Entries from June 2009
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article research showing that having a positive attitude improves problem solving through the use of insight.
“The distinction between insight and analytic solving has been anecdotally recognized for millennia and has been the subject of scientific inquiry for nearly a century (e.g., Duncker, 1945; Maier, 1930; Kohler, 1917). A plethora of behavioral evidence details how these two solving processes differ. Analytic processing involves deliberate application of strategies and operations to gradually approach solution. Insight, which is considered a type of creative cognition, is the process through which people suddenly and unexpectedly achieve solution through processes that are not consciously reportable. Insight solutions tend to involve conceptual reorganization, often occurring after solvers overcome an impasse in their solving effort, and are suddenly able to recognize distant or atypical relations between problem elements that had previously eluded them (Gilhooly & Murphy, 2005; Smith & Kounios, 1996; Schooler & Melcher, 1995; Weisberg, 1994; Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993; Metcalfe & Weibe, 1987; Metcalfe, 1986). When solution is achieved, these factors combine to create a unique phenomenological experience, termed the Aha! or Eureka! moment.”
The study is pretty dry – and goes through how the experiment was setup in detail. However I think the outcome clearly is expected. I don’t know about you, but when I am in a positive mood and not anxious I am able to do much better at making cognitive leaps. The more stressed out I get, the more I fall back into “brute strength” mode and use analytical capabilities to solve problems.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Attitude, Problem Solving, Stress
Bear with me. This isn’t one of my usual posts today. It’s written in memory of someone that I wish I would have been able to get to know better. If he would have had someone close to him who had access to this information, he might still be with us today. Bye Reggie – I’ll miss you.
This subject is really serious, and it is really uncomfortable. In today’s economy there are a lot of people that are feeling completely hopeless for a lot of different reasons. Their jobs are stressing them out completely, they are at the end of their rope financially (and possibly at the end of their bank account and credit), many people have lost their jobs. There is a huge amount of suffering going around and some people just do not have the coping mechanisms to deal with the amount of pain that they are in. For some of those people, the only solution they can come up with is suicide. The leading cause of suicide is untreated depression. In these times, depression is a lot more common. This article talks about how work, depression, and suicide can be related.
“A 2005 UK study of 250,000 employees found people with low job satisfaction were most likely to experience emotional burnout, have reduced self-esteem and suffer from anxiety and depression. Even a modest drop in job satisfaction could lead to burnout of “considerable clinical importance”, the report said, adding: “The relationships are particularly impressive for aspects of mental health, specifically burnout, lowered self-esteem, anxiety, and depression, where it can now be confirmed that dissatisfaction at work can be hazardous to an employee’s mental health and wellbeing.” (5)
A 2007 study (6) of almost 1,000 32-year-olds found 45 per cent of new cases of depression and anxiety were attributable to stressful work. The researchers defined a highly demanding job as involving a lack of control, long hours, non-negotiable deadlines and a high volume of work (Hazards 100).
Overall 10 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women in the study suffered a first episode of depression or anxiety over the year-long study. But the risk was double in those with the highest pressure jobs, according to the paper published in the August 2007 issue of Psychological Medicine.”
Here is a resource for depression signs.
There are a lot of things that you can do when you recognize that your friend or coworker is having suicidal thoughts. When people bring this up – it is a cry for help. People who really are contemplating taking their own lives will talk about it first.
Here and here are some resource to help you talk to someone who is feeling like they can’t go on.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Job Satisfaction, Stress
Or better known as – what can go wrong will.
Those of you who know me well, know that I have a need for speed. I like fast cars and fast jet skis. I’m not so much about top end as the fun of getting there. I’ve earned the name “Linda Leadfoot”. As I’ve gotten older I’ve really really REALLY tried to ditch the car problem and drive like grandma. Cars are great toys. Cars are EXPENSIVE toys. That money can always go to a better place.
However, we still have one very fun very fast little car in the family. It’s an Audi S4. It’s not a new one, and it is coming up on the 100,000 mile mark, but it still looks and runs like new. 2.7 liters of 250 HP twin turbo joy under the hood, a 6-speed manual tranny, and quattro all wheel drive. My baby is as surefooted as a mountain goat in snow and ice and hugs turns like nobody’s business. However, we’ve been seriously debating selling it because we don’t need it and I’m unemployed. We inherited a nearly new car that gets great gas mileage from my dad and sadly the Audi sits in the garage more days than not. I think that the S4 knew we were going to try and take it to a dealer this week that is running a special “buy your car” promotion (limited time only! – uh yeah, right) to see what they will give us…
Yesterday while rounding a turn and doing some fancy footwork I was alarmed to find the (ABS) and (BRAKE) lights coming on along with a very loud warning beep. Uh oh. What was that? I wasn’t going that fast. REALLY – remember – GRANDMA! I wasn’t sliding and the (ABS) didn’t engage. Then, a little closer to home on a straight approach to a stop sign… there it went again. This can’t be good. This is not something you can have going on when you are thinking about selling a car. It’s like I have Herbie the love bug living in my garage throwing a fit.
I spent this morning diagnosing the problem with a little prodding from my husband who was at work. Gotta love him. He never says – “oh honey I’ll look at that when I get home – don’t worry about it.” He always says – “why don’t you see if you can figure it out?” He expects me to be able to do all of the mechanical and electrical things that he can do. Sometimes I can and sometimes I really screw things up – but that’s a story line for a different time.
So, this morning found me crawling around under the dashboard looking for the connector plug for the VAG so I could hook the car up to my PC and get the diagnostic codes out. Yikes. ABS controller problems. The bad news is that there really is something wrong. It is fairly common. If you take it to the dealer it will be about $2000 to fix. Double YIKES! The good news is that there are aftermarket solutions available that aren’t anywhere near that expensive.
I don’t get it. Why do cars decide to break down precisely when my severance and vacation time pay ran out? Murphy. Good old Murphy. Always have to watch out for that guy.
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Personality Types, Problem Solving
Sigh, apparently some of the tinyurl links that I’ve recently put into my twitter feed are *broken*. Here’s a shout-out of “thanks” to one of my readers and old friends who pointed that out to me. If you happen to stumble onto one of these, PLEASE feel free to let me know. Shoot me a comment on a recent post or send me an directed twitter message or an e-mail (if you happen to know me personally) and I’ll put out an update post with the full link that I’ve verified still works correctly.
Here are two that I am aware of:
36 Hours in Research Triangle, N.C. – NYTimes.com RTP as a travel destination for New Yorkers.
-and-
How Not to Get Laid Off – BusinessWeek
Categories: Personal
Tagged: Social Networks
Recently in Business Week What’s Your Leadership Mindset?
“Those with growth mindsets believe they can get better at what they do, that they have reservoirs of untapped potential. They realize that promise by working hard and making incremental improvements over time, whether they are athletes, or writers, or surgeons.
Those with fixed mindsets, however, believe they can only go as far as their natural abilities will take them. They think talent, rather than hard work, is the fundamental component of success. They are often scared to challenge themselves because they are terribly afraid of failure—which, in their minds, is an indictment of their abilities rather than an opportunity to learn and do better next time. “
Maintaining a growth mindset is a difficult thing over a long career. It is hard work to always be on the lookout for the next thing to learn about and to figure out how to apply it to improve what you do. Sometimes picking the wrong “new thing” can make you look pretty silly in the long run – however you will learn something from it anyway. I do wonder about the applicability of twitter for instance. I see it as a pretty good marketing tool, but people have to want to follow you and your message. It’s actually pretty easy to get people to unfollow you if they don’t like something that you tweet. In fact there are all sorts of tools you can use to see who stopped following you. But, I digress.
It is easy after doing a job for a few years to sit back and rest, and stop being hungry. I know that I’ve had that happen to me a few times. I recognize it, but it is oh so difficult to do anything about it. Typically I’ve found that a large change will reenergize me and get me learning and growing again. Sometimes this means learning and growing at work, sometimes it means learning and growing outside of work. New companies and new jobs are great for ramping up that growth. It can be scary to make a leap like that for some people, but frankly I enjoy it a lot. Those first few months are my favorite. Getting to know all the players, understanding the technology, figuring out where the problems are as well as the opportunities. It is a lot harder once you are entrenched in an organization to keep up the growth mindset. This typically involves challenging the people, the existing processes, and sometimes even the culture. Depending on the organization and your role in it, that can be a losing battle. In those cases you’re better of working on an incremental approach. What little thing can you do that makes things better? Ok – did someone else notice this and appreciate it? Good. What’s the next little thing you can do? Repeat. Also, don’t forget to keep delivering on what you’re supposed to do in the first place. Sometimes the incremental approach isn’t appreciated though. That is unfortunate.
One aspect of the quote above that I really liked was that failure should be seen as an opportunity to learn and do better next time. I actually try not to even use the word failure. I call those episodes – “learning experiences”. I think that anyone who has tried something new or difficult has had one or two of them. I know that I have. With every one that I have I find that I bounce back faster than the last. I prefer to stand up and dust myself off and say “well, I didn’t expect THAT to happen! I guess I need to be careful of it next time!” Into the mental file cabinet it goes.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Learning, Personality Types
This morning I spent a few hours rewiring a bunch of outlets and switches in a room that I had just painted. When we built the house, we put in the ivory outlets… well, they have gone totally out of style so I’ve been working my way around the house replacing them all with white ones as I paint the rooms. I can’t explain why – but after you build a house or two you start to notice the little things that are off. For me this is one of those things. To do them myself only costs about a dollar an outlet. Not a lot of money for a bit of satisfaction.
Electricity is one of those things that a lot of people just won’t mess with. Don’t get me wrong – I have a healthy respect for it, but I’ve always lived in a house where doing wiring wasn’t something out of the ordinary. I think my dad taught me how to replace my first light switch when I was about 12. When I was even younger he used to let me play with batteries, pieces of scrap wires, switches, small motors, and low voltage light bulbs. I had a lot of fun, and I sure learned a lot about wiring circuits. Little things like wrap the wire around the screw in the direction the screw tightens so that when you tighten the screw the wire tightens down too. My dad never had a son, and he surely didn’t differentiate in how he treated me as a little girl. That’s something I have to thank him for. I helped him build out a playroom in the basement, I went on long hikes and sat in blinds looking for wildlife, I forgot more about SLR cameras and photography by the time I was 15 than most people ever know, and I was the kid who ran out into the yard to hold the snake in my PJs. Don’t even get me started about the deer mice I kept in an aquarium in my room – thank goodness we didn’t think about the hanta virus back then.
When I got a little older I remember a boyfriend getting pretty upset with me when I rewired the plug on a vacuum cleaner. I think he thought that women shouldn’t do such things. He didn’t last too long – go figure. I ended up marrying a man who was one of those kids who stuck things into outlets and tore appliances and clock radios apart to see how they work. I guess we’re made for one another, though these days he is the one who does most of this type of work around the house. Until this year I haven’t done any electrical wiring in a while. I’ve done phone and cable and pulled what felt like miles of bundle (2-cat5 + 2-coax) in new construction but nothing “live”.
Today was a “fun” day. After wiring 2 switches and about 10 outlets I flipped the breaker and it immediately tripped. Oh crap! The hunt was on. I ended up pulling every outlet that I had wired and inspected them all. Of course it was the VERY LAST one that I had botched. I short circuited the entire system. DOH! Not something that I am especially proud of, but the second I saw what I did I KNEW I found the problem.
There’s nothing like the feeling of solving a puzzle, it always makes me smile. When was the last time you did something out of the ordinary and had to solve a problem that was unusual for you? How’d you feel?
Categories: Personal · Tactical
Tagged: Job Satisfaction, Learning, Problem Solving, Women in Business
Well, this article comes right on the heels of the Confidence one that I posted yesterday. I think that they are related in more ways that one.
From the Wall Street Journal “Silencing the Voice That Says You’re a Fraud”
I think that every successful person succumbs to this problem now and then. I know that I do. There are days that I am hyper critical of myself. Nothing that I accomplish seems good enough. There are two outcomes to this – I’ll undertake herculean efforts to make what I am doing absolutely stellar and I’ll nearly kill myself in the process, or sometimes I’ll just walk away from what I am not feeling up to snuff about. I really try not to do the latter but it does happen on occasion when I feel that there is no way for me to succeed at what I’ve attempted. Why beat a dead horse right? The former isn’t all that healthy either. Sometimes we all just need to realize when something is “good enough”. Over the years I’ve learned to recognize when I am doing these two things and I’ve gotten better at moderating my behavior. I don’t always succeed and get it quite right, but I’m a lot less prone to the silliness than I was earlier in my career.
I’ve also heard the internal thoughts about being a fraud called the Imposter Syndrome. That’s when you think that other people will realize that you have no idea what you are doing. Eventually they will find you out and they will laugh at you. Many successful people feel this way. I took a class with a group of about 30 up and coming women leaders a few years back. When the facilitator explained this syndrome and asked who felt that way – I think every single hand was raised. It is good to know that I’m not alone… and I suspect it was good for the others to realize this as well.
If you don’t think that what you’re doing is good enough – you are NOT alone.
Categories: Leadership · Personal
Tagged: Confidence, Women in Business
Psychology Today reports that “You’re not alone in shunning center stage—shyness and social anxiety are as natural as breathing. But doing advance prep for a party or taking small social risks can lead to breakthroughs in confidence. Here’s how to relish even the brightest of spotlights.” in this article
I find that a lot of this advice really has helped me perform better in job interviews and when giving high pressure presentations to large audiences. I am a fan of the technique of “throwing oneself into a situation”.
- Are you uncomfortable giving presentations? Volunteer to do a small one and prepare for it extremely well.
- Do you hate making small talk with strangers? Go to parties where you will only know the host.
- Do you get tongue tied during interviews? Have a friend ask you practice questions in advance.
Really – it isn’t that bad. Yes, it can stress you out, but if you look at it differently – as an opportunity to gain experience that will only last a certain predefined amount of time you can get through it. Once you get through it once, the second time isn’t so bad. Lather, rinse, repeat. Once you do something three or more times it becomes second nature and is on its way to becoming a habit.
One key strategy that I’ve employed is to really work at making the other person feel comfortable. You aren’t the only one who dreads these types of situations. Complement a pretty dress or unique piece of jewelry. Poke fun at a common acquaintance (Don’t be cruel though). Self deprecating humor tends to work pretty well too.
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Confidence, Learning, Stress
Well, this article in Business Week is interesting. It specifically talks about Twitter and how many followers people have and what gender those followers are. I was curious about this, but I had no preconceived notions of what the outcome should be. As I write this post I’m still trying to decide if I find it relevant or not, and if I do, why. We’ll see if I can come to a conclusion by the end.
Ok, the basics are that men have 15% more followers than women, but women are more prevalent on Twitter than men by a ratio of 55% to 45% (based on statistics gathered in May 2009).
“Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity—both men and women tweet at the same rate.”
Why is this? Here’s my hypothesis. Looking at the people that I follow on Twitter (My ID on Twitter is lsbonanno) most of the men Tweet about business related topics. They use Twitter to promote their company, their product, and many times, themselves. They Tweet about technical topics too and provide interesting links to articles to read. These items tend to have a large audience – i.e. many people find the information relevant and useful. Most (not all) of the women that I follow Tweet about their personal lives and experiences. These are things that you’d share with friends and family and not a much larger audience typically. Could this be the key? Is it that women are using Twitter to stay connected and men are using Twitter as an extension of work – a way to market? I think it might be.
Something else that came up in this article is how women are the drivers in social networks. AH HA! YES! In the back of my mind I realized this. The people that I see most active on Facebook (but not so much LinkedIn – maybe for the same business reasons as above) are women. They post regular status updates, they update their pictures, they take the quizzes and send the beers, pillow fights, and easter eggs. The men are out there, but on a day to day basis they really are not that active. It’s funny, when they first come onto Facebook, they are very active – but within a few weeks it dwindles down to nothing. Not the ladies. Maybe it is my age group. Women in their 30s and 40s are the backbone of their families and the center of their day to day social networks – it makes sense for them to tackle this “chore” online as well.
Personally I find that I use social networks and Twitter for both business and personal. However, I do apply some boundaries to what I post where.
- LinkedIn – Business only.
- This blog – I’d say 80% business / technology related with a few lapses here and there (like the Twitter feed).
- Facebook – Personal only.
- Twitter – A combination of business and personal news.
I guess my conclusion is that in order for me to get more followers on Twitter I need to post more relevant Business/Technology links and topics there. Currently I read many many many articles that I would love to post some commentary about on this blog but I find that I just do not have the time. Maybe Twitter is the place to put those links and a short blurb about what makes them so interesting or entertaining!
Categories: Tactical
Tagged: Branding, Diversity, Social Networks, Women in Business
This is going to be a short post.
Watch this video. It is really cool. I got it from my friend Tom who showed it to me today. Can you imagine owning a product like this? I’d love it!
Here’s the video
Categories: Technology
Tagged: Creativity, Women in Business
