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Though he’s been called the greatest combat general of modern times, George S. Patton didn’t feel like a natural born leader. In fact, as a boy he was rather sensitive, timid, and mild in disposition, and thought himself deficient in the military virtues. But becoming a courageous, inspiring, tough-as-nails commander was the great desire of his heart, and so Patton trained himself to develop the qualities he lacked. He exercised his body to the point he could compete as an Olympic pentathlete, voraciously studied the tactics of militaries from every time and culture, practiced martial skills until he had mastered them, and volunteered for dangerous assignments to get comfortable under fire. By dint of an ironclad will, Patton not only overcame his innate proclivities, but learned to outwardly project his inner sense of determination. As he said:  “A man of diffident manner will never inspire confidence. A cold reserve cannot begat enthusiasm . . . It then appears that

One of the insidious things about trying to judge our own social skills, is that if an interaction went well for us , then we assume the other person thought it went well too. While you’ve probably never consciously thought about it, if you had a good time talking to someone, you think they felt the same. But this just isn’t the case. It’s very possible for you to walk away from an interaction feeling grand, while the other person walks away feeling annoyed, bored, or burdened. What usually happens in these lopsided engagements is that you talked a lot about yourself and your interests, an act which is enjoyable and makes humans happy. We like to talk about ourselves! But, the other person didn’t get to talk much about him or herself, and thus left the conversation without a corresponding level of elevation. While dominating a conversation simply by talking a lot is almost guaranteed to be a charm-killer, the worst kind of one-sided interaction is when you talk at

Your Concentration Training Program: 11 Exercises That Will Strengthen Your Attention You’ll never get big muscles from sitting on the couch all day, and you’ll never develop amazing powers of concentration from exclusively reading Buzzfeed and watching Tosh.O . Your mind muscles, just like your physical muscles, need resistance ; they need challenges that stretch their limits and in so doing, grow their focus fibers. Below we outline exercises that will beef up your focus so that you can start lifting heavier and heavier cognitive loads. 1. Increase the strength of your focus gradually. If you decide you want to physically get in shape, but are starting at ground zero, the worst thing you can do is to throw yourself into an extreme training program – you’ll end up injured, discouraged, or both, and you’ll quit before you even really get started. Likewise, if your attention span is currently quite flabby, it’s best to slowly build up the weight you ask it to lift. I

By Daniel Coleman, Ph.D. I was trained as a clinical psychologist, so I’ve always been interested in behavior change. When I became a science journalist at The New York Times, I started tracking what was then a very new surge in findings on the brain and emotions. Why would we lose it emotionally and what we could do about it—how we could manage our emotions better. I was reading a very obscure journal—so obscure it doesn’t exist anymore—that had an article called “Emotional Intelligence.” This was in 1990—it was the first time I’d ever heard the phrase, the first time it was used in print. And I thought: That is an electrifying phrase, because first of all, you don’t expect emotions and intelligence to go together. But second, it suggests we can be intelligent about emotions, we can get better at managing our emotions. This, of course, is the behavior-change piece. I used the concept of emotional intelligence as the framework for the book I did by that name, which w