Donald Conte is my father and one of the few people I talk to on a daily basis; but that relationship has nothing to do with why he is featured on this website. Although our philosophies are not identical, there are many overlapping similarities between he and I. Whether we always agree or not, however, there is absolutely no doubt that his writings are brilliant. It is difficult to read even a single article that my dad writes without learning something completely new: either about history, mental mapping, or self-help. The perspective he brings to this website is entirely creative, ingenious, and capable of eliciting the type of self-growth that is essential to emotional management. I’m confident his articles will inspire in you a fire for learning more, just as he instilled in me a raging fire to learn as much as I possibly can in this lifetime.
The first cartographers had not yet explored the entire world, yet they created maps of the entire world. In lieu of what they did not know, they simply put: “Here there be dragons.” But we have long since come to learn that dragons were not where they believed them to be; instead, there were simply undiscovered territories that needed only be explored to be explained. The same is true with the human psyche: There are unchartered regions of our own minds that we have yet to explore. It is not emotionally healthy to simply believe that dragons exist in these uncharted territories; instead, I believe it is our job to find a way to explore and navigate through the depths of our own undiscovered psyches.
To meet the goal of the emotional exploration, my father’s articles always center on the theme of mental mapping. We all create a psychological map of our worlds, whether we realize it or not; what he does, however, is help us realize how we in fact create our mental maps. Armed with the information on how we develop mental maps, we become more in control of the ways in which we can shape our maps. We have a map for how we believe the world should be, and the more attached we are to that map, the entrapped we are by it.
Neither my father nor I would ever want readers to accept what we present without questioning it. It was my father, after all, who taught me that good students question everything, but great students fervently pursue answers to those questions. Emotional management is about being in control of your life. The more you can understand both the world around you and your own internal world, the more you will set yourself up to be successful emotionally. The more you remain trapped in your own perspective without daring to question your beliefs, the more likely you will encounter emotional turmoil.