What are your goals right now? I currently have a variety of professional and personal goals about staying in touch with clients, my eating and exercise habits, reading non-fiction books, improving my Cantonese language skills, staying in touch with friends and family, and so on.

A recent research paper in the journal Behavioural Public Policy by social scientists Samuli Reijula at the University of Helsinki and Ralph Hertwig of the … Read more

What are your goals in life?

New research suggests that most human goals may fall into four broad categories. Researchers led by Benjamin Wilkowski at the University of Wyoming used what’s known as a lexical approach to investigate the structure of goal-related words in the English language.

The researchers initially identified more than 140,000 English nouns; they then asked hundreds of people to rate the extent to which the nouns … Read more

Want to boost your commitment to your goals and achieve more?

Silly question, really. Because I’m sure your answer is “yes”.

Perhaps your biggest goal at the moment is to do with your work – getting a promotion, finding a new job, securing a pay rise, or reducing your stress levels, for instance. Or maybe your main goal is to do with your personal life – finding someone to date, … Read more

It’s worth doing a quick checkup on your career every now and again. Perhaps you have just had a long holiday and a relatively quiet period at work. Or maybe you have had the opposite – a very busy or even stressful period at work. Whenever you feel as if you have either fallen into a rut or need to check how things are going, here are a few quick … Read more

When you fail at something, how long should you keep going? I often hear famous people saying that you should “never” give up on your dreams. But is that really realistic for most of us?

Say you want to be an artist or a TV presenter. Sure, you can keep applying for jobs. But if you’re not earning much money at all – how long can you keep going?

Some … Read more

A client of mine I’ll call Joanna had a tendency to take things personally. When projects went wrong at work and her colleagues pointed out her mistakes, she either got irritated and angry or she retreated and sulked.

Another client called Rupert wanted to change his life. He wanted to get a new job – but he wasn’t able to find the motivation within himself. When we first met, he … Read more

When I go to parties and tell people that I’m a psychologist, people sometimes ask me about topics such as the meaning of dreams. You probably know plenty of people in your life who are really interested in dreams and their meanings. Or perhaps you’re fascinated in the content of your own dreams.

Some believe that dreams have hidden messages for us. For example, seeing a church or snakes or … Read more

Death. It really is inevitable. And it may seem like a strange topic for me to write about, given that I usually write about self-improvement, confidence, productivity, and so on.

But I recently read a book which I felt was rather profoundly important: Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon who decided to investigate the modern experience of mortality.

I guarantee that this book will be … Read more