One of the most important things we seek in our lives is a balance. There seems to be some confusion about just what that means.

I don’t know many people who experience life without setbacks. How do we deal with setbacks? The lessons we learn and the maturity we develop while working through difficulties helps us develop strategies and resources for dealing with future setbacks.

I think in our society, many people tend to respond in anger and haste, rather than to take time to listen, to assess every point of view and every alternative before taking action. The fact is we cannot sustain the results of our actions unless we make sure we have taken this process seriously.

Remember when you were little and anything could be an adventure? Did you and your friends build forts out of whatever old materials were around? How is your sense of adventure today? What are the things you are still excited about accomplishing?

If you were asked, ”What are your strengths,” what would your response be? Many of us would have an easier time listing our weaknesses.

How do you handle stress? The answer says a lot about how you do in handling life. Few if any of us can go through life without stress. In fact, it would not be a good thing if we were able to pull that off.

Each of us has dreams. It is entirely up to us whether we experience our dreams only in this way or whether we decide to make our dreams the basis for action. What are your dreams?

What do you fear? There are many ways to describe fear. Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger—if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves from legitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far from life-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason.

A gift is something we did not earn. It just comes to us. It is our choice to accept or ignore our gifts and to use them any way we choose. The greatest thing about our gifts are when we share them with others, everyone’s life is richer. Each of us has gifts whether we recognize them or not. Part of adopting a person centered approach to your life is to spend some intentional effort discovering your gifts.

Recently a term has re-emerged in the human services field. The term is “person centered”, and it is usually followed by a word like thinking or planning. Person centered is lifted up as the standard by which things involving people’s live should be measured. The term, as it is presently employed, is too vast for one brief article like this. I would like to try to establish a basis from which to consider person centered thinking.