Glossary

Overload is what happens when more is arriving than you can reasonably sort, carry or respond to. Sometimes that means too many tasks. Sometimes it means too many emotions, too many decisions, too many social demands or too many signals coming in at once. The common feature is not just “a lot.” It is that…

Emotional differentiation is your ability to tell one feeling from another instead of treating them all as basically the same. That sounds simple, but it changes a lot. If every difficult feeling gets flattened into “bad,” “stressed,” or “upset,” then your inner life becomes much harder to work with. The more precisely you can tell…

Activation is the shift from intending to act to actually beginning to move. That shift is easy to underestimate. People often lump everything together under motivation, as if wanting something and getting into motion were basically the same thing. They are not. A person can care a great deal, know exactly what matters and still…

Self-understanding is your ability to make reasonably good sense of what is going on in you. That includes what you feel, what matters to you, what tends to throw you off, what helps you recover and what patterns you keep repeating. It does not mean having a perfect explanation for everything you do. It means…

Misapplied strengths are real strengths that have started costing more than they help. That can be a confusing thing to realize, because people usually expect strengths to feel good and weaknesses to feel difficult. Real life is not always that tidy. A person can be thoughtful, persistent, sensitive, careful or generous, and still find that…

Legibility is how easily another person can tell what is going on with you, what you mean, or what you are trying to protect. When someone feels legible, they feel readable in a good enough way. Other people may not fully understand them, but they can more or less track what matters, what is being…

Motivation is the force that gives action a reason to happen. It matters, but it is not the whole story. People often use the word as if it explains everything: if you are not moving, you must not want it enough. If you really cared, you would be doing it already. That sounds neat. It…

Trade-offs are what happen when two things matter, but you cannot fully serve both at once. People often talk as if a difficult choice should become obvious once you are clear enough, disciplined enough or honest enough. Sometimes that is true. But a lot of human difficulty is not confusion in that sense. It is…

Values are the qualities of life that feel worth organizing yourself around. They are not the same as goals. A goal is something you can complete. A value is more like a direction you keep trying to live toward. You can finish writing a paper, leaving a job or apologizing to someone. You cannot finish…

Emotional vocabulary is your ability to put more precise words to what you feel. That may sound small, but it matters more than people often think. If your only words are things like “fine,” “stressed,” “bad,” or “off,” then a lot of different experiences get lumped together. The result is not just vague language. It…