The Worrywart's Companion: Twenty-One Ways to Soothe Yourself and Worry Smart

Beverly A. Potter, PhD, (Docpotter) received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Stanford University and her masters in vocational rehabilitation counseling from San Francisco State University. She was awarded the prestigious Ford Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies.

Docpotter’s work blends philosophies of humanistic psychology, social learning theory and Eastern philosophies to create an inspiring and original approach to handling difficulties encountered in today’s world. Docpotter has developed a number of original self-help approaches, such as her breakthrough model of job burnout and how to overcome it based upon research in “learned helplessness”, her smart worry model inspired by Daniel Goleman’s “emotional intelligence”, her use of the Japanese ronin—the unindentured samurai­—as a metaphor for her new paradigm, non-linear, career strategy for the cyber-age in which work is an adventure. She is noted for challenging rules and thinking of issues from an out-of-the-box perspective.

Docpotter was a faculty member of the University of California at Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy’s prestigious Executive Seminar program for City Managers. She was a member of Stanford University’s Human Resources Staff Development Program for 20 years. Her managerial training programs have been offered through University of California at Berkeley Extension, San Francisco State Extension, De Anza College Short Courses, as well as in-house training at Sun Microsystems, Genentech, TRW-CI, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, IRS Revenue Officers, Tap Plastics, Becton-Dickinson, Department of Energy, California State Bar Association, International Association for Personnel Women, Design Management Institute, Asian Management Institute, Cisco Systems and others.