Relevance

About the Book

This book, the first in a series by the internationally-known and scholar Lee Thayer, addresses the centrality of relevance in people’s health and lives. It is not about what is relevant to us, but to whom or to what we are relevant. Loss of relevance leads to the degeneration of mental and then physical health. Those who do not feel relevant to their world are the people who do violence to other people, or to themselves. How and why this feeling of relevance to others and to the world affects our lives, and thus the lives of others, is thoroughly explored and documented. The concept of relevance should be the most basic concept in theory of psychology, sociology, anthropology and the therapeutic industries.

About the Author

Lee Thayer has been an internationally-known and prodigal social scientist for more than five decades. How best to “do” life has been at the center of his wide-ranging interests for all of those years, and has been more or less summarized in his 2012 book, Doing Life. In conjunction with his Explaining Things, Mental Hygiene, and Communication! he has provided a powerfully pragmatic conceptual framework for understanding people in their social contexts, which has attracted devotees around the world. Trained as a clinical and social psychologist and psychotherapist, Dr. Thayer also has university degrees in the humanities and in engineering, following on his early life as a musician and composer. His field work has taken him to most of the Scandinavian countries, through most of Europe, to Canada and Mexico, and to Australia and China. He has been a Fulbright Professor (in Finland and in France), a Ford Foundation Fellow (at Harvard), has been recognized as an outstanding teacher by the Danforth Foundation (twice), and has held posts as Distinguished Visiting Professor in many of the leading universities here and abroad. At midlife, he came to be a leading CEO coach, helping them to make high-performance organizations and learning how to be the kind of leaders they needed to be to make it happen. He has been involved in educational reforms and, more recently, in the process of reforming the delivery of healthcare in the U.S. He continues to write, to advise executives from a wide range of organizations and institutions, and to teach courses under the auspices of The Thayer Institute for Performance Virtuosity in North Carolina. He is the father of four grown children and a growing list of grandchildren. Dr. Thayer lives with his artist-wife Kate and their reclusive cat Connor in the mountains of Western North Carolina.