Curious Minds at Work

By Gayle AllenBusiness Science Social Sciences Arts Books Management

Curious Minds at Work episodes

August 11, 2018 CM 111: Kristin Neff on Self-Talk for Challenging Times
What kind of self-talk can best help us achieve our goals?
When we run into challenges, the voice inside our heads can be harsh and critical. Kristin Neff, Associate Professor in Human Development at the University of Texas, Austin, explains that this kind of self-talk does us more harm than good. What works instead, she says, is to speak to ourselves as we would to a close friend -- with kindness and understanding.
Kristin is the author of the book, Self-compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. She is a pioneer in the research on self-compassion and first established it as a field of study almost a decade ago. She also makes it clear that we shouldn’t confuse self-compassion with self-pity or lowering our expectations. Instead, we should see it as a strategy that’s been proven effective for achieving our goals.
In this interview we discuss:
The important differences between sympathy, empathy and compassion
How compassion shifts our response from understanding how someone feels -- being empathetic -- to taking action by providing care and support
The important role mindfulness plays in allowing us to remain open to ourselves and others when difficult feelings arise
The ways self-compassion gives us permission to be kind to ourselves and to show support and understanding, while recognizing our struggles are part of the human condition
How self-compassion differs from self-pity and emotional self-indulgence
Why self-compassion is more helpful than self-judgment or self-criticism as it allows us to view mistakes and failure as part of the learning process
How asking ourselves, what would you say to a good friend in this situation, can shift our perspective from one of harshness and judgment to compassion
The importance of recognizing that being human means we are imperfect, we will make mistakes, and difficult things will happen to us and to others -- that we are not alone
How our self-talk - the kinds of things we say to ourselves, our inner voice - should be that of a supportive, caring friend rather than a harsh critic
The importance of having our own back -- of having an inner ally -- and how that gives us the strength to cope with difficult things in life
How veterans’ level of self-compassion was more predictive of whether or not they developed PTSD than how much combat they’d seen
Why the advantage of self-compassion over self-esteem is that it is not dependent on our success or what others think of us
How self-compassion gives us the freedom to cultivate a learning mindset because it frees us up to make mistakes and try again
How self-compassion allows us to accepts ourselves without being complacent
How “the texture of wisdom is gratitude”
Links to Episode Topics
@self_compassion
Kristin Neff’s website
Emiliana Simon-Thomas
The Greater Good Science Center
Chris Germer
The Mindful Self-compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff and Chris Germer
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
38 min
July 29, 2018 CM 110: Laura Vanderkam on Getting More Done
When it comes to time, most of us feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Yet we’ve probably got more time than we think. It's just that the way to win back more hours is counterintuitive.
That’s what Laura Vanderkam reveals in her latest book, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. In it, she shares research on how our brains perceive time, interpret new experiences, and make memories. She explains how this knowledge can change our relationship with time, especially if we analyze how we spend it.
Laura’s written 5 other books, including, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fortune. Her TED Talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time, has been viewed over 5 million times, and she’s co-host of the podcast, Best of Both Worlds.
In this interview we discuss:
Why knowing how we spend our time helps us enjoy our down time that much more
How tracking our time -- even for a few days -- gives us the data we need to be more mindful
Why, to change our relationship with time, we need to take charge of it
How a program that tracked a veteran school principal’s time helped him focus more of his attention on instruction
How we can each make every day a "realistic ideal day" within the framework of our lives
How one way to stretch time is to add more memorable activities into your life
Why we need to manage our experiencing selves in order to make more memories that expand our sense of time
How we can woo good memories to make our lives feel fuller and richer
Why we should leave blank spaces in our calendars, so that we can reflect, slow down, and connect with others in the workplace
How savoring increases our enjoyment of an experience as we plan something enjoyable, take the time to anticipate it and then share it with others
How we can invest in our happiness by examining the pain points in our lives and, wherever possible, spending wisely to alleviate them
How taking the time to exercise gives us energy to enjoy our time more
Why taking time to reflect can help us step outside the stream of time so we can ask ourselves if we like how we’re spending it
How a better-than-nothing goal, or BTN, can help us accomplish big goals by committing to small daily activities that add up over time, like writing 400 words or running one mile a day
How spending time with the people in our lives expands our sense of time and means we should deliberately build time with others into our schedules
A simple way of building a network over the course of a year by reaching out to one person a day with a question, a tip, or a helpful article or piece of information
Episode Resources
@lvanderkam
https://lauravanderkam.com/
National SAM Innovation Project
Daniel Kahneman
Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei
Fred Bryant
10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life
Molly Ford Beck
Redbook
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
38 min
July 15, 2018 CM 109: Heidi Grant on the Science of Asking for Help
How do you feel about asking for help? For most of us, asking for help feels uncomfortable, mainly because we expect we’ll be rejected when we ask.
Yet there's a good chance we're wrong. Heidi Grant, social psychologist and author of the book, Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You, explains that a lot more people want to help us than we tend to predict. It’s the way we ask for help that determines the result, and that’s where Heidi’s practical tips can make all the difference.
Heidi is Chief Science Officer of the NeuroLeadership Institute and Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. She’s the author of a number of books, including No One Understands You and What to Do about It and Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.
In this interview we discuss:
How our brains process social pain -- rejection, exclusion, not feeling valued or respected -- using some of the same areas of the brain as physical pain
Why fears of social pain -- rejection, exclusion, not feeling valued or respected -- can prevent us from asking for help
How we’re twice as likely to get help from strangers as we think -- we tend to underestimate how much others want to help us
How we often underestimate the likelihood that someone will help is because we focus on how onerous the task is
We also underestimate the social cost of someone saying no to our request
How helping others feeds into a desire to connect and feel good about supporting someone else in their work
There are three responses we can have when someone asks for our help: (1) no; (2) yes, but I don’t want to because I have to; and (3) yes, and I want to and it feels rewarding
When you ask for help, don’t make it weird by being overly apologetic -- it makes the helper feel uncomfortable
How offering a reward can make the helper feel like it’s an exchange or a transaction rather than something they’d want to do for you
How offering a reward for someone’s help can shift the motivation they have from wanting to help for the sake of helping to wanting to help only if they get something in return
Why we should ask again even if someone has already turned us down -- especially if they’ve turned us down - because they often feel guilty and will want to help the next time
How we may not be getting the help we need because we aren’t letting others know we need their help -- they may be completely unaware
The fact that nothing goes without saying, since others can’t read our minds to know we need their help
The fact that someone may want to help but holds off so as not to offend
Why we should be specific in asking for what we need and in asking the right person, rather than making general asks to a group of people
Why your requests to meet up with someone just to pick their brain or chat may not be getting you the results you want
Why it’s so helpful to communicate what you have in common with the person whose help you’re requesting, like shared goals, experiences, or identities
How others are more inclined to help when they’re aware of the impact they’ll be having
Why it’s so important to go the extra mile to make the help you seek rewarding to the other person -- that way it’s a win-win for both of you
Episode Links
http://www.heidigrantphd.com/
@heidigrantphd
NeuroLeadership Institute
Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business School
Reach by Andy Molinsky
Illusion of transparency
Diffusion of responsibility
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
37 min
July 01, 2018 CM 108: Leonard Mlodinow on Unleashing Our Creative Thinking
In times of rapid change, people who can think creatively are invaluable. Leonard Mlodinow, author of the book, Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, calls this type of thinking elastic. It is a bottom up approach that unleashes new ideas, and he believes anyone can employ it, since it is innate to us.
Leonard’s previous books include Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), The Drunkard’s Walk (a New York Times Notable Book) and The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking. He’s also written for the TV Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. During our conversation he shares more about what elastic thinking is, why we need to cultivate it, and concrete ways to do just that.
In this interview we discuss:
Elastic thinking as a way of making new or breaking already-established rules, as well as framing or reframing problems
The fact that we need elastic thinking now more than ever in a world of rapid change
How bottom up thinking serves as the basis for artificial intelligence and machine learning
Why humans, with our 100 billion neurons, still outdo computers when it comes to elastic thinking
How our point of view can preclude us from solving a problem, so that we constantly need to challenge our hidden assumptions, in order to see things differently
Ways to broaden our thinking include asking about the least popular dish at a restaurant and then trying it, talking to people not normally in our social circles, questioning a strongly held belief, and thinking about times we made a mistake
How giving our brains down time to make associations, generate ideas and relax our mental filters can improve our problem-solving abilities
Episode Links
@lmlodinow
http://leonardmlodinow.com/
Encyclopedia Britannica
Wikipedia
Caltech
Ellen Langer
The Net and the Butterfly by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack
Natural neural networks
Google translate
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Doolittle Raid
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
34 min
June 17, 2018 CM 107: Adam Alter – Are We Addicted to Our Technology?
Tech addictions don’t just happen to certain kinds of people. Increasingly we’re finding they can happen to any of us.
In today’s technology-rich world, many of us check our phones obsessively, binge watch television programs and pour over social media. Author and New York University Professor Adam Alter calls this behavioral addiction, an area of psychology he’s studied in relation to the irresistible games, apps and other software that compel us to play, watch, read, and respond.
Adam is author of the book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s also author of the New York Times bestseller, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, and he’s written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Atlantic, WIRED, and Slate.
In this interview we discuss:
How advances in the fields of psychology and design have made our tech so much harder to resist
The fact that most of us dramatically underestimate how much time we spend online and how little joy it often brings us
How the presence of an iPhone on a table undermines our ability to connect
The fact that our tech-rich work, travel and home environments actually set us up for addiction
Why screen time poses a threat to children’s ability to learn empathy
How addiction is a form of learning where a seemingly pleasurable activity becomes a learned behavior
Important research on want vs like when it comes to addiction
How tech designers take advantage of the destructive and addictive side of goal achievement
How breaking goals into small steps helps us feel success daily, rather than failure until the larger goal is achieved
Why the lack of natural break points in online articles and programming sets us up for addictive online behaviors
How tech and online designers tap into our preoccupation with closing loops and completing tasks to hook us
Why it is so important that we carve out daily time to put our tech away
How we wouldn't give most people the ability to interrupt us, yet we continually give our tech that power
Episode Links
@adamleealter
Adam Alter
Kevin Holesh and Moment app
Your Smartphone Reduces Your Brainpower, Even If It’s Just Sitting There by Robinson Meyer
Technology Addiction - How Should It Be Treated?
Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use Among U.S. Vietnam Veterans
James Olds
Peter Milner
Reward system
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Aryeh Routtenberg
Kent Berridge
Natasha Dow Schull
Scott Adams on systems vs goals
Benjamin Franklin and the to-do list
Social comparison theory
Zeigarnik Effect - Bluma Zeigarnik - cliffhanger
The Sopranos
The Italian Job
Angry Birds by Rovio
American Academy of Pediatrics
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
51 min
June 03, 2018 CM 106: Daniel Cable on Happiness at Work
Unhappiness at work is at an all-time high. While some might blame bad attitudes or a lack of motivation, Daniel Cable offers another perspective. He believes that the routines of the modern workplace are simply out of step with how our brains are wired to explore and experiment.
Daniel Cable is Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School and author of the book, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do. He believes our biological urge to learn and discover is what’s needed in today’s fast-paced work world. He also thinks that the organizations that will most benefit from it are those willing to redesign how they operate.
In this interview we discuss:
How our brain’s urge to explore and discover is an asset in today’s workplaces
The fact that most workplaces fail to tap into our innate abilities to innovate and problem solve
The kinds of rewards organizations might gain for customers, workplace cultures, and the bottom line by tapping into what our seeking systems innately crave
How our brain’s reward system is triggered when others take the time to understand our perspective and unique strengths
How trying something new and novel also triggers our brain’s reward system
Why it’s so important for us to see the impact of our work on others -- to understand our purpose
How our seeking system is a feature and not the bug that Henry Ford believed it to be as he built scalable systems for repetitive work
How fear in the workplace can create learned helplessness
The fact that play is an important way for us to learn what we are capable of
Why encouraging employees to bring their best selves to work significantly increases their long-term retention and engagement, while also increasing customer delight
How team members problem solve more effectively when they share in advance when they have been at their best
Why it’s so important that leaders be willing to learn from employee experimentation, since it may not always go as planned -- and that’s part of the learning process
How servant or humble leadership works best in supporting employees’ desire to explore, discover, and innovate
How the role of the leader is to get the most out of their people at work by providing resources, removing obstacles, modeling psychological safety and modeling a growth mindset
How our perceived resistance to change flies in the face of our building flying machines and developing cures for diseases and so much more
Episode Links
@DanCable1
Dan Cable
Dan-cable.com
Jaak Panksepp
Ventral striatum
KPIs
Martin Seligman
Henry Ford
Frederick Taylor
In the Lab of Happy Rats video - Jaak Panksepp
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
How to Activate Your Best Self and What Happens When You Do by Dan Cable
Wipro
Harvard Kennedy School
Let Your Workers Rebel by Francesca Gino
William B. Swann
Jeffrey T. Polzer
Osteria Francescana and Massimo Bottura
Creative Change by Jennifer Mueller
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and KLM Surprise and KLM’s ‘Adios Amigos’ Tweet
Servant leadership
The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner
Growth mindset and Carol Dweck
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
51 min
May 20, 2018 CM 105: Tali Sharot On How To Change Someone’s Mind
Can facts change someone’s mind? Most times, this approach is a dead end, especially when we try to convince those with top-notch analytical skills. In fact, neuroscience shows that analytical people will tend to use data to find fault with facts they don’t like.
If we want to bring someone closer to our way of thinking, Tali Sharot suggests another way in her book, The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals about our Power to Change Others. Tali is founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC. Tali is also author of the book, The Optimism Bias.
In this interview we discuss:
Why we tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe
Our attraction to information associated with people who think like us
How bias compounds as we filter for information that aligns with, and people who agree with, our beliefs
How we will avoid getting advice from experts - on something completely unrelated to politics - if they are not aligned with our political beliefs
Why people with strong math and analytical skills can become even more entrenched in their beliefs on a topic
How our brains tend to encode information from people who agree with us and how that impacts the decisions we make
Why starting a conversation by focusing on an area of agreement can help us view one another as more similar than originally thought and help us listen more fully to a different perspective
How our brains can synchronize when we listen to an emotional, compelling speech and how that helps us predict what the speaker may say
How feelings of happiness, sadness, stress, and so on, can be emotionally contagious for others in a family, group or organization
How social media serves as the amygdala of the internet, rousing us emotionally in ways associated with how the amygdala works
How immediate, positive feedback, associated with progress and situated in a social setting, can improve performance
The fact that our phobias arise from areas of our life we cannot control
How our brains view choice as a reward
Episode Links
Tali Sharot
@affectivebrain
Affective Brain Lab
Dan Kahan
Mentalization
How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Susan Cain
Uri Hasson
Weizmann Institute of Science
Hospital Hand Hygiene Project
Discovery health insurance
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
42 min
May 06, 2018 CM 104: Janice Kaplan on Making Your Own Luck
We all know people who seem especially lucky or, in some cases, unlucky.
Janice Kaplan wondered whether this was due to random chance or luck overlooked, so she co-authored the book, How Luck Happens: Using the Science of Luck to Transform Work, Love, and Life. In writing the book, she learned how we can tilt the scales in our favor, even in cases where the odds are long.
Janice is the former editor in chief of Parade magazine and author of 13 popular books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Gratitude Diaries.
In this interview we discuss:
How there are aspects of luck within our control
How a winning combination of talent, hard work, and knowing your goals can increase your luck
How optimism and a belief in making our own luck makes good things happen
Why an optimistic mindset ensures we will apply the effort it takes to make our own luck
Why we need to toggle between focused and wide-ranging attention to see events as opportunities
What it means to choose the statistic we want to be
How we can put ourselves in a position where luck can find us
The fact that our weak ties have a greater chance of helping us achieve our goals
Why we may need to zig versus zag or try out a different lane to be successful
How revisiting what we thought of as dead ends can help us see new possibilities
Why goals and knowing what we want are paramount to making our own luck
How lucky breaks can actually be small events that make a big difference if we know how to take full advantage of them
Why it can be helpful to navigate life with a compass, rather than a map
The key role curiosity plays in helping us do things differently in order to make a lucky moment out of something that does not seem that way at first
Episode Links
Barnaby Marsh
Martin Seligman
Doug Rauch
Lara Galinsky
Mike Darnell
American Idol
Steven Strogatz
Six degrees of separation
Joi Ito
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
31 min
April 22, 2018 CM 103: Daniel Coyle on How to Build Amazing Teams
How do we build remarkable teams, the kind that are more than the sum of their parts? Daniel Coyle answers that question in his latest book, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.
After talking to some of the greatest teams, such as the Navy Seals, IDEO, the San Antonio Spurs, and Pixar, Dan found a replicable pattern of three behaviors shared by these dynamic cultures. They each actively work to (1) Build Safety, (2) Share Vulnerability and (3) Establish Purpose. Dan shares how our teams can do this, too.
Dan is also the author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, The Secret Race, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects. In this interview we discuss:
Why certain groups add up to way more than the sum of their parts
What kindergartners can teach us about group performance
How status management undermines group performance
How culture is something we do, not something we are
Why culture is about moving together toward a common goal
The three key skills of group performance - vulnerability, safety, and purpose
How bad apples chip away at psychological safety and derail groups
Why we need to be intolerant of brilliant jerks
The outsized impact of warmth as a counter to negativity
Key indicators of high-performing groups, like rapid speech, light physical touch, laughter, and high energy, which indicated safety and connection
The incredible value of collective intelligence in groups as they share information, problem solve, and connect the dots
Why belonging cues are so powerful for group performance
How great coaches, like Gregg Popovich, exude curiosity and care for their teams
The role emotional control can play in supporting team members
How Navy Seals use the vulnerability loop to amplify team safety and boost performance
How an after-action review - a discussion of what went right, what went wrong, and what will happen next time -- helps teams improve performance
The value of warm candor - telling a hard truth but emphasizing connection - over brutal honesty
Why cheesy catch phrases can be stronger indicators of group performance than we might think
Why we should focus on the first five seconds when we interact with someone for the first time, especially when it comes to our energy level, eye contact, facial expressions, and engagement
How asking our team members about one thing we should keep on doing and one thing we should stop doing can help us get better at what we do
Episode Links
Navy Seals
IDEO
San Antonio Spurs
Gregg Popovich
Pixar
Peter Skillman
Alexander Pentland
Sociometer
Collective intelligence
The Captain Class by Sam Walker
Draper Kauffman
Gramercy Tavern
Danny Meyer
Laszlo Bock
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
40 min
April 08, 2018 CM 102: Morten Hansen On Working Smarter
What sets top workplace performers apart?
To answer this question, Morten Hansen, Professor at University of California, Berkeley, studied over 5,000 U.S. corporate employees for his book, Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More. Through his research, he found that top performers engage in 7 key practices that explain 66 percent of the differences in their level of performance.
Co-author with Jim Collins of the highly acclaimed book, Great by Choice, Morten is also the author of the book, Collaboration, and he has been ranked one of the most influential global management thinkers by Thinkers50.
In this interview we discuss:
Why working longer hours is not enough to achieve high levels of performance
How seven work-smart practices can explain 66 percent of the differences between top performers and their peers
Why we need to do less and then obsess to produce exceptional work
How an obsession with sled dogs led one explorer to reach the South Pole before his highly competitive and well-resourced peer
Why Jiro, the famous sushi maker, is one of the best examples of someone who does less and obsesses his way to a Michelin star
The key question employees need to ask their bosses in order to do less and obsess: which of these projects is of the highest priority for achieving our goals?
How a lack of prioritization can be the linchpin to doing less and obsessing over it to provide key value
How a high school principal architected a work redesign that epitomizes what it means to start with delivering value and then determining goals
The value of redesigning our work without spending more or adding staff
Why our goals should emerge from the value we seek to deliver
How focus on fewer work projects allows you to ask deeper questions and provide more value
Why a focus on passion and purpose allows us to contribute more than passion alone
The fact that the goal of collaboration is better performance, not better collaboration
Why we need to avoid over collaborating and under collaborating and, instead, focus on disciplined collaboration to achieve our goals
How small changes can help us achieve big results, especially when it comes to focusing more, saying no to some things, setting better priorities, and collaborating more strategically
Episode Links
Robert Falcon Scott
Roald Amundsen
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Psyched Up by Dan McGinn
A Flipped School and Greg Green
Hartman Goertz and Tangier Terminal
Berkeley Executive Education
Genevieve Guay
Curious George
If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!
40 min

About Curious Minds at Work

From the publisher's feed

Want to get better at work? At managing others? Managing yourself? Gayle Allen interviews experts who take your performance to the next level. Each episode features a book with insights to help you…