That Got Me Thinking

Does what we choose to wear matter? Are we judged on our appearance? Does it make sense to put form over function? And what’s with three-piece suits and uncomfortable shoes?

Elizabeth Bean Smith, founder of Wardrobe Therapy has some answers to the age old question, “Does the suit make the man?” And does the dress, skirt, jumpsuit, suit, heels, flats, t-shirt, blouse, flares, trousers, jeans, flat front, pleated, cropped, side slit, wrapped…make the woman?

Elizabeth, a Fashion Institute of Technology graduate, founded Wardrobe Therapy in 2006. She left a successful career in Fortune 500 corporate retail and upscale boutique management to launch a dream that has in turn allowed others to realize theirs by helping them use fashion as a tool to brand themselves and their corporations.

https://www.wardrobetherapyllc.com/

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Everyone agrees our current model of education is broken. And Ted Dintersmith has some valuable suggestions on how to fix it. Ted set out across America to visit 50 states in one year and sound the alarm that our civil society is beginning to fracture, and we are preparing our kids for a world that no longer exists. The future is coming more quickly than we realize; we must reimagine education, and quick, if we want to be prepared.

Innovation expert and Padawan of education, Tim Dintersmith, is the author of the incredible book, “What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration From Teachers Across America.” He is the executive producer of the acclaimed documentary “Most Likely to Succeed” and co-author of the book, “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing our Kids for the Innovation Era.” Prior to his yearlong journey across the Country, he spent four decades excelling in the fields of technology, business and public policy.

Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.” And the costs to society when we don’t successfully educate our children are high. Our nation already experiences alarming rates of addiction, depression, homelessness and mass incarceration.

But don’t dismay, there is reason for hope. What Ted found again and again, across the United States, surprised him. He saw innovative programs working. Kids were excited, energized, engaged, empowered and performing well on tests they hadn’t spent day in and day out preparing for. Alongside innovation, discipline problems disappeared. Children were leading in their classrooms and in their communities. Kids were thriving, and it was costing less money and benefitting society.

“Today’s children will be adults in a world where the price-performance of machine intelligence is one hundred times as powerful as today, at least.” With this truth in mind, Dintersmith challenges our educators to ask,”What will that world look like and ask of our children to succeed?” and then go about doing better things rather than focusing our attention and resources on doing (the same) things better.

Ted Dintersmith

TEDxFargo

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For a great many people, negotiation is a very scary prospect. Even though we negotiate every single day of our lives, formally and informally. Heck, we even negotiate with ourselves on a regular basis. You might not like it; but it’s unavoidable, so you may as well embrace the fact and learn how to reduce the stress and level up your success.

Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is a negotiation and conflict resolution expert and the co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University. He believes people have a far too narrow view of what negotiation is even though they are actually doing it everyday. It’s a life-skill fundamental to our everyday existence; and yet, most of us have never learnt to negotiate properly and often don’t even recognize when we are in the midst of it.

The proper mindset is critical when negotiating. Weiss tells us, “It’s not a destination, it’s a journey.” And one it’s best to be prepared for. Planning is key, although it rarely goes as you’ve imagined. It isn’t always easy and you don’t have control over all of the elements. This is what makes it uncomfortable for people. Weiss’s advice, “You have to operate in a sea of uncertainty and chaos, but chaos in a good way… The ability to adapt is a critical element.” His three keys to effective negotiation: Remember negotiation is broader than you think, maintain self-awareness, and never forget that everyone involved in the negotiation is in it together.

Elements of a successful approach include,  expanding the pie and mastering the use of open ended questions. Get people to ask what you mean and what you are interested in. And find out what the others involved are interested in. Weiss reminds us, “It’s an interdependent process, so you can’t just stick to your prepared plan. The other side isn’t reading your playbook…It’s a bit like playing chess.”

Weiss is confident there are qualities that make an effective negotiator, and they can be learned. Be patient. Ask good questions and listen. Find a way to work with one another, and be clear on your objective as you stay attuned to the other person. You need their participation or you wouldn’t be negotiating. They are your problem solving partner, not the problem. “The issues are the problems, not the disagreements regarding them…Listen through the criticism to understand what they are trying to get at.”

Wisdom from Weiss: In the realm of negotiation trying to be something you’re not won’t work. When you are thoughtful and prepared, centered and confident, you don’t have to feel worried about being vulnerable or worry about tricks and tactics because they won’t be effective. Confidence is key, so you won’t be seen as someone who is easy to manipulate.

The biggest mistakes people make are making assumptions and bringing their own biased perception to the process. This is the biggest impediment to success. Weiss, “Information is the currency in negotiation, the more you have the better off you are.” There is a distinct difference between hearing and listening, and between debate mode and dialog mode. Rather than looking for holes in the other side’s argument to find tactical advantages to win, the superior approach is to seek information and understand interests to get where you want to go.

A favorite quote of Weiss,  – “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” ― John F. Kennedy. And with Weiss’s guidance, we can all be fearless.

https://www.joshuanweiss.com/

Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School

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Grab your phone or computer and type in How to Change into Google and this is what you get: about 10,370,000,000 results (0.99 seconds)

Ponder Cheryl Crow’s song, “A Change Would Do You Good” and David Bowie’s “Changes.” Think about the challenges of change and the ever-present fact that even when we desire it beyond all else, we fight its coming tooth and nail. Contemplate the sometimes excruciating conflict that wages, external and internal, between status quo and imagined realities and the battles we wage with ourselves and others to hold back the tides of change.

In this episode of “That Got Me Thinking,” Ellie Newman is joined by empowerment expert, Kim Fulcher. Kim is a seasoned Silicon Valley executive and serial entrepreneur.  She’s the author of Remodel Your Reality; Seven Steps to Rebalance Your Life and Reclaim Your Passion and the creator of the Get Your Groove Back an on-demand coaching program for women.  She speaks professionally about empowerment, engagement, marketing and community culture, and runs a coaching organization that specializes in helping professional women succeed in their careers.

Kim offers practical advice for clarifying what you want, getting unstuck and effectively and efficiently facilitating change. She reminds us that we can’t behave in ways that conflict with what we want and still hope for new results. She encourages us to match our behavior with the goals we are looking to bring into our lives. She defines power as what you do rather than something you have or don’t have. And if you are serious about facilitating change,  you’ll need to use your power in practical ways – acquiring agency- utilizing your power intentionally to impact your life and shift it in the direction you desire.

Her advice is straight forward and achievable: To change, identify what’s working, assess what’s not working and then determine exactly what you want to have instead. There will be a number of things you will need to start doing and a similar number of things you will need to stop doing. Four simple steps will get you where you want to go: Acknowledge your Status Quo. Disrupt your current circumstance. Make adjustments toward your new destination.  And lean into your new normal.

http://www.kimberlyfulcher.com/

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In 1901, more than 300 million pounds of dressed beef crossed the Atlantic. In 1902 there was a Kosher meat riot – Women smashed shop windows, poured kerosene oil on meat and stomped customers beef purchases. Between the years 1874 and 1880, barbed wired fencing use went from 10,00o to 80 million pounds. And the Dawes Act led to a decline of Indian controlled land of almost 75%. Railroads, cattle ranchers, cowboys, horses, corporate greed, industrialization, military intervention, status, corruption, food safety, blizzards, the expropriation of American Indian lands and Porterhouse steaks for all; this is the story of modern beef.

From the rise of corporate ranching, its fall to independent ranchers and their submission to the control of the Big Four slaughterhouses, this is the story of how the West was won (or stolen.) And this is the story of how the beef industry industrialized food production, kept prices low, modernized food safety and succeeded in the grandest branding campaign in history. Pun intended.

Join, Ellie Newman, host of the thought-provoking podcast, That Got Me Thinking, and historian, Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof to Table History of How Beef Changed American. Listen in as the conversation turns to how beef conquered America and gave rise to the modern industrial food complex. “By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high quality, fresh beef with almost every meal.”

Red Meat Republic

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Research shows a huge part of developing resilience is having supportive people in our lives. Yet, people often struggle with the idea that they aren’t worth the effort, or anyone’s time, so believe that no one is going to be available to help. Well, psychotherapist and author, Cheryl Bradshaw is here to help and show us how we can actually, intentionally, get in our own way to create more positive outcomes by actively breaking down the barriers that keep us from living our best lives.

Through developing our resilience muscle, we can learn to tolerate some of the discomfort that comes with being human. Instead of avoiding, or speeding past all of the emotional discomfort in our lives, we are able to sit with, feel and experience the often difficult emotions that arise. We learn to choose not to run away, and that in turn builds our strength and ability to do so.

The Resilience Workbook for Teens: Activities to Help You Gain Confidence, Manage Stress, and Cultivate a Growth Mindset, along with Cheryl’s earlier book, How to Like Yourself, help us to understand direct discomfort versus indirect discomfort, rabbit holes, thought traps, good stress, bad stress and the complexities of the brain’s schemas – state dependent webs. She takes us to the “brain gym” to actively work on making new connections to fire together and wire together. We create positive new associations that are equally true – that our brains previously did not believe – those positive elements in our lives and those amazing qualities we embody, our unique abilities, talents and accomplishments, including those we all share merely from the virtue of being human.

Join us, Ellie Newman, host of the thought-provoking podcast, That Got Me Thinking, and psychotherapist and author, Cheryl Bradshaw, as the conversation turns to embracing who you are, bouncing back from adversity and achieving your full potential.

Cheryl Bradshaw

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Meet your guide to living your best life possible, Regan Walsh.

If you’ve been asking yourself, “Is this is all there is?” If you are living a life filled with pressure to meet everyone else’s demands. If you have lost the ability to honestly distinguish what you truly want because of all the shoulds in your life and are tired of going through your days depleted, restless and unfocused, trying to live up to external standards of the life you ought to lead, what you ought to want and what you ought to do in every moment, then get onboard for this life altering tour.

Regan Walsh is an executive coach and life coach who believes strongly in the power of instinct, optimism, and honoring your own gifts. She tells us, “It’s time to participate fully in all life has to offer.” And she answers the ever looming question, “How can we experience the one life we are given in the best life possible?” She tells us, “Your best life is one in which you proudly stake your claim on what brings you joy.” She believes that this is actually what life is all about, and she is here to guide us all to that happy and fulfilling destination.

So, if you would like to set goals with clarity, say yes with confidence and live life with passion, listen in to this thought-provoking episode of “That Got Me Thinking” with Ellie Newman and Regan Walsh, as the conversation turns to saying goodbye to guilt, resentment, shame and frustration by shedding the shoulds and uncovering the richness of your life

https://reganwalsh.com/.

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Ellie Newman interviews SAT and ACT test prep expert, Joe McGovern, in this episode of That Got Me Thinking, a thoughtful and thought-provoking podcast. Listen as the conversation turns to standardized testing and college admissions. Who knew this would be the most exciting topic of the year?

The recent college admissions scandal has shone a new light onto the fairness of the process of applying to, and being accepted by, elite universities around the Nation. And it has brought a slew of new questions into our minds regarding the assessment tools used by these universities to gauge students’ preparedness and qualifications: Is there bias? Can students work hard and get a fair shot? Is the system rigged? Are the SATs and ACTs friends or foes?…And my favorite, who knows how a zero is related to a factor in a quadratic equation, and if I don’t will I fail the SAT?

Well, lucky for us, our test prep hero, Joe McGovern is here to set the record straight. He tells us, “The SAT isn’t the enemy. The College Board has a job to do.” And he believes they are doing a good job. There job is to identify the kids who have the skills, knowledge and material that it’s probably going to take to be successful in college and beyond.  Joe’s job is helping these kids to have what it takes to end up on the upper end of the spectrum created from testing results. He believes the skills and knowledge that are tested for on the SAT are pretty much a corollary for what students need to succeed in college, especially in relation to English studies. And, the Mathematics portions of the exams accurately test the thinking skills that one needs to connect the material to the problem and find a creative way towards the solution to the specific problem- skills necessary in math and life. (Turns out knowing the relationship zero has to a factor isn’t quite enough.)

The SAT presents a myriad of problems to solve. And Joe’s challenge (which he finds fun and exhilarating) is to figure out with each and every unique student, how he will get this material into this kid’s head in such a way that they can produce it in the test and get a good score that accurately represents their capacity for success. People think in different ways; therefore,  Joe devises successful strategies to help non-linear thinkers to sequentialize – to read, understand, calculate and come up with the correct answers . And yes, he confirms the tests are trying to trick us, but in a good way!

https://mcgoverntestprep.com/

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Lori Gottlieb knows what it’s like to sit with discomfort and pain, that of others and her own. She knows that our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. She knows that change and loss travel together, and that you’ll need to figure out what the loss will be to be able to move beyond it. And she knows that finding the space between stimulus and response is where we will find the power to choose growth and freedom.

She tells us, “I want to capture the process in which humans, struggling to evolve, push against their shells until they quietly (but sometimes loudly) and slowly (but sometimes suddenly) crack open.” And that’s just what she does in her instant New York Times bestseller, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist and Our Lives Revealed (Now being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria on ABC.) Her previous bestsellers – Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self, and Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.

Carl Jung said, “Who looks inside, awakes.” And Lori is looking. “One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.”

In this episode of “That Got Me Thinking” a thoughtful and thought-provoking podcast, Ellie Newman listens as Lori encourages us to take that leap of faith into our better future but to be forewarned that therapy will always take us into uncharted territory, even if we choose to preserve the status quo. “The path to peace is to call a truce with ourselves.” This is how we learn to manage the certainty of uncertainty without sabotaging ourselves and find our way to freedom.

https://lorigottlieb.com/

The post How Do We Change?… In Relation to Others is the Answer appeared first on That Got Me Thinking.

Are you or your child highly sensitive? Are you more aware of subtleties than others? Are you easily overwhelmed in crowds or loud and chaotic environments? Do you have a keen sense of smell? Do you cry easily and feel deeply? When you watch a violent movie scene, or hear about a medical procedure, do you feel the corresponding sensations in your body?

In this episode of “That Got Me Thinking” a thoughtful and thought-provoking podcast, Ellie Newman speaks with Dr. Ted Zeff, a leading expert on the trait of high sensitivity and author of numerous books, including, The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide. Listen as the conversation turns to what it means to be highly sensitive and how to take full advantage of this wonderful trait.

The highly sensitive person has been misunderstood for quite some time. Dr. Elaine Aron explains that in the past HSPs have been called shy, timid, inhibited, overly sensitive and introverted, but those labels completely miss the true nature of this trait. Today, the scientific community understands that the brain of a highly sensitive person (HSP) actually works differently, and 20% of the general population present this trait.

HSPs feel in deep and complex ways, are observant and detail oriented. They tend to be highly intuitive, pay close attention to what’s happening in their surroundings and have a rich inner life. Most HSPs have been told their entire lives to stop being so sensitive. But it just may be this heightened sensitivity that will save the world.

https://sensitivethemovie.com/

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