Practical Savvy Solutions to Everyday Problems
thousands of proven, simple ways you can change your life for the better
1. Influence Quiz: Test your IQ (Influence Quotient)
Are you an “influence genius”? Choose the best answer from these options to discover your Influence Quotient. Dr Robert Cialdini, the leading expert on Influence and Persuasion presents a simple quiz that can help you understand your ability to recognize influence and persuasion techniques.
Select a Test |
|
|
Gender – Science. This IAT often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males.
|
|
|
Weapons (‘Weapons – Harmless Objects’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Black faces, and images of weapons or harmless objects.
|
|
|
Gender – Career. This IAT often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males.
|
|
|
Sexuality (‘Gay – Straight’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish words and symbols representing gay and straight people. It often reveals an automatic preference for straight relative to gay people.
|
|
|
Skin-tone (‘Light Skin – Dark Skin’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize light and dark-skinned faces. It often reveals an automatic preference for light-skin relative to dark-skin.
|
|
|
Presidents (‘Presidential Popularity’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize photos of Barack Obama and one or more previous presidents.
|
|
|
Age (‘Young – Old’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish old from young faces. This test often indicates that Americans have automatic preference for young over old.
|
|
|
Religion (‘Religions’ IAT). This IAT requires some familiarity with religious terms from various world religions.
|
|
|
Arab-Muslim (‘Arab Muslim – Other People’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish names that are likely to belong to Arab-Muslims versus people of other nationalities or religions.
|
|
|
Race (‘Black – White’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.
|
|
|
Weight (‘Fat – Thin’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of people who are obese and people who are thin. It often reveals an automatic preference for thin people relative to fat people.
|
|
|
Disability (‘Disabled – Abled’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize symbols representing abled and disabled individuals.
|
|
|
Asian American (‘Asian – European American’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Asian-American faces, and images of places that are either American or Foreign in origin.
|
|
|
Native American (‘Native – White American’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize White and Native American faces in either classic or modern dress, and the names of places that are either American or Foreign in origin.
|
The NEF well-being survey is used to assess the well-being of European countries. (Denmark wins; the Baltic States do rather badly.)
The questionnaire takes about 10-15 minutes and asks 50 questions on a broad range of topics to assess your well-being.
At the end, you get your overall well-being score and your scores on the individual components.
Here is a list of the well-being components being measured:
From the latest national accounts of well-being report:
Personal well-being is made up of five main components, some of which are broken down further into sub-components. These are:
1. Emotional well-being. The overall balance between the frequency of experiencing positive and negative emotions, with higher scores showing that positive emotions are felt more often than negative ones. This is comprised of the sub-components:
- Positive feelings – How often positive emotions are felt.
- Absence of negative feelings – The frequency with which negative emotions are felt, with higher scores representing less frequent negative emotions.
- Satisfying life. Having positive evaluation of your life overall, representing the results of four questions about satisfaction and life evaluations.
- Vitality. Having energy, feeling well-rested and healthy, and being physically active.
2. Resilience and self-esteem. A measure of individuals’ psychological resources. It comprises the sub-components:
- Self-esteem – Feeling good about yourself.
- Optimism – Feeling optimistic about your future.
- Resilience – Being able to deal with life’s difficulties.
3. Positive functioning. This can be summed up as ‘doing well’. It includes four sub-components:
- Autonomy – Feeling free to do what you want and having the time to do it.
- Competence – Feeling accomplishment from what you do and being able to make use of your abilities.
- Engagement – Feeling absorbed in what you are doing and that you have opportunities to learn.
- Meaning and purpose – Feeling that what you do in life is valuable, worthwhile and valued by others.
4. Social well-being is made up of two main components:
- Supportive relationships. The extent and quality of interactions in close relationships with family, friends and others who provide support.
- Trust and belonging. Trusting other people, being treated fairly and respectfully by them, and feeling a sense of belonging with and support from people where you live.
5. In addition to these indicators, as an example of a well-being indicator within a specific life domain, a satellite indicator of well-being at work has also been created. This measures :
- job satisfaction
- satisfaction with work-life balance
- the emotional experience of work
- assessment of work conditions
Answer: Take this 20-item screening test to find out.
This quiz was developed by the Office of Health Care Programs, Johns Hopkins University Hospital.
The NPI is a reliable, well validated test used in a lot of psychological research into narcissism.
It consists of 40 forced-choice questions and takes just a few minutes to complete. You receive a total score and 6 sub-scores for:
I scored a bit below average overall, but was a tad high for authority and exhibitionism!
Apparently narcissism peaks around 24 and then declines–presumably we mature and grow a bit more wise and humble with age!
Here is a great article on How to Spot a Narcissist from the Psychology Today website.
Well-being is bigger and better than happiness.
Well-being = positive emotions + engagement + positive relationship + meaning + accomplishment (PERMA) (Martin Seligman in Flourish, 2011)
Positive emotions
Engagement – flow
Meaning ( opposite where you look in mirror and ask yourself “am I merely fidgeting until die?” Seligman, p 12)
Accomplishment — to choose to achieve things for their own sake, just for the satisfaction of achieving them
Positive relationships –
It’s good to love. Loving others is supposed to make us feel good; it’s not supposed to make us feel bad!
Women, especially, often seem to get emotionally beaten up by toxic relationships.
Are you concerned that you or a friend might be stuck in one of these toxic relationships?
Take this test and find out. It’s not an official, scientifically validated test, but it seemed very sensible to me. The test doesn’t just apply to women in romantic relatioships; it applies to everyone in close relationships. It is, in fact, taken from the opening paragraphs from the preface of the book Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood.
- When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much.
- When most of our conversations with intimate friends are about him, his problems, his thoughts, his feelings – and nearly all our sentences begin with “he. . . “, we are loving too much.
- When we excuse his moodiness, bad temper, indifference or put-downs as problems due to an unhappy childhood and we try to become his therapist, we are loving too much.
- When we read a self-help book and underline all the passages we think would help him, we are loving too much.
- When we don’t like many of his basic characteristics, values, and behaviors, but we put up with them thinking that if we are only attractive and loving enough he’ll want to change for us, we are loving too much.
- When our relationship jeopardizes our emotional well-being and perhaps even our physical health and safety, we are definitely loving too much.
I have created this website to show you simple, proven ways to improve all aspects of your life.
I hope the practical ideas I present in Practical Savvy help you become happier and more effective in all aspects of your life.