I hate uncertainty, and it turns out I’m not alone! In a talk I once gave on the psychology of creativity I asked a large audience of television creative workers to raise their hands if they liked being confused. I asked this because being stuck and facing contradiction are an essential part of the creative […]
In Part 1 of Creating Psychological Safety in Teams we saw that teamwork is perhaps the defining feature of our species and that leveraging it is the pathway to sustainable high performance. We also saw that emotional fortitude is created by teams facing meaningful challenges together in an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect and autonomy […]
Our topic is high performance in teams that is enabled by a special kind of emotional fortitude. The kind of fortitude that is required in response to sustained, very high challenges. It turns out that this is inseparable from creating a climate of psychological safety in which we feel we are in the trenches together. […]
We are a worrisome species. Our genetic code predisposes us to be pretty hypervigilant. An elderly Mark Twain once observed: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” So why we do worry so much? Evolutionary psychologists believe this negativity bias gives us a survival advantage. We overestimate danger […]
In part 1 of this series on mental health we examined how we can all go about helping colleagues and acquaintances if we see they are struggling with poor mental health. In this talk we address the following question: How does one handle the situation if we supervise or manage someone with a mental health […]
Over the past 20 years or so public awareness and acceptance of ill mental health has grown enormously. There is vastly improved knowledge of its prevalence and treatment. But there is still much improvement needed. In the context of the Covid pandemic, there is a secondary contagion of mental ill health that to varying degrees […]
Scratch anyone in the right place and you’ll find insecurity. We are hard-wired to fear rejection and to be suspicious of strangers. In fact, recent brain imaging studies show that social rejection is processed by the same areas in the brain that process physical threat. Yet, at the same time, human beings are extraordinarily social.
Although we may not be aware of it, everyone is potentially afraid of you and me. That’s right! But that cannot be the case, can it? Who’d ever be afraid of you or me? It turns out, in the right circumstances, just about anyone.
Milton Erickson was the premier hypnotherapist of the 20th century, if not of all time. He knew a thing or two about a lot of things, including resistance. He once told a teaching story involving his father on their farm in Wisconsin. Young Milton observed his father trying to pull a small steer by its […]
A quiet mind is a strong mind. In an age of busy-ness and urgency, of multi-tasking and work overload, it’d be understandable to think that what’s required is a really switched-on mind, or a really busy mind. But, nothing could be farther from the truth! The noisier the mind, the less productive it becomes. This […]
