Eric Barker's Blog, page 11

This Is How To Win With A Narcissist: 3 Secrets From Research

You 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 tried).

That said, we g...

This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 2 Secrets From Research

Dale 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 want all our friendships to not only go back to normal...

New Neuroscience Reveals 2 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent

A 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 scientific answers we need…

The first section of my upcoming book Plays Well...

Announcing My New Book — And The Free Bonuses You’ll Receive

Time to “officially” announce my new book: Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. (*jazz hands*)

It’s coming out on May 10th – but I encourage you to preorder it now on either Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Indiebound or Bookshop. If you do, you get supremely cool bonus goodies you don’t want to miss — as I shall detail below.

Nobody is more biased toward a book than its author but I 131% believe this is ...

My New Book Is Coming Out. And I Need Your Help.

Surprise!

The guy who lives in your device writing blog posts has a new book coming out on May 10th. Almost 5 years to the day since the last one. (It’s been quite a while but I’m still faster than George R. R. Martin.)

Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong will help you scientifically improve your relationships – not just love, but all your relationships including friendship and community.

Please do pre-order a copy...

This Is How To Be An Emotionally Intelligent Parent: 4 Secrets

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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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 have a sore elbow.

It come...

How To Be Resilient: 5 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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We always hear one thing about stress: it’s bad. I haven’t checked recently but I think that’s in the Constitution. Fortunately, stress is not that simple.

Researchers asked 30,000 adults how much stress they felt in the past year – and whether or not they thought stress was a negative. Eight years later the scientists circl...

This Is How To Overcome Regret: 5 Secrets From Research

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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There’s a study you may have heard about. Researchers showed subjects videos of Olympic athletes standing on the podium being awarded their medals. The subjects didn’t see the actual competition, and they didn’t know who got gold, silver or bronze. They just saw the athletes’ faces — and had to evaluate who looked the happie...

This Is How To Have Emotionally Intelligent Relationships: 4 Secrets From Research

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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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 again. And again. If it happens too often pe...

This Is The #1 Ritual You Need To Do Every Day

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Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here.

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“Third year of the pandemic” used to be a phrase reserved for science fiction novels.

Maddeningly, COVID may be going from historical “event” to “era.” I don’t blame you if your optimism has stretch marks and you’re feeling phantom pain where your hope used to be. We’re all wishing life would go back to precedented times.

So...