Category Archives: Mentoring

Can #Reading Make You Happier? | The New Yorker #books #psychology #therapy

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Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.

But the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. READ MORE: Can Reading Make You Happier? | The New Yorker.

A Cat Library in New Mexico Encourages Office Workers to Check Out #Kittens | Mashable #cats #libraries

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IMAGE: CBS

A county office in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is home to one of the most ingenious stress-relief ideas ever: a cat library, where office workers can check kittens in and out like books.

City officials installed a kitten playpen in lobby of the building in May 2012 as a way to promote the adoptable cats from local shelters. Inside the playpen are several cat condos, scratching posts and toys — and plenty of rescue kitties.

Visitors to the cat library can simply sign in, play with a kitten, then sign back out. READ MORE A cat library in New Mexico encourages office workers to check out kittens | Mashable

How to Use Your @LinkedIn Profile to Power a Career Transition | HBR #careers

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Are you raring to change careers? Break into a whole new line of work that makes you leap out of bed, happy to go to work every day? Parlay personal passions into professional endeavors? Or focus on a different clientele, type of product, or service?

We all know the power of LinkedIn for job hunting and networking. But how do we use it to help change careers—to make sure we’re found by the right recruiters, hiring managers, colleagues—not ones from our past, but from our future careers?

It’s tempting to create an “everything under the sink” profile that makes you look qualified for both the job you have and the one you want or for a variety of new functions, industries, or roles. But that’ll just confuse your readers and send them running—to others’ LinkedIn pages.

Instead, focus your profile on your new career direction, just as you’ve tailored your resume to specific jobs. In both cases, you highlight your most relevant experiences and minimize or omit the rest. READ MORE: How to Use Your LinkedIn Profile to Power a Career Transition | HBR.

This Little Robot Wants to Be Your Best Friend [Indiegogo] | WIRED #robots #AI #gadgets

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WE’VE LONG KNOWN there’s a market out there for robotic buddies. One compelling piece of evidence: The original Furby sold more than 40 million units, and it didn’t really do anything.

17 years later, an A.I. and machine-learning company is making a robot pal that will do way more than its fuzzy predecessor. It’s called Musio, and it houses a pretty impressive A.I. engine developed by a company called AKA.

The robot remembers details from prior conversations, asks follow-up questions based on that info, and can be used as a smart-home controller. But its main goal is to be your friend: Asking you questions, actually listening to your answers, and learning what you’re all about

READ MORE: This Little Robot Wants to Be Your Best Friend | WIRED

HuffPo: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Young #Women and Likability + Roxane Gay: ‘We Demand Perfection Of #Feminists. We Do Not Need To Do That.’ #feminism

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Thinks It’s Bullsh*t That Young Women Have To Be ‘Likable’ | Huffington Post
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is here to remind young women that whoever likes you or doesn’t like you should have no effect on your self worth. On May 19, the Nigerian author was honored at the 2015 Girls Write Now Awards, where she gave a riveting speech directed at young women — reminding them that their stories and their voices matter. “I think it’s important to tell your story truthfully and I think that’s a difficult thing to do — to be truly truthful,” Adichie told the crowd in New York City.

She said that it’s hard for women to be truthful when telling their stories because we’re conditioned to be concerned about offending people. Adichie told the young women in the crowd to forget about being liked. “If you start off thinking about being likable you’re not going to tell your story honestly because you’re going to be so concerned with not offending and that’s going to ruin your story. Forget about likability,” she said.

Roxane Gay: ‘We Demand Perfection Of Feminists. We Do Not Need To Do That.’ | Huffington Post
Roxane Gay has become known as a ‘bad feminist.’ The label comes from her August 2014 book’s title, a collection of essays which challenged how we define and interact with feminism. In it, Gay discusses why she doesn’t live up to the label, all the ways she’s a contradiction and how feminism, in many ways, is broken.

She took the stage Thursday at TED Women in Monterey, Calif. to break down how identifying as a “bad feminist” — originally an inside joke she had with herself — became a thing. In her 11-minute talk, she was funny, self-deprecating and painfully honest. That raw honesty awarded her a standing ovation.

However, it was her moving story of how feminism saved her that brought the auditorium to a hush.

Note: The video of Roxane Gay’s TEDWomen 2015 speech is not yet available.

Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness | HBR #mentoring #emotionalintelligence

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Very timely article on emotional intelligence and compassion in leadership. Well worth the read.

Stanford University neurosurgeon Dr. James Doty tells the story of performing surgery on a little boy’s brain tumor. In the middle of the procedure, the resident who is assisting him gets distracted and accidentally pierces a vein. With blood shedding everywhere, Doty is no longer able to see the delicate brain area he is working on. The boy’s life is at stake. Doty is left with no other choice than to blindly reaching into the affected area in the hopes of locating and clamping the vein. Fortunately, he is successful.

Most of us are not brain surgeons, but we certainly are all confronted with situations in which an employee makes a grave mistake, potentially ruining a critical project.

The question is:  How should we react when an employee is not performing well or makes a mistake?

Frustration is of course the natural response — and one we all can identify with. Especially if the mistake hurts an important project or reflects badly upon us.

The traditional approach is to reprimand the employee in some way. The hope is that some form of punishment will be beneficial: it will teach the employee a lesson. Expressing our frustration also may relieve us of the stress and anger caused by the mistake. Finally, it may help the rest of the team stay on their toes to avoid making future errors.

Some managers, however, choose a different response when confronted by an underperforming employee: compassion and curiosity.  Not that a part of them isn’t frustrated or exasperated — maybe they still worry about how their employee’s mistakes will reflect back on them — but they are somehow able to suspend judgment and may even be able to use the moment to do a bit of coaching.

What does research say is best? The more compassionate response will get you more powerful results.

READ MORE: Why Compassion Is a Better Managerial Tactic than Toughness | Harvard Business Review

Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All | HBR #careers

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Not taking action has costs that can be as consequential as taking risks; it’s simply less natural to calculate and pay attention to the “what-ifs” of inaction. In today’s marketplace, where jobs and job categories are being destroyed and invented at an accelerating rate, I’d argue that the riskiest move one can make is to assume that your industry or job is secure.

READ MORE: Not Taking Risks Is the Riskiest Career Move of All | Harvard Business Review

Debugging The Gender Gap: This Movie With A Mission Seeks To Inspire Women In Tech | Fast Company #gender #women

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CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap Theatrical Trailer from Finish Line Features, LLC on Vimeo.

[P]erhaps it’s no surprise that just 0.5% of the college degrees awarded each year in the United States go to women majoring in computer science. After they graduate and enter the workforce, women’s representation in technology declines even further.

That dismal state of affairs was news to documentary film director Robin Hauser Reynolds. She started her career in finance, a firsthand witness to harassment and grabby hands on the floor of the London stock exchange. Reynolds knew little about the gender imbalances in Silicon Valley. But as she began to interview women technologists, starting in February of last year, their stories resonated with her. The result is captured in her new film, CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap.

READ MORE: Debugging The Gender Gap: This Movie With A Mission Seeks To Inspire Women In Tech | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

You may also like:

  • The Representation Project: The Representation Project inspires individuals and communities to challenge and overcome limiting stereotypes so that everyone, regardless of gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation or circumstance can fulfill their human potential. About the Miss Representation film.

Chris Milk: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine | TED.com #virtualreality #psychology

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Chris Milk uses cutting edge technology to produce astonishing films that delight and enchant. But for Milk, the human story is the driving force behind everything he does. In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality.

via Chris Milk: How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine | Talk Video | TED.com

A Social Network Designed to Combat Depression | WIRED

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SOCIAL NETWORKS ASPIRE to connect people, which is a noble but naive goal. When we uncritically accept connection as a good thing, we overlook difficult, important questions: Are some forms of virtual communication more nourishing than others? Might some in fact be harmful? Is it possible that Facebook, for instance, leaves some people feeling more lonely? No one knows for sure. We tend to build things first and worry about the effects they have on us later.

Robert Morris is taking the opposite approach. Starting with the desired effect of helping people deal with depression, he developed Panoply, a crowdsourced website for improving mental health. The site, which was the focus of his doctoral thesis at MIT Media Lab, trained users to reframe and reassess negative thoughts, embedding an established technique called cognitive behavioral therapy in an engaging, unthreatening interface. After a study confirmed the site’s effectiveness, Morris formed a company and is now working on turning the idea into a polished consumer app.

Like other social networks, Panoply will take up that noble goal of connection, but in a more specific, structured way. As software goes, it’s something of a novelty—a product that aims to enrich lives through precise, clinically-proven means, rather than merely assuming enrichment as a byproduct of its existence. READ MORE: A Social Network Designed to Combat Depression | WIRED