by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D.\u00a0 ABPP<\/span><\/p>\n My brother contacted me a few months back and said he was writing his \u201cGreatest Hits.\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cRoy, the problem is you don\u2019t have any major hits, in fact you stopped playing guitar in college.\u201d\u00a0 Roy was a country crooner with a great style and a dream in high school, but he gave it up and entered the real world.\u00a0 So, Roy responded back, \u201cEveryone has a \u2018Greatest Hits\u2019 in them, they just might not be songs on a record\u201d (I didn\u2019t bother to tell him that records were a thing of the past.\u00a0 After all, he is my older brother by three years).\u00a0 \u201cI am writing the greatest things I ever did, the times I was spot on and just hit it.\u201d\u00a0 So, I asked him if this was a Maslow self-actualization thing you do at the end of life.\u00a0 He said \u201cnah, I just wanted to know I had done some things right.\u00a0 You should try it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Not that I want to admit that my retired drug salesman brother gave me a great psychological technique I use with people all the time, but we do live in a very negative world.\u00a0 I mean, I wake up in the mornings and read the news in New York and feel like Armageddon is upon us.\u00a0 Writing your \u201c12 Greatest Hits\u201d does lift your spirits and does make you think about the good you have done in the world, and you don\u2019t have to be a psychologist to suggest it to someone.\u00a0 You can be a boss or a supervisor or even a spouse.\u00a0 Write about family, work, social life, something you\u2019ve done for someone, just sort of spread the good cheer all around.\u00a0 It is great idea for the holidays, but even more for you personally to feel good for a change.\u00a0 Let me give you a couple of mine as example:<\/span><\/p>\n Early in my career, I was invited to the FBI Academy to give a 20-minute presentation on some topic to do with police families.\u00a0 They had invited the top 50 or so police psychologists and had one big 3-day conference for us.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know anyone, after all it was very early in my career.\u00a0 I was presenting at the end of the conference about simplifying life as a police officer, a really new idea at the time.\u00a0 Part of my presentation was quoting great philosophers, ancient intellects and authors about simplicity, like Dante, Einstein and Mark Twain.\u00a0 So, I listened to some presentations and it hit me to start taking notes.\u00a0 When I got up, the crowd was exhausted from 3-days of listening or pretend listening (psychologists are the best at pretend listening), I started quoting some of the greats, then I said \u201cnow for some of the current superstars in the world\u201d \u2013 and I started quoting the people around the room who had spoken and made one sentence or more about simplicity.\u00a0 Everyone was listening for their name, I had the crowd by the \u2026.well, let\u2019s just say I had their attention.\u00a0 That one speech spun me into years of working for the FBI and leading in the field of police psychology.\u00a0 It was a greatest hit.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2008, I had been married two years and we had tried to have a child.\u00a0 I read about Russian adoption of children and found out that Russian female children living in an orphanage usually either ended up dead, in sexual slavery or the military, and I decided we would go through the arduous process of adoption from Russia that usually took two to three years.\u00a0 Well three months after we entered an application, we got the call to adopt a little girl went to Russia and found our beautiful forever child.\u00a0 She had a special friend when in Rostov Russia, an elderly man who ran the orphanage.\u00a0 The people in the orphanage were wonderful, but the elderly man who ran the place had a sadness about him.\u00a0 He said his mother was buried in San Francisco and his niece lived there but he couldn\u2019t get a visa to come to the US even though he tried many times over thirty years.\u00a0 He said he didn\u2019t have any mark against him, but it was the ways things were in his country at the time.\u00a0 At 70, he had given up on ever seeing his mother\u2019s grave.\u00a0 I told him I would try and he gave me a sad smile as if doubting my intentions.\u00a0 He sad others had tried and it wasn\u2019t much use.\u00a0 When I returned, I had a letter from a US congressman friendly to police asking for him to be granted a visa, and we had made arrangements for his flight.\u00a0 I even went to Moscow with him and led him through the American consulate, smooth as silk.\u00a0 He was speechless and couldn\u2019t stop crying when he spoke to me.\u00a0 And, he came to the US and saw his mother\u2019s grave and his niece (who became our friend).\u00a0 A \u201cGreatest Hit\u201d if ever there was one.Everything is Negative<\/h2>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\nHundreds of Stories<\/h2>\n