Riding the Dragon: 10 Lessons for Inner Strength in Challenging Times

“Riding the Dragon gives the reader the chance to look for the lessons that are often hidden in our sorrows.”―Goodreads reviewer

Twenty years and 70,000 copies after it was first released, Riding the Dragon―by popular author, speaker, and psychologist Robert J. Wicks―continues to help thousands each year to confront the “dragons” of stress, discouragement, burnout, and unexpected change that everyone struggles with in their daily lives.

Instead of pretending these difficulties don’t exist or trying to remove them entirely, Wicks offers ten lessons to help us face them, overcome them, and grow from them. These simple yet profound lessons draw on the wisdom of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions as well as Wicks’s experience as a psychologist, and include

• pairing clarity with kindness,
• seeking perspective daily, and
• building a barrier of simplicity.

Riding the Dragon is a concise, compassionate, and knowledgeable guide for anyone experiencing or supporting someone facing personal or professional challenges. This twentieth anniversary edition features a new preface from the author, highlighting how Riding the Dragon is, perhaps now more than ever, an indispensable spiritual and psychological companion for all of us who are yearning for our lives to be transformed.

Psychologist and popular speaker Robert J. Wicks is the author of more than sixty books for individuals and professionals, including the bestselling Riding the Dragon.

He speaks internationally about resilience, self-care, and the prevention of secondary stress to audiences from the US Congress to Walter Reed Army Hospital, from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to Harvard Children’s Hospital, and from the Princeton Theological Seminary to the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center in England. Some of Wicks’s presentations include speaking at the commemoration of the Boston Marathon Bombing at the Boston Public Library; a keynote for the American Medical Directors Association; a course in Beirut, Lebanon, for relief workers from Aleppo, Syria; and the psychological debriefing of relief workers evacuated from Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. He also regularly speaks at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress.

Wicks serves as a professor emeritus at Loyola University Maryland, and has taught in universities and professional schools of psychology, medicine, nursing, theology, education, and social work. He earned a doctorate in psychology from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital and has received honorary degrees from Georgian Court, Caldwell, and Marywood universities.

In 1996, Pope John Paul II awarded Wicks a papal medal for his service to the Catholic Church. He also received the first Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Psychology from Widener University and the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the American Counseling Association’s Division on Spirituality, Ethics and Religious Values in Counseling.