No parent is perfect — and that’s for the best, according to child psychologist Becky Kennedy.

When parents make mistakes, and then make an effort to repair those missteps, they teach their kids important lessons about maturity and bonding, Kennedy told comedian Trevor Noah’s “What Now?” podcast in a Dec. 4 episode. Those lessons can help kids maintain happy and healthy relationships going forward, she said.

“We learn the most in our relationships when people take responsibility for their behavior, when people repair,” said Kennedy, a Columbia University-trained child psychologist, host of the parenting podcast “Good Inside” and a mother of three children herself. “I wouldn’t want to deprive my kids of that opportunity, and that’s such [an important] part of healthy relationships.”

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Repairing a mistake or a rift is the best way to get closer to another person, Kennedy said, calling it “the ultimate relationship strategy.” In parenting, those repairs can strengthen the parent-child bond and give your child a model for how to own up to their own mistakes, said Kennedy. They can teach kids that it’s natural to make mistakes, and how you respond to them matters.

Other parenting experts broadly agree: Parents should model to their children how to bounce back from a mistake by apologizing and then moving on. Learning that mistakes are inevitable rather than a sign of inherent flaws can help your kids avoid the stress of perfectionism, which can lead to long-term mental health issues like anxiety and low self-esteem, according to developmental psychologist Aliza Pressman.

“If our kids didn’t see [our mistakes], they would not have much hope that they get to make mistakes and grow and still be loved and be worthy,” Pressman told “The Mel Robbins Podcast” in a July 28 episode.

For her part, Kennedy said that she’s far from a perfect parent, admitting to Noah that there have been “innumerable” times where her kids threw tantrums — and all of the lessons she teaches about leading with empathy went out the window.

“I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again, and I mean it with such honesty that my kids don’t have some Dr. Becky[-type] person as a mom,” she said. She recalled an instance where one of her kids whined about what she’d cooked for dinner, and she lost her temper and yelled at the child. You shouldn’t do that, of course, she noted — but if you do, don’t be paralyzed by the shame or guilt of losing your cool.

“Every parent does that,” said Kennedy. “There’s not one parent who has not been in that situation.”

As for why you need to own up to your behavior: Consider “what happens for a kid when the person they depend on for safety becomes the person who scares them,” Kennedy said. It’s “a very frenetic experience” that can leave your child overwhelmed as they try to cope through a mixture of “self-doubt and self-blame.”

Instead of blaming your child for the frustration that caused you to lash out, say something like, “I’m sorry I yelled,” said Kennedy. “And this line really matters: ‘It’s never your fault when I yell. I’m working on staying calmer, even when I’m frustrated. I love you.’”

The apology is just a first step for parents who are prone to outbursts, Kennedy added. If that’s the case, she recommended working on catching yourself before you lose your cool by taking the time to identify what triggers your frustration. That way, you can try to take a beat and calm down with a deep breath rather than resorting to yelling, she said.

“You can’t help your kid if you’re not doing some type of internal work,” said Kennedy.

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Manipulation doesn’t always look dramatic or explosive. It could be a loaded comment in a meeting, a subtle guilt trip in an email, or a casual remark that leaves you questioning yourself long after the conversation ends.

What makes manipulators effective is their ability to influence how you feel. Research on social influence and coercive control shows that manipulators aim for emotional impact: the drop in your confidence, the spike in your anxiety, the moment you start defending instead of deciding.

In my decade advising Fortune 500 companies as a behavioral researcher, I’ve seen this pattern at every level: the person who controls the emotional tone often controls the direction of the interaction.

The most powerful response to a manipulator isn’t to confront them. This often backfires, triggering gaslighting, denial, or escalation. Here’s a simple strategy I teach to help you “CUT” through manipulation.

When your nervous system spikes, your thinking narrows and your behavior becomes easier to steer. Studies on emotional regulation show that staying physiologically calm preserves decision quality under pressure. Slow your breath. Lower your voice. Buy yourself a few seconds before responding.

Instead of reacting with:

• Snapping or raising your voice: “Why are you saying that? That’s not true!”
• Over-explaining or defending yourself: “Actually, I did do [X], and here’s why…”
• Appeasing or over-committing when it’s unreasonable: “Okay, I’ll handle it.”
• Getting defensive or anxious: internal panic, self-doubt, or visible agitation.

Try responding with:

• Neutral acknowledgment: “Noted.”
• Redirect to facts or agenda: “Let’s focus on the next step.”
• Brief, calm clarification if necessary: “I understood it differently; here’s what I did.”
• Pause and buy time: a slow breath, or a moment to compose your response before engaging.

By staying neutral in your responses, you remove the emotional fuel that manipulators rely on and shift the interaction back into your control.

Even when your heart is racing, how you show up matters. A relaxed posture, relaxed facial expression, and steady verbal pace signal that there’s nothing to hook into.

Research on status dynamics and dominance signaling shows that the least reactive person is often seen as the most powerful. Staying unfazed tells the manipulator: Your tactics aren’t working on me.

This is where most people slip. They explain, defend, justify, and try to be understood. But feeding the emotional layer is exactly what keeps manipulation alive. Instead, refocus on facts, boundaries, or the task at hand. Pay attention only to what you can control.

Together, these three moves cut off the oxygen from the interaction. You’re no longer a lever that can be pulled. Over time, that shifts the power in your favor.

The most powerful response is far more destabilizing to the manipulator’s strategy: emotional non-cooperation. Calmly, neutrally, and consistently refusing to feed the emotional leverage, you take away the fuel that sustains their behavior. When emotional leverage disappears, the manipulation often stops.

Shadé Zahrai is an award-winning peak performance educator, behavioral researcher, leadership strategist, and author of “Big Trust: Rewire Self-Doubt, Find Your Confidence, and Fuel Success.” Recognized as one of LinkedIn’s Top 50 Most Impactful People, she supports leaders at some of the world’s biggest brands, including Microsoft, Deloitte, Procter & Gamble, and JPMorgan.

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It’s a section that’s largely fallen off of job seekers’ resumes today: a person’s hobbies and personal interests outside of work.

But Yolanda Seals-Coffield, US Chief People and Inclusion Officer at professional services giant PwC, still loves to ask about it.

“It gives them an opportunity to talk freely about something that’s really important to them and I think it just helps me get a better sense of the person,” Seals-Coffield tells CNBC Make It.

A good answer should be realistic and honest.

“I don’t need you to tell me that you go out and you’re hiking every day or you’re out working in the community every single hour of the weekend,” Seals-Coffield says. “I’m okay if you tell me, like, you listen to audiobooks and you meditate or you love photography. I’m also okay with people saying — and this used to be the answer I would have told you if you asked me 15 years ago what I did outside of work — I would say I’m with my kids.”

The point is to give a sense of yourself as a “whole person,” which includes who you are outside of work, she says.

“The actual substance of what they’re doing doesn’t matter as much as their ability to sort of talk about something that they’re passionate about and that they care a lot about,” Seals-Coffield says. “I love to see that in people and hear that from people because I think that gives you another insight into their authentic self.”

When answering that question, or any other in the interview, she says it’s important to prepare beforehand but not to the point where you’re giving overly rehearsed or canned answers.

Seals-Coffield notices when candidates practice a response so much that they come across “over-scripted,” or if they’re “telling me what they think I want to hear as opposed to sharing their real life lived experiences,” she says.

The danger is that these answers no longer feel personal, she adds, and that could hurt your chances of getting the job.

“And if they aren’t personal, then you’re missing an opportunity as a candidate to help me really understand how your life has been shaped by your experiences,” she says. “I want to get to know that individual and I’m going to do that more if the person is being truly authentic, and sometimes you lose authenticity if you’re over-scripted.”

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Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos doesn’t have management books stashed in his work bag, on his desk or piled on his nightstand.

Sarandos doesn’t really read management books at all, he said in an interview for an episode of CNBC’s “Leaders Playbook,” a series set to premiere on Wednesday. Instead, he reads fiction novels to learn about leadership, he said. His favorite management book: “Typhoon,” a 1902 novella by Joseph Conrad about a steamship captain and crew navigating a severe storm while at sea.

“It doesn’t sound like a management story on the surface, but I think it’s the most powerful leadership story I’ve ever read,” said Sarandos, 61. “I read it over and over again because I find … I get something different in the book every time I read it.”

When Sarandos first read the book roughly 20 years ago, he thought the captain was a reckless “hot dog” who put himself and his family in jeopardy, he said. On more recent reads, he’s come away with a more salient lesson about leading in the face of conflict and uncertainty.

“Now, what I see is that when you go through life and you go through business, you make a lot of decisions that don’t turn out the way you thought they would,” said Sarandos. “The real leadership test is: How do you manage through that?”

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Sarandos joined Netflix as its head of content operations in 2000, and further learned how to embrace uncertainty while working for Netflix co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings, he said. “I think the lesson that he’s left for me is that you pick the best people, give them the tools to do the best work of their life, and get out of their way,” said Sarandos.

He recalled a specific instance in which he acted with a lot of autonomy, taking “a big financial swing” with no guaranteed payoff. About a decade into his tenure at the streaming company, Sarandos spent $100 million of Netflix’s money to create the company’s first original television series, “House of Cards” and greenlight it for two seasons — without asking Hastings for permission, he said.

“When he asked me, ‘Why would you do that?’ I said, ‘Reed, it’s a simple risk-reward for me. If this show fails, we will have dramatically overpaid for a show. We do that all the time, but if it succeeds, we could completely transform the business as we know it,’” said Sarandos.

Sarandos isn’t the only prominent businessperson who draws inspiration from fictional stories.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ leadership style has been partially shaped by Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” according to author Brad Stone’s biography “The Everything Store.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates frequently touts the value of reading fiction, noting in a Nov. 25 blog post that some novels can ”[pull] back the curtain on how something important really works.”

Anyone can glean real-life takeaways from novels if they practice summarizing the plot, analyzing the motivations of the characters and spend time drawing parallels between the conflict in the book and issues they may face at work, Northwestern University leadership professor Brooke Vuckovic told CNBC Make It in January 2023.

“Our best leaders are looking for ways to develop themselves, and fiction represents an often underused and incredibly powerful, low cost, ongoing, pleasurable way to develop ourselves — if read correctly,” said Vuckovic.

Watch Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos on CNBC’s ”Leaders Playbook″ premiering Wednesday, Jan. 7 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT. All new episodes Wednesdays.

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Jensen Huang seems unfazed by the prospect of a potential $7.75 billion tax bill.

That’s how much the Nvidia CEO could end up owing the state of California if a proposed ballot measure succeeds in implementing a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. Huang, whose $155 billion net worth makes him the world’s ninth-wealthiest person — according to a Jan. 6 Bloomberg estimate — would be “perfectly fine” with that outcome, he told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday.

“I’ve got to tell you, I have not even thought about it once,” said Huang, 62, when asked if the proposed tax concerns him. “We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes they would like to apply, so be it. I’m perfectly fine with it.”

The ballot initiative, proposed in November by a healthcare workers’ union and championed by lawmakers including Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would levy a 5% tax on the total assets of anyone with a net worth exceeding $1.1 billion who resided in California as of the start of 2026. The initiative would direct the tax funds to California’s health care budget — which faces a significant shortfall following federal spending cuts — and public school and food assistance programs.

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The initiative needs to obtain more than 870,000 signatures to land on the state’s November 2026 ballot, at which point California voters would decide whether or not to put it into effect. If it were to succeed, billionaires currently residing in California would be taxed on all assets of value, including any stocks or businesses they own, regardless of whether they move out of the state in 2026.

Real estate assets would be excluded from the tax, because residents already pay property taxes, according to an analysis by California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. Billionaires would be allowed to spread their payments over five years under the proposal.

Proponents say the tax could ultimately raise roughly $100 billion from the state’s 200 wealthiest individuals, including Huang. While the Nvidia CEO has never released a full breakdown of his assets, Forbes estimates that the vast majority of his wealth comes from his ownership of roughly 3% of Nvidia, a company currently valued at more than $4.6 trillion.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment beyond Huang’s Tuesday remarks when contacted by CNBC Make It.

Huang’s stated apathy over the proposed tax puts him at odds with many of his fellow billionaires in the state, and elsewhere. Billionaire Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, for example, has said that the proposed tax would force billionaire founders to “sell huge chunks of our companies” to gain enough liquidity to pay their tax bill, he wrote in a Dec. 28 post on social media platform X.

“Now me and my co-founders have to somehow come up with billions of dollars in cash,” Luckey wrote.

Another billionaire, venture capitalist and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, suggested in a Dec. 28 post on X that a wealth tax would convince billionaires to flee the state. Conversely, the ballot initiative’s proponents have pointed to studies debunking the idea that higher taxes result in the migration of significant numbers of wealthy people and businesses.

Business leaders including Google co-founder Larry Page and venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly considered leaving California before the end of 2025 to avoid the tax proposal, according to a Dec. 26 article in The New York Times. Neither Page nor Thiel has since publicly announced a personal change of residence, and spokespeople for each billionaire didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, whose Pershing Square hedge fund is based in New York, criticized wealth taxes more broadly in a Dec. 29 post on X, writing that they “effectively represent an expropriation of private property and have many unintended and negative consequences.” Billionaire investor Mark Cuban — who has said he’s “proud to pay” a large annual tax bill, but is opposed to taxing unrealized capital gains — wrote “agree” in response to Ackman’s post.

California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom has also stated his opposition to state-level wealth taxes, like the one proposed. If the California initiative garners enough signatures, Newsom and the state legislature could potentially try to block it from appearing on the November ballot by filing an emergency petition with the California Supreme Court.

Huang, however, was adamant that he still sees Nvidia’s location in Santa Clara, California, as a major benefit. “We work in Silicon Valley because that’s where the talent pool is,” he said. The company’s ability to hire qualified employees is typically the biggest factor in deciding where the company establishes a presence, he added.

“Wherever there’s talent, we have offices,” said Huang.

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