Senia Maymin, Ph.D. – Brave Job Search
Senior Leaders: Get a new job *before* you get laid off
Logic+Emotion posts a fascinating post on role models (a story, in fact).
Two great posts from Sharpbrains:
* A carnival with lots of information, and
* A neuroscience hosted carnival, as part of many neuro-related websites.
Enjoy them both! Both very worth your time.
Well, it’s about a month into the new year. How’re you feeling about exercise these days? What steps could you take right now – today – if you wanted to ensure your exercise success?
I read a sheet on this recently from a health club. Here is what they recommend. What would you recommend?
Five Steps to Exercise Success
Ok, and what would I recommend as my steps to success in exercise?
My Steps to Exercise Success
What do you think?
Q: What are your steps to exercise success?
“Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”
~ George Washington
“Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.”
~ Ayn Rand
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
~ Ayn Rand
“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth—whatever the truth may be—that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
~ June Jordan
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” …and… “Nature is goodness crystallized.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“Ethics begins when we are free: it is freedom itself, when that freedom is considered and controlled.”
~ André Comte-Sponville
“How can you be happy unless you have some self-respect? And how can you respect yourself unless you control yourself, master yourself, overcome your failings? … Ethically speaking, it’s pointless wishing you were someone else. You can dream of being rich, healthy, good-looking, happy … But it is absurd to dream of being virtuous. Whether you are a villain or a good person is for you and you alone to decide: you are worth precisely what you want.”
~ André Comte-Sponville
“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
~ Georges Bataille
“The only immorality … is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.”
~ Jean Anouilh
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
“Happiness is inward and not outward; and so it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.”
~ Henry Van Dyke
“Think of yourself as two people, and one of them is inside of you, and he’s a scorekeeper. And he keeps score of your idea of the world. … And when you have a conflict with your scorekeeper, that’s unhappiness. Happiness is being completely in sync with your own perception of goodness.”
~ Will Smith
“. . . happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it. . . .”
~ Aristotle
Note: Posted on 1-26 for 1-25.
Q: What is the wildest, most incredible, most intense goal that you could imagine for yourself?
What is the most audacious, courageous, gung-ho, must-do goal that you can see in your head?
Feel free to answer this question with an anonymous name. Or with your own name. Answer it as crazily as you possibly can. As intently as you can! Ganbatte!
Hi, I’ll be in Palm Springs, CA (near LA) for the weekend for the 11th annual Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology conference and its partner BrainMeeting conferences (Jan 19-22).
If you’re in the Palm Springs area, please send me an email (here), and we can figure out if we could meet up.
I’ll be giving three talks (my talks).
* Increase Three Factors Critical for Job Productivity and Enjoyment
* New Positive Psychology Results for BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION
* How Can You Increase Job Productivity and Enjoyment? (Workshop)
Let me know if you’re around.
Best!
S.
Last week, I wrote about sleep. Next week, I’ll be writing about goals. Hence, some prelimiary quotes about goals.
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
~ Larry Elder
On setting things in motion …
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
By losing your goal, you have lost your way.
~ Kahlil Gibran
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
~ John Lubbock
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
~ Goethe (from this page)
Here is a great new website!
Positive Psychology News Daily is authored by alumni of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology at UPenn, and provides DAILY, in-depth news articles about Positive Psychology today. It covers up-to-date news events, new research studies, and particually, applications of positive psychology to various fields and industries.
Expect articles on various topics of Positive Psychology, including
* positive experiences
* positive traits
* positive institutions
Check out the site, and please let me know of any improvements and additions that you would recommend! Thank you!
Senia
I enjoyed two posts recently about “WHAT IS YOUR GENIUS?” – Evelyn’s and Dwayne’s.
The way my friend H asks this “What is your genius?” question is
“What is the one thing that you do that ONLY YOU can do?”
Evelyn Rodriguez writes a couple of weeks ago in “What is Your Genius?” that she was at a party and was asked to write down the answer to the your-genuis question in fifteen minutes. Evelyn writes that this is a question that she would think it takes years and much insight to answer, and so was initially resistant to trying to do the same thing with minutes and a pencil? She writes that the way she jumped into it is through her curiosity and by thinking:
(Write what Allen Ginsberg calls “first thought”, first impulse, go for the raw unpolished unedited uncensored spew your guts forth wear your heart on the page just write as if no one is watching and no one needs to see it. Forget grammar, forget sentences that make sense, quickly before any “but” can sneak in.)
That’s the way to get to your subconscious is by asking details, and not giving yourself time to find a “but.”
And if you want to think about your wonder and genius in a more logical way, Dwayne Melancon of Genuine Curiosity writes how he does it. He writes the post “When are you at your best?” Dwayne says:
“At the recommendation of a mentor of mine I’ve been interviewing people I work with and asking them four simple questions, developed with help from my office mate Gene. The questions are simple and humbling […]:
Obviously, I picked people I trust (to be honest, to keep my best interest in mind, etc.) but it’s still difficult to have these conversations with people you admire or respect. Trust me – it’s worth it to power through the anxiety.”
So, whether you want to PLAY (i.e. Evelyn’s style above) or DISCOVER (i.e. Dwayne’s style), it would be fun to try yourself out on this one! In both cases, though, just keep going. You know the little child who asks his Mom, “why is the sky blue?” and she answers that it is the only color that is reflected to our eyes, and then he says, “well, why is that the only color?” and she tells him about how the eye works, and he asks “why is the eye like that?” – be like that little child…. in both the intuitive PLAY and the logical DISCOVER cases, go deeper. Don’t stop at the outer level. Find out what your genius really is.
As Dwayne says:
One thing that can be challenging is to simply listen during these sessions. Fight your impulse to dispute what you hear, or play it down, or even lead your interviewee down a different path. Try to limit your commentary responses to, “Thank you,” or, “I didn’t realize that,” and make liberal use of phrases like, “Tell me more…,” and, “What do you mean by that?”
ENJOY!!!!
Here are some great links. Read these! :)
IDEA: The best role of a boss.
SOURCE:MabelandHarry
(via Anna Farmery and via the ThoughtsPhilosophies carnival):
Robert Altman says the the role of the film director is
“to create a space where the actor or actress can become more than they’ve ever been before, more than they’ve dreamed of being”Now if you replace actor/actress with employee…isn’t that what business is all about? You are a dream creator, a dream coach, a dream maker…..now tell me that you have no power!
IDEA: How to measure what you’ve been doing.
SOURCE: David Maister’s summary of the words of Deborah Szekely, founder of the Golden Door Spa.
(via Anna Farmery and the ThoughtsPhilosophies carnival):
Among her pearls of wisdom was the advice that, every week, we should take an hour or two to examine what we have done with our time in the previous week, marking everything in one of five colors.
* Green would be used for anything that was a challenging growth experience
* Black would be used for things that were a waste of time
* Blue should be used for things that could have been delegated (even if the other person could only do it 85% as well as you could.)
* Red would represent something you did that was a deposit for your health
* and your own favorite color would be used for time spent on family, friends and fun
IDEA: Why smiling makes you happy.
SOURCE: Bob Sutton
(via Life At the Bar which was emailed by Stephanie of Idealawg.)
There is now compelling evidence that smiling causes people to feel happy. Requiring people to smile, no matter how they really feel at first, results in increased positive feelings; frowning conversely decreases positive feelings. Robert Zajonc and his colleagues show that smiling leads to physiological changes in the brain that cool the blood, which in turn makes people feel happy. [A series of experiments] show that positive emotion and cooler facial temperatures result when people saying the letter “e†or the sound “ah†over and over again, apparently because making these sounds requires a smile-like expression. …
These [experiments] also show that negative emotion (and hotter facial temperatures) result from repeating sounds like the letter O or the German vowel ü, apparently because making these sounds require a frown-like expression to pronounce. This effect was found to be equally strong in both German and American research subjects. These researchers also found direct effects of temperature on emotion, demonstrating that people who have had cold air blown up their noses are happier than those who have had hot air blown up their noses. Hundreds of other studies show that hot temperatures are a powerful and reliable cause of foul moods and interpersonal conflict (especially aggression and violence).
So, if you want to be really weird, try increasing happiness (and thus creativity) by having your people say “ah, ah, ah,†“e, e ,e, e,†or perhaps saying “cheese†over and over again, blowing cold air up their noses, or just keeping the buildings cold where creative people work. Or as Jane Dutton at The University of Michigan told me after she heard Robert Zajonc talk about these ideas: “When I want to get in a good mood, I’ll just go home and stick my head in the refrigerator.”
IDEA: A website about the good things in life.
SOURCE: Stephanie West Allen of Idealawg about DarynKagan.com. Stephanie writes:
Without identifying it as such, the article mentions confirmation bias. Because so much sensory data hits us each moment, we have to filter much out to maintain our sanity; we tend to let through that which confirms what we already believe.
“Bad things happen in the world,” Kagan says. “But I believe everyone has this life filter, this life view. We all run around collecting stories in our head to support whatever that life view is. I’m choosing to have the life view that good things are happening.”
We cannot get rid of our confirmation bias but, with managed and focused attention, we can change the bias. How do you see the world? Whatever your answer to that question, you will continue to see through that lens. If you don’t like what you see, trade in your bias for a new one.
IDEA: Being good. Returning library books.
SOURCE: Man returns book overdue since 1960
What is your advice for good sleep?
I suggest these three things:
Q: What do you find are the best things for you to do to get great sleep?
This is Quetion Friday. Thanks and happy weekend! For fun, check out yesterday’s quotes on sleep.