psychology / brain science

Every now and then someone launches a new ‘personal development’ product that is based on providing people with a fairly profound (usually physical) experience, and then getting them to relate it to the ways in which they go through life.… Continue reading →

At some time in the late 1970s, a well known TV scientist put forward the idea that there was a certain level of stress that was optimal for performance. He had no evidence to support this ‘claim’ but asserted it… Continue reading →

I don’t like the term ‘emotional intelligence’, or EQ, for several reasons; it is only one aspect of a more substantial area of psychology – social intelligence – that has been around since the 1920s; it is a cleverly marketed… Continue reading →

There’s more to success than manipulating peoples’ emotions. The idea of emotional intelligence seems to have pervaded business thinking since the book on the topic by Daniel Goleman was published in 1995. The first use of the term is usually… Continue reading →

True freedom to act is crucial to authentic leadership, and yet it depends on a personal clarity about our beliefs and values, and how we relate to those aspects of life that can never be known or seen. In a… Continue reading →

Leaders who lack the ability to empathise with their team especially in what seem to them to be trivia or unnecessary, make choices and act in ways, that undermine their ability to lead when they need to. We’ve all heard… Continue reading →