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Listening is a balance of hearing the content of what someone is sharing, as well as listening to the emotion surrounding what is being communicated. Quite often mis-communication happens when either one or both of these forms of expression are not entirely heard. When considering improving your communication skills, start with enhancing your overall ability to hear both content and emotion. This effort may include increased emotional awareness, availability, and presence.

Our spiritual lives and our psychological lives can be intimately intertwined. Often times, as one begins to develop, the other surfaces as well. These two forces have been the cause of ideological shifts and separations in the field of Psychology from as far back as its founders in Freud and Jung to more recent exploration by Psychologists Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary. The division has usually occurred between the practice (tradition) and the experience (atypical). You get to decide which side of the pendulum rings most true for you. Both perspectives probably contain invaluable wisdom. So, embrace the nuances and subtleties of our own unique psychological terrain, while continuing to reach for your own awakening and broadening reality.

Grief is often associated with the loss of a life. However grief can also be thought of as a significant emotion that can accompany a change in perception, a change of roles, or the loss of something sacred. As with all types of loss, the emotion of grief can be experienced as a process that can include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Although each individual may grieve differently, grief is an important emotional state that when honestly felt can bring about hope, resiliency, and life-affirming coping responses.

Most of us experience feelings of anxiety at some point in our lives. We may feel worried about a job interview, attending an event where we won’t know anyone, or getting lost on an upcoming trip. Occasional, mild anxiety is natural; but if your anxiety is severe, ongoing, and/or prevents you from fully engaging in life, it may be time to seek additional support.

Grief is the process of responding to loss. It usually occurs as a response to death, but it can also be triggered by the end of relationships, jobs, or chapters in our lives. We all deal with grief at some point; it’s a natural response to losing someone or something we cared about deeply.

Coping skills, also sometimes called “coping mechanisms,” are tools that help us deal with triggers, anxieties, and stressors in our lives. In a sense, they are the ways we choose to comfort or calm ourselves. Each of us has our own methods for working through stressful, painful, or difficult emotions and experiences. Some of these methods are things we turned to naturally, and some have evolved from what we learned throughout our lives. Coping skills are something everyone uses, but sometimes we develop ways of dealing with difficulties that end up harming us in the long run–manifesting in addiction, avoidance, or bottled emotions.

Austin, Texas is of significant interest to those pursuing higher levels of education. Although college can be a time of opportunity and tremendous growth, it also contains unique challenges.

Often times when we think about self esteem, we tend to think about things that we're good at. Or things that we can do. And so what we look at is questions of -- and there are two concepts that I would throw out there. This is a question of competence. Are you competent at what you're thinking about doing? But then, there's also this question of confidence. And when we really think about self esteem, what we really want is greater confidence, as opposed to greater competence. So confidence is your ability to do something. Confidence is your ability to fail at doing something.

As we're entering into the year of 2014, for a lot of people, it's pretty common to start thinking about where you'd like to be, and goals, and areas for growth, and resolutions. Oftentimes people will concentrate on diminishing or lessening behaviors that they don't want to do as much of.

When you're trying to understand your partner's emotions, the first thing, and the most prominent thing that couples come in to counseling for, is having a hard time communicating, and having a hard time with miscommunication. That's because communication can be really difficult. One of the things I would focus on is the ability to listen. Listening skills become really, really important in terms of really understanding our partner and being able to resolve conflicts.