Category: Notes

• What made you successful before is not likely to keep being successful
• When one is in transition, all are in transition
• Promotions
  • You need to see things at a higher level than before
  • What you delegate needs to change
• Onboarding
  • Understand what they want to do differently
  • You are the transplant, be wary of the org’s immune system
  • Orient to the business
  • Develop stakeholder connections, horizontally and vertically
  • Have frequent objective check-ins
  • Adapt to the culture
• Pay attention to
  • How do people get support (vertical or horizontal)
  • Meetings (discussions or rubber-stamps)
  • Execution (process or people)
  • Conflict (encouraged or avoided)
  • Recognition (personal or team)
  • Objectives (ends or means)
• Look for a cultural interpreter
• Be wary of the problems you like to solve; “To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”
• Always ask, “How did we get here?” to understand the history and see a path forward
• There are
  • Start-ups
  • Turn arounds
  • Accelerating
  • Realignment
  • Sustaining success
• Negotiating success with your new boss
  • Do not take “the extra rope”
  • Meet regularly, even if you do not like them
• Do not surprise bosses
• Early wins should fit into longer term goals, even if you forgo “low hanging fruit”

• All information processing goes bottom up
• Brains develop from the bottom up
• The younger you are, the more impressionable you are, even if you do not understand what is going on
• Trauma is more severe when we do not have the language to describe it
• Rhythm calms and leads to regulation
• Infants cannot self-regulate
• We have three neural systems: regulation, relationship, and rewards
• Fight, flight, freeze, or disengage
  • We tend to disengage when we cannot otherwise fight or flee (we are too young or small)
• Intense self-medication is often an attempt to soothe trauma
• Experience is important to changing how the brain works
• For infants, care is love
• Controllability of stress is what is important
• Flock (check to see what everyone else is doing), freeze (to assess what is going on), fight, or flee
• There is a difference between believing you deserve happiness and knowing you are worthy of it
• Trauma has three key aspects: event, experience, and effects
• Timing makes a huge difference
  • The younger the trauma, the worse the effects
• Early on, we can only take small doses of therapeutic revisiting
• “What happened to us?” Is also important to ask
• We inherit through genes, gene expression, behavior, and traditions
• Infants need a few deep, consistent relationships
• We are most comfortable when our experience lines up with our world view
  • This is why we sabotage relationships
  • (We are taught how to be treated then we teach people how to treat us)
• “We feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty.”
• Children are malleable not resilient
  • (Children are anti-fragile)
• Regulate, relate, and then reason

• “The less you know, the more you say”
• There is a spectrum between insufficient and excessive
• Anxiety is born from overactive fear
• Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC) predicts the future based on information
• When information is lacking PFC runs scenarios
• Reflexes are immediate, learning is seconds to minutes, anxiety is months to years
• Post adrenaline energy discharge is important to avoid PTSD
• Break the cycle by
  • Recognize the onset of anxiety
  • Identify what it leads to
  • Reflect on how you felt (without judgement or editorial)
• The more you wear glasses, the more they alter your perspective and the more comfortable they are
• All experiences can move us forward if we learn from them
• We only service pleasure when paying attention
• Habits without immediate rewards are difficult to make
• Beating yourself up about the past is not learning
• “Forgiveness is giving up on having a better past”
• There is Interest and Depravation Curiosity
  • Depravation is the stress of not knowing
  • Interest is when you explore something new
• Rewards Based Learning triggers the same brain parts as meeting bodily needs
• “If someone dies, first take your own pulse.”
• Lean into oncoming anxiety. There is no way to avoid it, so make the most of it. This is your experience, experience it.
• Recognize, accept, investigate, note.
• Focus on what triggered you not why you are triggered
• Focus on “one day at a time”, it is less scary than next year

• Search your feelings
  • Excited, for or against, can be a sign of bad data
• Ponder your personal experience
  • “Naïve reality” is when we think our perceptions are more accurate than they really are (most often because the news weights our perceptions to the novel)
  • We often substitute a hard question for an easier one, without knowing it
  • (Instead of “how many pregnant teenagers are there?” we ask “have I recently experienced a news story about pregnant teenagers”)
  • Be careful of how metrics are being leveraged
• Avoid premature enumeration
  • Definitions can skew enumerations
  • Start by understanding what was meant
  • Once you learn something, it is difficult to remember that everyone else is not familiar
  • Inference is an easy way
• Step back and enjoy the view
  • Carrying around reference numbers can help context
  • Good news tends to unfold slowly while bad news happens radiply
  • Reporting cadence can have a powerful effect on context
• Get the backstory
  • Survivorship bias pervades… No one is interested is the expected
  • This is especially true with replication studies
  • Be wary of hypothesis made after the study is started
• Ask who is missing
  • Females are almost always missing from studies
  • Almost every audience (especially “found” data) has response bias
  • “n=all” usually really means “n=all the people who do or have a thing“
• Demand transparency when the computer says “No”
  • Look for algorithm’s explanatory power or else they may be associating “winter trends” with flu cases
  • Algorithms are built by human and so can easily have bias built-in (hiring algorithms trained to hire men)
  • Transparency is what killed alchemy and brought science
  • We should question which algorithms we can trust
• Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted
  • Basic understandings are important for building senses of the world
• Remember that misinformation can be beautiful, too
  • Graphics lend authenticity, the more beautiful the more believable
  • Florence Nightingale was a statistician
• Keep an open mind
  • We naturally fill in data blanks
  • “Things are going badly, so do something different”
  • Making public commitments makes it harder to take back
  • When information changes, change your conclusions
• Be curious
  • Confirmation bias is real and powerful
  • Scientific curiosity is key (not scientific literacy)
  • Asking people to rate their knowledge, then explain how something works, can reduce stubbornness
  • “Please explain that” can do a lot to soften extreme stances

• “Ask yourself the question”
• For some, introspection is detrimental
• Our default state is non-present (future looking or past remembering; 30%-50% of our waking hours)
• Linguistic skills co-develop with self-control skills
• “Zooming out” helps calm out inner voices
• Time can be a natural way to zoom out
• “Invisible help” perseveres self-esteem
• Touch helps other’s manage their chatter
• Nature experiences (real or virtual, visual or auditory) create calm
  • The point is to create “awe”
• Voluntary attention exhausts quickly and needs to be recharged
• Imposing physical order creates calm
• Placebos, “good luck charms”, and rituals have a real affect on the brain
• Beliefs shape expectations which can hush the chatter

Tools

• Self-talk
  • User your name and 2nd person “you”
  • Ask what you would say to a friend in the same situation
  • Reframe the challenge is terms of situations you have handled before
  • Remind yourself that your body’s response to stress is there to help you
  • Normalize your situation
  • Think about future-you
  • Visualize the problem and zoom out
  • Write about your thoughts
  • Perform a ritual or hand a charm
• Tools that use other people
  • Address cognitive and emotional needs (validate their experiences and provide suggestions)
  • Invisibly support
  • Touch affectionately
  • Be someone else’s placebo
• Environment
  • Create order
  • Expose yourself to green space
  • Seek out awe-inspiring experiencing