Conflict & Difficult Conversations
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
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.
Stress & Burnout
Micromanagement degrades performance not because it's unpleasant but because it removes the autonomous action loop the brain needs to function.
Stress & Burnout
Burnout isn't a workload problem; it's what happens when the brain's predictions about effort and reward chronically fail to match reality, until the system shuts down to protect itself.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
The words that hurt us only land because they've found something inside us that already matters — and that pain is pointing somewhere worth looking.
Teams & Collaboration
High expertise builds strong mental priors that improve pattern recognition in familiar domains but systematically filter out disconfirming signals in novel situations, making smart people wrong in predictable ways that can be countered through structural practices like pre-mortems and red teaming.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Your brain treats challenges to deeply held beliefs as existential threats, which is why rational argument almost never resolves deep conflict.
Conflict & Difficult Conversations
Conflict isn't a disagreement about facts; it's two people running incompatible predictive models, where feelings are the output of that prediction process, not the cause of the conflict.
Self-Knowledge
Your brain generates a narrative before any conversation begins, and that prior shapes what evidence you notice, amplify, or discard entirely.
Self-Knowledge
Your brain doesn't passively record reality; it generates a constant predictive model of the world and only updates it when the evidence forces a correction.
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Most of us were taught, implicitly or otherwise, that the brain is primarily a thinking machine. It processes information, makes decisions, manages emotions, and coordinates behavior. That model is not wrong exactly, but it's incomplete in a way that matters. The past two decades of research in regulatory
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How your brain actually works — and why it matters at work Most of what people believe about how the brain works is wrong. Not wrong in a minor, fixable way. Wrong at the foundation. The standard picture — brain receives information, processes it, and reacts — is a fiction. A convincing one,