Problem Solving Psychology

Let's face it: We all know people who are irrational. No matter how hard you try to reason with them, it never works. So what's the solution? How do you talk to someone who's out of control? What can you do with a boss who bullies, a spouse who yells, or a friend who frequently bursts into tears? In his book Just Listen, Mark Goulston shared his best-selling formula for getting through to the resistant people in your life. Now he brings his communication magic to the most difficult group of all - the downright irrational.

The world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help them cut through complexity and separate good ideas from bad ones. They're called mental models, and you can find them in dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more. Or, you can just listen to Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to every mental model you could possibly need.

So often, books about learning to be more persuasive assume that everyone wants to dominate and control their worlds. They assume, so much of the time, that people are cynical, cruel, and just looking for power so that they can start stepping on people. That is not the case with this audiobook! Quite the contrary, this book will give you a road map to ensure that you are not only capable of defending yourself against bullies, con men, and cruelty but that you are capable of making other people's lives better, too.

In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively listenable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

Through nine easy-to-follow strategies, Dr. David H. Rosmarin demonstrates how to harness the power of anxiety to learn about ourselves, deepen our relationships with others, and achieve our deepest goals and dreams.

Do you struggle with impulsivity, mental overload, or difficulty prioritizing tasks? Do you want to harness the strengths of your ADHD brain and develop smarter strategies to thrive? Are you ready to improve your decision-making and executive function—without feeling overwhelmed? Think Smarter with Adult ADHD offers a comprehensive, practical approach to transforming the way adults with ADHD think, solve problems, and make decisions. This 6-week plan is designed to help you harness the unique strengths of your ADHD brain, while developing strategies to overcome common cognitive challenges.

Regain focus. Select relevant information. Make quick and clear decisions. We are dealing with too many options, too much information, conflicting advice on general choices like what diet to choose, or who to choose as a mate. It’s hard to maintain focus and be confident in our decisions under such conditions. The Systems Thinker - Mental Models helps you make decisions based on your relevant thought patterns and true values. Finding the most relevant information to you, the best decision to you is a matter of exploring your thoughts and wants.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life.

Do you ever feel like you're too busy, too stressed, or just too distracted to concentrate and get work done? In Unlimited Memory you'll learn how the world's best memory masters get themselves to concentrate at will, anytime they want. When you can easily focus and concentrate on the task at hand and store and recall useful information, you can easily double your productivity and eliminate wasted time, stress, and mistakes at work. In this book you'll find all the tools, strategies, and techniques you need to improve your memory.

Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”) offer a proven strategy for coming up with great ideas by yourself or with your team, and quickly determining which are worthy. Drawing upon their combined decades of experience leading Stanford’s premier Launchpad accelerator and advising some of the world’s most innovative organizations, like Microsoft, Michelin, Keller Williams Realty, and Hyatt, they’ll teach you how to:

These days, strong critical thinking skills provide a vital foundation for academic success, and Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies offers a clear and unintimidating introduction to what can otherwise be a pretty complex topic. Inside, you'll get hands-on, lively, and fun exercises that you can put to work today to improve your arguments and pin down key issues. With this accessible and friendly guide, you'll get plain-English instruction on how to identify other people's assumptions, methodology, and conclusions; evaluate evidence; and interpret texts effectively.

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally.

People Skills is a communication-skills handbook that can help you eliminate these and other communication problems. Author Robert Bolton describes the twelve most common communication barriers, showing how these "roadblocks" damage relationships by increasing defensiveness, aggressiveness, or dependency. He explains how to acquire the ability to listen, assert yourself, resolve conflicts, and work out problems with others. These are skills that will help you communicate calmly, even in stressful emotionally charged situations.

Lawyers. Accountants. Software Engineers. That what Mom and Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of "left-brain" dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

He knows how to win. More, he knows the many ways - subtle, brutal, often self-inflicted - we lose. As the most trusted mental coach in the world of sports, Trevor Moawad has worked with many of the most dominant athletes and the savviest coaches. From Nick Saban and Kirby Smart to Russell Wilson, they all look to Moawad for help finding or keeping or regaining their competitive edge. (As do countless business leaders and members of special forces.) Now, at last, Moawad shares his unique philosophy with the general public.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

Depression and anxiety disorders are rising, affecting more than 58 million people in the United States alone. Many rely on therapy and medications to alleviate symptoms, but often this is not enough. Now, we know there has been a missing factor. With the latest scientific advances in neuroscience, nutrition, and the mind-gut connection, we have discovered that how and what we eat greatly affects how we feel, physically, cognitively, and emotionally.

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.

What if the mystery of market crashes stems from a simple but total misunderstanding of our own minds? Could everything we think we know about ourselves - intelligence and rationality versus emotion and irrationality - be wildly off the mark? Simply put: yes. With these words, Denise Shull introduces her radical - and supremely rational - approach to risk. Her vision stems from the indisputable fact that human beings can't make any decision at all without emotion and that emotion gets the first - and last - word when it comes to our perceptions and judgments.