Campfire Conversation

The composer Gustav Mahler said "tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." These words echo importantly at summer camp. Dr. Elizabeth Corey has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the importance and challenges of traditions and how they help us both at summer camp and at home. Enjoy!

We all want to live our best selves and figure out ways to help others do the same. Steve Nugent, a former NCAA Division I head coach and awesome camp guy has been thinking about this very idea for decades. Want to bring out the best in your people? Pull up a log, grab a s'more, and tuck in.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Beth Goldstein for my entire career in camping. When Kate and I took the reins at Camp Wicosuta, a wonderful girls camp in NH, we spent a lot of time with many referral agents. Beth, who focuses on helping families in the Philadelphia and NYC area find a great summer camp fit, was very helpful to us.

By visiting a wide variety of camps each summer and working with a number of unique families, Beth has an valuable vantage point on the Summer Camp world. When we spoke recently, the idea of comfort zones came up along with an article that left her smiling and shaking her head a bit. It was too good an opportunity to pass up for me to get Beth around the campfire.

There are very few spaces in our world that combines joy and friendship, anxiety and challenge in a more fruitful way than camp. Dr. Dan Wolfson, a clinical psychologist with a great deal of summer camp experience, has combined his love of camp and his practical work to help his clients (and us) better understand our relationships, our anxieties, and our grief.

It's a new year and many of us have set a health goal. Whether it's creating an exercise habit, dropping a few pounds, or not eating Nutella with a spoon (I'm not judging you), we all want to get a bit better. Today's guest around the campfire can help in all of those ways. The best part is, he'll start with the first building block: how we breathe.

Dr. Tina Payne Bryson is the Executive Director of the Center for Connection in Pasenda, CA, mother of three boys, and a longtime attachment researcher. Along with her coauthor, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Dr. Bryson has written numerous books including the Whole Brained Child, the Yes Brain, No Drama Discipline and the upcoming The Power of Showing Up.

If fact, if you'd like get the chance to get free copy of her The Power of Showing Up, please leave an iTunes review to enter a drawing for the book. I'll announce the winner in the next podcast and send one along to you.

I've learned a lot from Dr. Bryson over the course of the last several years and was so excited to get her around the campfire to talk. I've not met anyone who can make the incredible advances in brain research both understandable and applicable better than Dr. Bryson.

I hope you'll enjoy this Campfire Conversation with Dr. Tina Bryson.

As we approach the holiday season, we want to explore the idea of summer camp being a gift. In the first two installments, we spoke with two camp parents who have a special view of summer camp and two long time former campers. In this, the final installment of 'Camp as a Gift', I talk with the one person besides my bride with whom I've shared the most campfires with: Camp Mom Judy. Over her 21 summers at camp, she'd gained a lot of wisdom and is happy to share tips, thoughts, experiences and her unique answer to 'how is a camp a gift?'

As we approach the holiday season, we want to explore the idea of summer camp being a gift. In the first of our three installments, we spoke with two camp parents who have a special view of summer camp. In this, the second installment of 'Camp as a Gift', I talk with one half of the 'main players' as it were: the kids! And, I'm not talking with just a random sampling. Our All-Around Campers from 2019 join us for a fun and thoughtful conversation on how camp has been a gift for them.

As we approach the holiday season, we want to explore the idea of summer camp being a gift. In the first of our three installments, we speak with two camp parents who have a special view of summer camp: they work there, too! Take a moment to listen to two incredibly involved mom's discuss how camp is a gift for them (as well as their kids) and how we can make our lives back home a bit more campy. Enjoy!

Last week, we spent time around the campfire listening how camp has made us more confident, empathetic, patient, and aware. This week, we've got the same crew around the fire talking about 'less' instead of more. The sentence I want each to finish starts this way: Because of camp, I'm grateful to be less…. I hope you'll enjoy this second part of A Grateful Campfire.