I've seen a lot of resistance to change over the years and I've left a lot of meetings where I've been asked, "Why can't so-and-so assume that we're working in the best interest of the company and all the employees?"
Here's what that means: our brains and bodies evolved to perceive danger and threats. For many of us day-to-day physical threats are not a major issue, but our minds are still wired to look for danger. They will continue to look for threats, even if the only thing there is emotional or potential emotional threats.
This slant towards the negative preserved our ancestors, but it can get in our way when we're in an unfamiliar situation, or when we're working with a client, or when we're trying something new, or when things change.
Knowing that our minds behave this way can be powerful in and of itself. It explains a lot. It helps us to empathize when we're the one asking for change and it should also help us be more self-aware of our own negative reactions and how it might be holding us back.
The big question is: How will you change your behavior? How will you alter your communication style in situations where you think you are likely to encounter the negativity bias?
Many thanks to Andrew Wien from Dynamic Leadership Center for bringing this topic to us and giving us ways to work through the Negativity Bias.
Mindfulness is key professional development that lies at the core of all other professional development.
Do you want the focus to make the most of your time?
Mindfulness improves focus by training the mind to focus.
Do you want the positive intent to overcome obstacles?
Mindfulness helps you avoid the negativity bias and focus on what is in your control.
Do you want the self-awareness to see that most obstacles are really perceived obstacles that exist inside yourself?
Mindfulness is self-awareness. As you become more self-aware you become more conscious of what obstacles are real and which are the ones you put up for yourself. This lets you focus energy on real obstacles and overcoming them.
Do you want the emotional maturity to handle stressful situations?
Mindfulness helps you understand and work better with your emotions and stress.
Do you want the inner strength to set your own direction?
Mindfulness provides you with the tools to manage your inner resources.
The more I am involved with mindfulness practice, the more it seems like this is where you should be starting your education and development. What else gives you these types of benefits?
Begin by knowing yourself - this is neither Eastern nor Western, but simply true.
Curiosity is a valuable skill. It's important to be curious about how things work, what others are like, and how other people solve problems.
Curiosity is indispensable and required in the 21st century - it gets you excited about new projects, and it also keeps you going when things get difficult.
Sometimes it's scary to learn something new. But once I've pushed through the fear I'm always glad I did.
Find a way to cultivate your curiosity: take a class that interests you, read a book on a difficult topic, talk to someone you wouldn't normally talk to.
If you come across someone who isn't curious or doesn't want to learn something new you should ask why and be curious about that. Maybe you can help. We all have times where we struggle with change.
When I want an egg, I don't want something that is not an egg.
Eggs don't have labels on them that say 'EGG'. They are still eggs.
Someone can put the label 'EGG' on a rock, but that doesn't make it an egg.
Most rocks don't carry the label 'NOT EGG' on it. This also does not make them eggs.
It might be that I find a whole bunch of egg-shaped things labeled 'EGG' where there were only rocks before. If this happens I promise I will run some tests before I start lowering the price of omelettes.
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What's this all about then?
Well, I found something on Google. It was clearly generated content that was generated poorly. It is a very high search result for the thing I was looking for.
Google isn't responsible for that, I realize.
It just makes me wonder why someone spends money (they clearly spent some money to build this thing) that is untested and wrong. Why do you do that?
I have a small site I am building with my kids. It's a simple site based around a story that we've been working on together. I'll provide a link to it, though it is not professional looking, polished, or completely working.
The point of bringing it up is two-fold -
It's the next step I'm taking related to the creative exercise I mentioned last week.
For number 1 the basic idea is to show them things like you can own a domain name and you can create HTML pages and here is a way to do something more with those creative ideas than just write them down. It's a little bit interactive.
For number 2 I've been leveraging Google Datastore (a really simple data storage mechanism from Google) to store small blurbs of text, references to images, and a little bit of HTML. The site can then pull this stored content with some basic API calls.
It's a nice way to get some simple content management for a very inexpensive price (free!), which I could see using on a single page site, basic site, or even integrated with a simple application.
It does not have as nice of features as Contentful, but it's a bit simpler and faster. Features that it lacks are: previewing HTML, management of unpublished content, and nice integration with uploaded media. So you wouldn't want to hand a back-end like this to (most) marketing departments, but for a technical person or someone willing to learn it is fine.
What I'm building is a fast, bare-bones kind of a thing, so I don't care if I have any of the nice content management stuff. The site is Chuckles The Dirt-Chip Muffin. It's probably more violent than what is appropriate for a 7 year-old and a 9 year-old, but it was their idea and we are enjoying working on it together.
Jonathan Fries on .