The Power of Prime

The cluttered mind uncluttered

by Jim Taylor, Ph.D.

You’re Not That Important! Letting Go of Self-Consciousness

Self-consciousness can become a source of tremendous angst and unhappiness. It can create a preoccupation with how you appear to others, what others think of you, and, often, can cause social anxiety and an inhibition of behavior that you fear others might judge to be less than desirable. Read More

Feed Your Children a Balanced “Diet” of Technology

A balanced diet involves ensuring that your children get adequate nutrition from all of the major food groups while allowing them periodic treats. The same holds true for your children’s diet of technology. Read More

The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good of Kids' Use of Social Media

Whether we like it or not, the Internet, social media, and all of the related technology are here to stay. As evidenced every day in so many ways, this new technological landscape brings many wonderful benefits to our family’s lives and relationships. At the same time, as with any new innovations, this impact has a dark side. Read More

Cognitive Biases Are Bad for Business

The conventional wisdom in classical economics is that we humans are “rational actors." But any notion that we are, in fact, rational, was blown away by the work of Kahneman and Tversky on cognitive biases. Nowhere is this irrationality more problematic than in the corporate world where bad decisions can wreak havoc on companies, people, countries, and the global economy. Read More

Threat vs. Challenge in Sports

I have found that a simple distinction appears to lie at the heart of whether athletes are able to rise to the occasion and perform their best when it really counts or crumble under the weight of expectations and tough conditions on the day of a competition: Do they view the competition as a threat or a challenge. Read More

How Do We Humans Ever Make Good Decisions?

It’s a wonder that good decisions are ever made by the species known as Homo Sapiens. The reality is that the cards are stacked against us whenever we are faced with choices, especially when the decisions are of consequence. Think about all of the horrendously bad decisions that have been made in recent history and how obviously bad they look in our rear-view mirrors. Read More

What, Me Worry? Why Worrying Does More Harm Than Good

We all experience worry. We know that nagging feeling that something is wrong and the anxiety that it produces. Interestingly, thefreedictionary.com notes that “The ancestor of our word, Old English wyrgan, meant ‘to strangle.’ It was a small step from this meaning to the modern definitions ‘to cause to feel anxious or distressed’ and ‘to feel troubled or uneasy.'" Read More

Is Big Media Slowly Killing Our Children?

The essential question to ask is: What role does the explosion of media in the last decade play in what many consider to be a public health crisis? A growing body of evidence suggests that the answer to this question is: A significant role. Unfortunately, Big Media is actually interfering with your efforts to raise healthy children. Read More

Has America Become Too Competitive?

I’m seeing some pretty clear indications that America’s competitiveness may be getting more than a little out of hand. More and more activities that people used to participate because they were fun, healthy, social, or intellectually stimulating, such as dancing, singing, cooking, and yoga, are being turned into competitions. Read More

Teach Your Wired Children about Healthy Relationships

Children’s relationships can be untidy, with hurt feelings, anger, and disappointment. But relationships are like two sides of a coin; children can’t experience the beauty of relationships—love, joy, and excitement—without also being willing to accept its occasional blood, sweat, and tears. I challenge anyone who can show me that online relationships can provide that. Read More

What is Technology Doing to Your Children’s Friendships?

There is one quality in particular that is perhaps most stark distinction between traditional and online friendships; the former is about the quality of relationships and the latter is often about the quantity of relationships. In real life, the goal is to have a few really good friends. With social media, the goal is to accumulate as many so-called friends as possible. Read More

Don’t Have Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda in Your Sport

I see athletes express many different emotions after competitions. After a good performance, I see joy, excitement, pride, and inspiration. But, after less successful competitions, I see frustration, anger, and sadness. Yet, the one emotion that I consider to be perhaps the worst of all emotions for athletes to experience is regret. Read More

Is Technology Creating a Family Divide?

There is little doubt that technology is affecting family relationships on a day-to-day level. Children are instant messaging, checking their social media, listening to music, surfing the Web, and playing video games. Parents can be equally guilty, often wrapped up in their own technology, for example, talking on their mobile phones, checking email, or watching TV. Read More

Is Technology Preventing Two Keys to Kids’ Relationships?

Children are faced with a “double whammy” against their learning how to develop positive relationships. First, they’re being bombarded with messages that teach them to be narcissistic and uncaring. Second, they have inadequate exposure to messages and experiences that convey selflessness and empathy which would support their development of healthy relationships. Read More

Are Online Relationships Healthy For Young People?

Virtual relationships have all the appearances of real relationships, for example, connectedness, communication, and sharing. Yet, these relationships are missing essential elements that distinguish them from flesh-and-blood relationships, namely, three dimensionality, facial expressions, voice inflection, clear emotional messages, gestures, and body language. Read More

Is Technology Changing the Way Kids Develop Relationships?

Do you want your children to learn about the meaning of love from The Bachelorette, about families from Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or friendship from Gossip Girls? Do you want your children to have 100 Facebook “friends,” learn about sex from pornography web sites, or experience cyberbullying though text messages? I hope not. Read More

How to Raise Mindful Children in a Digital World

If you want your children to be truly happy, you must give them opportunities to experience mindfulness. In this crazy new world of technology, what a wonderful lifelong gift you give your children when you help them to, paraphrasing a well-known adage from the 1960s counterculture movement, to “turn off and tune in.” Read More

Business: Real Corporate Change Takes the Six I’s

Let’s be honest, any kind of change, much less corporate change, is difficult, really difficult. Whether a start-up experiencing growing pains, a company faced with increased competition, or a successful business attempting to expand into global markets, the path toward change can often be unclear at best and the barriers can seem insurmountable at worst. Read More

Is Technology Making Your Kids Mindless Instead of Mindful?

Mindfulness has tremendous significance for your children growing up in this crazy new world of technology. It isn’t a stretch to see that technology fosters mindlessness rather than mindfulness. Children need to be able to turn off the “fire hose” of information periodically and just sit quietly with themselves, in other words, they need to be mindful. Read More

Is Raising Good Decision Makers Parents' Greatest Challenge?

Good decision making is one of the most powerful skills your children need to learn. But I promise you, it is not a skill that will develop readily on its own, particularly in the digital world in which they are growing up. You should teach your children why popular culture and technology can cause them to make poor decisions and guide them in how to make good decisions. Read More

Is Technology Creating a Generation of Bad Decision Makers?

Decision making is an aspect of children’s thinking that seems to be suffering as a result of the latest technology. This poor decision making is illustrated by events over the last few years involving young people making egregiously bad decisions that involve technology (not to mention the frequent examples occurring in the adult world!). Read More

Teach Your Children to Single Task, not Multitask

I hope you’re convinced now that so-called multitasking isn’t what it purports to be and definitely doesn’t do your children any favors in school or anywhere else. So, the next thing to do is to show them (and perhaps yourself) that “single tasking” is a much better way to go. Read More

Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Multitaskers

Like many digital natives, your children are probably on their way to becoming lifelong multitaskers (or so you think). Why do they multitask? The short answer is because they can and it’s what just about every young person does these days. There’s only one problem with this scenario: there is no such thing as multitasking—at least not in the way you may think of it. Read More

Are Your Children Overloaded with Information?

The sheer volume of information now accessible online is staggering; there are around 50 billion pages on the Web. A real danger for children is that they will feel like they are drowning in this torrent of information. Read More

How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus

Thinking encompasses many aspects of who our children are and what they do. There is little doubt that all of the new technologies are shaping the way we think in ways obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental. Read More

Practical Ways to Teach Values to Your Children

Values are a touchy subject to bring up these days when it comes to raising children. Values have gotten a bad rap because when most people hear the term they often think of the hot-button value issues that are regular fodder for cable news, But that's not what I'm talking about. Read More

Values Protect Against Media’s Unhealthy Messages

The same values that have enabled children to thrive in previous generations, respect, responsibility, hard work, integrity, compassion, just to name a few, will help your children resist the unhealthy messages from the popular media. Read More

Media Teaches Bad Values to Your Children

How powerful and toxic are the value messages that children are receiving from popular media today? According to a large body of research, the answer is very in both cases. Though I’m obviously making a judgment on what good and bad values are, I don’t think many parents would disagree with the values that I believe aren’t healthy for children. Read More

Sport Imagery: Athletes' Most Powerful Mental Tool

If you do anything to work on the mental side of your sport, it better be mental imagery. Why, you ask. Because there is no more powerful mental tool than mental imagery and it can have a huge impact on your sports performance. Read More

Healthy Self-identity in Children is Everything

Self-identity is one of the trickier contributors to children’s healthy development because you can’t “do” things to your children to give them their self-identity. Rather, you can only create an environment that allows their self-identity to emerge naturally. But today’s media can stunt, distort, or co-opt that self-identity. Read More

Jim Taylor, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.

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About The Power of Prime

The goal of The Power of Prime is to be "disruptive." I want to look at issues in ways that upset the conventional wisdom. My hope is to initiate a conversation with readers that will offer new knowledge, perspectives, and insights that will challenge and extend the intellectual marketplace. Always entertaining, frequently thought provoking, sometimes controversial, and occasionally outrageous, I want The Power of Prime to be a place for readers to go where, after reading my posts, will say, "Mmmm, that was interesting."