Plug: Author of, Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, and Young Adults to Win in Life. peaking Points: 1. The US recently commemorated the 22nd anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, when the tensions around the globe are higher than ever with war in Ukraine and the October 7 th Israel-Hamas conflict, where children, teens, and young adults were brutally slaughtered with what some commentators are calling barbarism. My storytelling in this book is a metaphor for how to grapple with life in the 21 st century that begins with Phil Nowick, a wrestling coach, who was a junior investor at Merrill Lynch on 9/11 and subsequently died. Phill’s life is emblematic of all our lives, when he showed us how to sprint faster away from the towers, while his lungs burned like wildfire. He wanted to climb the corporate ladder, like many of us, but was accused of being too nice, lacking the killer instinct, but was great at analytics. He told the truth, as he saw it. 2. Phil inspired me to write this book that is intended for everyday people to read and for professionals, whether you are a physician, soldier, CEO, farmer, teacher, butcher, banker, drummer, or teen, who wants to learn how to wrestle through adversity and win. In this book, I address the needs of those who are grappling with the high price of food and gasoline, as well as the needs of their children, teens, and young adults who are under duress with high rates of depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and suicide, and they don’t know what to do to help them to help themselves. My stories and lessons learned can teach us all how to become resilient and give us hope for the future. 3. This book represents my holistic work as a peak performance coach, teaching Mindful Toughness skill sets for 27 years to my clients at The Summit Center for Ideal Performance that I founded in 1996 and reflects my expertise as an inductee into the Nursing Hall of Fame at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition, it is based on my research as a behavioral health RN, medical-surgical nurse, historian of psychiatry and psychiatric nursing, and clinical hypnosis specialist. I work with clients of all ages but specialize in working with young people. 4. Each chapter in this book begins with what I call “Pictures at an Exhibition,” an idea based on the work of Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky, in his musical composition of the same name. He wrote a vivid collection of tone poems or sound pictures referred to as traveling music, as he envisioned himself walking through a promenade at an art exhibit. Within the context of this book, I am your guide as you experience a walking tour through a collection of my personal memoirs. Throughout my therapeutic narratives, I connect you with the topics of discussion in each chapter and with case stories of actual clients—some of whom are genuine wrestlers—that I have highlighted as representative of my work and show you how I empowered them to reach their potential. 5. Chapter 1: “Building Resilience in the Face of Adversity” is a call-to-action to combat our mental health crisis of young people and looks back to the future through the lens of my lived experiences of the past, which we all have, that now require a shift in our mental health paradigm from a pathogenic model of disease extent since the 17 th century when Rene Descartes, a philosopher, stated that the mind and body are separate to a more contemporary salutogenic model of wellness and health that was suggested by Aaron Antonovsky in his book, Health Stress, and Coping in 1979.
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