When we think of music, often what comes to mind is song. We may think of Broadway musicals, Bach or Justin Timberlake. In our minds, we might imagine orchestras or pianists.

It's natural to feel monstrously pissed off right now. What you do with that feeling makes all the difference. There's a great line in The Outlaw Josey Wales when Clint Eastwood tells his about-to-be-besieged friends that the only way to save themselves is to get "plumb mad-dog mean."

In a previous article in which I crowned EMPATHY as king when dealing with high-conflict personalities—those folks who are the most toxic, the most difficult of difficult people—I  asked for feedback from readers. You were kind with your comments and thoughtful with your suggestions. The comment that resonated the most was this:

High-conflict cases in the courts and high-conflict personalities (HCPs) in the workplace get a lot of play these days and we're seeing more people than ever claiming expertise in dealing with them. But should they? What qualifies anyone as an expert, or even moderately competent, to take on a high-conflict case, workplace or other dispute?

Inflection points should not be ignored. In mathematics, there is a concept called the inflection point, which describes the point at which a curve on a graph changes directions. Business has adopted this concept, sometimes known as the strategic inflection point, referring to when a change occurs that requires a business to change direction in order to survive. 

I’m told that one Chinese character communicates both “crisis” and “opportunity.” Its meaning—like so much in this life—is what you make of it, and what you make of it will trickle down to your kids.

Do you catch yourself using LOGIC and EXPLANATIONS when interacting with most people? It's natural and routine. We expect people to respond to logic, but it doesn't always work and sometimes it backfires, especially with people who may have a high-conflict personality (HCP).

In prior articles, we wrote about the natural desire to prevail against perceived rivals and the potential use of game theory to understand obstacles in the current legal system as it takes families through parental separations and divorce.  We next focused on how the legal system begins to trick people into self-defeating patterns of decision making......

Anyone who has launched a business (or practice) kicks it off with exuberance and dreams of freedom and unlimited potential. It starts with a great idea coupled with boundless enthusiasm about the future. We put in the effort to develop protocols, policies and procedures so we can have an efficiently run business and off we go to fulfill our life's purpose.

As a member of a Foster Care Review Board, I listen as parents whose children have been removed from their homes as a result of abuse or neglect explain how much they love their children and that there was no way they'd ever abused them. They point to smiling pictures of their beautiful children as proof of their stellar parenting.

Survivors of child abuse take different approaches to their handling of, or lack of, their personal experiences. Some survivors want to shut out their bad memories and never talk about those experiences again. Some talk a little and still struggle with their current afflictions, which they likely have as a result of the child abuse they endured on a regular basis. Some feel an overwhelming need to somehow make sense of the abuse and make it “mean” something.

Why do we like to win, whether it is a tennis match or an argument with our spouse? Natural selection favored those who survived and reproduced. One of the ways that humans survived, and thus were able to reproduce, was to prevail.