EDITORIALES-Alcohol: hablá con tu hijo

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EDITORIALES

Alcohol: hablá con tu hijo


28 de Septiembre de 2019

Lograda campaña del CPA tendiente a desalentar el consumo de alcohol entre los más jóvenes

Uno de los equívocos a los que la modernidad ha conducido a los más jóvenes es a creer que diversión y alcohol van de la mano; que sin tomar no hay alegría. Se cae así en iniciaciones cada vez más tempranas; se habla de registros a partir de los diez años, aun cuando los profesionales advierten que la llamada "madurez hepática" se alcanza recién entre los 18 y los 20 años. Un estudio de la Secretaría de Programación para la Prevención de la Drogadicción y la Lucha contra el Narcotráfico (Sedronar) da cuenta de que, entre 2010 y 2017, el consumo de alcohol en adolescentes de entre 12 y 17 años aumentó más de un 13%, siendo la franja etaria en que se verificó el mayor incremento. El 50% de los menores de 14 años ya lo probó, con cifras similares entre los sexos.

Cuanto más jóvenes, más rápido alcanzan el estado de embriaguez, al tiempo que la eliminación en cuerpos de menor peso también se ralentiza. Las intoxicaciones alcohólicas son así mayores en los jóvenes que en los adultos. Los daños al sistema nervioso central propios del consumo temprano se traducen también en trastornos mentales y de conducta, problemas gastrointestinales, cáncer, enfermedades cardiovasculares o trastornos inmunológicos que los acompañarán el resto de la vida.

Promover el consumo responsable apunta a contagiar conductas positivas. Esto incluye concientizar sobre la venta responsable, la importancia de la figura del conductor designado a la salida de bares y boliches, el respeto por quien no quiera consumir y recomendaciones en torno de alternar la ingestión con agua, consumir alimentos antes y durante esa ingesta, y no participar en juegos que incentiven el consumo excesivo, entre otras.

El siempre activo Consejo Publicitario Argentino (CPA) trabaja desde el año pasado en una campaña sobre estas temáticas para desnaturalizar el hábito y alertar sobre el impacto del consumo en la salud juvenil. Su campaña #ChicosSinAlcohol ( chicossinalcohol.org.ar) ha despertado fuerte adhesión y la pieza "Caminar" resulta muy movilizadora ( youtube.com/watch?v=monhc0NiLWw). Con la creatividad de J. Walter Thompson Argentina y el asesoramiento de prestigiosas ONG como Fundación Padres, El Reparo y Fundartox, la campaña se difundió en medios de prensa y en redes sociales anticipándose al Día de la Primavera en el que tradicionalmente los estudiantes celebran su día, muchas veces con desbordes, juntándose en plazas y bares con tristes resultados, algo que este año, por haber caído en sábado, alcanzó menor impacto.

En la antesala del fin de año, arranca la temporada de fiestas de egresados, con los trágicamente conocidos trenes de la alegría, colectivos discoteca o partybus, boliches móviles o de traslado de los jóvenes a discotecas, bares o restaurantes en los que muchos se entregarán al baile y a la peligrosa ingesta de cócteles y bebidas variadas. Recordemos que varios de estos transportes no están habilitados en la ciudad de Buenos Aires y que los operativos de control se refuerzan en estos meses, aplicando elevadas multas a vehículos y conductores.

No habrá campaña que pueda suplir en su rol a padres y maestros. El mensaje de la campaña se dirige particularmente a los padres como agentes de prevención, capaces de advertir a sus hijos de forma natural y simple sobre los terribles efectos de este peligroso consumo al que muchas veces se llega por curiosidad o por imitación.

Estar cerca y disponibles, orientando y guiando, sin sermones ni tonos autoritarios, escuchando cariñosamente. Poner el acento en dedicar tiempo a la conversación con los hijos, hoy amenazada por múltiples demandas. A mayor apoyo familiar, menor propensión al consumo. Encontrar un momento en la semana para hablar con ellos sobre las irreversibles consecuencias del consumo precoz de alcohol para el cerebro es ayudarlos a construir su proyecto de vida adulta de manera que merezca ser vivido.


Fuente:https://www.lanacion.com.ar/editoriales/alcohol-habla-con-tu-hijo-nid2292084

How to make your arguments stronger (hint: longer is not the answer)

The following information is used for educational purposes only.


WE HUMANS

How to make your arguments stronger (hint: longer is not the answer)

Sep 25, 2019 / Niro Savanthan

Monica Garwood

Resist the temptation to bury people under a blizzard of evidence, says psychology researcher Niro Sivanathan. He explains why.


Have you ever been in a heated discussion (Breaking Bad vs. The Wire; spring vs. fall; small college vs. large university; carbon offsets vs. renewable energy credits) and wanted so badly to show the other person just how wrong they were? If you’re like most of us, you tried to overwhelm your opponent with sheer quantity, to barrage them with every scrap of evidence you could think up.

As it turns out, piling on the proof is an unwise approach, says Niro Sivanathan, a psychology researcher and associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School in a TEDxLondonBusinessSchool talk. That’s because when we double down on our arguments, we’re setting ourselves up to be undone by the so-called “dilution effect”.

For humans, receiving too much information interferes with our ability to process it. Sivanathan explain that our minds deal with this by quickly sorting the input received into two types: diagnostic and non-diagnostic. He says, “Diagnostic information is information of relevance to the evaluation being made; non-diagnostic is information that is irrelevant or inconsequential to that evaluation. When both categories of information are mixed, dilution occurs.”

To show you how this works, Sivanathan describes two different students: Tim and Tom.

Tim studies 31 hours a week outside class.

Tom also studies 31 hours a week outside class. He has a brother and two sisters, he visits his grandparents, he once went on a blind date, and he plays pool every two months.

In an experiment, says Sivanathan, most of the participants said that Tim had a significantly higher GPA than Tom — even though the two put in the exact same amount of time studying. Why? All of the non-diagnostic information (the extraneous detail about his personal life) given about Tom diluted the diagnostic information (how many hours he studies) presented.

“The most robust psychological explanation for this is averaging,” says Sivanathan. Rather than adding up pieces of information and assigning them different values, most of us appear to average them in their minds. He adds, “So when you introduce irrelevant or even weak arguments, those weak arguments reduce the weight of your overall argument.”

One example of how this dilution effect has real-world consequences is in drug advertising, says Sivanathan. It’s requirement in the US for the side effects of prescription medications must be listed at the end of TV or radio commercials. But if you listen, you’ll notice that the commercials never end right after the listing of the major side effects such as stroke, heart attack or death. Instead, they’ll either end on minor side effects (such as headaches or itchiness) or on neutral information (such as telling people to discuss medication with their doctor). The drug manufacturers, consciously or not, is using the dilution effect — by including so much information, they end up watering down consumers’ assessments of how risky the drug actually is.

Sivanathan found this phenomenon confirmed in his own research. In one study, two groups of people were shown lists of side effects for the same drug. One group’s list contained both major and minor side effects, while the other group’s list contained just the major side effects. The results: “Individuals who were exposed to both the major side effects as well as the minor side effects rated the drug’s overall severity to be significantly lower than those who were only exposed to the major side effects,” says Sivanathan. “Furthermore, they also showed greater attraction towards consuming this drug.”

How can you use his insights to win over people in your own life? Sivanathan advises us to stick to their strongest points; resist the temptation to try besting others with brute force. “ “The next time you want to speak up in a meeting, speak in favor of a government legislation that you’re deeply passionate about, or help a friend see the world through a different lens, it’s important to note that the delivery of your message is every bit as important as its content,” he says. “You cannot increase the quality of an argument by simply increasing the quantity of your argument.”

Watch his TEDxLondonBusinessSchool talk now:





Dr Niro Sivanathan will talk about how a cognitive quirk in the evaluation of information holds important implications for how to communicate to ensure our messages are effective and influential. Dr Niro Sivanathan is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at LBS, where he speaks, teaches and consults on topics of influence, negotiations and decision-making. His research, published in top Science, Management and Psychology journals, explores how our psychological experience with status and power influences our judgements, decisions and behaviour.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Niro Savanthan Niro Sivanathan is an associate professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. His research explores how the psychology of the self – specifically our motivation to maintain the integrity of the self – influences our decision making.


Source:https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-make-your-arguments-stronger-hint-longer-is-not-the-answer/

TED TALKS: Tim Flannery:Can seaweed help curb global warming?

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TEDSummit 2019 | July 2019


Tim Flannery:Can seaweed help curb global warming?


It's time for planetary-scale interventions to combat climate change -- and environmentalist Tim Flannery thinks seaweed can help. In a bold talk, he shares the epic carbon-capturing potential of seaweed, explaining how oceangoing seaweed farms created on a massive scale could trap all the carbon we emit into the atmosphere. Learn more about this potentially planet-saving solution -- and the work that's still needed to get there.



ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tim Flannery · Environmentalist

Explorer and professor Tim Flannery seeks to grasp the big picture of planetary evolution and how humans can affect it -- for better or for worse.

Transcript:

Oh, there's a lot of it. This is seaweed. It's pretty humble stuff. But it does have some remarkable qualities. For one, it grows really fast. So the carbon that is part of that seaweed, just a few weeks ago, was floating in the atmosphere as atmospheric CO2, driving all the adverse consequences of climate change. For the moment, it's locked safely away in the seaweed, but when that seaweed rots -- and by the smell of it, it's not far away -- when it rots, that CO2 will be released back to the atmosphere. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could find a way of keeping that CO2 locked up long-term, and thereby significantly contributing to solving the climate problem?
What I'm talking about here is drawdown. It's now become the other half of the climate challenge. And that's because we have delayed so long, in terms of addressing climate change, that we now have to do two very big and very difficult things at once. We have to cut our emissions and clean our energy supply at the same time that we draw significant volumes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. If we don't do that, about 25 percent of the CO2 we put in the air will remain there, by human standards, forever. So we have to act.
This is really a new phase in addressing the climate crisis and it demands new thinking. So, ideas like carbon offsets really don't make sense in the modern era. You know, when you offset something, you say, "I'll permit myself to put some greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but then I'll offset it by drawing it down." When you've got to both cut your emissions and draw down CO2, that thinking doesn't make sense anymore. And when we're talking about drawdown, we're talking about putting large volumes of greenhouses gases, particularly CO2, out of circulation. And to do that, we need a carbon price. We need a significant price that we'll pay for that service that we'll all benefit from.
We've made almost no progress so far with the second half of the climate challenge. It's not on most people's radar. And, you know, I must say, at times, I hear people saying, "I've lost hope that we can do anything about the climate crisis." And look, I've had my sleepless nights too, I can tell you. But I'm here today as an ambassador for this humble weed, seaweed. I think it has the potential to be a big part of addressing the challenge of climate change and a big part of our future.
Now, what the scientists are telling us we need to do over the next 80-odd years to the end of this century, is to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by three percent every year, and draw three gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year. Those numbers are so large that they baffle us. But that's what the scientists tell us we need to do. I really hate showing this graph, but I'm sorry, I have to do it. It is very eloquent in terms of telling the story of my personal failure in terms of all the advocacy I've done in climate change work and in fact, our collective failure to address climate change. You can see our trajectory there in terms of warming and greenhouse gas concentrations. You can see all of the great scientific announcements that we've made, saying how much danger we face with climate change. You can see the political meetings. None of it has changed the trajectory. And this is why we need new thinking, we need a new approach.
So how might we go about drawing down greenhouse gases at a large scale? There's really only two ways of doing it, and I've done a very deep dive into drawdown. And I'll preempt my -- And I would say this stuff comes up smelling like roses at the end of the day. It does, it's one of the best options, but there are many, many possibilities. There are chemical pathways and biological pathways. So two ways, really, of getting the job done.
The biological pathways are fantastic because the energy source that's needed to drive them, the sun, is effectively free. We use the sun to drive photosynthesis in plants, break apart that CO2 and capture the carbon. There are also chemical pathways. They sound ominous, but actually, they're not bad at all. The difficulty they face is that we have to actually pay for the energy that's required to do the job or pay to facilitate that energy. Direct air capture is a great example of a chemical pathway, and people are using that right now to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and manufacture biofuels or manufacture plastics. Great progress is being made, but it will be many decades before those chemical pathways are drawing down a gigaton of CO2 a year.
The biological pathways offer us a lot more hope, I think, in the short term. You've probably heard about reforestation, planting trees, as a solution to the climate problem. You know, it's a fair question: Can we plant our way out of this problem by using trees? I'm skeptical about that for a number of reasons. One is just the scale of the problem. All trees start as seeds, little tiny things, and it's many decades before they've reached their full carbon-capture potential. And secondly, if you look at the land surface, you see that it's so heavily utilized. We get our food from it, we get our forestry products from it, biodiversity protection and water and everything else. To expect that we'll find enough space to deal with this problem, I think is going to be quite problematic.
But if we look offshore, wee see a solution where there's already an existing industry, and where there's a clearer way forward. The oceans cover about 70 percent of our planet. They play a really big role in regulating our climate, and if we can enhance the growth of seaweed in them, we can use them, I think, to develop a climate-altering crop. There are so many different kinds of seaweed, there's unbelievable genetic diversity in seaweed, and they're very ancient; they were some of the first multicellular organisms ever to evolve. People are using special kinds of seaweed now for particular purposes, like developing very high-quality pharmaceutical products. But you can also use seaweed to take a seaweed bath, it's supposed to be good for your skin; I can't testify to that, but you can do it. The scalability is the big thing about seaweed farming.
You know, if we could cover nine percent of the world's ocean in seaweed farms, we could draw down the equivalent of all of the greenhouse gases we put up in any one year, more than 50 gigatons. Now, I thought that was fantastic when I first read it, but I thought I'd better calculate how big nine percent of the world's oceans is. It turns out, it's about four and a half Australias, the place I live in. And how close are we to that at the moment? How many ocean-going seaweed farms do we actually have out there? Zero. But we do have some prototypes, and therein lies some hope.
This little drawing here of a seaweed farm that's currently under construction tells you some very interesting things about seaweed. You can see the seaweed growing on that rack, 25 meters down in the ocean there. It's really different from anything you see on land. And the reason being that, you know, seaweed is not like trees, it doesn't have nonproductive parts like roots and trunks and branches and bark. The whole of the plant is pretty much photosynthetic, so it grows fast. Seaweed can grow a meter a day.
And how do we sequester the carbon? Again, it's very different from on land. All you need to do is cut that seaweed off -- drifts into the ocean abyss, Once it's down a kilometer, the carbon in that seaweed is effectively out of the atmospheric system for centuries or millennia. Whereas if you plant a forest, you've got to worry about forest fires, bugs, etc., releasing that carbon. The key to this farm, though, is that little pipe going down into the depths. You know, the mid-ocean is basically a vast biological desert. There's no nutrients there that were used up long ago. But just 500 meters down, there is cool, very nutrient-rich water. And with just a little bit of clean, renewable energy, you can pump that water up and use the nutrients in it to irrigate your seaweed crop. So I think this really has so many benefits. It's changing a biological desert, the mid-ocean, into a productive, maybe even planet-saving solution.
So what could go wrong? Well, anything we're talking about at this scale involves a planetary-scale intervention. And we have to be very careful. I think that piles of stinking seaweed are probably going to be the least of our problems. There's other unforeseen things that will happen. One of the things that really worries me, when I talk about this, is the fate of biodiversity in the deep ocean. If we are putting gigatons of seaweed into the deep ocean, we're affecting life down there.
The good news is that we know that a lot of seaweed already reaches the deep ocean, after storms or through submarine canyons. So we're not talking about a novel process here; we are talking about enhancing a natural process. And we'll learn as we go. I mean, it may be that these ocean-going seaweed farms will need to be mobile, to distribute the seaweed across vast areas of the ocean, rather than creating a big stinking pile in one place. It may be that we'll need to char the seaweed -- so create a sort of an inert, mineral biochar before we dispatch it into the deep. We won't know until we start the process, and we will learn effectively by doing.
I just want to take you to contemporary seaweed farming. It's a big business -- it's a six-billion-dollar-a-year business. These seaweed farms off South Korea -- you can see them from space, they are huge. And they're increasingly not just seaweed farms. What people are doing in places like this is something called ocean permaculture. And in ocean permaculture, you grow fish, shellfish and seaweed all together. And the reason it works so well is that the seaweed makes the seawater less acid. It provides an ideal environment for growing marine protein. If we covered nine percent of the world's oceans in ocean permaculture, we would be producing enough protein in the form of fish and shellfish to give every person in a population of 10 billion 200 kilograms of high-quality protein per year. So, we've got a multipotent solution here. We can address climate change, we can feed the world, we can deacidify the oceans.
The economics of all of this is going to be challenging. We'll be investing many, many billions of dollars into these solutions, and they will take decades to get to the gigaton scale. The reason that I'm convinced that this is going to happen is that unless we get the gas out of the air, it is going to keep driving adverse consequences. It will flood our cities, it will deprive us of food, it will cause all sorts of civil unrest. So anyone who's got a solution to dealing with this problem has a valuable asset. And already, as I've explained, ocean permaculture is well on the road to being economically sustainable. You know, in the next 30 years, we have to go from being a carbon-emitting economy to a carbon-absorbing economy. And that doesn't seem like very long. But half of the greenhouse gases that we've put into the atmosphere, we've put there in the last 30 years.
My argument is, if we can put the gas in in 30 years, we can pull it out in 30 years. And if you doubt how much can be done over 30 years, just cast your mind back a century, to 1919, compare it with 1950. Now, in 1919, here in Edinburgh, you might have seen a canvas and wood biplane. Thirty years later, you'd be seeing jet aircraft. Transport in the street were horses in 1919. By 1950, they're motor vehicles. 1919, we had gun powder; 1950, we had nuclear power. We can do a lot in a short period of time. But it all depends upon us believing that we can find a solution.
Now what I would love to do is bring together all of the people with knowledge in this space. The engineers who know how to build structures offshore, the seaweed farmers, the financiers, the government regulators, the people who understand how things are done. And chart a way forward, say: How do we go from the existing six-billion-dollar-a-year, inshore seaweed industry, to this new form of industry, which has got so much potential, but will require large amounts of investment? I'm not a betting man, you know. But if I were, I'll tell you, my money would be on that stuff, it would be on seaweed. It's my hero. Thank you.

Source:www.ted.com

TED TALKS-Safeena Husain:A bold plan to empower 1.6 million out-of-school girls in India

The following information is used for educational purposes only.


TED2019 | April 2019


Safeena Husain:A bold plan to empower 1.6 million out-of-school girls in India


"Girls' education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to help solve some of the world's most difficult problems," says social entrepreneur Safeena Husain. In a visionary talk, she shares her plan to enroll a staggering 1.6 million girls in school over the next five years -- combining advanced analytics with door-to-door community engagement to create new educational pathways for girls in India. (This ambitious plan is part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)


ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Safeena Husain · Social entrepreneur

Safeena Husain has worked extensively with rural and urban underserved communities in South America, Africa and Asia. After returning to India, she chose the agenda closest to her heart -- girls' education -- and founded Educate Girls.

Transcript:

The world today has many problems. And they're all very complicated and interconnected and difficult. But there is something we can do. I believe that girls' education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to help solve some of the world's most difficult problems. But you don't have to take my word for it.
The World Bank says that girls' education is one of the best investments that a country can make. It helps to positively impact nine of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Everything from health, nutrition, employment -- all of these are positively impacted when girls are educated. Additionally, climate scientists have recently rated girls' education at number six out of 80 actions to reverse global warming. At number six, it's rated higher than solar panels and electric cars.
And that's because when girls are educated, they have smaller families, and the resulting reduction in population reduces carbon emissions significantly. But more than that, you know, it's a problem we have to solve once. Because an educated mother is more than twice as likely to educate her children. Which means that by doing it once, we can close the gender and literacy gap forever.
I work in India, which has made incredible progress in bringing elementary education for all. However, we still have four million out-of-school girls, one of the highest in the world. And girls are out of school because of, obviously poverty, social, cultural factors. But there's also this underlying factor of mindset. I have met a girl whose name was Naraaz Nath. Naaraaz means angry. And when I asked her, "Why is your name 'angry'?" she said, "Because everybody was so angry when a girl was born." Another girl called Antim Bala, which means the last girl. Because everybody hoped that would be the last girl to be born. A girl called Aachuki. It means somebody who has arrived. Not wanted, but arrived. And it is this mindset that keeps girls from school or completing their education. It's this belief that a goat is an asset and a girl is a liability.
My organization Educate Girls works to change this. And we work in some of the most difficult, rural, remote and tribal villages. And how do we do it? We first and foremost find young, passionate, educated youth from the same villages. Both men and women. And we call them Team Balika, balika just means the girl child, so this is a team that we are creating for the girl child. And so once we recruit our community volunteers, we train them, we mentor them, we hand-hold them. That's when our work starts. And the first piece we do is about identifying every single girl who's not going to school.
But the way we do it is a little different and high-tech, at least in my view. Each of our frontline staff have a smartphone. It has its own Educate Girls app. And this app has everything that our team needs. It has digital maps of where they're going to be conducting the survey, it has the survey in it, all the questions, little guides on how best to conduct the survey, so that the data that comes to us is in real time and is of good quality. So armed with this, our teams and our volunteers go door-to-door to every single household to find every single girl who may either we never enrolled or dropped out of school.
And because we have this data and technology piece, very quickly we can figure out who the girls are and where they are. Because each of our villages are geotagged, and we can actually build that information out very, very quickly. And so once we know where the girls are, we actually start the process of bringing them back into school. And that actually is just our community mobilization process, it starts with village meetings, neighborhood meetings, and as you see, individual counseling of parents and families, to be able to bring the girls back into school. And this can take anything from a few weeks to a few months.
And once we bring the girls into the school system, we also work with the schools to make sure that schools have all the basic infrastructure so that the girls will be able to stay. And this would include a separate toilet for girls, drinking water, things that will help them to be retained. But all of this would be useless if our children weren't learning. So we actually run a learning program. And this is a supplementary learning program, and it's very, very important, because most of our children are first-generation learners. That means there's nobody at home to help them with homework, there's nobody who can support their education. Their parents can't read and write. So it's really, really key that we do the support of the learning in the classrooms.
So this is essentially our model, in terms of finding, bringing the girls in, making sure that they're staying and learning. And we know that our model works. And we know this because a most recent randomized control evaluation confirms its efficacy. Our evaluator found that over a three-year period Educate Girls was able to bring back 92 percent of all out-of-school girls back into school.
And in terms of learning, our children's learning went up significantly as compared to control schools. So much so, that it was like an additional year of schooling for the average student. And that's enormous, when you think about a tribal child who's entering the school system for the first time.
So here we have a model that works; we know it's scalable, because we are already functioning at 13,000 villages. We know it's smart, because of the use of data and technology. We know that it's sustainable and systemic, because we work in partnership with the community, it's actually led by the community. And we work in partnership with the government, so there's no creation of a parallel delivery system. And so because we have this innovative partnership with the community, the government, this smart model, we have this big, audacious dream today. And that is to solve a full 40 percent of the problem of out-of-school girls in India in the next five years.
And you're thinking, that's a little ... You know, how am I even thinking about doing that, because India is not a small place, it's a huge country. It's a country of over a billion people. We have 650,000 villages. How is it that I'm standing here, saying that one small organization is going to solve a full 40 percent of the problem? And that's because we have a key insight. And that is, because of our entire approach, with data and with technology, that five percent of villages in India have 40 percent of the out-of-school girls. And this is a big, big piece of the puzzle. Which means, I don't have to work across the entire country. I have to work in those five percent of the villages, about 35,000 villages, to actually be able to solve a large piece of the problem. And that's really key, because these villages not only have high burden of out-of-school girls, but also a lot of related indicators, right, like malnutrition, stunting, poverty, infant mortality, child marriage. So by working and focusing here, you can actually create a large multiplier effect across all of these indicators. And it would mean that we would be able to bring back 1.6 million girls back into school.
I have to say, I have been doing this for over a decade, and I have never met a girl who said to me, you know, "I want to stay at home," "I want to graze the cattle," "I want to look after the siblings," "I want to be a child bride." Every single girl I meet wants to go to school. And that's what we really want to do. We want to be able to fulfill those 1.6 million dreams.
And it doesn't take much. To find and enroll a girl with our model is about 20 dollars. To make sure that she is learning and providing a learning program, it's another 40 dollars. But today is the time to do it. Because she is truly the biggest asset we have. I am Safeena Husain, and I educate girls. Thank you.


Source:www.ted.com

TED TALKS-Emily Nagoski: How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime

The following information is used for educational purposes only.


TEDxFergusonLibrary | May 2019


Emily Nagoski: How couples can sustain a strong sexual connection for a lifetime


As a sex educator, Emily Nagoski is often asked: How do couples sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term? In this funny, insightful talk, she shares her answer -- drawing on (somewhat surprising) research to reveal why some couples stop having sex while others keep up a connection for a lifetime.


ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emily Nagoski · Sex educator

Emily Nagoski teaches women to live with confidence and joy inside their bodies.

Transcript:

I'm sitting in a bar with a couple of friends -- literally, a couple, married couple. They're the parents of two young children, seven academic degrees between them, big nerds, really nice people but very sleep-deprived. And they ask me the question I get asked more than any other question. They go, "So, Emily, how do couples, you know, sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades?"
I'm a sex educator, which is why my friends ask me questions like this, and I am also a big nerd like my friends. I love science, which is why I can give them something like an answer. Research actually has pretty solid evidence that couples who sustain strong sexual connections over multiple decades have two things in common.
Before I can tell my friends what those two things are, I have to tell them a few things that they are not. These are not couples who have sex very often. Almost none of us have sex very often. We are busy. They are also not couples who necessarily have wild, adventurous sex. One recent study actually found that the couples who are most strongly predicted to have strong sexual and relationship satisfaction, the best predictor of that is not what kind of sex they have or how often or where they have it but whether they cuddle after sex. And they are not necessarily couples who constantly can't wait to keep their hands off each other. Some of them are. They experience what the researchers call "spontaneous desire," that just sort of seems to appear out of the blue. Erika Moen, the cartoonist who illustrated my book, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals -- kaboom! -- you just want it out of the blue. That is absolutely one normal, healthy way to experience sexual desire. But there's another healthy way to experience sexual desire. It's called "responsive desire." Where spontaneous desire seems to emerge in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure.
There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde, who taught me this great metaphor she uses with her clients. She says, imagine that your best friend invites you to a party. You say yes because it's your best friend and a party. But then, as the date approaches, you start thinking, "Aw, there's going to be all this traffic. We have to find child care. Am I really going to want to put my party clothes on and get there at the end of the week?" But you put on your party clothes and you show up to the party, and what happens? You have a good time at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right.
When it comes to a sexual connection, it's the same thing. You put on your party clothes, you set up the child care, you put your body in the bed, you let your skin touch your partner's skin and allow your body to wake up and remember, "Oh, right! I like this. I like this person!" That's responsive desire, and it is key to understanding the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term, because -- and this is the part where I tell my friends the two characteristics of the couples who do sustain a strong sexual connection -- one, they have a strong friendship at the foundation of their relationship. Specifically, they have strong trust. Relationship researcher and therapist, developer of emotionally focused therapy, Sue Johnson, boils trust down to this question: Are you there for me? Especially, are you emotionally present and available for me? Friends are there for each other. One.
The second characteristic is that they prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship. They choose to set aside all the other things that they could be doing -- the children they could be raising and the jobs they could be going to, the other family members to pay attention to, the other friends they might want to hang out with. God forbid they just want to watch some television or go to sleep. Stop doing all that stuff and create a protected space where all you're going to do is put your body in the bed and let your skin touch your partner's skin. So that's it: best friends, prioritize sex.
So I said this to my friends in the bar. I was like, best friends, prioritize sex, I told them about the party, I said you put your skin next to your partner's skin. And one of the partners I was talking to goes, "Aaagh."
And I was like, "OK, so, there's your problem."
The difficulty was not that they did not want to go to the party, necessarily. If the difficulty is just a lack of spontaneous desire for party, you know what to do: you put on your party clothes and show up for the party. If you're having fun at the party, you're doing it right. Their difficulty was that this was a party where she didn't love what there was available to eat, the music was not her favorite music, and she wasn't totally sure she felt great about her relationships with people who were at the party. And this happens all the time: nice people who love each other come to dread sex. These couples, if they seek sex therapy, the therapist might have them stand up and put as much distance between their bodies as they need in order to feel comfortable, and the less interested partner will make 20 feet of space.
And the really difficult part is that space is not empty. It is crowded with weeks or months or more of the, "You're not listening to me," and "I don't know what's wrong with me but your criticism isn't helping," and, "If you loved me, you would," and, "You're not there for me." Years, maybe, of all these difficult feelings. In the book, I use this really silly metaphor of difficult feelings as sleepy hedgehogs that you are fostering until you can find a way to set them free by turning toward them with kindness and compassion. And the couples who struggle to maintain a strong sexual connection, the distance between them is crowded with these sleepy hedgehogs.
And it happens in any relationship that lasts long enough. You, too, are fostering a prickle of sleepy hedgehogs between you and your certain special someone. The difference between couples who sustain a strong sexual connection and the ones who don't is not that they don't experience these difficult hurt feelings, it's that they turn towards those difficult feelings with kindness and compassion so that they can set them free and find their way back to each other. So my friends in the bar are faced with the question under the question, not, "How do we sustain a strong connection?" but, "How do we find our way back to it?" And, yes, there is science to answer this question, but in 25 years as a sex educator, one thing I have learned is sometimes, Emily, less science, more hedgehogs. So I told them about me.
I spent many months writing a book about the science of women's sexual well-being. I was thinking about sex all day, every day, and I was so stressed by the project that I had zero -- zero! -- interest in actually having any sex. And then I spent months traveling all over, talking with anyone who would listen about the science of women's sexual well-being. And by the time I got home, you know, I'd show up for the party, put my body in the bed, let my skin touch my partner's skin, and I was so exhausted and overwhelmed I would just cry and fall asleep. And the months of isolation fostered fear and loneliness and frustration. So many hedgehogs. My best friend, this person I love and admire, felt a million miles away.
But ... he was still there for me. No matter how many difficult feelings there were, he turned toward them with kindness and compassion. He never turned away. And what was the second characteristic of couples who sustain a strong sexual connection? They prioritize sex. They decide that it matters for their relationship, that they do what it takes to find their way back to the connection. I told my friends what sex therapist and researcher Peggy Kleinplatz says. She asks: What kind of sex is worth wanting? My partner and I looked at the quality of our connection and what it brought to our lives, and we looked at the family of sleepy hedgehogs I had introduced into our home. And we decided it was worth it. We decided -- we chose -- to do what it took to find our way, turning towards each of those sleepy hedgehogs, those difficult hurt feelings, with kindness and compassion and setting them free so that we could find our way back to the connection that mattered for our relationship.
This is not the story we are usually told about how sexual desire works in long-term relationships. But I can think of nothing more romantic, nothing sexier, than being chosen as a priority because that connection matters enough, even after I introduced all of these difficult feelings into our relationship.
How do you sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term? You look into the eyes of your best friend, and you keep choosing to find your way back. Thank you.


Source:www.ted.com

¡PRIMAVERA ROMÁNTICA!

The following information is used for educational purposes only.





             ¡PRIMAVERA ROMÁNTICA!

Fuente: Google Images/www.youtube.com

Parlamentarismo de facto/De facto Parliamentarism, por/by Ignacio Fidanza

The following information is used for educational purposes only.

Elecciones 2019

Parlamentarismo de facto

Por Ignacio Fidanza

La idea de un naciente albertismo que margine a Cristina del corazón del poder, ignora los datos estructurales del nuevo escenario.


22/09/2019

Los análisis lineales que por estas horas supuestos conocedores del pensamiento de Alberto Fernández filtran a los medios, circulan entre la imprudencia y la ingenuidad. La comparación fácil con la dialéctica que animó el vínculo entre Néstor Kirchner y su creador inicial Eduardo Duhalde, es tan perezosa como aventurada.

Primero la imprudencia. Alberto todavía no ganó la elección general, no asumió el poder y no tomó las primeras medidas para enfrentar una situación económica que se insinúa de gran complejidad. Es decir, están gastando a cuenta y mostrando las cartas, mientras irritan a engranajes esenciales del próximo esquema de poder.

Este guión previsible del nacimiento del albertismo, cimentado en la alianza con los gobernadores, Sergio Massa, Clarín y algunos intendentes del Conurbano, que forzará la marginación de Cristina del núcleo de decisiones de Estado, sorprende por todo lo que no considera. Como si el país fuera una maravilla que funciona sóla y los políticos tuvieran margen para modelar sus ambiciones en un universo paralelo.

Alberto Fernández, comentan quienes lo frecuentan, está muy preocupado por la economía que va a heredar de Macri. Sabe que en un puñado de meses la luna de miel que está viviendo con la sociedad, se puede transformar en desencanto y reproche.

Este guión previsible del nacimiento del albertismo, cimentado en la alianza con los gobernadores, Sergio Massa, Clarín y algunos intendentes del Conurbano, que forzará la marginación de Cristina del núcleo de decisiones de Estado, sorprende por todo lo que no considera.

El punto entonces lleva a preguntarse sobre que poder político se apoyará Fernández para enfrentar el momento de las decisiones difíciles. La respuesta es obvia: La legitimidad de fondo del proyecto es Cristina Kirchner. Ella aportó los votos decisivos y mantuvo la línea crítica contra el gobierno de Macri, cuando muchos de los que hoy apuestan a crear el "albertismo" se tentaban con un peronismo "republicano" y pro mercado que jubilara a la ex presidenta.

Fracasaron y hoy encuentran en Alberto la puerta de entrada que perdieron en el camino. Son una parte de la realidad política del peronismo, que la ex presidenta supo leer y por eso ensayó un paso hacia atrás que le permitió dar tres hacia adelante.

El que crea que una vez que ganó, Cristina se va a retirar a cuidar a sus nietos; bueno, que lo crea, total no pasa nada. Pero el poder es otra cosa.

La ex presidenta además de personificar la jefatura política de última instancia, tendrá en la etapa que viene el control directo la provincia de Buenos Aires -cuarenta por ciento del padrón nacional- y la mayoría larga en los bloques de diputados y senadores del peronismo. Esta situación mete a la Argentina en un parlamentarismo de facto, donde Alberto Fernández emerge como una suerte de primer ministro-presidente, que todavía tiene que construir su propio poder. Un desafío que hasta ahora ha sido esbozado en base a una trabajosa alianza con gobernadores y Sergio Massa, que a diferencia de los seguidores de Cristina, son administradores autónomos de su capital político. Es decir, Alberto no los puede mandar sin más, sino que necesitará negociar, cumplir y renegociar, con cada uno de ellos.

Entonces tenemos de un lado un bloque monolítico, con un liderazgo indiscutible y del otro una mezcla de entusiasmo y expectativa interesada, que contiene intereses muy diversos y de probable frustración.

"Alberto tiene la firma", se entusiasman cerca del candidato. Y es una realidad. Acaso la carta más concreta que tiene en el nuevo juego del poder. Posee el recurso último que destraba las decisiones del Poder Ejecutivo. Y no hay manera sostenible de eludirlo. Por eso es parte de la ecuación, que se engarza con los otros polos de poder del peronismo. Por eso la simpleza de intentar entender lo que viene en base a una tensión entre albertistas y cristinistas.

Todo indica que vamos a un mundo más complejo, multipolar pero con un planeta dominante -Cristina-, en el que el Presidente será una suerte de primer ministro, sin poder territorial pero con el control administrativo del Estado.

Un presidente que deberá transitar la articulación de los distintos polos de poder del peronismo, en un esquema de acuerdos y tensiones que sería ingenuo imaginar inmutable. Por eso, la figura de un parlamentarismo ad hoc, acaso sea más útil que la idea fácil de sobreexponer sobre la realidad naciente, la pulseada Kirchner-Duhalde.

Porque si se trata de un gobierno de coalición hay otro eje posible para la consolidación de Alberto, que acaso requiere menos voracidad peronista y más destreza política. Un eje que implicaría desmontar lo que hasta ahora vienen emitiendo los albertistas, habilitados o no, para darle una base de poder propio a su jefe. Se trata de algo tan simple como difícil de alcanzar: articular un gobierno, un bloque de poder, que empiece a resolver los problemas del país. Un desafío que implica reconocer que Cristina es la líder de la expresión mayoritaria de la nueva constelación del poder y la construcción que ubica en Alberto todas las virtudes y en ella todos los problemas, es además de maniquea muy poco práctica.





Editorial

De facto Parliamentarism

By Ignacio Fidanza

The notion of a newly-formed Alberto-following that marginalizes Cristina from the heart of power ignores the structural makeup of the new political scene in Argentina.


The linear analyses that have been filtered to the media by sources who supposedly know how Alberto Fernández thinks fall somewhere between imprudence and naiveté. The effortless comparison with the reasoning that encouraged the connection between Néstor Kirchner and its original creator, Eduardo Duhalde, is as idle as it is thrill-seeking.

First the imprudence. Alberto still hasn't won the general election, he hasn't assumed power and he hasn't implemented initial measures to face up to an economic situation whose intricate complexity has become apparent. They are showing their cards and spending on the house while they grate on the essential workings of the next power machine.

This predictable script on the birth of Albertismo (followers of Alberto Fernández), so neatly cemented in the alliance of governors, Sergio Massa, media giant Clarín and a few mayors from Greater Buenos Aires, that seeks to force Cristina's marginalization from the core of State decisions, is surprising for how much it doesn't take into consideration. It casts Argentina as a marvelous contraption that operates all on its own and with politicians who have margins to sculpt their ambitions in a parallel universe.

According to those who frequent his circles, Alberto Fernández is very worried about the economy he is inheriting from Macri. Fernández knows that in a few short months the honeymoon phase could quickly turn into disenchantment and rebuke from the people.

This predictable script on the birth of Albertismo, so neatly cemented in the alliance of governors, Sergio Massa, media giant Clarín and a few mayors from Greater Buenos Aires, that seeks to force Cristina's marginalization from the core of State decisions, is surprising for how much it doesn't take into consideration

The question is, on which political power will Fernández lean when the time comes to make difficult decisions? The answer is obvious: Cristina Kirchner is the underlying legitimacy of the project. She brought in the decisive votes and maintained a critical stance toward Macri's government when many who today wager on creating Albertismo had been trying out a republican-brand of Peronism that was pro-market and sought to retire ex-president Cristina.

That failed, and now Alberto is the entry point they previously tried to circumvent. He and his circle are part of a political reality of Peronism that Cristina knew how to decipher, taking a step back that paved the way to take three steps forward.

Whoever believed that once Cristina won she would leave politics to take care of her grandchildren, well, they are free to go on believing. But power is another thing altogether.

Apart from personifying last resort political leadership, she will have direct control over the province of Buenos Aires in the near future - Buenos Aires representing 40% of the electoral registry, and the majority of Peronist deputy blocs and senators. This situation casts Argentina as a de facto parliamentarian country, where Alberto Fernández emerges as a sort of quasi Prime Minister-President who still has to build up his own power. One challenge that has been outlined is a labor-intensive alliance with the governors and Sergio Massa, who in contrast to Cristina's followers, are autonomous administrators of their political capital. Alberto will not be able to simply command them but will have to negotiate, follow through and renegotiate, with each one of them.

So on one side, we have a monolithic bloc with undisputed leadership and on the other, a mix of enthusiasm and keen expectancy, laced with sundry interests and odds-on frustration.

"Alberto has the power," delight the enthused. And that's real. Perhaps this is the strongest card he has in the new play for power. He holds the trump card to override decisions made by the President, and there's no way to get around it. It's all part of the play and links to other players and Peronist centers of power. This is what leads to blundering when trying to understand what is to come based on the tension between followers of Alberto and those loyal to Cristina.

Everything points to a multipolar, complicated system on the horizon, but one with a dominant planet - Cristina - in which the President will be a sort of Prime Minister without territorial power but with more administrative control over the State.

This president will have to pass through the linkages of numerous centers of Peronist power, through a framework of agreements and tensions that it would be naïve to think were unchangeable. The concept of an ad hoc parliamentarism is therefore perhaps more useful than the easy out of overexposing the newly formed reality of the Kirchner-Duhalde power struggle.

Because if we are going to talk about a coalition government, there is another possible axis for Alberto's consolidation, one that perhaps requires less Peronist greed and more political dexterity. This axis could involve dismantling what up to now has been broadcast by Alberto's followers, authorized or not, to build a power base for their leader. It is something as simple as it is difficult: to organize a government, a bloc of power, that starts to solve Argentina's problems. This sort of provocation would involve recognizing Cristina as the leader of a majority in the new galaxy of power. But a structure that places Alberto as the center of all virtue and her as the source of all problems, besides being overly-simplistic, is not at all practical.





Fuente/Source:https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/nota/ignaciofidanza-parlamentarismo-de-facto/https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/nota/ignacio-fidanza-de-facto-parliamentarism/

Speak softly, make tough decisions: An interview with Alibaba Group chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang

The following information is used for educational purposes only.


Speak softly, make tough decisions:

 An interview with Alibaba Group chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang


September 2019


The chairman and CEO of China’s e-commerce giant describes Alibaba’s approach to innovation and how he balances analytics and instinct to push himself to spot hidden opportunities.

While visionary founder Jack Ma has provided Alibaba Group’s most public presence during the company’s journey from apartment start-up to global e-commerce powerhouse, current chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang can be credited with many of the company’s game-changing successes. Nonetheless, the pair present as opposites—Zhang, with calm and collected cogitation, in the face of Ma’s restless dynamism—a duality that drew attention when Ma nominated Zhang last year to succeed him as company chairman in September 2019.


Daniel Zhang biography


Education

Earned a BA in finance from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Career highlights

Alibaba Group

Chairman and CEO
(Sept 2019–present)

CEO and director
(May 2015–Sept 2019)

COO
(Sept 2013–May 2015)

President, Tmall.com
(June 2011–Sept 2013)

General manager, Taobao Mall
(subsequently rebranded as Tmall.com)
(Aug 2008–June 2011)

CFO, Taobao Marketplace
(Aug 2007–June 2011)

Shanda Interactive Entertainment

CFO
(Aug 2005–Aug 2007)

Fast facts

Responsible for launching Alibaba’s “Double 11” Singles Day event—now the world’s most successful retail promotion




Zhang, known on Alibaba’s Hangzhou campus by a nickname that translates to “the free and unfettered one,” had hitherto eschewed the spotlight, but his instinct for innovation proved instrumental in Alibaba’s rise to become the world’s most valuable e-commerce company in 2017. Among Zhang’s initiatives is Alibaba’s annual 24-hour sales promotion, known as the “11.11 Global Shopping Festival,” or “Double 11” for short, which notched gross merchandizing volume of $30.8 billion in just 24 hours in 2018. Zhang was also at the forefront of Alibaba’s drive to become a mobile-first business: more than 90 percent of sales on Alibaba’s China e-commerce sites are now made via mobile device. More recently, the Shanghai native spearheaded the launch of Freshippo (known as “Hema” in Chinese) grocery stores, which combine a high-end, in-store experience centered on fresh foods with rapid e-commerce home delivery and a robot-staffed restaurant option. 1
In this interview, Zhang talks with McKinsey’s Daniel Zipser about Alibaba’s approach to innovation, the power of purpose at Alibaba, and how Zhang balances analytics and instinct to guide his own decision making and push himself to spot hidden opportunities. The following is an edited version of their conversation.







Reaching China’s diverse consumers

The Quarterly: What strikes you as notable about Chinese consumers, and how are they evolving?

Daniel Zhang: What we see from our digital platforms is that they are very diverse. Because of the internet, they know what’s popular—not only in China but all around the world. They also have strong beliefs. Generation Z, for example, doesn’t believe only in so-called big brands; they prefer unique things and new brands from their own generation. That’s [a big part of] their lifestyle. The other important thing is that they tend to spend more. China is famous for being a high-savings-rate society, but the younger generation are more willing to improve their lifestyle through spending, and that presents huge opportunities.

The Quarterly: Speaking of consumer spending, Double 11, the online shopping festival that happens on November 11 each year, generated more than $30 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2018. What was your vision when you launched the event back in 2009?







The Double 11 phenomenon

Daniel Zhang: Tmall [Tmall.com] is now the largest online B2C business in the world, but at the time, it was tiny compared with Taobao [Taobao Marketplace]. So we wanted people to remember us. The idea was to bring together all the merchants on Tmall and create a common event where we could work together to serve our mutual customers with the best service, the best products. We never dreamed it would become such a fantastic event ten years later, and that really reflects the power of ecosystems.

But if you ask me about the idea on day one, I have to say it came from a sense of, “How can we make people remember us?” and “How can we survive?” From there, it came from trying new things. Going forward, it will continue to be about innovation. We will look to promote not only online sales but also brick-and-mortar stores. Double 11 is a day focused on consumers, and they seek online as well as offline experiences. That’s a very obvious trend we see and will pursue as we continue to make Double 11 the best day of the year for consumers.

The Quarterly: Say more about innovation and technology at Alibaba—and, in particular, the role of artificial intelligence [AI].

Daniel Zhang: We are always trying new things—always innovating services and using technology to give consumers new experiences. For example, people in China are now largely used to the convenience of mobile wallets, so we have pushed to promote facial recognition as confirmation for digital payments. Feedback tells us young Chinese consumers love the convenience of this; it’s a fantastic consumer experience.






Building a technology-empowered company

We had been working on AI for many years, but, to be honest, we didn’t even realize what we were doing was AI. We are a data-driven company. We create value from the data generated by real activity of users and merchants; we use data as fuel for our marketplaces to help merchants better serve their customers. That is our logic, and we have been working on this for many years.

Technology and data empower our whole business—not only on the sales side and marketplace side but also in the back-end office, in customer service, in every single area. This is how we work. So when people say “AI,” we laugh and say that, to us, it’s “Alibaba intelligence” because data and technology power everything we do.

The Quarterly: How would you describe Alibaba’s purpose, and how does your business model support it?

Daniel Zhang: Alibaba has been a mission- and vision-driven company from day one. Jack Ma, along with 17 other early cofounders, set a great mission: to make it easy to do business anywhere. Our mission drives our business strategy, which is empowering our business partners.

Even though our business is always evolving, the mission remains unchanged. For example, we are not only helping big brands and retailers—we also help small and medium businesses grow. We believe small is beautiful; we want to help new businesses and entrepreneurs be more successful. That’s always been our philosophy. In this digital era, when we talk about Alibaba’s future, we focus on helping our business partners win through successful digital transformation, rather than about how we can make ourselves even stronger. When small businesses can grow faster and grow healthier, it will benefit the whole society.

As the Chinese economy transforms into a consumption-driven economy, Alibaba has a huge opportunity to understand consumers’ changing needs. We help connect the whole world with China to facilitate easy trading and access to the world’s largest consumer market.

The Quarterly: You are often described as reserved, soft spoken, and detail oriented. How do you see yourself as a leader, and how has your leadership style evolved?

Daniel Zhang: I don’t think I’m a reserved guy, actually. People may tag me based on my background as an auditor, and I always say that maybe I picked the wrong first job. Obviously, though, that first job gave me a lot of opportunities to learn the basic skills and have access to many clients in different industries. I consider myself very lucky to be engaged in the digital landscape and to be part of such a fantastic company in Alibaba.

In terms of my leadership style, I’m very nice to people. I tend to give people opportunities to try their own ideas, but I’m very tough once a decision has been made. Once I make up my mind, I want my teams to go ahead and get concrete results. That’s why people at Alibaba always say it’s very difficult to deal with me in business meetings, because [in that context] I am always trying to get to the substance of the matter and drive people to make progress.

So my leadership style is that, yes, while I speak softly, I always make the tough decisions. I think the most important thing [for a leader] is to lead the whole team forward. They need direction, and they need clear guidance. Leaders have to make the tough decisions, even if it may not be the perfect decision. At the same time, I also try to learn from our young people—the people born after 1990, 1995. Learning about their lifestyle and preferences helps give me a lot of new ideas and inspires innovation.

The Quarterly: How much of your process for making tough decisions is intuition compared with data analysis?





Solving the customer’s pain points

Daniel Zhang: It’s a combination. Our advantage is having huge amounts of data, and my team does a fantastic job in providing me with daily analysis. But as a leader, you have to see something which others cannot, and often that comes down to focusing on customer pain points.

Four years ago, I had the idea for the Freshippo retail stores, which have since become very popular. My original thinking was that traditional e-commerce’s hub-and-spoke model could not deliver fresh products on time and on demand. It’s not like you can deliver fresh fish to a customer’s home while she is still in the office. We had to rearchitect the business model and address that particular pain point, and that process led to the origin of Freshippo.

Pain points mean opportunity. And that’s why, every year, I do a self-evaluation process during Chinese New Year. I ask myself, “How many new ideas, how many new businesses did I initiate last year?” I don’t focus my self-evaluation on the performance of the existing businesses: this is about the new opportunities. Today they may be new ideas—very tiny, very small—but they may become much bigger in the future. Maybe they will become a main business for Alibaba.

The Quarterly: Among those ideas, there will inevitably be failures as well. How do you handle failure as a leader, and how does Alibaba approach the topic as an institution?






Speak softly, make tough decisions

Daniel Zhang: We give our people a lot of space to try new things. It means you have to accept mistakes. The vast majority of innovations will result in failure; you have to acknowledge that. But the key is, can we learn from the failures?

For example, five or six years ago, we tried a new thing. It was a digital social-messaging platform called Laiwang. We started the business, invested heavily, sent some of our best people, but it failed. We didn’t create a new experience for consumers that differentiated from what they could already get in the market.

That experience served as a critical lesson that informed our thinking when we created DingTalk, a cloud-based, SaaS [software-as-a-service]-based work-collaboration platform. The tool is a direct result of Laiwang’s failure because the team realized that people have too many contacts on their social networks. Users wanted an alternative messaging platform dedicated to work relationships and communication. DingTalk’s success is another example of a pain point inspiring a new service. It’s an example of valuable lessons we can harvest from failure.

The Quarterly: What motivates you, personally, as a leader? What drives you when you get up in the morning?

Daniel Zhang: First, it’s about having fun. That’s the most important thing. I work with many young people in our line of business—the digital landscape is a brand-new frontier for society—and the experience of new things is not only fun, but it also makes you feel younger. I always say to my friends, to my team, that the key thing to ask yourself is, “Do you still have curiosity about the world?” If you are curious about the world, then you will find something different, then you will find new opportunities, and you will move ahead.






Working with Jack

The Quarterly: Finally, you’ve worked alongside Alibaba founder Jack Ma for several years now. What’s it like working with him, and what have you learned as a result?

Daniel Zhang: We work very well together. Since joining Alibaba 12 years ago, I’ve worked very closely with him. While we have totally different personalities, we complement each other well. Jack is a visionary. He thinks about not only today and tomorrow but five and ten years from now, and that is what makes Alibaba different. I learned from him the importance of looking at the big picture. You need to have your feet planted on the ground and move forward solidly, but you also need to be forward looking. We look at opportunities not only for today but, more importantly, opportunities for the next generation and the coming decades.

About the author(s)

Daniel Zhang is the chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group. This interview was conducted by Daniel Zipser, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Shenzhen office.



Source:https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/china/speak-softly-make-tough-decisions-an-interview-with-alibaba-group-chairman

SCIENCE-Feel like you’re about to lose it? It could be a good time for a Meta-Moment, by Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

The following information is used for educational purposes only.

SCIENCE

Feel like you’re about to lose it? It could be a good time for a Meta-Moment

Sep 6, 2019

Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

Ana Galvan

When we’re overwhelmed by emotions, we’re usually not our best selves. We may blow up, say hurtful things or burst into tears. But what if we had a tool we could use to turn down the temperature at those times? Psychologist Marc Brackett has a helpful strategy.

As founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, psychologist Marc Brackett has devoted the past 25 years to conducting research and developing RULER, an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning which has been integrated into more than 2,000 schools in the US and around the world. Here, he writes about a particularly useful tactic that all of us can use to defuse potentially destructive responses.

As we all know, our best attempts at calm, thoughtful reflection work only when we feel in control of our emotions. If you’re raging with resentment or crushed by disappointment, you’re probably not capable of the reasoning required to see a situation in a new light. You first need to bring down your emotional temperature, lower your activation, and give yourself the space required for rational thought. You might take a few deep breaths, a few steps back, a walk around the block.

Or, maybe you’re ready for the Meta-Moment. A decade ago, Robin Stern, psychoanalyst and associate director of our center, and I were wondering why so many people in our society are addicted to strategies that derail them from achieving their goals. Robin had worked with hundreds of patients who were unsuccessful even after learning new tactics, and I observed schoolchildren and educators who didn’t employ the strategies they were learning — even when they knew they were helpful.

“Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion,” says author and consultant Justin Bariso.

Many of us were exposed to destructive responses early in our lives — negative talk, screaming, blaming and so on. They require little cognitive control, and they’re often effective at getting rid of negative feelings and providing temporary gratification. But at the time, we fail to realize these strategies also can ruin our relationships and derail us from achieving our goals.

So we developed a tool we call the Meta-Moment — a hitting of the brakes and stepping out of time. We call it “meta” because it’s a moment about a moment. It might mean mentally counting, as in 1, 2, 3, or 1 to 10, depending on the severity of the emotion. Taking one or several deep breaths may also be a part of it — anything to give ourselves room to maneuver and deactivate.

A Meta-Moment is when we stop the action and say, “Am I hearing this correctly?” Or maybe we might say, “I need to pause and take a deep breath right now so I don’t blow my top, break down sobbing, or react in some way I will probably regret.” This helps us go beyond our first impulse and find a wiser response. As the author and consultant Justin Bariso put it, “Pausing helps you refrain from making a permanent decision based on a temporary emotion.”

Pausing gives us the chance to ask two useful questions: “How have I handled situations like this in the past?” and “What would my best self do right now?”

Pausing and taking a deep breath activates our parasympathetic nervous system. This reduces the release of cortisol, a major stress hormone, and naturally lowers our emotional temperature. Pausing also gives us the chance to quickly ask two useful questions: “How have I handled situations like this in the past?” and “What would my best self do right now?”

To tap into their best selves, some people may think of a set of adjectives such as “compassionate”, “intelligent” or “conscientious”. Other people could picture an image or look at an object. A good friend who is principal of a middle school has a Smurf on her desk to remind her to be her best self. Visualizing our best self can redirect our attention away from the triggering person, words or event and back towards our values.

A couple years ago, a student raised his hand in class and said, “I have a question that I don’t think even you’ll know how to answer.” To say that I was activated is an understatement — arrogance is a trigger for me. I wanted to reply: “I might not know the answer, but remember I grade your papers!” Instead, I reached into my “professor of emotional intelligence” self and asked “How about if I get questions from some of the other students now, and we can chat after class?” Then, I politely informed him that his question could have been worded more diplomatically.

I took myself out of the moment, visualized my best self as ‘the feelings master,’ and paused. In that small window of time, I calmed myself.

More recently, I was giving a presentation to a large group when someone challenged me on a point. She didn’t ask a question or offer a dissenting opinion; she just came at me to put me down. “A lot of us in the room would not necessarily agree with that model,” she said. My first impulse was to fire back and embarrass her with a comment like “A lot of us, meaning you and your 30 personalities.”

But I didn’t allow myself that petty pleasure. Instead, I took myself out of the moment, visualized my best self as “the feelings master,” and paused. In that small window of time, I calmed myself. “I’d love to connect with you later to hear your thoughts,” I said. Nobody in that room knew how close I came to losing it.

The Meta-Moment is not just for regulating unpleasant emotions. Sometimes our best selves help us to stand up for what’s right. Once, during a speech, a colleague bullied me in an unusual way — he joked about the fact that I was bullied as a child. My first impulse was to run onstage and deliver a flying dropkick to his head; I regressed to that middle schooler being pushed around in the locker room. But I took a Meta-Moment and I waited until after the presentation. I went up to him and said, “I have no idea what motivated you to say those words, but it wasn’t cool and you can’t ever do it again.”

What are your go-to strategies when you are triggered or caught off guard? Do you ignore your feelings, act out, or meet them head-on?

I count these as victories for the Meta-Moment.

How skilled are you at taking a Meta-Moment? What adjectives characterize your best self? What are your go-to strategies when you are triggered or caught off guard? Do you ignore your feelings, act out, or meet them head-on?

When your boss criticizes your work and you feel disappointed, devastated or resentful, how successful are you at taking a Meta-Moment and saying to yourself something like “Feedback is a gift, there is always something I can learn”?

When your daughter won’t do her homework, do you argue, threaten, plead, grimace in disgust, explode in rage … or do you take a deep breath, evoke your best self, think about the most effective strategy with this particular child and calmly take action?

Here are the steps to take for a Meta-Moment.

1. Sense the shift.

You are activated, caught off guard, or have an impulse to say or do something you might regret. You feel a shift in your thinking or body or both.

2. Stop or pause.

Step back and breathe. Breathe again.

3. See your best self.

Think of adjectives or an image that helps your best self appear in vivid detail, or look at an object that reminds you. You might also think about your reputation: How do you want to be seen, talked about, and experienced? What would you do if someone you respect were watching you?

4. Strategize and act.

You reach into your tool kit of healthy responses — positive self-talk and reframing are two good options — and choose the path that will close the gap between your triggered self and your emerging best self. This should always be the last step.

There are a few final aspects of this kind of emotion regulation to keep in mind. Because regulation requires brainpower — moving from automatic and unhelpful to deliberate and helpful strategies is hard work — it also depends on factors such as diet, exercise and sleep. When we eat poorly, our minds don’t function properly. Too much sugar or refined flour can cause our blood glucose to spike and then plummet, which affects cognitive functioning and self-control.

I think Mike Tyson had it right when he said, ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’

Too little physical activity also has a negative effect on mental capacity and moods, as does poor quality or insufficient sleep. Sleep serves a restorative function. When we don’t get enough or get too much, we can show more symptoms of anxiety and depression. Inadequate sleep is associated with reduced connections between the brain regions responsible for cognitive control and behavior and the use of effective emotion regulation strategies.

We can take two other measures to safeguard our overall well-being — the first is to do things we love. Spend time with family and friends, pursue passions and pastimes, get in touch with our spiritual side, immerse ourselves in nature, read a good book, watch a great movie. We build up cognitive reserves that way, which help us when emotional turmoil inevitably strikes.

The second measure is to practice mindful breathing. Daily practice enhances our ability to be present, accept the feelings that arise, and not be overly reactive or overwhelmed by them.

Recently, after an exhausting day of delayed flights, missed connections and other irritations, I felt on the verge of a meltdown. So I asked myself: “If a college professor with a doctorate in psychology has difficulty regulating emotions, what must it be like for a nine-year-old child or an adult under genuinely challenging pressures who have had little to no training in emotion skills?”

That calmed me down in a hurry. I think Mike Tyson had it right when he said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” What’s true in the boxing ring is true everywhere else. It’s easy to say that from now on we’ll master all our emotional responses, until our significant other or child or neighbor or boss triggers us with a word or look and all our training goes out the window.

Along with permission to feel, we must also give ourselves permission to fail. When that happens, we can only try again — take a deep breath or two, envision our best selves, and start over. We also need the courage to apologize and forgive ourselves as we’d forgive others. Courage might even mean seeking professional help when all else fails. We’ll never stop having to work at being our best selves. But the payoff is worth it: better health, better decision making, better relationships, better everything.

Excerpted from the new book Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive by Marc Brackett. Copyright © 2019 Marc Brackett. Reprinted with the permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing, LLC.

Watch his TEDxGoldenGateED talk here:






TEDxGoldenGateED - Marc Brackett


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Published on Oct 1, 2011


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marc Brackett, Ph.D. , is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, a professor at the Yale Child Study Center and the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based, systemic approach to social and emotional learning.



Source:https://ideas.ted.com/feel-like-youre-about-to-lose-it-it-could-be-a-good-time-for-a-meta-moment/