Should I resume child-like learning skills during COVID-19 quarantine?

Why would one want to return to child learning skills when you have developed so much better learning skills later in life?

Consider this: if you had been born in a different region of the world, your worldview would be dramatically different. Yes/no? Of course! When we were defenseless children our parents and the surrounding culture imbued (programmed if you wish) us with a set of VABEs. Current research (Tversky, Kahneman and others) confirm that people make decisions based on their VABEs over evidence and data. People in the majority would rather believe what they believe than trust in scientific evidence. !!! By the billions. So why go back to being a defenseless child and accept what others programmed us with—their VABEs.

A better approach, IMO, is to take this quarantined time to examine one’s own VABEs, write them down, and reflect on their functionality and dysfunctionality. Here’s a way to start:

1. Write down what you thought your parents were trying to teach you. By precept and example. One of the thousands my Depression Era parents tried to teach me was “use it up, wear it out, fix it up or do without.”
2. William Glasser’s book Choice Theory identifies the deeper subconscious way that our parents influenced us—by how much attention and what kind of attention we received. IF we didn’t get changed when we needed it, didn’t get fed when we needed it, didn’t get hugged when we needed it we may have “learned” something like “I’m not important.” And that kind of deep VABE can damage our lives thereafter. Freud once noted that “we spend our adult lives dealing with the residue of our childhoods.” Several years ago I asked my Mother what she was trying to teach me as a child. During that conversation she noted that when I was a baby and she was managing the motel my Father had built she didn’t have time to deal with me. SO, when I was fussy, she’d put a bottle in my mouth and leave there until the milk ran out my mouth and then I’d go to sleep. That struck a chord with me because — guess what — when I’ve been stressed at work or whatever, my go-to habit was eating a box of cereal, yes a BOX, until the milk was rising up my esophagus and then I’d go to bed. All that tendency was formed before I had conscious thought or memory. REALIZING where that (bad) habit came from was just the beginning. Now I still have to manage myself away from that “firmware” programming. (Genetics is the “hardware” and thought is the “software.”)
3. Learn to watch and listen for VABEs in what others say and do. What must they believe—consciously or not— to behave (say and do) that way? Does that VABE make sense?

I conclude that it’s ALL about VABEs. Unless we get to seeing and working there at Level Three (see Getting Below the Surface ) we are just pinging off the hard surface.

I hope this helps. Here are some VABEs that my parents “taught” “programmed” into me and which I’ve become aware of and examined carefully later in life:

1. Children are weapons to use in a bad marriage.
2. Fat is bad.
3. Waste is bad, clean your plate.
4. There is a God who cares about you.
5. Drinking and smoking is normal.
6. Work before Play. Do your homework before you play.
7. When you’re stressed, eat until you can’t eat any more.
8. Don’t ever contradict me (the Parent). Ever! Do what I tell you!
9. Work for what you want. Nothing is free.
10. Clean as you go. Clean your room, the garage, the yard, the house. Don’t leave your trash around. Don’t litter.
11. Never make a trip empty handed—wherever you are going, carry something. Don’t waste a trip.

Just a small snippet of the thousands. What are yours?  

How Can I Become More Articulate even if I Stutter?

I’m sympathetic. I stuttered badly in high school. Later I learned several things.

1. Slow down. My thoughts were often racing and way ahead of my mouth.
2. Don’t overemphasize others’ opinions of you. We all worry about the rejection of others. In my case, beginning with my Mother. Learn to rely LESS on others’ opinions for your self-esteem.
3. Understand that there are TWO TRANSLATIONS that are necessary to communicate well. Translation #1 is from “happening/experience” to “thought.” Many people live mindlessly unaware of what’s happening to them and why. Translation #2 is from “thought” to “speech.” Thoughts are ethereal floating around on the quadrillion synaptic connections in our totally imprisoned and encased brains. See the chart below.
4. Form your opinions consciously. Don’t rely on momentary impulsive thoughts to be the basis for your opinions. Whatever the topic— healthcare, sex, immigration, money, economy, religion— study and read until you have satisfied yourself that you have a reasoned, well thought out opinion. Being on the spot and having nothing really to say contributes to the hesitation and stuttering.
5. Practice expressing your opinions. I do this in the car, in the shower, while mowing the lawn, all the time, thinking and then OUT LOUD practicing finding the words to describe my conclusions about hundreds of topics. You have to do this one at a time, so it takes a while to build up your repertoire of opinions, but the time and energy invested is well spent. I practice constantly. My wife says, “Who are you talking to in the shower?” I reply, “I’m imagining the conversation with this CEO when he asks me about XYZ.” This is practicing Translation #2.
6. Write your opinions down. Even better than THOUGHT to SPEECH is writing it down. That forces you to find the right words. I often learn from myself from what I’ve written down about the Translation #2 process. Writing your conclusions down is KEY. A diary. A blog. On Facebook. Wherever. This is better practice at Translation #2 than speaking out loud—which is good. See #5 above. When you have found the words to write AND you practice speaking slowly for dramatic effect (and practice that too) you have your thoughts organized and gelled in place and any and every opportunity to express them is welcomed.
7. Never express your new found and formed opinions as facts. They are opinions however well researched and thought out. Avoid the stative verbs. (See E-Prime Language) It’s highly arrogant to assume that one’s opinions are absolute truth. It’s all about VABEs.

I hope this helps. Good luck. If you want more, check out my web site. Getting Below the Surface

What are the characteristics of a great executive leader?

Leadership theories abound.  Trait theory studies were discontinued at Ohio State when the number of traits exceeded hundreds. Path-goal theory.  Contingency Theory.  And many more.  SO many wonderful scholars have commented on this topic.  John Kotter, Kouzes and Posner, Henry Mintzberg, and many more.  

“Leadership” occurs at different levels and in different contexts and the attributes that might suit one situation may not fit another. Is leadership transportable? That’s been a big debate for a long time.

If we are talking about executive level leadership, leading an organization in the blue waters of shark-filled oceans, then IMO

1. Clarity of purpose and vision—something people can believe in and commit deeply to. What’s your purpose for existing (one sentence) and where in detail do you see the organization being in 10, 20, 50 years?
   
   
2. Determination to make that mission and vision achieved—never give up.
   
   
3. Ability to connect with and influence others—to sell your mission and vision (not the same things) so that others want to follow you. Including a good sense of humor. (More "soft skills")
   
   
4. Thick skin—no matter what you do, some will strive to take you out. It’s part of the role, just acknowledge and move on.
   
   
5. Care for the Commons—air, water, soil, flora, fauna, and Others. Don't pollute.  Leave the world cleaner than you found it.
   
   
6. Desire to be a net-contributor, not a net-extractor—give more than you take. Build society not your own net-worth.
   
   
7. Deep integrity—truth telling, promise keeping, respect for others, fairness. No lying cheating stealing or deceiving. (Thanks Rich Teerlink of Harley Davidson)  
   
   
8. Global Perspective--organizations compete across oceans and national boundaries.  

What is the value of "soft skills?"

Soft Skills have to do with things that are hard to measure, things like managing relationships, emotional stability, happiness, contentment, morality and influence. Hard Skills are those that are easier to measure: profits, engineering, manufacturing, athletic performance, etc.

Kaplan and Norton at Harvard Business School wrote about strategic mapping. At the base of their four level model were “intangible assets.” Things that are hard to measure like human capital pools (the sum of what all the employees can do), social capital asset pools (the net sum of value created by the way people interact—can be positive or negative) and organizational capital pools (the value added or detracted by the way we are organized). These are intangible capital pools because unlike financial capital they are hard to measure and therefore don’t appear on your balance sheet and income statements.

The goal of executive management is to transform intangible asset pools into tangible results like sales and profits that DO appear on your balance sheets and income statements. These are “soft skills.” How does one measure HC+SC+OC?

Or take a more micro example: a doctor’s bedside manner. Or a salesperson’s style. Or a company’s culture. Let’s assume that all three are equal in skill set. The doctor can diagnose and treat appropriately. The sales person knows their product and how to sell. The company can produce a quality product or service.

Now add soft skills. If one can get the same product or service but in one place they get a poke in the eye and a kick in the shin and in the other place they get a Japanese haircut, which would they choose?

What’s a Japanese haircut? At 19, I went to live in Japan for a while. After a month I needed a haircut. Where to go? In Idaho a haircut consisted of an elderly man with a translucent nylon smock using rusty sheep shears going zip zip zip while watching a black and white television showing football reruns. Quick blower once over. Ten minutes in and out, ten bucks. The rusty shears would pull some hairs out leaving a little blood perhaps but pain at least. Next! And I’m itching all day long for the cut hairs down my neck.

I picked a random barber shop. Five young women in blue and white uniforms lined up and said, “Irrasshaimase!” “Please come into our humble shop.” The first young lady took me to the shampoo station and shampooed my hair not once but three times. The second young lady took me to the cutting station and instead of zip zip zip swipes, she made a perfect taper with comb and scissors (sharp no rust). It felt like she was cutting every hair individually. The third young lady took me to the shaving station and then with hot towels and hot lather and a straight razor shaved my cheeks, chin, neck and THEN to my surprise my forehead, nose, and ear lobes. And THEN she cut the hair out of my ears and nose! No blood. No pain. Then the fourth young lady took me to the, what I learned later was the differentiating factor, head and neck massage station. Ten minutes of incredibly soothing head and neck massage. The fifth young lady took me to the grooming station. Instead of a blower, she used a small vacuum! Genius! That felt like another massage. Groomed me and put something that smelled really good on there. Then, they all lined up and said, “One US dollar please, and come again soon!” My answer was, “Can we do it again right now?”

Was it a haircut or an experience? See Pine and Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy. The profit margins are in the soft skills—the ability to understand customers well enough to give them a superior experience on top of presumed quality in product or service.

The experience economy is based on a set of VABEs that are very hard to imitate and copy. The VABE that if we give the customer a superior experience in addition to assumed core competency and quality, we can charge higher margins.

Soft skills are hard to imitate, hard to copy and therefore provide a superior, strategic, sustainable competitive advantage. (SSSCA) 

 

What's the most difficult feedback you ever got and how did it change your life?

I asked my mentor at Harvard to watch me teach one day. He said okay. That night I prepared late into the night. The next day he sat in the back and watched. After class, like Odie the Dog, I ran to his office panting for positive feedback. He said, “Jim, you’re boring!”

THUNK! An arrow to the heart!  OUCH!

Then he went on. “I notice you play basketball with the doctoral students at noon.”

"Yes," I said. "I love basketball."

"Well, it’s apparent. You come back floating two inches above the floor, glowing, and exuding energy. You’ve got to figure out how to play basketball in the classroom."

I went away sad and confused. Basketball was playing, teaching was work. Never the twain should meet. Then it occurred to me: You have to start some way—there’s a tipoff. Then you pass the ball to others who dribble and do their thing. Then the ball is passed to another. Someone dunks it, we all go wow and then race down the court to the other end. 

The “ball” is who’s talking in class! You COULD play basketball in the classroom! And that insight changed my whole philosophy of teaching and how I approached it. And I was later rated the 2nd best teacher at HBS (after Michael Porter that year). That change was the foundation for 35 years of extra-ordinary experiences in classrooms all over the world.

BEST PIECE OF ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED. Thanks Tony. Rest in peace!

How can I become smarter?

What is “smart?” Howard Gardner at Harvard posits seven different kinds of “smarts” including movement, artistic, etc in addition to math and science kinds. Here's one summary:  https://www.verywellmind.com/gardners-theory-of-multiple-intelligences-2795161 

If you want to become more aware of how the world works, READ READ READ. We have 11 family principles. #7 is “Read or you will have nothing to say.” Read widely—science, cosmology, evolution, climate change, culture change, politics.

THEN be careful never to assert your opinions as if they were facts. Avoid the stative verbs, to be. Never assume you are automatically “right.” Listen. Try to understand other people’s AND your own VABEs. When someone says “This is the truth.” be wary. Usually it’s in reality an opinion. Here's one summary of Albert Ellis's concept:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime  

Don’t be too quick to share what you’ve learned. Beware of the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia ) in which people who know a little overestimate their understanding—they know just enough to not know what they don’t know. People tend to overestimate themselves—everyone wants to be “above average.”

If you love to learn, and you read read read to satisfy your curiosity you will come to understand more about the way the world is. Don’t worry about what others say about whether you are smart or not. Smart is as smart does.

I relied on what others told me for a long time. Eventually I realized that much of that was rubbish. When I retired, I wrote a book, A Song of Humanity to provide a evidence based alternative to all of that. Check out the Table of Contents.

Learning is a life-long pursuit. The day you stop learning is the day that will be just like yesterday.

What is a "Well Rounded Person?"

I’ve developed a self-assessment tool to demonstrate and visualize this concept. First consider that we all have a dozen or more “—AL” aspects of life, like physical, financial, emotional, intellectual, professional, marital, etc. If we take “zero development” as our state at birth, we can compare our personal development with “world-class” (best of humans) development on each dimension and display that on a radar chart. You can also chart, somewhere in between zero and ten, what your personal goals are.

This is a great way to check your annual growth, your current profile and where if at all you want to make changes, “rounding out” your profile in the coming year—a more careful New Year’s Resolution process.

Here’s what a chart might look like:

We can also cluster and divide the —AL aspects into Professional, Personal, Social, and Societal sectors.

Here’s a link to the tool which you can download for free. Self-Assessment and Career Management Tools See the “Balancing Your Life” spreadsheet on the menu.

You can enter your self-assessment of your current development and enter your goals for each dimension and the radar chart will automatically appear. Again, the origin/center of the diagram is all of our states at birth—zero development. “TEN” represents world-class development on that dimension. World-class financially, for example is Bill Gates (~$150b in 2020) or V. Putin (~$200b). World-class spiritually would be (pick your favorite —Pope? Dalai Lama? ) World class physically would be Olympic Gold Medalist or World Record Holder. You can add YOUR goals in the second column—so you can see how you compare to other humans and to your own preferences.

NOW, a ROUND PROFILE is not necessarily the desired result. In fact, a round profile might suggest one is a “jack of all trades, master of none.” A colleague of mine once said, “Excellence is a neurotic lifestyle.” By which he meant to be really good at something one has to specialize. Many world-class performers were decidedly NOT well-rounded. Athletes, financiers, doctors, artists, etc.

So, put in your preferences and don’t let society’s definition of “well-rounded” confuse your goals and desires to be really good at something. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour guideline bears here—to be good at something, one has to focus and invest intensely.

“Well Rounded” might mean physically and emotionally “healthy,” a societal contributor/voter, a caring spouse and parent, and financially self-reliant. Where we all land on those dimensions over the course of our lives is a function of our weekly choices. Every week, we allocate our 168 hours and “demonstrate” our chosen “balance.” We can’t do that every day. And if we only exercised once a month, that wouldn’t work. So the WEEK is the BUILDING BLOCK OF LIFE.

The Balance Wheel tool will help you see and choose what kind of life you want. And what “well rounded” means to you.

Enjoy.  

Why study MOTIVATION?

People hire other people to work for them. From one or two up to hundreds of thousands. My Buy-In Scale posits a seven level response to being asked to do something.

1. Passion. What you ask is the #1 thing in my life. I may even blow myself up to do as you ask.
2. Engagement. I WANT to do what you ask me to do.
3. Agreement. I will do what you ask.
4. Compliance. I say I will do what you want and then I look for ways to cut corners or play just within the guidelines. I might go nine miles over the speed limit just to avoid arrest.
5. Apathy. I don’t care about what you ask me to do. Meh.
6. Passive Resistance. I will go slow, lose the paperwork, drag my feet.
7. Active Resistance. I will fight you on this. Organize a strike or sabotage the company.

Notice that this scale is essentially an ENERGY SCALE from high positive to high negative. If a manager threatens bodily harm, how will the person respond? If a person offers more money, how will the Other respond? etc.

I look at human behavior in three levels: Visible Behavior that you can capture on film, Conscious Thought which we may or may not reveal at Level One, and semi-conscious VABEs.

Each level involves different influence techniques:

1. Visible Behavior: rewards and punishments. Skinnerian theory.
2. Conscious Thought: science, logic, data, evidence. Cognitive theory
3. VABEs: clarity of purpose, vision, strategy. Symbols, flags, music, uniforms, religion, etc.

Scholars have been appropriately interested in “MOTIVATION” because of these challenges. Herzberg, Kohn (Punished by Rewards), Maslow, McClelland, Vroom, Skinner, and many others have studied motivation.

The basic question is “why are some people doing things and others are not?”  What makes one person get up in the morning and do things while another never seems to "apply" themselves?  Why are some people good workers and others are not?  

Here are two of hundreds of articles that one might find helpful.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532670.pdf

https://www.knowledgehut.com/tutorials/project-management/motivation-theories 

What is Adult Education?

Actually, there has been a lot of research on how adults learn. First, let’s consider what is an adult? Age is no guarantee of wisdom. To me, a person becomes an adult when and if they reach a point in life where/when they can relatively objectively examine the VABEs they were programmed with as defenseless children and decide which they want to Keep, which to Lose, and which to Add to their worldview. Most people never get there, that is, they live and die simply, like viral shells, replicating and perpetuating the VABEs they were taught as children. (See The Evolving Self by M. Csikszentmihalyi.) So while as people age, they may learn a trade or profession, they tend to live mindlessly (See Ellen Langer’s work Mindfulness )

Secondly, there are several books about how adults learn. Authors Malcolm Knowles and Ken Bain come to mind. I’ve adapted the bulk of Ken Bain’s observations in his book What the Best College Teachers Do in the slide below.


The next question might be the on-going challenge of people who pay for “adult education” like corporate training departments who hire consultants to teach their people or do it themselves to demonstrate any value in the “education” sessions. Is there a way to measure the impact of educational experiences?

Most organizations conduct post-experience surveys to gather participants’ subjective ratings/evaluations. Often those surveys include qualitative comments about the experiences as well. BUT, did their behavior actually change?

Given my opening comments above and informal surveys I’ve conducted in seminars worldwide from about 2,000 participants the odds are the answer is not really. And it has to do with VABEs.

Consider three levels of human behavior: visible behavior that can be captured on film (Level One), conscious thought which we may or may not reveal at Level One (Level Two), and our semi-conscious VABEs. (Level Three) I’ve asked thousands of people how much of human behavior at each level is HABITUAL, that is, mindlessly repetitive. (Again, see Langer) The answers consistently fell along the lines of 75%, 85% and 99% for Levels One, Two, and Three respectively. In their experience, these people from six continents argue that human behavior is largely habitual in nature, ESPECIALLY at the level of VABEs.
So why even try to teach adults? My answer is I’m looking for those 5–25% of people who are open to considering changing what they do. And I work/worked hard to challenge them to BE open to change and to reflect on their willingness and to identify and examine their VABEs throughout my week-long seminars. Most won’t change—I accepted that. And some will.

In the end, the question comes down to each individual—will YOU be willing to examine what you DO, how you THINK, and what you BELIEVE? People, adults, can change—it’s just that the odds are low.

IF the topic of the adult education has to do with physical skills like welding or coding or even interpersonal skills (more difficult), we can easily measure the impact of education--we measure skills beforehand and afterward. The VABEs that govern how people lead or how they relate to others or how they create strategies are much more difficult to change and to measure.