New posts are available every Monday and can be read in under 5 minutes.
|
Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  Photo: Stephen Brace This last summer, my wife and I had a fight. As with many fights between married couples, the surface issue was inconsequential but housed an important issue underneath. I’d accidentally burned the hamburgers I was grilling for our dinner (because we hadn’t cleaned our barbecue for some time, grease had accumulated, which increased the barbecue temperature as it burned). When I placed the charred hockey puck burgers in front of her, she became annoyed (having warned me about the grease). When I apologized, she said nothing, and I became angry that she was still annoyed with me. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: zoutedrop A few years ago, a close friend of mine was struggling with his job. He worked in a large corporation he couldn’t stand: unethical business practices, employee backstabbing, and sexual harassment all seemed to occur on a regular basis. He wanted out. Not only that, for years he’d harbored a secret dream of starting his own business. Driven by his growing disgust with his company’s culture, he made a determination to do just that. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: gustaffo89 I had a patient once—a fellow physician—who came to see me complaining of mid-back pain. When I examined him, I found I could reproduce his pain by pressing firmly on the spot he said was hurting him. He said pressing there also made the pain radiate around to his stomach, a phenomenon known as “referred pain” that meant his pain was almost certainly caused by a trigger point. I offered to inject it with a mixture of lidocaine and cortisone, a procedure that’s been shown in the medical literature to be helpful, but he declined, preferring instead to use over-the-counter pain relievers. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Anamorphic Mike In a previous post, The Three Realms Of Confidence, I told a story from my childhood (how I was bullied in seventh grade because I was Jewish) to introduce the concept that confidence exists in three separate realms. In response to that post, a reader commented (on the Psychology Today blog where my posts also appear): “I was periodically beaten up, but I ran away or didn’t fight back because I operated under the assumption that you should always ‘turn the other cheek’ and never fight back, regardless of the circumstances. The moral directive was to allow yourself to get beaten up…” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: oddsock I’ve had one panic attack in my life. It happened when I was a first-year medical student and taking my first biochemistry mid-term exam. Everyone agreed that all our teacher’s lectures had been virtually incomprehensible. And unlike most of my classmates, who’d majored in biochemistry or biology in college, I’d majored in English, so the material was almost all entirely new to me. I remember opening the test, reading the first question, and thinking I had no idea what it was even asking. So I turned the page to the second question—only to find myself equally at a loss. I read all seven questions in turn, each time thinking that I’d be able to answer the next one, until I reached the last one and realized I couldn’t answer any of them. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  A patient who held an upper-level management position in his company once told me the following story: he was interviewing a candidate for a mid-level management position and thought, on the surface, the candidate was a star: enthusiastic, mature, intelligent, articulate, prepared, experienced, and visionary. After consulting with his other upper-level management peers who also interviewed the candidate, hiring him seemed a no-brainer. And yet, my patient told me, something made him hesitate. Something about the candidate—he still couldn’t explain what—just “rubbed him the wrong way.” Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Lately, my wife and I have been having trouble with our water heater. Over the last few months we’ve been finding the blower blowing but no gas running along with it to actually heat our water. Recently, the gas would turn on for only 10 minutes before shutting off, leaving the blower going, sometimes all night while we slept.
You don’t fully appreciate what you have until you’re threatened with losing it, especially hot water. So my wife leapt into action. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Nuno Duarte When my wife and I were first learning to ballroom dance (much fun!) I was amazed at how effortlessly our teacher was able to lead her when demonstrating a technique to me. She always seemed to know where he wanted her to go and how he wanted her to move, despite being as inexperienced as I. When I danced with her, she mostly found herself confused about what I wanted her to do. “That’s because you’re confused yourself,” our teacher explained to me. “Don’t move her with your arms. Move her with your torso, your dance frame. Don’t worry about where you want her to go. Worry about where you want to go yourself.” Continue reading…
|
|
