Do you know what drives your team?
Ever since she was a child Amy loved to swim. She was one of those water babies that just seemed at home in a pool or in the ocean. As Amy grew up she went to swimming lessons and from a very young age, began to excel. Amy spent most of her spare time in the pool, she loved it. The feeling of weightlessness brought back memories of summers at the beach; even the smell of chlorine or salt water reminded her of happy times.
Amy began to train long hours early in the mornings with a coach who saw her obvious potential. She got up everyday at 5am and trained before school. Some mid winter mornings it seemed like madness to be up at the crack of dawn doing laps in a freezing pool. She was often so tired that homework took a back seat. But Amy never faltered, every time she took to the water she felt alive.
Failure didn’t stop her
Although she began competing at a young age Amy never really won anything. She always made the finals but throughout her adolescence she just didn’t have the physical speed of some of her peers.
Sometimes she felt like giving up but her love of swimming drove her on through countless failures and hours of training. Even when it seemed she couldn’t go on, something inside her pushed her forward. She trained harder, spent longer in the pool and at the gym. Her goal to be the world’s best was an obsession and she would not let anything stand in her way. She was so afraid of not being able to achieve what she so desperately wanted that she fought harder at every turn.
Facing reality
Amy was devastated when her coach and her family finally persuaded her that although she was fast, she was not fast enough to have a future career in swimming. In fact they were worried that she might not have a career at all if she didn’t spend more time on school work. Amy felt like her world had come to an end. [Read more…]
Do you sabotage yourself at work?
I want to share the story of Tracy. Tracy landed her dream job working for a start up company. She was to be part of a team to launch a new and exciting product. Although apprehensive, Tracey couldn’t wait to start. She was the most junior in the team of five but she specialized in an area in which the others were limited. Life was looking good.
Almost as soon as she started, Tracy felt intimidated by the others in the group. They were all experienced and talented. Sensibly, Tracy made a conscious decision to just put her head down and work to the best of her ability.
However, almost from the start, she had trouble accepting feedback and guidance from her team leader. Even the smallest piece of advice or direction made her feel angry and insecure. In fact, she had a number of quite emotional altercations with her team leader. Not so sensibly, after each one, she sent an email to another team member complaining about the team leader.
[Read more…]
10 Reasons Why You’re Not a Leader
Do you agree with all of these reasons? If not, please share which ones you disagree with and why.
70,000 thoughts per day? Another myth exploded?
I love the blog by the Neurocritic.
In one of the most recent blogs, a new film called Listening is reviewed and well as the concept of how many thoughts we have a day.
I too have always wondered where the 70,000 number comes from.
Here’s what the Neuroocritic has to say on this:
“Well, popular lore says we have 70,000 thoughts per day, which comes out to only 0.8101851851851852 thoughts per second. But this is also absurd, since we haven’t yet defined what a “thought” even is. Interesting factoid: the Laboratory of Neuroimaging (LONI) at UCLA has taken credit for this number. But they did offer some caveats:
*This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally accepted definition of what “thought” is or how it is created. In our study, we had assumed that a “thought” is a sporadic single-idea cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.
theoracleofdelphi-ga had some interesting thoughts on the matter:
So there’s the heart of the problem: No one really knows what the biological basis for a ‘thought’ is, so we can’t compute how fast a brain can produce them. Once you figure out the biological basis for a thought (and return from the Nobel ceremony) you can ask the question again and expect a reasonable scientific answer.
In the mean time, you could probably get a bunch of psychologists to argue about the definition of a thought for a while, and get a varying set of answers that depend highly on the definitions.”
Interesting!!! Can’t wait to see the movie.
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