My Articles

My articles provide you with a collection of interesting and relevant insights into a number of life-related topics, aimed at developing your YOU-Q and helping you find your Inner Winner.  Browse the articles for the information you need to regain control of your life.

Over the course of my career, I have often been asked by print and radio journalists to give my professional opinion on a variety of topics. You can read these articles on the magazine page and listen to the interviews I have given on the radio page of Claire in the Media. They make for interesting reading and listening.

Did you know that just like the rest of our development, our morals develop too?

Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development explains this process. It challenges the notion that morals are fixed, suggesting that individuals progress through a series of stages in their moral development. The importance of moral development cannot be overstated. Individuals, equipped to master their morality, contribute to a more ethically conscious society.

Are you equipped to embark on the journey of moral development? The choice is yours.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a widely recognised and utilised personality assessment tool that categorises individuals into different personality types based on four key dimensions:

  • Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I) - Where do you focus your attention?
  • Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N) - How do you take in information?
  • Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F) - How do you make decisions and evaluate information?
  • Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P) - How do you orientate to the Outer world?

In this article, we explore the F (Feeling) and T (Thinking) preferences. These preferences refer to how individuals make decisions and evaluate information. Our personality shapes our decisions.

Getting more sleep matters. It really matters.

Recent research shows us that sleep deprivation affects us much more than we used to think. We now know that lack of sleep significantly hinders all of our abilities, and this includes our cognitive functioning. When we are sleep deprived, not only is our performance negatively impacted, it is also much less likely that we will ever be able to perform at our best, no matter how hard we try and how many hours we put in.

When it comes to drinking alcohol, most people put very little thought into it. They have no understanding of the four levels of impairment caused by drinking alcohol, what a “unit” of alcohol is, or how much is too much. They could not tell you how long it takes for the liver to process alcohol and what a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) reading means.  And so too many people make poor choices and get into trouble with alcohol – getting arrested for drunk driving, having accidents, harming their health, wrecking relationships and so on.

Yet with a few simple facts and a basic understanding of alcohol and its effects, all of us can easily be in a position to make sensible and healthy decisions around drinking alcohol that will benefit ourselves, and others, in both the short and the long term.

In any workforce, there are most likely to be both extraverts (spelling as used in MBTI publications) and introverts. Both personality types have distinct strengths and weaknesses in the workplace and understanding each type can lead to a winning work formula: greater harmony and greater productivity.

A yearlong time-blocked calendar is possibly the most useful tool you can use to ensure that you have time to pay attention to ALL the different aspects of your life (physical, occupational, financial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spiritual, environmental and medical) and so live the fully integrated life which leads to optimal health and wellbeing.

We often hear people talk about the “work-life balance.” It’s an interesting phrase because it implies that work is separate from life. It also implies that we can balance the two. But think about it… On the one side of the scale there is work, sitting all on its own and on the other side of the scale there is the physical, mental, spiritual, environmental, interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of life which all get dumped together as “life”. The imbalance is obvious – one aspect of life versus all the other aspects of life - and yet we still aim to give an equal amount of time to both sides. It can’t be done - and striving for it just sets us up for failure. It’s the old traditional linear way of thinking.

When it comes to psychotherapy, there is a common misunderstanding that the psychologist is there to tell you what to do.  In other words, to give you advice. It’s a misunderstanding because giving advice is not what psychologists actually do. A psychologist’s role is far more complex than that.

2020, a year that will never be forgotten due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, has been a challenging year for everyone. It was certainly not the year that any of us expected and it is for this very reason – that it was so unexpected - that many of us have struggled.

When there are discrepancies between our expectations and reality, all sorts of distress signals go off in our brains. It doesn’t matter if it’s an annual holiday ritual or a more mundane daily habit like how you clean your teeth; if you can’t do it the way you normally do it, you’re biologically engineered to get upset. We really are creatures of habit.

Icebergs are deceiving because what you see on the surface is usually only a small fraction of what lies below.

Anger is exactly like an iceberg – it is easy to observe on the surface, but it has so many other hidden emotions below the surface.