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Improve your Bouncebackability
 How come some folks take longer to bounce back from setbacks than others? Don't blame their genes, their childhood, or a lack of wealth or opportunity.
Two long-time resilience researchers put the blame on thinking style. Karen Reivich and Andrew Shattė say it's the way we look at events and interpret them that makes all the difference.
In The Resilience Factor, they lay out seven skills for re-wiring the way we think. One, the ABC system, helps us look at what we believe when an event happens, what that leads to, and whether it's serving us. They also provide strategies to avoid jumping to conclusions, automatically blaming ourselves, and other thinking traps.
Other tools include detecting deeply held "iceberg beliefs" about the way things ought to be, solving problems without getting stuck, avoiding that automatic jump to the worst-case scenario, calming down during high-stress situations and staying out of that negative thinking spiral.
Reivich is the co-director of the Penn Resiliency Center. Shattė, a fellow with the Brookings Institution, faciliates resiliency programs for high-level government and military officials as well as business leaders. Both are Ph.D. psychologists.
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Reading Books Helps Reading People
 Do you enjoy curling up with a good piece of fiction? Getting lost in the nuances of the characters' conversation?
Turns out that your reading passion may count for more than a simple pleasure. Brain researchers are discovering that what we read stimulates our brains as if we were actually part of the scene. And beyond the vicarious sense of adventure, eavesdropping on fictional characters may help us develop our social skills and enhance our ability to see the world from others' perspectives.
In a Sunday New York Times piece, one researcher likened the social learning from fiction to the learning a pilot might experience from watching computer simulations of flight. More than tracking a story line, we are looking for subtle clues of human motivation, longings, and frustrations.
So next time you just want to hole up with a good read instead of a non-fiction how-to, no apologies. You are simply building your emotional intelligence. |
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Are you a likely entrepreneur?
 It's not uncommon, when we look for more balance in our lives, to entertain the possibility of starting our own businesses.
But are you the entrepreneurial "type," in love with your mission, your autonomy and the challenges that go with both? Or are you likely to say, like the sign I saw recently in a gift shop, "The only thing more overrated than natural childbirth is owning your own business."
Inc. Magazine offers a quick motivational test to give you a clue. The Motivational Matrix is patterned after a more extensive test designed by two at the Harvard Business School: associate professor Naom Wasserman, and senior fellow and director of career development Timothy Butler.
You can check out your own results and also see how you stack up against other men and women of your age range. The conclusion of one reviewer: Entrepreneurs are from Mars. Non-entrepreneurs are from Venus.
Copyright 2012 Pat Snyder |
