Introspection

“What Am I Sad About?”

March 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When you’re struggling with sadness, part of your feelings may involve experiencing a lot of distress and shame about how sad you feel.

You probably won’t even realize it’s happening, but you’ll feel like “I shouldn’t be this sad” and that “my sadness is a weakness.”

It shouldn’t always feel like it’s just you.

When you acknowledge your sadness, you can actually perceive how you’re tunneling yourself into more gloom. Then you could do a much better job of accepting your sadness as it is, as the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke reminds in the masterpiece Letters to a Young Poet (1929):

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Thinking through “What am I sad about?” can help you get happier

Try to redirect the blame from yourself and recognize that sadness is a natural and reasonable response to the miseries of the world—some of them personal, some collective.

Yes, believing in yourself in the face of self-doubt can be challenging. But the extent of sadness isn’t immutable.

You can trigger a vast shift in how you feel by dropping self-criticism and embracing a more kind, non-judgmental relationship with yourself. Sadness isn’t a state of sin.

Change “I can’t do this” to “this will be a challenge for me; it’s normal to feel anxious.
Accept “I hate this” with “this is a tough situation to handle, and I’m doing my best.”
Persuade yourself to substitute “I hate myself” with “I’m overwhelmed with low self-esteem at the moment, and I need to cheer myself as I would a friend.”
Instead of repenting, “I can’t believe it slipped my mind again,” let yourself off by acknowledging, “it’s difficult to balance so many things. Perhaps I need to let go of some of them.”

Idea for Impact: Befriending your feelings and not identifying with these feelings as your self can affirm not only who you are but also what you believe you can be. Even when you feel disturbed because you’re falling back into past patterns, bear in mind that simply being aware that you’ve retreated into going over the past is a precursor of growth. Self-awareness can pave the way to a great leap forward in your personal transformation.

How to Avoid Magical Thinking

February 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Magical thinking remains a subtle impediment to making sound decisions. The more you examine yourself, the more you can reduce your tendency to indulge in it.

Discover the truth for yourself. Beware of the tendency to let others think for you. Don’t believe what your parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, priests, and authorities of all inclinations have taught you from an early age. (The best predictor of people’s spiritual beliefs is the religiosity of their parents.) Question others’ underlying premises and discover for yourself what’s reasonable. Force yourself to test for alternatives.

Don’t believe what you want to believe is true. Many people believe in UFOs and ghosts, even when there’s no credible verification for any visitation from outer space or dead souls haunting abandoned buildings. Often, misinformation is cunningly designed to evade careful analytical reasoning—it can easily slip under the radar of even the most well-informed people. Shun blind optimism.

Consciously identify your biases and adverse instincts. Psychologists have identified more than 100 cognitive biases that can get in the way of clear and rational thinking. Explore how those biases could come into play in your thinking. Try to determine their motive. Work to extricate yourself from them to the best of your ability.

Demand proof when the facts seem demonstrable. Remain intellectually agnostic toward what hasn’t been established scientifically or isn’t provable. If you can’t determine if something is true or it isn’t, suspend judgment. Beware of anecdotes—emotionally swaying stories in particular—they are the weakest form of evidence.

Don’t believe in something that isn’t true just because there’s a practical reason to. If you feel emotionally inclined to believe in something because it gives you hope, comfort, and the illusion of control, identify your belief as just that. Faith is often no more than an inclination that’s not withstood the tests of reason. The process of faith is an absence of doubt. There’ll always be people who reject evolution for reasons that have little to do with evolution. Don’t act with more confidence in unproven theories than is justifiable.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Give critical thinking and systematic evidence the central role in how you understand the world. Improving the criteria you use to judge the truth of things is difficult—but it’s of the essence. Have an unvarying, well-balanced degree of skepticism about everything, especially your own postulations.

Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

February 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It’s okay to be wrong about things. It’s okay to be upset. It’s okay if things don’t go the way you purposed. It’s okay if you say something embarrassing. It’s okay if you make a fool of yourself. It’s okay if you failed. It’s okay if you disappointed a loved one.

We’ve all made mistakes—rushed decisions, careless oversights, and lapses of judgment. Even after taking the thoughtful time and overanalyzing them, we’ve not been able to avoid faults.

And after their immediate effects come to pass, our minds are assaulted by those woulda-coulda-shoulda ruminations.

Mistakes are a natural part of your journey. They’re patches of rough and bumpy ground that will eventually help you get where you need to go. Life is a long game, and you’ll never know what your current experiences will mean over time.

Mistakes can offer a kind of insight and perspective that nothing else does. After all, you don’t learn quite as much from a right decision as you do from a wrong one.

Curb the idea that you have to be successful at everything you attempt. In the grand scheme of things, no one’s going to care about your failures, and neither should you.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so hard on yourself. You are not your mistakes. Perhaps, when life rejects you from something good, it may be redirecting you to something better, whether or not you realize it at that time. Seek ways to move forward.

How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt

September 7, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

As the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes proclaimed, “All we have is but a woven web of guesses.”

The physicist Richard P. Feynman often talked about how doubt informs critical thinking and learning. In a 1964 lecture on “What Is and What Should Be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society,” published in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999,) Feynman warned,

A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false. … Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Science produces ignorance, and ignorance produces more science, reminded Feynman in a 1963 lecture on “The Uncertainty of Science” published in The Meaning of It All (1999,)

To solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

When the scientist tells you he does not know the answer, he is an ignorant man. When he tells you he has a hunch about how it is going to work, he is uncertain about it. When he is pretty sure of how it is going to work, and he tells you, “This is the way it’s going to work, I’ll bet,” he still is in some doubt. And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have the doubt, we then propose looking in new directions for new ideas. The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

The Czechoslovakia-born Israeli American scientist Itzhak Bentov formulated the so-called “Bentov’s Law,” reiterating that science produces ignorance both deliberately and unintentionally. In Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness (1977,) Bentov wrote,

One’s level of ignorance increases exponentially with accumulated knowledge. When one acquires a bit of new information, there are many new questions that are generated by it, and each new piece of information breeds five-ten new questions. These questions pile up at a much faster rate than does accumulated knowledge. Therefore, the more one knows, the greater his level of ignorance.

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Learning the boundaries of your knowledge—the shortcomings, caveats, hedges, and the standard deviations toward everything you think you know—hones decision-making.

In other words, to get to the right answers, you first have to ask the right questions. So the first thing is to ponder about is what questions to ask and how to ask them. What are the things you don’t know, and how can you reach out into these areas that may be new to you to uncover somethings about the world and yourself?

Once you discover the answers, you’ll realize that approximate statements and varying degrees of certainty will require you to think probabilistically. Your inquiry shouldn’t be, “Will I be right, or will I be wrong?” but rather “What is the probability of this scenario versus that, and how does this judgment impact my choices?”

Leave room for doubt, even in your highest conviction ideas. If not, you’ll risk becoming smug and self-satisfied.

The Power of Negative Thinking

May 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stoic philosophy recommends a practice called premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils,”) i.e. intentionally visualizing the worst-case scenario in your mind’s eye.

The first point is to acknowledge that misfortunes and difficulties could, rather than certainly will, come about. The second is to envisage your most constructive response should the worst-case scenario transpire. For instance, if you’d lose your job due to coronavirus, what resources could you rely on, and how could you handle the consequences?

The direct benefit of premeditatio malorum is in taming your anxiety: when you soberly conjure up how bad things could go, you typically reckon that you could indeed cope. You’ll not dwell in the negative thoughts. Even the worst possible scenario couldn’t be so terrible after all.

Another surprising benefit of negative visualization is in raising your awareness that you could lose your relationships, possessions, routines, blessings, and everything else that you currently enjoy—but perhaps take for granted. This increases your gratitude for having them now.

This Stoic exercise has an equivalent in Buddhist meditation-based mindfulness practices that encourage nonjudgmental awareness of unpleasant sensations (the vedanā.)

Your emotions, sensations, and events are in flux. They arise and pass. You’re merely to regard yourself as the observer of these thoughts and feelings, but you’re not to identify with them. You are not your thoughts … you are not your feelings. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology (2015,)

Thoughts and opinions arise but they think themselves and disappear, “like bubbles on the Ganges,” says the Buddha. When we do not cling to them, they lose their hold on us. In the light of awareness, the constructed self of our identification relaxes. And what is seen is just the process of life, not self nor other, but life unfolding as part of the whole.

Idea for Impact: Could you benefit from reflecting on how you think of potential negative events?

An awareness of the possible—and the self-determining attitude—can be quite liberating. Premeditatio malorum is a surprisingly useful technique, if only with a scary name.

“What then should each of us say as each hardship befalls us? It was for this that I was exercising, It was for this that I was training,” as Epictetus philosophized in Discourses (3.10.7–8.)

Let the Buddha Help You Appreciate the Role of Questions in Inquiry

March 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Athenian philosopher Socrates used a dialogic teaching method, now known as “Socratic Questioning.”

Socrates famously observed, “I know one thing, that I know nothing.” He habitually posed of ignorance even though he knew more about any subject matter than he let on. He led his pupils through a sequence of questions—not to test or assess them, but to draw out their “tacit knowledge.” According to Plato, Socrates assumed that a pupil already possesses the knowledge or the understanding, but is not aware of this until a skillful teacher can help the pupil draw it out of himself using leading questions.

In his dialogues, Socrates imparted no information about the subject of inquiry, but systematically asked questions. By responding to Socrates’s teased-out line of thinking, the pupils eventually arrived at the desired knowledge.

The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Discoursing about finding cognizance through systematic inquiry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer explains how the Buddha, like Socrates, used questions to help his disciples reveal the truth:

Buddha talked not because he was particularly loquacious, or because he was given to elaborate explanations, but in order to help people see through the smoke screen of their own language and views. Once someone asked him for his secret in answering questions as effectively as he did. He said that he had four ways of answering questions.

One way was categorically—just to say yes or no without ambiguity.

The second way was to examine the question analytically, clarifying definitions and trying to determine what was actually being said, usually by deconstructing it. Most of the time when the Buddha employed this method there was no need to answer the question: under analysis the question proved meaningless.

The third way was by posing a counterquestion, the purpose of which was to bring the questioner back to his or her own mind, redirecting attention away from the entanglement of the language of the question to something real that stood behind it.

The fourth way was simply to put the question aside, knowing that some questions are so hopelessly entangled that to take them up at all means beating your head against a wall—there is no end to it and you end up with a bloody head. To put the question aside is simply to walk around the wall. This way you can get to the other side without beating your head bloody. So sometimes the Buddha’s response to a question was silence.

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

Become skilled at how to facilitate critical thinking with the Socratic Questioning technique. I recommend Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s excellent The Thinker’s Guide to the Art of Socratic Questioning (2006; excerpt.) Here’s a handy primer on the nine types of Socratic Questions.

With patience and loving-kindness, ask questions in such a way that can skillfully lead your interlocutors to a better understanding of themselves. Help them cross-examine and uncover the inconsistencies and errors of their thinking, and even change their mind—all without arguing with them.

You can also use Socratic Questioning for self-reflection, which in itself is a rhetorical device to discover the true self. Engage yourself in contemplation not to judge your past choices, but to ponder on them, learn from them, and make whatever changes you believe are right for you in the here and now.

Question Success More Than Failure

March 5, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

When Stress is Good

November 5, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stress and Anxiety Can Lead to Improved Performance

Why Some Stress Is Good for You Many people claim that they work best under pressure. There’s some truth to that. Stress is a natural response in highly competitive environments. Before an exam, important meeting, or contest, your heart rate rises and so does your blood pressure. You become more absorbed, alert, and efficient.

However, this favorable relationship applies only up to a certain level of stress. Past this level, stress impairs your performance—and eventually your heart.

In 1908, Harvard psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first described the beneficial and harmful effects of stress (“psychological arousal”) on performance in a graph the shape of an upside-down U. According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, the ascendant curve reflects the energizing effect of arousal. The descendant curve reflects the negative effects of stress on thinking and learning, or performance in general.

Too Much Anxiety and Stress Impairs Performance, but so Does Too Little: The Yerkes-Dodson Law

Many physiological studies have demonstrated that stress enhances your performance by causing your brain to use more of its capabilities, improve memory and intelligence, and increase productivity. Without stress, athletes, performers, executives, and students are likely to underachieve.

There is an optimum level of arousal for every kind of task. So how do you find the right balance? How do you get yourself into the performance zone where stress is most helpful? How much stress is good? The answers depend on individual disposition, the types of stressors, the nature of the task itself, and perceptions of what is stressful to you.

When Stress is Good: The Yerkes-Dodson Law

Idea for Impact: Stress at Work May Be Inevitable but it Doesn’t Have to Be Detrimental

Stress can be a motivator. But don’t seek out stress—less of it is better. Make the stress you do have work for you. Becoming conscious of stress as a potential positive can reduce the harm it causes.

Develop an awareness of when you hit the limits beyond which working longer or harder is counter-productive (sportsmen tend to choke under intense pressure.) When you feel overwhelmed, look for ways to reduce or eliminate the stressors so you can become more productive again. Ask for help.
Performance deteriorates when your stress level is either too high or too low for a given task. Seek the optimal level of anxiety that can impel you forward without causing you to fight back or give up.

Idea for Impact: The Right Level of Anxiety Can Be a Positive Force for Driving Employees Forward

Anxiety and optimal performance is an individual affair. The Yerkes-Dodson Curve shifts as the performers become established and experienced with the undertaking.

Astute managers repeatedly assess and re-assess where their team members land on the Yerkes-Dodson Curve. Managers can identify over-stressed or under-motivated circumstances with employees and intervene quickly to tailor the level of stress.

Admit When You Don’t Have All the Answers

March 27, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As a leader or as a salesperson, your employees or customers expect you to have the answers. However, there’ll times when you may not know the answer to difficult questions right away. To avoid losing credibility and causing others to question your knowledge, it’s important to know how to handle the situation properly.

Folks Don’t Want to Confess to Not Knowing Enough

Having quick, confident answers is often seen as a mark of proficiency and leadership. For that reason, you may be conditioned to believe that “not knowing” makes you look exposed. You may assume that any gaps in knowledge should be veiled at all costs.

Rather than admitting that you don’t have an answer to a tough question, you may tend to make something up on the fly, fast-talk, or stumble your way with a dubious response. Rookie salespeople are particularly prone to this—they tend to give answers they believe their prospective customers want to hear.

Consequently, in trying to look strong, you’ll end up looking weak.

The Power of Saying “I Don’t Know”

The ability to recognize one’s limitations is an underappreciated intellectual skill. A humble individual is all too aware of the confines of his/her corpus of knowledge.

Intellectual growth can come about only when the humble person can admit to not knowing enough and opening up to the possibilities of learning.

In an interview at the Wharton school, Carol Bartz (the no-nonsense, swearword-spewing former executive at Yahoo, Autodesk, and Sun Microsystems) commented about this false bravado and misplaced poise:

The phrase, “I don’t know” is in fact a strength. I have a [nonsense] detector that is really good, really good. And I love playing with people who rubbish me. I would much prefer if someone told me, “Not only do I not know the answer, but I wouldn’t even know how to get it. Could we talk about how, and I can get back to you?” That is so, so powerful. I don’t care how old or seasoned or how high you are in an organization. Saying “I don’t know” can give you the vulnerability you need to lead better.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Be Afraid to Admit What You Don’t Know

Great leaders know when to admit “I don’t know” and how to follow up appropriately. When you’re tempted to misrepresent your understanding, try to declare,

“I don’t know the answer at this time, but I will get back to you.”
“Good point. I don’t know, but I’m interested in what you think.”
“I don’t know, but let’s consult someone who knows more about this.”
“I don’t know, but I can do more research and incorporate those risk factors in our contingency plans.”

To be appreciated as a reliable, confident, and ethical person, be willing to admit that you don’t have all the answers. This act of humility and the readiness to seek the help of others can inspire greater trust within your team and encourage others to follow suit.

Be honest and direct when dealing with people, and they’ll respect you even if you aren’t able to answer all their questions.

Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

November 8, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak;
whispers the o’er-fraught heart
and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3)

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

People often block out thoughts that provoke negative emotions as a way of reducing their stress and regulating their moods. However, intentional suppression of deep-seated emotions not only increases susceptibility to illness, but also amplifies the emotionality and associated psychological effects of the suppressed thoughts.

Discussing, venting, clarifying, or expressing a trauma is a natural human response. When this necessity is inhibited, emotional stress and physical illness ensue.

Facing up to deeply personal issues can promote physical health, well-being, and beneficial behaviors.

The scientific research on the benefits of putting negative experiences into words is extensive. Studies have shown that expressive writing about oneself and one’s traumatic or stressful experiences does produce significant health benefits. Expressive writing helps ameliorate mood disorders, reduces symptoms among patients with serious illness, improve a person’s physical condition after a heart attack, and even enhance memory.

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, first investigated expressive writing as a healing process in the 1980s. Since then, research that spawned from Pennebaker’s pioneering studies, has revealed benefits could accrue to those who were dealing with divorces, lost love, death of loved ones, job rejections, terminal illness, even college students struggling with first-year transitions.

Here are the main points about the expressive writing method:

Choose the part of the day when you are most contemplative (that’s the morning for most people.) Sit down at a place where you are not likely to be disturbed.
Reflect about a very personal and important event. Consider a significant emotional upheaval that influences your life the most or has in the past. Your topic can be about a distress or failure, lost love, health-, school- or career-related anxiety, relationships, inner conflicts, death of a loved one, or just about any topic that you would like to express.
If you’re writing about an experience or an event that involves another person, it can help to organize your writing as a letter to that person, whether alive or dead.
Write your deepest thoughts about your chosen event or experience continuously for 20 minutes. If you run out of things to write or reach a mental block, just repeat or recap what you have previously written.
In your writing, deeply explore your thoughts about the event and describe its effect on you. In other words, write both about what happened and how you feel about it. Think about how you can handle these events and their consequences now—what you can do specifically.
Connect your personal experiences to other parts of your life. How do they relate to your childhood, your parents, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be?
Write for yourself as your thoughts arise. Be as direct, intense, and serious as possible. Do not worry about grammar, spelling, comprehensiveness, legibility, or structure. On the opening day of writing, your stories are not very structured, but over the three or four days, you will develop a more structured narrative.
After writing for 20 minutes, do not look back over. Simply fold the papers you used, seal them, and put them away (read more about the “worry box technique.”) Unlike psychotherapy, the expressive writing technique does not employ feedback to the participant.
Make a mental note of how you feel. It is not unusual to feel sad or disheartened after writing—these feelings usually fade away in an hour or so. In research experiments, many participants have reported crying or getting upset by the experience of writing about emotional upheavals, but most participants testify that the writing experience was meaningful in helping them organize their experiences.
Repeat this exercise for four consecutive days. You can write about the same experience on all four days or about different experiences each day. If you choose to write about the same topic on all the four days, try to wrap everything up by the fourth day.

Note that expressive writing is distinct from keeping a daily journal in that it allows people to step back for a moment and evaluate their lives. Pennebaker once said, “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity. … But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

New research has shown that expressive writing—followed by expressive rewriting—can improve happiness and lead to behavioral changes. Narrative storytelling of an unpleasant and chaotic experience may make the experience and its effects more controllable. For instance, according this New York Times article,

At the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, life coaches ask clients to identify their goals, then to write about why they haven’t achieved those goals. Once the clients have written their old stories, they are asked to reflect on them and edit the narratives to come up with a new, more honest assessment. While the institute doesn’t have long-term data, the intervention has produced strong anecdotal results.

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Expressive writing is a method of self-help that supplements the value of therapeutic talking to someone accepting and non-judgmental.

By exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings with a reflective, inquiring, honest attitude, you can shift perspective. Standing back and reflecting on your suffering from different points of view can bring about an improved emotional state. You can create your greatest opportunities for change by confronting the realities, reframing your experiences in terms of your values and priorities, and identifying impediments that stand in the way of purpose, joy, and contentment.

For more on the means and methods of expressive writing, as well its many confirmed physiological and behavioral benefits, read James Pennebaker’s Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotion (1997) and Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (1999)

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Introspection

It shouldn’t always feel like it’s just you.

Thinking through “What am I sad about?” can help you get happier

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

The value of sound decision-making is to be mainly sought from embracing uncertainty.

Idea for Impact: If you can’t tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, you may as well embrace a fanatical ideology.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

The Buddha’s Socratic Questioning Technique

Idea for Impact: Rational Inquiry is Driven by Questions

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Stress and Anxiety Can Lead to Improved Performance

Too Much Anxiety and Stress Impairs Performance, but so Does Too Little: The Yerkes-Dodson Law

Idea for Impact: Stress at Work May Be Inevitable but it Doesn’t Have to Be Detrimental

Idea for Impact: The Right Level of Anxiety Can Be a Positive Force for Driving Employees Forward

Wondering what to read next?

Folks Don’t Want to Confess to Not Knowing Enough

The Power of Saying “I Don’t Know”

Idea for Impact: Don’t Be Afraid to Admit What You Don’t Know

Wondering what to read next?

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Wondering what to read next?