This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome
en you’re young, you gossip about the couples that are having sex. When you’re older, you gossip about the ones that aren’t. Keeping love alive isn’t easy. And when I was researching my new book Plays Well With Others, well, I learned a lot of very harsh truths about the current state of marriage. While I had no desire to write a “Romantic Necronomicon” that would drive readers mad (or just make them mad at me) I do cover a…
8 minutes
This Is How To Win With A Narcissist: 3 Secrets From Research
u know the type. Needlessly cruel and they think they’re better than everyone else. Always one-upping people. If you've been to Timbuktu, they've been to Timbukthree. Some of them almost reach “Talented Mr. Ripley” proportions and exhibit such bad behavior it makes your eyes go wide like a silent movie actor. Calling them a “friend” requires substantial creativity but – sadly -- they’re a part of your life. (No, you can’t kill them with your mind. It doesn’t work. I’ve…
7 minutes
This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 2 Secrets From Research
le Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” was wrong. Well, at least one of his principles was. But we’ll get to that in a second… Like you, I spent the pandemic not seeing friends nearly as often – but I was actually writing about friendship at the time. Oh, irony. The second section of my new book Plays Well With Others gives the Mythbusters treatment to the old maxim “Is a friend in need a friend indeed?” Post-pandemic, I…
9 minutes
New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent
big part of being emotionally intelligent is understanding what's going on in the minds of others. But doing that is really difficult. (So difficult I’ve been worried I broke my mirror neurons – and that’s why I’ve had 7 years of bad luck.) We’re not mind readers. But given the pandemic and its negative impact on our social lives, we need the facts more than ever. So I went all Hardy Boys on this one and dug for the…
8 minutes
This Is How To Be An Emotionally Intelligent Parent: 4 Secrets
Your living room looks like a highlight reel from “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The little ones are screaming the hits from “Frozen” and the teenagers are teenaging all over the place. The whole house needs an exorcism. Keeping things under control seems like an endless game of whac-a-mole when you already…
12 minutes
This Is How To Have Emotionally Intelligent Relationships: 4 Secrets From Research
We all have social situations where we consistently stumble. At certain times, or in certain contexts, often while under stress -- we blow it. And we just don’t know why. We lash out, cling, blame, or withdraw and it hurts our relationships. We try to be better… but then it happens…
11 minutes
How to Be Happier Without Really Trying
The meeting was supposed to be boring. In 2019 a bunch of academics and think tank policy folks were gathered for what should have been an uneventful conference of long-winded PowerPoint and bad coffee. Sadly, it would not stay that dull and predictable… The presenter finishes his talk. A colleague comments…
11 minutes
New Neuroscience Reveals 7 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent
If you were in Dare County, North Carolina, in September of 1902 you would have seen two men next to a large piece of machinery yelling at each other. And you probably would have thought that whatever it was these guys were trying to do, it wasn’t going to work out.…
12 minutes
