Episode 167: The Teen Years: Stage 4—What They Need

What’s the secret to having a good life?

Many of us believe that our happiness depends on how successful we are in our careers. But in The Good Life (2023), psychiatrist Robert Waldinger and psychologist Marc Schulz argue that the key to a good life is to cultivate good relationships. They base this conclusion on what they’ve learned from hundreds of people while directing the world’s longest-running longitudinal research study on how adults develop.

In this guide, we’ll define what a good life is and how to evaluate the current quality of your relationships. We’ll also share Waldinger and Schulz’s tips on how to improve your relationships with your spouse, family, coworkers, and friends. Along the way, we’ll share what other authors and psychologists have to say about Waldinger and Schulz’s findings.

Although we live longer today and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote. People are happiest when they feel in control of their inner thoughts and feelings and experience a “flow state”: a sense of enjoyment, purpose, and meaning.

Csikszentmihalyi explains: how controlling and ordering your consciousness brings flow and enjoyment, which personality characteristics produce flow, and how to find flow in your work and relationships.

Do you constantly get swept away by your emotions? Would you like to learn how to control your emotional reactions at home or at work? Or maybe you’re uncomfortable with emotions, and don’t understand why you or anyone else feels them? Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman is a comprehensive look at what emotions are and why we have them, how we can get better at managing them, and why the well-being of humanity might depend on us doing so.

From sibling arguments to temper tantrums, parents constantly have to manage conflict. These challenging moments are pivotal opportunities to promote your child’s psychological development. The Whole-Brain Child explains the neurological and developmental reasons for many of your child’s meltdowns and misbehaviors. When the different parts of your child’s brain—such as the logical left brain and the emotional right brain—are not integrated, it makes your child mentally and emotionally off-balance, which causes her to act out.

The book teaches you how to diagnose signs of dis-integration, as well as strategies to help your child to re-integrate her mind. With these tools, your child will develop a stronger relationship with you, increase her self-awareness and emotional self-control, and build the foundation for a lifetime of healthy relationships and mental and emotional stability.

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

No, you’re not a bad parent. And your kids are actually good kids—parenting is just hard. Do you wish it came with a manual? Clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside might be just what you need.

Good Inside is a parenting manual to help you make changes in your child’s behavior while building a positive relationship with them. Most parenting advice sees children’s behavior as a problem to be fixed through time-outs, rewards, and serious conversations. But Becky Kennedy argues that these strategies jeopardize your connection with your children. That’s a high price to pay for band-aid strategies that don't deal with the root causes of problematic behaviors.

Our guide lays out the core principles of Kennedy’s approach to parenting, her essential toolkit for dealing with challenging behavior, and strategies to deal with 10 common parenting challenges. We complement Kennedy’s advice with that of other experts, including the authors of parenting classics The Whole-Brain Child, 1-2-3 Magic, and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk helps parents build mutually respectful relationships with their children. Written by two educators, it’s been dubbed “the parenting bible” by The Boston Globe. Although it was published over 40 years ago, it remains popular because of its concrete advice on how to communicate in a way that shows your child you hear them and care about how they feel.

Having to say no to your child can make you seem like the enemy. The ideas in this book can shift that dynamic and show the child you’re on their side. Instead of getting locked in power struggles, you can work together to solve problems. You’ll learn how to give effective praise, respond when your child says they “hate” someone, get your child to cooperate, promote their independence, and get better behavior without punishment. This guide updates the material in the book and includes additional research about effective parenting techniques, including newer brain research that supports the authors’ original recommendations.

Disciplining kids often involves tears, yelling, and drama. In No-Drama Discipline, parenting experts Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson aim to empower parents to discipline their children without the drama, which creates the space to teach children, not just argue with them. This book builds on the lessons of the authors’ previous collaboration on parenting, The Whole-Brain Child, but with a specific focus on discipline.

In this guide, we’ll learn the basics of the authors’ approach to discipline, including how to calm your child’s raging emotions and solidify your bond before redirecting them to a new behavior. Throughout the guide, we’ll also feature advice from other experts on parenting as well as scientific context to help explain why Siegel and Bryson’s advice is so powerful.

In this follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face, blogger, motivational speaker, and author Rachel Hollis writes that she’s fed up with seeing women ignore their own dreams because of self-doubt, guilt, and society’s expectation that women put others first. Hollis offers the lessons she learned in growing from humble beginnings to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar media company to help her readers shed the weight of expectation and achieve their dreams.

Hollis’s advice consists of excuses to let go of, behaviors to adopt, and skills to acquire. In addition, she provides a step-by-step blueprint to take your dream from fantasy to realization. In this guide, we’ll compare Hollis’s advice to that of other popular self-help authors and expand on her messages through practical exercises.

Many women feel barred from advancing their careers but can’t identify the barriers holding them back. In How Women Rise, Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith argue that these barriers seem invisible because they’re the result of women’s overly self-critical mindset—the product of their desire to meet the rigid gender expectations placed on them by society and to avoid the backlash that occurs when they don’t. This mindset causes most women to develop at least one of 12 common habits that limit their professional success. To break free of these self-inflicted limitations, women must recognize and deconstruct their detrimental thoughts and behaviors.

In this guide, we’ve reorganized Helgesen and Goldsmith’s 12 limiting habits into four main thought patterns. The guide will explain these patterns, the detrimental behaviors they cause, and how to overcome them. In our commentary, we’ll share advice and perspectives from other sources on women’s success, such as Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is your ability to recognize your emotions, recognize the emotions of others, and use this awareness to develop your behavior and relationships. It’s also one of the defining characteristics of success in the workplace.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 helps you build your EQ skills through the development of four key pillars: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. These pillars will help you process your emotions, manage your triggers, develop healthy habits, and succeed in your career path.