9 DE JULIO: ¡DÍA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA!
Fuente:Google Images.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
9 DE JULIO: ¡DÍA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
9 DE JULIO: ¡DÍA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA!
Fuente:Google Images.
9 DE JULIO: ¡DÍA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA!
Fuente:Google Images.
Coronavirus en Argentina: las 8 herramientas de Facundo Manes para sobrevivir a la cuarentena, por Gonzalo Sánchez
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Definiciones de experto
Coronavirus en Argentina: las 8 herramientas de Facundo Manes para sobrevivir a la cuarentena
En el marco del ciclo Diálogos, de Clarín, el reconocido neurólogo dio sus claves para atravesar el encierro y superar la pandemia.
Facundo Manes. En una charla con Clarín, dio sus claves para atravesar este momento de encierro y pandemia.
Gonzalo Sánchez
09/07/2020
Es un largo viaje la vida de Facundo Manes, una de las personas más prestigiosas de la Argentina. Nació en Quilmes y creció en Arroyo Dulce y Salto, al norte de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Es neurólogo y neurocientífico, graduado en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y en la Universidad de Cambridge, Inglaterra, donde obtuvo su Doctorado en Ciencias. En 2001, regresó al país y creó el Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva, INECO, y el Instituto de Neurociencias de la Fundación Favaloro. También creó la Fundación INECO para la investigación en neurociencias cognitivas. Es profesor de prestigiosas universidades del exterior y ha publicado más de doscientos cincuenta trabajos científicos en las revistas internacionales más importantes de su especialidad. Manes está convencido de que la riqueza de un país "se mide por el capital humano, la educación, la ciencia y la tecnología, y que allí está la base del desarrollo social". Hace tiempo que recorre el interior brindando charlas.
Esta conversación con Clarín, que formó parte del ciclo Diálogos, exclusivo para suscriptores, se llevó a cabo en pleno endurecimiento de la cuarentena por el avance de la pandemia. Un concepto interesante anclado en el mensaje de Manes: para el neurólogo no hay un “día después” de la pandemia. En todo caso, señala, “el día después es ahora" y no hay tiempo que perder.
-Tenemos miedo, vivimos con miedo, estar expuestos a un virus nos predispone de un modo que no habíamos experimentado antes, ¿cómo lo vive usted?
-Estamos por primera vez en la historia emocionalmente sincronizados grandes sectores de la población mundial. Nunca pasó que una misma emoción predomine en todos los continentes. Es una crisis de salud, pero también humanitaria, social, de relaciones internacionales, de tensión entre potencias. Vamos a un mundo multipolar. Pero también es una crisis moral, política, ideológica. Y todo afecta nuestras emociones. Lo vivo como la mayoria de las personas. Tengo la suerte de contribuir con mi granito de arena al legado del doctor René Favaloro, tratando de acompañar a los médicos de la fundación, que están en el frente de batalla, y preocupado por el país porque esta situación requiere de un compromiso colectivo.
- No sirve salvarse solo, no se puede.
- El salvase quien pueda acá no existe. Está totalmente equivocado. Esta pandemia nos da la oportunidad de pensar qué somos realmente, quiénes somos, qué cosas valoramos, incluso para tratar de encontrar nuestra mejor versión, nos da una oportunidad para pensarnos colectivamente. Estamos más que nunca en el mismo mar. No en el mismo barco, en el mismo mar.
-Crisis sanitaria, crisis económica que se siente y se sentirá con más fuerza más adelante y el presente, el encierro y la incertidumbre. ¿Cómo hacer para no sentirnos abrumados?
-Es un momento muy delicado para nuestro bienestar mental. La pandemia y la cuarentena producen un impacto concreto y hay herramientas para intentar reducir esto. En epidemias previas en el sudeste asiático, también en Canadá, hubo cuarentenas que duraron muchos menos, aproximadamente 3 semanas. Algo tan largo como esto y que abarca a tanta gente nunca sucedió. Los datos que tenemos de impacto en la salud mental son de cuarentenas más cortas y se observó cómo aparecían síntomas negativos en la salud mental: estrés postraumático, depresión, ansiedad, agotamiento, insomnio, preocupaciones psicosomáticas, frustración, desapego, mayor uso de sustancias de tabaco, alcohol, drogas, más violencia doméstica, confusión e ira. Y este efecto es el efecto combinado de la pandemia y de la cuarentena.
-Nadie dice por ahora cómo será la salida.
-Es cierto. La falta de horizonte, la falta de una perspectiva, de una salida administrada que sea integral, multidisciplinaria, basada en la evidencia científica, con datos fiables y que aborde la enfermedad mental o el impacto mental, de la misma manera que se aborda la salud. La salud es una sola e incluye la salud mental, pero repito, tener un plan estratégico de salida administrada que sea integral, multidisciplinario, que nos dé perspectiva y que esté apoyado en datos confiables y de evidencia científica. Es clave que la sociedad tenga un horizonte y que haya una discusión seria, honesta, no de facciones, no contaminada por la política habitual, que sea un debate sanitario, social y económico. Y esto nos va a permitir reducir la incertidumbre. O sea que hay mucho que pueden hacer las autoridades para nuestro bienestar. Si los mensajes de las autoridades son contradictorios, se agrava el impacto mental de la pandemia. Las autoridades deben tener la empatía para comportarse y comunicar en forma transparente y forma muy responsable, con humildad, siendo conscientes de que muchos argentinos o ciudadanos están viviendo en la pobreza o han perdido el empleo.
"El cerebro es un órgano social", dice Manes.
-Parece buen punto, pero necesitamos herramientas, ¿qué podemos hacer nosotros por nosotros mismos en este tiempo de aguantar?
-Una herramienta, o un hábito, es ver noticias confiables y no por mucho tiempo, porque eso es lo que recomienda incluso la Organización Mundial de la Salud. Te voy a contar qué pasa en el cerebro. Yo tengo 51 años. Antes de la pandemia, me hice un chequeo y estoy bien. Si uno ve la probabilidad de que yo me enferme y me muera es ínfima. Puede pasar, pero es muy muy baja. Pero ahora que si Facundo Manes, que hace tres meses se hizo un chequeo y tiene buena salud, está todo el día viendo noticias de gente no muy confiable, contando los muertos, contando los muertos en el mundo, recibiendo whats apps de amigos con fotos de lo que pasó en China, en Madrid, empieza a pasar una cosa que llamamos negligencia de la probabilidad. Yo, que tengo casi muy pocas chances de que me pase algo, empiezo a pensar mucho más en la probabilidad de infectarme y percibo que me voy a enfermar gravemente y morir. Así que una de las cosas que tenemos que hacer para manejar el bienestar mental es ir a fuentes confiables de información y no mucho tiempo.
-Anotado: negligencia de la probabilidad.
-Otra conducta que sucede en esta crisis, sobre todo al principio, cuando nos avisaban que íbamos a entrar en cuarentena, es que la gente va al supermercado a comprar papel higiénico, ¿te acordás? Esto es una ilusión de control. Aparece ansiedad y miedo. La ansiedad es un miedo anticipatorio. Aprovisionar, claro, es una forma de bajar la ansiedad un poco. Tenemos los papeles higiénicos, pero después sube con mayor fuerza. Ya tenemos la ilusión del control, así que hay muchas conductas que estamos viendo que aparecen, pero a medida que vemos que el virus se propaga, también estamos viendo que se propaga el miedo y eso es muy importante charlarlo.
Facundo Manes. Foto: Luciano Thieberger.
-Por supuesto, adelante.
-Estamos viendo la propagación del virus desde el principio, pero también estamos viendo la propagación del miedo. Es porque nos enfrentamos a algo novedoso, amenazante, impredecible. Y por primera vez en la historia existe un miedo generalizado al mismo tiempo en gran parte de la población mundial. Y el miedo es uno de los estados emocionales que hace que el mundo se detenga. Todo en un compás de espera hasta que el peligro sea resuelto de alguna manera. Pero por ahora eso no va a pasar. ¿Por qué hay que tener cuidado? Porque el miedo es una emoción muy efectiva para el control social. El miedo a quedarse sin trabajo le hace al trabajador agachar la cabeza. El miedo a ser perseguido le hace al ciudadano resignarse frente al atropello del poderoso. El miedo a perder lo poco que se tiene lo hace a uno no ir por más. El miedo es una estrategia primitiva de coerción que dista mucho de lo que las sociedades modernas y democráticas mantenemos como ideal.
-Cuidado con la política del miedo, quiere decir.
-Claro, frente a esto, ¿qué hacer? La cooperación, otra vez sentirnos parte de algo colectivo. El antídoto para el miedo es cooperar y sentirnos parte de lo colectivo. Porque está el miedo real a enfermar. Pero también está el riesgo de consumir mensajes equivocados, mensajes tendenciosos o dirigidos a generar algo puntual y caer en esa trampa. Es muy importante conversar de esto, porque los poderosos pueden usar el término cuidarnos para controlarnos. El miedo predispone a eso.
-Hay un debate: ¿Cómo va a ser el mundo post pandemia?
El día después ya empezó. El mundo va a ser totalmente diferente. Cada pandemia a lo largo de la historia cambió las creencias de la época, y cambiaron a la sociedad. La pregunta cómo nos está cambiando. Pienso, como muchos, que se van a acelerar tendencias previas que existían antes de la pandemia. En términos de educación, vamos a una educación híbrida que nos requiere pensar nuevos desafíos. Por ejemplo, va a haber una educación a distancia mucho más importante que la que había antes de la pandemia. Pero también es cierto que nunca va a reemplazar al docente, al contacto humano, porque el cerebro, nuestro cerebro, aprende básicamente cuando algo nos motiva, nos inspira. Eso es lo que logra el docente con el contacto humano. Y como eso vamos a ver un aumento de las tendencias previas a la pandemia que se van a acelerar. Y esto puede sacar lo mejor del ser humano.
-Está dando un mensaje muy positivo en un momento en que no queda más remedio que estar un poco en soledad.
Ahora vamos al terreno de las herramientas para combatir este momento. Entra un término que es importante y qué es resiliencia. La resiliencia es una conducta humana, que nos permite enfrentar un problema, atravesarlo. Superarlo y salir fortalecidos. Se estudiaron desastres previos y se vio que una gran parte de la población sale más resiliente, así que probablemente una gran parte de la población que está sufriendo saldrá más resiliente. Lo que yo primero quiero comentar es que aceptar emociones negativas es parte de nuestro bienestar, ya que vamos a atravesar dolor, estamos atravesando dolor, sufrimiento y aceptar eso es parte del bienestar. El bienestar no es solo emociones positivas. Aceptar las emociones negativas es parte del bienestar. Hay una cosa que nombraste que es la soledad, que es un tema muy, muy importante, porque el cerebro humano es un órgano social. Nosotros necesitamos del otro y los vínculos humanos impactan en nuestro bienestar. Hay varios estudios que demuestran que la gente que tiene más vínculos humanos tiene más expectativa de vida. Somos seres sociales, necesitamos vincularnos para nuestra supervivencia, para nuestro bienestar y este virus agarra lo mejor de nosotros, lo mejor de nuestra especie, que es el contacto humano, el contacto social, y lo usa en nuestra contra. Por eso una recomendación.
-Adelante
La primera te diría que voy a dar para pasar. Lo mejor en este momento con respecto al bienestar mental es mantener el distanciamiento físico, pero estar conectado socialmente. Usar la tecnología, por ejemplo. Esto que estamos haciendo ahora para conectarnos y llamar a una persona mayor que quizás hace mucho tiempo que no vemos. Mi mamá vive en Salto, es mayor, no podemos ir a visitarla. Mi hermano vive en Buenos Aires conmigo, pero la llamamos dos veces por día. A la noche, cuando comemos, los nietos la llaman come con nosotros por teléfono o por videoconferencia. Tenemos que usar la tecnología que yo muchas veces critiqué antes de la pandemia para estar conectados.
-Estar juntos pero separados.
-Tenemos que estar distanciados físicamente, pero no socialmente porque somos seres sociales. La soledad nos mata. Sentirnos solos crónicamente es un factor de mortalidad tan importante como la obesidad, la polución ambiental o el tabaquismo. Llamemos a una persona mayor que hace mucho que no vemos, estemos conectados con la tecnología porque somos seres sociales.
-¿Y no tener miedo a pedir ayuda, no?
-Es muy importante lo que decís, porque uno no tiene vergüenza de decir tengo sed, pero tiene vergüenza de decir que está solo.
-Mucha gente manifiesta ansiedad y no saber qué hacer. También apareció el insomnio. ¿Hay alguna explicación desde lo neuronal?
-Hablamos de que estamos frente a la amenaza de un virus novedoso e invisible. La principal conducta humana en millones de años fue y es detectar el peligro y sobrevivir. Ahora, ¿qué es la ansiedad? La ansiedad es un miedo anticipatorio. Yo puedo ver, yo tengo miedo porque anda el virus por las calles de Buenos Aires. Está presente la amenaza. Eso es real. El ser humano, a diferencia de otras especies, tiene la posibilidad de recrear escenarios pasados y de imaginar escenarios futuros. Pero también eso es bueno evolutivamente porque uno, revisando el pasado, aprende para sobrevivir e imaginando el futuro. Tiene escenarios para protegerse y sobrevivir, pero también puede haber una ansiedad patológica que nos afecta.
-¿Pero es bueno que estemos preocupados?
-Buen punto: mindfulness, ¿puede contarnos qué es?
-Es una técnica de meditación con raíces budistas, que hoy la ciencia la usa y básicamente consta en una atención plena, una atención al presente sin juzgar, porque cuando uno está concentrado en el presente, el cerebro es mucho más productivo y más feliz, y los pensamientos ansiosos desaparecen, relajan su actividad porque nos concentramos en el presente.
-¿Fluir usando el cuerpo y concentrándose en la respiración en forma prolongada puede ser algo fácil de hacer?
-Sí, totalmente disponible y que nos baje el estrés y la ansiedad. Así que ya te di tres recomendaciones, pero además, ayudar a otro es también una manera de estar mejor. Ya cuando uno recibe ayuda se siente bien, pero cuando uno es altruista, el altruismo activa sistemas de placer en el cerebro.
-¿Y la actividad física, se puede considerar una herramienta más?
-Definitivamente, por mínima que sea, la actividad física es otro factor que influye muchísimo. El ejercicio diario reduce la ansiedad y mejora el estado del ánimo. Yo te diría que uno de los mejores. El ejercicio físico es uno de los mejores ansiolíticos y antidepresivos. Que un ejercicio pueda guiarse por Internet es muy importante porque refuerza el pensamiento creativo, disminuye la ansiedad y mejora el ánimo, así que es clave.
-Hemos vivido automáticamente y esta crisis nos paró en seco, eso también es dramático.
- Sí, pero estamos con tiempo para planificar. Hay que tomar esta crisis, esta pandemia, más allá de todo el drama, como una oportunidad para bajar un poco el cambio, para bajar cambios, para desacelerar. Una oportunidad para volvernos más creativos, para volvernos menos egocéntricos, para ser más conscientes. Incluso para descubrir o redescubrir nuestra mejor versión.
-¿De todos modos, no puedo dejar de preguntarle cómo piensa el 2021?
-Sobre la Argentina, creo que ha llegado el momento de la verdad para nuestro país. La Argentina viene de una decadencia crónica que es inaceptable y donde ningún partido político puede levantar bandera. Nosotros tenemos el mismo ingreso per cápita que en el año 74. Hoy hay 50 por ciento de pobreza. Entonces, ha llegado el momento de la verdad. Tenemos que pensar, armar, explicar y hacer un país diferente. Tenemos que hacer algo nuevo, sin los atajos ni las trampas de siempre. No va más. Tenemos que salir por arriba de esta grieta que nos empobrece. Esta lucha de facciones que nos lleva a cada vez más pobreza y más problemas. Tenemos que empezar a discutir las preguntas importantes. Tenemos que recomponer las instituciones y protegernos de los abusos del poder, la corrupción, las arbitrariedades, los zigzagueos. Vamos a tener sí o sí que invertir en lo que no invertimos hasta ahora, que es salud, educación, nutrición.
-¿Existe la felicidad?
-Lo respondo desde las claves de la ciencia diaria. ¿Qué sabemos desde las claves del bienestar? Bastante. La genética juega un rol en nuestro bienestar. Antes se pensaba que en un 50 por ciento nuestro bienestar estaba determinado genéticamente por nuestros tíos, abuelos, padres. Hoy sabemos que un 30, es menor, pero la carga genética aporta lo suyo. Otro aspecto que sabemos desde la ciencia por varios estudios que dan bienestar es el contacto humano. ¿Cuántos amigos tienen? ¿Cuánta gente con quien contar tienen? Es un indicador muy importante de bienestar. También concentrarnos en algo que nos guste. Cortar el césped, dibujar, escribir. Cuando uno hace algo con pasión, el mundo desaparece. También, y esto nos ayuda para la pandemia, encontrar un propósito en la vida, encontrar una meta que nos supere. Sentirnos parte de un sueño mayor nos da mucha felicidad. También el altruismo impacta en nuestro cerebro positivamente. Disfrutar del presente. Reducir los pensamientos negativos. Tener metas personales. Tener gratitud es otra cosa que tenemos que hacer ahora, cuando todo anda mal. Hay algo en la vida que anda bien. Por ejemplo, en mi caso yo ahora puedo hablar, puedo ver, puedo mover los brazos y las piernas. Muchos no pueden hacerlo. Eso también es clave: reconocer y celebrar aquello que tenemos, tener sentimientos de gratitud por todo lo bueno que nos pasa, aún cuando nos rodea el drama, también ayuda a que seamos felices.
Fuente:https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/herramientas-doctor-cerebro-sobrevivir-cuarentena_0_qUGCISpUg.html
Definiciones de experto
Coronavirus en Argentina: las 8 herramientas de Facundo Manes para sobrevivir a la cuarentena
En el marco del ciclo Diálogos, de Clarín, el reconocido neurólogo dio sus claves para atravesar el encierro y superar la pandemia.
Facundo Manes. En una charla con Clarín, dio sus claves para atravesar este momento de encierro y pandemia.
Gonzalo Sánchez
09/07/2020
Es un largo viaje la vida de Facundo Manes, una de las personas más prestigiosas de la Argentina. Nació en Quilmes y creció en Arroyo Dulce y Salto, al norte de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Es neurólogo y neurocientífico, graduado en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y en la Universidad de Cambridge, Inglaterra, donde obtuvo su Doctorado en Ciencias. En 2001, regresó al país y creó el Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva, INECO, y el Instituto de Neurociencias de la Fundación Favaloro. También creó la Fundación INECO para la investigación en neurociencias cognitivas. Es profesor de prestigiosas universidades del exterior y ha publicado más de doscientos cincuenta trabajos científicos en las revistas internacionales más importantes de su especialidad. Manes está convencido de que la riqueza de un país "se mide por el capital humano, la educación, la ciencia y la tecnología, y que allí está la base del desarrollo social". Hace tiempo que recorre el interior brindando charlas.
Esta conversación con Clarín, que formó parte del ciclo Diálogos, exclusivo para suscriptores, se llevó a cabo en pleno endurecimiento de la cuarentena por el avance de la pandemia. Un concepto interesante anclado en el mensaje de Manes: para el neurólogo no hay un “día después” de la pandemia. En todo caso, señala, “el día después es ahora" y no hay tiempo que perder.
-Tenemos miedo, vivimos con miedo, estar expuestos a un virus nos predispone de un modo que no habíamos experimentado antes, ¿cómo lo vive usted?
-Estamos por primera vez en la historia emocionalmente sincronizados grandes sectores de la población mundial. Nunca pasó que una misma emoción predomine en todos los continentes. Es una crisis de salud, pero también humanitaria, social, de relaciones internacionales, de tensión entre potencias. Vamos a un mundo multipolar. Pero también es una crisis moral, política, ideológica. Y todo afecta nuestras emociones. Lo vivo como la mayoria de las personas. Tengo la suerte de contribuir con mi granito de arena al legado del doctor René Favaloro, tratando de acompañar a los médicos de la fundación, que están en el frente de batalla, y preocupado por el país porque esta situación requiere de un compromiso colectivo.
- No sirve salvarse solo, no se puede.
- El salvase quien pueda acá no existe. Está totalmente equivocado. Esta pandemia nos da la oportunidad de pensar qué somos realmente, quiénes somos, qué cosas valoramos, incluso para tratar de encontrar nuestra mejor versión, nos da una oportunidad para pensarnos colectivamente. Estamos más que nunca en el mismo mar. No en el mismo barco, en el mismo mar.
-Crisis sanitaria, crisis económica que se siente y se sentirá con más fuerza más adelante y el presente, el encierro y la incertidumbre. ¿Cómo hacer para no sentirnos abrumados?
-Es un momento muy delicado para nuestro bienestar mental. La pandemia y la cuarentena producen un impacto concreto y hay herramientas para intentar reducir esto. En epidemias previas en el sudeste asiático, también en Canadá, hubo cuarentenas que duraron muchos menos, aproximadamente 3 semanas. Algo tan largo como esto y que abarca a tanta gente nunca sucedió. Los datos que tenemos de impacto en la salud mental son de cuarentenas más cortas y se observó cómo aparecían síntomas negativos en la salud mental: estrés postraumático, depresión, ansiedad, agotamiento, insomnio, preocupaciones psicosomáticas, frustración, desapego, mayor uso de sustancias de tabaco, alcohol, drogas, más violencia doméstica, confusión e ira. Y este efecto es el efecto combinado de la pandemia y de la cuarentena.
-Nadie dice por ahora cómo será la salida.
-Es cierto. La falta de horizonte, la falta de una perspectiva, de una salida administrada que sea integral, multidisciplinaria, basada en la evidencia científica, con datos fiables y que aborde la enfermedad mental o el impacto mental, de la misma manera que se aborda la salud. La salud es una sola e incluye la salud mental, pero repito, tener un plan estratégico de salida administrada que sea integral, multidisciplinario, que nos dé perspectiva y que esté apoyado en datos confiables y de evidencia científica. Es clave que la sociedad tenga un horizonte y que haya una discusión seria, honesta, no de facciones, no contaminada por la política habitual, que sea un debate sanitario, social y económico. Y esto nos va a permitir reducir la incertidumbre. O sea que hay mucho que pueden hacer las autoridades para nuestro bienestar. Si los mensajes de las autoridades son contradictorios, se agrava el impacto mental de la pandemia. Las autoridades deben tener la empatía para comportarse y comunicar en forma transparente y forma muy responsable, con humildad, siendo conscientes de que muchos argentinos o ciudadanos están viviendo en la pobreza o han perdido el empleo.
"El cerebro es un órgano social", dice Manes.
-Parece buen punto, pero necesitamos herramientas, ¿qué podemos hacer nosotros por nosotros mismos en este tiempo de aguantar?
-Una herramienta, o un hábito, es ver noticias confiables y no por mucho tiempo, porque eso es lo que recomienda incluso la Organización Mundial de la Salud. Te voy a contar qué pasa en el cerebro. Yo tengo 51 años. Antes de la pandemia, me hice un chequeo y estoy bien. Si uno ve la probabilidad de que yo me enferme y me muera es ínfima. Puede pasar, pero es muy muy baja. Pero ahora que si Facundo Manes, que hace tres meses se hizo un chequeo y tiene buena salud, está todo el día viendo noticias de gente no muy confiable, contando los muertos, contando los muertos en el mundo, recibiendo whats apps de amigos con fotos de lo que pasó en China, en Madrid, empieza a pasar una cosa que llamamos negligencia de la probabilidad. Yo, que tengo casi muy pocas chances de que me pase algo, empiezo a pensar mucho más en la probabilidad de infectarme y percibo que me voy a enfermar gravemente y morir. Así que una de las cosas que tenemos que hacer para manejar el bienestar mental es ir a fuentes confiables de información y no mucho tiempo.
-Anotado: negligencia de la probabilidad.
-Otra conducta que sucede en esta crisis, sobre todo al principio, cuando nos avisaban que íbamos a entrar en cuarentena, es que la gente va al supermercado a comprar papel higiénico, ¿te acordás? Esto es una ilusión de control. Aparece ansiedad y miedo. La ansiedad es un miedo anticipatorio. Aprovisionar, claro, es una forma de bajar la ansiedad un poco. Tenemos los papeles higiénicos, pero después sube con mayor fuerza. Ya tenemos la ilusión del control, así que hay muchas conductas que estamos viendo que aparecen, pero a medida que vemos que el virus se propaga, también estamos viendo que se propaga el miedo y eso es muy importante charlarlo.
Facundo Manes. Foto: Luciano Thieberger.
-Por supuesto, adelante.
-Estamos viendo la propagación del virus desde el principio, pero también estamos viendo la propagación del miedo. Es porque nos enfrentamos a algo novedoso, amenazante, impredecible. Y por primera vez en la historia existe un miedo generalizado al mismo tiempo en gran parte de la población mundial. Y el miedo es uno de los estados emocionales que hace que el mundo se detenga. Todo en un compás de espera hasta que el peligro sea resuelto de alguna manera. Pero por ahora eso no va a pasar. ¿Por qué hay que tener cuidado? Porque el miedo es una emoción muy efectiva para el control social. El miedo a quedarse sin trabajo le hace al trabajador agachar la cabeza. El miedo a ser perseguido le hace al ciudadano resignarse frente al atropello del poderoso. El miedo a perder lo poco que se tiene lo hace a uno no ir por más. El miedo es una estrategia primitiva de coerción que dista mucho de lo que las sociedades modernas y democráticas mantenemos como ideal.
-Cuidado con la política del miedo, quiere decir.
-Claro, frente a esto, ¿qué hacer? La cooperación, otra vez sentirnos parte de algo colectivo. El antídoto para el miedo es cooperar y sentirnos parte de lo colectivo. Porque está el miedo real a enfermar. Pero también está el riesgo de consumir mensajes equivocados, mensajes tendenciosos o dirigidos a generar algo puntual y caer en esa trampa. Es muy importante conversar de esto, porque los poderosos pueden usar el término cuidarnos para controlarnos. El miedo predispone a eso.
-Hay un debate: ¿Cómo va a ser el mundo post pandemia?
El día después ya empezó. El mundo va a ser totalmente diferente. Cada pandemia a lo largo de la historia cambió las creencias de la época, y cambiaron a la sociedad. La pregunta cómo nos está cambiando. Pienso, como muchos, que se van a acelerar tendencias previas que existían antes de la pandemia. En términos de educación, vamos a una educación híbrida que nos requiere pensar nuevos desafíos. Por ejemplo, va a haber una educación a distancia mucho más importante que la que había antes de la pandemia. Pero también es cierto que nunca va a reemplazar al docente, al contacto humano, porque el cerebro, nuestro cerebro, aprende básicamente cuando algo nos motiva, nos inspira. Eso es lo que logra el docente con el contacto humano. Y como eso vamos a ver un aumento de las tendencias previas a la pandemia que se van a acelerar. Y esto puede sacar lo mejor del ser humano.
-Está dando un mensaje muy positivo en un momento en que no queda más remedio que estar un poco en soledad.
Ahora vamos al terreno de las herramientas para combatir este momento. Entra un término que es importante y qué es resiliencia. La resiliencia es una conducta humana, que nos permite enfrentar un problema, atravesarlo. Superarlo y salir fortalecidos. Se estudiaron desastres previos y se vio que una gran parte de la población sale más resiliente, así que probablemente una gran parte de la población que está sufriendo saldrá más resiliente. Lo que yo primero quiero comentar es que aceptar emociones negativas es parte de nuestro bienestar, ya que vamos a atravesar dolor, estamos atravesando dolor, sufrimiento y aceptar eso es parte del bienestar. El bienestar no es solo emociones positivas. Aceptar las emociones negativas es parte del bienestar. Hay una cosa que nombraste que es la soledad, que es un tema muy, muy importante, porque el cerebro humano es un órgano social. Nosotros necesitamos del otro y los vínculos humanos impactan en nuestro bienestar. Hay varios estudios que demuestran que la gente que tiene más vínculos humanos tiene más expectativa de vida. Somos seres sociales, necesitamos vincularnos para nuestra supervivencia, para nuestro bienestar y este virus agarra lo mejor de nosotros, lo mejor de nuestra especie, que es el contacto humano, el contacto social, y lo usa en nuestra contra. Por eso una recomendación.
-Adelante
La primera te diría que voy a dar para pasar. Lo mejor en este momento con respecto al bienestar mental es mantener el distanciamiento físico, pero estar conectado socialmente. Usar la tecnología, por ejemplo. Esto que estamos haciendo ahora para conectarnos y llamar a una persona mayor que quizás hace mucho tiempo que no vemos. Mi mamá vive en Salto, es mayor, no podemos ir a visitarla. Mi hermano vive en Buenos Aires conmigo, pero la llamamos dos veces por día. A la noche, cuando comemos, los nietos la llaman come con nosotros por teléfono o por videoconferencia. Tenemos que usar la tecnología que yo muchas veces critiqué antes de la pandemia para estar conectados.
-Estar juntos pero separados.
-Tenemos que estar distanciados físicamente, pero no socialmente porque somos seres sociales. La soledad nos mata. Sentirnos solos crónicamente es un factor de mortalidad tan importante como la obesidad, la polución ambiental o el tabaquismo. Llamemos a una persona mayor que hace mucho que no vemos, estemos conectados con la tecnología porque somos seres sociales.
-¿Y no tener miedo a pedir ayuda, no?
-Es muy importante lo que decís, porque uno no tiene vergüenza de decir tengo sed, pero tiene vergüenza de decir que está solo.
-Mucha gente manifiesta ansiedad y no saber qué hacer. También apareció el insomnio. ¿Hay alguna explicación desde lo neuronal?
-Hablamos de que estamos frente a la amenaza de un virus novedoso e invisible. La principal conducta humana en millones de años fue y es detectar el peligro y sobrevivir. Ahora, ¿qué es la ansiedad? La ansiedad es un miedo anticipatorio. Yo puedo ver, yo tengo miedo porque anda el virus por las calles de Buenos Aires. Está presente la amenaza. Eso es real. El ser humano, a diferencia de otras especies, tiene la posibilidad de recrear escenarios pasados y de imaginar escenarios futuros. Pero también eso es bueno evolutivamente porque uno, revisando el pasado, aprende para sobrevivir e imaginando el futuro. Tiene escenarios para protegerse y sobrevivir, pero también puede haber una ansiedad patológica que nos afecta.
-¿Pero es bueno que estemos preocupados?
-Buen punto: mindfulness, ¿puede contarnos qué es?
-Es una técnica de meditación con raíces budistas, que hoy la ciencia la usa y básicamente consta en una atención plena, una atención al presente sin juzgar, porque cuando uno está concentrado en el presente, el cerebro es mucho más productivo y más feliz, y los pensamientos ansiosos desaparecen, relajan su actividad porque nos concentramos en el presente.
-¿Fluir usando el cuerpo y concentrándose en la respiración en forma prolongada puede ser algo fácil de hacer?
-Sí, totalmente disponible y que nos baje el estrés y la ansiedad. Así que ya te di tres recomendaciones, pero además, ayudar a otro es también una manera de estar mejor. Ya cuando uno recibe ayuda se siente bien, pero cuando uno es altruista, el altruismo activa sistemas de placer en el cerebro.
-¿Y la actividad física, se puede considerar una herramienta más?
-Definitivamente, por mínima que sea, la actividad física es otro factor que influye muchísimo. El ejercicio diario reduce la ansiedad y mejora el estado del ánimo. Yo te diría que uno de los mejores. El ejercicio físico es uno de los mejores ansiolíticos y antidepresivos. Que un ejercicio pueda guiarse por Internet es muy importante porque refuerza el pensamiento creativo, disminuye la ansiedad y mejora el ánimo, así que es clave.
-Hemos vivido automáticamente y esta crisis nos paró en seco, eso también es dramático.
- Sí, pero estamos con tiempo para planificar. Hay que tomar esta crisis, esta pandemia, más allá de todo el drama, como una oportunidad para bajar un poco el cambio, para bajar cambios, para desacelerar. Una oportunidad para volvernos más creativos, para volvernos menos egocéntricos, para ser más conscientes. Incluso para descubrir o redescubrir nuestra mejor versión.
-¿De todos modos, no puedo dejar de preguntarle cómo piensa el 2021?
-Sobre la Argentina, creo que ha llegado el momento de la verdad para nuestro país. La Argentina viene de una decadencia crónica que es inaceptable y donde ningún partido político puede levantar bandera. Nosotros tenemos el mismo ingreso per cápita que en el año 74. Hoy hay 50 por ciento de pobreza. Entonces, ha llegado el momento de la verdad. Tenemos que pensar, armar, explicar y hacer un país diferente. Tenemos que hacer algo nuevo, sin los atajos ni las trampas de siempre. No va más. Tenemos que salir por arriba de esta grieta que nos empobrece. Esta lucha de facciones que nos lleva a cada vez más pobreza y más problemas. Tenemos que empezar a discutir las preguntas importantes. Tenemos que recomponer las instituciones y protegernos de los abusos del poder, la corrupción, las arbitrariedades, los zigzagueos. Vamos a tener sí o sí que invertir en lo que no invertimos hasta ahora, que es salud, educación, nutrición.
-¿Existe la felicidad?
-Lo respondo desde las claves de la ciencia diaria. ¿Qué sabemos desde las claves del bienestar? Bastante. La genética juega un rol en nuestro bienestar. Antes se pensaba que en un 50 por ciento nuestro bienestar estaba determinado genéticamente por nuestros tíos, abuelos, padres. Hoy sabemos que un 30, es menor, pero la carga genética aporta lo suyo. Otro aspecto que sabemos desde la ciencia por varios estudios que dan bienestar es el contacto humano. ¿Cuántos amigos tienen? ¿Cuánta gente con quien contar tienen? Es un indicador muy importante de bienestar. También concentrarnos en algo que nos guste. Cortar el césped, dibujar, escribir. Cuando uno hace algo con pasión, el mundo desaparece. También, y esto nos ayuda para la pandemia, encontrar un propósito en la vida, encontrar una meta que nos supere. Sentirnos parte de un sueño mayor nos da mucha felicidad. También el altruismo impacta en nuestro cerebro positivamente. Disfrutar del presente. Reducir los pensamientos negativos. Tener metas personales. Tener gratitud es otra cosa que tenemos que hacer ahora, cuando todo anda mal. Hay algo en la vida que anda bien. Por ejemplo, en mi caso yo ahora puedo hablar, puedo ver, puedo mover los brazos y las piernas. Muchos no pueden hacerlo. Eso también es clave: reconocer y celebrar aquello que tenemos, tener sentimientos de gratitud por todo lo bueno que nos pasa, aún cuando nos rodea el drama, también ayuda a que seamos felices.
Fuente:https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/herramientas-doctor-cerebro-sobrevivir-cuarentena_0_qUGCISpUg.html
La debacle educativa que traerá el Covid-19, por Andrés Oppenheimer
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
OPINIÓN | CORONAVIRUS
La debacle educativa que traerá el Covid-19
Andrés Oppenheimer
8 de Julio de 2020
El cierre de escuelas por la pandemia del Covid-19 y el aumento del aprendizaje en línea hará que aumente la brecha educacional entre quienes tienen un tutor privado, o una computadora y acceso a internet y quienes no los tienen. Pero hay una manera de limitar este problema, y es gratis.
Según las Naciones Unidas, 1200 millones de niños en todo el mundo se han quedado sin ir a la escuela por la pandemia, y eso podría hacer crecer enormemente la inequidad dentro de los países, y entre los países ricos y los países en desarrollo.
En América Latina, solo el 34 por ciento de los estudiantes de la escuela primaria, el 41 por ciento de los de secundaria y un 68 por ciento de los de la educación terciaria tienen acceso a computadores con internet en sus casas, según otro estudio de la OCDE. En Estados Unidos y Europa, la cifra es del 76 por ciento.
La creciente disparidad educativa acelerada por la pandemia de Covid-19 puede condenar a muchos países a la mediocridad, o a la pobreza, durante varias décadas . A medida que nos sumergimos más en la economía de Zoom, con más gente trabajando desde casa, más comercio electrónico y más robots haciendo trabajo manual en las fábricas, la educación será más importante que nunca.
Es por eso que es tan importante que todos conozcan la fantástica labor del Khan Academy ( Khanacademy.org ), una plataforma de aprendizaje en línea gratuita que ayuda a millones de estudiantes en todo el mundo a resolver sus problemas de matemáticas, ciencias y otras materias en inglés, español, portugués y otros idiomas.
Es una organización notable, que fue creada en 2008 por Salman Khan, un conocido innovador social de Silicon Valley. La compañía sin fines de lucro, de 200 empleados, tiene como lema: "Educación gratuita para cualquier persona y en cualquier lugar".
Desde el comienzo de la pandemia del Covid-19 en febrero, la Academia Khan vio aumentar su número de estudiantes registrados de 90 millones a 107 millones en todo el mundo. Decenas de millones más usan la plataforma solo para aprender una o más lecciones específicas sin registrarse como estudiantes regulares.
He seguido la trayectoria de Khan durante años, y escribí sobre él como uno de los grandes innovadores sociales del mundo en mi libro de 2014 Crear o Morir!. A diferencia de Mark Zuckerberg y otros innovadores que crearon plataformas de internet gratuitas y luego las monetizaron, Khan no permite avisos ni permite la venta de datos en su plataforma . La Academia Khan vive exclusivamente de las donaciones de más de 200.000 personas y corporaciones.
En una entrevista días atrás, Khan me dijo que comparte los temores de las Naciones Unidas sobre el aumento de la inequidad por el cierre de las escuelas.
"Varios estudios muestran que durante los tres meses de vacaciones de verano los estudiantes no solo dejan de aprender, sino también se olvidan de lo aprendido," me dijo Khan. "Ahora, con el Covid-19, los estudiantes habrán estado fuera de la escuela durante cinco o seis meses. Sus conocimiento se volverán obsoletos".
Agregó: "Esto podría llevar no solo a seis meses de aprendizaje perdido, sino a un año entero de aprendizaje perdido. Entonces, cualesquiera que sean las desigualdades que ya existían antes del Covid-19, es muy posible que se acentúen ahora".
Es por eso que es urgente que los estudiantes que se están quedando atrás en el aprendizaje en línea comiencen a usar los videos de la Academia Khan. Y también es preciso que los países y las escuelas inviten a la Academia Khan a sincronizar sus videos con sus programas de estudios.
En Brasil, México y Perú, algunas escuelas ya lo están haciendo. Pero en otros, como la Argentina, este recurso masivo y gratuito de aprendizaje en línea es en buena parte desconocido, o está prohibido por presión de sindicatos de la izquierda jurásica que se oponen a cualquier tipo de innovación educativa .
En lugar de quedarse sentados sin hacer nada, o esperar soluciones mágicas, los gobiernos y las escuelas deberían aprovechar estos videos educativos de la Academia Khan y encontrar la forma de hacerlos llegar a los estudiantes más pobres. Es un gran recurso que ya existe, funciona, y es gratuito.
@oppenheimera
Fuente:https://www.lanacion.com.ar/opinion/la-debacle-educativa-traera-covid-19-nid2393603
OPINIÓN | CORONAVIRUS
La debacle educativa que traerá el Covid-19
Andrés Oppenheimer
8 de Julio de 2020
El cierre de escuelas por la pandemia del Covid-19 y el aumento del aprendizaje en línea hará que aumente la brecha educacional entre quienes tienen un tutor privado, o una computadora y acceso a internet y quienes no los tienen. Pero hay una manera de limitar este problema, y es gratis.
Según las Naciones Unidas, 1200 millones de niños en todo el mundo se han quedado sin ir a la escuela por la pandemia, y eso podría hacer crecer enormemente la inequidad dentro de los países, y entre los países ricos y los países en desarrollo.
En América Latina, solo el 34 por ciento de los estudiantes de la escuela primaria, el 41 por ciento de los de secundaria y un 68 por ciento de los de la educación terciaria tienen acceso a computadores con internet en sus casas, según otro estudio de la OCDE. En Estados Unidos y Europa, la cifra es del 76 por ciento.
La creciente disparidad educativa acelerada por la pandemia de Covid-19 puede condenar a muchos países a la mediocridad, o a la pobreza, durante varias décadas . A medida que nos sumergimos más en la economía de Zoom, con más gente trabajando desde casa, más comercio electrónico y más robots haciendo trabajo manual en las fábricas, la educación será más importante que nunca.
Es por eso que es tan importante que todos conozcan la fantástica labor del Khan Academy ( Khanacademy.org ), una plataforma de aprendizaje en línea gratuita que ayuda a millones de estudiantes en todo el mundo a resolver sus problemas de matemáticas, ciencias y otras materias en inglés, español, portugués y otros idiomas.
Es una organización notable, que fue creada en 2008 por Salman Khan, un conocido innovador social de Silicon Valley. La compañía sin fines de lucro, de 200 empleados, tiene como lema: "Educación gratuita para cualquier persona y en cualquier lugar".
Desde el comienzo de la pandemia del Covid-19 en febrero, la Academia Khan vio aumentar su número de estudiantes registrados de 90 millones a 107 millones en todo el mundo. Decenas de millones más usan la plataforma solo para aprender una o más lecciones específicas sin registrarse como estudiantes regulares.
He seguido la trayectoria de Khan durante años, y escribí sobre él como uno de los grandes innovadores sociales del mundo en mi libro de 2014 Crear o Morir!. A diferencia de Mark Zuckerberg y otros innovadores que crearon plataformas de internet gratuitas y luego las monetizaron, Khan no permite avisos ni permite la venta de datos en su plataforma . La Academia Khan vive exclusivamente de las donaciones de más de 200.000 personas y corporaciones.
En una entrevista días atrás, Khan me dijo que comparte los temores de las Naciones Unidas sobre el aumento de la inequidad por el cierre de las escuelas.
"Varios estudios muestran que durante los tres meses de vacaciones de verano los estudiantes no solo dejan de aprender, sino también se olvidan de lo aprendido," me dijo Khan. "Ahora, con el Covid-19, los estudiantes habrán estado fuera de la escuela durante cinco o seis meses. Sus conocimiento se volverán obsoletos".
Agregó: "Esto podría llevar no solo a seis meses de aprendizaje perdido, sino a un año entero de aprendizaje perdido. Entonces, cualesquiera que sean las desigualdades que ya existían antes del Covid-19, es muy posible que se acentúen ahora".
Es por eso que es urgente que los estudiantes que se están quedando atrás en el aprendizaje en línea comiencen a usar los videos de la Academia Khan. Y también es preciso que los países y las escuelas inviten a la Academia Khan a sincronizar sus videos con sus programas de estudios.
En Brasil, México y Perú, algunas escuelas ya lo están haciendo. Pero en otros, como la Argentina, este recurso masivo y gratuito de aprendizaje en línea es en buena parte desconocido, o está prohibido por presión de sindicatos de la izquierda jurásica que se oponen a cualquier tipo de innovación educativa .
En lugar de quedarse sentados sin hacer nada, o esperar soluciones mágicas, los gobiernos y las escuelas deberían aprovechar estos videos educativos de la Academia Khan y encontrar la forma de hacerlos llegar a los estudiantes más pobres. Es un gran recurso que ya existe, funciona, y es gratuito.
@oppenheimera
Fuente:https://www.lanacion.com.ar/opinion/la-debacle-educativa-traera-covid-19-nid2393603
Monday, July 6, 2020
TED TALKS-Chieh Huang: How to know if it´s time to change careers
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Way We Work | February 2020
Chieh Huang: How to know if it´s time to change careers
Quitting your job can be scary, but sometimes it's the best thing you can do for your career, says entrepreneur Chieh Huang. He shares how to know when it's time to move on -- and what can you do to prepare.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chieh Huang · Entrepreneur
Chieh Huang is cofounder and CEO of Boxed.com, a company that's disrupting the wholesale shopping club experience.
Transcript:
I was not one of those kids that knew exactly what they wanted to do when they were growing up. In the last 15 years of my career, I've been an English teacher, attorney, video game creator and now, a toilet paper salesman, selling millions of rolls of toilet paper a year.
[The Way We Work]
Life is about finding the intersection of what you really, really love with what you're really, really good at. As simple as it sounds, it's really not that easy to find.
After a brief stint as an English teacher, I went to law school and ended up becoming an attorney at a big law firm here in New York City. Like most Americans, for the next two, three years, I was holding on to my job for dear life, working really late hours at a job that I thought maybe I was good at but certainly not one that I really loved. I then came upon the epiphany that it takes years if not tens of thousands of hours to get really good at something. I really didn't have a lot of time to waste.
This talk isn't for those looking to quit their job because they don't like their boss or they had a long day at work. This is for those that are ready to make the completely scary leap into a brand-new career. So as you think about making a career change, here are a few tips I hope you consider and a few things I've picked up along the way.
First, there's three things to think about before you're ready to move on. Number one: professional life is about learning. If you're not even interested in learning anymore, that's a huge red flag that there might not be a future for you in that industry.
Number two: career changes are often gut-driven. If you constantly have sleepless nights where you're wide awake staring at the ceiling thinking, "Oh, man. I can't live with myself if I never try to make this change or if I don't even actually investigate it," then trust your gut. It might be time for that career change.
On the flip side, one reason to not move on is short-term pain. If you don't like your boss or people at the office are grating on you, that's actually not a good reason to absolutely change your career, because when you do change a career, you generally have to start from the bottom, and you'll probably feel a lot of short-term pain, whether it's through a lack of salary or lack of a title. Pain at any job is inevitable.
So now you're convinced that it's time to change your career. Then there's three things to do immediately. First: network, network, network. No one ever builds a career without a good mentor or a good support network. What I mean by networking is getting all the great advice that you can possibly get. Technology has made it so simple to reach out to new people to say, "Hey, I'm thinking about making a career change. Do you have just five minutes to chat with me?" That passion and that hunger and that ability to be a sponge really attracts awesome mentors and people willing to give you their time to give you some good advice. So go out there and meet new people.
The second thing you need to do immediately is shore up your finances. The reality is, when you change your career, you'll either start with a job with a lower title or lower pay or maybe even no pay, especially if you're starting your own business. So going out there and making sure your finances are in order to make the transition less painful is really, really important. For me personally, as I made the transition from being an attorney over to a video game creator, I wanted to have at least six to 12 months of personal runway in the bank. Six to 12 months might not be the right number for you, but be honest with yourself on what that number should be.
Number three, if you're not ready to make the full jump right at this moment, then get your side hustle on. Side hustles could be anything from volunteering with an organization that's in the new industry you want to go into, could be starting your business part-time on the weekends. It's a free way to get a taste to see if you really love something.
So you're ready to make the move or maybe you already made the move. Here are three things you should think about doing, right now. One: do not -- I repeat -- do not burn bridges. You spent years building those bridges, why burn them now? The world is such a small place, especially with all these online platforms, that, believe me, you will see these people again and probably in the most inopportune times.
Number two: take stock of what you've learned in your previous career or careers. Most likely, a lot of those things are really applicable to your new job and your new career, whether it's interacting with people, playing on a team or dealing with jerks and assholes. All those things are really universally applicable. You'll find jerks no matter what industry you're in; no one's immune to it, everyone's got to figure it out, and you probably know how to do it already.
Lastly, when you start your new job, you're going to be nervous. But don't worry, take a deep breath, because this is what I want to tell you: you're part of a new team now, and everyone around you is rooting for your success, because your success is their success. So welcome to your new career.
Source:www.ted.com
The Way We Work | February 2020
Chieh Huang: How to know if it´s time to change careers
Quitting your job can be scary, but sometimes it's the best thing you can do for your career, says entrepreneur Chieh Huang. He shares how to know when it's time to move on -- and what can you do to prepare.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chieh Huang · Entrepreneur
Chieh Huang is cofounder and CEO of Boxed.com, a company that's disrupting the wholesale shopping club experience.
Transcript:
I was not one of those kids that knew exactly what they wanted to do when they were growing up. In the last 15 years of my career, I've been an English teacher, attorney, video game creator and now, a toilet paper salesman, selling millions of rolls of toilet paper a year.
[The Way We Work]
Life is about finding the intersection of what you really, really love with what you're really, really good at. As simple as it sounds, it's really not that easy to find.
After a brief stint as an English teacher, I went to law school and ended up becoming an attorney at a big law firm here in New York City. Like most Americans, for the next two, three years, I was holding on to my job for dear life, working really late hours at a job that I thought maybe I was good at but certainly not one that I really loved. I then came upon the epiphany that it takes years if not tens of thousands of hours to get really good at something. I really didn't have a lot of time to waste.
This talk isn't for those looking to quit their job because they don't like their boss or they had a long day at work. This is for those that are ready to make the completely scary leap into a brand-new career. So as you think about making a career change, here are a few tips I hope you consider and a few things I've picked up along the way.
First, there's three things to think about before you're ready to move on. Number one: professional life is about learning. If you're not even interested in learning anymore, that's a huge red flag that there might not be a future for you in that industry.
Number two: career changes are often gut-driven. If you constantly have sleepless nights where you're wide awake staring at the ceiling thinking, "Oh, man. I can't live with myself if I never try to make this change or if I don't even actually investigate it," then trust your gut. It might be time for that career change.
On the flip side, one reason to not move on is short-term pain. If you don't like your boss or people at the office are grating on you, that's actually not a good reason to absolutely change your career, because when you do change a career, you generally have to start from the bottom, and you'll probably feel a lot of short-term pain, whether it's through a lack of salary or lack of a title. Pain at any job is inevitable.
So now you're convinced that it's time to change your career. Then there's three things to do immediately. First: network, network, network. No one ever builds a career without a good mentor or a good support network. What I mean by networking is getting all the great advice that you can possibly get. Technology has made it so simple to reach out to new people to say, "Hey, I'm thinking about making a career change. Do you have just five minutes to chat with me?" That passion and that hunger and that ability to be a sponge really attracts awesome mentors and people willing to give you their time to give you some good advice. So go out there and meet new people.
The second thing you need to do immediately is shore up your finances. The reality is, when you change your career, you'll either start with a job with a lower title or lower pay or maybe even no pay, especially if you're starting your own business. So going out there and making sure your finances are in order to make the transition less painful is really, really important. For me personally, as I made the transition from being an attorney over to a video game creator, I wanted to have at least six to 12 months of personal runway in the bank. Six to 12 months might not be the right number for you, but be honest with yourself on what that number should be.
Number three, if you're not ready to make the full jump right at this moment, then get your side hustle on. Side hustles could be anything from volunteering with an organization that's in the new industry you want to go into, could be starting your business part-time on the weekends. It's a free way to get a taste to see if you really love something.
So you're ready to make the move or maybe you already made the move. Here are three things you should think about doing, right now. One: do not -- I repeat -- do not burn bridges. You spent years building those bridges, why burn them now? The world is such a small place, especially with all these online platforms, that, believe me, you will see these people again and probably in the most inopportune times.
Number two: take stock of what you've learned in your previous career or careers. Most likely, a lot of those things are really applicable to your new job and your new career, whether it's interacting with people, playing on a team or dealing with jerks and assholes. All those things are really universally applicable. You'll find jerks no matter what industry you're in; no one's immune to it, everyone's got to figure it out, and you probably know how to do it already.
Lastly, when you start your new job, you're going to be nervous. But don't worry, take a deep breath, because this is what I want to tell you: you're part of a new team now, and everyone around you is rooting for your success, because your success is their success. So welcome to your new career.
Source:www.ted.com
TED TALKS-LeeAnn Renninger: The secret to giving great feedback
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Way We Work | January 2020
LeeAnn Renninger: The secret to giving great feedback
Humans have been coming up with ways to give constructive criticism for centuries, but somehow we're still pretty terrible at it. Cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renninger shares a scientifically proven method for giving effective feedback.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
LeeAnn Renninger · Cognitive psychologist
LeeAnn Renninger is the founder of LifeLabs Learning, a company that trains managers and teams at innovative companies around the globe. Her specialty is in rapid skill acquisition -- the fastest way to learn a skill that matters most.
Transcript:
If you look at a carpenter, they have a toolbox; a dentist, they have their drills. In our era and the type of work most of us are doing, the tool we most need is actually centered around being able to give and receive feedback well.
[The Way We Work]
Humans have been talking about feedback for centuries. In fact, Confucius, way back in 500 BC, talked about how important it is to be able to say difficult messages well.
But to be honest, we're still pretty bad at it. In fact, a recent Gallup survey found that only 26 percent of employees strongly agree that the feedback they get actually improves their work. Those numbers are pretty dismal.
So what's going on? The way that most people give their feedback actually isn't brain-friendly. People fall into one of two camps. Either they're of the camp that is very indirect and soft and the brain doesn't even recognize that feedback is being given or it's just simply confused, or they fall into the other camp of being too direct, and with that, it tips the other person into the land of being defensive.
There's this part of the brain called the amygdala, and it's scanning at all times to figure out whether the message has a social threat attached to it. With that, we'll move forward to defensiveness, we'll move backwards in retreat, and what happens is the feedback giver then starts to disregulate as well. They add more ums and ahs and justifications, and the whole thing gets wonky really fast.
It doesn't have to be this way. I and my team have spent many years going into different companies and asking who here is a great feedback giver. Anybody who's named again and again, we actually bring into our labs to see what they're doing differently. And what we find is that there's a four-part formula that you can use to say any difficult message well.
OK, are you ready for it? Here we go. The first part of the formula is what we call the micro-yes. Great feedback givers begin their feedback by asking a question that is short but important. It lets the brain know that feedback is actually coming. It would be something, for example, like, "Do you have five minutes to talk about how that last conversation went" or "I have some ideas for how we can improve things. Can I share them with you?" This micro-yes question does two things for you. First of all, it's going to be a pacing tool. It lets the other person know that feedback is about to be given. And the second thing it does is it creates a moment of buy-in. I can say yes or no to that yes or no question. And with that, I get a feeling of autonomy.
The second part of the feedback formula is going to be giving your data point. Here, you should name specifically what you saw or heard, and cut out any words that aren't objective. There's a concept we call blur words. A blur word is something that can mean different things to different people. Blur words are not specific. So for example, if I say "You shouldn't be so defensive" or "You could be more proactive." What we see great feedback givers doing differently is they'll convert their blur words into actual data points. So for example, instead of saying, "You aren't reliable," we would say, "You said you'd get that email to me by 11, and I still don't have it yet." Specificity is also important when it comes to positive feedback, and the reason for that is that we want to be able to specify exactly what we want the other person to increase or diminish. And if we stick with blur words, they actually won't have any clue particularly what to do going forward to keep repeating that behavior.
The third part of the feedback formula is the impact statement. Here, you name exactly how that data point impacted you. So, for example, I might say, "Because I didn't get the message, I was blocked on my work and couldn't move forward" or "I really liked how you added those stories, because it helped me grasp the concepts faster." It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and logic between the points, which is something the brain really craves.
The fourth part of the feedback formula is a question. Great feedback givers wrap their feedback message with a question. They'll ask something like, "Well, how do you see it?" Or "This is what I'm thinking we should do, but what are your thoughts on it?" What it does is it creates commitment rather than just compliance. It makes the conversation no longer be a monologue, but rather becomes a joint problem-solving situation.
But there's one last thing. Great feedback givers not only can say messages well, but also, they ask for feedback regularly. In fact, our research on perceived leadership shows that you shouldn't wait for feedback to be given to you -- what we call push feedback -- but rather, you should actively ask for feedback, what we call pulling feedback. Pulling feedback establishes you as a continual learner and puts the power in your hands. The most challenging situations are actually the ones that call for the most skillful feedback. But it doesn't have to be hard.
Now that you know this four-part formula, you can mix and match it to make it work for any difficult conversation.
Source:www.ted.com
The Way We Work | January 2020
LeeAnn Renninger: The secret to giving great feedback
Humans have been coming up with ways to give constructive criticism for centuries, but somehow we're still pretty terrible at it. Cognitive psychologist LeeAnn Renninger shares a scientifically proven method for giving effective feedback.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
LeeAnn Renninger · Cognitive psychologist
LeeAnn Renninger is the founder of LifeLabs Learning, a company that trains managers and teams at innovative companies around the globe. Her specialty is in rapid skill acquisition -- the fastest way to learn a skill that matters most.
Transcript:
If you look at a carpenter, they have a toolbox; a dentist, they have their drills. In our era and the type of work most of us are doing, the tool we most need is actually centered around being able to give and receive feedback well.
[The Way We Work]
Humans have been talking about feedback for centuries. In fact, Confucius, way back in 500 BC, talked about how important it is to be able to say difficult messages well.
But to be honest, we're still pretty bad at it. In fact, a recent Gallup survey found that only 26 percent of employees strongly agree that the feedback they get actually improves their work. Those numbers are pretty dismal.
So what's going on? The way that most people give their feedback actually isn't brain-friendly. People fall into one of two camps. Either they're of the camp that is very indirect and soft and the brain doesn't even recognize that feedback is being given or it's just simply confused, or they fall into the other camp of being too direct, and with that, it tips the other person into the land of being defensive.
There's this part of the brain called the amygdala, and it's scanning at all times to figure out whether the message has a social threat attached to it. With that, we'll move forward to defensiveness, we'll move backwards in retreat, and what happens is the feedback giver then starts to disregulate as well. They add more ums and ahs and justifications, and the whole thing gets wonky really fast.
It doesn't have to be this way. I and my team have spent many years going into different companies and asking who here is a great feedback giver. Anybody who's named again and again, we actually bring into our labs to see what they're doing differently. And what we find is that there's a four-part formula that you can use to say any difficult message well.
OK, are you ready for it? Here we go. The first part of the formula is what we call the micro-yes. Great feedback givers begin their feedback by asking a question that is short but important. It lets the brain know that feedback is actually coming. It would be something, for example, like, "Do you have five minutes to talk about how that last conversation went" or "I have some ideas for how we can improve things. Can I share them with you?" This micro-yes question does two things for you. First of all, it's going to be a pacing tool. It lets the other person know that feedback is about to be given. And the second thing it does is it creates a moment of buy-in. I can say yes or no to that yes or no question. And with that, I get a feeling of autonomy.
The second part of the feedback formula is going to be giving your data point. Here, you should name specifically what you saw or heard, and cut out any words that aren't objective. There's a concept we call blur words. A blur word is something that can mean different things to different people. Blur words are not specific. So for example, if I say "You shouldn't be so defensive" or "You could be more proactive." What we see great feedback givers doing differently is they'll convert their blur words into actual data points. So for example, instead of saying, "You aren't reliable," we would say, "You said you'd get that email to me by 11, and I still don't have it yet." Specificity is also important when it comes to positive feedback, and the reason for that is that we want to be able to specify exactly what we want the other person to increase or diminish. And if we stick with blur words, they actually won't have any clue particularly what to do going forward to keep repeating that behavior.
The third part of the feedback formula is the impact statement. Here, you name exactly how that data point impacted you. So, for example, I might say, "Because I didn't get the message, I was blocked on my work and couldn't move forward" or "I really liked how you added those stories, because it helped me grasp the concepts faster." It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and logic between the points, which is something the brain really craves.
The fourth part of the feedback formula is a question. Great feedback givers wrap their feedback message with a question. They'll ask something like, "Well, how do you see it?" Or "This is what I'm thinking we should do, but what are your thoughts on it?" What it does is it creates commitment rather than just compliance. It makes the conversation no longer be a monologue, but rather becomes a joint problem-solving situation.
But there's one last thing. Great feedback givers not only can say messages well, but also, they ask for feedback regularly. In fact, our research on perceived leadership shows that you shouldn't wait for feedback to be given to you -- what we call push feedback -- but rather, you should actively ask for feedback, what we call pulling feedback. Pulling feedback establishes you as a continual learner and puts the power in your hands. The most challenging situations are actually the ones that call for the most skillful feedback. But it doesn't have to be hard.
Now that you know this four-part formula, you can mix and match it to make it work for any difficult conversation.
Source:www.ted.com
TED TALKS-Adam Grant: Are you a giver or a taker?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TED@IBM | November 2016
Adam Grant: Are you a giver or a taker?
In every workplace, there are three basic kinds of people: givers, takers and matchers. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant breaks down these personalities and offers simple strategies to promote a culture of generosity and keep self-serving employees from taking more than their share.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Adam Grant · Organizational psychologist
After years of studying the dynamics of success and productivity in the workplace, Adam Grant discovered a powerful and often overlooked motivator: helping others
Transcript:
I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here --
And then I want you to point at that person for me.
OK, don't actually do it.
But, as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces, and I find paranoia everywhere. Paranoia is caused by people that I call "takers." Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me. The opposite is a giver. It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, "What can I do for you?"
I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style. We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default. I have a short test you can take to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker, and you can take it right now.
[The Narcissist Test]
[Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.]
[Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.]
This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it, but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon, the more worried we should be that you're a taker.
Of course, not all takers are narcissists. Some are just givers who got burned one too many times. Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today, and that's called a psychopath.
I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are, and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world's cultures. And I found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. They choose this third style called "matching." If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo -- I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And that seems like a safe way to live your life. But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life? The answer to that question is a very definitive ... maybe.
I studied dozens of organizations, thousands of people. I had engineers measuring their productivity.
I looked at medical students' grades -- even salespeople's revenue.
And, unexpectedly, the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers. The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favors than they got back. They were so busy doing other people's jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others," which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody.
And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople. I actually reached out to one of those salespeople who had a very high giver score. And I asked him, "Why do you suck at your job --" I didn't ask it that way, but --
"What's the cost of generosity in sales?" And he said, "Well, I just care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products."
So just out of curiosity, how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? Raise your hands. OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data.
But actually, it turns out there's a twist here, because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. We have a huge body of evidence -- many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization -- and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention -- even lower operating expenses. So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed.
So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you're a matcher, you believe in "An eye for an eye" -- a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person.
And that way justice gets served.
Well, most people are matchers. And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again.
Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople, tracking their revenue. What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes. They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue. The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity and medical students' grades. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that I can track. Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools -- even governments. Are you ready?
I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm.
The first thing that's really critical is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people, but if they're not careful, they burn out. So you have to protect the givers in your midst. And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker. It's the guy, not the cat.
His name is Adam Rifkin. He's a very successful serial entrepreneur who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people. And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor. Adam said, "You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people's lives." That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. Or It might be even something as basic as saying, "You know, I'm going to try and figure out if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed." And those five-minute favors are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves.
The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot. This may hit a little too close to home for some of you.
[So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?]
What you see with successful givers is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too. If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier. We can make it easier for people to ask for help. A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals. We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking, and on other floors, they did very little of it. The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common, where it was the norm, was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was to help other nurses on the unit. When that role was available, nurses said, "It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help -- it's actually encouraged."
Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data say that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations starts with a request. But a lot of people don't ask. They don't want to look incompetent, they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others. Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how.
But I think the most important thing, if you want to build a culture of successful givers, is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity, you should hire a bunch of givers. But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right -- that the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver. Think about it this way: one bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen. I don't know what that means --
But I hope you do.
No -- let even one taker into a team, and you will see that the givers will stop helping. They'll say, "I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks. Why should I contribute?" Whereas if you let one giver into a team, you don't get an explosion of generosity. More often, people are like, "Great! That person can do all our work." So, effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it's about weeding out the takers. If you can do that well, you'll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don't have to worry about the consequences. And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm.
So how do you catch a taker before it's too late? We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker, especially on first impressions. There's a personality trait that throws us off. It's called agreeableness, one the major dimensions of personality across cultures. Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada --
Where there was actually a national contest to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank, "As Canadian as ..." I thought the winning entry was going to be, "As Canadian as maple syrup," or, "... ice hockey." But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be -- I kid you not -- "As Canadian as possible under the circumstances."
Now for those of you who are highly agreeable, or maybe slightly Canadian, you get this right away. How could I ever say I'm any one thing when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people? Disagreeable people do less of it. They're more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school.
That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact.
So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers and disagreeable people were takers. But then I gathered the data, and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits, because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others?
If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for, and draw a two-by-two.
The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly, although you might call them by a slightly different name.
We forget about the other two combinations. There are disagreeable givers in our organizations. There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others' best interests at heart. Or as an engineer put it, "Oh, disagreeable givers -- like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system."
If that helps you.
Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker."
The other combination we forget about is the deadly one -- the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who's nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back.
And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, "Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?" The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don't have as much power, who can do them no good. And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver.
So if we do all this well, if we can weed takers out of organizations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition, people will realize success is really more about contribution.
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. And if we can spread that belief, we can actually turn paranoia upside down. There's a name for that. It's called "pronoia." Pronoia is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being.
That they're going around behind your back and saying exceptionally glowing things about you. The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion -- it's reality. I want to live in a world where givers succeed, and I hope you will help me create that world. Thank you.
Source:www.ted.com
TED@IBM | November 2016
Adam Grant: Are you a giver or a taker?
In every workplace, there are three basic kinds of people: givers, takers and matchers. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant breaks down these personalities and offers simple strategies to promote a culture of generosity and keep self-serving employees from taking more than their share.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Adam Grant · Organizational psychologist
After years of studying the dynamics of success and productivity in the workplace, Adam Grant discovered a powerful and often overlooked motivator: helping others
Transcript:
I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here --
And then I want you to point at that person for me.
OK, don't actually do it.
But, as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces, and I find paranoia everywhere. Paranoia is caused by people that I call "takers." Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me. The opposite is a giver. It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, "What can I do for you?"
I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style. We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default. I have a short test you can take to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker, and you can take it right now.
[The Narcissist Test]
[Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.]
[Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.]
This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it, but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon, the more worried we should be that you're a taker.
Of course, not all takers are narcissists. Some are just givers who got burned one too many times. Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today, and that's called a psychopath.
I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are, and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world's cultures. And I found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. They choose this third style called "matching." If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo -- I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And that seems like a safe way to live your life. But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life? The answer to that question is a very definitive ... maybe.
I studied dozens of organizations, thousands of people. I had engineers measuring their productivity.
I looked at medical students' grades -- even salespeople's revenue.
And, unexpectedly, the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers. The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favors than they got back. They were so busy doing other people's jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others," which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody.
And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople. I actually reached out to one of those salespeople who had a very high giver score. And I asked him, "Why do you suck at your job --" I didn't ask it that way, but --
"What's the cost of generosity in sales?" And he said, "Well, I just care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products."
So just out of curiosity, how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? Raise your hands. OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data.
But actually, it turns out there's a twist here, because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. We have a huge body of evidence -- many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization -- and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention -- even lower operating expenses. So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed.
So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you're a matcher, you believe in "An eye for an eye" -- a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person.
And that way justice gets served.
Well, most people are matchers. And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again.
Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople, tracking their revenue. What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes. They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue. The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity and medical students' grades. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that I can track. Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools -- even governments. Are you ready?
I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm.
The first thing that's really critical is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people, but if they're not careful, they burn out. So you have to protect the givers in your midst. And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker. It's the guy, not the cat.
His name is Adam Rifkin. He's a very successful serial entrepreneur who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people. And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor. Adam said, "You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people's lives." That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. Or It might be even something as basic as saying, "You know, I'm going to try and figure out if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed." And those five-minute favors are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves.
The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot. This may hit a little too close to home for some of you.
[So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?]
What you see with successful givers is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too. If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier. We can make it easier for people to ask for help. A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals. We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking, and on other floors, they did very little of it. The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common, where it was the norm, was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was to help other nurses on the unit. When that role was available, nurses said, "It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help -- it's actually encouraged."
Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data say that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations starts with a request. But a lot of people don't ask. They don't want to look incompetent, they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others. Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how.
But I think the most important thing, if you want to build a culture of successful givers, is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity, you should hire a bunch of givers. But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right -- that the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver. Think about it this way: one bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen. I don't know what that means --
But I hope you do.
No -- let even one taker into a team, and you will see that the givers will stop helping. They'll say, "I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks. Why should I contribute?" Whereas if you let one giver into a team, you don't get an explosion of generosity. More often, people are like, "Great! That person can do all our work." So, effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it's about weeding out the takers. If you can do that well, you'll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don't have to worry about the consequences. And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm.
So how do you catch a taker before it's too late? We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker, especially on first impressions. There's a personality trait that throws us off. It's called agreeableness, one the major dimensions of personality across cultures. Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada --
Where there was actually a national contest to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank, "As Canadian as ..." I thought the winning entry was going to be, "As Canadian as maple syrup," or, "... ice hockey." But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be -- I kid you not -- "As Canadian as possible under the circumstances."
Now for those of you who are highly agreeable, or maybe slightly Canadian, you get this right away. How could I ever say I'm any one thing when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people? Disagreeable people do less of it. They're more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school.
That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact.
So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers and disagreeable people were takers. But then I gathered the data, and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits, because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others?
If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for, and draw a two-by-two.
The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly, although you might call them by a slightly different name.
We forget about the other two combinations. There are disagreeable givers in our organizations. There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others' best interests at heart. Or as an engineer put it, "Oh, disagreeable givers -- like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system."
If that helps you.
Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker."
The other combination we forget about is the deadly one -- the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who's nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back.
And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, "Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?" The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don't have as much power, who can do them no good. And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver.
So if we do all this well, if we can weed takers out of organizations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition, people will realize success is really more about contribution.
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. And if we can spread that belief, we can actually turn paranoia upside down. There's a name for that. It's called "pronoia." Pronoia is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being.
That they're going around behind your back and saying exceptionally glowing things about you. The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion -- it's reality. I want to live in a world where givers succeed, and I hope you will help me create that world. Thank you.
Source:www.ted.com
TED TALKS-Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TED@IBM | September 2014
Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kare Anderson · Writer
A columnist for Forbes, Kare Anderson writes on behavioral research-based ways to become more deeply connected.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind.
I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks"— "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." Thank you very much. Thank you.
Source:www.ted.com
TED@IBM | September 2014
Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kare Anderson · Writer
A columnist for Forbes, Kare Anderson writes on behavioral research-based ways to become more deeply connected.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind.
I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks"— "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." Thank you very much. Thank you.
Source:www.ted.com
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