said, “We weren’t really amputating. We were just finishing what the bombs started…” meaning that the amputations were pretty much there. They were just cleaning them up and making the limb more usable to fit with a prosthetic later on…but it takes about 3 to 4 weeks for these wounds to actually heal. They heal with a scar and then the internal healing takes another year to a year and a half.

So what do these victims have to look forward to in that time? First of all, they do have a lot of trouble with pain, as we can imagine, from any surgery or any traumatic injury. They’re going to have a lot of trouble with swelling, so they have to wear a compression bandage to keep the swelling down. In this situation too, it helps to mold their limb so that it will fit better into the prosthesis. That’s a very big part of the immediately postoperative weeks after this traumatic amputation.

In this time the wound is going to feel really weird… not to just say hey, I don’t have a leg anymore or I don’t have an arm anymore, but it’s going to feel really odd. They say it can really feel supersensitive and we’ve also heard of that thing called, “phantom pain”, where they can sort of feel a residual pain from the fresh wound. There’s been immense trauma to the bones and the nerves, so they are going to have a phantom pain sometimes where, even though the foot is gone, they may feel like they’re having pain there.

It takes a good 10 days before the wound is ready for them to try, what they call, an “interim prosthetic.” This prosthetic is just what it means. It’s just kind of a temporary one that can help them begin to get back on their feet.

Think about it… you lose a leg above the knee or even below the knee and you’ve lost a lot of tissue, a lot of muscle, a lot of weight. You’re going to have a lot of balance problems. One other thing that people talk about is how you’re going to have to put almost 80% of the workload on your surviving leg, if you have a surviving leg, to make up for the one that you lost. The prosthetic will come in and gets to feeling like it at least gives you that initial balance, because of the weight of the prosthetic. But you have to first learn to stand… you have to learn how to walk. You have to learn how to sit and how to get back up again. You have to learn how to do stairs. You have to learn how to go up a ramp, down the ramp… things that we don’t even think about it.

I want you to think about this, not just for our Boston victims, but also for our war victims that have to live with amputations. Think about when you get out of your car, what they have to do differently. When you walk into your home, up those few steps, what they have to do differently with their prosthetic limb. They can go back to swimming and jogging, even mountain climbing. With a special type of prosthesis, they can do almost unlimited things. But, the truth of it is, this doesn’t happen overnight and it takes many, many months and sometimes, even years for them to get comfortable enough with their prosthetic to where they can get back to that full life. The rule of thumb is that it’s going to take these amputees about six months to become really independent, not only with caring for their prosthesis, but of course with all the mobility that they need to be trained, once again, to do. Getting back to work is their priority and getting back to their normal lives is their priority. For those of us that have not been victims of these very vicious terrorist attacks, we should all be mindful of the challenges that lay ahead for these people as we go about our normal daily lives.

The emotional component is a huge piece of recovering from this kind of traumatic accident or amputation. As you can imagine, there’s a huge grieving process that goes on. They grieve the loss of life as they knew it, they grieve the loss of independence. Imagine needing to ask someone for help to take a shower or get dressed or all those little things that we take for granted. Then there are the feelings that would come along with feeling inadequate, feeling like you’re not the wife you used to be or the partner you used to be. Then, sometimes, I’m sure these people worry about if they’re in a relationship, will they be rejected for this? How will they be treated? How will the people on the streets look at them? Will they be treated differently at work?

I was reading about a doctor who wrote about this and said that the first thing that people typically experience is “shock” from the sudden, traumatic amputations from like the bombing, or from a war situation (of course a sudden amputation can also be from a health problem). I’m not talking about those amputations that happen because they have complications of diabetes or peripheral vascular disease (those are the higher percentage), but of the traumatic amputations which are only about 15% of all amputations. These traumatic amputations are the ones where their first feelings might be shock. Then, as you can imagine, there’d be the “why me”, “why me”?

One thing I will leave you with is what some of the people writing about this have to say about what carries them through; this can speak to all of us as they mention their faith, the hope they have, and the caring and loving people they surround themselves with. Most especially, they say, when they had this traumatic amputation they decided that they need to go on and find their life purpose, so that they can live the life they are meant to live.

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Yes. Repeated instances of drinking to the point of drunkenness or passing out are not social drinking.  It is a sure sign of someone who has a problem with alcohol…but you already know this, which is why you are asking this question. You have a difficult decision to make, because if you choose to make her your wife, her drinking will impact all aspects of your life. Assuming she is a problem drinker, odds are that this problem will only get worse over time.

What can you expect in a marriage to an alcoholic or binge drinker?  Lies, lies and more lies about the drinking; living in fear that they will get hurt or hurt someone else by drunk driving; a roller coaster of emotions where they can be angry drunk or angry hung-over leading to a higher incidence of abusive behavior; irresponsible behavior with work, finances and children and often an escalation to other drugs. An addicts desire and need for their drug of choice will be all consuming.  Yes, there is the hope of recovery, but be prepared for multiple episodes of relapse.  Sorry, I know this sounds bleak, but that said, I know some really good people who suffer with addictions.  This illness is one of humanities great tragedies.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How committed are you to be with a partner who suffers with an addiction?
• What strengths could you bring to this type of relationship?
• What are your weaknesses and vulnerabilities?
• Is this the type of marriage you envision for yourself and your future family?
• How willing are you to place your heart on the line as you ride this roller coaster?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

Hospice of Salina, Hassman Termite and Pest Control, Martinelli’s Little Italy, Girls Scouts, Dignity Care Home, Protandim, LifeVantage, Bennington State Bank, George Jerkovich Photography, Circles of the Heartland

Sadly, the reality is that most victims take their abusers back multiple times before they break off with them for good.  This has to be one of the hardest things for a parent to stand by and watch.  I’m sure you feel helpless, and essentially you are.  Your daughter will have to find her own way through this maze of emotional turmoil.  That’s not to say that you can’t be there to support her in any way you can.  Go on a fact-finding mission to learn what you can do to help her.  Your local domestic violence organization is a great place to start.

One piece of advice I have is to see if she will sign a No-Contact contract.  This is a written document that is a contract or pledge she makes with herself to have Zero contact with him.  Just have her write out what she needs to do to avoid him completely… NO texts, Facebook, phone calls, driving by his place, and absolutely NO make-up sex (!)…Zero contact.  (NO SEX because the hormones that are released with sex will chemically and biologically keep her feeling attached to him!)  The longer she can maintain Zero contact with him, the easier it will be to extract him from her life and her heart.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What plan do you have for learning more about protecting your daughter from domestic abuse?
• Knowing your daughter, how and when will she be the most receptive to your efforts to protect her?
• How will you share information on domestic abuse with your daughter?
• What frame of mind do you both need to be in before having this talk or sharing this information?
• What do you need to do to bolster your own emotional strength during these trying times?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at http://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/30/why-mass-murderers-kill-telling-baby-mama-got-girl-pregnant-man-abused-by-girlfriend/

I’m titling this piece “Why Mass Murderers Kill”. The quick and easy answers that I found are usually revenge, envy, or rejection. Let’s look a little bit deeper into that and, let me tell you, I’ve researched a number of scholarly research articles about this and pulled out some facts to share.

One of them came from Knoll, writing in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law titled “The Pseudo-Commando Mass Murderer – Part One – The Psychology of Revenge and Obliteration”. This author-researcher is calling this pseudo-commando type of mass murderer, the one who likes to kill in public during the daytime, the ones who do plan their carnage well in advance. They’re the ones who show up with a powerful arsenal of weapons. These type of perpetrators have no escape planned and expect to be killed during the incident.

This isn’t necessarily true of the bombers that we saw in Boston, but many of these mass murderers; the shooters at Columbine, at Newtown, and even in Aurora oftentimes not only commit the murders but then commit suicide.

So what are these murderers driven by? They’re driven by really strong feelings of anger and resentment. Many of these perpetrators believe that they are being personally persecuted and that they’re grossly mistreated in some way. They have this mass murder in mind in order to have their own personal agenda of payback.

Another researcher, Mullen, writes in “Behavioral Sciences in the Law” an article titled “The Autogenic (self generated) Massacre”. He was able to review five cases even though a lot of these do commit suicide, but in these 5 cases they happened to survive.

He found that most of them are almost stereotypical and had a lot of common traits. The perpetrators themselves had a common trait of social and psychological disabilities. They’re often times very isolated loners who are bullied in childhood. They rarely establish themselves in effective work roles as adults. When you think about the personality traits, as the author says, what these people have in common is that they oftentimes are marked by suspicious personalities, they’re very obsessional, and they have feelings of grandiosity. They also harbor feelings of being persecuted against and oftentimes might even become somewhat delusional (which is a true psychiatric disorder in my opinion). Here’s their intent: their intention is to kill as many people as they can and then kill themselves. They don’t expect there to be survivors. Mullen was lucky to find five survivors to actually study in depth.

There were several research articles that talked about looking at these perpetrators and maybe even doing a test for sociopathy. I’m not going to get into a lot about the criteria associated with sociopathy because I do want you to go back to my website, joanjerkovich.com. I did a complete video interview, a very in-depth study, with a counselor who was on Nancy Grace at one time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZZ3hEWHAIg

The risk factors associated with sociopathy, or psychopathy, is someone who comes from a family with a history of abuse or ineffective parenting having a history and childhood of setting fires, hurting animals, being sadistic, self-centered, and most importantly they lack compassion and lack empathy.

Several of the authors mention this as if you could have taken these mass murderers and given them this sociopathy test and they would have scored high in this category.  This would be one way of maybe predicting future behavior. Then again, as we can imagine, that would be quite a task to undertake and we have personal rights to be concerned about.

Let’s go back to the researcher Knoll who wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, where he writes, that some of these mass murderers take special steps to send out one piece of final communication to the public or the news media. He’s making a case that these really need to be scrutinized carefully.

Let me go back quickly and say that all of these pieces I’m quoting from were written before the Boston bombing. As we know, there has been some information coming out about what those two perpetrators either said or posted on Facebook…those are real clues to what might be their motivation, and their next steps in these areas of perpetrating these acts of violence against the public.  Watching for any of these and having a heads-up alert for any of these types of communication might have helped us identify these violent offenders before their violent acts take place.

He talks to about these revenge fantasies that many of these pseudo-commandos have. They have this horrifically, mortally wounded self-esteem and ultimately that enables them to commit these mass murders and suicides.

I have to add this other piece of research here because of the debate over gun laws and especially over the background checks, mostly to kind of see if we can not only keep the criminals out but someone who might be mentally unstable. This was by a Phillips and printed in the “Virtual Mentor” predicting the risk of future dangerousness. He says this dangerousness is not always the result of mental illness. Many individuals who commit violent or aggressive acts often do so for reasons completely unrelated to their mental state, and the vast majority of violent people do not have any kind of mental illness whatsoever.

We have this very small portion of the violent people in our society that might also be mentally ill. Let’s really think about that when we are trying to cull out the mentally ill people for a violent attack, although I do think it’s very critical to not get guns in the hands of those who are possibly suicidal. He goes on to say that violence is not a diagnosis. It is not a disease and the potential to do harm is not actually a symptom or sign of mental illness but it must be a central consideration when we’re assessing someone who might be potentially dangerous in the future.

I really like this piece put up by J. Reid Meloy, who is a PhD Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, and president of Forensis, Inc. Forensis, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to forensic psychiatry and psychological research. He put up several blogs in the Oxford University Press in September, 2012. This would’ve been before the Newtown incident even occurred. I’m going to go through some of those blogs and the Newtown timing will be critical, with one of them being relative to weapons used in these mass murderers… in particular, assault rifles. He starts the blog by saying, For the past fifteen years, my colleagues and I have conducted research on mass murder.

Myth number one: they snap. Research on this shows that these mass murderers don’t just snap, on a whim, and perpetrate this violence. They actually do a lot of research, a lot of planning, a lot of preparation… for days, weeks, and even months. This becomes like a fantasy that they’ve been incubating in their mind for years. It starts the clock, when they finally come to the point, where they have enough detailed preparations, that they actually are ready to carry through. However, there’s no evidence that they actually have a high state of emotional arousal when the killings occurred. Witnesses who have seen the mass murderers who survived, talked about them being cool and calm, and very deliberate… lacking in complete emotion, relative to the violence that has happened.

For example, when we see a video of the Boston bombers or any of these other perpetrators taken into police custody, they’re like blank slates. They’re not very emotional and they’re certainly not showing any remorse.

Myth number two: They can easily be divided into psychopaths, psychotics, and depressives. I talked about sociopathy earlier, but he’s saying this is very complex. Their motivations are complex. Their psychopathology, if they have it, is very complex. One thing they have is self-centeredness. They are also very grandiose and have a lack of empathy. They’re chronically indifferent toward others and very detached from their emotional life as well. This would stand to reason that when we find them and catch up with them, they’re just kind of blank slates. They don’t seem to care, one way or the other, that they killed people, blew their legs off, and changed their lives forever. They just don’t have it in them to even feel that…

Myth number three: Incidents of mass murder are increasing. This author says, “No. It’s a very rare phenomenon and it’s neither increasing nor decreasing in the US.”

Myth number four: Banning assault weapons will lower the frequency of mass murder. Meloy writes that the most popular weapon chosen by mass murderers is a 9 mm pistol, oftentimes a Glock, but they usually do bring two or three firearms to the scene. Assault weapons, such as the AR 15 and AK-47, are generally not utilized. Remember though, this was written before the Newtown massacre, where the bushmaster that was used in that incident, did fall under the 1994 assault weapons ban legislation. This author had made the case that it’s no surprise that between 1994-2004 when that ban was in effect that there was no decrease in the average number of mass murders per year in the US.

More study needs to be done because this type of weapon was used in Newtown Connecticut with the killing of the young children.

Myth number five: Psychotic individuals cannot plan in a precise and methodical manner. They say the majority of adult mass murderers are psychotic which means they have broken with reality and perceive the world in an idiosyncratic and often paranoid way. So, yes, they can plan and carry this out in a methodical manner.

Myth number six: It must be the drugs that they’re abusing. It is very true that the violence that occurs in the general population most often does involve drug use and particularly alcohol, but in mass murderers, drugs are minimally used. They think that’s because the mass murderer doesn’t want drugs to cloud their consciousness at the time. It would mess with their planning and preparation and their goal of getting this carried out…their goal is often to maximize their casualty rates. Research has found two cases where the mass murder actually used therapeutic amounts of an illicit drug to help him remain calm during the shooting.

I’m going to wrap up this piece by talking about the final myth, number seven, that mass murder can be predicted and can be prevented. This author says…it’s not going to happen. It’s too rare, and as I mentioned earlier there are too many of the murderers who commit suicide, so we can’t study them after the fact. There’s also the concern that we can infringe on individual rights and freedoms by trying to profile everybody. We already have that issue in our society.

There is one thing that this author holds out as a little piece of hope that he says can probably mitigate the risk of such events. That is that all of us have a responsibility to pay attention to the behaviors of people we see and hear. These mass murderers oftentimes give us warning signs, such as leaking their intent to others, or posting something on the Internet that might raise concerns. It can be very overt, like “I’m going to kill my supervisor tomorrow at work”. Or it can be covert, such as “don’t come to work tomorrow, you’re my friend, but watch the news you might see me there”.

Our logical reaction should be initially that it doesn’t feel quite right, or something in your gut is telling you to tell somebody in a position of authority. The truth is, most of us, even if we feel that gut reaction, don’t do that. We need to start alerting the authorities.

There are people out there that suffer the guilt of feeling that something was wrong. They knew something was up with a suspicious person and didn’t speak up. Can you imagine the survivors’ guilt you would feel if you knew you could’ve averted a tragedy? The author writes that sometimes we will say, “I just didn’t think he was serious”.  Don’t just use this rationale of passivity.  Trust your emotional reactions. Trust the anxiety you feel. Trust the wariness and fear and report it to law enforcement and let them do their job of investigating.

I actually got to talk with someone, not from the bombing at the Boston Marathon, but someone who was in the crowd that escaped in a panic when shots were fired by gang members at the 4/20 event in Denver Colorado. This person was shook up. It really brings to mind that we not only have care and concern for the people who were killed, the people who lost family members, those that were wounded and injured, but also those that are injured from a psychological stance by being bystanders at these tragic events.

I heard some news reports of people that said they walked up to people at the Boston bombing wanting to provide help and they just couldn’t stop because they saw limbs that had been blown off. They were thinking how unqualified they were to be there and left the scene. There is a huge trauma involved with that as well.

So, what do we do with the people who have been so traumatized by being in the proximity or even directly involved with these acts of violence?

If you follow me on my website then you know that once a day I put up a life coaching question. One of these questions was from someone who was a witness to the Aurora shooting. They were saying that every time they looked at the news and saw anything about Boston, or see something about Newtown, the traumatic event just all comes back to them. They are almost re-traumatized. When I addressed this person I told them this question was out of the realm of life coaching. If they’re this severely affected by this then they may want to consider professional help.

However, I did put up some information that I reprinted from the Mayo Clinic website on post traumatic stress disorder, as we often call it PTSD, and this info very specifically states when to see a doctor. The Mayo Clinic said that it’s normal to have a wide range of feelings and emotions after a traumatic event. You might experience fear and anxiety, lack of focus, sadness, changes in how well you sleep or how much you eat, and crying spells that catch you off guard. You might even have nightmares or be unable to stop thinking about the event. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a post traumatic stress disorder, but if you’re having these disturbing thoughts and feelings for more than a month, or if their severe or you’re having trouble getting your life back under control, talk to your healthcare professional and get treatment as soon as possible. You can see that information on my website at JoanJerkovich.com.

http://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/18/joan-jerkovich-bcc-your-life-coach-2/

If there’s any take away from today’s show it’s that I want all of us to be very aware that if we see something or hear something that we think is dangerous or someone who is unstable then please report it to the authorities and let them do their job of checking it out. Let’s also be mindful of the people who witnessed these types of traumatic events and the symptoms they may incur from post traumatic stress disorder. If we see or know someone with PTSD symptoms and they don’t get better, like it said in the Mayo Clinic posting, and it persists for over a month, encourage them to get help. Help them get to their doctor or other healthcare professional.

Often people think a move to a new city is going to be the panacea for what ails them.  The move may be a good decision for you but you need to realize what a huge upset to your daily routines this will create.  Moving away from your family and friends and support systems will also stress you.  If you are a person who likes new adventures and change you will adjust more easily.  If not, you are wise to think this through very carefully before you make this decision.  Also, it is advisable to not make this decision (nor any other life changing decisions) when in the throes of depression.  Wait for a “sunnier” day outside, and as reflected in how you feel inside, to think this through.  Don’t rush this decision; it’s too far reaching.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What more can you do to actively address and treat your depression?
• How do your family and friends help you when you are depressed?
• How could you tap in to their support if you moved away?
• Find someone who within the past year moved away from family and interview them on the pros and cons to moving.
• Make a list of the pros and cons you would expect to encounter with this move.
• What amount of time do you think you should take to carefully consider this move?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

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We all need and want friends like you! His loss if he just threw your friendship away like this! Few friendships can survive this type of “dropping off the face of the earth”, especially when his absence put you through so much anxiety over his well-being.  You may care more for his welfare then he does and I think your concerns about his drinking and depression point to the crux of the issue. We can be there for our friends, but if they don’t want our help there’s nothing we can do for them. Decide how much of your heart you want to put back in to this friendship. It’s been trampled with his inconsiderate, intentional absence, so decide for yourself if you want to continue to reach out or let him come to you.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What does your heart tell you to do with your friend?
• How do you sometimes put yourself out for friends to the detriment of your own well-being?
• How has your friend shown signs of wanting or needing your friendship to help him deal with his depression and drinking, if at all?
• What does staying tapped in to this friendship mean to you personally?
• What would walking away from this friendship, or distancing yourself, mean to you?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach. Contact her with your questions, or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show! 

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

Hospice of Salina, Hassman Termite and Pest Control, Martinelli’s Little Italy, Girls Scouts, Dignity Care Home, Protandim, LifeVantage, Bennington State Bank, George Jerkovich Photography, Circles of the Heartland

This sounds like a classic case of “my way is the right way” and “your way is the wrong way” in a relationship.  I’m right and you’re wrong.  This makes me chuckle because after I married my husband I had to get over feeling like he was stacking the dishes in the dishwasher the wrong direction.  Truth is, he wasn’t, he’s just left-handed!  So, while his way seemed backward to me, it was the “right” way for him!

Ok, if the dishes really aren’t getting clean, and you aren’t being either OCD, or a controlling jerk about this, you can nicely point out to her how she could do this differently.  That said, what I really want to tell you to do is to just let this one flush on down the drain.  Let it go dude!  Who says your way is the right way?  Are you the dish cop?  What will you learn from just letting this one go?  Try these on for size: acceptance of others and of a different way of doing things; less tension in your relationship; not getting labeled a controlling jerk? So…just plan on rewashing a few dishes, or picking a few dried on crumbs off the plates…I bet you’ll reap the rewards in your relationship outside the kitchen once the dishes are done!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• How could you grow as a person by letting this go?
• If you try and tell or teach your girlfriend how to do this differently and she doesn’t catch on, what will you do then?
• At what point will you be willing to accept your differences?
• Is this battle worth the tension it could cause in your relationship?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

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This is a challenging question and I’m going to invite commenters to jump in with their opinions…here goes my best attempt…

Short and sweet, the answer to should you tell her is “No”.  Believe it or not, some women don’t want to know that their husbands are cheating.  Maybe they sense that something is wrong, but aren’t ready to hear the truth.  Maybe they don’t like sex and have an understanding that their husband will have his dalliances and she will look the other way.  Across the ages, married women have “allowed” their husbands to have mistresses, so long as he continues to support her and the children financially.  Personally, I say kick him to the curb, but to each his own…

My opinion to not tell may be skewed, because I had this very situation years ago with one of my best friends.  I’d been hearing from her about her husband and his girl-friend.  My red-flag intuition went up, but she seemed to have no concerns over their “friendship” and seemed to almost be encouraging this relationship (my friend didn’t like to have sex with her husband).  Then, I had the occasion to see her husband and his girl-friend at a party.  My friend wasn’t there with her husband and I witnessed this woman flirting all over him and sitting on his lap!  I promptly told my friend what I saw and to this day I don’t think she wanted to hear it.  I felt she was more concerned over the public display and how it would look to others in the community, than his involvement with the other woman.

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• You know your friend, without giving it too much thought; do you think she’d want you to tell her?
• Do you feel the personal need to tell her, as in, if you don’t you will feel that you are not being true to yourself?
• What might the consequences to your friendship be to either telling her, or not telling her?
• How can you be there for her during this difficult time and those to come?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily and share your COMMENTS at www.joanjerkovich.com

Last week’s questions for you to read and comment on:

• Overslept, Lost Job
• Work with Ex
• Friend Stealing
• Finish Writing Book
• Losing Weight

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com 

Listen to “The Joan Jerkovich Show” weekends @9am on 910 KINA

If you’ve been fired for being late to work too many times, this is a problem for you.  The cure to most bad habits can be to suffer consequences that hurt enough to motivate you to stop, and losing your job is a pretty big consequence!  As an employer, I thank our grade schools and high schools for setting consequences for tardiness.  This makes me wonder how old you are?  If you are young, we can say that you are still learning about life.  If you are an adult, there must be something more going on that you would be so irresponsible to get fired for repeated tardiness.

A responsible adult knows that they either have to turn off the late night TV and get some sleep; or they will go to work tired and gut it out until their shift is over (assuming you can perform sufficiently and safely at work while tired).  You overslept?  Again, a responsible adult knows to set their alarm (set 3 if you need to) and get their butt out of bed and off to work!  Barring a crippling mental or physical health problem, you don’t get a free pass from this Life Coach on this one!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching ~

• If you are brutally honest with yourself, why do you think you don’t prioritize getting to work on time?
• What can you do to address the real, deep-seated issues that dictate your behavior in this area?
• What small behavior changes can you make to change your attitude and habits?
• How will you build accountability in to your plan for change?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

It is reasonable to expect that you won’t relieve the tension.  I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, but I’m sure that if I tried to give you some sure-fire way to make these awkward feelings go away you would know, in your psyche, that I was just spouting off some BS!  Falling in love is all about opening our hearts to let someone else in.  When you do this, you place yourself in a position of being emotionally vulnerable.  This vulnerability is the basis for the hurt of a breakup and the tension you now feel post-breakup.

The fact that you can work at all with your Ex is a testament to your professionalism.  While at work, keep your focus on the task at hand; monitor your thoughts and try to keep them on work and off the relationship muck; don’t let on that being around him bothers you (even if it does).  If those things don’t help you can always show him up on the job, outperform him and go for the promotion so you can be his boss and fire his arse!  Yeah!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What works to calm you in tense situations?
• How can you incorporate your self-calming methods in to your work situation?
• Do you feel the need to further process the hurt of this broken relationship?
• What has helped you heal from past broken relationships?
• What does “accept the things you cannot change” mean to you?
• Are there things you can do to help accept that healing a broken heart takes time?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

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You, and your parents, should feel proud that you are concerned about a member of your peer group stealing.  This puts you in the category, in my opinion, of “good” guy or girl.  Young as you are, you are recognizing a need to discern (decide) whether you want to be a part of this group.  Sadly, while the people who care about you would love to shield you from these types of people, you will encounter them all through your life.  As they get older, they just go from stealing candy to stealing at work or even from friends.  You get the picture.

So long as the other members of the group you hang out with don’t agree to the stealing, you’re OK to consider the kids who value honesty friends.  When you’re hanging out with this group, make sure you keep your distance from this particular person and don’t spend time alone as friends.  If you’re more of a quiet, shy person and see something that shouldn’t be going on, such as stealing or bullying or lying, walk away.  If you’re more assertive and feel strong enough to do so, speak up and tell your friend to stop!  Most of all, you need to tell your parents or teachers about it so that the adults in your life can help you and guide you.  Also, and this is very important, if others in the group start to go along with the bad behavior, you have to get out of this group and find new friends!  Leaving old friends behind will be hard, but worth it in the end, as bad people will either treat you bad or get you in trouble.  I believe in you!  Stay strong!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• Get out your computer or something to write with and write about what you saw happening when this friend stole the candy.
• Next, write about how this made you feel guilty by association.
• Then, be honest in writing about whether or not the other friends in the group are the type of “good” people you want to associate with.
• Read over what you’ve written and ask yourself:  Do I feel OK with still being a part of this group?
• If not, what plan will you follow to leave the group for new friends?
• Who can you count on to help you, or still be your friend, as you break away from this group?
• What will you do to stay positive, and on the right path, as you leave these old friends behind (a hard thing to do)?

Please SHARE this on Facebook and lend your COMMENTS ~ we learn from each other!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

Yes!  Absolutely!  Life Coaching is geared toward helping people accomplish their goals.  A key factor in finishing your book is going to be tapping in to your MQ (Motivation Quotient~I admit I just made that up!).  When we don’t have external forces setting deadlines for us, such as a publisher (should we be so fortunate to have a real book deal in place!), we have to create our own deadlines.  Maybe you can plan to finish your first rough draft before your birthday, or maybe before your cat’s birthday (don’t all writers have cats?).  Who cares?  Just make up a date, write out your plan and find a way to stick to it!

Before I shut up here, as a fellow writer, I’m going to share something super secret with you…it doesn’t take “years” to write a book or screenplay, and it doesn’t take “months” to write something less involved.  The writers who claim it does are simply enjoying their time spent in what I call~ “Mental Masturbation”.  Hired gun Hollywood screenwriters are given 6 weeks to complete a feature film screenplay.  Diablo Cody, stripper turned academy award winning screenwriter of Juno (2007), finished the piece in 4 months.  (Damn, if only I’d have known to try stripping before writing! lol)  I’ve written 3 screenplays and guarantee it didn’t take me 10 years to complete each one!  When you set your mind to it, you can, and will, finish writing your book.  Send me a copy!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• Can you break down your process of writing in to small, incremental steps?
• Can you assign your own deadlines to each of the steps you listed?
• Who can you call on to keep you accountable to sticking to the steps and deadlines you listed (p.s. your cat doesn’t count here)?
• Write a “dream achieved” story, using all your senses and making it as detailed as you can, about the celebration you will have once your book is finished!  Woo Hoo!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at http://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/20/criticism-of-obama-drone-policy-local-doctor-responds-to-elected-official-using-n-word-420-weed-day-chill-musician/

As President Obama promised, in his State of the Union address in January, that he was going to engage with Congress on the targeting of terrorists, to make sure that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world. So, has he kept true to his promise?

As reported by Albert R. Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist, back in 2008, then presidential candidate, Barack Obama was unsparing in his criticism of President George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policies. He condemned the torture and the infamous detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and certainly the lack of transparency and congressional oversight, calling it something of a dubious legal framework and the blow-back that was spawning more terrorists and diminishing US standing in the world.

Yet, here we are under Obama’s administration, and there are serious questions on these very same issues… the same issues he was critical of the Bush administration for.

The one area in the Obama administration that is being most closely scrutinized, over the transparency issue, is under his drone policy.  Since his administration, the use of drones has increased seven-fold and caused the deaths of thousands of suspected terrorists and at least hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. In most other countries, there is an overwhelming opposition and resentment toward the United States for these drone strikes.

We may have a monopoly on these weapons at the time being, but it’s being said that this is not going to last, because dozens of other countries, including Russia and China, are rushing in to develop armed drones. The Council on Foreign Relations Report warns that if the US doesn’t establish a coherent legal and policy rationale for its use of drones, they could become an unregulated, unaccountable vehicle for states to deploy lethal force with impunity. Kind of scary…

I know that some of you are critical of Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, and the reporting that she does. Michael Isikoff was the one that talked about the last piece I did on, “Hubris, the Selling of the Iraq War.” On her show, Michael Isikoff shared some breaking news that he’d had at NBC, where he revealed a leaked white paper from the Department of Justice outlining the legal case for using drones to kill American citizens, if they are senior operational leaders in Al Qaeda or in another terrorist organization, even if they have not been convicted of a crime.

This 16-page memo provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama Administrations, as he calls it, most secretive and controversial policies. One of the reasons I wanted to put up a show about this is because some of my liberal friends have privately talked to me about their very concerns on how Obama is handling this…

In my research, one of the most compelling pieces I saw on this, was an interview that Bill Moyers did with, “Moyers and Company,” with Vicki Divoll and Vincent Warren. These are two experts on civil liberties during wartime. They talked about the ethics and the legality of drone strikes, and these very targeted killings that we’re seeing happening, in countries we’re not even at war with. This interview went up on February 1, 2013 and I’m going to embed that in a video at JoanJerkovich.com. I have to encourage you to watch the full interview because I’m going to be paraphrasing and hitting some highlights of this interview. I don’t want you to take anything out of context:

http://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/20/bill-moyers-with-vicki-divoll-and-vincent-warren-talk-about-obamas-drone-policy/

Bill Moyers is asking both of them, “Do you think that President Obama is fighting the War on Terror within the rule of law?” Vincent Warren replied, “I do not. In fact, I know that he is not.” Vicki DiVoll said, “I’m concerned that he may not be, but I’m not going to go quite so far as to say that he is not following the rule of law. I think his lawyers have told him that he is and he believes them.”

Divoll goes on to tell us how this actual program of targeted killing works. The Pentagon and the CIA nominate people to be on the list and it goes through what the White House promises is a very rigorous process of review to determine if those people should or should not be on the list. Finally, it makes it to the president, and President Obama has the final say on who or who is not on the list.

In talking about the concerns over this transparency issue, Vincent Warren was saying that the problem is that the only thing we ever know about the counter-intelligence that they’re collecting, has been what the government has been forced to say, or what journalists have been able to find out, or maybe even forced, through litigation work, from humans rights organizations such as his.

This is frightening because Vicki says there are US citizens who have been put on the same hit lists… the same targeted killing list of high value target lists that foreigners have.

So far, that we know of, three US citizens have been killed. With regards to the killing of US citizens, our drones did kill a United States citizen, born in Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki. Then two weeks later, his 16-year-old American-born son was also killed by a drone while having dinner in an outdoor café with his cousin. In that attack, the person they were actually looking to target, reportedly was not found among the dead.

Like Vincent Warren said, the 16-year-old was a US citizen, born in Colorado. He went to Yemen with his family in 2002. As a US citizen, don’t we all have a right not to be summarily killed by our government without a trial? Without due process? He goes on to say that under international law there is no legal justification for targeting people without any meaningful purpose. There are rules that have been established in terms of the “law of war” that keep governments from just dropping bombs randomly in different countries… countries that are not even at war.

The second piece that he mentions is the constitutional issue and they talk quite a bit about this in the interview… that we certainly cannot and should not, live in a country where the US is targeting it’s own citizens for killing, without any due process at all. So as he says, we’ve simply moved from the Bush Administration, where we started out with detention in Guantánamo, without charge or trial, and now we’re in the Obama Administration “era of killing,” without charge or trial.

This is where I agree with what Vicki Divoll says: “War is difficult under all circumstances” and she says, “They’re the ones, Presidents’ Bush and Obama, who want to call it war… because it enhances their own powers by doing so.

Vincent mentions that right now, we’ve killed almost as many people in the last 10 years with drones, as Al Qaeda killed here in New York on 9/11. There is not a country, in the world, that believes that these US drone attacks we are waging on other countries, that we are not even at war with, is the right and sustainable solution for us as a country. There’s certainly a cry of concern going out that talks about the fact that these drone strikes might be simply radicalizing people who otherwise might not of been so radical. So there’s a concern here that maybe we’re just making this problem bigger.

In his interview, Bill Moyers asked Vicki about the recently published op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Who says you can kill Americans, Mr. President?”… Pretty controversial title.

So he says, well, what are we talking about here, Vicki? She says, “The issue is that there are legal memoranda in the Department of Justice that explain in great detail the legal support that Obama believes he has for conducting this program, but the Justice Department won’t release them and he, Obama, won’t order them to be released… even though he, himself, released the very same type of memos about President Bush’s program.”

“So, Obama, tell us what your legal theory is? Congress isn’t doing anything. The courts are having trouble doing anything. You’re the only one who knows what your legal theory is. So tell us what it is. Make it transparent to all of us, so that we can decide and we can scrutinize whether it is actually right or not.”

Vincent Warren jumps in here. He talks about the democracy that we have, and the problems that can occur in saying that when we talk about the legal justifications, we’re now in an era where even the government’s interpretation of law becomes something aiken to a state secret.

That’s kind of true. How much of this should be kept secret for intelligence reasons and what is open and should be open to the public? We have to go through all these legal hurdles to get the government to articulate their legal theory, by which they have the justification for, let’s say, their drone policy. He is saying that is probably one of the deepest problems that you can find in a democracy.

Vicki weighs in saying, “So all we have, is a president interpreting his own powers and the limits on his own powers, and that is not the way it’s supposed to work. We need more oversight.”

At this part of the interview, Bill Moyers jumped in and was very critical of the Bush administration in saying, you know, isn’t Obama doing exactly the same thing? But here, Vicki jumped in and said: The Bush Administration’s actions in all of these areas was that, and his stance on it, was that the rule of law didn’t apply to him. That if Congress enacts a law and says, ‘don’t do that,’ why, he could do it anyway. She says, and of course, she’s defending Obama here, that President Obama does not subscribe to that theory. She felt that if Congress passed a law tomorrow that said, “you may not target with drones,” she believed he (Obama) would obey that law. The problem is, Congress isn’t doing that.

So who do we look to? Vicki looks to Congress but as Bill Moyers says, “Who’s going to push Congress if the Democrats are skeptical about taking on their own White House, and they want to cooperate with the White House, and the Republicans are voting on the other side?

Vicki says, “The media. The American people. The voters. It’s not a perfect system.” This is where Vincent jumps in and says, “I agree with Vicki, that there is really a fourth branch of government here, and that is the one that is probably the most important.”  He’s talking about the American people, the American voters. Vicki jumps in and says, “Yes, and they have been too quiet.”

I do think we have been too quiet on this issue. I’m going to leave you with what Vincent said. He said, “You should never ever trust that the government is being completely and totally honest about the mistakes that it’s making. And the stakes are just so high for both the law and our foreign-policy, and for civilians targeted in a killing program.”

The American citizens, that fourth branch of the government, need to speak up and need to hold this administration accountable…

I want to finish up with some of the legal concerns of the Obama drone policies. I talked about Vincent Warren who was on the Bill Moyer’s show. He said the problem we’re going to have in the next four years is narrowing the gap between what the law says and what the law should be in order for us to be safe, secure, and free citizens within this country and to treat other countries and other people around the world with the same amount of respect. Narrowing the gap between what’s legal and what’s just is the big battle.

Vickie jumps in and says we really need Congress to step up and do its job, which is to conduct oversight of this president and all presidents in the presidency, not just President Obama, in order to get some of these issues addressed. They talk about how it’s a golden opportunity because there’s a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. It would be much harder if you had a Republican president because it looks so partisan. She must have been feeling a bit conciliatory over this interview about President Obama because she said that, in fairness to President Obama, presidents don’t like to acknowledge the giving up of power, no president does. On their watch they don’t want to be the guy that shrunk the job.

I do think that the Senate, in particular, because it’s still Democratic, has a golden opportunity to get some of these things back under control, so that when the next president comes in we’ll have some laws and some standards that we can follow.

That is my personal hope for this very process.

In closing I want to tell you what Vincent Warren said. He says, “I firmly believe that President Obama is our best chance for the foreseeable future to do exactly what Vicki’s talking about, which would be to shrink that pie of presidential power (I said this earlier) he’s inherited from George Bush and Bush took more than anybody else. If he doesn’t do that, then the next president will have more power than the previous two and we’ll be back on the show in four years about how we slipped even more and there’s more egregious policies. We’ll be looking at the ramifications for those policies. I want to see that change and it’s going to take people here in this country to be able to make that happen.”

I can see my Fox News listeners out there being those very ones to rally the cry for transparency…Thanks for joining me here on “The Joan Jerkovich Show”!

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Geesh, I wish I could find this elusive thing called motivation and bottle it!  I’d be a gazillionaire!  Finding motivation, especially where weight loss is concerned, is tough.  We love to eat; eating tastes good; it feels good.  Often, it soothes over that rough day.  Damn, why can’t they make zero calorie cookies! I think there is something genetically mutated in those people who don’t like to eat and are content to crunch on raw vegetables all day. Don’t you? If they had lived in prehistoric times, they’d have all died out.  Why then, do we have to put up with their skinny bodies as that unattainable target we’re all supposed to strive for?…oh, how I digress…

Take an honest look at your eating habits to determine what small changes you can make to control your eating.  Also, take an honest look at your daily activity and map out a plan for adding more movement in to your day.  Decreasing calories and increasing activity is, and always will be, the gold standard for weight loss.  Start with small steps, and watch them grow to bigger steps and bigger success! Make your plan for weight loss as unique as you are. Here’s to your all-powerful, all-wonderful, uniqueness!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• What helped you motivate the last time you successfully lost weight?
• What lifestyle changes to decrease calories did you make that helped you lose weight?
• What lifestyle changes to increase activity did you make that helped you lose weight?
• How was your thinking about your weight different when you were staying on track to now when you’re lacking motivation?

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

Watch the full interview here.

Listen to The Joan Jerkovich Show podcast on the Obama Administration’s Drone Policy @ http://joanjerkovich.com/

 http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/pakistani-u-s-activists-protest-against-american-drone-strikes-1.986102#ixzz2QwdlfUtA

http://www.demotix.com/news/1190557/children-protest-drone-attacks-pakistan#media-1190498

http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone

I’m so sorry to hear that she had to witness this carnage, but it does bring to light the fact that while the authorities give us concrete numbers on the wounded and killed in these attacks, there is no way to quantify the numbers of bystanders who are emotionally traumatized.  Their trauma can range from the terrors of the mental images and memories of what they saw, to feeling helpless to stop the carnage or guilty over seeing others hurt or killed when they escaped that outcome (survivors guilt).

The best support you can provide your girlfriend is to make sure she gets professional help if she needs it.  Review the information below to see if she might need the help of a licensed counselor or Doctor.  There are times when issues go beyond the realm of Life Coaching, and this is one of them.  I wish you and your girlfriend, and all those affected by these horrific tragedies, an eventual return to well being.

Reprinted from the Mayo Clinic Website on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

When to see a doctor

It’s normal to have a wide range of feelings and emotions after a traumatic event. You might experience fear and anxiety, a lack of focus, sadness, changes in how well you sleep or how much you eat, or crying spells that catch you off guard. You may have nightmares or be unable to stop thinking about the event. This doesn’t mean you have post-traumatic stress disorder.

But if you have these disturbing thoughts and feelings for more than a month, if they’re severe, or if you feel you’re having trouble getting your life back under control, talk to your health care professional. Getting treatment as soon as possible can help prevent PTSD symptoms from getting worse.

In some cases, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms may be so severe that you need emergency help, especially if you’re thinking about harming yourself or someone else. If this happens, call 911 or other emergency medical service, or ask a supportive family member or friend for help.

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

When staying in the same place in life gets too painful, you will make a change.  This applies to a bad marriage, addiction or dissatisfactory job.  Is your unhappiness at work affecting other areas of your life?  Do you come home from work only to bark at your family members?  Do you dread going to work every day?  Has your unhappiness in this area of your life kept you from enjoying your friends, hobbies and other things you used to enjoy?  If so, you are wise to take steps toward change.

Leaving a job of 14 years is scary, but don’t let your fear take away your chance for living a fuller, happier life.  Plan for your escape to minimize your anxiety over making this huge change.  Now put on your ninja warrior suit, grab your nunchucks, and fight for the change you deserve!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• If you could show up tomorrow at your perfect job, what would that be?  Write this vision out in detail.
• What steps would you need to take to make your vision of your ideal job a reality?
• What excuses for making this change have you been making?
• What arguments can you make for refuting those excuses?
• On a scale of 1-5, how do you rate your motivation for taking those steps to make this change?
• If your motivation scale is near the top, how can you hold your “feet to the fire” to keep moving toward getting your dream job?

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

This blog is taken from “The Joan Jerkovich Show” radio transcript and edited for easier reading. Listen to the Podcast and post your COMMENTS at http://joanjerkovich.com/2013/04/13/hubris-part-3-elected-official-uses-n-word-actor-tyrese-allen-comments-musician-staying-off-drugs/  

Starting back in with the commentary on Hubris, as you remember I talked about Paul Wolfowitz. From 2001 to 2005 during the George W. Bush administration he was a US Deputy Secretary of Defense reporting to the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld…I want this segment to focus on some of why and how. How did it happen that we ended up in a war with Iraq based on faulty intelligence? Well, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were two of the kingpins running this propaganda machine. It was their idea initially, which was rejected by the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, to try and tie in Iraq to the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks.

As I found in a Wikipedia article, commenting about the journalist John Kampfner, Mr. Kampfner said that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz held secret meetings about opening up a second front against Saddam. Powell was excluded (from these meetings). They created in these meetings a policy that would later be dubbed “The Bush Doctrine” that centered on a preemption (preemptive war) and the war on Iraq. They saw this as an opportunity to root out hostile regimes in the Middle East and to implant American interpretations of democracy and free markets from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I’ve done a lot of research trying to find out what the motivation was of these key players in taking us into this war…This journalist (Kampfner) also reported that Wolfowitz saw a liberated Iraq as both the paradigm and the linchpin for future interventions. Of course, the job of finding those weapons of mass destruction and providing actual justification for the attack, was going to fall to the intelligence service agencies.

According to Kampfner, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believe that while the established security services did have a role to play, they were just too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking. As a result, they came in and set up what was known as the “cabal”, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new special office called “the office of special plans (OSP)” based in the US Defense Department. This new office of intelligence became President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible connection to Al Qaeda and possible possession of weapons of mass destruction.

In later history it was the actions of this very intelligence group that they pulled together, the OSP, that led to many of those accusations of the Bush administration actually “fixing” the intelligence to support their policy and his own agenda. This was also used to influence the congressional vote to go to war.

Okay, so maybe they want to bring democracy and free markets to the Middle East, but one other conjecture of why they wanted to start this war, and this is really a sad and sickening thought, is that operations in the war in Afghanistan were actually winding down. Let’s talk about following the war making money machine. Is that possibly a reason why we were drawn into another conflict?

Even though we have this somewhat sketchy intelligence, the administration starts pushing hard for Congress to take quick action against Saddam. Sen. Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader, even said the president made the point that there was “an urgency” to taking action, and that it couldn’t wait, and he got very animated. He used, uncharacteristically, profanity and used the middle finger to demonstrate Saddam Hussein’s disdain for the United States and for him personally.

When I heard that, I had to wonder if this is something of a personal vendetta for Bush? We do know that his father HW Bush was criticized for not finishing the job by taking out Saddam Hussein.

Was then-President Bush’s motivation for going into war with Iraq based on his belief that Saddam Hussein had called for the assassination of his father? I heard one journalist make a comment saying, “I love my father too but sending all these people to war to avenge their own father…very few of us have that power… and I think none of us in our country should.”

Based on this hurry up mode that the Bush administration had everybody in, the Senate intelligence committee did request that a national intelligence estimate, which is a comprehensive summary of the intelligence evidence, be compiled.  The NIE’s are routinely delivered on intelligence issues, yet this being one of the most grave matters our country might undertake…sending our servicemen to war…they pulled this together in only three weeks. This (NIE) is something the CIA normally would put together in months. So, with this hurry up attitude, not only did they pull it together in just a few short weeks, but it was delivered to Congress for them to review just days before the congressional vote for war.

Here is the really scary bombshell. In October 2002 the congressional vote came out 373 “yes” votes to go to war to 156 “no”.  Of those votes, Michael Isikoff, as you know as the co-author of the book “Hubris:  Selling the Iraq War”, said that as far as his investigation could tell only about half a dozen of the US senators accessed that NIE report that is kept in a classified vault. He went on to say that, otherwise, if they had read the report, they would have seen that it was filled with dissents, meaning dissenting opinions on whether there were actually weapons of mass destruction.

How did Colin Powell, who was called the most trusted US warrior of the time, weigh in on all of this? He was the one that was slated to give the speech to sell this war to the United Nations. Well, for one, Colin Powell called the contacts with Al Qaeda and 9/11 BS. He wanted it out of his speech. He wasn’t going to represent the United States to the UN unless he had what he felt was clear credible information from solid intelligence. He pretty much shot this right back to the CIA director Tenet (George Tenet). According to the film, it only took minutes for Tenet to show up on Powell’s doorstep. He was explosive in saying that, Yes, we do have an operative who has admitted to us that there are these contacts, so put it back in the speech!

Powell moved forward, convinced that the CIA knew something that he didn’t know and believed what Tenet was telling him. Powell’s 90-minute speech was presented to the UN and later he admitted that the intelligence that was submitted to him was not solid.

One of the most wrenching parts of this whole film was when Walter Jones, who was the Republican congressman from North Carolina, said that one of the most serious responsibilities a Congress person has is to cast a vote to send a young man or woman to war to die. He is quoted as saying in the film, “I probably would have done myself a favor by being better informed than listening to the administration. We were two months out from an election and no one wants to be viewed as weak on national security.  In my heart, I knew that a “No” to the authority for the president was the right vote, but yet, I was not strong enough to vote my conscience.” He went on to say, “I was more concerned about the politics of my decision rather than what is right and what is wrong.  I prayed to God many times that he would forgive me for sending his children into a war that never had to happen.”

The vote passes and President George W. Bush has the free hand to take us into war with Iraq.  In March 2003, the military invades Iraq. Soon after, we saw the quick conquest of Bush on the aircraft carrier declaring victory.  Soon after that, everything dissolved into chaos.  After 19 months of scouring the country no weapons of mass destruction were found. The information that we would go in and find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction did not come true.

Why did I put up this piece on “Hubris:  Selling the Iraq War”? Let me put these numbers out as a reminder: casualties of US soldiers are at 4,486, wounded 32,021, and Iraq civilians (which must not be forgotten) are over 100,000.

Do I have concerns that our elected congressmen did not do their job in voting for this war? Yes I do. Do I have concerns that any administration can take on too much Presidential Executive Power and abuse that? Absolutely.

I want to go on into the final segment of my show today and tell you some of what I’m researching for next week regarding the concerns I have over President Obama and his administration doing the very thing he was critical of his predecessor for, which is overusing and overstepping his presidential authority.  No president in any administration should be allowed to do this without oversight, especially where the lives of people, not just in the United States, but in the world, are concerned.

When your trust in others has been as stripped down as you share in your story, you have to take yourself to the root of all trust, which is trust in yourself.  Trust that you can emotionally handle this ebb and flow of people in your life.  Trust that there will be times of stable relationships and times of turmoil, these too you can emotionally deal with.  When you trust yourself to make the best decisions you can and trust that you can effectively deal with the rewards or consequences that come with those decisions, you are on your path to building and growing as a person.  You will make a better life for yourself.  Believe that and you have already succeeded!

Embrace your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• Recall a time when you made a decision you were proud of.
• Review in your mind the steps you took toward making that decision.
• What comes to mind when you look within yourself regarding trust?
• If there are negatives (and there will be) can you set those aside?
• Focusing only on the positive attitudes you have regarding trust, can you make a list of ways you can keep your “eye on the prize”, keep the positives your primary goal?
• Have you done research on how you can build trust (books, internet)?
• Will you schedule time each day to work on building you inner trust?

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com

LUCIA BRAWLEY VIA FACEBOOK

8 year old Martin Richard was waiting for his Dad to cross the finish line when he was killed in the Boston Marathon bombing.  Keep his memory alive by spreading his message of Peace!

Correction:  Martin was there with his family to cheer on friends.  His father was not in the race.

Here is my suggestion for making friends…the greatest compliment you can give to a person is to remember their name and show an interest in them and their lives.  People love to talk about themselves and about things they are interested in.  They want validation and this can be given as you nurture new friendships by being enthusiastic and positive when you’re with them.  You don’t need to know all about pop culture, or any subject for that matter, to make friends.  Listen attentively and ask questions drawn from what they are talking about, then, listen some more.  Let them tell you about their world and as you sit back and listen with a bright, accepting smile on your face, I guarantee you have a new friendship in the making.  So take a deep breath, put that smile on your face and make it happen!

Unleash your Personal Power with Life Coaching~

• Make a list of your top 3 personal interests
• Research where people with your similar interests meet
• Commit to getting involved in an organization with people of like interests
• What will you challenge yourself to do to combat your awkwardness?  (crawling under your bed covers does not apply here)
• What “mantra” can you say to yourself when meeting new friends that will bolster your social confidence?  You’re cool and you know it so make it powerful and positive!  You can do this!

Joan Jerkovich is a Board Certified Life Coach who takes your questions on Relationships, Health, Careers, Sexuality and Self Care.  No question is off limits!  She gives her opinion, then partners with you by submitting Life Coaching questions that will help you move toward health and happiness in your life.  Email your questions to tjjs.radio@gmail.com or arrange a time to talk with Joan in person on her radio talk show at www.joanjerkovich.com

Follow Joan’s Life Coaching questions Daily at www.joanjerkovich.com