ABOUT THE MACDERMOTT METHOD

About Kristin MacDermott

Kristin MacDermott is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder and creator of the MacDermott Method. She is the author of It Takes Two Minutes to Shift Your Mindset and Build Resilience.

Kristin’s resilience training programs have been validated in four studies (including two randomized-controlled trails) with researchers for the Duke Clinical Research Institute, published in peer-reviewed journals, and proven to promote clinically significant improvement in key resilience measures, including distress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and self-efficacy.

She has developed resilience training programs for some of the highest performing people on the planet, including the Navy SEALS and the Los Angeles Police Department. Her resilience training programs have been used in more than twenty hospitals across the country, in the Duke Cancer Institute, and in the National Institutes of Health, among others. She has also created programs for college, high school, and middle school students.

Kristin holds a bachelor of arts from Duke University and a master’s in clinical psychology from Antioch University. She has also completed advanced training in Mind-Body Medicine at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. and at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

She is the co-founder of Pathfinders, an Aspen-based nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of people living with cancer as well as those experiencing grief. She also helped start Zero Hour Expeditions, a nonprofit that helps combat veterans reintegrate into civilian life and overcome the effects of PTSD by experiencing 30-day wilderness trips.

Kristin has been married to Michael for 27 years and is the proud mother of their three resilient children—Connor (21), Griffin (17), and Riley (13). The family lives in Los Angeles with their giant Akita.

About Resilience

When people think of resilience, they envision things like persevering against all odds, overcoming terrible hardship, and rising from the ashes of defeat. They know that being resilient is clearly better than the alternative, but it certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.

After all, most people would rather be happy than resilient. And that's what we really want for our kids, right? For them to be happy? 

That's where we come in. Resilience is as beneficial during the best of times as it is during the worst.

The same skills that help us put ourselves back together after experiencing a setback or disappointment help us milk the joy out of our daily lives and show up as our best selves in the best of times as well as in the worst.

Bottom line: Resilience will make you happier, whether you are experiencing a challenge or not.

Sadly, though, too many parents and children are experiencing distress.

But it doesn't have to be. Resilience skills are the antidote to distress, anxiety, and hopelessness.

The resilience skills we teach in our courses come from two decades of research and comprise a comprehensive model that has been proven in multiple studies (including two randomized-control trails) to improve quality of life even for people experiencing extreme distress.

There are three main skills sets upon which our resilience model is founded:

1. Emotional intelligence, which is the ability to identify, understand, process, and utilize your emotions. Not only does emotional intelligence allow you to stay calm, clear, and in control during stressful times, it also gives you empathy. Study upon study has shown that emotional intelligence is the single biggest predictor in professional success.  It is more important than education, skill set, experience, or even IQ.
2. Social support. We teach interpersonal skills that help children successfully navigate their social challenges and build healthy relationships.
3. Trust. Perhaps more importantly, we believe it is critical that people (including teens and younger children) trust themselves to make good decisions, handle responsibility, and be their own best advocates. The key to instilling a sense of self-trust and self-efficacy is to help kids tune into their own "Inner Wisdom," which is the term we use to describe the inner voice or gut intuition that guides us in caring for ourselves. We teach skill sets to tune into Inner Wisdom so that both adults and children can trust themselves.

Fortified with these skills, children and adults can bring their best selves to the table in every interaction. They will choose kind, empowering, interesting friends and steer clear of people and activities that feel bad to them. They will be open, optimistic, and engaged with their dreams and hopes for the future rather than guarded, insecure, and defensive. They will stack the deck in their favor for happiness, success, personal growth, and resilience.

About Jocelyn Baker

Jocelyn Baker is a ghostwriter who has written and edited more than eighty books, including bestsellers, across a range of industries: parenting, sales, estate planning, neurolinguistic programming, sports, education, finance, marketing, hypnosis, politics, death and grieving, self-help, technology, economics, philosophy, stocks, fitness, and psychology. Through her work as a writer, she became interest in the impact of words on behavior.

Jocelyn has a background as a successful copywriter, helping her clients promote their books, launch products, and convert leads into sales through online marketing. When she became a mother, Jocelyn began studying the impact of her own language on the development of children's internal working models.

In 2016, in the midst of a cancer diagnosis, Jocelyn met Kristin MacDermott—and she has not stopped picking her brain since.

Jocelyn and her two children, Juni (10) and Keir (7), live in Los Angeles. She has a strong co-parenting relationship with her ex-husband, Mike. Jocelyn sits on the board of the Magical Holiday Parade.