Most of us know that we can take a hot shower and almost always feel better. Problems melt away. You feel better because feelings come from your body. And warm water is a pleasurable feeling as opposed to say cold water. The same is true of eating food. It’s definitely something that triggers positive reinforcement. No doubt you’ve been hangry…
Category: Meaningful Management
What shouldn’t you do?
Got a problem that you just can’t solve? If you want to be creative and solve it then do what you shouldn’t do. The shouldn’ts are often what hold us back at the artificial fences that we erect mostly because someone else told us to. Mindlessly. Have you ever felt something wasn’t proper? Not the right way to do things?…
Stop Watching the Local News
I turned on the news last night only to be barraged by a laundry list of atrocities. A home explosion, a MOAB dropped in Afghanistan, protests, a judge found dead in the Hudson, four teenagers brutally murdered, NYC officers complicit in helping a suspect escape custody, a guy got stung by a scorpion on a United flight from Texas to…
Expertise is Intuition
It’s easy to assume that expertise is experience. That ten years of experience makes an expert. Quite often it’s just ten years of experience holding a title. But after 10 years, it’s possible that a manager could be flustered when confronted with conflict resolution. Or a photographer could be incapable of framing a photo. When you’re an expert you will feel it, you’ll…
You don’t have to listen to yourself
Your mind will tell you what it thinks whether you want to hear it or not. But just like with other people, you don’t have to listen. You aren’t obliged to concur. You can freely ignore. You can disagree. To the untrained mind, one cannot differentiate oneself from one’s thoughts. To the trained mind, one can.
Save yourself the trouble – don’t make trivial changes to the written word
In high school I remember being told to start any paper as a draft. And to constantly revise it. If memory serves, we submitted draft after draft before submitting a final paper. And why not? It’s easy to make changes. But, that doesn’t mean those changes are worth while. And more often than not they’re trivial changes at best. Sometimes they…
Being right often conflicts with being successful
The desire to be “right” is occasionally mutually exclusive with being successful. Which do you prefer? Either way the desire to be right is innate, subconscious. That means it’s largely out of your control. You’re not a bad person for wanting to be right. No, you pretty much have no say over the satisfaction you receive. Or the gut wrenching…
Stress is often an illusion
Over the course of a day you can encounter many small stressful situations. Maybe a difficult problem to solve, a difficult decision to make, some conflict, maybe a paper cut or a stubbed toe. These stressors tend to linger in your mind. By the end of the day you can feel stressed even if all the sources of stress are…
Staring
If you’re waiting in line at a fountain while the person in front of you is filling up a gallon jug, all you have to do is make eye contact and they’ll stop. Even a momentarily glance will come across as a death stare. Conversely if you don’t mind, avert your eyes or you’ll interrupt them. Influence is affect
Not even the worst of things last
It doesn’t matter how good things get, or how bad they become. After six months at most, your mind will revert to a mean level of happiness. Lose your job or win the lottery? Same impact on happiness in the long haul. That means that no matter what happens in life you can take solace in knowing that the new…