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When it comes to guilt, Freud was the expert, but he certainly didn't have a corner on the market. Guilt comes in many forms, but when all is said and done, it can be boiled down to a set of five basic types. You'll learn what those five types are, but first let's take a look at how psychologists define guilt.

Guilt is, first and foremost, an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation. Guilt is not a very good motivator. It's more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. It's one of the "sad" emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness, according to one comprehensive framework (Fischer, Shaver, & Carnochan, 1990).

Like other emotions, there is no one explanation for guilt. The traditional Freudian view is that guilt resides under the surface veneer of our behavior. The psychodynamic theory of Freud proposes that we build defense mechanisms to protect us from the guilt we would experience if we knew just how awful our awful desires really were. Specifically, Freud linked the feeling of guilt, and its related emotion of anxiety, to the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development. Young children, he believed, desire having sex with their opposite-sex parent. Eventually, these desires become submerged and transformed into sexual attraction toward others of their own age. Freud's disciple, Erik Erikson, took a somewhat dim view of Freud's emphasis on sexuality as the only force in development and therefore took issue with Freud's notion of guilt. Instead, Erikson believed that guilt first emerges in life at about the age of 3-5 as the negative outcome to a period he called "initiative vs. guilt." Children develop a strong sense of guilt at this age as the polar opposite of playfulness. They are afraid to express themselves with their toys because they fear that if they showed their true emotions, they would commit an unacceptable act. They grow up to be overly inhibited adults who constantly fear doing something for which they'd later feel guilty.

If you don't like the psychodynamic approach to guilt, perhaps you'll find the cognitive explanation a bit more palatable. From a cognitive point of view, guilt is an emotion that people experience because they're convinced they've caused harm. In cognitive theory, the thoughts cause the emotions. The guilt of emotion follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else's misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, according to the cognitive perspective, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. Their negative emotion follows from their tendency to misinterpret what happens to them and not to question the logic of their conclusions. In cognitive therapy, treatment often involves teaching people to rid themselves of their "automatic thoughts" that they've caused others to suffer. People constantly plagued by guilt are also taught to recognize their "dysfunctional attitudes" so that they recognize when they're going through such mental processes as catastrophizing (making the very worst of a bad situation) or overgeneralizing (believing that if one bad thing happened, many more must have as well).

In contrast to the psychodynamic view of guilt, the cognitive perspective gives the average person some clues for fixing the tendency to blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. According to the cognitive view, if you change your thoughts, you can change your emotions. Once you realize that you're inaccurately seeing yourself as causing others to suffer, you can readjust your mental set and more realistically figure out your role in whatever grief came their way.

Armed with this background, let's examine the five types of guilt and-more importantly-how you can cope when guilty feelings come your way.

Guilt Cause #1: Guilt for something you did. The most obvious reason to feel guilty is that you actually did something wrong. This type of guilt may involve harm to others, such causing someone physical or psychological pain. You may also feel guilty because you violated your own ethical or moral code, such cheating, lying or stealing. Guilt over your own behavior can also be caused by doing something you swore you would never do again (such as smoking, drinking, or overeating). In each of these cases, there's no doubt that the behavior occurred.

It's appropriate to feel guilty when you've done something wrong. Feeling the emotion of guilt for an action deserving of remorse is normal; to not feel guilty, in these cases, may be a sign of psychopathy. The problems occur when you ruminate over this guilt. An action in the past cannot be changed, no matter how much you wish it would. Accept the fact that this happened, apologize to the person or persons you harmed, and then figure out how to avoid committing the same act in the future. If you've violated your own personal standards (such as through overuse of alcohol or cheating on your partner), you can best avoid straying in the future by seeking support from others who can help you rid yourself of this habit or help you to keep on the up and up. Finally, because of our natural tendency toward egocentrism, we assume that others place far more importance on our thoughts and actions than they actually do. The behavior over which you are tormented by guilt, such as inadvertently insulting a friend, may hardly have even penetrated that friend's consciousness.

Guilt Cause #2: Guilt for something you didn't do, but want to. You're thinking about committing an act in which you deviate from your own moral code or engage in behavior that is dishonest, unfaithful, or illegal. Like Jimmy Carter, you may have mentally lusted after someone other than your spouse or long-term partner. This is a tough type of guilt to handle. It's true that you didn't actually commit the act, and so you're still sitting on the moral high ground. However, we all know that the very fact that you're contemplating an act that violates your own standards can be as guilt-provoking as the act itself.

If you're beating yourself up for these forbidden and taboo thoughts, you can try the good old Freudian defense mechanism of repression (where you stop up the hidden desire) or denial (where you don't acknowledge it). However, this is unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome because by defending against your feelings, you may actually fall prey to them and behave in a way that gives you reason to feel guilty. An approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides some guidance for how you can cope with this type of guilt. You can recognize that you have these illicit thoughts, accept them as part of who you are right now, and then, commit yourself to changing your behavior so that you don't follow through on them. Rather than shove them under the surface, you can embrace your illicit thoughts and desires and work on reducing them through conscious effort.

Guilt Cause #3: Guilt for something you think you did. As cognitive theories of emotions tell us, much of the unhappiness we experience is due to our own irrational thoughts about situations. If you think you did something wrong, you can experience almost as much guilt as if you actually committed the act - or even more. One fairly typical cognitive source of guilt is the magical belief that you can jinx people by thinking about them in a negative or hurtful way. Perhaps you've wished that a romantic rival would experience some evil twist of fate. Should that evil twist of fate come to pass, you may, at some level, believe that it was due to your own vengeful wish. At some level you "know" that you're being illogical, but it's hard to rid yourself completely of this belief. We also know that our memory for past events is highly flawed. It's possible for you to have done nothing wrong at all but to misremember and think that you did, particularly when there are highly charged feelings involved. Suspects can have false memories implanted into them that convince them that they not only were at the scene of a crime, but actually committed it.

Before you start accusing yourself of wrongdoing, make sure that the wrongdoing actually took place. If you're distorting your recollection of events to make you seem more at fault than you are, it's time for a hearty dose of reality testing.

Guilt Cause #4: Guilt that you didn't do enough to help someone. Perhaps you have a friend who is very ill or who is caring for an ill relative. You've given hours of your free time to help that person, but now you have other obligations that you absolutely must fulfill. Or perhaps your neighbors suffered a tragic loss such as the death of a relative or fire that destroyed their home. You've offered days and weeks of your free time but, again, you find you can't continue to do so. The guilt now starts to get to you and you try desperately to figure out ways to help them despite the toll it's taking on you. Psychologists use the term compassion fatigue to capture this feeling of burnout. Though used typically to describe professional helpers, it can also occur among people who offer continued informal support to others in need. Adding to the overall emotional drain of the situation is the guilt you overlay on top of the fatigue because you think you should be doing more.

You can decide or not whether you want to continue to make the sacrifices needed to help these individuals. However, it's important to separate your desire to help from the guilt you fear will overwhelm you if you don't. Acting out of guilt can only drain you further and ultimately make you a less effective helper.

Guilt Cause #5: Guilt that you're doing better than someone else. The experience of survivor guilt is one recognized by professionals who work with combat veterans who outlive their fellow troops. Survivor guilt also occurs when people who lose families, friends, or neighbors in disasters themselves remain untouched or, at least, alive. Applying not only to people who live when others in the same situation have died, though, survivor guilt also characterizes those who make a better life for themselves than do their family or friends. First-generation college students, for example, often feel torn by conflicting emotions about their success in school. They want to do well (and their families want them to also), but the students themselves feel guilty that they are getting opportunities that their parents or siblings did not. To "protect" their family members, they may engage in self-destructive behaviors that ensure they won't make it in school. Logic would dictate that the family truly want the student to succeed (and thus bring honor to the family), but this logic is lost on the student due to survivor guilt.

The only way to cure yourself of survivor guilt is to remind yourself of how proud, glad, and invested those who love and care for you. Remind yourself, as hard as it might be, that your own failure will not help bring someone back to life, nor will it make others who love you feel better about themselves. You need to gain your inspiration from the knowledge that your efforts are a tribute to them. Don't get down on yourself if you can't reach your loftiest goals (or the ones they have or had for you) but at least know that you're giving yourself the shot at success that they would want you to have.

There's no doubt that guilt is a complex and interesting emotion. It can even cause you to spend more than you want to or can when buying gifts for your friends and family. You can't live a completely guilt-free life but you can keep it within manageable bounds. Guilt can also help you gain greater self- understanding by helping you to recognize when, in fact, you've done someone else harm. Guilt, in and of itself, isn't a destructive emotion. If you let it become all-consuming, however, guilt can get the best - or the worst - of you.
Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, "Fulfillment at Any Age," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting. Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, 2012
Reference:

Fischer, K. W., Shaver, P. R., & Carnochan, P. (1990). How emotions develop and how they organise development. Cognition And Emotion, 4(2), 81-127. doi:10.1080/02699939008407142

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Guilt is one of the most common but least understood emotions. When the guilt becomes chronic, it can contribute to chronic mental health problems including depression and anxiety disorders. By learning to identify these five types of guilt, you can learn ways to cope with and manage your own.

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incredibly simple formula for killer résumés

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incredibly simple formula for killer résumés

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It's not exactly E=mc².

But for would-be job hunters, it's probably a lot more useful.

In a Q&A-style interview with Google's senior vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock, The New York Times's Tom Friedman fished a few seriously helpful words of wisdom out of the search giant's human resources chief. This one is perhaps the most concrete.

How do you write a good résumé?

"The key," [Bock] said, "is to frame your strengths as: 'I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.' Most people would write a résumé like this: 'Wrote editorials for The New York Times.' Better would be to say: 'Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.' Most people don't put the right content on their résumés."

Google has seemed to get a lot more rational about its hiring habits under Bock, who notably admitted that the famous brain-teasers the Mountain View, Calif. company once used to winnow potential hires proved to be a complete waste of time. Moreover, it's becoming increasingly clear that the résumé is far from dead even for the most sophisticated big-data operations. Although-as always-poorly written CVs do quickly get buried.

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Google just revealed the incredibly simple formula for killer résumés

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It's not exactly E=mc². But for would-be job hunters, it's probably a lot more useful. In a Q&A-style interview with Google's senior vice president of people operations Laszlo Bock, The New York Times's Tom Friedman fished a few seriously helpful words of wisdom out of the search giant's human resources chief.

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REAL Entrepreneurs who achieved true wealth, meaning and freedom in their lives.

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"Prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child.

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"Prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child.

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When I became a mom, I got lots of advice on how to love my child. But not until a few years ago did someone actually point out that loving a child means wanting what's best for them long-term.

When my four daughters were young, long-term didn't resonate with me. Back then it was about survival, meeting daily needs and keeping my head above water.

Now that my kids are maturing, however, the fog is lifting. I'm no longer a pledge of parenting, but rather an indoctrinated member. The perk of this stage is that my kids want to spend time with me. We have real conversations that reveal their beautiful personalities. With everyone sleeping through the night, I'm sleeping better, too. I can think coherently and be more intentional in how I raise them.

These days, I put more thought into long-term. I think about the kind of adults I hope my children will be and work backward to ask, "What can I do today to foster that?" Being mindful of their future has changed my parenting paradigm, because what makes my children happy at age 10 or 15 is somewhat different from what will make them happy at age 25, 30, 40 and beyond.

A while back I came across some interesting articles and books that dig into what psychologists today are seeing: a rising number of 20-somethings who are depressed and don't know why. These young adults claim they had magical childhoods. Their parents are their best friends. They never experienced tragedy or anything more than normal disappointments. Yet for some reason, they're unhappy.

One reason given is that parents today are too quick to swoop in. We don't want our children to fall, so instead of letting them experience adversity, we clear the path. We remove obstacles to make their life easy. But adversity is a part of life, and only by facing it can our children build life-coping skills they'll need down the road. So while it seems like we're doing them a favor, we're really stunting their growth. We're putting short-term payoffs over long-term well-being.

One article mentions incoming college freshmen known to deans as "teacups" for their fragility in the face of minor problems. The question posed was this: "Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we're depriving them of happiness as adults?"

Here's psychiatrist Paul Bohn's response, as paraphrased in the piece:

[M]any parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment -- "anything less than pleasant," as he puts it -- with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Why am I sharing this information? Because I think it's relevant in this age of helicopter parenting. While I find it great that today's parents are more invested in their children's lives than previous generations, our involvement can go overboard. What we may justify as "good parenting" can hurt our children later. Unless we're mindful of that, it's easy to handicap them by making their lives too easy.
As my favorite parenting philosophy goes: "Prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child."
With this said, I've outlined 10 common mistakes that parents today -- me included -- often make. My intention isn't to point fingers, but to raise awareness. What may be ingrained in our culture is not always in the best interest of our kids.

Mistake #10: Worshipping our children. Many of us live in child-centered communities. We're raising our kids in child-centered homes. Our children love this, of course, because our lives revolve around them. And for the most part we don't mind either, because their happiness is our happiness. It thrills us to do for them, buy for them, and shower them with love and attention.

But I think it's important to keep in mind that our children were made to be loved, not worshipped. So when we treat them like the center of the universe, we create a false idol, turning a good into an ultimate. Rather than kid-centered homes, we should strive for God-centered homes. Our children will still be loved, only in a better way, one that promotes selflessness over selfishness.

Mistake #9: Believing our children are perfect. One thing I often hear from professionals who work with children (counselors, teachers, etc.) is that parents today don't want to hear anything negative about their kids. When concerns are raised, even concerns voiced out of love, the knee-jerk reaction is often to attack the messenger.

The truth can hurt, but when we listen with an open heart and mind we stand to benefit. We can intervene early before a situation gets out of hand. It's easier to deal with a troubled child than repair a broken adult.

As a Children's of Alabama psychiatrist recently told me when I interviewed her on teenage depression, early intervention is key because it can change the trajectory for the child's life. She said that's why she enjoys child and adolescent psychiatry -- because kids are resilient, and it's a lot easier to intervene effectively when they're young instead of years later, when the problem has gone on so long it's become incorporated into part of their identity.

Mistake #8: Living vicariously through our children. We parents take great pride in our children. When they succeed, it makes us happier than if we'd done it ourselves.

But if we're overly involved and invested in their lives, it gets hard to see where they end and we begin. When our children become extensions of us, we may see them as our second chance. Suddenly it's not about them, it's about us. This is where their happiness starts getting confused with our happiness.

Mistake #7: Wanting to be our child's BFF. When I asked a priest to name the biggest mistake he sees in parenting, he thought for a moment and then said, "Parents not being parents. Not stepping up to the plate to do hard things."

Like everyone, I want my children to love me. I want them to sing my praises and appreciate me. But if I'm doing my job right, they'll get mad and not like me sometimes. They'll roll their eyes, moan and groan, and wish they'd been born into another family.

Seeking to be our child's BFF can only lead to permissiveness and choices made out of desperation because we fear losing their approval. That's not love on our end; that's need.

Mistake #6: Engaging in competitive parenting. Every parent has a competitive streak. All it takes to stir this monster in us is another parent giving his or her child a leg up at our child's expense.

I hear these stories a lot at the junior high and high school levels, stories of broken friendships and betrayals due to one family blindsiding another family. In my opinion, the root is fear. We fear our children will get left behind. We fear that if we don't jump into the craziness, and pull out every stop to help them excel early, they'll be stuck in mediocrity the rest of their life.

I believe children need to work hard and understand that dreams don't come on a silver platter; they have to sweat and fight for them. But when we instill a "win at all costs" attitude, permitting them to throw anyone under the bus to get ahead, we lose sight of character.

Character may not seem important in adolescence, but in adulthood it's everything.

Mistake #5: Missing the wonder of childhood. The other day I found a Strawberry Shortcake sticker on my kitchen sink. It reminded me how blessed I am to share my home with little people.

One day there won't be stickers on my sink. There won't be Barbies in my bathtub, baby dolls on my bed or Mary Poppins in the DVD player. My windows will be clear of sticky handprints, and my home will be quiet because my daughters will be hanging out with friends instead of nesting at home with me.

Raising small children can be hard, monotonous work. At times it's so physically and emotionally exhausting we wish they were older to make our life easier. We're also kind of curious who they'll grow up to be. What will be their passion? Will their God-given gifts be clear? As parents we hope so, for knowing which strengths to nurture enables us to point them in the right direction.

But as we project into the future, wondering if our child's knack for art will make them a Picasso, or if their melodic voice will create a Taylor Swift, we may forget to soak up the splendor in front of us: toddlers in footed pajamas, bedtime stories, tummy tickles and elated squeals. We may forget to let our children be little and enjoy the one childhood they're given.

The pressures on kids start way too early. If we really want our kids to have a leg up, we need to protect them from these pressures. We need to let them have fun and grow at their own pace so 1) they can explore their interests without fear of failure and 2) they don't get burned out.

Childhood is a time for free play and discovery. When we rush children through it, we rob them of an innocent age they'll never pass through again.

Mistake #4: Raising the child we want, not the child we have. As parents we harbor dreams for our children. They start when we get pregnant, before the gender's even known. Secretly we hope they'll be like us, only smarter and more talented. We want to be their mentors, putting our life experiences to good use.

But the irony of parenting is that children turn our molds upside down. They come out wired in ways we never anticipated. Our job is to figure out their inherent, God-ordained bent and train them in that direction. Forcing our dreams on them won't work. Only when we see them for who they are can we impact their life powerfully.

Mistake #3: Forgetting our actions speak louder than words. Sometimes when my kids ask a question, they'll say, "Please answer in one sentence." They know me well, for I'm always trying to squeeze life lessons into teachable moments. I want to fill them with wisdom, but what I forget is how my example overshadows my words.

How I handle rejection and adversity... how I treat friends and strangers... whether I nag or build up their father... they notice these things. And the way I respond gives them permission to act the same.

If I want my children to be wonderful, I need to aim for wonderful, too. I need to be the person I hope they'll be.

Mistake #2: Judging other parents -- and their kids. No matter how much we disagree with someone's parenting style, it's not our place to judge. Nobody in this world is "all good" or "all bad"; we're all a mix of both, a community of sinners struggling with different demons.

Personally, I tend to cut other parents more slack when I'm going through hard spells. When my child is testing me, I'm compassionate to parents in the same boat. When my life is overwhelming, I'm forgiving of others who slip up and let things fall through the cracks.

We never know what someone's going through or when we'll need mercy ourselves. And while we can't control judgmental thoughts, we can cut them short by seeking to understand the person instead of jumping to conclusions.

Mistake #1: Underestimating CHARACTER. If there's one thing I hope to get right in my children, it's their CORE. Character, moral fiber, an inner compass... these things lay the foundation for a happy, healthy future. They matter more than any report card or trophy ever will.

None of us can force character on our kids, and at age 10 or 15 character won't mean much. Children care about short-term gratification, but we, as parents, know better. We know that what will matter at 25, 30 and 40 is not how far they once threw the football, or whether they made cheerleader, but how they treat others and what they think of themselves. If we want them to build character, confidence, strength and resilience, we need to let them face adversity and experience the pride that follows when they come out stronger on the other side.

It's hard to see our children fall, but sometimes we have to. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves whether intervening is in their best interest. There are a million ways to love a child, but in our quest to make them happy, let us stay mindful that sometimes it takes short-term pain to earn long-term gain.
This post originally appeared on karikampakis.com.
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10 Common Mistakes Parents Today Make (Me Included)

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When I became a mom, I got lots of advice on how to love my child. But not until a few years ago did someone actually point out that loving a child means wanting what's best for them long-term. When my four daughters were young, long-term didn't resonate with me.

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"Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day." ~Friedrich Nietzsche

What beautiful rewards sleep delivers- if you can get enough of it.

Sleep has profound effects on our memories, desires, self-control, learning, relationships and more.

Here are twelve studies which demonstrate some of the psychological benefits of sleep and a few of the dangers of not getting enough.

1. Placebo sleep

Sleep is slippery beast, not least in how it's susceptible to our perceptions of its quality.

If we think we've had a wonderful sleep last night, we feel and perform better, even if our sleep was actually the same as usual.

This is what Draganich and Erdal (2014) found in a study which had participants hooked up to sensors which they were told were measuring the quality of their sleep.

Actually the sensors weren't measuring anything. Instead the researchers randomly told some people they'd had better sleep than others.

When they were given a cognitive test the next day, those who'd been told they slept the best also did the best in the test.

Their self-reported sleep quality had little effect on the test results.

The researchers dubbed this 'placebo sleep'.

2. Emotional sleep

During sleep our memories are reorganised and made stronger-in particular the emotional centres of the brain are highly active.

Psychologists have found that the mind is cataloguing our memories and deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

Sleep expert Elizabeth A. Kensinger explains:

"Sleep is making memories stronger. It also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories."

A review of studies on sleep found that we tend to hold on to the most emotional parts of our memories ( Kensinger & Payne, 2010).

3. Blame bad sleep on the full moon

If your sleep wasn't up to scratch last night, perhaps it was partly down to the phase of the moon.

People often complain of worse sleep around the full moon, but until recently scientists have been sceptical.

A study by Cajochen et al., 2013, though...

"...studied 33 volunteers in two age groups in the lab while they slept. Their brain patterns were monitored while sleeping, along with eye movements and hormone secretions."

This is what they found:

"The data show that around the full moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by 30 percent. People also took five minutes longer to fall asleep, and they slept for twenty minutes less time overall.

The researchers think it may be because we have a kind of 'moon clock' inside us that tracks its cycles and affects our hormone levels. This is in addition to the better known circadian rhythms which affect many bodily processes during the day.

→ Read on: Bad Night's Sleep? Blame the Full Moon

4. Junk food cravings

One of the dangers of not getting enough sleep is craving junk food.

Recent research from UC Berkeley scanned the brains of 24 participants after both a good and a bad night's sleep ( Greer et al., 2013).

After disturbed sleep, there was increased activity in the depths of the brain, areas which are generally associated with rewards and automatic behaviour.

It seems a lack of sleep robs people of their self-control and so their good intentions are quickly forgotten.

Hence those junk food cravings get out of control.

→ Read on: Why the Sleep-Deprived Crave Junk Food and Buy Higher Calorie Foods

5. Learn in your sleep

It's not possible to learn something new when you sleep, like a foreign language, but you can reinforce something you already know.

Gobel et al. (2012) found that students learned to play a series of musical notes better after listening to them during a 90-minute nap.

One of the authors, Paul Reber explained:

"The critical difference is that our research shows that memory is strengthened for something you've already learned. Rather than learning something new in your sleep, we're talking about enhancing an existing memory by re-activating information recently acquired."

→ Read on: Offline Learning: How The Mind Learns During Sleep

6. Benefits of a six-minute nap

Even tiny amounts of sleep can be beneficial.

A study by Lahl (2008) found that even a short six-minute nap was enough to measurably improve performance on a test of word recall.

Tell that to the boss the next time your caught 'resting your eyes' at work!

7. Night owls have lower integrity white matter

Different neural structures have been discovered between people who are night owls and early risers.

Research on 59 participants, those who were confirmed night owls (preferring late to bed and late to rise) had lower integrity of the white matter in various areas of the brain ( Rosenberg et al., 2014).

Lower integrity in these areas has been linked to depression and cognitive instability.

Unfortunately work, school and other institutions mostly require early rising, which, for night owls, causes problems.

As night owls find it difficult to get to sleep early, they tend to carry large amounts of sleep debt.

In other words, they're exhausted all the time and their brains clearly show the consequences.

→ Read on: Like to Stay Up Late? Different Neural Structures Found in the Brains of Night Owls

8. Children's sleep

Children are processing way more information than adults because everything is so new to them.

That is why irregular bedtimes at a young age can reduce their cognitive performance.

One study had children learning a task which had a hidden pattern. After a night's sleep they were much more likely to guess the secret pattern without being told ( Wilhelm et al., 2013).

Children also outperformed adults, suggesting that sleep was more important to them for this task.

9. Adolescents need more sleep

Adolescents typically require an hour or two more sleep than adults.

If so, why do we make them get up so early for school?

One study has delayed the waking up time of adolescents at a boarding school by just 25 minutes ( Boergers et al., 2013).

They found that afterwards the number of students getting more than 8 hours sleep a night jumped from 18% to 44%.

On top of this, the students experienced less daytime sleepiness, were less depressed, and found themselves using less caffeine.

→ Read on: Later School Start Times Improve Sleep and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents

10. Consolidate motor skills

When we are learning a motor skill, like playing the piano, our brains continue to process the information after we've finished.

In research by Allen (2012), musicians who practised a new song had improved in speed and accuracy compared with before a night's sleep.

Like memory, a good night's sleep can also improve motor performance.

11. Relationship damage

People are usually at their worst after a bad night's sleep, but what does that do to their intimate relationships?

A new study finds that even one bad night's sleep can be surprisingly damaging to a relationship ( Gordon & Chen, 2013).

They found that even for those who were good sleepers, just a single night's poor sleep was associated with increased relationship conflict the next day.

→ Read on: How Just One Night's Poor Sleep Can Hurt a Relationship

12. Hidden caves open up during sleep

If sleep has such amazing restorative powers then what is going on physiologically?

New research has discovered "hidden caves" inside the brain, which open up during sleep, allowing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to flush out potential neurotoxins, like β-amyloid, which has been associated with Alzheimer's disease ( Xie et al., 2013).

The flushing out of toxins by the CSF may be central to sleep's wondrous powers.

→ Read on: Hidden Caves in the Brain Open Up During Sleep to Wash Away Toxins

Last word

Last word to the playwright Wilson Mizner who said:

"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."

Quite right.

→ Related: 10 Sleep Deprivation Effects.
→ Explore PsyBlog's ebooks, all written by Dr Jeremy Dean:
Image credits: Ryan Ritchie & HaoJan Chang & Simon Pais-Thomas & Sheldon Wood

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The Miracle and Mystery of Sleep: 12 Remarkable Psychological Studies - PsyBlog

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"Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day." ~Friedrich Nietzsche What beautiful rewards sleep delivers- if you can get enough of it. Sleep has profound effects on our memories, desires, self-control, learning, relationships and more.

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"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." | Lily Tomlin

Being busy used to make me feel important. It made me feel like the world needed me, like somehow I was more valuable or valid when busy. Perhaps that's why I wore it like a badge and quickly resorted to it when people asked how life was. Yet in all reality, busyness was just another addiction I clung to so I could avoid things that made me uncomfortable.

Sadly, the things I often stayed busy to avoid happened to be some of the more worth while things in life.

I recently shared an article by one of my favorite columnists, Tim Kreider, in which he divulges on the vanity of always being busy. The general gist of his rant can be caught when he says,

"I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy."

Tim's article is one of many pieces in a recent and widespread frustration with the perpetual busyness of life. As of late, there seems to be a general suspicion growing about the, once viable, value of always being busy. And because more questions are being asked, more answers are being found.

As it turns out, always being busy isn't a virtue, nor is it something to respect anymore. Among many reasons for this, there are a few that stand out to me.

It can actually be a sign of an inability to manage our lives well. Though we all have seasons of crazy schedules, few people have a legitimate need to be busy ALL of the time. For the rest of us, we simply don't know how to live within our means, prioritize correctly, or say no. "Being busy is not the same as being productive," says Tim Ferriss, "...and is more often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action."

It can be indicative of a lack of confidence and self-worth. Often we stay busy to subconsciously feel important and valuable to the world around us. Sadly, this points to an ignorance of our inherent value, in that regardless of our performance in life, we are important, loved and valuable. This slippery slope typically makes us too uncomfortable with ourselves or the reality of our lives to slow down.

Busyness actually restricts professional performance and limits mental capacity. With plenty of recently published psychological and biological evidence of this, Kreider seems to capture it well in the previously cited Busy Trap when he says,

"Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

Busy often keeps us from the finer things in life. Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a time, the sensation is not sustainable long term. We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of the rat race and more time actually living. Or as Seneca says in Letters from a Stoic, "There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living, and there is nothing harder to learn."

An Experiment & Challenge in Resisting Busy.

Paul E. Ralph is a fundraising, copywriting & marketing expert living outside of Toronto. He's recently launched PathwaysFund, an online tool which assists non-profits to cultivate spontaneous generosity. He also happens to be a longtime friend.

I'll never forget when I was young seeing Paul standing outside in the freezing cold after evacuating my house with nothing but his boxers, a toothbrush in his mouth, and a pet parakeet under his shirt. This was after another friend and I, in attempt to clean up around the house, emptied hot coals from the fireplace into the plastic trashcan and returned it to it's respective place: in the garage between two Lexus'. Long story short, six firetrucks later, we were able to salvage the cars and laugh about the incident today.

Shortly after I posted the previously mentioned article, Paul reached out to me about an experiment he and his wife did last year revolving around the issue of busyness. I thought it too good not to share.

Enter Paul.

My wife and I began noticing that everybody in our circle of influence, including ourselves, responded to virtually any question with "busy." Normal questions? busy. Normal life? busy. It was evident that the new normal was a declaration of busy. It became the new mantra for living in the 21st century. 'I am busy. Hear me roar!'

So, we decided to conduct an experiment.

We decided to never use the phrase BUSY as an answer for an entire year and to see if there were any changes in attitude and/or behaviour. Ours. Theirs.

We noticed alright. Instantly.

We were forced to describe our own situations with more clarity, and without our best friend 'busy' to blame, we engaged with people more authentically. As we did, we noticed the general depth of conversations increase as we and those we were sharing with, were invited to communicate differently about our actual states of being.

We stopped manipulating our friends. We weren't actually aware that we were doing it before, however with that little four letter word excommunicated, we no longer predetermined the ubiquitous auto-response - "me too."

We also quit guilting other people with all of our so called busy-ness. There's nothing quite like the overachiever in the crowd diminishing everybody else efforts. Our busyness somehow validated us in the minds of our peers. So we thought. When we stopped using the word, we were free to be happy with our efforts for the day - and free to let others be comfortable with their own accomplishments.

'The devil made me do it' was a well-worn phrase when I was a kid. Perhaps 'busy' is its new iteration. An unintended consequence of our banishment of all things busy was that we stopped justifying our poor behaviors & choices. As we practiced choosing better words to describe our circumstances, we noticed a steady decline in the blame game. It included saying things like "we choose to take on too much...our bad."

And most importantly, when we quit using the word BUSY, we noticed that others did the same. It was refreshing, for all of the aforementioned reasons.
Busy, it would seem, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we said it - the more we felt it. The more we felt - the more we acted like it. The more we acted like it - (well, you know the rest). Guess what? When we quit saying it, we reversed SOME (not all) of the craziness.
Exit Paul.

So, here's the challenge. Regardless of our love or hate of busyness, let's experiment with what it's absence does for us.

There are several ways we could go about doing this. Elimination using the 20/80 rule, or a good dose of Parkinson's law, or any one of a number of popular methods. However, I like Paul's approach.

For one month, I'm going to stop using the word "busy." I'm going to resist the comfort of it to try and dig deeper to explain how things really are. If I feel busy, my hope is to be aware enough to discover why and to learn how I can change it.

Join me. Or at the very least, remember that being busy isn't all it's cracked up to be and often isn't as necessary as we think.
Disclaimer: Being busy, in this context, is not synonymous with being hard working or productive or effective. (read more about this here) Also, this article is calling into question busyness for busyness sake. Busyness by necessity, at least for a season, is an entirely different conversation.
Also, I've recently been fascinated by the impact of our daily routines. Rhythms is a series of short weekly emails on how to design your daily rhythms, in cooperation with your biology, to increase energy, productivity & margin. If interested, learn more here.

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"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." | Lily Tomlin Being busy used to make me feel important. It made me feel like the world needed me, like somehow I was more valuable or valid when busy.

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Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It's been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we'd pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them). But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides-no music, no animation-would become so influential.

People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that Netflix has been really successful: During 2013 alone its stock more than tripled, it won three Emmy awards, and its U.S. subscriber base grew to nearly 29 million. All that aside, the approach is compelling because it derives from common sense. In this article I'll go beyond the bullet points to describe five ideas that have defined the way Netflix attracts, retains, and manages talent. But first I'll share two conversations I had with early employees, both of which helped shape our overall philosophy.

Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings discusses the company's unconventional HR practices.

HBR: Why did you write the Netflix culture deck?
Hastings: It's our version of Letters to a Young Poet for budding entrepreneurs. It's what we wish we had understood when we started. More than 100 people at Netflix have made major contributions to the deck, and we have more improvements coming.

Many of the ideas in it seem like common sense, but they go against traditional HR practices. Why aren't companies more innovative when it comes to talent management?
As a society, we've had hundreds of years to work on managing industrial firms, so a lot of accepted HR practices are centered in that experience. We're just beginning to learn how to run creative firms, which is quite different. Industrial firms thrive on reducing variation (manufacturing errors); creative firms thrive on increasing variation (innovation).

What reactions have you gotten from your peers to steps such as abolishing formal vacation and performance review policies? In general, do you think other companies admire your HR innovations or look askance at them?
My peers are mostly in the creative sector, and many of the ideas in our culture deck came from them. We are all learning from one another.

Which idea in the culture deck was the hardest sell with employees?
"Adequate performance gets a generous severance package." It's a pretty blunt statement of our hunger for excellence.

Have any of your talent management innovations been total flops?
Not so far.

Patty talks about how leaders should model appropriate behaviors to help people adapt to an environment with fewer formal controls. With that in mind, how many days off did you take in 2013?
"Days off" is a very industrial concept, like being "at the office." I find Netflix fun to think about, so there are probably no 24-hour periods when I never think about work. But I did take three or four weeklong family trips over the past year, which were both stimulating and relaxing.

The first took place in late 2001. Netflix had been growing quickly: We'd reached about 120 employees and had been planning an IPO. But after the dot-com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks occurred, things changed. It became clear that we needed to put the IPO on hold and lay off a third of our employees. It was brutal. Then, a bit unexpectedly, DVD players became the hot gift that Christmas. By early 2002 our DVD-by-mail subscription business was growing like crazy. Suddenly we had far more work to do, with 30% fewer employees.

One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I'll call John. Before the layoffs, he'd managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. "There's no rush-I'm happier now," he said. It turned out that the engineers we'd laid off weren't spectacular-they were merely adequate. John realized that he'd spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. "I've learned that I'd rather work by myself than with subpar performers," he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix's talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees-a perk better than foosball or free sushi-is hire only "A" players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She'd been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals-and Laura had only an associate's degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn't be right.

So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation-and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I'd braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well: She was sad to be leaving but recognized that the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path. This incident helped us create the other vital element of our talent management philosophy: If we wanted only "A" players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people-and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them-we learned to offer rich severance packages.

With these two overarching principles in mind, we shaped our approach to talent using the five tenets below.

Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you're careful to hire people who will put the company's interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we'd made a hiring mistake.

Adultlike behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently skirted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.

Let me offer two examples.

When Netflix launched, we had a standard paid-time-off policy: People got 10 vacation days, 10 holidays, and a few sick days. We used an honor system-employees kept track of the days they took off and let their managers know when they'd be out. After we went public, our auditors freaked. They said Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that we account for time off. We considered instituting a formal tracking system. But then Reed asked, "Are companies required to give time off? If not, can't we just handle it informally and skip the accounting rigmarole?" I did some research and found that, indeed, no California law governed vacation time.

So instead of shifting to a formal system, we went in the opposite direction: Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate. Bosses and employees were asked to work it out with one another. (Hourly workers in call centers and warehouses were given a more structured policy.) We did provide some guidance. If you worked in accounting or finance, you shouldn't plan to be out during the beginning or the end of a quarter, because those were busy times. If you wanted 30 days off in a row, you needed to meet with HR. Senior leaders were urged to take vacations and to let people know about them-they were role models for the policy. (Most were happy to comply.) Some people worried about whether the system would be inconsistent-whether some bosses would allow tons of time off while others would be stingy. In general, I worried more about fairness than consistency, because the reality is that in any organization, the highest-performing and most valuable employees get more leeway.

We also departed from a formal travel and expense policy and decided to simply require adultlike behavior there, too. The company's expense policy is five words long: "Act in Netflix's best interests." In talking that through with employees, we said we expected them to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs. It also reduced costs: Many large companies still use travel agents (and pay their fees) to book trips, as a way to enforce travel policies. They could save money by letting employees book their own trips online. Like most Netflix managers, I had to have conversations periodically with employees who ate at lavish restaurants (meals that would have been fine for sales or recruiting, but not for eating alone or with a Netflix colleague). We kept an eye on our IT guys, who were prone to buying a lot of gadgets. But overall we found that expense accounts are another area where if you create a clear expectation of responsible behavior, most employees will comply.

Tell the Truth About Performance

Many years ago we eliminated formal reviews. We had held them for a while but came to realize they didn't make sense-they were too ritualistic and too infrequent. So we asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work. In many functions-sales, engineering, product development-it's fairly obvious how well people are doing. (As companies develop better analytics to measure performance, this becomes even truer.) Building a bureaucracy and elaborate rituals around measuring performance usually doesn't improve it.

Traditional corporate performance reviews are driven largely by fear of litigation. The theory is that if you want to get rid of someone, you need a paper trail documenting a history of poor achievement. At many companies, low performers are placed on "Performance Improvement Plans." I detest PIPs. I think they're fundamentally dishonest: They never accomplish what their name implies.

One Netflix manager requested a PIP for a quality assurance engineer named Maria, who had been hired to help develop our streaming service. The technology was new, and it was evolving very quickly. Maria's job was to find bugs. She was fast, intuitive, and hardworking. But in time we figured out how to automate the QA tests. Maria didn't like automation and wasn't particularly good at it. Her new boss (brought in to create a world-class automation tools team) told me he wanted to start a PIP with her.

I replied, "Why bother? We know how this will play out. You'll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can't, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you'll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won't sleep on Tuesday nights, because you'll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you'll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she's been consistently rewarded for being great at her job-a job that basically doesn't exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

"Instead, let's just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria's skills no longer apply. This won't be a surprise to her: She's been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package-which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit." In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they're told the truth-and this proved to be the case with Maria.

When we stopped doing formal performance reviews, we instituted informal 360-degree reviews. We kept them fairly simple: People were asked to identify things that colleagues should stop, start, or continue. In the beginning we used an anonymous software system, but over time we shifted to signed feedback, and many teams held their 360s face-to-face.

HR people can't believe that a company the size of Netflix doesn't hold annual reviews. "Are you making this up just to upset us?" they ask. I'm not. If you talk simply and honestly about performance on a regular basis, you can get good results-probably better ones than a company that grades everyone on a five-point scale.

Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

Discussing the military's performance during the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, once famously said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." When I talk to managers about creating great teams, I tell them to approach the process in exactly the opposite way.

In my consulting work, I ask managers to imagine a documentary about what their team is accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do they see? How is the work different from what the team is doing today? Next I ask them to think about the skills needed to make the images in the movie become reality. Nowhere in the early stages of the process do I advise them to think about the team they actually have. Only after they've done the work of envisioning the ideal outcome and the skill set necessary to achieve it should they analyze how well their existing team matches what they need.

If you're in a fast-changing business environment, you're probably looking at a lot of mismatches. In that case, you need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a place where their skills are a better fit. You also need to recruit people with the right skills.

We faced the latter challenge at Netflix in a fairly dramatic way as we began to shift from DVDs by mail to a streaming service. We had to store massive volumes of files in the cloud and figure out how huge numbers of people could reliably access them. (By some estimates, up to a third of peak residential internet traffic in the U.S. comes from customers streaming Netflix movies.) So we needed to find people deeply experienced with cloud services who worked for companies that operate on a giant scale-companies like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook, which aren't the easiest places to hire someone away from.

Our compensation philosophy helped a lot. Most of its principles stem from ideals described earlier: Be honest, and treat people like adults. For instance, during my tenure Netflix didn't pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they're unnecessary if you hire the right people. If your employees are fully formed adults who put the company first, an annual bonus won't make them work harder or smarter. We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent. Many HR people dislike it when employees talk to recruiters, but I always told employees to take the call, ask how much, and send me the number-it's valuable information.

In addition, we used equity compensation much differently from the way most companies do. Instead of larding stock options on top of a competitive salary, we let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity. If employees wanted stock options, we reduced their salaries accordingly. We believed that they were sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs, judge their personal tolerance for risk, and decide what was best for them and their families. We distributed options every month, at a slight discount from the market price. We had no vesting period-the options could be cashed in immediately. Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as "golden handcuffs" to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you've earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don't want to hold you hostage.

We continually told managers that building a great team was their most important task. We didn't measure them on whether they were excellent coaches or mentors or got their paperwork done on time. Great teams accomplish great work, and recruiting the right team was the top priority.

Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture

After I left Netflix and began consulting, I visited a hot start-up in San Francisco. It had 60 employees in an open loft-style office with a foosball table, two pool tables, and a kitchen, where a chef cooked lunch for the entire staff. As the CEO showed me around, he talked about creating a fun atmosphere. At one point I asked him what the most important value for his company was. He replied, "Efficiency."

"OK," I said. "Imagine that I work here, and it's 2:58 PM. I'm playing an intense game of pool, and I'm winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?"

"You should finish the game," he insisted. I wasn't surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality. "Wait a second," I said. "You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It's not efficient to delay a meeting and keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn't there a mismatch between the values you're talking up and the behaviors you're modeling and encouraging?"

When I advise leaders about molding a corporate culture, I tend to see three issues that need attention. This type of mismatch is one. It's a particular problem at start-ups, where there's a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create. I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They're working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who's not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It's a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don't model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

The second issue has to do with making sure employees understand the levers that drive the business. I recently visited a Texas start-up whose employees were mostly engineers in their twenties. "I bet half the people in this room have never read a P&L," I said to the CFO. He replied, "It's true-they're not financially savvy or business savvy, and our biggest challenge is teaching them how the business works." Even if you've hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success. At Netflix, for instance, employees used to focus too heavily on subscriber growth, without much awareness that our expenses often ran ahead of it: We were spending huge amounts buying DVDs, setting up distribution centers, and ordering original programming, all before we'd collected a cent from our new subscribers. Our employees needed to learn that even though revenue was growing, managing expenses really mattered.

The third issue is something I call the split personality start-up. At tech companies this usually manifests itself as a schism between the engineers and the sales team, but it can take other forms. At Netflix, for instance, I sometimes had to remind people that there were big differences between the salaried professional staff at headquarters and the hourly workers in the call centers. At one point our finance team wanted to shift the whole company to direct-deposit paychecks, and I had to point out that some of our hourly workers didn't have bank accounts. That's a small example, but it speaks to a larger point: As leaders build a company culture, they need to be aware of subcultures that might require different management.

Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Throughout most of my career I've belonged to professional associations of human resources executives. Although I like the people in these groups personally, I often find myself disagreeing with them. Too many devote time to morale improvement initiatives. At some places entire teams focus on getting their firm onto lists of "Best Places to Work" (which, when you dig into the methodologies, are really based just on perks and benefits). At a recent conference I met someone from a company that had appointed a "chief happiness officer"-a concept that makes me slightly sick.

During 30 years in business I've never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company's products aren't perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain-and they'll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

Instead of cheerleading, people in my profession should think of themselves as businesspeople. What's good for the company? How do we communicate that to employees? How can we help every worker understand what we mean by high performance?

Here's a simple test: If your company has a performance bonus plan, go up to a random employee and ask, "Do you know specifically what you should be doing right now to increase your bonus?" If he or she can't answer, the HR team isn't making things as clear as they need to be.

At Netflix I worked with colleagues who were changing the way people consume filmed entertainment, which is an incredibly innovative pursuit-yet when I started there, the expectation was that I would default to mimicking other companies' best practices (many of them antiquated), which is how almost everyone seems to approach HR. I rejected those constraints. There's no reason the HR team can't be innovative too.

A version of this article appeared in the January-February 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It's been viewed more than 5 million times on the web.

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Trust is probably more important than confidence

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Trust is probably more important than confidence

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A strong handshake and assertive greeting may not be the best way to make a good first impression. New research suggests that people respond more positively to someone who comes across as trustworthy rather than confident.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School is studying how we evaluate people we meet. Cuddy is known for her research on power posing, which she presented last year at TedGlobal and the annual PopTech conference in Maine. This research suggests that if you strike a strong pose-where you take up as much space as possible-your levels of testosterone rise, while cortisol levels drop. The result: If you do it for two minutes before going into a job interview or other public performance, you will have more confidence and perform better.

Cuddy returned to PopTech this year with an all-new talk about how we form first impressions. Turns out that when we meet individuals or groups for the first time, we mostly evaluate two metrics: trustworthiness and competence. And the best part is that once you understand this, you can learn to make a better first impression. We asked her to tell us how this all works.

Wired: What have you learned about how we form first impressions?

Amy Cuddy: When we form a first impression of another person it's not really a single impression. We're really forming two. We're judging how warm and trustworthy the person is, and that's trying to answer the question, "What are this person's intentions toward me?" And we're also asking ourselves, "How strong and competent is this person?" That's really about whether or not they're capable of enacting their intentions. Research shows that these two trait dimensions account for 80 to 90 percent of an overall first impression, and that holds true across cultures.
Why did you get into this line of research?
Since just after World War II, social psychologists have been studying prejudice, really trying to understand what drives it. And the classic social-psychological model was that it's all about love for the "in-group" and hatred for the "out-group." The problem with this is that it assumed there's a single evaluative dimension: You either have negative or positive feelings toward a person or group. And because that's not really what's happening, social psychologists were not able to use the in-group/out-group evaluation to predict discrimination. Ultimately, what we really want to know isn't just what you think and feel about somebody but also how do you treat them. We didn't know who was going to be a target of genocide, who was going to be neglected, who was going to be mocked.

Discrimination comes in very nuanced forms these days. And we wanted to be able to predict discrimination. Our research group was interested in how people categorize each other. When we meet somebody, what determines whether we see them as a member of a group or see them as an individual? And how do we determine if we like the other person or not? Through research we found that it really comes down to two traits: trustworthiness and competence. People universally sort groups in a two by two matrix. And what you end up getting is that most groups are seen as high on one trait and low on the other. You don't actually have many groups that are both not trusted and not respected, or that are both loved and respected.
How did you determine all this?
We would literally just go into a society and do a preliminary study asking people to freely list all the groups in their society. After going into about two-dozen different cultures we found that people tended to come up with about 15 to 20 groups in their society. Some of them are overlapping, so you have women and men, but then you also have race, and you've got profession and religion and all these other categories. Then we go in again and ask a different sample of people to rate all those groups on a long list of traits. Through factor analysis we were able to show that people assess groups largely by these two main factors. Now, when you ask people "how much do you like a given group?" often they're not going to tell you the truth. There's too many social desirability concerns. But when you give them, say, 20 traits to evaluate, they're much more willing to actually give you variance in the responses.
And you can somehow use this to predict who is at risk of genocide?
When the economy or the status quo is threatened, often it is the high-status minority groups that get targeted for genocide. If you look over the last 100 years at the groups that have been the targets, they are not groups that were seen as incompetent. They're groups that were seen as highly competent. So the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Jews in Germany, educated people in Cambodia. These aren't groups that were both not liked and not respected. They were groups that were hated but respected. That is the quadrant that gets targeted for genocide. Again this goes against the former popular thinking in social psychology, that it was just a mater of one group hating another.
What else do these two traits tell you about how one group views another?
The thing we found after sorting people into these four quadrants is that they predict four unique emotions and four unique behavioral responses. So groups that are seen as competent but disliked elicit a lot of respect and admiration but also a lot of resentment and antipathy. Groups that are seen as warm and trustworthy but incompetent illicit pity, which is about both compassion and sadness.
What if you see a group as warm and competent?
You think they're just great all around. But this is rare, as is viewing someone as both cold and incompetent. We usually see one trait or the other.
At Poptech you also talked about how these reactions occur on a personal level. You mentioned that when we first meet someone we're often looking for warmth or trust, but trying to project competence and confidence.
We want to see others as trustworthy but we want them to see us as competent or strong.
So knowing this when you're going into interactions with people, can you use this knowledge to better make and give first impressions?
To make an accurate judgment of somebody, you want to bring out their true nature. People need to trust you in order to be themselves. So trying to be the more dominant one in the interaction is probably going to make it harder for you to get accurate information about the other person, because it's going to shut them down. Or they're going to feel defensive, or they're going to feel threatened, or they're going to try to out alpha you. It's not going to be any sort of natural interaction. So I'm such a big believer in trying to establish trust, and there's evidence that shows that trust begets trust. I know people find this very controversial but it's true. If you are trusting, if you project trust, people are more likely to trust you.
How do you convey trust in a first interaction?
There are a lot of things that you can do. One is to let the other person speak first or have the floor first. You can do this by simply asking them a question. I think people make the mistake, especially in business settings, of thinking that everything is negotiation. They think, "I better get the floor first so that I can be in charge of what happens." The problem with this is that you don't make the other person feel warmth toward you. Warmth is really about making the other person feel understood. They want to know that you understand them. And doing that is incredibly disarming.

You can also establish trust by collecting information about the other person's interests-get them to share things about themselves. Just making small talk helps enormously. Research proves that five minutes of chit-chat before a negotiation increases the amount of value that's created in the negotiation. What's funny about all this is that the things that you do to increase trust actually often are things that are seen as wastes of time. People say, "Oh, I don't have time for small talk." Well, you should make the time for small talk because it will really help.
But are there times when it's better to project dominance and confidence?
I'm sure there are, but it's an empirical question and I'm not ready to answer it yet. We're doing some work on that now. We'll see. But in general I really think people make the mistake of over-weighting the importance of expressing strength, at the expense of expressing warmth and trustworthiness. I think this is a mistake. How can you possibly be a good leader if the people who are supposed to be following you don't feel that you understand them? How is it possible? No one is going to listen if they don't trust you. Why would they? Why should they? Trust opens them up to what you have to say. It opens them up to your strength and confidence. Trust is the conduit through which ideas travel.

Can you rule through fear? Of course you can. But not for long.
Image: ____ Wirawat Lian-udom/Flickr

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First Impressions: The Science of Meeting People

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A strong handshake and assertive greeting may not be the best way to make a good first impression. New research suggests that people respond more positively to someone who comes across as trustworthy rather than confident. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy explains why.

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So-called "boomerang" employees - those who leave and then return - will become an increasingly valuable source of talent over the years ahead. In what's perhaps the most frequently discussed example, some women chose to off ramp for several years sometime in their career, and many are eager for opportunities to return. Older workers may present boomerang possibilities as well. Sixty percent of workers age 60-plus say they will look for a new job after they retire - possibly back in your organization.

But it would be a mistake to only focus on these two groups; there are also those who left initially due to personal issues, other job opportunities, or even a round of layoffs.

Former employees, of course, offer many advantages: they are familiar with your operations and culture, know many of your current employees and clients, and may require little or no training to start making contributions. Often they are cheaper to hire, particularly if former managers have maintained contact while the employee is away.

So how do you make it so these boomerang employees actually want to return to your company?

The biggest challenge to leveraging boomerang talent for most organizations is the nature of the "out" process itself. For most of us, departures, whether initiated by the employee or the company, are negative events. They are weighed down with feelings of guilt and failure, often on both sides. This negativity occurs because conventional "outs" are shaped by the expectations we convey about the relationship from the beginning - that we want unconditional loyalty and that it will be rewarded (perhaps, "wink, wink") with a steady career and comfortable retirement. When these expectations are not borne out, due to either parties' initiative, bad feelings are the inevitable result.

Setting the stage for positive "outs" and creating the possibility of happy returns requires redefining the relationship from the very beginning - setting different expectations during the hiring process. Today more than 25 percent of the working population goes through career transitions every year and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days, according to research conducted by Talya N. Bauer of SHRM Foundation; clearly the "employee for life" model has run its course.

Rather than implying that you expect indefinite tenure and unconditional loyalty, ask for the employee's full discretionary effort for the time they will be here. And rather than signaling that you will provide opportunities for life (something few hires actually trust anyway), make it clear that you are offering interesting and challenging work, coupled with fair arrangements, while it is available.

Reducing the implied promise of long-term protection and care sets the expectation that departures will naturally occur when that interesting and challenging work comes to an end. It conveys the expectation that departures can be mutually positive and facilitates multiple employment stints (off-ramps on-ramps, boomerangs, and retiree returns) as the company's work load warrants. This philosophy focuses on matching relevant skills and capabilities in the moment and recognizes, where appropriate, the legitimacy of concurrent employment arrangements.

Creating an environment that leverages the power of positive "outs" is greatly enhanced by forward thinking work arrangements that are designed to let people connect and reconnect with your organization in a variety of ways. For example:

Flexible time: Flexible shifts, compressed workweeks, and individualized work schedules.

Reduced time: Part-time options, job sharing, self-scheduling, leave-of-absence programs, and cyclic or project-based work.

Flexible place: Mobile work and telecommuting.

Tasks, not time: Requirements to put in only as much time as it actually takes to get the work done, removing restrictions around a prescribed time or place.

Decelerating roles: Career path options that go 'down' (to lower levels of responsibility).

In addition to setting the right tone at the beginning, structure the exit process to facilitate re-entry and build a flexible network of talent possibilities. Invite them to join your network, build your own flexible talent pool, and create a residual knowledge bank. Regardless of whether their departure is voluntary or involuntary, it's never wise to say goodbye to a good employee.

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So-called "boomerang" employees - those who leave and then return - will become an increasingly valuable source of talent over the years ahead. In what's perhaps the most frequently discussed example, some women chose to off ramp for several years sometime in their career, and many are eager for opportunities to return.

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We don't know what it's what it's like to live without our privilege

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We don't know what it's what it's like to live without our privilege

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I'm a hugely privileged person. Almost all the advantages that can be bestowed upon someone in our society have been bestowed upon me. I was brought up in a family for which money wasn't really an issue. I lived in a nice place - in leafy, privileged Cambridge - and went to very good schools....

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Editors' Note: Following the huge popularity of this post, article source Amy Morin has authored a guest post on exercises to increase mental strength here and Cheryl Conner has interviewed Amy in a Forbes video chat about this article here.
For all the time executives spend concerned about physical strength and health, when it comes down to it, mental strength can mean even more. Particularly for entrepreneurs, numerous articles talk about critical characteristics of mental strength-tenacity, "grit," optimism, and an unfailing ability as Forbes contributor David Williams says, to "fail up."

However, we can also define mental strength by identifying the things mentally strong individuals don't do. Over the weekend, I was impressed by this list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker, that she shared in LifeHack. It impressed me enough I'd also like to share her list here along with my thoughts on how each of these items is particularly applicable to entrepreneurs.

1. Waste Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves. You don't see mentally strong people feeling sorry for their circumstances or dwelling on the way they've been mistreated. They have learned to take responsibility for their actions and outcomes, and they have an inherent understanding of the fact that frequently life is not fair. They are able to emerge from trying circumstances with self-awareness and gratitude for the lessons learned. When a situation turns out badly, they respond with phrases such as "Oh, well." Or perhaps simply, "Next!"

2. Give Away Their Power. Mentally strong people avoid giving others the power to make them feel inferior or bad. They understand they are in control of their actions and emotions. They know their strength is in their ability to manage the way they respond.

3. Shy Away from Change. Mentally strong people embrace change and they welcome challenge. Their biggest "fear," if they have one, is not of the unknown, but of becoming complacent and stagnant. An environment of change and even uncertainty can energize a mentally strong person and bring out their best.

4. Waste Energy on Things They Can't Control. Mentally strong people don't complain (much) about bad traffic, lost luggage, or especially about other people, as they recognize that all of these factors are generally beyond their control. In a bad situation, they recognize that the one thing they can always control is their own response and attitude, and they use these attributes well.

5. Worry About Pleasing Others. Know any people pleasers? Or, conversely, people who go out of their way to dis-please others as a way of reinforcing an image of strength? Neither position is a good one. A mentally strong person strives to be kind and fair and to please others where appropriate, but is unafraid to speak up. They are able to withstand the possibility that someone will get upset and will navigate the situation, wherever possible, with grace.

6. Fear Taking Calculated Risks. A mentally strong person is willing to take calculated risks. This is a different thing entirely than jumping headlong into foolish risks. But with mental strength, an individual can weigh the risks and benefits thoroughly, and will fully assess the potential downsides and even the worst-case scenarios before they take action.

7. Dwell on the Past. There is strength in acknowledging the past and especially in acknowledging the things learned from past experiences-but a mentally strong person is able to avoid miring their mental energy in past disappointments or in fantasies of the "glory days" gone by. They invest the majority of their energy in creating an optimal present and future.

8. Make the Same Mistakes Over and Over. We all know the definition of insanity, right? It's when we take the same actions again and again while hoping for a different and better outcome than we've gotten before. A mentally strong person accepts full responsibility for past behavior and is willing to learn from mistakes. Research shows that the ability to be self-reflective in an accurate and productive way is one of the greatest strengths of spectacularly successful executives and entrepreneurs.

9. Resent Other People's Success. It takes strength of character to feel genuine joy and excitement for other people's success. Mentally strong people have this ability. They don't become jealous or resentful when others succeed (although they may take close notes on what the individual did well). They are willing to work hard for their own chances at success, without relying on shortcuts.

10. Give Up After Failure. Every failure is a chance to improve. Even the greatest entrepreneurs are willing to admit that their early efforts invariably brought many failures. Mentally strong people are willing to fail again and again, if necessary, as long as the learning experience from every "failure" can bring them closer to their ultimate goals.

11. Fear Alone Time. Mentally strong people enjoy and even treasure the time they spend alone. They use their downtime to reflect, to plan, and to be productive. Most importantly, they don't depend on others to shore up their happiness and moods. They can be happy with others, and they can also be happy alone.

12. Feel the World Owes Them Anything. Particularly in the current economy, executives and employees at every level are gaining the realization that the world does not owe them a salary, a benefits package and a comfortable life, regardless of their preparation and schooling. Mentally strong people enter the world prepared to work and succeed on their merits, at every stage of the game.

13. Expect Immediate Results. Whether it's a workout plan, a nutritional regimen, or starting a business, mentally strong people are "in it for the long haul". They know better than to expect immediate results. They apply their energy and time in measured doses and they celebrate each milestone and increment of success on the way. They have "staying power." And they understand that genuine changes take time. Do you have mental strength? Are there elements on this list you need more of? With thanks to Amy Morin, I would like to reinforce my own abilities further in each of these areas today. How about you?
Cheryl Snapp Conner is a frequent speaker and author on reputation and thought leadership. You can subscribe to her team's bi-weekly newsletter, The Snappington Post, here. ALSO ON FORBES

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Mentally Strong People: The 13 Things They Avoid

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Editors' Note: Following the huge popularity of this post, article source Amy Morin has authored a guest post on exercises to increase mental strength here and Cheryl Conner has interviewed Amy in a Forbes video chat about this article here. For all the time executives spend concerned about physical strength and [...]

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By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits.

After the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly "invaded" the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective. By surveying, interviewing, and observing hundreds of analysts across 64 different intelligence groups, the researchers ranked those units from best to worst.

Then they identified what they thought was a comprehensive list of factors that drive a unit's effectiveness-only to discover, after parsing the data, that the most important factor wasn't on their list. The critical factor wasn't having stable team membership and the right number of people. It wasn't having a vision that is clear, challenging, and meaningful. Nor was it well-defined roles and responsibilities; appropriate rewards, recognition, and resources; or strong leadership.

Rather, the single strongest predictor of group effectiveness was the amount of help that analysts gave to each other. In the highest-performing teams, analysts invested extensive time and energy in coaching, teaching, and consulting with their colleagues. These contributions helped analysts question their own assumptions, fill gaps in their knowledge, gain access to novel perspectives, and recognize patterns in seemingly disconnected threads of information. In the lowest-rated units, analysts exchanged little help and struggled to make sense of tangled webs of data. Just knowing the amount of help-giving that occurred allowed the Harvard researchers to predict the effectiveness rank of nearly every unit accurately.

The importance of helping-behavior for organizational effectiveness stretches far beyond intelligence work. Evidence from studies led by Indiana University's Philip Podsakoff demonstrates that the frequency with which employees help one another predicts sales revenues in pharmaceutical units and retail stores; profits, costs, and customer service in banks; creativity in consulting and engineering firms; productivity in paper mills; and revenues, operating efficiency, customer satisfaction, and performance quality in restaurants.

Across these diverse contexts, organizations benefit when employees freely contribute their knowledge and skills to others. Podsakoff's research suggests that this helping-behavior facilitates organizational effectiveness by:

enabling employees to solve problems and get work done faster

enhancing team cohesion and coordination

ensuring that expertise is transferred from experienced to new employees

reducing variability in performance when some members are overloaded or distracted

establishing an environment in which customers and suppliers feel that their needs are the organization's top priority

Yet far too few companies enjoy these benefits. One major barrier is company culture-the norms and values in organizations often don't support helping. After a decade of studying work performance, I've identified different types of reciprocity norms that characterize the interactions between people in organizations. At the extremes, I call them "giver cultures" and "taker cultures."

Give, take, or match

In giver cultures, employees operate as the high-performing intelligence units do: helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return. Meanwhile, in taker cultures, the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return. Employees help only when they expect the personal benefits to exceed the costs, as opposed to when the organizational benefits outweigh the personal costs.

Most organizations fall somewhere in the middle. These are "matcher cultures," where the norm is for employees to help those who help them, maintaining an equal balance of give and take. Although matcher cultures benefit from collaboration more than taker cultures do, they are inefficient vehicles for exchange, as employees trade favors in closed loops. Should you need ideas or information from someone in a different division or region, you could be out of luck unless you have an existing relationship. Instead, you would probably seek out people you trust, regardless of their expertise. By contrast, in giver cultures, where colleagues aim to add value without keeping score, you would probably reach out more broadly and count on help from the most qualified person.

In light of the benefits of more open systems of helping, why don't more organizations develop giver cultures? All too often, leaders create structures that get in the way. According to Cornell economist Robert Frank, many organizations are essentially winner-take-all markets, dominated by zero-sum competitions for rewards and promotions. When leaders implement forced-ranking systems to reward individual performance, they stack the deck against giver cultures.

Pitting employees against one another for resources makes it unwise for them to provide help unless they expect to receive at least as much-or more-in return. Employees who give discover the costs quickly: their productivity suffers as takers exploit them by monopolizing their time or even stealing their ideas. Over time, employees anticipate taking-behavior and protect themselves by operating like takers or by becoming matchers, who expect and seek reciprocity whenever they give help.

Fortunately, it is possible to disrupt these cycles. My research suggests that committed leaders can turn things around through three practices: facilitating help-seeking, recognizing and rewarding givers, and screening out takers.

Help-seeking: Erase the shadow of doubt

Giver cultures depend on employees making requests; otherwise, it's difficult to figure out who needs help and what to give. In fact, studies reviewed by psychologists Stella Anderson and Larry Williams show that direct requests for help between colleagues drive 75 to 90 percent of all the help exchanged within organizations.

Yet many people are naturally reluctant to seek help. They may think it's pointless, particularly in taker cultures. They also may fear burdening their colleagues, lack knowledge about who is willing and able to help, or be concerned about appearing vulnerable, incompetent, and dependent.

Reciprocity rings

It's possible to overcome these barriers. For example, University of Michigan professor Wayne Baker and his wife, Cheryl Baker, at Humax Networks developed an exercise called the "reciprocity ring." The exercise generally gathers employees in groups of between ten and two dozen members. Each employee makes a request, and group members use their knowledge, resources, and connections to grant it. The Bakers typically run the exercise in two 60-to 90-minute rounds-the first for personal requests, so that people begin to open up, and the second for professional requests. Since everyone is asking for help, people rarely feel uncomfortable.

The monetary value of the help offered can be significant. One pharmaceutical executive attending a reciprocity ring involving executives from a mix of industry players saved $50,000 on the spot when a fellow participant who had slack capacity in a lab offered to synthesize an alkaloid free of charge. And that's no outlier: the Bakers find that executive reciprocity-ring participants in large corporate settings report an average benefit exceeding $50,000-all for spending a few hours seeking and giving help. This is true even when the participants are from a single company. For example, 30 reciprocity-ring participants from a professional-services firm estimated that they had received $261,400 worth of value and saved 1,244 hours. The ring encourages people to ask for help that their colleagues weren't aware they needed and efficiently sources each request to the people most able to fulfill it.

Beyond any financial benefits, the act of organizing people to seek and provide help in this way can shift cultures in the giver direction. Employees have an opportunity to see what their colleagues need, which often sparks ideas in the ensuing weeks and months for new ways to help them. Even employees who personally operate as takers (regardless of the company's culture) tend to get involved: in one study of more than 100 reciprocity-ring participants, Wayne Baker and I found that people with strong giver values made an average of four offers of help, but those who reported caring more about personal achievements and power than about helping others still averaged three offers.

During the exercise, it becomes clear that giving is more efficient than matching, as employees recognize how they gain access to a wider network of support when everyone is willing to help others without expecting anything in return rather than trading favors in pairs. After running the exercise at companies such as Lincoln Financial and Estée Lauder, I have seen many executives and employees take the initiative to continue running it on a weekly or monthly basis, which allows the help-seeking to continue and opens the door for greater giving as well as receiving.

Dream on

There are other ways to stimulate help-seeking. Consider what a company called Appletree Answers, a provider of call-center services, did back in 2008. John Ratliff, the founder and CEO, was alarmed by the 97 percent employee-turnover rate in his call centers. The underlying challenge, Ratliff believed, was that rapid expansion had cost the company its sense of community. Appletree had undergone 13 acquisitions in just six years and grown from a tiny operation to a company with more than 350 employees. As the cohesion of the group eroded, employees began prioritizing their own exit opportunities over the company's need for them to contribute, and customer service suffered.

During a brainstorming meeting, the director of operations suggested a novel approach to improving the culture: creating an internal program modeled after the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Ratliff and colleagues designed a program called Dream On, inviting employees to request the one thing they wanted most in their personal lives but felt they could not achieve on their own. Soon, a secret committee was making some of these requests happen-from sending an employee's severely ill husband to meet his favorite players at a Philadelphia Eagles game to helping an employee throw a special birthday party for his daughter.

After granting more than 100 requests, the program has helped promote a company culture where, in the words of one insider, "employees look to do things for each other and literally are 'paying it forward.'" Indeed, employees often submit requests on behalf of their colleagues. The program has helped reduce the uncertainty and discomfort often associated with seeking help: employees know where to turn, and they know they're not alone. In the six months after Dream On was implemented, retention among frontline staff soared to 67 percent, from 3 percent, and the company had its two most profitable quarters ever. "You're either a giver or a taker," Ratliff says. "Givers tend to get stuff back while takers fight for every last nickel . . . they never have abundance."

Such programs aren't limited to small companies. In a study of a similar program at a Fortune 500 retailer, Jane Dutton, Brent Rosso, and I found that participants became more committed to the company and felt the program strengthened their sense of belonging in a community at work. They reported feeling grateful for the opportunity to show concern for their colleagues and took pride in the company for supporting their efforts.

Boundaries and roles

Despite the power of help-seeking in shaping a giver culture, encouraging it also carries a danger. Employees can become so consumed with responding to each other's requests that they lack the time and energy to complete their own responsibilities. Over time, employees face two choices: allow their work to suffer or shift from giving to taking or matching.

To avoid this trade-off, leaders need to set boundaries, as one Fortune 500 technology company did when its engineers found themselves constantly interrupted with requests for help. Harvard professor Leslie Perlow worked with them to create windows for quiet time (Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays until noon), when interruptions were not allowed. After the implementation of quiet time, the majority of the engineers reported above-average productivity, and later their division was able to launch a product on schedule for the second time in history. By placing clear time boundaries around helping, leaders can better leverage the benefits of giver cultures while minimizing the costs.

Alternatively, some organizations designate formal "helping" roles to coordinate more efficient help-seeking and -giving behavior. In a study at a hospital, David Hofmann, Zhike Lei, and I examined the importance of adding a nurse-preceptor role-a person responsible for helping new employees and consulting on problems. Employees felt more comfortable seeking help and perceived that they had greater access to expertise when the preceptor role existed. Outside of health-care settings, companies often develop this function by training liaisons for new employees and leadership coaches for executives and high-potential managers. Designating helping roles can provide employees with a clear sense of direction on where to turn for help without creating undue burdens across a unit.

Rewards: To the givers go the spoils

In a perfect world, leaders could promote strong giver cultures by simply rewarding employees for their collective helping output. The reality, however, is more complicated.

In a landmark study led by Michael Johnson at the University of Washington, participants worked in teams that received either cooperative or competitive incentives for completing difficult tasks. For teams receiving cooperative incentives, cash prizes went to the highest-performing team as a whole, prompting members to work together as givers. In competitive teams, cash prizes went to the highest-performing individual within each team, encouraging a taker culture. The result? The competitive teams finished their tasks faster than the cooperative teams did, but less accurately, as members withheld critical information from each other.

To boost the accuracy of the competitive teams, the researchers next had them complete a second task under the cooperative reward structure (rewarding the entire team for high performance). Notably, accuracy didn't go up-and speed actually dropped.

People struggled to transition from competitive to cooperative rewards. Instead of shifting from taking to giving, they developed a pattern of cutthroat cooperation. Once they had seen their colleagues as competitors, they couldn't trust them. Completing a single task under a structure that rewarded taking created win-lose mind-sets, which persisted even after the structure was removed.

Johnson's work reminds us that giver cultures depend on a more comprehensive set of practices for recognizing and rewarding helping behavior in organizations. Creating such a culture starts with expanding performance evaluations beyond results, to include their impact on other individuals and groups. For example, when assessing the performance of managers, the leadership can examine not only the results their teams achieve but also their record in having direct reports promoted.

Yet even when giving-metrics are included in performance evaluations, there will still be pressures toward taking. It's difficult to eliminate zero-sum contests from organizations altogether, and indeed doing so risks extinguishing the productive competitive fires that often burn within employees.

To meet the challenge of rewarding giving without undercutting healthy competition, some companies are devising novel approaches. In 2005, Cory Ondrejka was the chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world Second Life. Ondrejka wanted to recognize and reward employees for going beyond the call of duty, so he borrowed an idea from the restaurant industry: tipping.

The program allowed employees to tip peers for help given, by sending a "love message" that adds an average of $3 to the helper's paycheck. The messages are visible to all employees, making reputations for generosity visible. Employees still compete for bonuses and promotions-but also to be the most helpful. This system "gives us a way of rewarding and encouraging collaborative behavior," founder Philip Rosedale explained.

Evidence highlights the importance of keeping incentives small and spontaneous. If the rewards are too large and the giving-behavior necessary to earn them is too clearly scripted, some participants will game the system, and the focus on extrinsic rewards may undermine the intrinsic motivation to give, leading employees to provide help with the expectation of receiving.

The peer-bonus and -recognition programs that have become increasingly popular at companies such as Google, IGN, Shopify, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos reduce such "gaming" behavior. When employees witness unique or time-consuming acts of helping, they can nominate the givers for small bonuses or recognition. One common model is to grant employees an equal number of tokens they can freely award to colleagues. By supporting such programs, leaders empower employees to recognize and reinforce giving-while sending a clear signal that it matters. Otherwise, many acts of giving occur behind closed doors, obscuring the presence and value of helping-norms.

Sincerity screening: Keep the wrong people off the bus

Encouraging help-seeking and recognizing those who provide it are valuable steps toward enabling a giver culture. These steps are likely to be especially powerful in organizations that already screen out employees with taker tendencies. Psychologist Roy Baumeister observes that negative forces typically have a stronger weight than positive ones. Research by Patrick Dunlop and Kibeom Lee backs up this insight for cultures: takers often do more harm than givers do good.

As a result, Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, many companies, from Robert W. Baird and Berkshire Hathaway to IDEO and Gold's Gym, have policies against hiring people who act like takers. But what techniques actually help identify a taker personality? After reviewing the evidence, I see three valid and reliable ways to distinguish takers from others.

First, takers tend to claim personal credit for successes. In one study of computer-industry CEOs, researchers Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick found that the takers were substantially more likely to use pronouns like I and me instead of us and we. When interviewers ask questions about successes, screening for self-glorifying responses can be revealing. Mindful of this pattern, Barton Hill, a managing director at Citi Transaction Services, explicitly looks for applicants to describe accomplishments in collective rather than personal terms.

Second, takers tend to follow a pattern of "kissing up, kicking down." When dealing with powerful people, they're often good fakers, coming across as charming and charismatic. But when interacting with peers and subordinates, they feel powerful, which leads them to let down their guard and reveal their true colors. Therefore, recommendations and references from colleagues and direct reports are likely to be more revealing than those from bosses.

General Electric's Durham Engine Facility goes further still: candidates for mechanic positions work in teams of six to build helicopters out of Legos. One member is allowed to look at a model and report back to the team, and trained observers assess the candidates' behavior, with an eye toward how well they take the initiative while remaining collaborative and open. In such environments, the fakers are often easy to spot through their empty gestures: as London Business School's Dan Cable reports, the takers "try to 'demonstrate leadership' and 'take initiative' by jumping up first." When it comes to predicting how people will actually treat others in a company, few pieces of information are more valuable than observing their behavior directly.

Finally, takers sometimes engage in antagonistic behavior at the expense of others-say, badmouthing a peer who's up for a promotion or overcharging an uninformed customer-simply to ensure that they come out on top. To maintain a positive view of themselves, takers often rely on creative rationalizations, such as "My colleague didn't really deserve the promotion anyway" or "that customer should have done his homework." They come to view antagonism as an appropriate, morally defensible response to threats, injustices, or opportunities to claim value at the expense of others.

With this logic in mind, Georgia Tech professor Larry James has led a pioneering series of studies validating an assessment called the "conditional reasoning test of aggression," a questionnaire cleverly designed to unveil these antagonistic tendencies through reasoning problems that lack obvious answers. It has an impressive body of evidence behind it. People who score high on the test are significantly more likely to engage in theft, plagiarism, forgery, other kinds of cheating, vandalism, and violence; to receive lower performance ratings from supervisors, coworkers, and subordinates; and to be absent from work or quit unexpectedly. By screening out candidates with such tendencies, leaders can increase the odds of selecting applicants who will embrace a giver culture.

Walk the talk

Giver cultures, despite their power, can be fragile. To sustain them, leaders need to do more than simply encourage employees to seek help, reward givers, and screen out takers.

In 1985, a film company facing financial pressure hired a new president. In an effort to cut costs, the president asked the two leaders of a division, Ed and Alvy, to conduct layoffs. Ed and Alvy resisted-eliminating employees would dilute the company's value. The president issued an ultimatum: a list of names was due to him at nine o'clock the next morning.

When the president received the list, it contained two names: Ed and Alvy.

No layoffs were conducted, and a few months later Steve Jobs bought the division from Lucasfilm and started Pixar with Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.

Employees were grateful that "managers would put their own jobs on the line for the good of their teams," marvels Stanford's Robert Sutton, noting that even a quarter century later, this "still drives and inspires people at Pixar."

When it comes to giver cultures, the role-modeling lesson here is a powerful one: if you want it, go and give it.

About the author(s)

Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

This article is based in part on Adam Grant's book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Viking, April 2013).

Article - McKinsey Quarterly

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Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture

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By encouraging employees to both seek and provide help, rewarding givers, and screening out takers, companies can reap significant and lasting benefits. After the tragic events of 9/11, a team of Harvard psychologists quietly "invaded" the US intelligence system. The team, led by Richard Hackman, wanted to determine what makes intelligence units effective.

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Change is hard. You've probably noticed that.

We all want to become better people - stronger and healthier, more creative and more skilled, a better friend or family member.

But even if we get really inspired and start doing things better, it's tough to actually stick to new behaviors. It's more likely that this time next year you'll be doing the same thing than performing a new habit with ease.

Why is that? And is there anything you can do to make change easier?

Before we talk about how to get started, I wanted to let you know I researched and compiled science-backed ways to stick to good habits and stop procrastinating. Want to check out my insights? Download my free PDF guide "Transform Your Habits" here.

How to Be Good at Remembering People's Names

My girlfriend is great at remembering people's names.

Recently, she told me a story that happened when she was in high school. She went to a large high school and it was the first day of class. Many of the students had never met before that day. The teacher went around the room and asked each person to introduce themselves. At the end, the teacher asked if anyone could remember everyone's name.

My girlfriend raised her hand and proceeded to go around the room and accurately name all 30 or so people. The rest of the room was stunned. The guy next to her looked over and said, "I couldn't even remember your name."

She said that moment was an affirming experience for her. After that she felt like, "I'm the type of person who is good at remembering people's names."

Even today, she's great at remembering the names of anyone we come across.

Here's what I learned from that story: In order to believe in a new identity, we have to prove it to ourselves.

Identity-Based Habits

The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first. Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously).

To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself.

Imagine how we typically set goals. We might start by saying "I want to lose weight" or "I want to get stronger." If you're lucky, someone might say, "That's great, but you should be more specific."

So then you say, "I want to lose 20 pounds" or "I want to squat 300 pounds."

These goals are centered around our performance or our appearance.

Performance and appearance goals are great, but they aren't the same as habits. If you're already doing a behavior, then these types of goals can help drive you forward. But if you're trying to start a new behavior, then I think it would be far better to start with an identity-based goal.

The image below shows the difference between identity-based goals and performance and appearance-based goals.

The interior of behavior change and building better habits is your identity. Each action you perform is driven by the fundamental belief that it is possible. So if you change your identity (the type of person that you believe that you are), then it's easier to change your actions.

The reason why it's so hard to stick to new habits is that we often try to achieve a performance or appearance-based goal without changing our identity. Most of the time we try to achieve results before proving to ourselves that we have the identity of the type of person we want to become. It should be the other way around.

The Recipe for Sustained Success

Changing your beliefs isn't nearly as hard as you might think. There are two steps.

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.

2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

Here are five examples of how you can make this work in real life.

Note: I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to start with incredibly small steps. The goal is not to achieve results at first, the goal is to become the type of person who can achieve those things.

For example, a person who works out consistently is the type of person who can become strong. Develop the identity of someone who works out first, and then move on to performance and appearance later.

Start small and trust that the results will come as you develop a new identity.
Want to lose weight?
Identity: Become the type of person who moves more every day.

Small win: Buy a pedometer. Walk 50 steps when you get home from work. Tomorrow, walk 100 steps. The day after that, 150 steps. If you do this 5 days per week and add 50 steps each day, then by the end of the year, you'll be walking over 10,000 steps per day.
Want to become a better writer?
Identity: Become the type of person who writes 1,000 words every day.

Small win: Write one paragraph each day this week.
Want to become strong?
Identity: Become the type of person who never misses a workout.

Small win: Do pushups every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Want to be a better friend?
Identity: Become the type of person who always stays in touch.

Small win: Call one friend every Saturday. If you repeat the same people every 3 months, you'll stay close with 12 old friends throughout the year.
Want to be taken seriously at work?
Identity: become the type of person who is always on time.

Small win: Schedule meetings with an additional 15-minute gap between them so that you can go from meeting to meeting and always show up early.

What is your identity?

In my experience, when you want to become better at something, proving your identity to yourself is far more important than getting amazing results. This is especially true at first.

If you want to get motivated and inspired, then feel free to watch a YouTube video, listen to your favorite song, and do P90X. But don't be surprised if you burn out after a week. You can't rely on being motivated. You have to become the type of person you want to be, and that starts with proving your new identity to yourself.

Most people (myself included) will want to become better this year. Many of us, however, will set performance and appearance-based goals in hopes that they will drive us to do things differently.

If you're looking to make a change, then I say stop worrying about results and start worrying about your identity. Become the type of person who can achieve the things you want to achieve. Build the habit now. The results can come later.

Read Next

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Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year

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Change is hard. You've probably noticed that. We all want to become better people - stronger and healthier, more creative and more skilled, a better friend or family member. But even if we get really inspired and start doing things better, it's tough to actually stick to new behaviors.

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I have employed thousands of people over the years. And every time one resigned, a little part of me died. (Okay, I lie. I have actually danced a celebratory jig around my desk on the odd occasion, but that's another post!)

Mostly, my natural reaction has always been a human one I suppose. "What possible reason would they have to do that?" or, "What's wrong with them?" or even, "She must be leaving for money. The fool!"

But I grew wiser as the years rolled by.

Mostly, people don't change jobs solely for money. They almost never resign on a whim or in a fit of anger. They joined your company because they believed it right for them, and they actually want it to be right. Something, at some point, makes it wrong. And if you really take the time to dig into their real reasons for leaving -- and you should -- you will find that it's not "the company" they blame. It's not the location, or the team, or the database or the air-conditioning.
It's the leadership!
Sure, they may not use that word. Indeed, they may not mention management at all.

But when they talk about "morale," when they say, "communication is poor," when they express frustration at the lack of clarity for their career progression -- they are telling you that it's the leaders they are leaving. For it's obvious, isn't it? Leaders are responsible for morale, communication and career path.

So, for maybe 15 years I have been irritating the senior managers who report to me by stopping them mid-sentence when they start venting at the stupidity, lack of gratitude and disloyalty of the departing employee.

Looking into a mirror can be a shocking experience. Especially if you have not done it for a while.

A "company" is just a legal entity. A "business" is a collection of desks and computers. No one resigns because of that.

It's the decisions, the motivation, the atmosphere, the ethos, the support, the training, the vision, and the direction set by the leadership that they will follow.

So, next time you get a resignation, resist the temptation to laugh it off as "another dumbo who doesn't get us."

Take a moment to reflect on what it actually is they are resigning from.

It's not the departing employee who doesn't "get it." It's not the company they are leaving.

It's you.
This post first appeared on The Savage Truth Also on HuffPost:

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People Don't Leave Companies -- They Leave Leaders!

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I have employed thousands of people over the years. And every time one resigned, a little part of me died. (Okay, I lie. I have actually danced a celebratory jig around my desk on the odd occasion, but that's another post!) Mostly, my natural reaction has always been a human one I suppose.

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Have you ever noticed leaders spend a lot of time talking about talent, only to make the same mistakes over and over again? Few things in business are as costly and disruptive as unexpected talent departures. With all the emphasis on leadership development, I always find it interesting so many companies seem to struggle with being able to retain their top talent. In today's column, I'll share some research, observations, and insights on how to stop the talent door from revolving.

Ask any CEO if they have a process for retaining and developing talent and they'll quickly answer in the affirmative. They immediately launch into a series of soundbites about the quality of their talent initiatives, the number of high-potentials in the nine box, blah, blah, blah. As with most things in the corporate world, there is too much process built upon theory and not nearly enough practice built on experience.

When examining the talent at any organization look at the culture, not the rhetoric - look at the results, not the commentary about potential. Despite some of the delusional perspective in the corner office, when we interview their employees, here's what they tell us:

More than 30% believe they'll be working someplace else inside of 12 months.

More than 40% don't respect the person they report to.

More than 50% say they have different values than their employer.

More than 60% don't feel their career goals are aligned with the plans their employers have for them.

More than 70% don't feel appreciated or valued by their employer.

So, for all those employers who have everything under control, you better start re-evaluating. There is an old saying that goes; "Employees don't quit working for companies, they quit working for their bosses." Regardless of tenure, position, title, etc., employees who voluntarily leave, generally do so out of some type of perceived disconnect with leadership.

Here's the thing - employees who are challenged, engaged, valued, and rewarded (emotionally, intellectually & financially) rarely leave, and more importantly, they perform at very high levels. However if you miss any of these critical areas, it's only a matter of time until they head for the elevator. Following are 10 reasons your talent will leave you - smart leaders don't make these mistakes:

1. You Failed To Unleash Their Passions: Smart companies align employee passions with corporate pursuits. Human nature makes it very difficult to walk away from areas of passion. Fail to understand this and you'll unknowingly be encouraging employees to seek their passions elsewhere.

2. You Failed To Challenge Their Intellect: Smart people don't like to live in a dimly lit world of boredom. If you don't challenge people's minds, they'll leave you for someone/someplace that will.

3. You Failed To Engage Their Creativity: Great talent is wired to improve, enhance, and add value. They are built to change and innovate. They NEED to contribute by putting their fingerprints on design. Smart leaders don't place people in boxes - they free them from boxes. What's the use in having a racehorse if you don't let them run?
WATCH: How Billionaire John Paul DeJoria Keeps His Employees Happy
4. You Failed To Develop Their Skills: Leadership isn't a destination - it's a continuum. No matter how smart or talented a person is, there's always room for growth, development, and continued maturation. If you place restrictions on a person's ability to grow, they'll leave you for someone who won't.

5. You Failed To Give Them A Voice: Talented people have good thoughts, ideas, insights, and observations. If you don't listen to them, I can guarantee you someone else will.

6. You Failed To Care: Sure, people come to work for a paycheck, but that's not the only reason. In fact, many studies show it's not even the most important reason. If you fail to care about people at a human level, at an emotional level, they'll eventually leave you regardless of how much you pay them.

7. You Failed to Lead: Businesses don't fail, products don't fail, projects don't fail, and teams don't fail - leaders fail. The best testament to the value of leadership is what happens in its absence - very little. If you fail to lead, your talent will seek leadership elsewhere.

8. You Failed To Recognize Their Contributions: The best leaders don't take credit - they give it. Failing to recognize the contributions of others is not only arrogant and disingenuous, but it's as also just as good as asking them to leave.

9. You Failed To Increase Their Responsibility: You cannot confine talent - try to do so and you'll either devolve into mediocrity, or force your talent seek more fertile ground. People will gladly accept a huge workload as long as an increase in responsibility comes along with the performance and execution of said workload.

10. You Failed To Keep Your Commitments: Promises made are worthless, but promises kept are invaluable. If you break trust with those you lead you will pay a very steep price. Leaders not accountable their people, will eventually be held accountable their people.

If these thoughts resonate with you, I'd encourage you to pick up a copy of my upcoming book Hacking Leadership (Wiley) as I unpack several more thoughts about talent, team building, leadership and culture.

Bottom line, if leaders spent less time trying to retain people, and more time trying to understand them, care for them, invest in them, and lead them well, the retention thing would take care of itself. Thoughts?

Follow me on Twitter @mikemyatt

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10 reasons your top talent will leave you

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10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You

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Have you ever noticed leaders spend a lot of time talking about talent, only to make the same mistakes over and over again? Few things in business are as costly and disruptive as unexpected talent departures. With all the emphasis on leadership development, I always find it interesting so many [...]

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There's an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

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There's an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

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Alan Moore strolls through Northampton town centre carrying a walking stick that's been sculpted to resemble a dangerous snake, and a hairbrush. The 59-year-old writer moves with a slight trip in his step, thus the cane, and keeps the brush to hand because he hasn't visited a barber since he was a teenager. For decades Moore has maintained his tremendous mane of hair, his wizard's beard, through bursts of aggressive combing. "That way it tends to manage itself."

Kids at the nearby shopping centre sometimes heckle, Moore says, calling him God, or Jesus, "which I'll take, because Jesus died at 33 and they've obviously mistaken me for a much younger man". But to fans of the landmark comic books Moore has written over the years (superhero whodunnit , chilly dystopia V for Vendetta) deification might really feel justified. Moore is one of the most revered and influential writers in the country. Also one of the most confounding - perverse and hard to fathom.

The work he did in the 1980s on Watchmen and V for Vendetta, for instance, made an entire industry shift its focus, with publishers targeting more comics not only at pocket-money-splashing kids, or teens, but at adults too. Later, as a wider audience took to his writing, Moore edged away from the mainstream, developing such an aversion to corporate America that he declined large payments for Hollywood adaptations of his work. Five blockbuster films were made of Moore's stories anyway, but only last month did a film get a release that he actually likes and endorses - a low-budget short that Moore scripted, currently available to view for free online. As well as this screenplay, and decades of comics, Moore has written prose fiction, history, protest songs and pornography. Alone among Britain's bestselling authors he describes himself as a practising magician.

Reading on mobile? Click here to watch A trailer for Jimmy's End.

Moore is a puzzle, and one of the more startling facts about him is that he has spent his life in Northampton, the UK's 73rd biggest town, rich in terms of local history and deprived in most other senses. "So many of the shops are dying on their arse. The only people prospering are the plasterboard manufacturers."

Yet he never expects to leave, even as enthusiasm for his fictions grows in the wider world. A Watchmen film was a big hit four years ago, taking about £140m at the box office. Meanwhile it was the 2005 film made of Moore's V for Vendetta that spawned those unnerving Guy Fawkes masks, the ones habitually worn by protest groups such as Occupy. The masks are now such a potent symbol of rebellion that they were last month outlawed in the UAE, "but I don't want to take credit," says Moore. "It's these protesters making their individual efforts that are doing the job." Besides he is reluctant, ever, to let his attentions stray too far from Northampton. When in 2007 he was asked to appear in an episode of The Simpsons, a producer flew to the Midlands from Los Angeles so that Moore could record his dialogue in a ramshackle studio near to his home.

"This is a good place for me. Keeps me focused. Life's not easy; it's not massively difficult. There's a gravity about Northampton that I like."

The short film Moore scripted, premiered online last month, is called Jimmy's End, an unsettling and richly realised story about the underworld that's directed by fellow Northamptonian Mitch Jenkins. It was shot in a working men's club in town, and features Moore in a brief cameo.

Why make a film now, after so many years of squirming resistance? "My main experiences in the past had been of the Hollywood variety, which was on many levels repulsive to me. Every film is a remake of a previous film, or a remake of a television series that everyone loved in the 1960s, or a remake of a television series that everyone hated in the 1960s. Or it's a theme park ride; it will soon come to breakfast cereal mascots.

"But I'd always thought I liked the idea of a really cheap, little film. If you want to be a writer or an artist, all you need is a Biro and a Woolworths jotter; it's a democratic medium. I love films that are made with almost no budget."

Moore has a complicated relationship with money. "Pure voodoo," he says now. "Only there as long as we believe in it." Challenged, during a television interview this year, about why he would sign away the movie rights to a comic such as Watchmen if he didn't ever want it to become a movie, Moore said he gave up the rights because he never expected any adaptations to happen; he called it making money for old rope. But then the films came out, and somewhere along the way Moore developed such a distaste for what he saw on the screen, and the revenue accrued from it, that he asked for his name to be taken off the credits; then he started turning down production money. Moore gave his share of the Watchmen fee to Dave Gibbons, the artist with whom he conceived the series.

As well as Jimmy's End, Moore and Jenkins recently filmed a related short called Act of Faith, set within the same fictionalised Northampton. It cost £11,000, which on the set of Watchmen would have paid for... ? "Oh, the coffee. This is it: I am horrified by the budgets of these films, almost as much as I am by the films themselves."

"I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination.

"You've got to be able to pay your bills, otherwise you're not going to sleep at night. But beyond that, the world inside my head has always been a far richer place than the world outside it. I suppose that a lot of my art and writing are meant to bring the two together."

In the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium, one of Moore's old computer keyboards sits on permanent display. This would have seemed an unlikely outcome, in 1969, when he was hauled out of an art class at Northampton School for Boys by the deputy headmaster.

His hair newly grown out, long enough to hit a first kink and to look like "a strip of guttering" above each ear, the 16-year-old was taken to the headmaster's office to meet a detective constable from the local drugs squad. Their subsequent chat could only have been tenser if Moore had not discreetly emptied his pockets of low-grade marijuana en route. "I thought I handled myself fairly well," he recalls. "Obviously they thought otherwise."

Telling his parents that he'd been expelled "felt like the end of the world". His family lived in a part of west Northampton called the Boroughs, a poor neighbourhood that was generally avoided, Moore says, by others in town. He was unusually bright. "Growing up in the Boroughs I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school." One of about 10 working-class boys enrolled there, he found himself in a minority that hadn't been to prep school and couldn't already decline Latin. "My position in the class plummeted."

American comic books were "a welcome escape hatch, a doorway into unbridled imagination". Moore started writing and drawing his own strips, inventing an early superhero called Ray Gun (secret identity: Raymond Gunn) and loaning his efforts to friends for a small fee. Profits went to Unicef, or Save the Children. He can't remember. "I thought it would look kind of noble. How could anyone resist, a badly drawn children's comic in aid of charity?"

After his expulsion at 16, which he attributes to "the 1960s happening, a euphoric and expansive time", Moore thought about applying for art school but soon started pitching comic strips. Cartooning ran in the family. His paternal great-grandfather, a legendary Northampton rake called Ginger Vernon, used to trade caricatures for pints in the pub. (He was, adds Moore, a ferocious alcoholic.) Moore started writing and drawing a regular strip for the local newspaper, then another for the music magazine Sounds. By the time he'd found work on a line of British-made Doctor Who titles, Moore had given up drawing ("I couldn't do it fast enough, or well enough") to focus on writing.

He was by then married, and lived with his wife Phyllis and their daughter Leah on an estate on the edge of town. By the time second daughter Amber was born, they were in a run-down council house closer to the centre, and here Moore worked in the bedroom, his long body folded over a typewriter propped on a stool. "Writing V for Vendetta I knew I was doing good stuff. But it wasn't until I was headhunted by American comics that there was a major change in my circumstances."

Moore was asked to work on the US title Swamp Thing, which told of a superhero who was also a human vegetable. It was ideal territory, schlocky and idiosyncratic and hardly a flagship title for its publishers, meaning Moore could get away with introducing darker notes. "I didn't realise that incest and necrophilia were still frowned on socially over here," Moore said, deadpan, to an American interviewer in 1985, after he'd been criticised for his controversial plots.

By this point his V for Vendetta series was being published, and Moore was crafting Watchmen, an unusual fusion of genres that told of a group of retired crime fighters under threat from a serial killer. On the surface Watchmen was superhero fiction - powers, cloaks, chins - but it was set in something more like the real world, noir-like and patently intended for grownups. It was groundbreaking, still imitated to this day.

Moore went on to write the historical horror story From Hell (turned into an unsatisfying Johnny Depp film in 2001) and a raucous adventure series called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which became a cinematic flop for Sean Connery in 2003). In the 1990s he started work on , a pornographic comic conceived with the American artist Melinda Gebbie. By the time it was fully published in 2006, Moore had separated from his first wife and he and Gebbie were a couple. They married in 2007, wearing outfits of "iridescent blue and green" that made them look, in the words of Moore's eldest daughter, like a pair of bluebottles.

Nothing in his varied output has ever quite eclipsed Watchmen ( listed by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the modern era) but Moore, in 2012, won't keep a copy of it in the house. He has long been at odds with its co-creator, Gibbons, about whether to allow publishers to revive the series for a line of prequels, and whether to endorse a tie-in computer game, and Moore has said the pair even bickered over Watchmen on his wedding day. Anyway a comics series called Before Watchmen has since gone on sale, and there will doubtless be more movies to come.

Moore has disavowed the lot - at a personal cost, he has guessed, of more than £1m. He hates being coerced, whatever the financial incentive, and it may well be something in the blood. His great-grandfather Ginger, the hard-drinking cartoonist, was at the turn of the 20th century offered the chance to become the director of a glass company in town, Moore claims. He was told: "You'll make millions! The only condition is that you stay out the pub for two weeks." The answer, inevitably, was no; and Vernon spent the rest of his life walking past the mansion of the man who took the job.

"But I'm immensely proud of that. Turning something down because it wasn't what you wanted to do. This stuff... it's probably in the genes."

Imagination, says Moore, is like a muscle. "If you work on it, it gets bigger." After four decades, though, it might be possible to have overworked it. Moore hardly knows where to put his ideas anymore.

Not content to have made Jimmy's End and its prologue Act of Faith, he has thought up all sorts of surplus fantasies that might flavour future episodes set in the same world. He has taken the time to write a fictional radio show that could feature at some stage, and with his daughter Amber has invented a computer game that might get a mention. He's come up with a line of energy drinks. Also a social network.

"I overreach. It could be something to do with being the cleverest boy in the world at the age of 10. But what I want to do is blur the lines between what's real and what's made up."

There has been, surely, a blurring in what's real and what's made up about Moore himself: that he's a recluse, that he's a magician. You alight the train in Northampton expecting to seek out a Salinger-like sourpuss, or else to find an Aleister Crowley figure chalking pentangles on the platform. Instead you meet a man who is warm and obliging and wears a purple hoodie. Moore is patently eager to show off Northampton, and to explain what it means to him, and is unembarrassed about grooming his vast mane in front of an audience - an extraordinary production, by the way, the whole thing brought down in a canopy over his face for combing before a middle parting is found and the hair is eased apart like heavy drapes.

He chats continuously, about homeopathy and Lemsip, CSI: Miami and the burning car murderer Alfie Rouse ("a local favourite"). "I think I'm quite gregarious," he says, approximately 100 minutes into conversation, bashful about it and pulling in his chin so that his beard folds up on to his chest. He wears a long, heavy ring on his finger that looks, at a glance, as if it might be related to the magic stuff; in fact it is his wedding band, self-designed and inset with a pair of teardrop opals.

This business of being a practising magician, which he first announced in the 1990s (about the time his beard started to grey, and he got the snake-shaped stick). Is it for real, or is he playing? "It's a major part of how I see the world. Looking like I do, halfway to Gandalf before I've put a foot out the door, you've got to diffuse... " And for once, Moore fails to find an eloquent end to his sentence. He tries again: "There is an element of playing. But what's behind it is very serious."

Pick a card, any card? No, says Moore, it's not about tricks. To him it's about consciousness - and quickly he gets away on a tangent about the limits of the mind, flitting through Freud, Alan Turing, Paracelsus and Twelfth Night before arriving at an explanation that makes reasonable sense. Moore sees magic as a form of meditation, an outlet for his seriously vivid imagination.

"Do I believe, for example, that by using magic I could fly? No. How would you get around gravity? Impossible. Do I believe that I might be able to project my consciousness into a very, very vivid simulation of flying? Yeah. Yes, I've done that. Yes, that works."

Does it require that you take... "Sometimes you have to take drugs, yes. Sometimes you can do it with dreaming. Sometimes you can do it with a creative act. Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position."

When another of Moore's old computer keyboards was put up for auction on eBay, last year, the seller hazarded that it "may contain otherworldy powers". It went for £461, despite having a faulty Z key. Walking in Northampton, Moore explains that his old keyboards have ended up on eBay, or in that museum in Charleroi, because he has had to decommission so many of them. He currently writes on an industrial-strength keyboard made of metal, properly meant for use in foundries and conflict zones. The plastic sort used to last him a few months before melting under the constant spray of cigarette ash, or otherwise breaking from overuse.

He has been bashing away on a novel, he says, a book that like his film shorts is set in Northampton. Almost finished, it is called Jerusalem and rings in at about 600,000 words - longer than the Bible, he says, delighted if not a little concerned that having typed it all with single digits he has worn away the tips of his index fingers. As Moore strolls on he lets his imagination stroll too - thinking aloud about the crimes someone in his position might now commit without fear of detection. There could be a murder involving two stiff fingers to the victim's temple, for example...
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch of video of Alan Moore's song The Decline of English Murder
Moore regrets that neither his father or his mother got to read his best stuff before passing away in the 1990s. (Though his mum did once tackle Swamp Thing, "which I think was probably the second book she'd read in her life, after the novelisation of The Sound of Music".) It's to his parents that he credits the conviction that money is of secondary value in life. "It was my class. The only thing you could pride yourself on, in the Boroughs, was to be decent people. To stand up to bullies. That was very heavily imprinted on me as a kid, and it's not a bad way to conduct your life."

His daughter Leah recently had twins, and Moore is a grandfather four times over. Did that give him pause about all the cash he's turned down? "No. I look out for my kids as much as I can do, and the grandkids don't ever go short. But I don't want to set them up in mansions, any more than I would have wanted Ginger Vernon to have accepted that job 100 years ago."

You suspect that Moore, a century on, will take his place alongside Vernon in the family legend. The eccentric ancestor who refused a fortune, out of stubbornness, or from other, hazier, essentially quite decent reasons.

While walking Moore has been pointing out local landmarks: the Guildhall where he married, and a statue that marks the town's role in the discovery of DNA, and the site of the old Woolworths where he used to buy his jotters. Now he pauses in Northampton's ancient market square, one of the country's oldest. The market was granted its charter by Richard I on 18 November, 1189. "And 18 November happens to be my birthday," the writer says, with plain satisfaction. "So in many ways, je suis Northampton. Yes... I do identify with this town."
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Alan Moore: why I turned my back on Hollywood

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Alan Moore strolls through Northampton town centre carrying a walking stick that's been sculpted to resemble a dangerous snake, and a hairbrush. The 59-year-old writer moves with a slight trip in his step, thus the cane, and keeps the brush to hand because he hasn't visited a barber since he was a teenager.

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Ever wonder what makes the Google the holy grail of productivity and creativity? There's no magic in the drinking water at the Mountain View, CA company. The tech giant draws from what Google's chief social evangelist, Gopi Kallayil, calls the nine core principles of innovation.

Kallayil shared his insights at this week's San Francisco Dreamforce summit. Here are the nine rules that any enterprise, large or small, can adopt to steal Google's innovative culture.

It can come from the top down as well as bottom up, and in the places you least expect. For example, a medical doctor on Google's staff argued persuasively that Google had a moral obligation to extend help to those typing searches under the phrase "how to commit suicide." He ignited the charge to adjust the search engine's response so that the top of the screen reveals the toll free phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. The call volume went up by nine percent soon thereafter. The same change has been adopted in many other countries.

Worry about the money later, when you focus on the user, all else will follow. Google improved the speed of its search capabilities with predictive analysis so search suggestions come up after the user types a few keystrokes. This Instant Search feature saves the user a few microseconds with each entry. Google sales reps were concerned that this shortened the time customers would view ads, but the company went ahead and believed that it was worth the risk.

End result? Thanks to Instant Search, Google estimates the time saved is equivalent to giving back mankind 5,000 years after a year of collective use. "Create a great user experience and the revenue will take care of itself," says Kallayil. In addition, more customers will be attracted to your product's increased benefits.

If you come into work thinking that you will improve things by ten percent, you will only see incremental change. If you want radical and revolutionary innovation, think 10 times improvement, and that will force you to think outside the box. For example, in 2004, Google started its Google Books project and set forth a challenge to organize all the world's information and digitize all the books ever printed in history.

Google co-founder Larry Page built his own book scanner, and the initial process required having someone manually turn its pages in rhythm, one at a time, according to the pace of a metronome. Google has now scanned 30 million of the 130 million books they first set out to scan, and dozens of libraries around the world are participating in the project.

Every organization has unique insights, and if you bet on it, it leads to major innovation. Google engineers, not the auto industry, came up with the idea of driverless cars after seeing that millions of traffic deaths come from human error. Google already had all the building blocks in place to build a self-driving car-Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View cars. Working with an artificial intelligence team at Stanford University, Google engineers have produced experimental cars that now have travelled to Lake Tahoe and back to the Bay Area and have given the blind more independence by driving them to shop and carry out errands.

Ship your products often and early, and do not wait for perfection. Let users help you to "iterate" it. When Chrome was launched in 2008, every six weeks Google pushed out an improved version. "Today, using that approach, Chrome is the Number One browser in many countries," says Kallayil, "You may not have perfection in your product, but trust that your users will get back to you."

Give employees 20 percent of their work time to pursue projects they are passionate about, even if it is outside the core job or core mission of the company. "They will delight you with their creative thinking," Kallayil promises. At Google, engineers and project managers have the freedom to set aside one day a week to work on a favorite idea. Many can wind up as products or product improvements. Case in point: an engineer planning a trip to Spain found that he could not get a close-up view of the hotel since the road was too narrow for the Google Street View car to enter. He later adapted a Street View camera to fit on a specially-made Google tricycle to go places too narrow for a car and tourist locations that ban autos from approaching the premises.

Make your processes open to all users. Tap into the collective energy of the user base to obtain great ideas. When Google created the Android platform, it knew it could not hire all the best developers on the planet. For that reason, it "defaulted to open," and encouraged developers outside of Google to create apps for the one billion people using Android devices daily. "That is how an ecosystem is formed," says Kallayil. In marketing, Google asked users how they would market its voice search app, and children sent clever videos that rivaled the campaigns of the big ad agencies.

There should be no stigma attached to failure. If you do not fail often, you are not trying hard enough. At Google, once a product fails to reach its potential, it is axed, but the company pulls from the best of the features. "Failure is actually a badge of honor," he says. "Failure is the way to be innovative and successful. You can fail with pride."

"This is the most important principle," Kallayil says. "Everyone at Google has a strong sense of mission and purpose. We believe the work we do has impact on millions of people in a positive way." Each person should have his or her own story.
-Kathy Chin Leong is a technology writer who lives in Sunnyvale, CA.

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Google Reveals Its 9 Principles of Innovation

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Ever wonder what makes the Google the holy grail of productivity and creativity? There's no magic in the drinking water at the Mountain View, CA company. The tech giant draws from what Google's chief social evangelist, Gopi Kallayil, calls the nine core principles of innovation.

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I did it. I went to a cocktail party where I didn't know anyone, and successfully chit-chatted for two hours. (Not to myself. I actually spoke with other people.)

I have never been good at the kind of networking where you're supposed to walk into a room full of strangers and walk out with "connections." The very idea makes me cringe. But as a writer and reporter, I get invited to more than my fair share of meet-and-greets. Every now and then, I read an invite and think, "Eeek. I really should go. But I won't know anyone." Sometimes I go, sometimes I don't. Some of these events are better than others. I rarely have fun.
The Secret to My Big Turnaround
These days, I'm actually looking forward to networking receptions. It's as if all these events are part of a big game, and I've finally figured out how to play.

Here's how I learned. Last month, as I was heading to a work-related cocktail hour with some my colleagues, I groaned that I hated having to introduce myself to a room full of strangers. Even though some of my co-workers were coming with me to this particular event, the whole point was for us to talk to people we hadn't met before.

Then one of my colleagues told me about the trick he uses: When he walks into a room alone, he looks for pairs of people who are talking, and introduces himself to each person.

I had always thought I was supposed to approach people who were by themselves. So I asked him: "If two people are talking already, why would I interrupt them?"

"Because everyone else is there to meet other people, too," he explained. He went on to explain that if you see a pair of people talking, the chances are that they arrived together and know they should be mingling. Or else they've just met and are, in the back of their minds, worried that they're going to end up talking to this one person all night. (You've just made it easier for one of them to exit.) Either way, they're relieved to see you. And your chances of having a decent conversation are better, because now you're talking to two people, not just one.

Consider the alternatives: Approaching one person makes it harder to extricate yourself. And if you can find absolutely nothing in common with that other person, you're sort of stuck, at least for a while. Plus, it's getting harder to approach someone who's alone, because self-conscious people who don't have anyone to talk to will stare into their phones and give off the 'I'm so busy' vibe--even if they want to mingle. Breaking into a knot of four or more people is really hard. So groups of two are your best bet.
It Works; It Really, Really Works
This is the bizarre thing. At the next cocktail party I went to, I had met only one person before. Since she was with the company that was hosting the event, I knew she wouldn't have time to talk to me. I took a deep breath, got a glass of wine, and looked for groups of two. I probably had a dozen conversations that night, some more comfortable than others. About half the people I spoke with offered me their cards, which, in the age of LinkedIn, is becoming more rare.

Then I went home, flopped on my bed, and thought, "I can't believe that worked." Try it for yourself and see.
This story originally appeared on One Thing New, the digital media startup that is rebooting women's content. To read more like it, check out our newsletter.

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How I Became the Kind of Person Who Can Work a Room

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I did it. I went to a cocktail party where I didn't know anyone, and successfully chit-chatted for two hours. (Not to myself. I actually spoke with other people.) I have never been good at the kind of networking where you're supposed to walk into a room full of strangers and walk out with "connections."

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11 Unusual Methods for Being a Great Public Speaker

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11 Unusual Methods for Being a Great Public Speaker

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Prakash Panangaden taught me everything about public speaking. The first thing he taught me when we were in Kaiserslautern, Germany, for my "fascinating" talk titled "A Mechanically Assisted Proof in Category Theory" was 'never go to the porn shops here. They will rip you off.' I was 22 and Kaiserslautern was the worst city I had ever been to in my entire life.

In a 24 hour period, I was chased by a lunatic, accused of stealing at the hotel I was staying at, kicked out of a bar for reasons I still can't understand, and warned by my professor/mentor not to go to any porn stores or I would be ripped off. Being 22, I promptly ignored him. Part of the reason I was later chased and perhaps also accused of stealing but that's another story.

I was very very nervous about public speaking to these people (the name of the conference is so boring I can't even repeat it). For one thing, its impossible to make esoteric math like "Category Theory" funny.

So when the conference was having their big banquet and awards ceremony, Prakash (my mentor at the time and co-author on the article I was presenting) took me to the speaking hall. He said, "you are hopeless. We have to skip the party or you are going to be an embarrassment to me."

We were the only ones in the speaking hall while everyone was in the banquet.

He said, let me see your slides. I showed him. He said, "these are all awful" and he quickly rewrote all of them and explained why he was rewriting each one. Then he sat in the back of the hall and had me stand on the podium. He said, "give the talk."

For every slide, he went over and over it again. "You have to have a joke or something that surprises on each slide." He would have me walk to different parts of the podium for different slides. Or move my hands a certain way to make a point. He went over every nuance with me. He taught me how to tell a joke and wait for the laugh. If nobody laughs "Tell people, 'you were supposed to laugh at that' even if it's not funny. And then they will."

I horribly disappointed him when I was thrown out of graduate school less than a year later and he hasn't spoken to me since. (more on why I got thrown out in "How I Torture Women")

The next day I gave the talk and I was very happy - people laughed at my jokes. A woman came up to me afterwards and said, "I had no idea Category Theory could be so funny." Prakash even said to me, "you were a natural, they can't teach that." And I know he was just being nice but it was the highest praise.

A colleague of ours, sitting next to Prakash during my talk whispered to him during the talk, "why didn't James even ask for my help on this." Prakash turned to him and said, "because he hates you." From Prakash I learned a particular brand of honesty.

So I have to give a talk Thursday and on June 13 so I've been thinking of these items.

Here's my 11 unusual tips on being a better public speaker:

1) Start off with a joke. This is a must. People need to laugh within the first 30 seconds or else you're going back to your cubicle at the pencil factory and they will never remember you.

I spend about at least one to two hours before the talk coming up with the first joke because I know that's what starts off the good feelings for the rest of the talk. I usually make it relevant to the locale and the topic or the news (Tomorrow's joke starts off: "True story: two days ago I was having dinner with the prime minister of Pakistan and...") And it actually will be a true story.

2) Get on their level. This has two meanings. I once fell off of a podium while pacing around giving a talk. I was very embarrassed. So now I always get off the podium and explain that I'm afraid to fall off so I'm just going to walk around if that's ok with everyone. People laugh a little bit and it physically and mentally brings me onto their level.

3) Very important: I very very slightly slur my words. A very small slur. I don't drink at all. But by slightly slurring my words it's as if I'm telling my brain I'm a little drunk. When you're a little drunk you don't really care what people think of you and you take a few more chances than you would've otherwise. It also makes me a bit more brutally honest. And everyone likes a nice drunk!

4) I try to use JUST one word plus one image per page. No more! You think people really want to come to a talk and read a novel? They want to look at funny pictures. At heart, we are all two year olds trying to just stay alive. I'm not saying this in a patronizing way. Its just true.

Here's one slide from my upcoming talk:

Colorful, topical. It's the world record bubble creator, so its interesting. And has the flare of magic around it. Given recent events, if I can't fill up 30 seconds of brilliant insight with this slide then I shouldn't be doing any public speaking.

5) Try to shock people on each slide. This keeps them awake. They've just been jolted with electricity. Like a taser. That hits their brain to keep them awake for another 30 seconds (I say this all because I hate talks and I know I fall asleep every 30 seconds during a talk) Here's another slide from my upcoming talk:

I then tell people I just bought this house. People are shocked for a brief second (the human mind is conditioned to believe everything it hears). Then I say, "no I didn't". And everyone relaxes. All of their muscles relax. The jealousy muscle, the reality muscle, the humor muscle. Everything settles down. Some chuckles. Its obviously not my house. But now we can all move ahead and talk again.

(I actually think the above house is Stevie Cohen's house. Here's how Stevie Cohen Changed My Life).

6) Self-deprecating. Very important to remind people that you have the same fears, worries, faults that they do. We're all human. We all have lots of problems and we're just trying to get from birth to death and solve those problems.

So hell, let's solve some of those problems right here together in this talk.

Remember you don't get wiser when you get older. You just get older. You have to practice to get wiser. Self-deprecation, really studying your foibles, helps with the wiser part.

So in the middle of my talk I remind people I'm not allowed to drive. The reason: because unfortunately there was a photographer present the last time I drove a car. Here's the result of that photographer taking a picture of my last driving experience:

7) A talk should be a three act structure, like a play or a movie. Or like July 4 fireworks. In the first third of a talk, set up "GREED" - why they need to be listening to you. In the second part, set up "FEAR" - what could happen if they don't listen. Then in the explosive third act, the grand show! .

You can tell how impressively intelligent I am when I have a slide like this in the final third of the presentation:

8) The Pretty Girl Rule. You need a pretty girl in your presentation. Remember, magicians always have pretty assistants. So I put one in the slide show.

9) Never ever self-promote. You have to come across as honest and not selling something. Nobody trusts a used-car salesman. So, in the final slide tomorrow, I have this book BUT I will, on purpose, yell at the person from Fidelity who organized the conference and say "I TOLD YOU NOT TO PUT THIS IN HERE!" and everyone laughs.

( click here to find out why i self-published, how you can, and how to get a free copy)

10) Simple facts nobody knows. I peek in at talks sometimes and there's all these charts and data. Puke! Nobody remembers stuff. This isn't college you know! Keep the facts simple. Example: everyone thinks Greece is really important today in the news. You know the economy of Greece is the same size as the economy of Rhode Island? BAM!

11) Tell Stories. This is a must. Whenever anyone goes to a talk they are signing up for a couple of reasons:

a. They want to know they are "ok"

b. They want to know how they can be better

c. They want to be entertained

d. They want to know more about you

I'm not so bad at telling stories. Like the time I went to this sleazy porn store in Kaiserslautern, Germany and...

-

Follow me on Twitter. I hope you can come to a talk I give eventually.

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11 Unusual Methods for Being a Great Public Speaker - Altucher Confidential

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Prakash Panangaden taught me everything about public speaking. The first thing he taught me when we were in Kaiserslautern, Germany, for my "fascinating" talk titled "A Mechanically Assisted Proof in Category Theory" was 'never go to the porn shops here. They will rip you off.'

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No, try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.

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No, try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.

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Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you're raging pissed and throwing a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, "Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?" No, you're out for blood. You inhabit and live the anger. You are the anger. And then it's gone.

Just as a confident man doesn't wonder if he's confident, a happy man does not wonder if he's happy. He simply is.

What this implies is that finding happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. This gets mixed up a lot, especially since happiness is marketed so much these days as a goal in and of itself. Buy X and be happy. Learn Y and be happy. But you can't buy happiness and you can't achieve happiness. It just is. And it is once you get other parts of your life in order.

Happiness is not the same as pleasure

When most people seek happiness, they are actually seeking pleasure: good food, more sex, more time for TV and movies, a new car, parties with friends, full body massages, losing 10 pounds, becoming more popular, and so on.

But while pleasure is great, it's not the same as happiness. Pleasure is correlated with happiness but does not cause it. Ask any drug addict how their pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how happy pursuing pleasure made him feel.

Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable and less happy in the long-run. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest. Pleasure is what's marketed to us. It's what we fixate on. It's what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary, isn't sufficient. There's something more.

Finding Happiness does not require lowering one's expectations

A popular narrative lately is that people are becoming unhappier because we're all narcissistic and grew up being told that we're special unique snowflakes who are going to change the world and we have Facebook constantly telling us how amazing everyone else's lives are, but not our own, so we all feel like crap and wonder where it all went wrong. Oh, and all of this happens by the of age 23.

Sorry, but no. Give people a bit more credit than that.

For instance, a friend of mine recently started a high-risk business venture. He dried up most of his savings trying to make it work and failed. Today, he's happier than ever for his experience. It taught him many lessons about what he wanted and didn't want in life and it eventually led him to his current job, which he loves. He's able to look back and be proud that he went for it because otherwise, he would have always wondered "what if?" and that would have made him unhappier than any failure would have.

The failure to meet our own expectations is not antithetical to happiness, and I'd actually argue that the ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is actually a fundamental building block for happiness.

If you thought you were going to make $100,000 and drive a Porsche immediately out of college, then your standards of success were skewed and superficial, you confused your pleasure for happiness, and the painful smack of reality hitting you in the face will be one of the best lessons life ever gives you.

The "lower expectations" argument falls victim to the same old mindset: that happiness is derived from without. The joy of life is not having a $100,000 salary. It's working to reach a $100,000 salary, and then working for a $200,000 salary, and so on.

So, I say raise your expectations. Elongate your process. Lay on your death bed with a to-do list a mile long and smile at the infinite opportunity granted to you. Create ridiculous standards for yourself and then savor the inevitable failure. Learn from it. Live it. Let the ground crack and rocks crumble around you because that's how something amazing grows, through the cracks.

Happiness is not the same as positivity

Chances are you know someone who always appears to be insanely happy regardless of the circumstances or situation. Chances are this is actually one of the most dysfunctional people you know. Denying negative emotions leads to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and emotional dysfunction.

It's a simple reality: shit happens. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made and negative emotions arise. And that's fine. Negative emotions are necessary and healthy for maintaining a stable baseline happiness in one's life.

The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way which aligns with your values.

Simple example: A value of mine is to pursue non-violence. Therefore, when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also make a point to not punch them in the face. Radical idea, I know. (But I absolutely will throw a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids. Try me.)

There's a lot of people out there who subscribe to "always be positive" ideology. These people should be avoided just as much as someone who thinks the world is an endless pile of shit. If your standard of happiness is that you're always happy, no matter what, then you've been watching way too much Leave It To Beaver and need a reality check (but don't worry, I promise not to punch you in the face).

I think part of the allure of obsessive positivity is the way in which we're marketed to. I think part of it is being subjected to happy, smiley people on television constantly. I think part of it is that some people in the self-help industry want you to feel like there's something wrong with you all the time.

Or maybe it's just that we're lazy, and like anything else, we want the result without actually having to do the hard work for it.

Which brings me to what actually drives happiness....

Happiness is the process of becoming your ideal self

Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying a new computer.

And the funny thing is that all three of the activities above are exceedingly unpleasant and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of our lives. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair, yet once we've done them we look back and get misty-eyed about them.

Why?

Because it's these sort of activities which allow us to become our ideal selves. It's the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. This is why some people are happy in war and others are sad at weddings. It's why some are excited to work and others hate parties. The traits they're inhabiting don't align with their ideal selves.

The end results don't define our ideal selves. It's not finishing the marathon that makes us happy, it's achieving a difficult long-term goal that does. It's not having an awesome kid to show off that makes us happy, but knowing that you gave yourself up to the growth of another human being that is special. It's not the prestige and money from the new business that makes you happy, it's the process of overcoming all odds with people you care about.

And this is the reason that trying to be happy inevitably will make you unhappy. Because to try to be happy implies that you are not already inhabiting your ideal self, you are not aligned with the qualities of who you wish to be. After all, if you were acting out your ideal self, then you wouldn't feel the need to try to be happy.

Cue statements about "finding happiness within," and "knowing that you're enough." It's not that happiness itself is in you, it's that happiness occurs when you decide to pursue what's in you.

And this is why happiness is so fleeting. Anyone who has set out major life goals for themselves only to achieve them and realize that they feel the same relative amounts of happiness/unhappiness knows that happiness always feels like it's around the corner, just waiting for you to show up. No matter where you are in life, there will always be that one more thing you need to do to be extra-especially happy.

And that's because our ideal self is always just around that corner, always three steps ahead of us. We dream of being a musician and when we're a musician, we dream of writing a film score and when write a film score, we dream of writing a screenplay. And what matters isn't that we achieve each of these plateaus of success, but that we're consistently moving towards them, day after day, month after month, year after year. The plateaus will come and go, and we'll continue following our ideal self down the path of our lives.

And with that, with regards to fingind happiness, it seems the best advice is also the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and then step towards it. Dream big and then do something. Anything. The simple act of moving at all will change how you feel about the entire process and serve to inspire you further.

Let go of the imagined result - it's not necessary. The fantasy and the dream are merely tools to get you off your ass. It doesn't matter if they come true or not. Live, man. Just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be.

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Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you're raging pissed and throwing a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, "Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?"

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Wherever you are, you can create your own.

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Wherever you are, you can create your own.

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Doing what you do best is the first step to making a good job great

At a recent conference, Shane Lopez, Ph.D., Gallup senior scientist and one of the world's leading researchers on hope, was talking with well-known vocational psychologist Mark Savickas, Ph.D. During that conversation, Savickas said, "Work won't love you back anymore." That sentence stuck with Lopez -- and it changed the focus of one of his research projects.

Great bosses want their people to have autonomy.

We've all heard that we should balance our work and family lives because our families, unlike our jobs, will love us back. But what Savickas meant was a little different. "What Savickas was saying is that there's no loyalty in the modern American workplace anymore," Lopez says. "You won't get much professional development anymore. You won't be on a team that stays together two or three years anymore. You won't spend your career in one place. So I started wondering: What if you love your job? Can you buck the trend in the modern workplace and have a job that will love you back?"

Lopez was already conducting research on Career Well-Being, but Savickas' comment prompted Lopez to broaden his view. "I needed to figure out what 'loving your job' means," Lopez says. "What I discovered was that it's not the Confucian notion of 'Choose a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.' Instead, people who love their jobs aren't choosing jobs they love -- they're making jobs they love."

Of the thousands of workers Lopez researched, only 1% truly loved their jobs. And they weren't necessarily hedge fund managers or rock stars; they were teachers and gas station attendants and preachers. What set them apart from other people is that they were proactive in designing the job they have, as Lopez, author of Making Hope Happen, explains in the following interview.
Gallup Business Journal: What kinds of people love their jobs? Are they just better employees, or are they job-loving people?
Shane J. Lopez, Ph.D.: We often say that a good job is one that engages you, pays you a decent salary, and lets you contribute meaningfully to a company. So I looked deeper into a study of American workers for the most engaged people who also had a high degree of Career Well-Being.

I started asking a series of questions to our research participants and to the most engaged, job-loving employees at companies that received the Gallup Great Workplace Award. I wanted to discover the attributes and behaviors that are shared by people who love their jobs. What I found was that these folks don't have much in common except they believe that they need to design and build their own jobs. When they're given a job, they think it's up to them to turn it into something they love.

At the same time, they are surrounded by -- or they surround themselves with -- people who care about them. They expect it's up to them to shape their job into one that they love, and they can do this because they're surrounded by people who care about and encourage them. What I learned is that a job you love doesn't have to start out as your dream job. People who love their jobs found a good job, then they shaped it into a job they could love.
But how can a person engineer an environment where people care about each other?
Dr. Lopez: Finding a caring environment is fundamental to loving your job, but it's a hard thing to create on your own. That's why we need to be better at picking jobs. We need to respond to our intuition, our gut reaction, when choosing a place where it feels good to work and where we are connected to people who care about one another. I don't mean an "everybody-gets-a-birthday-cake" kind of caring, but a place where folks are interested in you as a human being.

That's especially important for young people looking for their first real job. They need to know that they can work as a teller at a bank where their coworkers and managers ignore them -- or they can work as a teller at a bank where their fellow employees like each other because the work environment has been created over time to enable that.

It's hard to craft that kind of environment yourself because few people have the authority to move some coworkers in and others out. Caring environments are easier to join than to make, so people who love their jobs choose to join them.
So how can you shape a job to suit you?
Dr. Lopez: People who love their jobs make sure they're doing what they do best. They gravitate to opportunities within their job where they can put their talents and strengths to work. Now, many of these folks don't know about the Clifton StrengthsFinder [Gallup's online assessment that reveals users' talents] or strengths science. They just know that they're more productive when they do what they do best. They design their own job, and it gives them the sense that they can craft other things -- their workstation, their relationships, and the opportunities that come their way.
How does this work?
Dr. Lopez: Most people can't control every task they have to do every day, but they can advocate for getting assignments that will allow them to be productive. They can do that by showing they've got the talent for that kind of work, which in turn makes them more productive at it, which means they are more likely to get more of that kind of work in the future. So the first step to designing your job is to start doing more of what you do best. You'll get a little more autonomy because you're more productive, then you can job craft a little bit more.
But it takes autonomy to get autonomy, right?
Dr. Lopez: There is a huge range in how much autonomy a person can have at work. But the amount of autonomy you are given isn't determined by your educational level or the skill level demanded in your job. It's determined by the company you work for and -- more specifically -- by the boss you have.

Autonomy is a local issue, just like engagement. That's why boss shopping -- choosing the right boss -- is so important, because we need as much autonomy as we can handle in our work lives. Regardless of whether you're working on an assembly line or on a sanitation crew or as a banker, autonomy is necessary but not sufficient for loving your job. If you have some autonomy, you can do a little more of what you do best every day. If you have some autonomy, you can job craft. If you have some autonomy, you can spend time with the people who care about you at work. And your boss holds the key to that autonomy.
Wouldn't good bosses want their people to have autonomy or to exercise a little initiative?
Dr. Lopez: Great bosses do. But bosses at every level are trying to meet many different demands from many different people. And if their own boss makes them fearful of granting autonomy to their workers, then they'll try to minimize any ambiguity in their situation. And when they try to minimize ambiguity, they often undermine autonomy.

So if your boss' boss is making him fearful, your boss will become stricter in his thinking. He'll get a little more rigid. Your boss will, in a subtle way, communicate that autonomy is not a good thing right now. When that happens, people start falling into line, but they may become less engaged. They may look busy, but often there's less meaning, mission, and purpose connected to their activities, so they're less productive.
So how do you land yourself a great boss?
Dr. Lopez: By boss shopping -- that's what you do when you're at the black belt level of loving your job. To do that means you've shaped your job over time and you work with people who care about you. But to love your job, you need to work for someone who gets you, who understands your life. Certain people, certain bosses, are better at understanding certain people, getting their people promoted, or developing talent. Once you find someone like this, subtly you start moving in the direction of that boss.
Can you give me an example of someone who made boss shopping work?
Dr. Lopez: I talked to a person in the financial services industry who said she "laid in wait." She knew exactly who she wanted to work for, but there were no immediate opportunities on that team. So she waited -- for two and a half years. Then she finally moved to that team, and it was everything she imagined. Her job went from being good to one she could love because that boss was a genius at tapping into her talent, caring about her, promoting her development, and promoting her well-being. Another person told me, "I'm willing to go two steps back on the status ladder to work for someone who really gets me."

Having a leader who makes us enthusiastic about the future, well, we know that's engaging. But I think also it models Career Well-Being and helps us have the kind of life we want -- not just the kind of work life we want, but the kind of happy life we want. Not everybody can go boss shopping, but the folks who can make the change and maybe even risk taking two steps back to get the right boss find that it pays off in a big way.
-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison

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Doing what you do best is the first step to making a good job great At a recent conference, Shane Lopez, Ph.D., Gallup senior scientist and one of the world's leading researchers on hope, was talking with well-known vocational psychologist Mark Savickas, Ph.D. During that conversation, Savickas said, "Work won't love you back anymore."

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As soon as children are old enough to walk, we expect them to share. I prefer putting "share" in quotes, since this type of sharing is usually forced by the adult. Our goals are noble: kindness, generosity, awareness of others. Unfortunately, our approach backfires.
Kids learn more life skills -and develop better generosity-when they aren't forced to share.
Of course, sharing squabbles happen all the time between kids. Here's a typical scene: One child is busily engaged with a toy when a new child comes up and wants it. A nearby adult says: "Be nice and share your toys," or "Give Ella the pony. You've had it a long time." What happens? The child is forced to give something up and her play gets interrupted. She learns that sharing feels bad. It's the parent who's sharing here, not the child.

Traditional sharing expects kids to give up something the instant someone else demands. Yet we don't do this ourselves. Imagine being on your cell phone when somebody suddenly comes up and asks for your phone or takes it from you. "I need to make a phone call," he says. Would you get mad? As adults, we expect people to wait their turn. We might gladly lend our phone to a friend or even a stranger, but we want them to wait until we're done. The same should apply to kids: let the child keep a toy until she's "all done." It's turn-taking. It's sharing. But the key is it's child-directed turn-taking .
Positive assertiveness
Here's what it looks like in real life. Instead of YOU saying "Five more minutes, then it's Ella's turn" or "I'm going to set the timer," teach your child to say "You can have it when I'm done." This teaches positive assertiveness. It helps kids stand up for themselves and learn to set boundaries on other kids. What a terrific life skill. How many of us as adults have trouble saying "no?"
True Generosity and Awareness of Others
When the first child drops the toy and moves on, remind her that Ella's waiting for a turn (a great lesson in courtesy and awareness of others). The best part of all is when the first child willingly hands over the toy-it's a joyous moment for both kids. That's the moment when your child experiences the rush of good feelings that comes from being kind to others. It's true generosity. It's a warm feeling. One she'll want to repeat over and over - whether a parent is watching or not.
Emotional Impulse Control
What about the waiting child? Waiting is hard, especially for impulsive 2-6 year olds, but just like assertiveness, waiting is an excellent life skill. It's OK for the waiting child to feel frustrated, sad or angry for a time. Don't be afraid of a few foot stompings or tears. Learning to control behavior and express intense feelings appropriately is really the main job of early childhood. Impulse control (waiting for a toy and not grabbing) is a vital part of brain development and gets stronger through practice. The more practice kids get, the better. Sharing through turn-taking provides excellent practice.

Life is much more relaxing when you stop playing referee. Throw away your timer. Kids pick up the new method quickly, because it's fair and simple. Let kids keep a toy until they are "all done."

Words you can say

Positive assertiveness
- You can play with it until you're all done.
- Are you finished with your turn? Max says he's not done yet.
- Did you like it when he grabbed your truck? Tell him to stop!
- Say: "I'm not done. You can have it when I'm done."
- She can have a turn. When she's all done, you can have a turn.
- I see Bella still has the pony. She's still using it.
- You'll have to wait. I can't let you take it out of her hands.

Waiting and awareness of others
- Oh, it's so hard to wait!
- You're so mad. You really want to play with the pony right now!
- You can be mad, but I can't let you take the toy.
- Will you tell Max when you're all done?
- I see you're not using the truck any more. Go find Ben. Remember, he's waiting for a turn.

Curious to learn more? See this sharing video and watch for future posts on taking loooong turns, hogging toys, waiting lists and making the transition to turn-taking.

Or check out a from the book It's OK Not to Share...And Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids . Sharing and long turns are just two of the 29 "renegade rules."
Did you ever resent sharing something as a child? Have you tried child-directed sharing?

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Throw Away your Timer: Why Kids Learn More when they Don't "Share" - Starlighting Mama

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As soon as children are old enough to walk, we expect them to share. I prefer putting "share" in quotes, since this type of sharing is usually forced by the adult. Our goals are noble: kindness, generosity, awareness of others. ... Continue reading →

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There was also a period of time when I was convinced that my ex-girlfriend left me because I wasn't good enough for her and so I had to prove myself to every woman I ever met. But after a lot of overcompensation around other women, I eventually realized that I was fine and much better off without her.

Then there was the idea that every bad emotion I ever experienced was a result of some underlying trauma and that by "working through it," I was precipitating some sort of transformation in myself. Boy, was that one delusional (Spoiler alert: Sometimes you feel bad just because you feel bad).

What I'm getting at is that we're often poor arbiters of our own emotions and desires. We lie to ourselves. And we do it for one obvious reason: to feel better.

We may not know exactly what we're lying to ourselves about, but it's safe to assume that some chunk of what we consider "truth" today is likely nothing more than a defense against some deeper meaning which is painful to accept.
By lying to ourselves we mortgage our long-term needs in order to fulfill our short-term desires. Therefore, one could say personal growth is merely the process of learning to lie to oneself less.
When it comes to uncovering our own BS, many of us rely on similar patterns to protect ourselves. Here are some common patterns I've come across in myself and people I've worked with:

1. "If I could just X, then my life would be amazing."

Take your pick of what X is: get married, get laid, get a raise, buy a new car, a new house, a new pet rabbit, floss every Sunday, whatever. Obviously, you're smart enough that I don't have to tell you that no one single goal will ever solve your happiness problems permanently. After all, that's the tricky part about the brain: the "If only I had X, then..." mechanism never goes away.

We're evolutionarily wired to exist in a state of mild dissatisfaction. It makes biological sense. Primates who are never quite satisfied with what they already have and want a little bit more were the ones who survived and pro-created more often.

It's an excellent evolutionary strategy, but a poor happiness strategy. If we're always looking for what's next it becomes quite difficult to appreciate what is now. Sure, we can alter this wiring a bit through conditioning, learned behaviors and changed mindsets, but it's an immovable piece of the human condition, something we must always lean against.

So what does that mean? Learn to enjoy it. Learn to enjoy the challenge. Learn to enjoy change and pursuit of one's higher goals. Relish the chase, so to speak. A big misconception in the self-help world is that being satisfied with the present moment and working towards one's future are somehow contradictory. They're not. If life is a hamster wheel, then the goal isn't to actually get anywhere, it's to find a way to enjoy running.

2. "If I had more time, I would do X."

Bullshit. You either want to do something or you don"t. We often like the idea of doing something, but when it comes down to it, we don"t actually want to do it.

I like the idea of being a surfer and surfing in all of the cool places I visit each year. But every time I rent a surfboard, I get frustrated and lose interest after a few hours. I like the idea of being really good at chess, but I don't really put much time into it. On the other hand, I really do want to learn more languages, so I do take time out of my day to continue studying.

People say they want to start a business, they want six-pack abs, they want to become an expert musician. But they don't want it. If they did, they would make time and commit themselves. Rather, people are enamored with the idea of their goals rather than the painful living that comes with living one's goals.

Now, you may say, "Oh Mark, you don't understand, I'm so busy."

But choosing to be busy is a choice of investment of time. And you invest your time in things that matter to you. If you are working 80 hours per week, that was something you wanted more than all of the other things you say you want to do. And if that's true, then you can always choose to stop working so much. You can choose not to work at all. You can choose to value your dream more than money or sleep or eating at your favorite restaurant every week. But you don't...

3. "If I say or do X, people will think I'm stupid."

The truth is most people don't care if you do X or not, and even if they do, they're going to be far more concerned about what you think of them. The truth is that you're not afraid because other people will think you're stupid or lame or obnoxious. The truth is you're afraid because you will think you are stupid or lame or obnoxious.

This is a worthiness issue. It's a lie that is borne from an insecurity of not being good enough. It has nothing to do with how mean/nice people around you are. The people around you are too busy worrying about what you think of them to care.

4. "If I just say or do X, then that person will finally change."

You can't change people. You can only help them to change themselves. The rationalization that if you could only do that one more thing to get someone to see your way, to see the enlightened path, to see how to stop being such a raging asshole, is usually a product of an unhealthy attachment to someone and/or a boundary issue.

All advice and support must be offered up unconditionally, without expectation of any miraculous turnarounds. Love people for the messed up ways that they already are, not how you'd wish them to be.

5. "Everything is great/Everything sucks."

Everything is how you choose to see it. Choose wisely.

6. "There's something inherently wrong or different about me."

This lie is the cornerstone of personal shame, the belief that something about us is inherently wrong or insufficient. An unfortunate side effect of having robust societies with hundreds of millions of people is that we are inevitably encouraged to compare ourselves with arbitrary social standards. As we grow up, we notice (and are reminded by others) whether we're taller/shorter, prettier/uglier, smarter/stupider, stronger/weaker, cooler/lamer than the average bear.

This is called "socialization" and it actually serves a useful purpose. The idea is to get people in line with culturally-defined ideals so that we can all coexist with one another without everyone stabbing each other in the throats and eating dead babies for breakfast. It worked (mostly).

But the price of that social stability and cohesion is the internalization of beliefs that we aren't good enough as we are, that we're fundamentally flawed and unlovable. Some of us internalize greater amounts of these beliefs than others, especially if we were abused or traumatized at some point in our past.

And this clinging belief that we're somehow deficient undermines everything we think and do and generates misery throughout our lives.

But here's the truly messed up part: We're afraid to let go of the beliefs that we're inherently deficient.

Why? Why would we hold onto beliefs that we're somehow sub-human, not worthy of the same love and success as those all around us, and not give them up in the face of evidence to the contrary?

The answer is the same reason we hold on to any belief: it makes us feel special. If we're inherently inferior in some way, then we get to permanently play victim, to play martyr, and it imbues our life with a sick noble purpose. If we were to let go of that and accept that we are inherently worthy of life, worthy of all others, then we would lose our right to victimhood, our right to being special, and instead turn into an anonymous nobody, just another face in the crowd.

And so we hold on to our misery and wear it like a badge of honor. Because it's the only identity we know...

7. "I would change, but I can't because of X."

Unless X is "I don't really want to," then this statement is bullshit. You're making excuses. And it's OK, we all do, but you might as well own up to it. You don't want to change, because if you truly wanted it, you would do it. And if you don't do it, then that means that what's causing you misery is also benefiting you in some unconscious way.

I talked to a client recently who is ambitious, but he's been blaming the injustice of the present economy and social system for his inability to work on his business idea. Throughout the conversations, he began to look at some of his beliefs and see that many of them were merely excuses to justify his already being unhappy.

But still, his inability to act persisted. That's because the root of the issue was deeper. His anger at the injustice of the current system not only justifies his inability to act, but it also feeds his sense of self-importance, his belief that if he were allowed to try, he'd be amazing but because he's not allowed, he'll forever be angry and miserable instead.

The need for importance is one of the most fundamental psychological needs. And in this case, a bright young man would rather hold on to his misery than risk anonymity and failure.

8. "I can't live without X."

In most cases, you can. If there's one thing I've learned from traveling the world and staying in some particularly unsavory places for a period of time, it's that humans adapt incredibly quickly. I (and many others) have documented the arduous process of selling and giving away most of our possessions and the spectacular realization that after a brief period of nostalgia, we don't miss any of them at all.

So caught up in modern society's cycle of consumerism, many of us have forgotten that, psychologically speaking, we already have everything we need. Our psyches possess an incredible ability to adapt to what's available in our environments to get all of our needs met and keep ourselves happy. And beyond a certain level of comfort and subsistence, what matters is not so much what we do or what we own, but rather how much meaning each activity or relationship gives us.

Optimize your life to enhance meaning. That's the metric of success.

9. "I know what I'm doing."

Sure you do, buddy. Sure you do.

Our lives are defined by nothing but glorified best guesses, a constant process of trial-and-error. And right now, my best guess is that this article is over.

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There was also a period of time when I was convinced that my ex-girlfriend left me because I wasn't good enough for her and so I had to prove myself to every woman I ever met. But after a lot of overcompensation around other women, I eventually realized that I was fine and much better off without her.

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This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children's talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one's status as "smart" and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes. Dr. Dweck's work aligns nicely with that of Dr. Baumrind, who also found that reasonably supporting a child's autonomy and limiting interference results in better academic and emotional outcomes.

Their research confirms what I've seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.

The central task of growing up is to develop a sense of self that is autonomous, confident and generally in accord with reality. If you treat your walking toddler as if she can't walk, you diminish her confidence and distort reality. Ditto nightly "reviews" of homework, repetitive phone calls to "just check if you're O.K." and "editing" (read: writing) your child's college application essay.

Once your child is capable of doing something, congratulate yourself on a job well done and move on. Continued, unnecessary intervention makes your child feel bad about himself (if he's young) or angry at you (if he's a teenager).

But isn't it a parent's job to help with those things that are just beyond your child's reach? Why is it overparenting to do for your child what he or she is almost capable of?

Think back to when your toddler learned to walk. She would take a weaving step or two, collapse and immediately look to you for your reaction. You were in thrall to those early attempts and would do everything possible to encourage her to get up again. You certainly didn't chastise her for failing or utter dire predictions about flipping burgers for the rest of her life if she fell again. You were present, alert and available to guide if necessary. But you didn't pick her up every time.

You knew she had to get it wrong many times before she could get it right.

HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting. It's easier when they're young - tolerating a stumbling toddler is far different from allowing a preteenager to meet her friends at the mall. The potential mistakes carry greater risks, and part of being a parent is minimizing risk for our children.

What kinds of risks should we tolerate? If there's a predator loose in the neighborhood, your daughter doesn't get to go to the mall. But under normal circumstances an 11-year-old girl is quite capable of taking care of herself for a few hours in the company of her friends. She may forget a package, overpay for an item or forget that she was supposed to call home at noon. Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it's the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world. But it is in the small daily risks - the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate - that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.

So if children are able to live with mistakes and even failing, why does it drive us crazy? So many parents have said to me, "I can't stand to see my child unhappy." If you can't stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn't bring you running) present the opportunity for "successful failures," that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.

While doing things for your child unnecessarily or prematurely can reduce motivation and increase dependency, it is the inability to maintain parental boundaries that most damages child development. When we do things for our children out of our own needs rather than theirs, it forces them to circumvent the most critical task of childhood: to develop a robust sense of self.

There is an important distinction between good and bad parental involvement. For example, a young child doesn't want to sit and do his math homework. Good parents insist on compliance, not because they need their child to be a perfect student but because the child needs to learn the fundamentals of math and develop a good work ethic. Compare this with the parent who spends weeks "helping" his or her child fill out college applications with the clear expectation that if they both work hard enough, a "gotta get into" school is a certainty. (While most of my parent patients have graduated from college, it is always a telltale sign of overparenting when they talk about how "we're applying to Columbia.")

In both situations parents are using control, in the first case behavioral (sit down, do your math) and in the second psychological ("we're applying.") It is psychological control that carries with it a textbook's worth of damage to a child's developing identity. If pushing, direction, motivation and reward always come from the outside, the child never has the opportunity to craft an inside. Having tutors prep your anxious 3-year-old for a preschool interview because all your friends' children are going to this particular school or pushing your exhausted child to take one more advanced-placement course because it will ensure her spot as class valedictorian is not involved parenting but toxic overparenting aimed at meeting the parents' need for status or affirmation and not the child's needs.

So how do parents find the courage to discard the malpractice of overparenting? It's hard to swim upstream, to resist peer pressure. But we must remember that children thrive best in an environment that is reliable, available, consistent and noninterfering.

A loving parent is warm, willing to set limits and unwilling to breach a child's psychological boundaries by invoking shame or guilt. Parents must acknowledge their own anxiety. Your job is to know your child well enough to make a good call about whether he can manage a particular situation. Will you stay up worrying? Probably, but the child's job is to grow, yours is to control your anxiety so it doesn't get in the way of his reasonable moves toward autonomy.

Parents also have to be clear about their own values. Children watch us closely. If you want your children to be able to stand up for their values, you have to do the same. If you believe that a summer spent reading, taking creek walks and playing is better than a specialized camp, then stick to your guns. Parents also have to make sure their own lives are fulfilling. There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.

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This may seem counterintuitive, but praising children's talents and abilities seems to rattle their confidence. Tackling more difficult puzzles carries the risk of losing one's status as "smart" and deprives kids of the thrill of choosing to work simply for its own sake, regardless of outcomes.

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This article presents a series of regrets that many people experience of their deathbed. It's an interesting source of perspective for many of us who are moving into new phases of our adult lives.

Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

By: Bronnie Ware ( Via)

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Nurse reveals the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed - Seenox

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This article presents a series of regrets that many people experience of their deathbed. It's an interesting source of perspective for many of us who are moving into new phases of our adult lives. Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and...

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"Happiness is a habit - cultivate it." ~ Elbert Hubbard Happiness is one aspiration all people share. No one wants to be sad and depressed.

We've all seen people who are always happy - even amidst agonizing life trials. I'm not saying happy people don't feel grief, sorrow or sadness; they just don't let it overtake their life. The following are 21 things happy people make a habit of doing:

1. Appreciate Life
Be thankful that you woke up alive each morning. Develop a childlike sense of wonder towards life. Focus on the beauty of every living thing. Make the most of each day. Don't take anything for granted. Don't sweat the small stuff.
2. Choose Friends Wisely
Surround yourself with happy, positive people who share your values and goals. Friends that have the same ethics as you will encourage you to achieve your dreams. They help you to feel good about yourself. They are there to lend a helping hand when needed.
3. Be Considerate
Accept others for who they are as well as where they are in life. Respect them for who they are. Touch them with a kind and generous spirit. Help when you are able, without trying to change the other person. Try to brighten the day of everyone you come into contact with.
4. Learn Continuously
Keep up to date with the latest news regarding your career and hobbies. Try new and daring things that has sparked your interest - such as dancing, skiing, surfing or sky-diving.
5. Creative Problem Solving
Don't wallow in self-pity. As soon as you face a challenge get busy finding a solution. Don't let the set backs affect your mood, instead see each new obstacle you face as an opportunity to make a positive change. Learn to trust your gut instincts - it's almost always right.
6. Do What They Love
Some statistics show that 80% of people dislike their jobs! No wonder there's so many unhappy people running around. We spend a great deal of our life working. Choose a career that you enjoy - the extra money of a job you detest isn't worth it. Make time to enjoy your hobbies and pursue special interests.
7. Enjoy Life
Take the time to see the beauty around you. There's more to life than work. Take time to smell the roses, watch a sunset or sunrise with a loved one, take a walk along the seashore, hike in the woods etc. Learn to live in the present moment and cherish it. Don't live in the past or the future.
8. Laugh
Don't take yourself - or life to seriously. You can find humor in just about any situation. Laugh at yourself - no one's perfect. When appropriate laugh and make light of the circumstances. (Naturally there are times that you should be serious as it would be improper to laugh.)
9. Forgive
Holding a grudge will hurt no one but you. Forgive others for your own peace of mind. When you make a mistake - own up to it - learn from it - and FORGIVE yourself.
10. Gratitude
Develop an attitude of gratitude. Count your blessings; All of them - even the things that seem trivial. Be grateful for your home, your work and most importantly your family and friends. Take the time to tell them that you are happy they are in your life.
11. Invest in Relationships
Always make sure your loved ones know you love them even in times of conflict. Nurture and grow your relationships with your family and friends by making the time to spend with them. Don't break your promises to them. Be supportive.
12. Keep Their Word
Honesty is the best policy. Every action and decision you make should be based on honesty. Be honest with yourself and with your loved ones.
13. Meditate
Meditation gives your very active brain a rest. When it's rested you will have more energy and function at a higher level. Types of meditation include yoga, hypnosis, relaxation tapes, affirmations, visualization or just sitting in complete silence. Find something you enjoy and make the time to practice daily.
14. Mind Their Own Business
Concentrate on creating your life the way you want it. Take care of you and your family. Don't get overly concerned with what other people are doing or saying. Don't get caught up with gossip or name calling. Don't judge. Everyone has a right to live their own life the way they want to - including you.
15. Optimism
See the glass as half full. Find the positive side of any given situation. It's there - even though it may be hard to find. Know that everything happens for a reason, even though you may never know what the reason is. Steer clear of negative thoughts. If a negative thought creeps in - replace it with a positive thought.
16. Love Unconditionally
Accept others for who they are. You don't put limitations on your love. Even though you may not always like the actions of your loved ones - you continue to love them.
17. Persistence
Never give up. Face each new challenge with the attitude that it will bring you one step closer to your goal. You will never fail, as long as you never give up. Focus on what you want, learn the required skills, make a plan to succeed and take action. We are always happiest while pursuing something of value to us.
18. Be Proactive
Accept what can not be changed. Happy people don't waste energy on circumstances beyond their control. Accept your limitations as a human being. Determine how you can take control by creating the outcome you desire - rather than waiting to respond.
19. Self Care
Take care of your mind, body and health. Get regular medical check ups. Eat healthy and work out. Get plenty of rest. Drink lots of water. Exercise your mind by continually energizing it with interesting and exciting challenges.
20. Self Confidence
Don't try to be someone that you're not. After all no one likes a phony. Determine who you are in the inside - your own personal likes and dislikes. Be confident in who you are. Do the best you can and don't second guess yourself.
21. Take Responsibility
Happy people know and understand that they are 100% responsible for their life. They take responsibility for their moods, attitude, thoughts, feelings, actions and words. They are the first to admit when they've made a mistake.

Begin today by taking responsibility for your happiness. Work on developing these habits as you own. The more you incorporate the above habits into your daily lifestyle - the happier you will be.

Most of all: BE TRUE TO YOURSELF.

original post: Global One
photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

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21 Habits of Happy People - Mind Openerz

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"Happiness is a habit - cultivate it." ~ Elbert Hubbard Happiness is one aspiration all people share. No one wants to be sad and depressed. We've all seen people who are always happy - even amidst agonizing life trials. I'm not saying happy people don't feel grief, sorrow or sadness; they just don't let it overtake their life.

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In the past, we have discussed 10 Ways A Good Woman Will Make You A Better Man, but what I think often goes overlooked is that a woman like this won't just be with any schmuck. If you want a woman who is genuinely special, you should be treating her that way.