Marty Nemko's Blog, page 237

Evaluating Your Current or Prospective Job

Sometimes, it’s hard to get clear on what’s truly important in a job. So, many people default to money and status. 

The list I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today may be more helpful in deciding whether, when today, when unemployment is at a 50-year low, to stay in your current job or to seek greener pastures. And if you're a less-than-ideal employer, perhaps it will give you a gentle nudge.

A Fast Way to Identify Your Strengths

Self-report is a valuable way for you to identify our strengths and weaknesses. Not only does that enable you to consider the full range of your life’s past experiences, it allows you to project forward: what are your latent attributes—those that life hasn’t yet afforded you sufficient opportunity to express but that you might like to. Plus, self-report is free.

To keep concise the self-report strengths inventory in my PsychologyToday.com article today, it isn't universally applicable. It focuses on the Psychology Today readership—people who are well educated and/or with above-average intelligence. So, for example, it doesn’t ask about physical strength or ability to do repetitive tasks.

24 Rules of Thumb for a Better Life

Many people are more likely to benefit from simple than complex advice, for example, one-liners that are easy to keep top-of-mind. Rules of thumb are particularly helpful because they’re more flexible than rules — They’re guidelines: usually but not always wise. 

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers some rules of thumb that have been particularly helpful to my clients.

Distractions: 14 ways to distract yourself from worry or to spend time when you're bored.

Sometimes, there’s reason for worry and nothing we can do about it, at least for now. Then, distraction may be a good alternative. Perhaps you’ll find something sufficiently compelling in the list below.

Or you find yourself bored, perhaps after work or on the weekend. Sure, if you could motivate yourself, you’d get out and exercise, see a friend, work on your novel, but you’re not motivated—You’re in the no-win of feeling bored yet not energized enough to do much.

Worry and/or boredom too often results in drugs or alcohol. It’s so easy—Just open the bottle or pull out the vape pen and you’re not bored anymore; you're blitzed. And if you want some weed, endless billboards tell us to just click and it will materialize at your door.

What to do? Often in writing self-help advice, I feel the need to issue the disclaimer that there are no, ahem, magic pills, but might any of the ideas in my PsychologyToday.com article today be helpful?

My Most Potent Dating Tips

Many of my clients have wanted help in meeting their special someone. The tips I offer in today's PsychologyToday.com article have been the most potent.

How to Be a Good Parent of a Student Athlete

We’re mid basketball and football season, and parents of student athletes from elementary school through college are trying to be good sports parents: encouraging and teaching life lessons without overinvesting.

Like most potentially fraught human interactions, threading the needle isn’t so easy. Perhaps the thoughts I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today will help.

We’re mid basketball and football season, and parents of ...

We’re mid basketball and football season, and parents of student athletes from elementary school through college are trying to be good sports parents: encouraging and teaching life lessons without overinvesting.

Like most potentially fraught human interactions, threading the needle isn’t so easy. Perhaps the thoughts I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today will help.

Pruning Your Life: What to cut out so you flower more in 2020.

When we think of improving our lives, we tend to think of adding or replacing, but pruning your life’s weak wood often helps more. My PsychologyToday.com article today offers a checklist--Should you prune any of these from your life?

My Seven Most Potent How-to-Do-Life Tips: Career, relationships, money, mental health, physical health, and the life well-led

Amid the information overload, it may help, even at the risk of reductionism, to offer a super-distillation of the advice on how to live life.

So, as a thought experiment, I reflected on my 1,538 How To Do Life posts here on PsychologyToday.com to identify what, for each of life’s seven core components, is the single idea that has been most helpful across the 5,700 career and personal advising clients I’ve had the privilege of serving. I offer them as my PsychologyToday.com article today.

Do You Look for Reasons to be Angry or Sad?

Some people tend to seek a reason to be happy, others to be angry, still others to be sad.

It’s easy to understand happiness seekers, but what could motivate people to want to be angry or sad?   

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers my hypothesis, the pros and cons of trying to change, and if you want to change, some baby steps that can help.