Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time?

There is an 8 out of 10 chance that you are one of the poorest people in the world. However, when I say you’re poor, I’m not talking about your bank account (although material poverty is indeed a pressing concern for many of us).

Rather, I mean you are time poor: You have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Time poverty affects all cultures and crosses all economic strata. Most of us feel this way.

In 2012, about 50 percent of working Americans reported they were “always rushed,” and 70 percent “never” had enough time. In 2015, more than 80 percent said they didn’t have the time they needed.

If you’re worried that this is some kind of first-world problem and that you should just get on with it, don’t. Time poverty is a serious problem, with serious costs for individuals and society. The data that I and others have amassed show a correlation between time poverty and misery. People who are time poor are less happy, less productive and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. Time poverty forces us to compromise. Instead of preparing a nutritious dinner, we grab chips and guac and munch mindlessly while staring at our screens.

The most obvious explanation is that we simply spend more time working than previous generations but evidence doesn’t support this theory. Time diaries show that men’s leisure time in the US, for instance, has increased six to nine hours a week in the past 50 years, while women’s has increased four to eight hours a week.

Why, then, do we feel more time poor than ever?

Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours. It’s as much psychological as it is structural. We are ceaselessly connected. When free time arrives, we are unprepared to use it so we waste it. Or, we tell ourselves we shouldn’t take a break so we work right through it.

The first step to becoming time smart is to identify the time traps in your life.

Time trap #1: Technology interruptions break our hours into confetti 

Technology saves us time, but it also takes it away — this is known as the autonomy paradox. We adopt mobile technologies to gain autonomy over when and how long we work, yet ironically we end up working all the time. Long blocks of free time that we used to enjoy are now interrupted constantly by our devices. This situation taxes us cognitively and fragments our leisure time in a way that makes it hard to use.

I and other researchers call this phenomenon “time confetti”, the little bits of seconds and minutes lost to unproductive multitasking. Each bit alone is not very bad, but all that confetti adds up to something more pernicious.

Consider this example. Let’s say you have one hour of leisure at 7PM. During that hour, you receive two emails, check both and respond to one; four Twitter notifications, and you thumb through the replies for one of them; three Slack notifications from colleagues asking you questions or a favor, of which you answer one and ignore two; one alarm reminding you to call your mother tomorrow on her birthday; and four texts from a friend trying to make plans for next weekend, all four of which you reply to.

Each of these events takes only seconds — but collectively they create two negative effects. The first is the sheer volume of time they take away from your hour. A few seemingly harmless interruptions can usurp 10 percent of this leisure time. However, research shows that our estimates of interruptions is conservative, so typically it may be worse than this.

The second and more invasive effect of time confetti is the way it fragments an hour of leisure. Most likely, these interruptions are randomly distributed throughout your hour so the hour of leisure becomes several smaller chunks, sometimes only five or six minutes long. Even if you’re disciplined about not responding or not responding very quickly, the interruptions undermine the quality of those chunks of leisure time by reminding you of all the activities that you could or should be doing.

It also takes time to cognitively recover from shifting our minds from the present to a stress-inducing activity. People end up enjoying their free time less and, when asked to reflect on it, estimate that they had less free time than they actually did. Time confetti makes us feel even more time impoverished than we actually are.

Time trap #2: We focus too much on money

Another trap is a cultural obsession with work and making money. We are taught — incorrectly — that money, not time, will bring greater happiness.

Research shows that money protects against sadness but doesn’t buy joy. Once we make enough money to pay our bills, save for the future and have some fun, making more does little for our happiness.

In data from 1.7 million people in 165 countries, researchers figured out the exact dollar amount at which added money no longer increases happiness. After we make USD$65,000/year — or $60,000 globally — money stops predicting how much we laugh or smile each day. After we make USD$105,000/year ($95,000 globally), money stops predicting how well we think we are doing in life.

If anything, once people make a lot of money — $105,000/year in the United States — they start thinking they are doing worse in life. When we become rich, we begin to compare our lives to people even richer than we are.

Having money definitely shields us from stress. When your car breaks down, money provides a solution. And having cash on hand even provides peace of mind in the absence of a crisis. But staving off negative outcomes is different from creating happier ones.

I will repeat this point, because it’s so important: Money does not buy joy.

A culture obsessed with making more money believes, wrongly, that the way to become more time affluent is to become financially wealthier. We think, “I’ll work hard and make more so that I can afford more leisure time later.” This is the wrong solution. Focusing on chasing wealth leads only to an increased focus on chasing wealth.

Time trap #3: We undervalue our time

Because of a cultural obsession with money, many people protect their money in ways that are counterproductive to time affluence.

In one survey, 52 percent of people who were financially comfortable but extremely time poor — working parents with young kids — said they’d rather have more money than more time. Asked how they would spend a hypothetical $100 prize to increase their happiness, only 2 percent of working parents said they would spend this money to save time, such as by having groceries delivered. People who could clearly afford to value time — people who had an average of $3 million in the bank — still said that they would rather have more money.

It’s hard for us to measure time’s value. Even if we’re making a bad trade-off between time and money — such as driving two miles out of our way to save 10 cents per gallon on gas — it doesn’t feel like a bad choice. That’s because we don’t really know the worth of the time it took.

When you book a trip with connecting flights to get a slightly cheaper price, you are falling into a time trap. Suppose you save $300 on that flight, but it takes 8 hours total out of your vacation time and increases your fatigue and stress because you have to get up early and switch planes. Would you pay $300 for an extra eight hours of vacation — a full workday’s worth — along with less stress and fatigue?

The trap is simple: We reflexively go for the lowest cost when we shouldn’t. Let’s look at the gas example more closely. You consistently drive an extra six minutes to a different station to save 15 cents per gallon, and you go in for a 15-gallon fill-up four times a month. Impulsively it seems worth it — six minutes isn’t that much, and the savings will add up.

15 cents × 15 gallons = $2.25 saved per trip

$2.25 × 4 visits per month = $9.00 saved per month

$9.00 per month over 12 months = $108 saved per year

But someone aware of time traps would see it differently:

6 minutes per trip × 4 visits per month = 24 minutes lost per month

24 minutes per month × 12 months = 4.8 hours lost per year

Looking at it this way, you’ve spent almost five hours to save $108. This doesn’t take into account the opportunity cost of what you could have done with that five hours instead of driving out of your way to save money.

You might still feel that this trade-off is worth it. But doing these calculations puts a different lens on time value, which we tend to grossly underestimate.

Time trap #4: We regard busyness as a status symbol

More than ever, our identities are tied to work. The best data show that people living in the US increasingly look toward work — not friends, families or hobbies — to find purpose. In a 2017 survey, 95 percent of young adults said that having an “enjoyable and meaningful career” was “extremely important” to them.

Given the importance that we place on work, busyness at work carries status. We wear it like a badge of honor. We want to be seen as the employee who works the longest hours, even when these hours aren’t productive.

Financial insecurity also drives workism, and it’s on the rise. As society becomes more unequal, people feel increasingly insecure about their financial future, regardless of their current stature. Those doing well worry about how far they could fall. Those struggling to make ends meet fear falling farther behind.

Most of us cope by working more and trying to make more money. And we feel guilty about spending money on things that make us happy, such as dining out or vacations.

With our self-identity so wrapped up in work and productivity, the social appearance of being busy makes us feel good about ourselves. In contrast, focusing our attention on something other than work can threaten our livelihood and status. We worry we won’t be valued, and, in part, we are right.

Turns out employers are mostly rewarding the cult of busyness. Research shows that employees who boast about working nonstop and being extremely busy are seen by others as better workers who have more money and prestige, even if they don’t. They’re even thought to be more physically attractive.

Even if it feels good in the moment for someone to see the email you sent on Saturday at 8:30PM, this behavior contributes to an unhealthy, unhappy life.

Time trap #5: We have an aversion to idleness

Even if we lived in a perfectly equal society, we would still create time stress for ourselves because human beings are not built for idleness.

Researchers call this idleness aversion, and it makes us do some strange things. Dan Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, placed some college students in an empty room and gave them nothing to do. Many preferred giving themselves mild electric shocks to being left alone with their thoughts. Another study showed that working parents felt “bored” and “stressed” during leisure activities, signaling that even the most time poor among us don’t know how to relax.

Technology may help us avoid being alone with our thoughts, but it is a trap that contributes to stress and time poverty. Being constantly connected to our devices prevents the brain from recovering, keeps our stress levels elevated and takes us out of the present.

In fact, idleness has been shown to be a valuable form of leisure and can increase time affluence. The physical and mental benefits of disengaging the brain are far more valuable than the stress created by keeping the mind engaged at all times.

Time trap #6: We think we have more time tomorrow than we actually do 

Most of us are overly optimistic about our future time. We mistakenly believe that we will have more time tomorrow than we do today. This is sometimes referred to as the “planning fallacy” I call it the “Yes … damn!” effect. Let me explain.

Last Monday, a friend asked if I could help her move on Saturday. No problem. On Tuesday, a colleague asked me to look over her report by Saturday. I said yes. On Wednesday, another friend invited me out for dinner on Saturday at a new restaurant that I wanted to try. I said yes. I said yes over and over and over until Saturday morning, when I woke up and thought, “Damn! What was I thinking!”

Actually, as a happiness researcher, I know what I was thinking: “Even though I’m too busy now, Saturday is a ways off, and I’ll have time to do these things.”

Statistically, the best predictor of how busy we are going to be next week is how busy we are right now. Our minds frequently forget this important point and trick us into believing we’ll have more time later than we do now. This overoptimism means that we’re cavalier with our yeses, even for small stuff we don’t want to do. We also want to say yes; we see it as a way to overcome idleness and feel productive, connected, valued, respected and loved.

But where does the time to fulfill these yeses come from? From the leisure time that we could be using to feel more time affluent, of course. Ironically, perpetual busyness undermines the goals that we set out to achieve with all our busyness in the first place.

While these are the six most common time traps, of course there are many other reasons that we fail to prioritize time. For now, your goal should be to recognize and document the time traps that you fall into most often.

Keep in mind: Your time traps won’t be the same as other people’s. What makes it a trap for you is that it makes you unhappy and steals time that you would otherwise use in a way that makes you happy.

We all have the power to overcome the time traps we have fallen victim to. Like getting fit, increasing your time affluence requires taking small, deliberate steps each day to have more free time and enjoy it. And like getting fit, it’s not easy at first. Both our society and our psychology make these time traps extremely appealing.

Keeping the exercise metaphor going, just as you shouldn’t punish yourself for not being perfect in your workout habits, don’t ever beat yourself up about being bad at prioritizing time. Multiple forces are making it difficult. We don’t naturally respond to time poverty in a way that controls it. In fact, when we feel busy, studies show that we take on small, easy-to-complete tasks because they help us feel more control over our time. In this case, it’s a false sense of control that doesn’t alleviate the root cause of our busyness.

Even though time poverty feels the same for everyone, time affluence looks different for everyone. It could mean spending 15 more minutes strumming the guitar instead of scrolling through your phone, or it could be 10 minutes of meditation or a Saturday morning learning how to invest your savings instead of Slacking about work gossip.

No matter what time affluence looks like for you, the happiest and most time affluent among us are deliberate with their free time. Working toward time affluence is about recognizing and overcoming the time traps in our lives and intentionally carving out happier and more meaningful moments each day.

Excerpted from the new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life by Ashley Whillans. Copyright © 2020 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. All rights reserved.

Watch her TEDxCambridge Talk here: 

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/which-of-these-6-time-traps-is-eating-up-all-your-time/
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6 public art projects that make climate change up close and personal

For some people, climate change can be an abstract concept, especially if they’re living somewhere that hasn’t experienced serious effects yet.

Art is one effective way to provide people with a vision of what the future could look like if we do take action — or if we don’t.

That’s why TED Countdown — a global rallying cry to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and move towards a zero-carbon world — has partnered with the nonprofit Fine Acts to launch 10 public artworks from TED Fellows on 10.10.2020.

Four of them were covered in a previous post, and here’s a look at the other six. (Go here to see and learn more about all of the artists and their works.)

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Image: Courtesy of Bahia Shehab.

Cairo is perhaps best known for the nearby Pyramids of Giza, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world. But today, in the shadows of one of humankind’s greatest architectural achievements, is also the city’s massive waste-management problem. To highlight the issue, artist and historian Bahia Shehab decided to build a pyramid of her own — out of trash. On display for one week at a location in Cairo, the pyramid challenges people to rethink their consumption and waste habits.

“As a species, we have built monuments that have defeated time. We have designed civilizations that dreamt of eternity,” she says. “With climate change, this eternity is now challenged. Now is the time for us to rethink our legacy on this planet. Are we going to come together to build a sustainable future for all of us — or will our new legacy be pyramids of garbage?”

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GIF: Matt Kenyon.

As rising seas continue advancing upon coastlines, millions of people in the US alone are at risk of displacement. (Worldwide, one estimate says the number could be close to 500 million people.) To illustrate this threat, new media artist Matt Kenyon designed two haunting art installations — called TIDE and Cloud — at Eleven Twenty Projects in Buffalo, New York, which are on display until December 2020. “Both works provide a visceral representation of the next housing crisis, when homes lose their value and families are displaced due to the forces of climate change,” he says.

Image: Matt Kenyon.

TIDE is a 15-foot-tall champagne glass pyramid. Each glass holds a miniature house (shown above) made from a unique material that appears to turn invisible when submerged in water, symbolizing the homes lost to rising tides.

GIF: Matt Kenyon.

Cloud represents disappearing opportunities. A machine produces house shapes out of helium foam. These homes shrink and grow in tandem with real-time housing and climate data, before floating out of reach in the sky. “The viewers witness common house-ownership dreams disappear as fast as they materialize,” Kenyon says.

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Image: Camille Seaman.

The vanishing ice in Arctic and Antarctica may seem faraway to many people, but for photographer Camille Seaman, currently based in Limerick, Ireland, glacial melt and sea-level rise are close by. “It is estimated that 70,000 Irish addresses are at risk of coastal flooding by 2050,” she explains. “A three-meter storm surge to such low-lying areas such as Limerick would have devastating effects.”

Image: Camille Seaman.

Seaman has traveled to both the North and South Poles, where she has captured the  ice in photographs and video to viscerally show us what’s happening there and what’s headed our way. She’s combined some of her most haunting images into a short video, and residents of four coastal cities around the world — New York, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Limerick — are invited to project the video on their walls and buildings. Each video concludes with a slide of the sea-level rise timeline in that region by 2050 if no action is taken on climate change.

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Image: Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz.

Temperatures in Austin, Texas, are on the rise, and according to projections through 2100, climate change will put the city at higher risk of extended drought, wildfires, intense rain and flooding. Artist Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz wanted to show Texans that they are standing at a crossroads between two futures, so he designed a unique mural that changes color as it gets hotter.

In collaboration with Kimie Flores and Michu Benaim Steiner, he put this showstopper on the exterior of 501 Studios. The mural’s special thermochromic paint is activated when the temperature hits 77 degrees Fahrenheit. “This artwork calls people to ‘Change the world’ and ‘Change climate change,’ underlining the importance of individual actions to the collective future,” Gutiérrez-Ruiz explains.

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Image: Ian Byers-Gamber.

Los Angeles is no stranger to the impact of climate change. In recent years, the city has struggled to manage heatwaves, wildfires and rolling blackouts. For Countdown, artist Christine Sun Kim unveiled a public billboard on the 710 Freeway near Bandini Blvd called The Sound of Temperature Rising.

Of the image, she says, “It points to the reality of climate disaster that has become all too clear on the West Coast and the need for significant change now.” The illustration, on display until the end of October, features a graph of music notes that get progressively longer and redder until we can no longer see where they end — a plea to act on climate change before our planet reaches an irreversible tipping point.

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Image: Courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Chris Woebken, Oliver Medvedik.

Globally, species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. In response, architect Mitchell Joachim, designer Chris Woebken and biologist Oliver Medvedik partnered to create The Anti-Extinction Library in New York City’s Brooklyn Navy Yard, on display through October 2020. But their sculptural piece isn’t just strikingly beautiful — it’s also functional.

Image: Courtesy of Mitchell Joachim, Chris Woebken, Oliver Medvedik.

Their egg-shaped library contains a micro-vault of cryogenically-preserved, frozen test tubes, filled with embryonic cells and DNA of rare lifeforms. “We need to raise awareness of the urgency of preserving and defending the essential rights of diverse local species,” the artists explain. “Into each stored organism we will encode the following Nature Bill of Rights on to the DNA: All human and non-human beings are born or created free and equal in dignity and rights. Regardless of legal status and territories, they have the right to life and [to] contribute or take part in any form or shape they desire in any environment, whether natural, digital or otherwise.”

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/6-public-art-projects-that-make-climate-change-up-close-and-personal/
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Oddballs with high-level intelligence: a Q & A with Roger Hanlon about the amazing octopus

Why have we underestimated octopus, squid and other cephalopods? How do these color-blind animals achieve such a good color match when they camouflage? And how exactly do you study them in the wild? Marine scientist Roger Hanlon goes deeper into his research.

Have you ever stumbled upon a subject so intriguing that it fired your imagination and made your brain clamor for more, more, more? That’s how we felt about the talk from marine scientist Roger Hanlon where he revealed the incredible discoveries that researchers like him are making about octopus, squid and other cephalopods. TED’s Mary Halton cornered him after he spoke in Vancouver in April to learn exactly how he studies them (in brief: a lot of patience and laser focus), some of their amazing attributes, and just how much we still need to understand about them.

TED: Your talk is all about the amazing intelligence of the octopus, squid and other cephalopods. Can you put it into context for us? Where does its intelligence sit, compared to other animals — like dolphins or corvids — that we think of as being particularly smart?

Roger Hanlon: That’s an impossible question to answer [and] I’m worried about the term “intelligence.” I think the key thing is animals that are so well adapted to their specific, unusual environments. If you take that into [account], then I can easily see it’s equivalent to a corvid. I don’t think it’s quite as good as a fox, but it’s up in that category. (Editor’s note: The corvid family of birds includes crows, ravens and rooks, and it’s thought to be among the most intelligent birds studied.)

Some of the demonstrated behaviors of octopus — such as its episodic-like memory, its spatial memory — are thought to be really high-level things. So they’re comparable to fishes and birds, and, in some cases or elements, to higher vertebrates and even to mammals. Everyone thinks cats and dogs are clever — and they are in different ways — but cephalopods can do some things that are comparable to those animals.

The octopus, cuttlefish, squid — they’re just such oddballs. People just can’t imagine there’s a high level of intelligence in something that weird, but there is!

TED: Why do you think most people don’t know this about octopus? Is it because they’re not in our daily environment?

Hanlon: There are only a few charismatic species in the ocean that people pay attention to, things like dolphins and sharks. The octopus and cuttlefish and squid — they’re just such oddballs. I think they’re getting enough attention now from the media that people are beginning to see a little more, but they’re just such a strange animal. People just can’t imagine that there’s a high level of intelligence in something that weird, but there is!

TED: You point out in your talk that there there are some things we don’t understand about them because we’re not smart enough to know what questions to ask. Can you explain what you mean?

Hanlon: There are some young researchers coming into the field who are asking those very tough questions [about them]: Are they capable of play? Do they have high-level cognition? Do they do dreaming and memory consolidation the way we do? The spatial memory, for example, of an octopus is extraordinarily good. We can’t figure out how it works, and it’s something of interest to a lot of folks who study learning and memory.

The neuroscience community is starting to accept the idea that many animals have higher level cognitive capabilities, and we’ve not paid attention to them. We’re opening up our own brains and thinking, “OK, let’s look at this and see what they can do.” But it’s hard to ask the right question when you’re dealing with a cephalopod head foot. I mean, if our head was on our feet, we wouldn’t look like this! It’s alien right away, at least in appearance. (Editor’s note: The term cephalopod means “head foot” in Greek, referring to the way that a cephalopod’s head connects to its multiple arms.)

Octopuses observed by Hanlon made an average of 177 camouflage decisions in a single hour.

TED: You’ve said that only a small number of divers have observed them. How challenging is it to do fieldwork? Are there a lot of days when you don’t see anything? Is it a matter of perseverance or knowing where to look?

Hanlon: It’s all of the above. I’ve been diving for 45 years, I’ve done thousands of dives, and, early on in my career, I wasted a lot of time learning how not to do it. We eventually got smarter, took volunteer groups out, and found where their dens are. Then we would station ourselves on the den early in the day and watch from a distance until the animal came out for its normal foraging period. We’d let the octopus see the divers, spend 10 minutes habituating to them, realize they’re not a negative stimulus, they’d start their normal foraging, and we began getting real data. We would use successive dive teams with a lot of patience and a lot of wasted time underwater.

How we operate now is we do something called “focal animal sampling.” You have to be extremely disciplined to focus on one animal or one pair, and stick with it the whole time, no matter what happens. There might be something really great going on in your left peripheral eye vision, but you don’t go over and look at it because you want to quantify what this animal is doing. That’s when you get the rare behaviors, but it takes forever. Every natural history cinematographer knows this. I’m just doing it underwater, where you have a lot less time.

TED: In your talk, you speak about finding that an octopus can make as many as 100 camouflage decisions in two hours. How did you learn this? Did you follow one animal for two hours straight?

Hanlon: Yes, and we did it several times over a week-long period, so you could count the number of times it was changing. It would be here, camouflage, do a stealthy move over to here, and when it stops over here, it’s a totally different background, and they have to assess that background and modify the camouflage. They’re doing that over two hours covering a couple of 100 meters. Actually, the mean was 177 times per hour for the octopuses that we did [track].

Octopus’s camouflage reaction times are faster than any other animals’, occurring in one-fifth of a second.

TED: How do their camouflage reaction times differ from other animals, like chameleons?

Hanlon: Oh, the fastest ever. We’re talking as fast as 200 milliseconds — that’s one fifth of one second, the fastest human eye blink you can do.

TED: Can all cephalopods camouflage so quickly, or is just the octopus?

Hanlon: Almost all of them can — squid, cuttlefish, octopus. It’s because you have neuron cell bodies in the brain that go all the way out to the periphery and hook up directly to a chromatophore organ [which is what creates the color change]. So it’s the fastest wiring diagram you can create in biology; you don’t have any intermediary stops. I’m interested in rapid adaptive coloration, and that means it’s neurally controlled. There’s a lot of animal coloration that is slower and hormonally controlled. [That’s because] hormones have to take time to go into the blood, distribute, get back into the tissue, and do something. The cephalopods don’t do that at all. It’s like electric skin. It really is!

TED: That’s amazing. You mention it’s quite recently that scientists have discovered cephalopods have opsins, or light-sensitive proteins, in their skin. Is it true opsins are usually present only in the eyes of other organisms?

Hanlon: All animals have opsin molecules in their eyes; those are the molecules that absorb a photon of light and help with other molecules to turn it into a neural signal, which becomes vision. We knew what the gene was for the opsins in the retina of a cuttlefish, then we searched for that gene in the skin and found it. That was astounding. There are lots of opsins in the skin of many animals — think of frogs in particular — but [in cuttlefish] the exact same opsin that is in their retina is in their skin! That was the first that’s ever been seen.

TED: Is having these opsins in their skin somehow connected to their lightning-fast distributed decision making? Is all their skin sensing what’s around them?

Everyone thinks cats and dogs are clever — and they are in different ways — but cephalopods can do some things that are comparable to those animals.

Hanlon: That’s what we think, but we have not an ounce of data to prove that. It’s one of these really, really hard biology questions, because when you look in the skin you can detect that there are molecules but the molecules are not aggregated into a cell, tissue, organ, [or] anything that you can find. It’s just molecules in the skin.

We have no idea how the cephalopods might take that information and do something with it, because it’s only a molecule. So the idea is there, and I would even say they could probably do it — “probably” in heavy quotes — but no data. It’s really intriguing.

The question we’re trying to get at is: How do cephalopods achieve color-blind camouflage? Their predators have great color vision, and the cephalopods’ color match to their background seems to be quite good. But cephalopods are colorblind, so it’s really amazing that they can get the color so close without having color capability in the eye. That’s why we looked at the skin. We published a short paper in Biology Letters, and that got us a five-year grant and we really studied it. Now we still don’t know. Welcome to science!

TED: What does the world look like through the eyes of an octopus? Is it shades of gray or what?

Hanlon: Oh, this is a great question. Well, they do not have a round pupil. Cuttlefish, for example, have a ‘w’ shaped pupil or two slants. They have very good contrast vision. They can see polarized light — which humans are totally blind to — but they cannot see color so their world is monochromatic. It’s got the polarization signature, which probably increases contrast, and great visual acuity, and they can see at night. Now with that capability, how do they get the color right in camouflage? Nothing I mentioned has anything to do with color, so it’s still an outstanding question and we’re just too ignorant to figure it out so far!

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/oddballs-with-high-level-intelligence-a-q-a-with-roger-hanlon-about-the-amazing-octopus/
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How do good leaders give advice? The short answer: They don’t

Instead of having an answer to every question, the most effective leaders are coaches — people who can guide others to arrive at their own solutions, put them into action, and set goals, says researcher and business school professor Julia Milner.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Here’s an unfortunate truth about the working world: Too many leaders in organizations simply don’t know how to lead.

Why? In part, it’s because the skills that get someone elevated to a top job may have little to do with their ability to guide and inspire others. It’s also because many of us hold an erroneous assumption about leadership, according to Julia Milner, leadership researcher and academic director of the Global MBA program at EDHEC Business School in Nice, France. Namely, we think that a leader should be the supreme expert who can give advice to any of our employees about anything and everything.

As a result, people end up becoming overly prescriptive micromanagers. So, what separates a good leader from a so-so one? The most effective leaders are coaches, according to Milner. “Instead of teaching people, you’re helping them to arrive at their own solution,” she says in her TEDxLiege talk. And, she adds, with the right training, anyone can learn how to be a coach.

Milner, who as a management consultant works with leadership in companies in Europe, Australia and Asia, has observed this tendency towards micromanagement, and she’s seen the significant impact it can have on employee morale and turnover. As she explains, “People do not leave jobs; they leave their leader.”

To examine the problem, Milner and her colleague (and husband) Trenton Milner conducted a study. They recruited a group of 98 professionals enrolled in a leadership training course and divided them into pairs; the people in each pair were asked to coach each other on the topic of time management for five minutes. These conversations were filmed and later evaluated by the subjects and by coaching experts. After receiving 15 hours of training in leadership skills, the subjects participated in another set of five-minute coaching conversations, which were also filmed and assessed.

Despite being told before the first conversation that they should coach the other person, most subjects engaged in “motivational micromanaging,” or giving advice sweetened with a bit of motivation, reports Milner. Not surprisingly, they reported dissatisfaction with the experience when their fellow participants didn’t respond kindly to being told what to do. Milner says, “Some said to me, ‘I had such a difficult partner. I was coming up with all these great ideas and solutions, and they were basically ‘Yes, but’-ing me.’”

But after the training, “what we found was quite astonishing,” says Milner. The coaching conversations became fruitful rather than adversarial. One subject told her, “All I had to do is provide the space and the room to let them reflect, let them think it through, and arrive at a plan.”

Here, she shares some of the basics of being a good coach:

Listen

A poor leader is frequently too busy dispensing advice to fully understand the situation they’re being asked about. And because they don’t know all of the issues at stake, they risk focusing on the wrong ones. Listening allows a manager to be as informed as possible; it also shows respect and confidence in the other person.

Ask the right questions

Yes/no questions have a tendency to shut down conversations; they can also make people feel like they’re being led in a particular direction. Instead, a good manager poses open-ended questions — these gently guide the other person to brainstorm possible solutions and to decide which one is the best. “You’re acting like a sounding board, allowing room for the right answer to develop,” says Milner.

Assist with goal setting

After an employee settles on a solution, a manager should work with them to create a plan to implement it. Together, they can establish a desired outcome. This process not only serves as a spur to action, but it also ensures that the two people are aligned. “Sometimes, we think it is clear where we are heading, but often we later realize the other person was going in a completely different direction,” says Milner. “Good goal setting can avoid these misunderstandings and ensures all parties are pulling in the right direction.”

Provide useful feedback

Milner believes that good feedback is at the core of a strong team. And by “good feedback,” she says, “I don’t mean only positive feedback but constructive feedback that is well delivered and actually helps the other person to move forward.”

Watch her TEDxLiege talk now:

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/how-do-good-leaders-give-advice-the-short-answer-they-dont/
via Satellites Middlesbrough

Everything you know about hyenas is wrong — these animals are fierce, social and incredibly smart

Don’t be misled by the cringing creatures seen in The Lion King. From their biology to their social structure, spotted hyenas are complex creatures like none other on earth, explains author and conservationist Lucy Cooke.

In the animal world, the hyena has been censured by more scandalous untruths than even the sloth. They are considered nature’s thugs — condemned throughout history and across cultures and continents as dim-witted cowards, skulking in the back alleys, waiting for an opportunity to mug other, more noble, animals of their dinner.

Among the four species of hyena, the largest, most widespread and most misconstrued of is the spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta. With its scrappy fur, hunched back and wide, drooling grin, this so-called laughing hyena may not be the prettiest of animals. But our disdain goes more than skin deep; it’s personal.

The hyena’s bewildering biology is partly to blame. Here is an animal that looks and hunts like a dog but is in fact a souped-up member of the mongoose family and therefore more closely related to a cat. Over the course of several editions of his tome, Systema Naturae, zoologist Carl Linnaeus classified the hyena first as a cat, then later as dog. He never got it right.

Even more baffling than what kind of animal the hyena is, was the basic question of its gender. “It is the vulgar notion, that the hyæna possesses in itself both sexes, being a male during one year, and a female the next,” wrote Pliny the Elder in his animal encyclopedia. The Roman naturalist wasn’t the first — or the last — to suggest the hyena was a hermaphrodite. The rumor was rife in African folklore and debated by Aristotle. But while modern science has identified more than 65,000 known cross-sexual species, the hyena is not one of them.

The clitoris of female spotted hyenas extends almost eight inches, and it can even get an erection.

The likely stimulus for this myth is the female spotted hyena’s wildly unconventional genitalia, which are a near perfect facsimile of the male’s. A Crocuta’s clitoris extends almost an impressive eight inches and is shaped and positioned exactly like a penis, hence known in polite biological circles as a “pseudo-penis.” They can even get erections. To complete this trans-trickery, the female spotted hyena also appears to sport her very own pair of testicles: Her labia have fused to form a false scrotum and are filled with fatty-tissue swellings, which are quite understandably mistaken for male gonads. Paul A. Racey and Jennifer D. Skinner, authors of a paper on sexual mimicry in the spotted hyena, declared the appearance of males and females “so close that sex could only be determined with certainty by palpation of the scrotum.”

What’s more, the female spotted hyena is the only known mammal with no external vaginal opening. Instead, she must urinate, copulate and give birth through her multi-tasking pseudo-penis. This last eye-watering feat is like squeezing a cantalope out of a hosepipe, and 10 percent of first-time hyena mothers die in the process. The fate of their cubs is even more precarious, since the umbilical cord is too short to navigate a birth canal that’s not only twice the length of a similar-sized mammal’s but includes a cheeky hairpin turn halfway down. Up to 60 percent of cubs suffocate on their way out. It is easy to see how the sight of a “male” hyena giving birth through his penis led to the hermaphrodite myth (as well as a few lingering nightmares).

The female’s gender-bending doesn’t end with her fake phallus. Spotted hyenas are unlike all other mammals in that the females are significantly bigger than the males and much more aggressive. “You do not want to be a male spotted hyena,” Kay Holekamp, professor of evolutionary biology and behavior at Michigan State University, told me. She’s spent over thirty years studying Crocuta in the wild, painting a fresh portrait of these miscast creatures and earning a reputation as the Jane Goodall of hyenas.

Every hyena clan is a matriarchy ruled by an alpha female. In the clan’s strict power structure, dominance passes down the alpha female’s line to her cubs. Itinerant adult males rank last, reduced to submissive outcasts begging for acceptance, food and sex. At a communal carcass, where 30 or so hyenas might be vying for their pound of flesh, these adult males eat last — if there’s anything left — or risk violent retribution from the sisterhood. Holekamp believes the driver of the female spotted hyena’s aggression and dominance is the intense competition over carcasses. A frenzied scrum of hyenas can turn a 550-pound adult zebra into a bloody stain on the grass in under 30 minutes. In a single feeding, an adult can gobble up to one-third of its body weight, or between 33 and 44 pounds of meat. It’s a frantic, frenzied and, at times, frightening scene. A female that is bigger and meaner has a better shot of ensuring her surviving cubs get a place at the table and don’t get hurt in the process.

Dominant females have another trick for giving their cubs an aggressive advantage. A recent study by Holekamp has shown that the more powerful the female, the more testosterone her fetuses are exposed to during the final stage of pregnancy. These androgens are produced by the mother’s ovaries, which is unusual enough. It is Holekamp’s belief that female cubs are more sensitive to their effects than males are. Spotted hyenas have an unusually long gestation period, and marinating in this prenatal androgen bath affects the development of the cub’s nervous system so they’re wired to fight from the moment they are born. And they already have the necessary weapons: Unlike most mammals, hyena cubs emerge with eyes open, muscles coordinated and teeth already pierced through their gums and eager to bite.

The female hyena’s pseudo-penis may be acting as an “anti-rape” device, allowing her to exercise choice over whom she mates with.

These belligerent newborns frequently fight to the death over dinner, and siblicide is commonplace. Scientists presumed that this superfluity of prenatal testosterone also caused the disproportionate growth of the female hyena’s clitoris. But when the same researchers gave captive pregnant spotted hyenas a diet packed with anti-androgens (which blocked the male sex hormone), female cubs still surprised them by popping out of the birth canal sporting “a large pendulous phallus” and a “normal pseudo-scrotum.”

According to Holekamp, the spotted hyena’s extraordinary sexual equipment remains “one of the most interesting mysteries in biology.” Some scientists have suggested the hyena evolved the pseudo-penis in order that it could be licked by subordinates, which is how female spotted hyenas tend to greet each other (and assess dominance). But Holekamp can’t see how this would be a strong enough evolutionary driving force to create a structure as reproductively damaging as the pseudo-penis.

“I am convinced we can rule out all the hypotheses that have been forwarded in the literature to date: it is definitely not merely a ‘side-effect’ of female androgen exposure, and it is not there to permit greeting behaviors,” she said. Her educated guess — and it is still a guess — is that the female’s gender-bending is a result of the age-old war between the sexes. Unlike most animals, where the males duke it out and the winner gets the girl, in spotted hyena clans the females dictate the who, where and when of copulation.

Sex is an undignified affair that sees the male forced to squat at the female’s rear, stabbing away blindly in an attempt to insert his erect actual penis into her floppy, half-foot pseudo-penis. It’s a bit like the male’s trying to have sex with a sock — a pretty tricky exercise that’s completely impossible without the female’s full cooperation. Brute force alone simply won’t work, as it does in many other animals. The female hyena’s pseudo-penis may be acting as an “anti-rape” device, allowing her to exercise choice over whom she mates with. This is pretty handy because, in addition to the dangers lurking in her precarious birth canal, a spotted hyena suffers a few other reproductive challenges. Her ovaries have comparatively little follicular tissue and produce relatively few eggs, and so it pays for her to be picky.

You’d never imagine this was the strategy from observing her behavior, since female spotted hyenas are highly promiscuous. Holekamp reckons the pseudo-penis allows the female to choose not just whom she mates with but, more impressively, who actually fertilizes her precious eggs by acting as a form of built-in birth control. That strangely elongated reproductive tract, with its various twists and turns, slows down sperm as they swim towards their goal. If the hyena changes her mind about a male after mating, she simply flushes out his semen by urinating. Go, sister!

I wonder whether this new image of the spotted hyena as a pioneering feminist, strutting around the savannah with a counterfeit penis, beating up on submissive males and taking control of her sexual destiny, would have been any less sacrilegious to the male bestiary authors than the original hermaphrodite myth. In the hands of these religious scribes, the animal’s suspicious sexuality rendered it “a dirty brute,” and hyenas were frequently used to warn against the evils of homosexuality.

This set the stage for a resolutely damning portrait of the hyena that often included grisly tales of grave robbing. However, only the brown hyena and the striped hyena are primarily scavengers. Spotted hyenas are highly efficient predators, killing 95 percent of the food that they consume. Hunting parties are capable of bringing down aggressive animals, like water buffalo, several times their size. Even lone hyenas have been known to catch impressively large prey — one bold strategy being to lock on to the animal’s testicles and hang on until the victim bleeds out. Such tactics are not for the faint-hearted, yet somehow hyenas have an enduring reputation for being a bunch of wimps.

“All writers agree that the hyaena lacks courage,” wrote the naturalist John Nott in 1886. This rumor can be traced back to Aristotle, who developed an arcane theory about how bravery could be predicted by the size of an animal’s heart. He lumped the hyena, somewhat incongruously, in with “the hare, the deer, the mouse,” along with “all other animals that are either manifestly timorous, or that betray their cowardice by their spitefulness” for having a disproportionately large heart.

Field studies have found that lions actually steal more kills from spotted hyenas than vice versa.

The idea that hyenas are cowards has persisted well into the modern age. On safari one misty morning near Lake Nakuru, Kenya, I caught up with a pack of spotted hyenas hunting a zebra, their favorite prey. It was a tough watch. When I arrived, the hyenas had already ripped the hide from the right flank of the zebra, exposing the beast’s innards in the manner of a living, breathing Gunther von Hagens anatomical sculpture, as the skin trailed behind the animal like a piece of half-discarded clothing. The hyenas were now following this semi-eviscerated beast, waiting for its inevitable collapse. It was hard not to anthropomorphize the actors before me: the zebra seemingly dignified in the face of death, the hyenas cruel and cowardly.

But survival is an unsentimental sport, and the hyena’s hunting strategy is based on endurance. It often involves “testing” prey to see how much fight they have left, which could be interpreted as timidity but is better understood as a key part of their winning long game. There’s no point risking fatal injury from a kick or a claw when all you need is patience.

The idea that hyenas spend their time sneaking about and stealing the spoils from more “noble” animals like the lion is another misconception. Field studies have found that lions actually steal more kills from spotted hyenas than vice versa. The animosity between the animals is, however, very real: These two species are arch enemies, locked in battle over territory and food. While lions may have the size advantage, the hyena makes up for this with intelligence. “Lions are not the sharpest tools in the shed,” as Holekamp put it.

The hyena is a pathetic fool in The Lion King, but these feminist freaks are the brains of the savannah — and smarter than your average carnivore. A few years ago, I got to spend a couple of days watching spotted hyenas in the Maasai Mara with Sarah Benson-Amram, an expert in hyena intelligence. “I think their reputation for being stupid has a lot to do with their gait,” she told me. “They have this sort of lope which is very beneficial in terms of being superefficient runners, energy-wise; they can run really long distances. But it gives them this sort of awkward, dopey appearance.”

To find the truth, Benson-Amram invented the world’s first carnivore IQ test — a metal puzzle box with a meaty treat trapped inside that can only be released by using brains, not brawn. She has plonked her puzzle box before various predators from polar bears to panthers to gauge their problem-solving skills. She discovered that the animals that performed well tended to share a rich social life and believes sociability could be the evolutionary force responsible for the hyena’s superior intellect.

Spotted hyenas gather in social groups bigger than any other carnivore — their packs can number up to 130 individuals and they’ve been observed defending territories of up to 620 square miles. They live by the clan, and everything they do is tied up with the female dominance hierarchy that underpins it, but they don’t remain together all the time. Instead, they spend much of their time in smaller splinter groups that coalesce in order to fight, hunt or feed.

This arrangement is known as a fission-fusion society, and maintaining it demands sophisticated communication skills. Aristocratic French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte deBuffon, dismissed the hyena’s calls as simply sounding like “the sobs or reachings of a man in a violent fit of vomiting.” But spotted hyenas have one of the richest vocal repertoires of any terrestrial mammal, including primates. They make a wide range of sounds including that famous giggle (actually a sign of submission), but the whoop — a quintessential sound of the savannah — is their signature call. It is a ghostly echo that can carry on the wind for up to three miles, transporting with it a wealth of information about the caller, including its identity, sex and age.

Hyenas’ big brains enable them to recall each member’s voice and status, ensuring they have the political savvy to recognize friend from foe and negotiate their strict social hierarchy.

Hyenas’ big brains have evolved to memorize the identity and rank of each of their clanmates. They also appear to be able to recall each member’s voice and status throughout their lives — no mean cognitive feat, and one that ensures they have the political savvy to both recognize friend from foe in a single call and negotiate their strict social hierarchy, without endless conflict. And Benson-Amram has found that hyenas respond differently depending on whether they hear the whoops of one, two or three individuals.

This means the spotted hyena sisterhood can, in some sense, count — a useful tool when trying to gauge whether to fight a rival gang. She has also shown that rival hyena clans will use their numeracy and communication skills to band together and fight off a common enemy, such as the lion. Despite being wired for aggression, spotted hyenas use their intelligence to keep the peace and collaborate. “Hyenas are very cooperative with their clan members and close relatives,” she explained. “You see these sisters and they spend a lot of time together, eating, hunting and resting together, and they have long-term, very close relationships …While they can be very competitive, in many respects they are also very cooperative.”

Ultimately, the hyena’s extraordinary success at bringing down large prey, intimidating lions and raising their cubs in a hostile environment depends on their capacity for teamwork. Recent fieldwork suggests that the social structures of the spotted hyena are every bit as complex as those of baboons, and CT scans have confirmed that hyena brains have evolved in a similar frontal direction to primates, with the region involved in complex decision-making enlarged. They have even out-performed chimpanzees on certain cooperative problem-solving tests.

This supports the idea that living in a complex fission-fusion society — as both chimps and hyenas, along with dolphins, other apes and, of course, humans, do — is key to the evolution of big brains. This may even help explain why our species evolved a brain that is seven times bigger than what would be predicted for an animal our size. This shared portion of the evolutionary path may also provide the ultimate clue to our unswerving contempt for these calculating creatures.

Bones that show cut marks from early stone tools mixed with tooth marks of hyenas suggest hyenas were laughing at humans and stealing our dinner for as much as 2.5 million years.

Humans and hyenas are long-standing enemies. The Australian anthropologist Marcus Baynes-Rock, who has spent several years living in Ethiopia studying the relationship between our two species, has some insights as to why. Both humans and hyenas are highly intelligent social predators with origins on the African savannah, he explained to me. But the hyenas were there first, so when our distant hominin relatives came down from the trees, they were muscling in on the spotted hyena’s patch.

Baynes-Rock thinks the hyena’s bone-crunching bite could even be the reason for the sparse evidence of early human evolution. He said, “Most hominid remains are just teeth and jawbones. When you are finding teeth, it’s almost a guarantee that the dead person has been through the digestive tract of a hyena, because that’s all that comes out.”

Our early ancestors had only very basic stone tools, and were probably scavenging more than they were hunting. They would not have been able to fight off a pack of hungry hyenas to protect their prize meal; a theory borne out by bones from the period that show cut marks from early stone tools mixed with tooth marks of hyenas, suggesting that hyenas were laughing at us and stealing our dinner for as much as 2.5 million years. No wonder we don’t like them.

Excerpted from the new paperback The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife by Lucy Cooke, with the permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2018 by Lucy Cooke.

Watch Lucy Cooke’s TEDWomen talk here:

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/everything-you-know-about-hyenas-is-wrong-these-animals-are-fierce-social-and-incredibly-smart/
via Satellites Middlesbrough

How to talk to kids about sex in the time of #metoo

Today, it’s not enough to have one birds-and-the-bees talk; it needs to be an open, ongoing conversation. Author and activist Christa Desir explains why and how.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

The first few times I talked to high school students about sexual assault, when we got to the Q & A section, I was inundated with what I call the “Does that count?” question.

“What if we’re both drinking, does that count?”

“What if she said yes but then in the middle she changes her mind, does that count?”

“What if neither of us remember the next day?”

This happened with different high school groups, and eventually, I realized that something was wrong with my presentation. I said, “You know what? Let’s reframe this. Let’s put the legality of this aside, and let’s look at this from the perspective of our own values. Do you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t remember it the next day? Do you want to not remember it the next day? Do you want to be someone’s regret? Or, would you rather be someone’s enthusiastic ‘yes’?”

With these questions, the conversation changed. It got much more open, honest, authentic and vulnerable. It turned out their questions weren’t what was wrong; I was. I was too busy pointing out all the scary and dangerous places where sex can go that I forgot to talk about the wonderful, amazing, awkward and beautiful places. And I’m not the only one.

By only talking to our kids about the dangers of sexual violence, we’re leaving girls feeling afraid and boys feeling indicted. We need to give them the chance to explore their sexual curiosity, and we need to guide them through this very complicated, modern sexual world with transparency, honesty, non-judgment and vulnerability.

Unfortunately, we put sex in the same category of risky behaviors as vaping, texting while driving, and sniffing glue, instead of as something that many of us will do throughout the course of our lifespan. Furthermore, we’re failing to give our young people a language around consent. We are not helping them develop a voice to unapologetically own their “No”s and enthusiastically declare their “Yes”s.

How do we do this? The first step is to create an understanding in children around consent. This understanding needs to start young. They should learn about good touch and bad touch and the difference between them, that their bodies are their own to make decisions about, and that we are listening to them.

This might mean when you bring your child to a big family party, you don’t insist they hug and kiss every single person in the room. In schools, if it’s not a safety issue, perhaps we don’t require that they hold hands with the person next to them in a circle. What kind of message are we sending kids if we tell them, “Your bodies are your own to make decisions about, but you have to hold the next person’s hand because that’s the nice thing to do”? This is a mixed message, and it’s not good for kids. We also need to give kids the opportunity to say “Yes.” In my house, that means I’ll say to my son, “Hey, buddy, you look kind of sad. Could you use a hug?” and he’ll tell me if he does.

As a second step, we adults need to be advocates for comprehensive sexual education in our local schools. That includes positive representations of LGBTQI youth, information about birth control, instructions on how to use birth control, and information about STI’s. If you can’t make sex ed part of the school curriculum, then make sure it’s taught elsewhere in your communities or in your places of worship. And, of course, we must always keep having these conversations in our own homes.

As a third step, we need to accept that there is not just one sex talk we have with our kids. This should be an ongoing conversation, and you should continue it every opportunity that you have. So if you’re driving to school, listening to the radio, and your 11-year-old hears the morning DJ bring up porn — as morning DJs are wont to do — and your kid asks, “Hey mom, what’s porn?”, you might turn off the radio and then distract him by finding out what he wants for dessert. Or, you could answer the question. You don’t have to give him a full treatise on sex workers’ rights, but you could answer this one question and allow him to ask another one. That’s honesty.

The nice thing about sex being an ongoing conversation is if you muddle it the first time, you’ll always get the chance to do it again. In these discussions, we just need to be as open and non-judgmental as possible and admit that we’re not the captains of the ship who know everything. In fact, we are learning as much as our kids are.

Doing this makes you a person who is safe to talk to, and that’s who you want to be with your children. If they tell you, “Oh, hey, mom, I have this crush,” you could say, “Oh really. What are they like? What do you like about them?” instead of assuming that the person is a he or she.  Similarly, if they tell you that their best friend is a “non-binary aro/ace,” you could say, “Oh really! What’s that?” If you know what that is, you could say “What do you think that means? What does that mean to you?” That’s how you open the conversation and how it keeps going.

As a fourth step, acknowledge that it can be uncomfortable at times to talk about sex. A few months ago, I had my 14-year-old son in the car with me. It was just the two of us, and this never happens. So I thought I would take opportunity to talk, and I turned to him. I said, “Hey, buddy, I just want you to know that if you have a wet dream, it’s totally normal. It’s very common. This happens to adolescent boys all the time. Just let me know because I can make sure we get the laundry done right away so it’s not a big sticky mess for two weeks.” He said, “Yeah, Mom, I know how to do my own laundry, but can you just pull over here on the side of the road? I’ll walk the rest of the way to school.”

As you can see, sometimes it goes wrong, but that’s all right as long as we keep showing up. With these conversations, we’re building the scaffolding — however rickety it might be — beneath our children so they can lead healthy sexual lives that are rooted in open communication and enthusiasm.

This piece was adapted from Christa Desir’s TEDxOakParkWomen talk. Watch it now:

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-talk-to-kids-about-sex-in-the-time-of-metoo/
via Satellites Middlesbrough

How to cope with the end of a relationship

While clean breaks can and do happen, sometimes we’re left with unresolved feelings. Psychologist Antonio Pascual-Leone shares the 3 steps we need to take to work through them.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Whether it’s with a partner, family member, friend, boss or colleague, ending a relationship is hard. But even harder can be what comes afterward. While clean breaks do happen, sometimes we get stuck — stuck with unresolved feelings, doubts and anxieties that seem to fill up all our empty spaces.

“Let’s call it unfinished business,” says Antonio Pascual-Leone, clinical psychologist and head of the Emotion Change Lab at the University of Windsor in Canada, in a TEDxUniversityofWindsor talk. “Most people think that moving on is just a matter of time … but if you feel devastated, it’s not going to be as simple as sleeping it off like a bad hangover.”

Pascual-Leone has been examining this process. He says, “It turns out people who resolve these issues often go through three distinct steps.” He adds, “It’s sort of a messy, nonlinear, two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process … and you can get stuck anywhere in that pipeline. The good news is we also know a bit about how to get people unstuck from each of those spots.”

Step 1: Untangle and identify your feelings

Pascual-Leone shares the story of a woman who took on a junior partner in her work. She spent significant time mentoring her, and they developed a great collaboration — until the junior partner abruptly left. When speaking to him about it, according to Pascual-Leone, “the businesswoman tells me about industry conventions and things like that, and she says, ‘I’ll just cringe. What if she’s there? It’ll be so awkward. I don’t know!”

Interestingly, that last phrase — “I don’t know” — is the most telling part to Pascual-Leone. Why? It reveals the woman’s “sense of a very global distress,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I’m so upset and I don’t know why it’s so awful.’” If you’ve ever felt like that, you probably pushed those feelings under the rug to deal with later. “It’s like the person thinks they can wait it out as if there was a storm passing overhead. But while you’re avoiding the issue, not too much can change,” explains Pascual-Leone. His solution: “Get in there.”

How to get unstuck:

Often, the most dominant feelings after the end of a relationship are anger and sadness, and these can get fused together into a dense ball — Pascual-Leone likens it to children’s play putty. He says, “You need to take some time to tease these apart, find the right words, and describe what’s so awful, awkward or hard.”

To do that, ask yourself, “Where does it hurt?” and “What’s the worst part of it?” Pascual-Leone says, “If you want to get past feeling upset, empty, lonely in these very general ways, then you have to take the time to focus on the feelings that you have and figure out what hurts the most.”

Step 2: Understand what you really need

After a relationship ends, some people know exactly what hurts them the most but they’re trapped in a cycle of self-blame — often, because the break “stirred up some deeper, older, uglier feelings,” as Pascuale-Leone put it. They might think, “Whatever happened was my fault; maybe I deserve to be mistreated or neglected” or “It’s true — I am incompetent/unlovable/uninteresting/fill in the blank.” These people are, he says, “not avoiding; they’re not bewildered like in the first step. It’s that they get caught beating themselves up about something related to the relationship.”

How can you tell if this is you? “You feel vulnerable and broken, but it’s familiar in a way,” says Pascual-Leone. “It’s the same old story; you’ve been here before.” He adds that some people are able to glide through this step, just as some can travel through any or all of the steps of the process with a minimum of friction and distress.

How to get unstuck:

Ask yourself, “What do I most deeply need?” These aren’t surface needs, such as “I need a partner to go on vacations with,” “I need a boss who likes my ideas,” “I need a sibling who will worry with me about our father,” or “I need a friend who gets my sense of humor.” These needs are also not specific to the person of the ended relationship, like “I need the sense of security that she gave me” or “I need the way he looked at me.”

Instead, you’re considering your deeper, existential needs, “what you need to flourish as a human,” says Pascual-Leone. These might be “I need to feel like I matter,” “I need to feel lovable,” “I need to feel like I have dignity,” or “I need to feel that someone knows the real me.”

There’s a good chance that your need and your relationship’s end are in active conflict with each other — for example, “I need to feel valuable, but our divorce make me feel like I’m disposable.” It’s in this contradiction, says Pascual-Leone, “where change starts to happen.” He adds, “Even if you don’t feel entitled to it, spell it out.”

Step 3: Revisit the relationship’s end and look at what was lost

For the final step in the process, you need to go back to how the relationship ended, look at what stings and at what you lost, and work through these feelings. Frequently, this means tapping into and expressing anger and sadness, and handling the latter can be surprisingly tricky.

“When we work through grief, we usually focus on the good things — ‘we’ll never get together again for a barbecue’ or ‘there will be no more Wednesday family dinners.’ You have to say goodbye to these things and put up little tombstones for them,” says Pascual-Leone. “But one of the reasons that people have trouble finishing the grief process is because there are also so many undeclared losses — the hopes, the dreams that you had together.”

For a couple getting divorced after a brief marriage, the loss might be the children who will never be born; for a business partnership, it’s the big project that will never be launched. Pascual-Leone says, “When I was doing therapy with a man who was an inmate in prison, he knew his partner had already left him while he was serving time. So he was like, ‘We’ll never go on that holiday together, the one we were saving up for and we kept all those brochures for.’”

How to get unstuck:

Ask yourself, “What do I resent?”, “What do I miss?” and “What dreams and hopes do I need to say goodbye to?”

These aren’t easy questions to ask or easy answers to absorb, and exploring them can take effort and time. But it’s a critical part of working through a relationship’s end. “Healthy emotion has a vitality curve,” says Pascual-Leone. “It emerges, you feel it, you express it, and then you’re done.”

Watch his TEDxUniversityofWindsor talk now:

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-cope-with-the-end-of-a-relationship/
via Satellites Middlesbrough

4 ways to quiet imposter syndrome and start believing in yourself

Many of us have an inner voice telling us we lucked into what we have or we’re a fraud. That’s normal; the problem is when we believe it. Here’s how to start recognizing your own worth, from coach and consultant Tania Katan.

I’m about to get onstage at one of the largest tech conferences in the world, CiscoLive!. Then, I’m supposed to share some wisdom that will inspire thousands of people to embrace their inner superhero. No biggie. (Insert emoji face screaming in fear!)

Just so you know, I love public speaking. But that doesn’t mean I don’t channel my inner scaredy-cat when staring out into a sea of smart, capable and curious people. My nerves start acting up, especially when I am reminded that it’s me, a five-foot-three-inch nerd with a tendency toward seasonal eczema, about to tell a room full of real, largely acne-free superheroes how to be a … superhero.

Holy fraud, Batman!

I am scheduled to speak right after the senior vice president of Cisco Systems and right before Lieutenant Carey Lohrenz, the first woman lieutenant to fly an F-14 Tomcat in the US Navy. Talk about intimidating.

Palms a little sweaty, I climb up onto the stage. I stare into the sea of faces and ask, “Are there any superheroes here today?” I take a breath and continue, “That’s right, we are all born superheroes, then we spend the rest of our lives apologizing for it.”

Just like that, I’m off and running. The minutes pass faster than a locomotive, and I exit the stage in a post-talk fog. Standing there is the first woman F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot, who says, “How am I going to follow that? You were amazing!”

But here’s the thing. Until that moment, I was totally convinced that I had blanked in the middle of my talk, farted, or used the f-word. I was positive the wave of applause was actually an explosion of boos.

Isn’t it amazing how sometimes the only difference between feeling like an imposter and a superhero is finding out how other people see you from the outside? But what if we could channel that outsider all the time — like what if we could carry a fighter pilot around in our pockets to constantly remind us how awesome we are? And we actually believed it?

If you often feel like a fraud or phony and worry that someone is going to call bulls—t on you at any moment, you’re not alone. It’s been proven that the more accomplished we are, the more likely we are to feel like an imposter. In fact, the more I coach and consult with some of the most hardworking, intelligent and super-successful business leaders, performers, movers and shakers, the more I hear: “I feel like an imposter; can you help me with that?”

We all feel like an imposter from time to time — that we lucked out and it’s the only reason we’re running the company, speaking on stage, leading trainings, being given opportunities. Even worse is when we decide that we don’t have the credentials, knowledge or experience to run the company, speak publicly, lead trainings or get opportunities, so we don’t even try or we give up too quickly or we tell ourselves that pursuing these things isn’t that important.

The truth is, we are all a hard act to follow. So, can we put a lid on those internal monologues? And while it often takes an outsider who believes in us to see what we’re capable of, we can develop that capability inside ourselves, too. We just gotta do our homework, develop our skills, and show up — and continue to scale buildings like the superheroes we are.

If you’re not ready to embrace your inner superhero, do it for the young people in your life just so they can see what it looks like to be scared but do it anyway. Or, do it for your colleagues; otherwise, you’re cheating them out of all the ideas, skills and connections you’ve developed and could develop. Don’t be stingy with your gifts.

Here are four creative ways to silence your fear and insecurity and unleash your superpowers.

Stop underselling yourself

A coaching client needed guidance. She’d worked in technology years earlier, then moved into finance and now wanted to get back into tech. She was interviewing for a position at a company I knew very well and asked for my insights. First, I assured her that no one currently in that department had as much direct technology experience as she had. Secondly, I told her that I knew the salaries of the last two people hired in the position: $70,000. And finally, I gave her a full-blown, rah-rah, pompoms-in-the-air pep talk, which wasn’t difficult because she was totally and uniquely qualified for the job. A few days later, the company invited her to be part of the team. When they brought up salary, she asked for $55,000; they offered her $50,000. She took the job. Why?

Even though she was more qualified for the job than the last two people, she doubted herself and her experience. She had textbook imposter syndrome and, as a result, undersold herself to the tune of $20,000 in that first year alone.

How many times have you undersold yourself to an employer? When you do, not only are you leaving cash on the table, but you’re telling yourself (and everyone around you) that you don’t value your abilities.

Next time, try admitting that you are worth it. Admit that you have put in the work. Admit that you are uniquely qualified for this opportunity. Admit to your awesomeness. Admit it again and again. The more we admit we have value, the more that valuable opportunities present themselves.

Make your own “I ROCK Files”

Remember The Rockford Files? That TV show from the 1970s about detective Jim Rockford, who was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit? Once he got released, he lived in a ramshackle trailer while trying to launch his career as a private eye. He had career setbacks, like we all do, and yet still managed to rock his cases.

“Creative Trespassing” is a term I’ve coined to mean the ability to conjure imagination in any place, at any time, knowing it will make you and others more innovative, more energized and more valuable in your work in the world. As its exponent, I’ve spent years testing dozens of crazy, status-quo-busting practices. Jim Rockford was my inspiration for an act of Creative Trespassing that I call the “I ROCK Files.”

It’s time to become a private detective hot on your own trail. Create a physical file (or a digital one or both), and gather evidence that proves the unique value you bring to work. Slide a glowing performance review in there. A print-out of an email from a colleague or boss that praises you for a “job well done!” Press clippings from events you helped produce, reports showing goals achieved or surpassed, thank-you cards from customers, awards, certificates, and so on. From teeny to extra-special, every piece of evidence counts.

Whenever you need a reminder that you rock or you need to hear it from an outside source, open your file, read about one or more of your accomplishments, and mentally give yourself a high five. Then get back to rocking.

Assemble a legion of superheroes

You know how corporations have a board of directors to — in theory — make them stronger, maintain checks and balances, leverage resources, and help advance the organization’s vision? Why not assemble your own board of directors to leverage resources to help make your career stronger, keep you in check and balanced, and advance your vision?

My friend Alison Wade, president of conferences, training and consulting at Techwell, calls her personal board of directors her “front row” — those are the people she invites to sit spitting distance from the stage, cheer her on, challenge her, and review her performance. I call mine my “legion of superheroes,” because I dig the idea of joining forces to do good in the corporate galaxy.

The point is to assemble a group of diverse humans who have your back. They should be diverse in all directions: cultural background, thinking, skill set, and so on. Meet once a week or once a month or once a quarter. Share your experiences, fears, creative ideas, aspirations. Celebrate each other’s accomplishments. Challenge and support each other. Discover what you are capable of doing when you combine your powers.

Ask for a raise in haiku

Disclaimer: I’m not promising this technique will get you a raise, but I’m not promising it won’t. I did crowdsource it with several hundred Creative Trespassers, and based on their responses, it appears this exercise works — at least as a creative way to blow off steam about being underpaid and/or celebrate your unique value in a job (even when your boss doesn’t seem to be celebrating). And even if it doesn’t get a zero added to your paycheck right away, it will get you noticed and maybe pave the way for a future raise.

A haiku is a Japanese poem that uses five syllables for the first line, seven syllables for the second, and five syllables for the third line, and it generally celebrates the beauty of the natural world. We’re gonna put our own twist on it and use it to write a poem that celebrates the beauty of what you bring to the workplace. Here’s an example:

I’ve done a great job

She agreed with me, then said

Yes to the request!

Once you’ve written your haiku, you’ll want to deliver it to your boss in a creative way. You could email it to yourself — and cc her — on Employee Appreciation Day. Or, have the florist write it on the card that accompanies the flowers or cupcakes or both you send him for his work anniversary. Or, give it to her at the holiday gift exchange, along with an empty envelope.

Or, you might go the slightly more sincere route and tell her in haiku that her leadership is part of why you are thriving. Do whatever feels right to you as long as it shows that you’ve got awesome creative impulses, that you come up with unique approaches to address everyday challenges, and that you’re capable of seeing the value you bring to work. At the end of the day, your value resides in your being uniquely qualified to be you.

Excerpted with permission from the new book Creative Trespassing: How to Put the Spark and Joy Back into Your Work and Life by Tania Katan, published by Currency Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2019 Tania Katan.

Watch her TEDxNCSSM talk now:

 

from ideas.ted.com https://ideas.ted.com/4-ways-to-quiet-imposter-syndrome-and-start-believing-in-yourself/
via Satellites Middlesbrough