Dr. Brown’s last speech at TED was one of our most watched video post of 2011. Now she is back with more insight and reflection on how vulnerability can impact change and innovation in your life.
By the way her opening is a great example of modeling personal vulnerability. This opening teaches you how to use self-disclosure and vulnerability to connect with an audience.
Want to Be Open and updated on Reality—Try asking questions
Daily Quote: “ Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.” -M Scott Peck.
Reflection: If it is obvious that asking questions is such a powerful way for learning. So why do we stop asking questions and give more advice or try sell our arguments at any cost. Self-protection? Fear of cognitive dissonance? Or are we just lazy learners? Most people in order to create a comfort zone and reduce unknowns in life assume they know all the main things they need to know on a subject and then go through life looking for examples and evidence to reinforce our own beliefs and view of the world. They don’t bother to ask questions because they do not want to upset their views and beliefs about life. So they don’t ask questions because would require change and pain for them. They cling to outdated beliefs and remain certain in their assumptions – yet they often end up being viewed as inflexible, dogmatic and rigid– saying stupid things like the world is flat or all those “people” who are on food stamps are lazy or do such and such. This inability to be open-minded and flexible leads to absolute thinking and limits our ability to deal with the uncertainty and inevitable changes in life.
Other people are afraid that by asking questions they will look weak, ignorant or unsure. They like to give the impression that they are decisive and in command of the relevant issues. They fear that asking questions might introduce uncertainty or show them in a poor light. In fact asking questions is a sign of strength and intelligence – not a sign of weakness or uncertainty. Great leaders constantly ask questions and are well aware that they do not have all the answers.
Finally some people are in such a hurry to get with things that they do not stop to ask questions because it might slow them down. They risk rushing headlong off the cliff.
In many situations, checking-in by asking questions and challenging our assumptions provides us with more information and leads us to gain a better appreciation of the issues.
Action Challenge:
So how do we improve our skills and ability to ask better questions? Start with very basic, broad questions then move to more specific areas to clarify your understanding. Open questions are excellent – they give the other person or people chance to give broad answers and they open up matters. Examples of open questions are:
Over the next week try out your skill in asking questions and then see if this doesn’t improve your ability to see people and situations with a more open-mind. Keep us informed of your progress and we can start a dialogue for all of us to feel more comfortable in living with uncertainty and change.
The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust
One youth dead, neighborhood watch citizen goes free. Everyone wants to know how and why did this shooting happen? One reason maybe that Zimmerman’s past experiences and his negative perceptions of black youths as thugs and therefore automatically dangerous to him and his gated community neighbors. He never learned how to balance his negative filters that colored his experiences with black youth. What if he saw black youths in a more bright, optimistic and flexible light. Instead he focused on the dark, pessimistic and inflexible thinking that constantly reminded him that black youths are people who were always causing trouble and needed to be feared.
Almost every creature comes into world more wired for negativity than positivity or optimism. Why? Fight or flight response. Say you’re wandering through the woods and you fail to notice the pretty wildflowers under your feet. Inconvenient perhaps, but not catastrophic. Now imagine that the thing under your feet is a rattlesnake. Fail to notice this, and its good night, Mark. Which is why we give the bad things in our lives so much more attention than the good ones—a phenomenon known as a negativity bias. The more you defy your innate negativity bias, building from your strengths, finding relief by looking at things from a more positive frame, and embracing delight wherever you can, the more you become stronger in controlling your own way in life. The impact of optimism of one person living in acceptance of good things happening in life are immense. Become that person, and you’ll find that in spite of everything, when their is positivity in your life you will experience more happiness and positive interpersonal relationships. It won’t necessarily change the reality of the situation, but the positiviness has a strong ripple effect on anyone coming in touch with you.
Most research on perception and thinking show how your memory of the past helps you determine what to pay attention to in the present but does not lock you into forever thinking that way. Checkout the 10 irrational thoughts that cause people trouble by Dr Albert Ellis. Recognizing faces or race is a simple way to distinguish friends from strangers without a thorough background check each time you encounter someone. We all use this function in perceiving our environment so we are not overwhelmed with too much information. We use this discriminating perceptual process to distinguish different types of birds or poison berries from edible ones. This is a good use of this perceptual function but we also use it as a short-cut for identification and discrimination of people and this can be a bad way to us this function depending on the situation an ensuing action.
We unconsciously make unfortunate emotional investment in things that have happened to us in the past creating a closed, inflexible mindset that all “black youths wearing baggy pants and a hoody” spell trouble. According to Malcolm Gladwell, in his popular book Blink, many of our life decisions and especially social interactions are based on little information that are generalized to specific situations almost in an automatic way.
Almost every creature comes into world more wired for negativity than positivity or optimism. Why? Fight or flight response. Say you’re wandering through the woods and you fail to notice the pretty wildflowers under your feet. Inconvenient perhaps, but not catastrophic. Now imagine that the thing under your feet is a rattlesnake. Fail to notice this, and its good night, Mark. Which is why we give the bad things in our lives so much more attention than the good ones—a phenomenon known as a negativity bias.
The more you defy your innate negativity bias, building from your strengths, finding relief, and embracing delight wherever you can, the more you become stronger in controlling your own way in life. The impact of optimism of one person living in acceptance of good things happening in life are immense. Become that person, and you’ll find that in spite of everything, when their is positivity in your life you will experience more happiness and positive interpersonal relationships. It won’t necessarily change the reality of the situation, but the positiviness has a strong ripple effect on anyone coming in touch with you.
My hypothesis is that Zimmerman, the shooter, may have used irrational beliefs based on past experiences in his encounter with Travon. When he saw Travon, on that raining night, he inaccurately identify someone as a “no good black youth up to no good” the hoody reinforced his suspicion and led to a self-fulfilling prophecy that this person was dangerous and something bad was going to happen any moment. With this expectation in mind he called 911 and began to actively pursue this dangerous person, even though he was told not to follow or pursue and wait for the police to arrive. He expected to see danger or a possible attack, just as you do when you look at every plant expecting to see poison ivy or poison mushrooms. Past experience can set your filters up to see in either a positive, optimistic or negative, pessimistic light. Automatic filters are necessary, otherwise, your life would be bogged down in the need to resolve every minute doubt, prepare for every possible situation. But Zimmerman’s maladaptive thinking may have led him to belief that Travon, a young black man, signaled trouble and possible danger to him and his neighbors. These triggers led him to make a snap judgment based on past experiences. For example, when you listen to the 911 audiotapes of Zimmerman with police authorities you hear his negative triggers and fears at work, he said something like these type of punks usually get away with breaking-in or doing harm and it wasn’t going to happen again on his watch. If in the past he had a positive past experiences with black youths his automatic “fight response” may not have been triggered and his snap judgment and action based on fear might have been stopped. Thus, averting the terrible shooting that left one person dead and the shooters life in shambles. If he had reacted in a more positive automatic filter or perception he might have seen the situation in a different light that would have made Travon’s and his life happier and help him to see the best in a person wearing a hoody and walking down the sidewalk in his gated community in a more neutral way as an ordinary citizen to be respect and treated with dignity.
So how do you in the moment of decision stop or block the negative triggers in your mind from putting you and other people in harm’s way and advert a dangerous encounter. By challenging your negative triggers and past experience which lead to negative stereotypes, poor decision-making and inappropriate actions. It is a thinking process I call the STOP. CHALLENGE. REFLECT. ACT. LEARN. REPEAT. learning cycle that gives you time to overcome your impulses and automatic behavior. I will cover how to STOP negative bias and impulsive actions more on my next post. Thanks and I hope this post provides some ideas on why this tragedy took place in Florida. We can all do better. Just STOP and Challenge our irrational thinking before acting.
Quotes:
The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious – from behind a locked door inside of our brain – but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control.”
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Its’ all about storytelling. It’s about creating a connection to the audience.”
Reginald Hudlin, President of Entertainment, BET
Reflection:
Spend more time on making a strong and lasting “first impression” on the audience. Like the old saying, you only get one chance for a great first impression. Overcoming a lack luster open to your presentation, like a flat or non-energized beginning, and then having to change that initial poor image, takes lots to time and effort. Your initial first impression can make or break your presentation.
Action Assignment: You may not be making a speech today, but is helpful to practice how to make good first impressions. Today, stop and try to make a positive impression on someone you don’t know. After the interaction circle back to get some feedback–How did you come across to this person and what was their first impression of you? There is a lot to learn here because we all have “blindspots” between how we want to come across to others and their actual experience of you.
“Speech is power. Speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.” Ralph Emerson
When you have a captive audience take advantage of the opportunity, do not bore them to death. Presentations are critical in promoting your ideas and advancing your career. Presentations are a wonderful platform for capturing people’s attention, interest and changing their point of views. It is one of the few mediums that if used properly contain the human interaction necessary for changing and promoting new ideas and behaviors. Yet with the innovation of PowerPoint and other presentation templates the opportunity to make a ” unique connection” is generally lost or squandered on uninteresting and boring lectures.
Most presentations today could be finished in five minutes by simply handing out your deck of slides. Most rules of “adult learning” are violated in boring presentations. For example, some speakers try to influence you by “telling and selling” rather than engaging and connecting with the audience needs and wants. These type of presentations end-up being speaker and content centered rather than audience-centered.
So the question becomes if presentations are so boring and unproductive, why do we continue to have meetings and presentations that are obviously a waste of time and resources?
Continue reading ‘Death by “boring” presentations and how to Eliminate them’
Daily Quote: ” I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen, heard, understood and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand and touch another person. When this is done, I feel contact has been made “–Virginia Satir
Reflection: Now it is your turn to absorb, focus and capture your own reflection. You can’t hope to become an effective leader without self-awareness and looking at how words and experiences effect your daily interactions. Learning to learn how to reflect on experiences and the lessons life offers will enhance your ability to relate, communicate and develop as a fully functioning leader and congruent person. So give it a try by reflecting on what it means in your life to truly connect with others. Share your ideas with the rest of our community at the wick.
Practice Makes Perfect —Really
Does 10,000 hours make you expert or master of a subject or performance activity, like tennis or public speaking? From my review it seems that the key is 10,000hours done in deliberative practice structure. So what exactly is deliberative practice? Most research defines it as an activity with a very well-defined end-goal, which should be difficult. The activity needs to be highly repeatable. There needs to be feedback on the quality of each repetition; so it is helpful to have a coach or friend review your performance.
Many cognitive scientist that the key to mastery comes about when a skill is moved from the short term memory of the beginner to the working long term memory of the expert. Once embedded in the working long term memory, the brain can short-cut the slow process of deliberation associated with juggling new rules stored in the short term memory. Indeed, the operation of working long term memory is like snap judgments or “gut decisions” you make on a daily basis because we have been there before and done that thing we wanted to do.
I believe that the neurological rewiring that occurs during focused attention is the driving mechanism behind the deliberative practice process for learning. Only focused attention can trigger the brain into the process of rewiring the brain. Self-reflection over the feedback seems to be the important element needed to move a skill from short term memory to the working long-term memory. Often, after I’ve practiced a new technique in tennis, a burst of energy and satisfaction of having let my natural Self 2 do what it does best without interferences of past experience, doubt or negativity. This is probably a consequence of some kind of rewiring. The repetition of this self-awareness in deliberative practice results in the most effective rewiring, leading ultimately to a state of mastery where the activity can be done quickly, and without effort.
http://boscoh.com/books/towards-mastery-deliberative-practice-flow-and-personality-traits
Daily Quote: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
Reflection:
2. Presenter doesn’t spend time building rapport or trying to connect with audience, so confidence and credibility are questioned
3. Material is not useful or relevant to audience needs and expectations
4. They’ve heard it all before—you don’t stimulate their curiosity
5 . No roadmap or agenda, is provided so participants—are lost, bored or confused
6. Presenter doesn’t take learning styles into consideration and presents too much information or just lectures without any involvement of audience members eg, too detailed and too many PPT slides.
7. It’s too long and attention span of participants wanes or you go over the allotted time
8. Close is just not compelling or powerful enough to inspire participants to action
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Victor Frankl
Constructive Living necessitates the elimination of self-sabotaging thinking and behavior. It requires more self-directed action and the creation of a meaningful life purpose and process.
The technique used to facilitate this transformation is what I call the Smart-Step Centering process. It is all about establishing a clear and meaningful purpose, confidence through positive self-talk and skill development through realistic practice, feedback and execution plans.
Smart-Steps framework is more manageable in developing positive behavior changes then a more general or holistic approach. Smart-Steps allow the client to focus on the goal and the process instead of judging performance (based on fears, false expectations and results). For example, process goals help people to focus on being in the moment and responding in a responsive way to others and their environment. It helps people turn shyness and nervousness energy into positive enthusiasm for interacting and understanding others. Here are some essential components of the Smart-Step Process as applied to interpersonal communication.
1. Clarify and agree to an agenda and expectations for your time together. Start interaction by asking questions and listening to the other person. Show interest and sincere concern in hearing their story.
2. Monitor and Edit yourself. Sincerely listen and try to meet the other person’s need to share and be understood by not giving advice, judging their behavior or opinions. Show them that you have their best interest at heart.
3. Soften your “connection”. Be friendly and welcoming. Too much, too soon and too strong usually leads to suspicion and resistance from others.
4. Accept influence. A presentation succeeds to the extent that the presenter can accept influence from the audience members. Be responsive to audience comments or concerns. Be quick on your feet and flexible to show your care.
5. Respect and Encourage candid dialogue. Understand how to become a better listener, give positive feedback, and mirror the other person’s gestures and body language. Learned to model the good habits and positive energy you would like others to show you.
7. Focus on the optimistic “POV”. Try to connect with and understand the other person’s view of the world. Interpersonal conversations work best when you are experienced as a caring and respectful listener So make at least three-five times as many positive statements as negative comments.
Once you understand the Smart-Step process you are on the road to significant personal change. Process goals replace personal expectations and help performers focus on what is really important during a performance – being audience centered and in the moment. Being and living in the moment is critical to developing confidence. It means learning to trust, believe in yourself and developing a sense of being vulnerable and at risk. Trust is directly related to your ability to be open and is experienced as authentic by others. Make sure you leave a good first impression and this could turn-out to be the start of a life-long friendship.
” Communication between leader and constituent is at the heart of everything.” John Gardner
Process with Structure key elements: Process and principles trump techniques every time
Seven fatal errors of communication– The biggest flaw with communicators is assuming that they have connected, their message has taken place. and people will know how to execute it.
1. People are listening and with listening the message has been internalized
2. People understand what was communicated–check to see if they get it.
3. People care what was communicated–Show people what is needed to be more selfless
4. People agree with was communicated–Communicator must over come cynicism and doubts
5. People are inspired and motivated take action on new ideas–Create support systems and models for change
6. People are willing to change their ways without evidence that it is the right thing to do–Provide facts and emotional reasons for change that overcome the fears of changing
7. People are able to push pass uncertainty and doubt with only limited exposure to a message.–Need for continuous and frequent reinforcement of message by communicator
Want to participate in your own custom designed MBA course in Excellence don’t miss this series by Tom Peter’s one of the top ten consultants in business since Peter Drucker.
” In the 30 years since the publication of In Search of Excellence, I’ve given 2,500+ presentations on organizational and personal excellence. For the last two+ years I’ve been pulling those 30 years of materials together. Throughout 2012, we will release, one part every two weeks, essentially “the best of”—a heavily annotated, 23-part mega-“presentation” titled “Excellence. Now.” This video gives you a preview. Use this material as you wish and please “steal” all you want! —Tom Peters
Check this one out on | # 5 Strategic Listening
“IN-effective Leaders talk, EFFECTIVE leaders LISTEN. “Strategic Listening” is arguably the #1 competitive advantage”.
“ Unfortunately, some people will genuinely be harmed by change, particularly those who benefit strongly from the status quo. Others may take a long time to recognize the benefits that change brings. You need to foresee and manage these situations.” Kurt Lewin, 1939
Sometimes, as I look at the poorly planned approach of the White House and Congress attempts to lead us out of these difficult times I wonder if any of our leader’s have studied or learned about the how to institute and manage the process of successful change projects. Or are they just flying by the intuitive “seat of their pants” which guarantees a longer period for adjustment and acceptance of change initiatives and more suffering when changing large system like Health Care, Deficit Reduction and job creation programs.
So I am going to provide one straightforward and simple model developed by Dr. Kurt Lewin,who has been called the father of change management for their edification and use.
Lewin’s Model for Understanding the Process of Change
One of the cornerstone models for understanding organizational change was developed by Kurt Lewin back in the 1950s, and still holds true today. His model is known as the three-step process for change–Unfreeze – Change – Refreeze. Lewin used a clear, concise and compelling analogy for explaining the change process by describing the simple process of changing the shape of a block of ice into the shape of a cone.
Block of Ice Analogy for understanding Change Process
If you have a large cube of ice, but realize that what you want is a cone of ice, what do you do? First you must melt the ice to make it amenable to change (unfreeze). Then you must mold the iced water into the shape you want (change). Finally, you must solidify the new shape (refreeze).
By looking at change as process with distinct stages, you can prepare yourself for what is coming and make a plan to manage the transition – looking before you leap, so to speak. All too often, people go into change blindly, causing much unnecessary turmoil and chaos.
To begin any successful change process, you must first start by understanding why the change must take place. As Lewin put it, “Motivation for change must be generated before change can occur. One must be helped to re-examine many cherished assumptions about oneself and one’s relations to others.” This is the unfreezing stage from which change begins. If you more details on Lewin’s practical Change Management Model see this website or see a summary on our next page. Continue reading ‘Rediscovering and Executing Successful Change Process–Kurt Lewin’s Model’
Quote: “Sometimes you have to try out a “new you” to discover what’s real and authentic. We can engage in pretending not out of fear or accommodation, but out of the courage to get off automatic pilot and try out new behaviors.”
Reflection: After an education and skills training session many of my participants have reported the difficulty of executing their new skills back home or in the work place. I often tell them to be patient and gentle on themselves. What I mean is that personal change and substituting new behaviors takes hours of practicing the new behavior, soliciting feedback on how you are doing and time to replace and unlearn old behaviors. The “smart step approach is what I recommend. See the wick blog on “smart steps”
