In lieu of a full bio, whic
h I will link to this page at some point, let me briefly say who is talking here.
My name is Dr. Kenneth Anbender. I have a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. That credential is not what allows me to say what I am offering here, though it contributes. More relevant is how I have lived, the work I have done, and the breadth of study that has been provoked after finding psychology as a discipline weak in being able to provide a fulfilling life rather than a merely adjusted one.
The most relevant points for my credibility for the kind of approach I offer here are the following:
- I got comfortable with death being part of life at age 12, and found people’s avoidance of that fact to call into question how truthful people were being about life, and hence how congruent they were capable of being with it. I thought it was a bad idea to argue with how life works.
- I have led courses on the high end of human health and happiness in college, graduate school, and through training programs offered worldwide over the last nearly 50 years.
- I have found communication to be a fundamental aspect of relating well to people and life and developed programs that free people to communicate and listen well that have been offered in more than 100 cities around the world and in most of the Fortune 500 companies in one form or another through other leaders.
- The basic question I have wrestled with both personally and with dedicated communities of others is “What fulfills a human life?” I am not interested in what merely fits in, gets along, or gets by. I am convinced that there is a clear, rigorous and available answer to that question, and that it can be answered at different times and at different stages of life in harmonic but different ways.
- Given the over hundred thousand people I have worked with directly, and the millions that have been worked with by those I have trained, I can say that fulfillment is widely available to people of widely differing backgrounds and circumstances.
- In my view, being able to be in development with life is a fundamental skill critical to fulfillment, and development is often misunderstood as something natural (as in the phrase “childhood development”). I find intentional and open development to be an unusual discipline that is more uncommon than “natural.” In addition, the occasional transformation seems to be called for at key transitional points in life. The alternating dance of appropriate development and well-met transitions/ transformations seems to be the pathway for a fulfilling life.
- Finally, there are thousands of people who say the quality of their life is vastly different after our working together and that the orientation and its results hold up over the years.