Fresh ideas about career, education, the life well-led, and improving the world.
It’s hard to cure procrastitis—Perhaps you know from personal experience. Indeed, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So, as a parent, you can be invaluable in preventing your child from succumbing to that serious disease. My Psychology Today article today should be helpful.
“Mom, I can’t do this!”
How do you get your child to more often solve problems? The ideas in my Psychology Today article today should help.
Considerable human happiness has derived from how we've responded to people’s individual differences
Alas, increasingly, the recognition of individual differences is an
endangered species. My Psychology Today article today argues that this threatens to undo much of the happiness that
the responding to individual differences hath wrought.
Recently, I described an approach to uncertainty that has worked well with my clients. Its acronym is RAD: Resolve, Accept, Distract: Do what you can to resolve the problem, accept the uncertainty of it working, and distract yourself to something productive.
My Psychology Today article today shows how RAD can be applied to six common fears.
Religious people find comfort in their faith. What’s an atheist to do? My Psychology Today article today offers 15 possible sources of comfort. They’re of course, applicable to religious people as well.
How do you feel when you get criticized? Many people's first reaction is often defensiveness, demotivation, antipathy and even retribution.
I’ve had a number of clients say that on giving a supervisee a deservedly poor performance review, in addition to no improvement, the honest feedback was met with a formal complaint to HR.
Yet criticism, especially constructive criticism, is widely viewed as key to individual, organization, and societal progress.
My Psychology Today article today makes the case that while criticism is invaluable to self-teaching computers, people aren’t computers. They have feelings, which usually tip the scales toward minimizing criticism and maximizing earned praise.
We’re often warned against self-deprecation, that we shouldn't put ourselves down. It’s argued that it lowers your credibility and that, internally, it harms your self-esteem.
But my clients, my wife, and I have often benefited from self-deprecation. I make the case for it in my Psychology Today article.
Especially in challenging times, taking a moment to appreciate the wondrous can be especially comforting.
Recently, I wrote about what’s probably the ultimate wonderment: birth. Today, my Psychology Today article offers 13 other secular miracles.
Should you be angrier? Less angry? In general, or situationally?
Answering the 12 questions in my Psychology Today article today may help you decide.
Clarity is comforting while uncertainty can be disconcerting. For example:
Alas, there are no clear answers to such questions. So how can you deal with the uncertainty?
One approach that my clients have found helpful is RAD. I describe it in my Psychology Today article today.
Many people scramble to find even an extra few minutes in their crammed day.
Many of those same people spend a good amount of time shopping, chopping, and cleaning up meals.
Of course, there may be times you’ll want to make something elaborate, but there are a surprising number of dishes that are healthy, cheap, and tasty, and only take one minute to make. My Medium.com article today offers my faves.
We often behave on autopilot. That can preclude us from living the life we’d actually like to live.
A bit of reflection can help us decide if we want to change. To facilitate that, previous installments in this series asked you to self-assess how honest, how kind, and how high-standards you want to be.
My Psychology Today article today turns to looking at how hard you want to work. To that end, answer these five questions:
We tend to behave on auto-pilot. It may be helpful to step back and evaluate our behavior.. Previous installments in this series asked you to consider how ambitious you want to be, how honest, and whether to raise or lower your expectations of yourself and others. Here we turn to where you are and would like to be on the kindness vs. justice continuum.
My Psychology Today article today asks you 11 questions to help you decide.
I’m amazed that some very intelligent, usually thorough people have made major life decisions quite simplistically.
My Psychology Today article today offers examples and then, a wiser yet not overly complex approach to choosing a college, a career, and a spouse.
Even if your time isn’t running out, it may be wise to live as if it is.
Perhaps one or more of the ideas I offer in my Psychology Today article today might help you make the most of your time.
Many of us cut our honesty teeth on the apocryphal tale of George Washington admitting to chopping down a cherry tree: “I cannot tell a lie.”
Well, truth is, none of us can honestly say that we cannot tell a lie. We can and do lie. The benefit and fun may lie in deciding when to lie.
Consider the 5 gray-area situations:I describe in my Psychology Today article today.
Thomas Aquinas wrote, "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship."
It may not be so black-and-white.
My Psychology Today article today asks you five questions that may help you have a true BFF.
How ambitious do you want to be? It may help to answer the five questions I ask in my Psychology Today article today.
The Nobel Prize is awarded in six categories: physics, chemistry, physiology, peace, economics, and literature.
My Psychology Today article today makes the case that psychology should be added to the list of categories.
If you're aware of where you’d like to be on seven continua, you may well increase how much you enjoy your recreation. I describe them in my Psychology Today article today.
Like most of our important behaviors, how we deal with money has a psychological component. My Psychology Today article today offers thoughts on how to use that in your favor.
Imagine that your counselor emailed you between sessions to ask how you’re doing. Or that your friend promised to help you on Saturday at 9 and, voila, there s/he was. Or that your romantic partner remembered that you dislike cilantro and when phoning for takeout, made sure that nothing had cilantro.
Diligence is one of those virtues that seem to have gone a bit out of fashion, along with duty, discipline, responsibility, and restraint. Yet diligence has always been and always will be at the hub of accomplishment and, among the discerning, of respectability.
But how to get more diligent? Ay, there’s the rub. My Psychology Today article today offers my best but I fear inadequate suggestions:
Too often, recommendations for reducing stress are for after you're already stressed: take deep breaths, exercise, talk with a friend or counselor.
But many people can prevent the problem by cleaning your House of Stress. That is, inventory your life to see if there are people, activities, and things you should sweep out.
My Psychology Today article today offers a self-inventory which should help.
Former TIME editor-in-chief and head of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson, has written a series of biographies and wrote that a criterion he uses for choosing his subjects is whether they have combined disparate interests. For example, Da Vinci merged art and science. Ben Franklin excelled in invention and politics. Steve Jobs described Apple’s philosophy as the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. When Einstein was stuck on a physics problem, he often pulled out his violin.
Few people will rise to such accomplishment, but the concept of combining interests and expertise remains useful to us all. It can build a personal identity that differentiates you from the crowd, and it can facilitate your having an unusual career niche, making it easier to brand and market yourself.
My Psychology Today article today offers examples from my clients as well as from my own life.
A talk, even if it’s just a one-minute report at a staff meeting can catapult a career.or hurt it. So the stakes are high. No surprise that public speaking tops the list of fears.
The good news is that public speaking is learnable and it's made
easier because there are three ways to prepare a talk, so you can choose
one that fits you and the occasion. I describe them in my Psychology Today article today.
The Fellows in a leadership
training program at two top universities will be reading the following
article that | wrote for that program. I thought it might be of value to others who are aspiring to management or
leadership. So, it's my Psychology Today article today.
We all operate under various day-to-day philosophies, perhaps unconsciously. If you make those choices consciously, you’ll more consistently live by your philosophies and occasionally decide to change one.
To encourage that consciousness, my Psychology Today article today lists 16 issues on which people’s philosophy varies. For each, I offer two people's quite different philosophies.
