Shape Perceptions of Your Work, Early and Often

From HBR. There is an obvious lesson for you in this: don't assume that anyone — your boss, your peer, or your subordinate — knows the good work you are doing. They are all probably focused on their own jobs and concerns. Do things to let them know.
Yes, I know this smacks of self-promotion, and self-promoters are not only disliked for blowing their own horns but not particularly credible in doing so. But there is a way around the dilemma. Research by social psychologist Robert Cialdini, two doctoral students, and myself shows that when you get someone else to sing your praises — even if that individual is hired by you, under your control, and the audience knows these facts — you receive attributions of competence without being tarred by the brush of behaving inappropriately.(Here's the pdf.) If hiring someone is not an option for you, then start relying on the norm of reciprocity. Praise one of your colleagues for her good work and chances are, she will feel obligated to return the favor. When others talk about your great works, those works will garner the attention they deserve.

Consuming Passions

From Psychology today. All the animals are unwilling recruits in the scientific quest to understand appetite, a fundamental human drive whose complexities have long frustrated researchers and dieters alike. Craving and bingeing are anomalies in rodents, but they're common in people. Studies of eating behavior show that most men and women go on occasional eating binges and experience food cravings that feel overwhelming.

I Win, You Lose: Brain Imaging Reveals How We Learn from Our Competitors

From Science Daily. Surprisingly, when players were observing their competitor make selections, the players' brains were activated as if they were performing these actions themselves. Such 'mirror neuron' activities occur when we observe the actions of other humans but here the players knew their opponent was just a computer and no animated graphics were used. Previously, it has been suggested that the mirror neuron system supports a type of unconscious mind-reading that helps us, for example, judge others' intentions.

"The Secret of Happiness Lies in Taking a Genuine Interest in All the Details of Daily Life."

“The secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
-- William Morris

Is happiness impossible?

From Psychology today. People who tell us happiness is impossible imprison us in illusion. Positive individuals break the tyranny of our stories about happiness, because they, like that doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, show us that the external world does not dictate the terms of our happiness. The truth is there have been positive people even in some of the most horrific situations in history.  And thus, happiness is a verifiable, scientific possibility.

The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (And Very Few Have)

From HBR:
1. Great leaders recognize strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves.
This is precisely what Kosner did with me. He provided belief where I didn't yet have it, and I trusted his judgment more than my own. It's the Pygmalion effect: expectations become self-fulfilling.
Both positive and negative emotions feed on themselves. In the absence of Kosner's confidence, I simply wouldn't have assumed I was ready to write at that level.
Because he seemed so sure I could — he saw better than I did how my ambition and relentlessness would eventually help me prevail — I wasted little energy in corrosive worry and doubt.
Instead, I simply invested myself in getting better, day by day, step by step. Because we can achieve excellence in almost anything we practice with sufficient focus and intention, I did get better, which fed my own confidence and satisfaction, and my willingness to keep pushing myself.
2. Rather than simply trying to get more out of us, great leaders seek to understand and meet our needs, above all a compelling mission beyond our immediate self-interest, or theirs.
Great leaders understand that how they make people feel, day in and day out, has a profound influence on how they perform.
We each have a range of core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Great leaders focus on helping their employees meet each of these needs, recognizing that it helps them to perform better and more sustainably.
Arthur Gelb helped my meet not just my emotional need to be valued, but also my spiritual need to be engaged in a mission bigger than my own success. Far too few leaders take the time to figure out what they truly stand for, beyond the bottom line, and why we should feel excited to work for them.
3. Great leaders take the time to clearly define what success looks like, and then empower and trust us to figure out the best way to achieve it.
One of our core needs is for self-expression. One of the most demoralizing and infantilizing experiences at work is to feel micromanaged.
The job of leaders is not to do the work of those they lead, but to serve as Chief Energy Officer — to free and fuel us to bring the best of ourselves to work every day.
Part of that responsibility is defining, in the clearest possible way, what's expected of us — our concrete deliverables. This is a time-consuming and challenging process, and most leaders I've met do very little of it. When they do it effectively, the next step for leaders is to get out of the way.
That requires trusting that employees will figure out for themselves the best way to get their work done, and that even though they'll take wrong turns and make mistakes, they learn and grow stronger along the way.
4. The best of all leaders — a tiny fraction — have the capacity to embrace their own opposites, most notably vulnerability alongside strength, and confidence balanced by humility.
This capacity is uniquely powerful because all of us struggle, whether we're aware of it or not, with our self worth. We're each vulnerable to believing, at any given moment, that we're not good enough.
Great leaders don't feel the need to be right, or to be perfect, because they've learned to value themselves in spite of shortcomings they freely acknowledge. In turn, they bring this generous spirit to those they lead.
The more leaders make us feel valued, in spite of our imperfections, the less energy we will spend asserting, defending and restoring our value, and the more energy we have available to create value.
All four capacities are grounded in one overarching insight. Great leaders recognize that the best way to get the highest value is to give the highest value.

How the internet is rewiring our brains

It’s no-one’s idea of news that the internet is changing the way we live. But could it actually be fostering ignorance?

Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch, The Shallows) is one of the world’s most ground-breaking thinkers on technology and its impacts. In this conversation with journalist Gideon Haigh, he describes how internet use is changing our brains. Distraction, skim-reading and instant information - all hallmarks of the new technology - have real potential to reduce our capacity for deep concentration and deep reading.
The Wheeler Centre, September 2010

Build Your Confidence

From Psychology Today. Perhaps the single greatest source of mental energy is positive interaction with others. Even if you were the class nerd in high school, it's never too late to achieve social success. You can develop social confidence by following a few simple steps.

Training the brain.

From the New Scientist. Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.

Four faces of introversion

From Psychology today. While many people self-identify as shy, whether this is problematic or not depends on their need to socialize--an important distinction, says Cheek. His research identifies four subcategories of shyness.

1. Shy-secure people self-identify as shy and score somewhat high on the Cheek and Buss Shyness Scale  They have some social anxiety but don't need a lot of interaction and don't stress about it. "When they were put in the psych lab and asked to converse with a new acquaintance, they were very low key," explains Cheek. "It doesn't necessarily interest or excite them, but they were calm and they would talk." (This is how a number of us here have described our introversion. Yeah, we can socialize. When we want to or must.)
2. Shy-withdrawn people are more anxious about affiliating with others. "They have a lot of sensitivity to rejection, fear of negative evaluation, concern about becoming embarrassed and of social faux pas," says Cheek. Shy-withdrawn people struggle more than the shy-secure because in our society, they must frequently do that which makes them anxious.These shy types also might get lonely.
3. Shy-dependent people want so much to be around others, they are overly accommodating and compliant, and self-effacing. "If you think about it as a social strategy, the withdrawn move away from other people but the dependent move toward other people," says Cheek. "They are affiliative, they go along to get along. They have a better short-term social adaptation profile but long term, how can you build a relationship based on mutuality if you are volunteering to be the junior partner?"
4. Shy-conflicted people have a high need for affiliation, but also are anxious about it. Cheek calls it the approach-avoid conflict. "They have a conflict between withdrawing or seeking autonomy versus moving towards others," says Cheek. "They vacillate and tend to have anticipatory anxiety." While Cheek is fine with the shy-positive movement (he cites such books as The Highly Sensitive Person and The Gift of Shyness), he thinks shy-conflicted shyness may not be benign. "That type of person tends to, among all shy people, have the most problems," he says.