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One of the most important and proactive conversations you can have with your spouse is to evaluate your vulnerabilities to temptation.

While it is tempting to ignore these and even hide them, one of the best things you can do for your relationship is to discuss these openly. This way you and your spouse are a team fighting a challenge to your relationship rather than alone on opposite sides.

So do you have a job, a volunteer position or a passion that involves being away a lot? Being away from home in tempting environments can create challenges. What is your plan for dealing with these challenges and temptations? What rules and boundaries do you have in place to keep connected with your spouse and stay away from temptation?

Do you have a personality that is very empathetic or affectionate? Are you a really good listener? Do you naturally help those who are distressed? While these are positive qualities, they do attract many people towards you and they also leave you vulnerable to...

Here is your daily dose of Wisdom for Living Your Best Self!

Ever have a day when things have gone completely off track? Everything seems to have gone wrong, you are at the end of your rope and you cannot wait for your significant other to get home to vent. To "have it out" with them or just to "let it all out".

Consider this: The first few minutes of the interaction after you have been away from each other sets the tone for the rest of the evening.

If you can just hang in there for just a little bit longer, greet your significant other and welcome them, the effort will be worth your while.

It is much more productive to have a de-stressing conversation when both of you are calm, connected and ready to listen.

As we have been saying, when two or more people are sharing micro-moments of connection, it creates a back-forth exchange of warmth and positive energy that sustains itself and can grow stronger with each exchange.

The positive energy or "positivity resonance" (aka love), however, only lasts as long as the connection. When the connection wanes, so does this resonance or biological love response.

This is of course inevitable, because it is how emotions work. They come and they go.

In order to sustain these feelings and the positive energy they generate, we need to keep finding OTLs and keep practicing these gestures to create these micro-moments of connection.

While some of us have a hard time starting things, there are others of us who are "chronic starters". We are high achievers, we aim high and we always have a ton of projects on the go.

Finishing those projects, or completing those goals, however, is another story (again, don’t ask how I know this . . . ). Perfectionism greets us along the way and uses every tactic under the sun to block us from getting to the finish line.

I just finished reading a great book by Jon Acuff: Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. It is full of practical ideas on beating perfectionism and completing projects. And it is SUPER FUNNY (was laughing out aloud throughout J )

Here are the three things that I am working on, inspired by this book, to get to the finish line:

Cut your goals in half
This sounds contrary to what we have been talking about, but it is not. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a given amount of time (in the future, that is, not in the present). We always think we will have...

Do you remember Newton’s First Law of Motion?

"An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by some outside force."

This is also known as the law of inertia or the law of momentum.

How does it apply to us with regards to goal setting?

Well, some of us have a hard time getting started towards our goals. We have a case of ‘paralysis by analysis’. We think and think and think and think without taking any action. We plan and think of obstacles and do ALL of that.

And we get the booby prize for goal setting. The prize for knowing the most theory and having the most knowledge (please do not ask me how I know this)

There is however, no actual change in our lives. Oooops!

Life, in turns out, only rewards actual effort. And movement.

Here’s the good news though. Once we take that first step, we are in action and then Newton’s law kicks in. The moment we take a little bit...

It is important to dream big and visualize success when we are setting goals.

There is, however, a potential downfall of such dreaming.

The mind is a strange and powerful thing. When we continue to dream about achieving our goals, we begin to feel good, right? Well, this tricks the brain into believing that we have already achieved the goal!! In essence, feeling good about our progress can make us reduce our effort.

So what should we do instead?

WOOP your goal.

Gabrielle Oettingen is a world-class researcher who has spent her career studying the science of making your dreams come to life.

In her book Rethinking Positive Thinking, she explains that although it’s very important to start with a vision of our ideal lives, it is not enough. In order to keep moving forward, we then need to "rub the vision up against reality."

Here is her WOOP formula:

W is for Wish
O is for Outcome (or benefits—the "why")
O is for Obstacles
P is for Plan

Start with the Wish. What do you want in...

Should you tell others about your goals? Or should you plod along on your own, not telling anyone in case you do not manage to achieve your goals?

There is a good deal of research that social support (encouragement, information or help) that we receive from others is an integral part of reaching our goals.

A 2008 study demonstrated how social support helps when we encounter hurdles. The lead author of the study, Simone Schnall, said "We showed that when a friend was actually present, or when participants merely thought of a supportive significant other, a steep hill looked less steep. This suggests that people rely on close others when considering how difficult tackling a given environment might be."

Wow. It turns out that our loved ones can support us in achieving our goals even when they are not physically present!

We can also access social support for our goals in other ways of course. We could join an in-person support group (such as weight-watchers or toastmasters) or a virtual...

If you are planning to achieve something significant this year, you will lose inspiration and motivation along the way. Almost guaranteed.

So what will keep you going?

People who keep going after the initial inspiration has waned do so because they recognize and remember the meaning and purpose of their goals.

In other words, the reasons WHY they set the goal as they did are front and centre in their minds. This is what keeps them going when the going gets tough.

Research in psychology shows that meaning and purpose are strong motivating factors for people. In one study, for example, two groups of mountain climbers rated the difficulty of climbing certain hills. Those climbers who had a strong sense of purpose thought that the hills required less effort to ascend and weren’t as steep as those who did not have this sense of purpose.

What can we learn from this?

If we want to achieve something big this year, we need to ask
ourselves what it means for us to get this done, to...

Many of us believe that we need lots of self-control and willpower to be able to achieve our goals and keep our resolutions.

It turns out that the people who end up achieving their goals have no more willpower or self-control than the rest of us. They achieve their goals by setting up their environment for success rather than relying on willpower or self control.

Studies on willpower and self control show again and again that the spaces and situations we find ourselves in can keep us on the path to achievement or nudge us toward failure.

So the people who appear to have lots of willpower take steps to minimize temptations rather than give their self control a workout. They put their smart phones away, they do not buy junk food and they leave their credit cards at home.

When such people want to instill a habit or start doing something new, they set reminders on their calendars, set out their workout clothes the night before and keep their food journal on the kitchen counter.

They...

We’ve been talking about speaking the truth and the kinds of lies that are far from the truth and the whole truth.

But what about "white lies", the harmless or trivial lies that we sometimes tell, especially to avoid hurting someone's feelings?

Well, according to Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of the book, Lying, honesty is always the best policy.

"The people who undo their lives, and destroy relationships and careers, always accomplish this through lying," he says. "The decision to not lie is the best prophylactic i’ve ever come across for not bringing needless misery into your life."

Harris firmly believes we should stay away from all lies, including the "white" ones. "They tend to be the only lies that good people tell, while imagining that they are being good in the process," he says.

Here are some reasons that those white lies can damage relationships:

1. We undermine people’s trust.

When people overhear us lying to someone else, it tells them that...