Genius Ideas Are Made Out Of Simple Things

Looking for some inspiration in the TED inventory of fabulous speakers’ clips, I found this fantastic clip; a speech by Eng. Ayah Bdeir, who’s the owner of a genius company, called Little Bits.

Watch and allow yourself to be amazed by the cute little gadgets put together to make fun things.

Genius doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be made of simple things.

What Did You Give Up, To Get What You Got?

What Did You Give Up, To Get What You Got?.

 

Negotiating a raise … in a fun way

Negotiating a raise … in a fun way.

 

How to Turn Your Worst Employee Into a Top Asset

Source: Inc.com

You can’t save your weakest staffers. But you can use them as an way to upgrade your whole team’s performance.

shutterstock images

938
inShare

Today’s Editor’s Picks

• Capitalize on a Lack of Focus
• Could a Divorce Wreck Your Business?
• Make Your Worst Employee a Key Asset
• Made in USA (Again): Why Manufacturing Is Coming Home
• Need an Idea for a Killer New Business? Try This.

You’ve heard the adage, “Hire the right people, and everything else is easy.” That may be true, but it’s also unrealistic—especially in start-ups and rapidly growing, innovative businesses. Mistakes are made in hiring; high-potential peope fizzle out, burn out, or check out. Every owner eventually leads a workforce with mixed talent and ability.

And inevitably, one member of the workorce comes in dead last.

In that situation, the temptation is to fix the weak link. Under pressure from other team members who resent the poor performer, you start to squander time and energy in righteous indignation, remediation, and repair. It’s a dispositional world view—if only you could fix this one person, the organization would be better. I once took charge of an organization where a direct report actually told me, “Here we spend 90% of our time on the worst 10% of our performers.” If the worst are taking energy away from the best at your company, there is no way you are performing to capacity, and your leadership will be distracted and ineffectual.

How great leaders handle the problem

So what should you do? Great leaders reframe this issue, and start working on behalf of the team instead of fixing the “eaches”—a more situational world view.

Many years ago I saw this play out on a planning staff run by then-Lieutenant Colonel David Petraeus. It became clear that a few of us were substantially weaker than others. Petraeus had the power to fire and hire, but turnover creates its own set of challenges. Rather than spending his time trying to fix individuals, the future four-star drilled into team development using the weak performance as team indicators, rather than individual failings.

We became better—not in spite of the weakest performers, but because of them. Their performance focused us on organizational vulnerabilities and areas where we could make changes to strengthen our processes. Our team took responsibility for each other’s products, worked together, and all boats rose. We sometimes worked around those who needed help, touching up their work, making sure that the team didn’t fail. We were respectful of people trying their very best but falling a little short, and everyone learned to critique unemotionally. I loved working on that staff, and in just a few months with no personnel changes, we became very, very good.

Why the weak performer is a gift

The primary insight is that poor performance points to conditions in the organization that allow it to occur. What a gift that can be! In the long run, it’s usually more important for you to address those conditions than it is to fret over a single weak employee. Is there a flaw in the hiring process that, if fixed, could improve hiring across the organization? How can on-boarding be improved so that everyone’s potential is maximized? Are the right assessments and metrics in place to help predict problems before they take the organization down? Are other leaders in the right place at the right time? Is there sufficient coaching? Is there sufficient guidance provided so that people make the right decisions? The list goes on.

A single poor performer can capture a leader’s attention and energy like a drowning person taking a would-be rescuer to the bottom. Team rescues, on the other hand, always succeed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone, and do not represent an official position of the US Military Academy, the Army, or the Department of Defense.

Col. Thomas A. Kolditz: Tom is the founder of Saxon Castle, a consultancy specializing in leader development. Since 2000, he has taught at West Point, where he was founding director of the Academy’s Leadership Ctr. @ThomasKolditz

 

Read more:

• Who Is the World’s Greatest Entrepreneur? You Decide.
• The Best Way to Fire an Employee
• Mindshare Matters More Than Market Share

How To Build A Mind Map

By Matthew Caines, eHow Contributor

Use colors as landmarks for your mind map; this will help you remember the topic’s key points.

Mind mapping is the visual representation of the topics, thoughts and key points for a particular subject or study. Mind maps are “maps” because they help you remember the routes to different themes by way of visual “paths” or “roads”. You can aid your studies or revision by building a concise, detailed and easy-to-understand mind map.

Other People Are Reading

• How to Build a Mind Map Website
• How to Transfer a FreeMind Mind Map to a Word Document

Things You’ll Need

• Blank paper (A4 size or larger)
• Pencil or pen
• Coloring pencils or highlighter pens

Instructions

1. • 1

     Take a piece of blank white paper and lay it down horizontally. Blank paper helps you create less clutter on the page and clears your memory when you come to remember the mind map later. A horizontal page will ensure you can visualize the whole page at once, making better use of the page’s empty space.

   • 2

     Write the title of your studied subject or theme in the center of the page, in big bold lettering. Add a cut-out image or a drawn picture to accompany your title. Big, bold lettering and a clear image aid your memory in associating the mind map with the subject.

   • Sponsored Links

     • Looking for Drawing Pencil?Find Drawing Pencil on Facebook. Sign Up Free Now!www.Facebook.com
   • 3

     

     Begin to make branches away from the center of the mind map to represent your key points. The branches should be evenly spaced away from each other; this makes the best use of the space and keeps the map readable, memorable and uncluttered.

     For example, if you are making a mind map about the seasons of the year, your key points are autumn, winter, spring and summer, and each should be spaced evenly at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o’clock positions.

   • 4

     Curve more branches away from your key points to make sub-points or sub-themes. The sub-points should be drawn into the empty space and must not be crossing or colliding with each other.

     For example, from a mind map about the seasons of the year, your sub-points for the months of winter might be December, January, February and March. All should be spaced evenly and read clearly.

   • 5

     Continue to add branches to your mind map until you have explored all the avenues of the subject. These could be quotes if studying literature or equation formulas if learning a math topic. Your points should make use of the space on the page and be uncluttered and readable.

   • 6

     Add the finishing touches to your mind map. Where possible, add colors and images to aid your brain in memorizing the information. For example, you can use different colors to shade the main points of your map, or insert images to some of the sub-points. These images and colors are landmarks for your memory, helping you follow the map routes to the various topic themes and points.

Related articles

• Mindmapping – get tooled up (carefulkaty.wordpress.com)
• The master guide to mind mapping software file import and export formats (mindmappingsoftwareblog.com)
• Mindmapping – the origins … (carefulkaty.wordpress.com)

Much To Learn From Others

Much To Learn From Others.

via Much To Learn From Others.

Why Active Listening?

Listening is usually identified as a positive personality trait. It can be seen as a virtue and a sign of ‎generosity and wisdom, which may place listeners at high regard in front of other people. Therefore, ‎many individuals may not hesitate to say they are good listeners, but may do so when confessing they ‎are good talkers.

‎
Listening may seem like an easy process, but active or power listening is a specialized skill, which can be ‎acquired through the intentional training of oneself to focus on what is and isn’t being said. A Certified Professional Coach practices power listening through actively listening to his clients.

One can ‎enhance their powerful listening skills over time by attempting to increase the number of seconds, for ‎which one can stay focused. One of the ways to practice this skill is through counting to 50 silently. If ‎we can try to maintain our counting progress for that period of time, we have practiced the skill of ‎power listening for almost one minute. Now this may seem like a short amount of time ‎but in a conversation this can be quite a long one. ‎

One of the key areas of becoming a power/ active listener is to determine whether you value this skill or ‎not. If we ask ourselves whether it is important enough to spend much of our time listening to what ‎other people say, and whether anything they say may offer any benefit to our life. Can we really listen to ‎someone if we can’t directly see the connection between what they are saying and whether it holds ‎any value to us.‎

By practicing this powerful skill regularly, we allow it to be part of our conscious thinking process, and ‎we will start to become more aware of how we often listen to others. We may start to observe ‎ourselves in conversations.‎
Jumping in too early is a guilt trap many people may fall in, but the good news is that we can acquire ‎and develop our skills in listening and trying to understand what the other person is saying and how ‎they are linking things in their own logic. ‎

A good coach is one who listens well, and makes their client feel valued and relieved, through ‎sharing their thoughts and feelings with their coach. That can make clients feel at ease to realize their ‎problems should not take control of them, and that solutions are possible through the voluntary ‎interaction between coach and client.‎

‎ A good coach discerns what is truly motivating, triggering and inspiring a client, and becomes part of ‎his joy, sadness, and celebrations. A coach’s main focus while listening is to understand what inspires ‎the client and what obstacles stand in the way of realizing this inspiration. ‎

Finally, coaches can try to listen to what the client is not saying, i.e. read between the lines.‎Non-verbal communication plays a large role in communication. Therefore, not everything we say means what we really want to say.

Active Listening is a skill when refined to a professional level can open the door to a speaker’s internal wisdom. Empathy is the window for that interaction between speaker and listener. Therefore, being actively present for their clients, coaches try their best to focus mainly on what their client really wants to say.

Everyone needs a coach, why not try it for yourself.

It works!

 

Character & Mental Toughness- On Mental Toughness

Character & Mental Toughness- On Mental Toughness.

What Tolerations Are You Putting Up With In Your Life?

A Tried Method: Using Psychology to Get to Students

Expat Corner Articles and common questions from expats

Mar 13, 2012By Michael Robinson, eChinacities.com  

Comments (11) Add your comment

For the great many of us out there who are English teachers, we all face the common problem each day of figuring out how to reach our students. Some students respond quite well, and others require you to cram the lesson down their throats in order to get them to participate. It’s one of our daily challenges, and the ability to transfer ideas from your head into theirs is one of the key qualities of a good teacher.

Photo: theepochtimes.com

There are a few mechanisms that the brain does which we might call “learning”. Chinese students must rely on one mechanism exclusively in order to pass the high pressure, high importance examinations: memorization. Anyone who has taught has seen the reflex behaviour of Chinese students when they walk into the room: books open, pens out, ready to snap up as much vocabulary words as they can.

Then the foreign teacher, who has most likely not been raised in an environment that requires unending repetition of vocabulary, starts asking questions, resulting in numerous blank, confused, anxious stares. The body language and facial expressions of these students say one thing: “You are not sticking to the script and it is scary, please give us vocabulary words and sentences to repeat”.

Here is one possible solution to this problem.

The Ben Franklin Effect

The story goes that Ben Franklin was a generally likeable person with opinions that most people could get behind…with the exception of one particularly fierce and unforgiving rival. After this rival took a sharp jab at Franklin (intellectually and socially of course), the young Ben Franklin decided enough was enough. He was determined to make this adversary his friend, not by kowtowing and flattery, but with the kind of sheer skill that should come from the future founder of a country.

Knowing his opponent was an avid book lover with an extensive book collection, Ben actually went to his adversary and asked him for a favour—specifically to borrow a very rare book from the rival’s extensive library. Shocked that the man who he had spent many days degrading would ask him for help, he actually gave Ben Franklin the tome—which was eventually sent back with Mr. Franklin’s warmest thanks. The two remained best of friends for the rest of their lives.

Ben, being the clever chap that he was, knew about the incredible power of cognitive dissonance—the discomfort that comes from holding two competing beliefs at the same time. This adversary had spent a great amount of time and energy attacking and lambasting him on every conceivable subject, which by normal logic would make him an irreconcilable enemy. However, Ben did the exact opposite and treated this enemy as a friend. This created a psychological conflict:

My enemy just asked me for a favourà enemies do not ask their opponents for favours à this person is my friend

Human beings like their psychological world to be neat, orderly, and most importantly, without conflict. When two bits of knowledge seem to cancel each other out, a person experiences tension and uncertainty about what is true—an uncomfortable experience to say the least. This experience—cognitive dissonance—gives us the mechanisms for which old, outdated information can be replaced with new, factual information. Wait a minute…old, worn out information replaced with new? Enter language learning in China!

Using cognitive dissonance to reach your students

Now rote memorization does have its place too—times tables would be a monumental pain without them, and basic maths would become nigh impossible. However, when it comes to learning and speaking another language, the power of cognitive dissonance cannot be matched. The onus of energy moves from the teacher onto the student, who on accepting that two competing ideas are true, will be hanging on every word in order to ensure that the ideas in their head work in harmony once again.

Using this power is much easier than you might think:

1. Find your students’ basic assumptions

   We all have some things we assume about life simply because nobody has shown us reason to believe otherwise. You are there to teach English, so they have already accepted that what you will tell them is correct—therefore there is no energy or effort put into defending their English skills. However the purpose of using cognitive dissonance is not simply to teach—but to build a rapport that will allow future lessons to be accepted eagerly. These assumptions are the target for your psychological smart-bomb.

2. Look for common ground

   Everyone in some way has common ground with another person. Even if you are from a completely different culture or background from your students, it is possible to find something that you can identify with. Finding common ground, like Ben Franklin’s mutual love of books, provides the connection that you need to reach them. The kicker here is that you must desire to find common ground with your students; arrogance will be seen as a threat and the plan will backfire.

3. Present a situation that runs contrary to their basic assumptions, while supporting the common ground

Once a student has accepted that you both have something in common, this part becomes incredibly easy. Simply show them that you, a person who is like them, have a different experience or point of view that you would like to share with them. An example would be to share a personal story (real or fictional) that shows you have an emotional investment in their well-being, and do it in a fashion that your students will accept. Your students will see that you, a person who is similar to them, is trying to connect with them on a level that most teachers will not.  From this, any previous ideas they had about you will conflict with the new information they have been given—and the process of cognitive dissonance begins.

Turning a boring lesson around

It happens every so often that I am given a lesson plan on energy and natural resources to teach. This lesson is so incredibly dull and uninspired that it often puts my students to sleep if I stick to it exactly, especially if my students are young (as they often are). Normally I heavily “modify” this particular plan as to fit the needs of my students. However on one particular day, my supervisor was especially keen on ensuring that I stuck exactly to the subject matter. Upon walking into the classroom, I saw to my dismay that my students were all in the throes of middle school, and upon beginning the class showed absolutely no interest in the subject matter at all.  It would take some extra effort to convince them this was important.

 

First I asked them a series of boring questions about energy, the kind they were already prepared for. These were followed by a very personal and direct question, for which they were unprepared: “Do you care about this lesson?”

Shocked, the students answered truthfully with various polite versions of “No”.

“I understand,” I said, and explained this was because energy simply came to them and did not need to be thought about, so long as the lights work and the water is hot. To this they agreed. We had reached a mutual understanding and the breaking of their ideas could begin.

I thereafter gave the most graphic descriptions of where their energy comes from. I described, sparing no detail, of my visit to a McDonald’s beef factory and the plight of a friend who comes from an oil producing nation in Africa. These are not pretty stories—they are stories of power, pain, and wealth beyond our most fantastic imaginations—and the very human cost of things that we take for granted. My students, who formerly were sleeping and uninterested, were now glued to their seats and asking a whole slew of questions that they could not be bothered with even an hour prior. Their old idea, “energy does not relate to me”, was no longer relevant due to the information relayed onto them—that their food and the stuff that powers their precious cell phones and QQ comes with a terrible and carefully hidden cost.  The power of cognitive dissonance has succeeded once again.

Simple, powerful, and used incessantly throughout time, cognitive dissonance is the difference between a teacher and a mentor. Now that you know a little bit about it, for those of you that choose to try, I hope that you will find only success in your quest to be a better teacher.

Or become the founding father of a new country—whichever works for you.