Jennifer Battle asked the National Association of Crisis Organization Directors’ mailing list for some uplifting hotline memes to use in training, since there didn’t seem to be that many available. Here are my first responses. (please feel free to use these if you like)  

A meditation on how and why we change, what holds us back, and what we can do about it.

Somebody must have seen it coming… (comics)

Hipsters are so ironic that their ironic irony has now become ironically iconic. Ironic, no? (comic)

Want to leverage your skills to maximally impact the people you’re talking to? Click this slightly snarky post about levers and leverage to learn more!

Dr. Frankenstein cooks up a new musical instrument in his lab, combining the beauty of a violin with the speed of a typewriter.

This… is the honey badger (diet)! You may be surprised to learn that honey badgers do care about some things. They’re actually very sensitive to the size bias and body loathing that are rampant among Mellivora capensis. Honey badgers receive a lot of negative messaging encouraging them to hate their bodies and feel stupid about their eating ...

Survey conducted using Standard Empathy Instrument (Quantitative) version 2.5, n = 577. In light of the perhaps-surprising results of the initial survey, we attempted to repeat the survey to investigate whether the initial results were anomalous. Regrettably, nearly all the honey badgers had engaged themselves in other activities (seeking honey and larvae, hunting and eating cobras, ...

Pathologizing Language Most of you have seen the video about the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger, with narration by Randall, somewhere in your travels around the internet. I delight in using the honey badgers to teach about crisis hotlines; we’re using the honey badger in our initial training to talk about inappropriate sexual callers, frequent callers, the ...

What if the woods were filled with digital natives? Millennial maples? Tweeting tupelos? Mobile mahogany? Do the digital birds Hangout in the cloud(s)? If a #tree falls in the digital forest, does it show up in anyone’s feed?

Good customer service involves helping people to talk about feelings, not just facts, before solving problems. Here’s how and why to do it.

(I’m in Rochester, NY for the annual conference of the National Association of Crisis Center Directors and Contact USA, and I often draw or make lists during workshops, which often helps me dispense with the distraction of whatever thought has arisen, letting me get back to the workshop’s content.) This thought came to me today: What’s ...