133 Seconds on Leadership, Teaching, Parenting, Coaching
In just over two minutes of talking fast, Daniel Pink introduces a simple and very useful 2 x 2 matrix to illustrate something that’s common to good leadership, teaching, coaching and parenting practices: an appropriate balance between being demanding and being supportive. Check out his video. The matrix is from Angela Duckworth’s 2016 book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a new and helpful take on what others have termed balancing a requirement for accountability with providing safety – a balance often missing in the workplace.
Duckworth reckons grit is what separates the best from the merely good and may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment. Want to know how gritty you are? Find out by using the Grit Scale.
Spoiler alert: Duckworth reports, If it’s important for you to become one of the best people in your field, you are going to have to stick with it when it’s hard. No short cuts? Can’t be right. My mind began running a familiar thesaurus on avoid: circumvent, evade, dodge, escape, equivocate . . .
Avoiding Avoidance
Avoidance has a kind of diabolical quality to it. The more we avoid something, the greater our aversion grows. Time passes. Not doing what we needed to do has unpleasant consequences. The “thing we didn’t do” haunts us and stalks us. Eventually the whole story becomes a movie. A scary movie. Maybe even with zombies in it. This is from Gregg Krech, author of The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology He conducts courses and writes on Finishing the Unfinished and Starting the Unstarted. His website is Thirty Thousand Days. (Divide that number by 365: clock’s ticking.) On the point of reading his Three Ways to Avoid Being Haunted by the Thing You Didn’t Do, my phone rang.
How Technology Hijacks Your Mind
The average person checks their phone 150 times a day. Why do we do this? Are we making 150 conscious choices? If you’re an app, how do you keep people hooked? Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?
These questions from Tristan Harris, a former Design Ethicist at Google, a position which involved “caring about how to design things in a way that defends a billion people’s minds from getting hijacked”. Harris demonstrates how we often focus optimistically on all the things technology does for us. and shows us where it might, in fact, do the opposite. By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. It’s a revealing read: By paying closer attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.
New mail’s in. Gotta go.
Tom Watkins
Tom has owned a number of professional training and consultancy business, coached several other consultant trainers and facilitators into successful careers, and authored a range of well-respected publications.
