Hal Movius' article about workplace confrontation in Fast Company Magazine shows with a little resolve and a willingness to wade into conflict rather than shrink from it, you can actually build more collaborative partnerships than you'd otherwise think.

Hal Movius explains that we shouldn’t be afraid of conflict in negotiation, that it can actually produce good outcomes—but only if we can be smarter about it. I asked him to help walk me through the pitfalls and opportunities for Democrats attempting to negotiate and govern at a time when such negotiating will happen from a position of total weakness.

Hal Movius appeared on Vancouver radio recently to discuss confidence in the workplace. The discussion with Hal starts around the 23 minute mark.

Ethics is a hot topic these days, and (sadly) for good reason. There is little sign that greater emphasis on ethics and compliance has led to better behavior, at least judging from recent headlines. Ethicalsystems.org is an inspiring organization that is trying to understand how to foster more effective ways to promote ethical reasoning and action.

Do you practice mindfulness? Here’s an interesting piece questioning the evidence that it is effective. Here’s how I think about it: mindfulness is an emotion-focused coping strategy (one that tries to help us escape or modify our emotions in the moment); evidence suggest these strategies can be helpful when we face a situation that cannot be changed.

From an article, “How People Learn to Be Resilient” by Maria Konnikova in the New Yorker:

“Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.”

Much will be written about the 2016 Presidential election. Its outcome signaled a realignment in political coalitions but also reflected an increasingly balkanized information environment, with people reading and watching sources that reinforced their beliefs and emotions.

Psychologist John Gottman has been researching relationships for more than four decades, and in recent years the popular media have taken notice of his findings. Accounts of his work have often emphasized the four “horsemen” in communication patterns that signal trouble for marriages: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt.

Quick: would you ratherBe stuck overnight in an airport with no place to sleepRaise an issue with a friend when it might lead to a fight or argumentArgue with a roommateIf you’re like 330 adults I surveyed this summer on MTurk, Amazon’s research tool, all three are equally unpleasant.

“In this second podcast in our collaboration with EthicalSystems.org, we examine negotiation. Turning again to behavioral science for insight, we learn that transparency and prioritizing joint gains can keep negotiations above-board, and might help companies avoid the pitfalls that beset Dell Computers a few years ago.”

Reliable generalizations about human behavior are hard to come by, and much sought after. We want to understand ourselves as much as anyone else, and the notion of broad, easy-to-understand categories of personality promise to simplify things. Categories – personality types – suggest that understanding our motives, biases, and behaviors, can be less messy and probabilistic. Often enough, the tools we use to place ourselves in these categories come with the imprimatur of science.

I study human relationships from the perspective of Social Neuroscience. For the past twenty years, I’ve watched people navigate their sometimes quite troubled social environments, looking for clues about what makes some relationships successful while others flounder toward conflict.