If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy.

I think the characteristics of really effective leaders when people are frightened and depressed are the same qualities that leaders need when people are optimistic. The difference is when people are frightened the need for these few qualities becomes much stronger because frightened people are desperate to have someone they can trust and believe in and who seems to be able to create a better future.

Most people think of a balanced life in terms of how much time is given to the various sectors of a life. While time is one measure of involvement, I think the critical variable is passion. How energized, fascinated and absorbed are you in each sphere in which you are engaged? They are rarely, and usually only briefly, equal.

The balanced life is a goal, but for us it is mostly a myth.

In the end, leadership is not intellectual or cognitive. Leadership is emotional.

Women's self didn't die; it had never been born. And when women insisted on their right to have a self, they weren't understood even by their husbands who cried, Haven't I given you enough? And by their parents who joined the crowd who deemed them selfish and responsible for all the problems in their marriage. I remember it all too well.

The Psychological Recession is the cluster of feelings that the present is really scary and the future will likely be worse. It comes from the sense you have no control over what's happening to you and you don't see a way to get your life back under control. It's the feeling that life is unfair; you paid your dues, you worked hard, and you ended up naked and vulnerable. There is no comfort to be found in the dismissal of the Psychological Recession as being just an idea; it is a real phenomenon with real consequences, all of them bad.