The House Always Wins: What I know from 20+ years of in-home therapeutic coaching.
I've driven from house to house to house daily, since 2004, supporting clients and families fighting for their mental health and substance use recovery. We've worked with countless dozens who've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on treatment, have endured...
Beyond Recovery Coaching: What Clients, Families, & Providers Should Know
As coaching continues to gain traction and prove helpful in mental health and substance use spaces, many people assume all coaching models are the same. They aren’t. And understanding the difference can save a lot of time and money for our clients and help them get...
The Locus of Freedom: A Buddhist Twist on Locus of Control
In psychology, we often hear about the locus of control—the idea that we have an internal or external sense of power over our lives…
Why You Should Metaphorically Rip Off Your Eyelids
Recently, my wife sent me a picture from up the road: a hill overlooking the houses, mountains, and cityscape of Tijuana from our palm tree lined San Diego street. It was beautiful, and though I agreed with her sentiment, I didn’t think much too much more about it....
The Hidden Crisis in Mental Health Care: Lack of Discharge Planning
They Spent Their $750,000 Retirement on Two Years of Treatment. He Ended Up Homeless Without a Discharge Plan. This is the third time I’ve heard this story from a family who has reached out to us, hopeless and desperate. When a family spends $750,000 on treatment in...
Why Does the Treatment Industry Keep Dropping the Baton?!!
It doesn’t matter how good your clinicians are or your program is, if coordination of care is not a main priority nor executed well, it's as if the race were never run. I’ve spent 20 years coordinating care and running community-integrated therapeutic coaching...
Active Recovery Network: Revolutionizing Therapeutic Coaching with Community-Integrated Care
In the realm of addiction recovery and mental health treatment, the traditional model of therapy often falls short of helping clients achieve long-term success and recovery despite the efforts of great people and good programs. The reason for this, and solution to...
Why It Makes Sense for Your Mental Health or SUD Treatment Program to Partner with Active Recovery Network’s Community Integrated Recovery Solutions
Enhancing Recovery: The Power of ARN’s Community-Based Integrated Coaching and care Management In the journey towards recovery from substance use disorders, abuse, and the management of mental health disorders, the transition from residential or structured PHP/IOP is...
What is Therapeutic Coaching?
The value of ARN is in our individualized and flexible approach to building and maintaining health, wellness, and independence. At Active Recovery Network we offer individualized therapeutic coaching and case management support for individuals and families. So, what...
Going Within and Daily Habits
“Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” Let’s use this time to build ourselves up. Strange times we are living through. Tough for many. What’s it revealing for you? How have things been unfolding in the last week? For many of us, since we can’t go OUT,...
The “Midwest Curse” and A Practical Understanding of Time
Telling people I grew up in Kansas is rarely a conversation starter. Tornadoes and The Wizard of Oz is usually as far as the conversation goes. It was a wonderful place to be raised and I definitely have inherited the Midwestern, blue-collar, bucking hay bales and up...
The Most Important Question You Can Ask
The most important question we can ask has been attributed to Albert Einstein, whether accurately or falsely. Regardless of who said it this question carries immense weight and possibility if contemplated. This question is, "Is the universe a friendly place?" Seems...
On the Importance of Adventure & Play
If you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, then you'll remember the cabin fever experienced by Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson. This lead to his abandoning the writing of his play in favor of, or more accurately transfixed by, typing this sentence over and...
Clinicians as Coaches. Our Key Differentiator.
I've been doing the same work for the last 15 years. In 2004 I started doing in-home clinical case management and coaching for young adults who were either leaving treatment through “graduating” or getting kicked out. This was in Boulder, Colorado. All the staff were...
The 3 Things We Should Always Be Doing
Do you remember that part in the movie Glennary Glen Ross with a young, brash Alec Baldwin where he is grilling the sales team? The “coffee is for closers”, “ABC. Always. Be. Closing!” scene? Well, I had a mom the other day who had just sent her son to a wilderness...
N.A.A.P. Time for Adults – Understanding the Utility of Mindfulness Practice
When I taught mindfulness at retreat centers, treatment facilities, the cancer center or 1:1 with coaching clients I have found that there is a lot of confusion around what mindfulness practice is and what it is not. Everyone is teaching mindfulness, but the...
The Keys to Success: Resilience, Optimism, Meaning & Purpose
The difference between those who “succeed” in life and those who do not very often lies in the level of optimism and resilience they have developed. The earlier people are able to do this the more likely they are to live meaningful, principled and fulfilling lives....
On Realizing I Was a Helicopter Parent, Too!!
Ok, soooo.. I got called out when I posted some pictures of my daughter learning to ride a bicycle. My sister commented, “Nice photo bombs, helicopter dad!” Well, she’s only 6 I thought, and…., and…. Then she’ll be 12, then 18, then 26 and someday she’ll be 30, and I...
The Importance of Dreaming Big and Believing in Others
One of the most important things we can do for others is to keep dreaming big ourselves. This may sound odd or somewhat contradictory but let me explain. An extraordinary human strength that we have all observed directly in our own lives is the capacity to endure. On...
Mindfulness is NOT a Self-Improvement Project
It took me 10 years of Buddhist practice and study to learn this lesson. It took me pursuing a Master’s Degree in Comparative Religious Studies at Naropa University, several month long meditation retreats in the Tibetan tradition at the Shambhala Mountain Center, a...
How to Win Your 2019 With Ease
Anyone who knows me well knows that I love goals! I love setting goals, I love envisioning the future, dreaming big and trying to catch up with what's possible. My clients and staff know that I come prepared with worksheets, with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with...
Allowing Heaven
I was going to write something beautiful and elaborate about how we can trap ourselves and create a self-limiting reality that becomes our norm or we can get out of our own way and allow ourselves to experience heaven on earth. But ironically, or not so, I kept...
The Lost Art of Boredom
The best thing my mom ever did was ground me from church. Wait, that's not true. The best thing my mom ever did was adopt me and my sister and show us unconditional love and positive regard. The second best thing she ever did was ground me from church. (Fast forward...
Uncovering our Client’s History of Sanity
The first open-air cremation I ever attended was of a psychiatrist and Buddhist teacher Ed Podvoll, or Llama Mingyur. It was the winter of 2003 at the Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center. There was a light snow on the ground, chants and prayers in the air and ashes in the...
Thank God it’s Monday!!
Thank God it’s Monday!! If you are not saying “Thank God It’s Monday!” on your way to work each Monday, please, do yourself and everyone else a favor, turn your car around and go home. Get Your Mind Right If the most effective agent for healing in the work we do are...