Get your brain in motion
Effective delegation is an essential managerial skill and probably one of the most difficult to implement effectively.
The site Mindtools has elaborated a test to measure “How Well Do You Delegate?” and discover Ways to Achieve More. Take this short quiz to explore how well you currently delegate. Your answers will show you if you need to improve. If you do, we’ll direct you to some great resources that will help you.
Image: Diplofoundation
Worth remembering…
Manage or simply participate to a meeting, can sometimes be hard. Colleagues and co-workers can become real “Meeting Killers”. The Wall Street Journal has published an humorous editorial by Sue Shellenbarger, which provides advices and solutions to handle this situations.
Read the full article at: http://on.wsj.com/JaBDcT
Mrmediatraining.com provides a list of the seven main causes that could make a speech uninteresting and boring:
1. Your Introduction Failed to Interest Me
2. One Thought Ran Into The Next
3. You Loaded The Speech With Technical Detail
4. Your Delivery Was Sleep-Inducing
5. You Didn’t Tell Me What You Wanted
6. You Read From Your PowerPoint
7. You Didn’t Manage the Question and Answer Period
Read the full post at: http://www.mrmediatraining.com/index.php/2011/10/27/seven-reasons-i-hated-your-speech/
Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. On his Blog he has recently published a post on Stress.
His starting line goes like this: “How often do you intentionally push yourself to discomfort?”
A very effective example he provides, explains his position on stress management: “This is easiest to see at the physical level. In the absence of regular cardiovascular exercise — a form of stress — the heart’s ability to efficiently pump blood drops an average of 1 percent a year between the ages of 30 and 70, and faster after that. Likewise, in the absence of strength training — literally pushing weight against resistance — we lose an average of 1 percent of lean muscle mass every year after age 30.” … “The principle is simple, but not entirely intuitive. The harder you push yourself, the more you signal your body to grow. It’s called supercompensation, and the growth actually occurs during recovery. The limiting factor is mostly your tolerance for discomfort.”
In fact research on dementia also says about the brain “use it or lose it”, which is directly related to the famous Latin quotation “mens sana in corpore sano”. However it should also be considered that persistent stress and over-exertion can push you to burnout.
The full text of Tony Schwartz’s post is available at http://www.theenergyproject.com/blog/stress-not-your-enemy
image from http://vistratess.com
Another Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com as a follow up to the previous post on ideas from books: The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (part 1)
“In my previous post I explored the concept of mind mapping and the theory behind its effectiveness, based on Tony Buzan’s approach. Now I want to touch on a related topic, to which Buzan dedicates the second part of his mind mapping book: success! Chapter 3 is literally titled: The ultimate success formula (we are definitely in cliché “self-help” territory, and if I didn’t have so much respect for the author, a phrase like that would have stopped me from reading further…)
So what is this special formula for success, and what does it have to do with mind maps?
The “goal of goals”
In 30 years of teaching, Buzan has discovered that most people seem to think that the path to success – the “goal of goals” – is to get better with every trial. This is a deeply flawed formula, because it implies that we should progress in a linear fashion, and that errors, especially after many trials, represent heartbreaking failures. In other words, Buzan maintains that most people are wrought with the fear of failure, which ultimately translates into fear of success, because there can be no success without experiencing a certain amount of “failure” all along the learning path – a path that is everything but linear.
This is why Buzan introduces his own formula for success, which is meant to mirror the way the brain works in learning and adapting to the universe: to learn with every trial. This formula acknowledges that learning is a complex process with a few ups and many downs, and with long periods when it seems like we are making no progress at all. It also puts errors is the proper perspective: they are the conduit for success or, conversely, success is the byproduct of our errors. [….]
Effective Time Management is a challenge for everybody. Most people keep running all day long, complaining about time constraint. But have they ever analyses the way they emply their Time.
Bookboon has a vast collection of valuable free ebooks for Professionals. One of the best books is dedicated to “Successful Time Management” and can be freely downloaded from the Web.
“In this textbook you’ll will learn skills and techniques to prioritise your work, how to avoid time wasting events and how to communicate what you want and what you don’t want!”
Peter Diamandis is the co-founder and chairman of Singularity University which runs Exponential Technologies Executive and Graduate Student Programs. Singularity University is pushing the frontiers of human progress through innovation and emerging technologies, looking to greater longevity and better health. In this recent TED talk, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism: “I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”
Here is a Repost from Tommaso Coniglio’s Blog http://synapseburning.com
Tony Buzan is widely considered the “father” of Mind Maps – a revolutionary way of representing ideas and their interrelations – so I thought it fit for SynapseBurning.com to discuss this powerful tool by exploring his beautifully illustrated book, The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps. I am particularly passionate about the subject since I’ve used mind maps for over 10 years, and they have helped me enormously in writing, planning and problem solving (as a matter of fact, rarely does a week pass without me having the urge to produce a mind map for one reason or another).
Mind maps are extremely simple: starting from a central concept in the middle of the page, you branch out by drawing all the related ideas that come to mind. Each idea, which is represented by not more than a few words, is linked to others through a parent-child relation or through a sibling relation (take a look at the mind map I generated to create this post!).
The creation of a mind map typically consists of two phases: the brainstorming phase, when a very large number of ideas is generated; and the organizing phase, when these ideas are grouped into logical units. Each phase activates a distinct part of the brain (the principle of synergy): in the brainstorming phase, it’s the right side – the creative, intuitive, holistic, imaginative one; in the organizing phase, it’s the left side – the logical, analytical, relational one. This distinction is however mostly theoretical, since in practice brainstorming and organizing occur in rapid sequence or even simultaneously (i.e. organizing as you brainstorm). I personally prefer to keep them as distinct as possible, to free the brainstorming from the constraint of having to organize, which tends to stifle the process (it’s called “going wild”!).
There are three main uses for mind maps.
1. Creating. Whether our endeavor is writing or speaking, mind maps can assist us much better than the most common tool, the linear outline, which narrowly focuses on the organizational aspect and is thus less conducive to brainstorming, which requires absolute freedom to write down ideas without any type of constriction. The productivity guru David Allen said it best when he described his anguish as a child: during a writing assignment in class, he stared at “roman numeral number one” of his outline, without knowing what to put down first! He was waiting for a truly great idea to come… The truth is that at the beginning of any creative endeavor we probably don’t know what is to come first; good ideas won’t jump at us immediately, but that shouldn’t keep us from moving on. The only way to get good ideas is to have many ideas, and mind maps are the most powerful idea-generators. They are also remarkably effective in helping the writer discover connections between the ideas he has generated; he can then “move” them around until he is able to fashion them into a (hopefully) coherent stream of thought. This flexibility is amazing and… truly liberating!
2. Planning/problem solving. If an event or a project needs to happen, we have to find solutions that address all the possible “moving parts” so as to avoid the embarrassing “oops factor” (i.e. “I planned every thing but I forgot to consider x”). Again, thanks to their twofold nature, mind maps can help us dig out heaps of ideas and organize them into logical units that can be in turn broken down into manageable tasks.
3. Learning. When we are confronted with new material, the key is to understand the main ideas and separate them from the details. Mind maps help us do just that. The main branches represent the key points of a book, chapter, lesson etc, while the smaller branches contain less important information, which should be assimilated in relation to the central ideas. There is nothing like seeing both the big picture and the details, all in one. This “juggling” between ideas and their interrelation favours retention thanks to its innate reinforcing mechanism and the activation of both parts of the brain. That’s why it’s so much easier to learn something from a mind map that you’ve created than from flipping back and forth through a book you’ve underlined or notes you’ve scribbled.
Apart from explaining what mind maps are, their uses and why they work, Buzan provides some very useful complementary tips for boosting creativity, learning ability and for being successful, which I discuss in my next post.
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