Category: K.E.E.N. skills

How face-to-face social interaction leads to a longer life

In this excellent Washington Post blog ‘Prioritizing these three things will improve your life — and maybe even save it‘, a point is made that “Smoking, drinking, exercise and even heart problems are not predictors of a person’s longevity — a person’s close relationships and social integration were.”

Too bad for social networks and digital freaks, “It’s not enough to text or email. The actual health benefits of socializing are only achieved through in-person contact “Face-to-face contact releases a whole cascade of neurotransmitters and, like a vaccine, they protect you now in the present and well into the future,” [psychologist Susan Pinker] said“.

“Face-to-face contact releases a whole cascade of neurotransmitters and, like a vaccine, they protect you now in the present and well into the future. And it doesn’t even have to be long, close interactions to have an immediate effect. Making eye contact, shaking someone’s hand, giving someone a high-five lowers your cortisone levels and releases dopamine, making you less stressed and giving you a little high”

Well let’s give this computer or phone a short break and have a little face-to-face interaction, shouldn’t we?

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How ‘What To Do Next’ Has Become The Key Question

Seth Godin in his post ‘What to do next‘ explains how this has become the key question nowadays. Still we should not forget to enjoy the present moment!

what_next“What next used to be a question answered by your boss or your clients.

With so many opportunities and so many constraints, successfully picking what to do next is your moment of highest leverage. It deserves more time and attention than most people give it.”

I tend to agree with this analysis – people do not spend enough time deciding to change themselves and their environment, and would prefer continuity. At the same time we also need to spend enough time enjoying the present moment and not always wondering what’s next. This balance is difficult to establish at the right level.

Maybe being more in the present moment will give clues about what to change next. What about your next?

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How Mirroring Gestures Is Often the Outcome of Rapport (and not the Contrary)

in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), mirroring is identified as a powerful tool in connecting with other people. It is even recommended to sometime consciously try to mirror the other person in terms of posture, gesture and energy to establish connection. Is that really the case? Is mirroring not rather the outcome of an established connection?

Presidential mirroring (connection well established!)

This case is debated and it would seem that actually, mirroring is an outcome and not a cause for connection.

In any case it can be quite uncomfortable to be voluntarily mirrored by someone we are speaking to, so mirroring should be used cautiously and scarcely.

Personally I find mirroring a powerful tool that can only be used after some level of connection has been established, to reinforce further the connection, in particular when it comes to tackling difficult personal issues.

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How We Should Learn As If We Were to Live Forever

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi

What a great recommendation for our daily priorities. The learning part resonates in particular with me (I am still probably less good at living in the present moment?)

We often underestimate all the learning opportunities that we encounter every day. They are not all formal opportunities of course. There is a lot more to learn around us.

What about making sure that we learn something substantial every day by making sure we benefit from all the opportunities that come to us?

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How Life is How We Respond to It

I like this famous quote by Charles Swindoll “Life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent of how I react to it“. But it’s wrong.

What’s wrong here is that it’s not how we react to it but how we respond to it.

In fact, life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent of how I RESPOND to it.

This is a small difference but it will create a world of distinct outcomes.

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How Leading in Complexity Also Requires Self-Centering

Complexity is a matter of keen investigation in this blog. Leading in complexity is an essential area for the Collaborative Age. In his post ‘Scaling Awareness‘, Doug Silsbee gives some interesting hints. This approach stems from a necessary self-awareness.

“Action in a complexity context is less about directing and engineering a process towards our desired outcomes. It is more about establishing an overall direction, discerning the present state of the system and the dynamics as best we can see them, stabilizing our internal condition, and facilitating a collective exploration of this context along with others who can help with the discernment of what we might invite to come forward.”

Thus the recommendation is to

  1. Normalize complexity. Have real conversations about how complexity is different.
  2. Center yourself. Having done the inner work to be able to de-couple your own inner state from the stresses of your context, act in ways that support the others in your system in doing the same.
  3. Design and conduct safe-to-fail experiments: Conduct small scale, cheap, interesting experiments that are designed to explore how the system works, and that can be amplified if they do something worthwhile, or recovered from quickly if they don’t work.
  4. Organize around direction, not goals.

What I find particular interesting in this approach is the recognition that there is a need to work on self centering as well as taking action on the external aspects.

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How to Consciously Refresh Your Identity and Announce It to the World

Following on our previous post ‘How Essential it is to Overcome Threats to our Identity‘, we can go one step further and actually decide to create our own identity. And we should actually do that exercise on a regular basis, refreshing our identity according our evolution and what we would like to become.

My post ‘How I Became a Businessman‘ was such a realization that my identity had changed and I needed to recognize it. One step further is to create the identity of what you want to become. And with social networks we can even announce this new identity to the world.

I have recently done the exercise. For example my LinkedIn title has changed subtly from ‘Senior Managing Partner and Founder, Project Value Delivery’ to ‘Executive Management in Project-Driven Businesses – Entrepreneur & Business Angel’. It was important for me to recognize for my professional identity that my occupation today is more into leading a few companies, being a businessman and investing in startups as business angel. And that is what I want to do more systematically in the near future.

I believe that doing periodically this conscious exercise of inventing and announcing to the world the identity of what you want to be is essential.

When do you start the same exercise?

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How to Improve Inner Resilience by Decoupling State from Context

Increasing our inner resilience is essential for well-being and happiness. In this excellent post ‘Resilience: De-Coupling State from Context‘, Doug Silsbee explains very well how to improve our inner resilience.

The aim is to be less affected by external events and the automatic triggers these events create in our mind. Doug Silsbee proposes a 4 step decomposition:

  1. Sense, and name, what is happening in your context.
  2. Sense, and name, your own reactions to this context. Bear witness to how your identity is challenged, how you are taking on the stress of the system, how your thoughts are racing and shoulders hunched and attention span decreasing. Take a balcony view of our own experience.
  3. Consciously direct your attention in order to interrupt the automaticity of your own nervous system’s response to triggering.
  4. de-link your internal state from the context around you. This is liberation.

Of course this will take some practice and the author recommends regular meditation to increase self-awareness. Still we certainly need to practice these steps to improve our response to external events. When do you start?

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How Important It Is to Exercise Writing Regularly

For some reasons related to being busy on other things I did not write so much during a while in the past few months (blog posts or books or white papers), and the amazing thing is that I found it very difficult to start writing again. And then with some practice writing became easy again!

It was not writers’ block or anything like that. It was just that I found a strong resistance to start writing. I always found something more urgent to do. I found it difficult to concentrate on writing words together. It was like I was a beginner trying to piece together some sentences.

This all goes to show how much writing is a muscle that needs exercising regularly. And with exercise and regular writing it is possible to have substantial production that will improve over time.

Lesson learnt – I will keep exercising my writing muscle regularly and not let it weaken too much in the future!

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How our Origin Explains Why Actual Facts Don’t Change Our Mind

A number of older and newer experiments are described in the New Yorker article ‘WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS – New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason‘. They clearly show that even exposure to real facts may not change an opinion we would have developed beforehand.

The interesting part of the article is the reference to a study that would show that these limitations of our reason could be linked back to the context of the hunter-gatherer. The need for collaboration, fostered by evolution, may have blunted some aspects of our reasoning. That would be in particular the case for confirmation bias (the tendency to find confirmation that confirms our opinions).

There is hope still: “Humans aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.” The trick is to be able to get others look at our situations. And, maybe, try to get over those limitations we have inherited from our ancestors.

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How To Properly Apply the Open-Close-Act Facilitation Method

In my facilitating I like to use a simple process that I call the ‘open-close-act’ approach. Faced with a problem, we first open to the widest possible range of solutions before converging and deciding which way to act.

open-close-actIn this process, the first ‘open’ step is essential because people too often jump for the most obvious solution without taking the time to stand back, reflect, and spend some creative moments. The second step is also sometime difficult because people hesitate to take action.

This is very well touched upon in Seth Godin’s post ‘The simple two-step process‘: “The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren’t open enough, aren’t willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.”

This is a reason why in my method I have added a third step, which is action. This needs to be constantly reminded to participants: the goal is certainly to take action – after having undergone a proper process to determine what is the best one.

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How our Core Personal Network Evolves Quicker with Social Networks

According to common knowledge it is difficult to entertain tight bonding with more than about 150 people at any one time. This is called the Dunbar’s number, a concept developed in the 1990s. However with the Fourth Revolution, I believe the rotation frequency of this tighter community might have increased.

weak_tiesThe approximate number is probably applicable and maintaining actual strong bonds with this group of people requires some engagement, as reminded to us by Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘Most of our Activities require a Combination of Bonding and Bridging‘.

My observation is that with social networks that allow us to maintain weak ties with a lot more people in a more intense manner than before, the composition of this elect group of stronger bonded people is much higher than before. Depending on exchanges, meetings and opportunities, we tend to renew this group much more frequently than before (around a much smaller stable core community). This has implications about the relative impermanence of stronger bonds which might be an issue, while the accelerated renewal rate is an opportunity for a richer life as well.

Is that your case also that your tighter community tends to rotate quicker than before?

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