Don't let the voice in your head push you down"Everyone talks about winning but our biggest opponent is in our own head."

Uncovered: The Essential Mental Skills For Ambitious Youngsters

Write it down somewhere where you can see it and remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing.Imagine living that goal everyday. Believe in it till it becomes a reality.SA cricket Captain Graeme Smith had it written on his refrigerator that he wanted to captain the national team at mere 11 years old. He saw it daily for all these years and down the line he did that.Believe in the beauty of your dreams.

Set A Goal

What I heard from champion's is that they visualize the success in Technicolor. They visualize with all their senses; they know what it will sound like on the podium; they taste the salt in their tears; feel the sun on their backs in front of that crowd.

Instead focus on what you can control.Surely winning is the ultimate goal but you shouldn't talk about that all the time. Work on the things you can control. Training, your mindset, the work you put in to succeed.Sir Dave Brailsford, famous Olympic winning coach focuses on training and behaving like a champion rather than just winning. He also focuses on being clear about the target, the dream. Its about developing that behaviour of a champion and being able to control what is within your limits.

Don't Focus On Winning

Many of us are self critical. We tend to bash ourselves after a failure for a very long time. Being analytical is one thing and self critical another.We tend to think we're useless, in the wrong field, not deserving etc. Don't let that happen.Give yourself time to feel bad. But limit that negative talk time. Set a timer say 20 mins. In these 20mins you can bash yourself all you want but beyond which you won't talk or think about it. If timer isn't possible keep a physical sign say at your doorstep you'll stop thinking no matter what. Train your brain to do it in limited time.

That Negative Voice

Imagine you are at the start of a race. You see your competitors. All look built up like proper runners. You start feeling that you've got no chance although you've been practicing well.This thinking already sets the tone for your race. You wouldn't win even if you tried now because your mind already told you that you're not going to win. You will try hard but it will be difficult to get on from there.Don't feel overwhelmed by the people around you. Stay confident. Push that negative thought out as soon as it comes.

Environment Stressors

All of us know this. It's self explanatory. Sweaty palms, nausea, muscular movements, faster heart rates and what not. We have all been through this a lot many times to know we're in stress. The human brain wasn't meant to deal with stress thousands of years ago. The occasional threat was a predator. All these physical changes were preparatory phase to fight and flight.However today it means different. This stress response has the power to spoil our performance. Nervousness and anxiety make you commit mistakes.

The Stress Response

To perform at your highest level you need to be able to fight off this stress response.Slow down. Don't rush. Take a deep breath.When you slow down, you allow your body to be able to adjust to the stress hormones in the system and make sense of it. Decisions taken in a hurry often are wrong.To make it easier to remind yourself to calm down, you can use tactics like see a picture or an act like tapping your fingers to calm down. This will train your mind to start being calm once you see this picture.

Control Your Stress Response

Every morning when I wake up, I see two versions of myself; one the energetic one who is ready to conquer his day and inch closer to his targets and the other a low energy one who just gets through his day.You get to choose which one you want to be.

Social media is 80% fake. Something created so we can buy into it. What's real is in front of you. Listen to anybody who has a feedback that helps you and as you go along you can dissect what is important out of this.

I have been listening to this podcast for more than a year now. It's a simple yet effective one on how to be at the best of your performance. Give it a go!

Download our podcast, whitepapers and more.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Podcast E7 | Sporting Edge | Uncovered: The Essential Mental Skills For Ambitious Youngsters |

<ul>
<li>The only way to make your dreams come true is to influence other people to change their behavior.</li>
<li>Trying to influence someone means you’re a threat to their time, money, pride, or social capital. Most importantly, influence threatens their attention. But when you make an invitation without any pressure whatsoever, they become inclined to lean forward.</li>
<li>Keep in mind that people are more likely to say yes to a face-to-face request, and far less likely to respond to a social media post. The pressure and likelihood of saying yes depend on the closeness of the interaction.</li>
</ul>

Making it ok for someone to say No makes them want to say Yes

<ul><li>There are 2 internal systems governing our thinking and behavior. The first is fast, unconscious, emotional, and instinctive; these are your gut reactions. The second is slow, conscious, effortful, and seemingly rational; these are your deliberate decisions.</li><li>Because the unconscious mind is fast, it is the first responder. The conscious mind, being slow, is the second-guesser. </li><li>We tend to overestimate the conscious system because it’s the only one we can experience, but the unconscious mind is far more powerful. Being influential requires us to focus first and foremost on people’s gut reactions.</li></ul>

Influence doesn't work the way you think 

The biggest misperception about changing minds is that you need to do it at all. A lot of our behavior doesn’t reflect any conscious thinking; that’s why the best predictor of behavior is ease. It’s more powerful than motivation, price, quality, satisfaction, or intentions.
Ease makes people happy, and effort can really annoy people. So whenever you want to influence behavior, make that behavior as easy as possible.

The best predictor of behavior is ease

You can become more charismatic—someone people want to pay attention to—with a few tweaks to your language, body language, and your attention.The simplest charisma hack is to practice focusing your attention on people one at a time. Start by asking questions and using people’s names more often. Pronouns reveal where your attention is focused (and I don’t mean gender pronouns). To have charisma is to shine so that other people feel like they’re the only one in the room, and people want to say yes to you.

Being charismatic isn't something you are; it's something you do

Few of history’s turning points can credit just one hero. Instead, there was an army of poeple who spread the word, or they stepped up and did it.
In Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of these people said, "I can’t rescue them all". All of them said, "I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy the authorities to do it". And they did.

Lasting influence is a group project

Behavioral scientist Zoe Chance reveals one of the aikido moves for handling resistance and other strategies to help you win people over.


Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

5 insights from behavioral science that can make you better at influencing others

Whether the game was inspired by life or our lives are inspired by the game, we can learn from everything! If you have not already tried this Wordle Game, play it here: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html">https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html</a>

Six Life Lessons I Learnt Playing Wordle Game

Wordle, a once-a-day “guess the word” game, has been one of the recent viral sensations on the internet. Josh Wardle, a Software Engineer, designed this game during the lockdown in October 2021 intended for him and his partner to play online, as a daily routine. By early Feb 2022, New York Times has purchased the game from Wardle for an undisclosed lower 7-figures sum.

Brief on Wordle Game

You have to guess a five-letter word in six chances every day. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to indicate the closeness of your guess. A correct letter in the correct spot will have a green tile. A correct letter in the wrong spot, will have a golden yellow tile. A wrong letter will have a grey tile.

Simplicity of Wordle

Similar to Wordle, we have to live life within its simple framework, applying our common sense! The evolution of our brains and the development of our civilization has given way to what we refer to as “common sense” that we have to live by. Much of common sense is still a lot more common to lead a meaningful and peaceful life.

Life Lesson 1: Simple Rules, Common Sense

Just like how the Wordle challenge is available only one game a day, we can only live life one day at a time!Whether we win or lose, we just have to keep coming back daily and keep Playing the Game of Life, with the new knowledge and awareness that we have gathered to date.Play the Game of Life, One Day at a Time!

Life Lesson 2: One Wordle a Day, One Day at a Time

Though it might seem we have unlimited choices in front of us every day, we have to make deliberate and intentional choices that can lead us towards our goals and pursuits. We all have things to accomplish in our lives — be it following our daily routines, taking care of our health, pursuing our learning goals, preparing for that certification, taking care of our family, getting a job, attending to our work, leading our teams, running our businesses or pursuing our spiritual path — everything needs focused and consistent efforts on a daily basis.

Life Lesson 3: Limited Chances, Unlimited Choices

As we progress in making those choices and taking those actions, we are constantly receiving feedback, whether we notice it or not. Some of them might be short-term, and some may be long-term feedback. We constantly get feedback both from internal and external sources.Be alert and aware so you can notice and process the feedback, decide whether to continue or alter the course of future action and ensure you keep going on the right track.

Life Lesson 4: Color Codes, Clues, and Cues

The game accepts only dictionary-defined meaningful words. There is no such single dictionary for finding such meaning in life. The meaning of life has internal and external dimensions.The purpose and meaning of our life is to have a sense of internal satisfaction and a sense of external achievement.

Life Lesson 5: Meaningful Words, Meaningful Life

What we share, with whom we share, how much we share, and how often we share, can vary from individual to individual and situation to situation. Some social settings might compel us to share — to brag, to feel high, to put someone down, to show superiority, to get some support, to evoke sympathy, or to simply share for the heck of it. We mostly share when we know we will be understood, acknowledged, and accepted. This helps to keep us going, day after day, to come back and do better.Sharing is a form of Social Therapy.

Life Lesson 6: Sharing is Being Social

So go ahead and Live Life One Wordle a Day! Put the pieces of your life puzzle together, one day at a time. Play On, Live On. No matter you win or lose, keep playing. We often feel we play to win and get dejected if we lose. We need to learn that we play for the sake of learning how to play the infinite game of life.We do not play to win. We play to learn. We play to learn how to play the infinite game of life!

Conclusion

What Life Lessons we could learn from this simple Wordle Game? Read on the excerpts from my article on Medium.

Early in Jan 2022, during my routine daily web browsing, Google Chrome threw some recommendation links at me regarding this viral trending game of Wordle. I have always enjoyed solving puzzles and…

habits

Habits

education

Learning & Education

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day

"The sky is filled with stars..." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quotes from BrainyQuote.com

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before. While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organizations, we also intuitively know that employee happiness should boost job performance. Still, two nagging questions remain: Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? And just how much does initial happiness matter?

Happiness And Success

Not only do happiness and optimism matter to employee performance, but they matter a lot, and both predict how well employees will do. The research highlights the competitive advantage that employee happiness offers businesses. There are some things about employee happiness that every business leader should know and be able to apply. As we emerge from a demoralizing global pandemic, we would all do well to take stock of how to influence the happiness and optimism of those around us in the workplace.

The Long Term Research On Happiness

What really is happiness? The behavioural science literature often refers to happiness as subjective well-being because the meaning of happiness varies in different contexts. As with most concepts that emerge from psychology, definitions vary, but when it comes to happiness, they generally coalesce around three areas: a person’s own assessment of their satisfaction with life; how much positive emotion (such as enjoyment, enthusiasm, inspiration, or pride) they experience; and how little negative emotion (such as hostility, irritability, fear, or nervousness) they experience.

Defining Happiness

Some people just seem happier, and researchers have looked closely at heritability (factors we’re born with) and how our environment shapes our happiness. Research suggests that heritability accounts for about 40% while 60% is attributed to other factors, especially life experiences. Researchers found that while heritability accounted for about 30% of job satisfaction at age 21, the importance of heritability dropped to less than 20% when measured again at ages 25 and 30. Thus, environmental factors within the workplace become more important over time

The Reasons For Happiness

The relative importance of some of those environmental factors has shifted recently. The “World Happiness Report 2021” noted that within the workplace, happiness before the pandemic was largely due to employees’ sense of belonging within an organization and among coworkers, the flexibility afforded to workers, inclusivity, and a sense of purpose to their work.Things changed dramatically during the pandemic: Having a supportive manager became the largest predictor of happiness — nearly twice as important as the next ranked workplace happiness factor, purpose.

Environmental Factors Influencing Happiness

Not surprisingly, money matters to employee happiness too — but research has shown that is chiefly for those employees who indicated that money is important to them. In a recent study, the relationship between income and happiness was over four times greater for people who reported that money was important to them compared with those who cared much less about money. Thus, for employees who aren’t driven by money, income may merely be a hollow way to keep score.

The Importance Of Money

Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company. All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.

A Happy Workplace

While happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important.  Many organizations already use a variety of surveys to evaluate job candidates. Even if adding these questions about happiness and optimism to the applicant survey results in only a small increase in downstream productivity and profitability, most leaders would jump at this opportunity, because it costs almost nothing.

Enhancing Employee Happiness: Measure Happiness in Both Employees and Job Candidates

Beyond hiring, employee happiness should also be a consideration when measuring organizational performance. Yes, objective performance still matters greatly. But, while a high-performing division within a company may bring short-term profit, if that performance was driven by toxic leadership and management practices, then those profits could evaporate quickly if employees were to leave in response. Unwarranted attrition is expensive.

Measuring Performance

Given all the training and development requirements placed on most organizations, the thought of actively trying to develop happier employees may initially seem daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. However, the academic literature repeatedly shows that training initiatives targeting employee well-being do not require a significant time investment, are cost-effective, and carry a high ROI.For organizations willing to make a larger investment, there are of course turnkey, validated programs shown to improve employee well-being.

Enhancing Employee Happiness: 
Develop Happiness In Your Workforce

The pandemic has reminded us of some tough realities, namely that organizations can contract in turbulent times just as fast as they expand when the economy is booming.<ul><li>Organizations need happy employees because happiness is in fact contagious.</li><li>Like happiness, unhappiness is also contagious. This contagion effect places leaders in a precarious position, especially if they are presented with the difficult scenario of being able to retain only one of two employees. </li><li>With performance and other factors held constant, they should keep the one who is happiest.</li></ul>

Enhancing Employee Happiness: Retain Employees Who Are Happy

Employee well-being initiatives work best when confident leaders present the material and when senior leaders place significant emphasis on the overall effort. Leaders must be willing to invest their efforts into making the initiatives successful by not only advocating for them — for example, by securing resources for a program and promoting positive strategic messaging — but also by participating in the training and incorporating it into their own behaviours. We learn best by watching others, so let your employees learn to be happy by watching you.

The Bottom Line

Employee well-being and happiness are surprisingly powerful predictors of performance.

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

Experimentation fosters innovation, but it can also consume time and resources. To make experimentation productive in your organisation, you must manage the following conditions: <ul><li>What you learn from experiments</li><li>How you apply what you learned</li><li>The opportunities that come from your learnings</li><li>The conversations you have with colleagues about your findings</li></ul>

Effective experimentation

Managers often assume that testing a new product, price, or service means approaching it like a clinical trial in medicine with a hypothesis and validation. But business is different. You seldom have a chance to do randomised trials. Instead, you have to alter the product or price while in use and in conditions you can't control. Some tests may be unnecessary if you use existing data and literature. Consider the opportunity costs in testing and adjust the methodology and scope.

Understand testing in business conditions

You need reliable data. Over 80% of the time and costs of data scientists and IT groups is spent cleaning up data due to, for example, inconsistent inputs and outdated views of buyer behaviour and legacy assumptions. You should build tests from data you are confident about.

Mind your data

The most difficult challenges in testing are internal processes. While managers are good at asking questions, they fail to specify what would constitute a feasible answer to those questions. Managers must always interpret data with a specific end in mind. For example, pricing has many dimensions, such as base price, discounts, rebates tied to volume, special offers, etc. The evaluation criteria for price testing should be established because testing means evaluating alternatives.

Establish decision-making criteria

Companies tend to allocate testing time and money to large initiatives while ignoring small ideas that can have a bigger impact. Seek progress, not perfection. Invest in processes that encourage employees to submit small ideas. <ul><li>Use your website purchase interactions. For example, when airlines ask if a trip is for business or personal, they gain insight into price sensitivity for upgrades.</li><li>Occasionally rotate the questions you ask to gather insights from a different perspective.</li><li>Engage users and non-users.</li></ul>

Small ideas can have a bigger impact with less risk

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

business

Business

How Managers Can Build a Culture of Experimentation

Research shows that the brain responds more strongly to bad experiences than good ones — and our memories retain them longer. Five positive experiences are about equal to one negative one. This five-to-one ratio, discovered by psychologist and relationship researcher John Gottman in the 1970s, still applies to our present-day workplace.

How our brains respond to bad experiences

We are all naturally wired to blame other people or circumstances when things go wrong. These propensities are partially psychological, driven by something called the fundamental attribution bias. We tend to believe that what people do is a reflection of who they are, rather than considering there may be other factors (social or environmental) influencing their behavior.

Humans are wired to blame

We don’t even notice how often we do it. And our brains interpret blame the same way they interpret a physical attack. When we’re blamed, our prefrontal cortices effectively shut down and direct all our energy to defending ourselves, which, ironically, sabotages our ability to solve the problem for which we are being blamed.
Blame also kills healthy, accountable behaviors. Nobody will take accountability for problems if they think they’ll be punished for doing so.

We blame more than we think

Switch your mindset to “We’re all still learning,” and share your mistakes.<ul><li>We all make mistakes from time to time. It’s what makes us human. No good comes from blaming and shaming each other for our imperfect nature. </li><li>You benefited from learning from your mistakes, so allow others to do the same. Use problems and mistakes as teaching moments, not shaming moments. </li><li>If you’re a manager, discuss your own mistakes and the lessons learned from them. Doing so creates a psychological safe space that will encourage others to follow suit.</li></ul>

Eliminate blame culture on your team

Want to build a high-performing team? Start with creating a safer work evironment

books

Books

problemsolving

Problem Solving

teamwork

Teamwork

Fostering Psychological Safety In The Workplace

Blame Culture Is Toxic. Here’s How to Stop It.

The Three Ways describe the values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, practices of DevOps, as well as the prescriptive steps.

The “Three Ways" which are the principles that all of the DevOps

The First Way emphasizes the performance of the entire system, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department — this as can be as large a division (e.g., Development or IT Operations) or as small as an individual contributor (e.g., a developer, system administrator).

The First Way: Flow/Systems Thinking

The Second Way is about creating the right to left feedback loops. The goal of almost any process improvement initiative is to shorten and amplify feedback loops so necessary corrections can be continually made.The outcomes of the Second Way include understanding and responding to all customers, internal and external, shortening and amplifying all feedback loops, and embedding knowledge where we need it.

The Second Way: Amplify Feedback Loops

The Third Way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from failure; and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery. We need both of these equally. Experimentation and taking risks are what ensures that we keep pushing to improve.

The Third Way: Culture of Continual Experimentation and Learning

Principles that all of the DevOps patterns can be derived from

The Three Ways describe the values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.

The Three Ways: The Principles Underpinning DevOps - IT Revolution

<ol><li>The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity</li><li>The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy</li><li>The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work</li><li>The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety</li><li>The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus</li></ol>

The Five Ideals

We need to design things so that we have locality in our systems and the organizations that build them. We need simplicity in everything we do.

The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity

The Second Ideal is all about how our daily work feels. Is our work marked by boredom and waiting for other people to get things done on our behalf? Do we blindly work on small pieces of the whole, only seeing the outcomes of our work during deployment when everything blows up, leading to firefighting, punishment, and burnout? Or do we work in small batches, ideally single-piece flow, getting fast and continual feedback on our work?

The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy  

The Third Ideal addresses paying down technical debt and improving architecture. When technical debt is treated as a priority and paid down and architecture is continuously improved and modernized, teams can work with flow, delivering better value sooner, safer, and happier.

The Third Ideal: Improvement of Daily Work

Psychological safety is one of the top predictors of team performance. When team members feel safe to talk about problems, problems can not only be fixed but prevented. Solving problems requires honesty, and honesty requires an absence of fear.

The Fourth Ideal: Psychological Safety

Customer focus relates to the difference between core and context as defined by Geoffrey Moore. Core is what customers are willing and able to pay for, the bread and butter of your business. Context is what they don’t care about, what it took to get them that product, including all the backend systems of an organization like HR and marketing and development.

The Fifth Ideal: Customer Focus

These are five topics that underpin what is required to create better value, sooner, safer, and happier.

These Five Ideals, along with the Three Ways, are required to help our organizations survive and win in the marketplace.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

The Five Ideals of DevOps - IT Revolution

Thing happens.But the funny thing is that bad decisions never seem like bad decisions at the moment.“Smart people do dumb things.”You can never avoid making a mistake. However, you can do your best to avoid making dumb decisionsPlus, by learning from other people’s mistakes, you can make their mistakes your own. You’ll learn faster that way.

Want To Make Better Decisions? Do This 

Smart people are way too preoccupied with doing the right things.When you put too much pressure on yourself to make the right decisions, you get analysis paralysis.The only way you can stop overthinking is by making yourself aware of your thinking process. When I asked my friend about his thinking, he became aware of how irrational his process was.You can’t control the future. So stop thinking about it.

Don’t Overthink

When you make small decisions early, before they become big — it’s easy. When you put off decisions, they become big — and painful.

Do This Instead: Make Small Decisions. Decide Often

The earlier and more you decide, the more chance that you make better decisions.But here’s the thing: NOT making a decision is also a decision. If that’s a conscious move, that’s okay. You think about something, and you decide that doing nothing is the best option.No matter what, you’re making decisions all the time. Instead of making fewer conscious decisions, we need to make them earlier.Because all you need are a few good choices in your lifetime anyway. What will be your best? You only find out after, you guessed it, you’ve made a decision.

Earlier Decisions Lead To Better Decisions

We all make bad decisions. But the funny thing is that bad choices never seem like bad decisions in the moment. I’ve been reading about the decision-making process of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, two of the most successful investors of all time. Here's a simple strategy that helps you to make better decisions.

productivity

Productivity

Want To Make Better Decisions? Do This 

Find 100+ Facts about Leadership - Curated from inspiring sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!