Leadership & Influence
When Mentoring Goes Wrong
When an opinionated senior engineer and a hesitant junior engineer clash, the real problem isn't attitude; it's two brains doing exactly what evolution designed them to do.
Corporate Buddhist
Self-Knowledge
You're Not Who You Think You Are (And That's the Problem)
The narrative self your brain constructs is largely built from other people's projections and fears, and mistaking that story for reality is the root of a particular kind of suffering.
Teams & Collaboration
When the Room Goes Quiet: Reading Silence as Data
Silence in meetings isn't agreement; it's a rational response to an environment where the brain predicts honesty is unsafe, and fixing it requires redesigning the prediction loop, not asking for more courage.
Emotion & Memory
The Story You Tell Yourself When Things Go Wrong
When workplace setbacks feel like personal indictments, it's because your brain is protecting a mental narrative of yourself rather than processing new information.
The Nervous System
Your Manager Can't Fix Your Anxiety (And That's Not Her Job)
When a project is in crisis, employees instinctively look to their manager for reassurance, but the relief they're seeking is something only they can provide for themselves.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
When Someone Criticizes You, Your Brain Goes to War
Criticism activates the same neural circuits as physical pain, and understanding that mechanism is what lets you actually use feedback instead of just defending against it.
Teams & Collaboration
The Rashomon Effect: Why You and Your Colleague Can't Agree on What Just Happened
Using neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy, this post explains why two people can experience the same event completely differently — and what to do about it at work.
motivated reasoning
When the Argument Isn't Really About the Argument
When a colleague argues hard against a well-supported idea, the real obstacle is usually emotional, not logical, and understanding what they're protecting matters more than winning the debate.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
When "He Makes Me Uncomfortable" Is Actually About You
When a colleague's bluntness feels threatening, the real work isn't changing them but understanding why your nervous system is treating direct feedback as a personal attack.
Career & Performance
The Expert Who Couldn't Explain What They Knew
Deep expertise is stored as unconscious pattern recognition, which is why experts can't teach what they do and why real-time narration (not documentation) is the only reliable fix.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Why We Love to Hate Our Manager's Decisions
When managers make unpopular calls, tribal bonding and amygdala threat responses make group indignation feel like safety, but often at the cost of clear thinking.
Career & Performance
The Promotion You Didn't Get and the Story You Told Yourself About It
Self-serving attribution bias turns career setbacks into missed learning opportunities; the fix is reframing feedback requests from backward-looking judgments to forward-looking behavioral predictions.