New Year's good words

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else. – R. Buckminster Fuller

Holiday reading

Just started Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers. I love it already. He aims to explode our idea that individuals succeed solely because of their own personal qualities, like talent, brains and moxie. Gladwell feels that "we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with." Sometimes it seems like we ignore the community to focus on the person - sort of like attributing a substance's qualities just to its electrons rather than to its atoms (or molecules, more likely). Corporate culture, anyone?

Just in case you somehow missed them, I strongly recommend Gladwell's other books, The Tipping Point and Blink. He's got a wonderful way of twisting the common wisdom and helping us look at the world - and our minds - in a fresh way that nevertheless resonates with experience. Gladwell's blog is fun, too. Check it out - and have a happy and enlightening New Year!

Pic via Swiss Miss

Surfacing

A dear friend wrote recently, surmising that I've been really busy, because I haven't updated my blog in quite a while. Actually, I've been so active I forgot I even have a blog! (Thanks for the reminder, M.)

It's been several months of new projects and exciting work with (mostly) eager learners. Giving technical presentations, keeping calm under stress, leadership and diversity have been some of Workplace's topics lately. With our last training date of the year just last Thursday, it's been a busier-than-usual December.

But now...ahh! Some time to kick back and catch up a bit on the reading. I promise to share.

Good words

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. -- Thomas Szasz

Face facts

Wonderful article in Discover Magazine this month about facial expressions. Humans, it seems, have a "deep instinct" to mimic faces. When we see an expression on another person, we make the same face, fleetingly -- which helps us understand what that person is feeling. Mirroring facilitates empathy.

I'm trained as an actor, and actors have long understood that assuming a facial expression can create the emotion associated with it. Try it right now. Allow the inner edges of your eyebrows to rise up. Feel the corners of your eyes pull down. In other words, make a sad face. And stay with it for a little. Suddenly feeling sad?

Now look at the kid in the picture. Grin along. Feel better?

As Carl Zimmer says in the Discover piece, "When humans mimic others' faces...we don't just go through the motions. We also go through the emotions."

What implications does this have for communications training? It's fascinating to think.

Photo by CARF, Creative Commons

Bad blogger. Bad. Bad!

So sorry for neglecting you for so long. What can I say? It's been a busy fall, with Workplace designing a bunch of new programs. And then the hard drive fried...don't ask!

Anyway, I have a new book review up at the Perdido website. If you've thought about reading Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, I recommend it -- and I'm not exactly what you'd call a visual thinker. Great stuff.

I'll try to stay with you better during the weeks ahead. Been reading lots of fascinating stuff about emotion and learning, faces, and neurological whizbang. Let's talk!

Photo by Morten Skovgaard, Creative Commons

Good words

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. - Hans Hofmann