“One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” —Luciano Pavarotti and William Wright, 1981” Quoted in Van der Wal & van Dillen (2013) This article is about food, and eating. And sensations. But there’s a more [...]
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Freedom! Why a personal sense of autonomy is a good thing
Freedom! Why a personal sense of autonomy is a good thing What was it that Mel Gibson says in Braveheart? “They can take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” I quite like my freedom and I am sure you appreciate yours. We dislike it when we don’t have some level of control over [...]
Communication For Inspiration
The purpose of today’s column is to demonstrate how informal conversations that go on during a coffee break can be a critical determinant of whether your business succeeds or fails. Essentially, if you want to ride the financial storm and respond to a changing economic and commercial environment, then don’t cancel the coffee breaks!
Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind
Last time, I reported research into resilience – what it is and what resilient people do in order to bounce back from adversity. On the one hand, it is about being able to accept failures, learn from them and try again. On the other it is about having a particular attitude that will allow perseverance even in the face of daunting challenges. Two specific examples from last time were that resilient individuals dealt with feedback in a certain way, and also that they interpret situations differently. Put together, resilience is a mind-set that shapes the way you see the world – it is full of achievable challenges that may take several attempts to overcome. (But they *will* be overcome…)
The Potential of Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR is a hot topic for many companies these days. Here in Birmingham certainly the city centre companies are mostly aware of doing things that benefit their community. Some of activities include doing a tree planting, mentoring local secondary school students or raising money for a local charity through a sponsored [...]
Climb Onto The Bandwagon! But Does It Have Wheels?
Resilience is a term that is used more and more these days. In these times of recession, stress and adversity we are told that we must develop resilience and that we must ‘future-proof’ our businesses to weather the storm.
Today and next time, I talk about future-proofing ourselves. But am I just peddling more snake-oil or is there truth (or *evidence*) that we can indeed develop resilience and be better able to deal with the slings and arrows that the world throws at us?
To think and to do
“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater. “ Albert Einstein. A recurrent theme here is Behaviour Change. Not just a focus on what determines our behaviour, but the processes that help us change. Why is that? For some reason, we appear to develop habits [...]
When Push Comes to Nudge
When Push Comes to Nudge What do you do when you want to change someone’s behaviour? You can simply ask them to change. You could put up a poster. Perhaps you can try and explain why they should change. These are the traditional approaches – an attempt to change attitudes or beliefs with the [...]
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink
Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink… Next week I travel to Denmark for a conference on Behaviour Change. In fact it is run by the Danish Nudge Network! What on earth is that, I hear you ask. Well, it’s a long story and it involves competing brain systems trying to control our behaviour. Let me explain… [...]
Learning To Take Control
In the last article, I described “self-control” and ended by noting that it can be learnt. I also made a case for ‘control’ being a valuable ability to have. Sometimes of course we want to let go and our creativity would benefit from freedom to think and behave without restraint. But there are many occasions [...]
