Tag: Curious Minds

Listened CM 211: Liz Wiseman on Standing Out at Work from gayleallen.net

If someone asked what they should do to succeed in their job, you’d probably have a quick response. You might say something like, just do what you’re asked, get your work done on time, or don’t step on anyone’s toes.

But what if the question wasn’t about how to succeed, but how to stand out as the best of the best?

These are the high performers Liz Wiseman calls “impact players.” They’re the ones who leave an indelible mark on their work and the people around them. Liz spoke with nearly 200 top professionals, and she uncovered 5 behaviors that set them apart. Her findings inform her latest book, Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact.

In a conversation with Gayle Allen, Liz Wiseman talks about her new book Impact Players. According to Wiseman, impact players look to how they can make a difference, rather than just play a roll. Most people aspire to make a difference and have a contribution. She shares five characteristics of an impact player:

  • Useful – what’s important now
  • Step up and step back – leading without it being a land grab
  • Finish strong
  • Ask and adjust
  • Make work light – removing the phantom work

Allen and Wiseman discuss the questions to consider when trying to hire an impact player:

  • How do they handle messy problems?
  • Leadership problems?
  • Roadblocks?
  • Moving targets?

Wiseman explains that the book does not serve as a recipe, but rather the start of a conversation. WHat matters most is creating the right conditions.

The best leaders … create both safety and stretch.

Wiseman also discusses the current challenges of remote work. She touches on the breakdown of chains of impact, explaining that when we are apart we often fall into a habit of going from task to task.

We burnout not from too much work, but too little impact.

This all reminds me of something that David Truss recently wrote about improvising:

The world is your stage. The play is your playground. Improvise your roles as best as you can. And remember that others are improvising theirs roles too. Work with your fellow actors to create the best performance you can. But remember it’s all an act, and if you aren’t playing a role that works, change the role or change the way you act in it. All the world is an improv stage, and so you get to write the script as you go. Enjoy the performance, you only get one.

Listened CM 154: Laura Huang On Finding Your Edge from gayleallen.net

Laura is author of the book, Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. In this interview, she explains why we need to shape how others see us. She asserts, “People are perceiving and making attributions…all the time. If you realize…somebody’s making an incorrect attribution about you, changing that…is…difficult. It’s more difficult than if you…direct [it] from the get go.”

Listened CM 131: James Clear on Making and Breaking Habits from gayleallen.net

Whether we want to adopt good habits or avoid bad ones, we need to think beyond willpower or setting bigger goals. Instead, James Clear, author of the book, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, argues that the secret is designing a system of small, repeatable habits. He challenges us to ask ourselves, “How can we make these small changes that we layer on top of each other – these little 1% improvements or tiny advantages – and in the process of integrating them all into a larger system, end up making some really remarkable progress?”

Through compelling stories and brain research, James teaches us how to design game-changing habits and sustainable systems. In addition, he shares ways we can leverage environmental factors and addictive tendencies to our advantage. Finally, he helps us see how a commitment to daily habits leads to the identity we seek: “Every action you take is like a vote for the person that you want to become. Doing one push up or writing one sentence or reading one page, it’s not going to transform you right away. But it does cast a vote for being that kind of person, for reinforcing that kind of identity.”

James Clear talks with Gayle Allen about his new book Atomic Habits. Some of the take-aways from the conversation were:

  • The most important aspect to behaviour change is identity
  • Four stages to a habit: Cue, craving, response, reward/outcome
  • A high level framework involves making habits obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. If you are trying to break a habit, then invert this.
  • If you want a habit to be a part of your life, make it a part of your environment.
  • We need habits of action, rather than motion. This is about showing up.

I think that this book would have a lot of implications for education and change.

Listened CM 115: Steven Johnson on Making Decisions that Matter the Most by Gayle Allen from Curious Minds Podcast

What if you could make better decisions? Even with the biggest, life-altering choices, such as where to live, who to marry, or whether to start a company?

Steven Johnson, author of the book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions that Matter the Most, thinks we often face decisions like this with little to no training and that we could use more tools in our decision-making toolbox.

I am always captivated by Steven Johnson’s work. In his discussion with Gayle Allen he provides a number of tips and reflections the act of making a decision.
Listened CM 095: Olivia Cabane and Judah Pollack on Breakthrough Thinking by Gayle Allen from Curious Minds Podcast

Breakthroughs can take our work to new and exciting places, yet they rarely happen as often as we’d like. Are there ways to prompt these kinds of moments, so we can create them more often? Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack tell us how in their book, The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking.

There are four four types of breakthroughs: Eureka, Metaphor, Intuitive and Paradigm. Just as we build up resistance at a gym, Olivia Cabane and Judah Pollack talk about taking time to extend our neuroplasticity by breaking with our usual practices and embrace all the parts of the self. Three *super-tools* the authors talk about to support this include gratitude, altruism and meditation. In some ways this touches upon Doug Belshaw’s idea of [serendipity surface](http://discours.es/2016/increasing-your-serendipity-surface).