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If you want to signal loyalty, affinity, closeness and camaraderie for your family or team, here are my recommendations. Number one, listen loudly. Pay attention during conversations, phone calls, video chats and other communications. What specific language do your colleagues always use? Which acronyms or phrases are repeated most often? Are there any references that regularly sneak their way into people’s emails and chat messages? If you spot a…

Organizational psychologists have found that our informal, nontask related workplace social interactions matter more than we realize. Those little moments represent what are called affective events. They’re the emotions and moods that influence job performance and satisfaction. And it is largely through the accumulation of those very events that lead to healthy outcomes of more enduring workplace relationships. The more affective events we can experience, the more we will…

I am wrong all the time. I actually enjoy being wrong. Nobody learns from being right. People don’t grow from success. Show me one athlete who transformed from winning every game. What about you? What kind of intention do you hold around reflection? If we want to ramp up our experiential learning, it’s helpful to have a framework to guide our efforts. Mine has three parts. Insightful exploration, critical…

History repeats itself over and over. The rhythms of time never stop beating. And yet, humans have notoriously short memories. Our brains are liars. We easily and rapidly reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what happened. I read a popular study from a psychology journal showing that our brains generate false memories of events mere seconds after they have occurred. We paraphrase, distort and misremember…

Empowerment is the ability to take personal agency. This is what living life fully is all about. I was reading a paper in an analytic philosophy journal, and the researcher made a distinction between two forms of empowerment. Hypoagency and hyperagency. Hypoagency means that anything bad that happens to us isn’t our fault. It was society, or culture, or some outside influence that made us do it. Hyperagency means…

A linguistic element for navigating fear is using evaluative language. The goal is to create a sense of urgency. To prompt ourselves to critically assess our choices and motivations. Using such phrasing encourages our emotional shift from passive acceptance to active evaluation of our actions and their consequences. A question we can learn to ask ourselves is this: Would it serve me more to avoid temporary discomfort here, or…

Rhetorical questions are the most underrated linguistic tool in our arsenal. They’re powerful because they’re more about making a point than getting an answer. Such language stimulates introspection, which is an invaluable asset when navigating fear. We need to learn how to deploy that within on a moment’s notice. During the pandemic, I remember reading headlines each day, seeing the same doom and gloom everyone else did. But there…

Here is a useful framework for freeing ourselves from fear. This tool contains four elements. Dichotomy, rhetoric, evaluation and empowerment. Dichotomy presents us a choice between two contrasting options. This trait prompts us to reflect on our own beliefs and encourages critical thinking. Dichotomy helps to break free from binary thinking and open up possibilities for more nuanced understanding. For example, late one night, our relative sends us a…

Identity is a complex, dynamic and multifaceted entity. And it’s not evenly distributed. Who we are as unique individuals rests at the nexus of a vast number of dynamic and interwoven factors. Whitman’s immortal mantra, I am large, I contain multitudes, is not an understatement. The interesting question to ask is, in the mosaic of our lives, composed of these diverse and distinct tiles, which pieces are most prominent?…

There’s no such thing as a person who is always right. Certain people may over index on intelligence, intuition and prescience, and their batting average may be an order of magnitude higher than the rest of us. But do the math. At eight billion strong, the human experience is far too complicated, dynamic and immense for anyone to always be right. People are fallible and prone to errors in…