Business: Four Emotions to Avoid in a Crisis
Our primitive brains, which have yet to catch up with the challenges of business life in the 21st century, will likely cause you to feel four emotions when faced with a crisis in your work, what I call the caveman crisis chain: fear, frustration, anger, and despair. As I noted in the last issue of Prime Business Alert!, which emotions you experience and the intensity with which you feel them depend on a variety of factors including your innate temperament, your past experiences with emotions in general and crises in particular, the degree to which the crisis threatens you directly, the resources you have available to respond to the crisis, and amount of control you have over the crisis. The caveman crisis chain is all-encompassing, so that it impacts us physically, psychologically, and cognitively. And one thing is certain: this reaction can’t be stopped; 300 million years of instinct can’t be readily undone. Rather the best you can hope for is to understand your temperament and develop tools that will prevent caveman crisis chain from gaining control of you during a time of crisis when a calm heart and a cool head are necessary for your survival. Your goal is to limit the intensity and duration of this reaction when faced with a crisis, so that your more highly evolved capabilities, namely, those associated with your cerebral cortex, can assert themselves and guide you toward a solution to the crisis at hand.
Read MoreTechnology: Hanging Out with Your Friends — High-Tech Style
A commenter on one of my blogs sent me this “funny if it wasn’t so sad” illustration of the role that technology plays in the lives of many people these days: 10 Awesome Ways to Have a Really Great Time with Your Friends. If you’re anything like me, you see these scenes play out every […]
Read MoreEducation: In Support of the Whole Child
I recently contributed to an article, In Support of the Whole Child, that was recently published on HuffingtonPost.com. As the title suggests, it argues for a holistic approach to educating children rather than the current emphasis on a few core subjects and extensive testing.
Read MoreLatest News: Newest Parenting Book Coming in August
Be on the lookout for my latest parenting book, Raising Generation Tech: Prepare Your Children for a Media-fueled World, which will be published on August 1st.
Read MoreTechnology: Can You Disconnect from the ‘Matrix’?
Yes, you heard me right. I asked whether you are capable of disconnecting…from your smartphone, PC, laptop, tablet, or mp3 player! I realize that is a shocking and perhaps heretical suggestion in a time when most people are connected 24/7. I’m not saying that you have to be thoroughly disconnected; that’s not realistic in today’s […]
Read MoreParenting: How to Raise Good (and Safe) Kids These Days
This is a question that all parents ask themselves…constantly. There are no easy answers and, realistically, there is probably not one single answer. The important thing for parents is to at least ask and try to answer the question for their own family. My wife, Sarah, and I are still early in the game of raising our own two daughters. Though I’m the author of four parenting books and considered a parenting expert, I’m not going to pat myself on the back for my own parenting until our girls have left for college and I have clear evidence that my child-rearing ideas actually work (though, admittedly, even then, it could be my wife’s good genes or just dumb luck if my daughters turn out okay). In the meantime, when I meet parents who have actually gotten the job done and done it well, I like to ask them for some nuggets of wisdom that they believed contributed to raising good and safe kids. I recently ran into a long-time friend and colleague, I’ll call him Steve Barnes (he asked that I not use his family’s real names). Though accomplished professionally beyond pale, he says that his greatest achievement (in collaboration with his wife, Debra) has been raising his two daughters, Eva and Annie. Now in their early 20s, they have achieved a great deal academically to this point (Eva graduated from an Ivy League school and Annie is currently attending the same), but what is notable about them is that they are simply fine young women: intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, and compassionate, just to offer up a few descriptors. Having known them both since they were young, I can attest to the fact that Steve and Debra did more than a few things right. During our recent visit, Steve was kind enough share his nuggets of wisdom with Sarah and me.
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