Mind Space

Want to Impress Your Colleagues? Be Honest With Yourself

- Adam Clare

Interview

Many people want to change how their coworkers or their boss views them in the workplace, and no matter the reason for wanting a change there are tons of suggestions on how to do so. Indeed the self help industry in the USA is worth $10 billion dollars! That’s a lot of desire for self-improvment in American offices. Here’s a tip to save you money: don’t buy those self-help shills and instead get some self-reflection. It turns out that being conscious of how those around and adding in some metacognition is all you need.

According to executive coach Joel Garfinkle — whose advice is geared more toward your professional relationships — if you’re trying to change the way your coworkers see you, pay close attention to how your behavior impacts them. “Start by being honest with yourself. Notice how your behavior affects those around you. How do people react to you in meetings? In the coffee room or at lunch? If clients aren’t returning your calls, perhaps your behavior is making them feel pressured or uncomfortable,” Garfinkle writes on his blog.

The idea here is that by being honest with yourself about the way you affect others, you can begin to make behavioral changes, like talking less and listening more. “If you’re the type who usually dominates the conversation in meetings or groups, try keeping absolutely quiet and taking notes for a change,” writes Garfinkle. “If you usually hang back and let others take the spotlight, write down some key points that are relevant to the topic being discussed and speak up.” According to Garfinkle, making these changes will slowly change your colleagues’ perception of you.

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Kids Don’t Benefit from Helicopter Parenting

- Adam Clare

Being a parent must be hard since websites are constantly telling you what you’re doing wrong. If you’re letting your kid explore the world on their own terms than you’re doing things right! Take a breather parents, it turns out that relaxing and stepping back is best for your kid. Parents who try to control their kids too much end up not letting the kids learn how the world works which means that later on in life those kids can’t cope. So, maybe just take it easy and watch your kids instead of directing them.

At the age of five the team looked at the children’s response to an unfair share of sweets, and their ability to think carefully about a puzzle under time pressure.

When the children were aged five and 10, the researchers asked teachers to rate problems such as depression, anxiety or loneliness in the children, the children’s academic performance, and their views of the children’s social skills. At 10 years the children were quizzed on their attitudes to school and teachers as well as emotional issues.

The team found that once factors including the child’s age, behaviour as a toddler and socioeconomic status were taken into account, more controlling behaviour by mothers was linked both to their children having less control over their own emotions and less control over their impulses by the age of five.

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A Community-Driven Map of Pre-Colonized Land

- Adam Clare

maps

If you’ve ever wondered about the history of the land you’re on then this website (and app) is for you! The website Native-Land collects historical data from around the world of what peoples claimed what land so any curious individual can investigate some cartographic history. Layers on the map include territory, language, and treaties which cover North America. Mapping territory can complicate reconciliation issues as it may inadvertently rewrite history; to counter this the online teacher’s guide brings up good resources and questions.

Temprano emphasizes that Native Land maps are constantly being refined by user input, and he welcomes data submissions. On the website, he also cautions about the nature of mapping. “I feel that Western maps of Indigenous nations are very often inherently colonial, in that they delegate power according to imposed borders that don’t really exist in many nations throughout history. They were rarely created in good faith, and are often used in wrong ways.”

Reorientation to the Indigenous perspective, though, just might offer an entirely new way to experience this continent.

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Thanks to Delaney!

Being Lazy Doesn’t Mean Your a Bad Person

- Adam Clare

run
Too many of us look at others and think they are no-good lazy people. Think about the person living on the streets or a friend who never seems to be able to keep their job. We see people who are struggling through life and instead of thinking about what external forces influenced how they ended up in dire straits we assume it has to do with their moral behaviour. E Price calls on us to take a holistic look at individuals when we accuse them of “immoral” laziness:

People love to blame procrastinators for their behavior. Putting off work sure looks lazy, to an untrained eye. Even the people who are actively doing the procrastinating can mistake their behavior for laziness. You’re supposed to be doing something, and you’re not doing it — that’s a moral failure right? That means you’re weak-willed, unmotivated, and lazy, doesn’t it?

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

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GDPR Might Make the Internet Better by Eliminating Shady Businesses

- Adam Clare

computer screen

Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in effect companies are reacting. You may have noticed new messages on websites outlining that they are collecting information on you, or maybe you’ve received emails updating you on new privacy policies. Those notices are a result of the GDPR’s rules around how companies spy on you and use your data for profit. What GDPR is doing in practice is eliminating the business models of some corporations and we might all benefit from these sketchy companies going kaput.

For companies whose entire business model was users not really understanding the entire business model, the cost of direct sunlight may just be too high. Unroll.me, a company that offers to automatically declutter your in-box (while, uh, selling the insight it gleans from your data to companies like Uber), announced that it will no longer serve E.U. customers.

If enough companies follow this lead, one practical effect might be a split internet, with one set of GDPR-compliant websites and services for the E.U. and another set with a somewhat more, let’s say, relaxed attitude toward data for the rest of the world. But even a loosely enforced GDPR creates conditions for improving privacy protections beyond Europe. Facebook, for example, has already said it will extend GDPR-level protections to all of its users — if they opt in to them.

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