“The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.”
—motto used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (”Seabees”)
during World War II
George Dantzig describes an event when he was a graduate student in his first year of PhD study in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley:
“I arrived late one day at [...]

An example of the impact of nonverbal (tonal) qualities of a message.
Recently I sent a note to some colleagues mentioning that I had noticed that some people—more often women—ended a sentence or a phrase with an upward inflection that usually indicates a question. I asked if anyone had an understanding of this, since I didn’t [...]

“You’ve got to ac-cen-tuate the positive,
E-lim-inate the negative,
Latch on to the affirmative,
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”
Lyrics by Johnny Mercer (1944)
From time to time we need to sort through an accumulation of things in order to make space for what we want to keep. However, many people have great difficulty doing this. Would you like to [...]

This article (The New Yorker, May 18, 2009, pp. 26-32.) summarizes research on self-control in children and how that tends to predict success later in life. In the late 1960s, researchers showed four-year-old kids a marshmallow, and told them that they “could eat one marshmallow right away, or if they were willing to wait while [...]

Case Report: NLP in Action*
Steve Andreas
© 2007

Cathy was a 55–year-old single client of a colleague. Her initial complaint was that although she was very competent in her work, she repeatedly raged at her boss and at co-workers. It soon emerged that she had a history of sexual abuse from her father, and had a very [...]