Let's assume that you're a parent, and that you want your child to behave. (Or eat their vegetables. Or clean their room. Etc.) How do you do it? One standard answer is to create a system of reward and punishment. Lay out some rules, then give rewards and punishments so that your kids will follow …
Category: feelings and relationships
Celeste and the denial of perfectionism
What's the difference between greatness and perfection? In theory, being perfect sounds great. But in practice, it means avoiding all mistakes, and that can be limiting. The easiest way to be perfect is to avoid everything outside your comfort zone, which means you'll never grow and improve. In this way, perfectionism can be a malicious …
Positive and negative criticism
I'm preparing to teach a class about mathematical proofs. I want to teach my students to write proofs, but I also want to teach them to think critically about their own work. This is really important. If you can understand and check mathematics on your own, you've earned a kind of intellectual self-reliance. You have …
When to work on it and when to leave
One of my friends recently commented that all the relationship advice online seems to be "dump him and go to therapy." Of course, the people who go online for this advice aren't representative of all relationships, so maybe this isn't such a bad thing. It seems that all of us struggle at some point with …
Emotional maturity, Part 7: Avoiding the obstacles and just talking about feelings
This is the final post in this series -- I'll explore some possible explanations for why we don't just talk about our feelings. To reiterate, talking about your feelings is really important. They originate in your subconscious, making them hard to interpret, but they have important information. Talking to other people is the best way …
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Emotional maturity, Part 6: Building emotional intelligence
The last part of emotional maturity is fairly simple: talk about your feelings, and listen to the feelings of others. That's really the entire thing. But there are two big issues that come up when we put this into practice, the first of which I'll discuss in this post. This first issue is simply one …
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Emotional maturity, Part 5: How to interpret your feelings
The last two posts tell nearly opposite stories. On the one hand, your feelings are amazing things that give you quick, broad-reaching impressions of what will be good for you. On the other hand, they don't always point you in the right direction, and it's hard to double-check the math on them because the process …
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Emotional maturity, Part 4: Feelings are not facts
In the last post, I discussed the idea that your feelings are a kind of cognition (thinking). They are a calculation that sorts through an incredible amount of input data, identifies what's most important, and distills it down into a simple yes/no or want/do not want. And they can be amazingly accurate at picking up …
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Emotional maturity, Part 3: Feelings are amazingly useful
So far I've talked about how most of your thinking takes place in the subconscious, out of reach from your conscious mind. But what's actually going on down there? How are our feelings created? I like to imagine that feelings are the result of a thought process. Your brain takes in information about the world, …
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Emotional maturity, Part 2: Subconscious beliefs
In the last post I talked about how most of your feelings are hidden, buried in your subconscious mind until you dredge them up. But feelings aren't the only things in your subconscious. You also have a lot of ideas and beliefs about who you are and how the world works. Some of them have …
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