Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Focus”

05 Jun 2011

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // ben’s blog

By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics….. all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.

via What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // ben’s blog.

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Posted in Control, Focus, Leadership, Learning, Psychology and tagged , | Leave a Comment
20 Apr 2011

Emotion and engagement

‘What is the emotion the potential customers want to feel or what is the emotion they have right now? Take that and play with it. Find a way to make that emotion motivate them or find out how they could learn from it. For example, if you have business owners in your list or your funnel, one of their biggest issues right now is the economy. That is an emotion—it is fear. You can turn fear into motivation by reassuring them that it can be okay, that they can make it through troubled economic times. Because it can be.’

Scott Stratten in UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. is discussing the use of emotion to engage and then make something go viral. It immediately made me think that he’s describing the core lever for human psychology. Leveraging our attention by triggering our emotion via our limbic system. Dr Boeree describes the limbic system as ‘primarily responsible for our emotional life, and has a lot to do with the formation of memories’

‘We are feeling creatures that think’

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23 Dec 2010

Oxygen, Glucose and the Brain: spend it wisely

JB comments on Will I? : The Frontal Cortex, ‘I have to question the opening statement of this post….”we can’t help but talk to ourselves”. While it’s true that our brain automatically reverts to operating “in the default mode” when we don’t give it something more demanding to do, it turns out this mental chatter uses as much glucose and oxygen as giving the brain a more demanding mental task. Mindful-awareness meditation trains the brain to just be present for whatever sense perceptions are happening without that ongoing commentary and when a decision about action is required, one automatically discriminates between the choices based on whether the action will be helpful to self and others or not. This is truly getting in touch with one’s intrinsic power and wisdom and compassion and saves energy’

The average amount of mental chatter is scary. However, when we consider our energy as a finite daily resource which is expended via lack of focus, our human interest in focus and attention starts to look like an evolutionary adaptation in action.

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