The fourth of the big-five personality traits is agreeableness. A mnemonic for the big five traits is OCEAN that stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. While displaying high levels of agreeableness, a person is usually being empathetic, cooperative, and considerate by taking the views of others. Although called…

The third among the Big Five personality traits is extraversion or extroversion (a mnemonic for the Big Five traits is OCEAN — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). We looked at the first two in the previous two posts. Extraversion is arguably the most well-studied personality trait and a lot…

One of the challenges to write about “conscience” is that I am pro-science. Fortunately, conscience does not have much to do with con but a con artist can give the appearance of being conscientious. Let us first see what being conscientious is about. It refers to a person’s degree of…

The Five personality traits using the OCEAN mnemonic are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This article is about the first of those traits, namely openness. Openness reflects an individual’s willingness to experience new things, their imagination, and their intellectual curiosity. More than anything else, this trait (as the name…

What is Networking? Merriam Webster defines it as “the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business”. To give a technical analogy, if everyone in the world is a node, and if person X knows person Y, then draw an arc from node X to node Y for every X and Y. This…

In case you have not seen the Ikigai chart, it is reproduced above from this world economic forum website. Take a moment to view the chart carefully, and, if needed, read about Ikigai either in the aforementioned website or elsewhere, or you can also watch YouTube videos on Ikigai. The…

When we start a new job, move to a new role, or a new project comes in, we sometimes feel like we are drinking from a fire hose (if you are unfamiliar with the idiom, here it means overwhelmed with information). Some of us feel we are unable to process…

Whether we like it or not, both at work and in our personal lives we will be faced with new situations, challenges, and change. Some of us move to a new job, a new role in the same company, a new state, a new country, a new family, a new…

When we join a new organization or when there is a major organizational change, we may want to figure out the lay of the land. In other words, we may want to know what is the culture, what are the goals, and what is the structure of the organization at…