Amy Cuddy wasn’t supposed to become a successful scientist. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to finish her undergraduate degree. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish her undergraduate degree.
But she proved them wrong. Today, Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom. And her training as a classical dancer (another skill she regained after her injury) is evident in her fascinating work on “power posing” — how your body position influences others and even your own brain.
“Using a few simple tweaks to body language, Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy discovers ways to help people become more powerful.”
TIME Game Changers, March 19, 2012
Here goes:
If this sounds hokey, simple.. or even stupid.. GET OVER IT.
You might want to construct your own power pose if you don’t feel comfortable with Amy Cuddy’s version … I myself have a slightly different pose AND supplement with a genuine smile…for 2min.
It is a very powerful exercise..highly recommended.
When I “found” GTD.. the thing that fascinated me the most was the expression “Mind Like Water“. It sounded like a dream… was this possible.. could I experience such a peaceful & present state of mind? Off course.. and I actually did from time to time, but not as often as.. & not for as long as I wanted.
“Mind Like Water”.. … perfectly appropriate response to, and engagement with, whatever is present
~David Allen
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders”
– Lao Tzu
When you throw a pebble into a pond, what does
the water do?
It responds with total appropriateness to the force
and mass of the rock.
It doesn’t overreact or underreact.
It doesn’t react at all.
It simply interacts with whatever comes to it
and returns to its natural state
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to anything
~Shunryu Suzuki
There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can.. give all our attention to the opportunity before us.
~Mark Van Doren
There is usually an inverse relationship between the amount something is on your mind and the amount it’s getting done
~David Allen
“Getting Things Done” is NOT about how to be more productive @ work. It’s about how to find peace & being present i life. It’s a “life improvement system”
“Allen’s ideas are nothing short of life-changing”
~Ben Hammersley (The Guardian)
The GTD system was indeed life-changing for me. I will post a lot more about GTD in the future…
Here is David Allen @ TEDx in September 2012:
Let Me give you a little secret… “Getting Things Done” ..is not about getting things done. It’s really about being properly engaged with what’s going on.
Appropriate engagement is the real key here. Many times not getting something done is how to properly engage with it.
~David Allen @ TEDx
Dan Ariely (born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli American professor of psychology and behavioral economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight.Ariely’s talks on TED have been watched 2.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers.
—
TED bio:
Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as predictable. Why, for instance, are we convinced that “sizing up” at our favorite burger joint is a good idea, even when we’re not that hungry? Why are our phone lists cluttered with numbers we never call? Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, has based his career on figuring out the answers to these questions, and in his bestselling book Predictably Irrational (re-released in expanded form in May 2009), he describes many unorthodox and often downright odd experiments used in the quest to answer this question.
Ariely has long been fascinated with how emotional states, moral codes and peer pressure affect our ability to make rational and often extremely important decisions in our daily lives — across a spectrum of our interests, from economic choices (how should I invest?) to personal (who should I marry?). At Duke, he’s aligned with three departments (business, economics and cognitive neuroscience); he’s also a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His hope that studying and understanding the decision-making process can help people lead better, more sensible daily lives.
He produces a weekly podcast, Arming the Donkeys, featuring chats with researchers in the social and natural sciences.
“If you want to know why you always buy a bigger television than you intended, or why you think it’s perfectly fine to spend a few dollars on a cup of coffee at Starbucks, or why people feel better after taking a 50-cent aspirin but continue to complain of a throbbing skull when they’re told the pill they took just cost one penny, Ariely has the answer.”
Daniel Gross, Newsweek
—
TED intro to the talk:
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.
It’s become increasingly obvious that the dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In “Predictably Irrational,” Dan Ariely tells us why.
When it comes to the mental world, when we design things like health care and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited. I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations … we could design a better world.”
—Dan Ariely
Here goes:
My view:
Funny, interesting & solid delivery.
… and “most people” are irrational.. indeed. I remember one of the first “talk’s” (Google Tech Talk actually) I saw.. David Rock stressed: Rational is overrated.
