I hear it all the time: "My wife (brother, co-worker, etc.) just doesn’t get what I’m saying." Today's polarized political climate has exacerbated the issue.
There are a number of ways to effectively address these communication issues, therapy, role-pl...

“I ask my kids/spouse/employees to do something and invariably, they always get it wrong and I have to end up doing it myself!”
We’ve all heard people say this, and probably have said this ourselves, but is it really the other ...

Today we have far more information than we have ever had. We used to have a handful of TV channels, now we have hundreds, not counting streaming services, and Facebook, etc. We used to have a daily paper (sometimes morning and evening editions), now we have the 24-hou...

In our increasingly complicated world, we have so much information that we must wade through to make a decision. Today, we wouldn’t think of making a major purchase such as a car without looking online to see the price ranges in our area, and how much the various options cost. ...

Perhaps the most rewarding part of my work is helping post-traumatic brain injury clients to regain astery of skills they thought were lost forever. Many of you may be familiar with this aspect of my work from Clark Elliott’s book, The Ghost in My Brain, about his nearly decade-long journey to recover from a concussion...

In the midst of all the turmoil in the world, I am often asked why normally intelligent, rational people make the decisions they make. When smart people make dumb mistakes, it usually isn’t because of stupidity, ignorance, or apathy. They make dumb mistakes because they’ve been ...

Part 1 explored why smart people do highly questionable things. Part 2 delves deeper into how personality affects decision making.
As noted in Part 1, for some people, modifying a goal is the equivalent of admitting failure. And they will never admit failure. On...

2020 has been a challenging year, to say the least. We have all had to make changes, in some cases significant changes, in the way we do things. Many of us have left our offices to work at home. Our children are also schooling fro...

Formal education trains people to be efficient, learning routines so that the tasks become hardwired. For example, once people learn to read, they automatically attempt to read when faced with text. The message may be indecipherable if written in an unfamiliar language, but in mo...

My last blog provided an exercise with multiple solutions—but not the answers so that you would have the opportunity to try it for yourself. Herewith are the various possible answers and what they can tell about your thought processes. The exercise asks you to fill in the first and ...

We’ve all done it. Going through the motions of showering in the morning and not remembering whether you shampooed before you put in the conditioner. Meeting someone new, engaging in a whole conversation but unable to remember the person’s name afterward. Driving somewhere and then wondering how you got that ...

Whether we know it or not, we categorize all the time. “You’re just like your mother!” “That’s like the pair I got in New York.” He’s the kind of doctor, lawyer, etc., who….” We do it with animate and inanimate objects as well as with ideas and other less tangible items—it’s just like the time you ...

When each of us sits down, we navigate our feet to a position that feels comfortable, even if the seat we are in is uncomfortable. What we may not realize is that how we position our feet may affect our ability to think and ...

Technology can make us more efficient but not necessarily more effective. Our complex brains are what make us effective, but most of the time we don’t make good use of our ability to think. Thinking takes practic...

Words are enormously powerful tools that most people don’t fully appreciate. Although people recognize the importance of communication skills, they don’t necessarily grasp how to become more effective communicators...