The worse someone feels, the more honesty we should wield

Do you know somebody who hates being told what to do? Neuroscience researchers explain this personality is called control averse. These people resent restrictions on their freedom of choice and are compelled to reassert this freedom. A study even showed how certain brain regions were more strongly activated during people's controlled decisions than their free decisions. And the reasoning was, people felt misunderstood and untrusted. But hating being told what to do isn't necessarily about loathing authority, or the inability...

Despite living in a time where all the world's knowledge is available to anyone with a cell phone, we still live in an uncertain realm, filled with empty space, hanging questions and knowledge gaps. And because of the fundamental human desire for predictability and control, we eagerly fill those holes. Our brains have a way of color correcting the world, so to speak, when we believe it's been filtered through the wrong light. And so, we start guessing. Our minds...

In most professional relationships, whether it's doctor patient, boss employee, interviewer interviewee, therapist client, teacher student or coach player, there are always going to be power dynamics and knowledge gaps. And these imbalances can make it difficult for us to challenge the advice and instruction of the person in the authority position. Resisting makes us feel guilty, impolite or ungrateful. Especially if there is an investment of time or money. And especially if we have pleasing, approval seeking, conflict avoidant,...

A trend you'll notice in memoirs, documentaries and autobiographies is when the character looks back on some particular period of their lives with fondness, gratitude and wonderment. Maybe it was their childhood when they had boundless energy, no cell phones and romped around the neighborhood every afternoon until dark. Or adolescence when they were coming of age and the whole world was still in front of them. Or maybe it was during college when they had zero responsibilities but learning...

One of the few lessons I retained from high school algebra was a principle called the order of operations. This is a collection of rules that reflect conventions about which procedures to perform first in a given mathematical equation. The guiding acronym for the order of operations was pemdas, aka, parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. The way we remembered that was through the mnemonic device, please excuse my dear aunt sally. Strangely enough, teachers never told us what this...