Curious Minds at Work

Are you prepared to live to 100? Research shows that it is becoming the norm, but that few of us are planning for it. Many are surprised to learn that it not only requires rethinking saving and retirement, but also education, jobs, and relationships. To guide us, London Business School Professor and future of work expert, Lynda Gratton, has written The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. In addition to her many books, Lynda writes for Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes. She points out the possibilities, as well as the challenges, associated with living longer lives. Lynda also encourages us to plan for what lies ahead, so that we can take full advantage of this opportunity. In this interview, we talk about: What learning will look like as we continue working into our 70s and 80s Why working well with robots will decrease our odds of obsolescence How generational markers, such as millennials, limit how we think about work and life Why we will become age agnostic as people of all ages learn and work together Are you building, maintaining, or depleting current skills? The secret to increasing our adaptability and willingness to change Three new life stages that are upending how we think about life and work Are you spending your free time in recreation or re-creation, and why it matters? The important role experimentation will play in our lives as we live longer How marriage and friendships will change as we live longer lives Why juvenescence holds the key to navigating a longer life Why we should be worried about wealth disparity Why living longer will push organizations to rethink work policies and expectations Why individuals and families - not most organizations - will guide us in innovating Selected Links to Episode Topics @lyndagratton www.100yearlife.com 100 Year Life Diagnostic London Business School World Economic Forum Andrew Scott Future of Work Consortium The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here by Lynda Gratton Stretch by Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistick If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

We have more control over our happiness than we think. And if we follow the advice of the most cutting-edge happiness researchers, we can help others achieve it, as well. Emiliana Simon-Thomas happens to be one of those researchers. A neuroscientist and Science Director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she speaks and writes about the connection between happiness, meaning, compassion and wellbeing. She also co-teaches an online course, The Science of Happiness that, to date, has been taken by over 450,000 people. In this interview we discuss: Just how important social relationships are to our happiness and wellbeing How our baseline for study is social, not solitary The fact that social deprivation leads to greater stress, lowered resilience, and less happiness How friendships helps us reframe challenges as more achievable The fact that an ongoing sequence of pleasurable moments does not guarantee happiness How happiness is derived from a rich emotional life that includes negative emotions How happiness speaks to the ease with which we experience the entire range of human emotion The fact that happiness stems from our ability to transcend ourselves - to view our lives in relation to a bigger purpose How the ways we spend our time, where we put our focus, and how we view others determines our happiness How forgiving others can have a greater impact on us than the person we forgive How mindfulness is about noticing the world beyond ourselves How graduates of the Science of Happiness course show significant improvement when it comes to happiness, flourishing, and connections to others, along with decreased loneliness and stress The fact that the quality of our relationships has a significant impact on our happiness The game changing difference it makes when we express our gratitude toward others How practicing gratitude helps us feel more optimistic, decreases our self-absorption, and increases feelings of pleasure that can create a reinforcing loop How practicing gratitude and showing appreciation can shift workplace culture The difference between valuing someone for who they are versus what they achieve How our ability to express gratitude and to show compassion are culturally influenced habits, not gendered skills How the data shows that happier employees are more productive, more engaged, more loyal and more attentive to creating a better customer experience The importance role self-compassion plays in our ability to be happy, to show compassion to others, and to improve or maintain our wellbeing Links to Episode Topics Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas @GreaterGoodSC The Expanding Gratitude Project Gratitude and Wellbeing at Work The Science of Happiness course Eric Liu Social baseline theory - James Coan and David Sbarra Robert Emmons Judson Brewer The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan Center for Positive Organizations Davita Kristin Neff If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Ninety-five percent of us think we are self-aware, but only ten to fifteen percent of us actually are. How important is that difference to our well being and happiness? Well, according to Tasha Eurich, self-aware individuals are are better at their jobs, more satisfied with their relationships, raise more mature children, are better students, lead more profitable companies, and choose better careers. Tasha is the author of the book, Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-aware As We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life. An organizational psychologist and researcher whose work has been featured in Entrepreneur, CNBC.com, The Huffington Post, and FoxBusiness.com. In this interview we discuss: Why self-awareness is the metaskill of the 21st century How self-awareness includes how clearly we see ourselves and how well we understand how others see us The fact that 95 percent of people think they are self-aware when the reality is closer to 10 to 15 percent How the ways we self-reflect can work against the benefits we might gain How reflecting on what, not why, shifts us into action and a more positive mindset Why we should journal to figure things out rather than merely ruminate or emotion dump How a focus on learning well helps us take on new challenges in ways that a focus on doing well may not Ways we can mine solutions to problems by asking ourselves what it might look like if the problem were already solved How getting feedback from others helps us gain additional perspectives on how we see ourselves How asking for feedback allows us to show vulnerability in positive ways Why we want to control the kinds of feedback we ask for by choosing the right people, asking the right questions, and using the right process Why we should seek out loving critics for feedback -- people who couple honesty with care How the ways we receive feedback are also important -- that we should give ourselves time to process feedback and to determine if we should act on it Self-aware teams practice honesty and transparency Leaders are the linchpins when it comes to self-aware teams Self-aware teams need psychological safety and an ongoing awareness process Team members can jumpstart self-awareness by taking small steps, like admitting something they do not know or something they did wrong Why it is important to recognize when you cannot influence someone to be more self-aware Links to Episode Topics @tashaeurich http://www.tashaeurich.com/ James Pennebaker Carol Dweck Solutions focused therapy How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett Alan Mulally http://www.insight-book.com/quiz.aspx If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Most of us can learn anything, if we're taught how. Yet few of us find this to be the case. Why? Because we lack the skills we need to deal with the resistance and frustration we inevitably face when learning difficult topics. Barbara Oakley wants to change that. Author of the book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science, and Professor of Engineering at Oakland University, she shares techniques for mastering any subject. And these are techniques over 2 million people have experienced in her incredibly popular MOOC, Learning How to Learn. In this interview we discuss: How she made the leap from self-described high school math "flunky" to accomplished engineering professor What inspired her to make the shift from Russian linguist to engineer How offering interesting learning hooks can help people learn content more effectively How a diffuse or relaxed mode of thinking helps us organize what we learn The importance of toggling between focused and diffuse thinking to learn The fact that learning difficult things is hard How sleep helps us build the neural architecture we need to learn new things How we can be strategic in our approach to learning Why you actually need content knowledge to become an expert - we cannot outsource it How repetition, practice, and seeing things from different perspectives builds important neural patterns for expertise Why conceptual chunking -- memorizing and understanding -- help us create these neural patterns How our prefrontal cortex relaxes when we know something, so that we can build on that knowledge to solve more complex problems What it means to have an illusion of competence when it comes to learning How we can check our understanding by seeing if we can explain it to a five year old How neural reuse theory, or learning something new by attaching it to something we already know, is a powerful learning tool Why teachers should emphasize how simple something difficult can be to learn How interleaving helps us learn when to use one technique versus another How transfer helps us use learning we have done in one area in a new area and how it is best learned by doing How we can reframe procrastination by focusing on the process not the product How breaking the work into tiny tasks helps us overcome procrastination Links to Episode Topics @barbaraoakley https://barbaraoakley.com/ The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/ Bayes Theorem Negative binomial Geometric distribution Pomodoro Technique and Francesco Cirillo Terry Sejnowski Lynda.com If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Do you really know your neighbors or coworkers? To understand human behavior, we need research participants who act and respond truthfully. But that is a tall order when it comes to topics that are embarrassing or even incriminating. Social scientists have found it hard to get honest answers when asked about topics that might reveal racism, sexism, gluttony or a slew of other socially unacceptable traits. Researchers like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz have found a way around that problem by analyzing data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches. And it turns out that the candid words, phrases, and questions we type in reveal a whole lot about us. Seth is the author of the bestselling book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are. He is also a New York Times op-ed contributor, a visiting lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. In this interview we discuss: How Internet datasets help us ask bigger questions than ever before How word and picture data expand the kinds of questions we can ask and yield unexpected insights How data from our over 3.5 billion daily Google searches serves as a digital truth serum for learning more about what we actually think and do How big data is giving researchers insights into small groups of people we rarely had before   How big data is helping researchers engage in rapid experimentation and conduct quick tests to see how people respond How horse racing analytics data scientists like Jeff Seder help us think beyond traditional data sets to uncover game-changing findings How night lights in India revealed key insights regarding economic activity Just how much creativity is involved in data science research How researchers studied big data in the hopes of helping political leaders shift hate group behaviors What Google search analysts learned about gender from searches on children and intelligence What we are learning about poverty and economic mobility from big data The connection between the health of poor people and the number of rich people living nearby The connection between the number of tax accountants and how many people cheat on their taxes How data scientists are using our doppelgangers to anticipate what we might want to buy How the healthcare industry can use doppelgangers to personalize treatment The fact that Google conducts more experiments in one day than the FDA does in one year How your love of curly fries may signal high intelligence to prospective employers How it is becoming harder than ever for regulators to stay ahead of all the things companies can know about us as the number of variables keeps on growing How researchers may use big data to figure out, once and for all, which foods are nutritious -- and whether we really should be eating broccoli Links to Episode Topics @SethS_D http://sethsd.com/ Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner Jeff Seder American Pharoah Night Lights and Economic Activity in India 2015 San Bernardino Attack The Rise of Hate Search New York Times article Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What's behind the extraordinary experiences that stay with us? Are they as random as we're led to believe or is there a pattern to them that, if we understood it, would allow us to create them ourselves? In his research, Dan Heath, co-author of the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, uncovers four key elements that characterize these kinds of moments. And he explains how we can create them not only for ourselves, but for our family, our friends, and the people in our organizations. Dan is a Senior Fellow at the CASE Center at Duke University and co-author of the bestselling books, Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive. In this interview we discuss: The important role that elevation, insight, pride, and connection play in defining moments How we can tap into defining moments to celebrate and inspire employees at work Ways to spot opportunities, like important work and life transitions, to design defining moments How our brains hold onto the peaks and endings of defining moments The fact that great experiences are mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable What it looks like when we break the script to create unforgettable moments Why we need to beware of the soul-sucking force of reasonableness to create defining moments How defaulting to ease and efficiency can turn peak moments into speed bumps How social moments of shared meaning and responsiveness build connection The key roles that understanding, validation, and caring play in connecting with others Why we build deeper connections more quickly when we work together on something bigger than ourselves How creating the right mission and conditions can get people to take on difficult challenges The fact that purpose has a greater impact on our performance than passion Why purpose is central in making us more effective in our roles How we can learn to cultivate purpose How just one hour visiting student families in their homes completely changed the culture of a low-performing elementary school Why 36 simple questions can help us deepen our relationships in less than an hour When people experience crystallizing experiences that cause them to rethink their work and their lives Links to Episode Topics http://heathbrothers.com/ https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/team_profiles/dan-heath/ John Deere and CEO Sam Allen Magic Castle Hotel Images of Joshee on vacation Simply Brilliant by Bill Taylor Harry Reis Sharp HealthCare Morten Hansen Flamboyan Foundation Carlie John Fisherow Arthur Aron and his 36 questions Post-traumatic growth Option B by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal Roy Baumeister and the crystallization of discontent If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Maybe performing under pressure is easier than we think. In those moments before an interview, an exam, or a presentation, we often feel our worst. Yet Daniel McGinn, author of the book, Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed believes we can decrease and even repurpose those anxious feelings to up our performance. Senior Editor of Harvard Business Review, Dan has written for Wired, Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine, and Newsweek. In this book, he draws on the fields of performance and sports psychology and shares quick and simple techniques we all can use. In this interview we discuss: Why we should take a page from pre-performance rituals of top athletes How we can leverage stress before a high-stakes event and maximize our performance What it means to fine-tune our emotions before a high-stakes event The role that centering plays to enhance high-level performance How pre-performance routines distract us from feeling anxious and prime us for the event Why that lucky pen, ring, or tie really can make a difference in our performance How the words we choose and the connections we make to something bigger than ourselves can help us psych up our teams Why a highly experienced, highly motivated team may not need a pep talk How listening to certain kinds of music can improve our performance in all kinds of tasks How a sports DJ is impacting two of the top sports teams in the U.S. Two factors that make a song motivational - how its musicality -- beats, tempo - resonate with us and how emotionally connected we feel to it How our self talk, our visualizations, and our mental rehearsals before an important event can improve our performance The important role priming -- physical and emotional - plays before a high-stakes event Why we should reflect back on past successes to increase our confidence in a new performance task How we can sit there feeling worried or we can develop a set of practices to give us confidence before a high-stakes event Links to Topics Mentioned @danmcginn http://www.psychedupthebook.com/ Improving Acute Stress Responses: The Power of Reappraisal Yuri Hanan and the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning Don Greene and centering The River and Laura Donnelly and Hugh Jackman Malcolm Gladwell Peak by Anders Ericsson Stanley A. McChrystal Sports DJ TJ Connelly Eye of the Tiger Nate Zinsser The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

When you hear the word power, what comes to mind? For most of us, we imagine power-hungry leaders or think of phrases like power corrupts. But when my guest, Eric Liu, considers power, he sees something different. He views power as a positive force. In fact, he believes it is a gift each of us can use to shape society. At a time when many of us feel powerless, Eric offers a simple set of instructions for seizing power and using it to help shape our communities, our nation, and the world. He is Founder and CEO of the non-profit, Citizen University and author of the book, You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen. His TED Talk on citizen power and voting has been viewed over 2 million times. In this interview we discuss: How power is an important literacy Why power is about who gets to decide How power is a gift we are continuously giving away How our citizenship endows us with unearned power and privilege that we should share with intention Why we need to ask ourselves, to whom am I giving my power, my might, and my imagination? The myth of rugged individualism in the face of game-changing collective action and collaboration we have seen across history How we are part of a collective web of relationship, obligation, and mutual aid The fact that power compounds as people with voice and connections amass it The fact that power justifies itself as incumbents spin narratives to maintain it The realization that many rely on intimidation and self-justifying narratives to maintain their power How power is infinite as demonstrated by movements to push back and reinforce pockets of power How we can reframe power by changing the game, the story, and the equation The fact that we are all better off when we are all better off The power of story in organizing for change -- the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now How a civic collaboratory taps into the shared need and wisdom of organizations to amplify their impact How we are strong in our ideals of citizenship but weak in practicing them Why citizenship is about power plus character - working on behalf of a greater good How we accuse others in order to excuse ourselves How taking responsibility sets in motion a cycle of responsibility that is contagious Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @ericpliu http://www.citizenuniversity.us/ The Power Paradox by Dacher Keltner Nick Hanauer Marshall Ganz Jose Antonio Vargas Bonds that Make Us Free by C Terry Warner If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Few of us realize how dependent we are on the people and objects around us for our knowledge. But Steven Sloman does. He reveals that we are constantly accessing expertise stored in our communities, our technologies, and in our environment. In fact, research reveals that many of us adopt positions on issues like climate change and health care from certain experts, without even realizing it. These findings have enormous implications for our increasingly polarized society, including the fact that educating people about issues is probably not the most effective way to change their minds. Steven Sloman is co-author of the book, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.  He is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Cognition. His work has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In this interview we discuss: The fact that we tend to think we understand how things work better than we actually do How we fail to distinguish what we know from what others know How complexity prevents us from understanding many of the things we think we do The fact that knowledge must be collective to offset all the complexity in our lives When we want to understand how the government or our car works, we figure out enough causal structure to solve our problems What the deliberative mind is good at, which is coming to causal conclusions How deliberation depends on a community of knowledge and connects us to other people The unique ability of human beings to share intentionality, that is, to engage in tasks with other people The limitations of understanding that comes from someone else How understanding is contagious and community based Much of our understanding comes  from having access to knowledge rather than actually knowing Why it is important to help people see that they do not understand -- that they cannot explain something they think they understand well Our conviction that we understand or know something comes from the trust we place in certain experts The fact that we cannot convince people by making them experts but by convincing them to  believe in a different set of experts That we tend to stick with our first explanation or conclusion, even if it is found to be incorrect The fact that most of our beliefs are formed independent of data -- they tend to be shaped by our culture and what our community thinks The fact that the thought leaders we look to actually determine what we believe How we actually vote for what our communities judge to be the right things, not what the right things might actually be The fact that group intelligence is derived from how well team members communicate with and relate to one another rather than individual intelligence How many VCs make investment decisions based on the team and their collective intelligence That what should spend more time on collective or team intelligence over individual intelligence A question we can ask individuals whom we hire: How have you contributed to group performance in the past? How engaging in the activity is key to helping us learn and to gaining causal knowledge Why it is so important to be aware of what we do not know -- to reduce our pride in what we think we know How intelligent nudges can guide people toward better decision making Why focusing on policy consequences is preferable to the values associated with those policies yet is much harder to do Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast Steven Sloman Frank Keil Clark Glymour Michael Tomasello Herbert Clark and common ground Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo Anita Woolley Pixar Disney Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference.

Most of us are aware of the negative effects of income inequality on health and well-being. But few of us realize that just seeing yourself as unequal can produce the same results. Keith Payne, author of the book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times and on NPR. His research helps us understand how inequality is the public health problem of the 21st century. In this interview we discuss: How we see ourselves compared to others is a better predictor of health and well-being than income and education How inequality is a better predictor of drug use, health outcomes, crime, and other self-defeating behaviors than poverty in advanced economies The false dichotomy of blaming the system or the individual when it comes to understanding inequality rather than understanding how individuals respond to their environments How bees engaged in high risk, high reward behavior after they lost some of their honey supply and how this mirrors how humans behave when they have less How people living in areas of greater inequality search Google on more high risk, high reward topics like payday loans and lottery tickets Why how we feel about our status in relation to others can have a greater impact on how we vote than our actual status How the poor do not actually tend to vote against their own self interest -- how there is more to that story than meets the eye The fact that there is a strong correlation between the rise in income inequality and the rise in political partisanship The fact that parts of the world with greater equality are less religious How pay incentives works well for individual performers but less so for collaboration and teams Does your organization value teamwork and collaboration? Then think twice about incentivizing individuals with big payouts for performance. How we often overlook the fact that inequality is driven more by the wealthiest than by the poorest How solving the problem of inequality by adopting a public health mindset can help develop bigger, more impactful solutions How moving to a zip code with less inequality can potentially have a more positive impact on future outcomes than moving to a wealthier zip code Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast @UNCPsych http://bkpayne.web.unc.edu/ Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi Nancy Adler Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil Angus Deaton Anne Case If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!