The Value of Emotional Resilience
"Emotional resilience" is the ability to bounce back from emotional upheaval. You may have a moment of despair, but you recover quickly. Your buttons may be pushed, but you are able to be curious about your reaction and refocus on values. The key to emotional...
Resolve Conflict with the Golf Course Analogy
To resolve conflict, you need to understand the root cause. It's biological. We have two completely independent motivational systems. One system, traditionally called “motivation by love,” exists to motivate action toward values. A value in the psychological sense is...
Goals
A goal is an intention you set to achieve a particular outcome. Here, in summary, is my approach to goals. Goals on different timescales need different standards of doability, different degrees of certainty, and different depths of passion. Long-range goals can be as...
Don’t Make Concentration Harder Than It Is
When Thinking Lab members tell me their task is hard, I hear alarm bells in my mind. Invariably, I find they are making a difficult task harder than it has to be. A difficult task is one that requires a special mental effort to complete. It may require all your...
Three Types of Obstacles to Concentration
When we played 20 Questions as a family, the first question was always, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" If you are trying to identify an object, it falls into one of those categories. When you are mentally stopped, unable to concentrate, you should ask an analogous...
Snap Out of It: The Mental Importance of a Physical Pause
"Snap out of it" is pretty useless as a piece of advice. Typically, when you tell someone to "snap out of it," he is overreacting emotionally, or obsessing about something, or letting himself be distracted. Your advice won't be welcome if he disagrees with your...
“Should” and Self-Improvement
In a recent article, I wrote: "Should" is a moral concept. When you say you "should" do something, you are saying it is the moral thing to do. If you, as I, ascribe to the moral code of rational egoism, "I should" means: Based on everything I know, including all of...
Think Your Way to Better Time Management
I didn't set out to teach time management, but I sure talk about it a lot in my programs. That's because each aspect of a time-management system takes firsthand thinking to make it work. Consider the first basic problem in time management: keeping track of what you...
How to Take Advantage of Low-Quality Time
To concentrate on a mentally demanding task, you typically need at least one full hour of free time when you can ignore everything and everyone else. At that time, you focus all of your energy on that one task. I teach many tactics for concentrating effectively during...
Should You Use “Should”?
In a call on "How to Get Results Now on Your Long-Term Objective,” I was asked whether I thought "should" should be eschewed. I don't. I think "should" should be reclaimed. However, for many people, this will involve automatizing a new meaning for the word "should."...