personal growth

Start the Year with Hope

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

Hope: Human Being with Dr. Susan – Episode 8

Hope is an active, learned conviction in one’s ability to influence outcomes, sharing personal experiences and insights.

Hope is essential in leadership and impacts team performance. Hope is not just a personality trait, but a skill that can be developed through practice. There is scientific basis to hope. Neuroplasticity can be harnessed through various practices to cultivate resilience and courage in the face of adversity.

Cultivating Hope

Albert Bandura said that hope is an active, learned conviction in one’s ability to influence outcomes rather than passive wishing. Hopeful people don’t give up when faced with obstacles, but instead seek alternative routes.

Stirring Up Hope Through Leadership

Having hope, setting goals, and maintaining self-belief lead to success. Hope is an active verb, not a passive feeling. You can develop hope through learned habits and multiply it with leadership.

Hope as a Strategic Tool

Hope is a tool for leaders and individuals facing complexity. It’s not optimism or positive thinking, but the belief in one’s ability to shape a future and the creativity to find pathways to achieve goals. When hope is lost, people stop taking purposeful action and become less adaptable. You can learn to recognize and nurture hope as a fundamental force for navigating uncertainty.

Join us at 10 a.m. Eastern on sandcastleradio.org to explore how to stir up hope in your own life.

Listen to Human Being with Dr. Susan every Saturday at 10 am ET on Sandcastle Radio, America’s Hottest Online Variety and Music Station. Follow Susan at    / @susanhendrich  

Explore the Human Being with Dr. Susan podcast: 13 episodes

Susan Hendrich

Getting Unstuck: Install Your Mental Pause Button

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

When you feel stuck, it’s rarely because you lack options.
It’s because your nervous system is running the show.

That’s where the mental Pause Button comes in.

Think of the mental pause Button as a built-in pattern interrupter—a way to stop the stress loop, create space, and choose a better response. Not later. In the moment.

The Pause Button isn’t about calming down for calm’s sake.
It’s about regaining agency.

When you hit an internal wall and don’t know what to do next, the Button helps you shift energy, interrupt autopilot, and move forward differently.

The Pause Button Method (3 Simple Steps)

Step 1: Install the Button

Close your eyes for 10 seconds and imagine installing a physical pause button in your mind.

Make it yours:

  • Big or small
  • Blue, gold, red, sparkly
  • Subtle or bold

The design doesn’t matter.
The function does.

This button exists for one reason: to interrupt a stuck pattern.

Step 2: Assign It a Job

Your Button’s job is to stop emotional autopilot—fear, frustration, irritation, reactivity.

When you press it:

  • Emotions don’t disappear
  • They simply stop driving

You create a gap—and in that gap lives choice, perspective, and agility.

This is the moment you remember:

I’m not stuck. I can pivot.

Step 3: Pair It with New Language

Agility isn’t activated by force.
It’s activated by reframing.

Every time you press your Button, say this—out loud or silently:

“If this moment isn’t working, I’m allowed to change it.”

That one sentence gives you permission to pivot:

  • Mentally
  • Emotionally
  • Strategically

Now you’re back in the driver’s seat.

What Happens After You Pause

Once the stuck pattern is interrupted, ask better questions:

  • What else could be true?
  • What’s the next right move, not the perfect one?
  • Where is the opportunity inside this friction?
  • What version of me do I want leading right now?
  • If this were a chapter in my story, how do I want it to end?

You’re not rewriting the past.
You’re rewriting your response.

And that’s where leaders grow.

Stuckness wants you to believe there’s only one ending.
Agility reminds you: you’re the author, not the character.

So the next time you feel stuck—
Press the Button.
Pause the pattern.
Choose differently.

You are not stuck. not stuck.

The Spaces Between: Taking time for your personal development

/ Susan Hendrich / 2 Comments

What if you spent 30 minutes on your personal development every day? Reading. Blogging. Journaling. Drawing. Imagining. Networking. Planning your future. A half hour. Every. Single. Day.

A friend recently told me that in a “How to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile” seminar, she learned that we should spend a certain amount of time each day focused on our personal and professional development. Each day? Wow, that sounded like a lot. I mean seriously, how many meaningful moments do you average each day, working on developing your strengths? Or your resume? Or your network?  Pffft, my answer to the question wasn’t all that great, so I decided to try out the concept.

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For one month, I’ve spent 30 minutes each day with focused attention on my personal development. Reading, writing, sharing, listening, and absorbing myself in energy focused on my growth as a professional and as a person. The results are predictably exciting and positive, but not for the reasons I’d expected.

Of course I learned a lot through tuning in to authors and speakers and mentors and idea-makers. But it wasn’t those active learning moments that made the biggest difference. It was the spaces bewteen that yielded a refreshing and unexpected rush of creativity, clarity and focus.

I believe that investing in your personal and professional growth is an iterative process best achieved through small, meaningful steps over time. Just like a great athlete or musician or speaker, it takes sustained and consistent effort to build the muscle memory needed to become fluent in any worthy pursuit. Intentional practice in directional increments is often said to be the secret to reaching a development goal. But I believe that in between those efforts of intention, the silent “pauses” are just as important. A pause can be a time of silent introspection or just a rest from the norm of day-to-day goal pursuit.

The pause is for me is about allowing thoughtful spaces between my rushed and hurried emails, calls, and meetings. It’s about protecting and valuing those spaces, rather than rushing to fill them with urgent-but-not-important matters…Allowing those spaces to be dedicated to developing my strengths and focusing on where I want to be, not just where I am.

English musician Gordon Sumner, better known as The Police’s Sting, once said,

“Paradoxically, I’m coming to believe in the importance of silence in music. The power of silence after a phrase of music for example; the dramatic silence after the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or the space between the notes of a Miles Davis solo. There is something very specific about a rest in music. You take your foot off the pedal and pay attention. I’m wondering whether, as musicians, the most important thing we do is merely to provide a frame for silence. I’m wondering if silence itself is perhaps the mystery at the heart of music? And is silence the most perfect music of all?”

What are you doing with the “spaces between” in your life?