Preparing for the new year (professionally) — Like someone wise once said, “if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.” But most of us need some prompts to imagine things. The 1–2–3–4 visioning exercise* does exactly that. …

How silence can boost efficiency, creativity, and psychological safety — Eight people sit in a Zoom call together. One of them is sharing his ideas. He continues until someone disrupts him and starts building on the idea. Another person joins in and shares her perspective. This goes on for the rest of the hour-long session. When the time is up…

I was once raving about a piece of professional literature to a senior designer when she told me that she had learnt most things by doing. I wondered if I should also leave the books alone and stick to learning on the job. …

The subtle art of single-tasking — By the end of the workday I feel twitchy, slightly irritated, dissatisfied with the day’s work. Absent-minded. Or perhaps it’s the opposite. So deeply intertwined with the urges of my mind that I feel absent from my body. For the rest of the day, I keep habitually picking up my…

I feel an ache in my heart and this ache is urging me to go abroad for a while. But I don’t know where to go, or when to leave. — I’ve been troubled by one question for years now. I’ve thought about it from all possible angles resulting in one of the most complex polygons my mind has ever drawn. I’ve talked to friends about it. I’ve waited, hoping that time would one day drop the answer in my letter…

Making sense of painful behaviors and emotions that emerge in the present with little sense — I devour movies and TV shows that deal with how trauma is passed on from one generation to the next. It’s not that I can necessarily relate to the stories, but these shows allow me to pull a string from the main character’s present-day behavior to her childhood experiences. In…

On Giving Yourself Permission to Be Creative — Whenever I write, I hear a voice that criticizes me. This inner critic adamantly tries to keep me from writing, especially from sharing anything publicly. Last time I was working on a text, she was particularly persistent. …

A Story About Growing Into Body Image Issues and Gradually Beginning to Grow Out Of Them — One of my strongest early body image memories is from when I was about 13 years old. We were going swimming with the PE class and I was taking a shower before going to the pool. One of my friends was in the shower next to me and she commented…

Research suggests that unconscious thought can improve decisions — I was planning to write an article on how you can avoid bad purchases by carefully analyzing your decision. I had been crafting criteria against which you could rate each new purchase. For example, when buying a new jacket, you could rate it on a scale from 1–5 on four…