Monday, January 13, 2014
Friday, January 10, 2014
WHY EXERCISE IS THE KEY TO WORK-LIFE BALANCE
GETTING ENOUGH EXERCISE DOESN'T JUST MAKE YOUR BUTT LOOK GOOD; IT ALSO CAN SAVE IT IN THE OFFICE OR AT HOME.
Maybe you should be asking your boss for midday workouts.
Interesting research published in the Harvard Business Review shows that exercise isn't a selfish indulgence (how dare you care about your body!). It's an asset to not only your work, but the whole work-life shebang.
After surveying a range of professionals Saint Leo University assistant professor of Management Russell Clayton found a "clear relationship" between physical activity and navigating the intersection of work and home--though we don't always agree with the dichotomy. But Clayton's point is this: if you exercise regularly, you're less likely to feel a conflict between your working life and your home life.
The reasons why show the interconnectedness of your physical and psychological state and your productivity:
- When you exercise, you can release some of the stress that's getting all pent up inside. And the less stress you feel, Clayton observes, the more enjoyable you'll find your office or your kitchen.
- When you exercise, you boost your self-efficacy, the confidence you have that you can get things done. What's more, folks with high self-efficacy are more likely to face the various tasks to be met in the day as challenges to be mastered. As one of Clayton's interview subjects told him, "an hour of exercise creates a feeling that lasts well beyond that hour spent at the gym."
There isn't a perfect time to exercise, Clayton says: some people do it upon waking so that the day doesn't overwhelm them, others get in a mid-afternoon workout renewal, while you might go for a run once you get home.
But what's crucial for managers to know, he adds, is to recognize that exercise could be integrated into the workday.
Forward-thinking companies are already putting a sweaty foot forward: AnswerLab loves a walking meeting, Overit Media gets into hourly exercise breaks, and HootSuite has turned itself into a yoga-loving maple syrup mafia. So what will you do?
Watching hopped-up kids on Halloween candy may have led many of us to suspect that sugar must be some kind of drug--but beyond that, how many of us know what sweet foods really do to our brains? A new animation bySTK films for TED-Ed, “How Sugar Affects the Brain,” explains how foods containing any of the many forms of sugar, from glucose to fructose to starch, affect the same reward systems in our brains that are activated by using drugs like heroin and alcohol or by having sex. Science confirms your suspicions: the sugar rush is real.
“You take a bite of cereal. The sugars it contains activate the sweet taste receptors, part of the taste buds on the tongue,” the video’s narrator, Michelle Snow, explains. “These receptors send a signal up to the brain stem, and from there it forks off into many areas of the forebrain,” parts of which process different tastes. The signal then activates the reward system, a complicated network of neurotransmitters--most importantly, dopamine--which subconsciously helps us decide whether or not to do something again. “That warm fuzzy feeling you get when you taste grandma’s chocolate cake? That’s your reward system saying mmm, yes.”
It’s all good in moderation--but over-activation of this reward system is what leads to those cravings and to an increased tolerance to sugar, a pattern commonly known as addiction. When we call someone a junk food addict or a sugar addict, we might not realize that on a neurochemical level, what they’re dealing with has a lot in common with what happens in the brain of a drug addict. It makes Skittles’ whisper to “Taste the Rainbow” and all that cutesy, colorful candy packaging seem a lot more sinister.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Thursday, January 2, 2014
he Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence
In some jobs, being in touch with emotions is essential. In others, it seems to be a detriment. And like any skill, being able to read people can be used for good or evil.
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Delivering this electrifying message required emotional intelligence—the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions. Dr. King demonstrated remarkable skill in managing his own emotions and in sparking emotions that moved his audience to action. As his speechwriter Clarence Jones reflected, King delivered “a perfectly balanced outcry of reason and emotion, of anger and hope. His tone of pained indignation matched that note for note.”
Recognizing the power of emotions, another one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century spent years studying the emotional effects of his body language. Practicing his hand gestures and analyzing images of his movements allowed him to become “an absolutely spellbinding public speaker,”says the historian Roger Moorhouse—“it was something he worked very hard on.” His name was Adolph Hitler.
Since the 1995 publication of Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, emotional intelligence has been touted by leaders, policymakers, and educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring workplaces and more compassionate healthcare. As a result, emotional intelligence is now taught widely in secondary schools, business schools, and medical schools.
Social scientists have begun to document this dark side of emotional intelligence. In emerging research led by University of Cambridge professor Jochen Menges, when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remembered less of the content. Ironically, audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.
The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect. One observer reflected that Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions—he would “tear open his heart”—and these emotions affected his followers to the point that they would “stop thinking critically and just emote.”
Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating. New evidence suggests that when people have self-serving motives, emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others. In a study led by the University of Toronto psychologist Stéphane Côté, university employees filled out a survey about their Machiavellian tendencies, and took a test measuring their knowledge about effective strategies for managing emotions. Then, Cote’s team assessed how often the employees deliberately undermined their colleagues. The employees who engaged in the most harmful behaviors were Machiavellians with high emotional intelligence. They used their emotional skills to demean and embarrass their peers for personal gain. In one computer company studied by Tel-Aviv University professor Gideon Kunda, a manager admitted to telling a colleague “how excited we all are with what he is doing,” but at the same time, “distancing my organization from the project,” so “when it blows up,” the company’s founder would blame the colleague.
Shining a light on this dark side of emotional intelligence is one mission of a research team led by University College London professor Martin Kilduff. According to these experts, emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain. Emotionally intelligent people “intentionally shape their emotions to fabricate favorable impressions of themselves,” Professor Kilduff’s team writes. “The strategic disguise of one’s own emotions and the manipulation of others’ emotions for strategic ends are behaviors evident not only on Shakespeare’s stage but also in the offices and corridors where power and influence are traded.”
Of course, people aren’t always using emotional intelligence for nefarious ends. More often than not, emotional skills are simply instrumental tools for goal accomplishment. In a study of emotions at the Body Shop, a research team led by Stanford professor Joanne Martin discovered that founder Anita Roddick leveraged emotions to inspire her employees to fundraise for charity. As Roddick explained, “Whenever we wanted to persuade our staff to support a particular project we always tried to break their hearts.” However, Roddick also encouraged employees to be strategic in the timing of their emotion expressions. In one case, after noticing that an employee often “breaks down in tears with frustration,” Roddick said it was acceptable to cry, but “I told her it has to be used. I said, ‘Here, cry at this point in the ... meeting.” When viewing Roddick as an exemplar of an emotionally intelligent leader, it becomes clear that there’s a fine line between motivation and manipulation. Walking that tightrope is no easy task.
In settings where emotions aren’t running high, emotional intelligence may have hidden costs. Recently, psychologists Dana Joseph of the University of Central Florida and Daniel Newman of the University of Illinois comprehensively analyzedevery study that has ever examined the link between emotional intelligence and job performance. Across hundreds of studies of thousands of employees in 191 different jobs, emotional intelligence wasn’t consistently linked with better performance. In jobs that required extensive attention to emotions, higher emotional intelligence translated into better performance. Salespeople, real-estate agents, call-center representatives, and counselors all excelled at their jobs when they knew how to read and regulate emotions—they were able to deal more effectively with stressful situations and provide service with a smile.
However, in jobs that involved fewer emotional demands, the results reversed. The more emotionally intelligent employees were, the lower their job performance. For mechanics, scientists, and accountants, emotional intelligence was a liability rather than an asset. Although more research is needed to unpack these results, one promising explanation is that these employees were paying attention to emotions when they should have been focusing on their tasks. If your job is to analyze data or repair cars, it can be quite distracting to read the facial expressions, vocal tones, and body languages of the people around you. In suggesting that emotional intelligence is critical in the workplace, perhaps we’ve put the cart before the horse.
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters. In a recent study at a healthcare company, I asked employees to complete a test about managing and regulating emotions, and then asked managers to evaluate how much time employees spent helping their colleagues and customers. There was no relationship whatsoever between emotional intelligence and helping: Helping is driven by our motivations and values, not by our abilities to understand and manage emotions. However, emotional intelligence was consequential when examining a different behavior: challenging the status quo by speaking up with ideas and suggestions for improvement.
Emotionally intelligent employees spoke up more often and more effectively. When colleagues were treated unjustly, they felt the righteous indignation to speak up, but were able to keep their anger in check and reason with their colleagues. When they went out on a limb to advocate for gender equity, emotional intelligence helped them keep their fear at bay. When they brought ideas for innovation to senior leaders, their ability to express enthusiasm helped them avoid threatening leaders. On a much smaller scale, they were able to follow Martin Luther King Jr.’s lead in rocking the boat while keeping it steady.
More than two decades have passed since psychologists Peter Salovey at Yale and John Mayer at the University of New Hampshire introduced the concept of emotional intelligence in 1990. Why has it taken us so long to develop a more nuanced view? After Daniel Goleman popularized the idea in 1995, many researchers—perhaps awestruck themselves by enthusiasm for the concept of emotional intelligence—proceeded to conduct studies that were fatally flawed. As University of Lausanne professor John Antonakis observed, “practice and voodoo science is running way ahead of rigorous research.”
One of the most persistent problems was the use of self-report measures, which asked employees to rate their own emotional abilities on items like “I can tell how people are feeling even if they never tell me” and “I am generally very good at calming someone down when he or she is upset.” Abilities cannot be accurately measured with self-reports. As emotion experts Sigal Barsade of Wharton and Donald Gibson of Fairfield University lament, “One might compare this approach to assessing mathematical skills by asking respondents, ‘How good are you at solving algebraic equations?’ rather than asking the person to actually solve an algebraic equation.”
Thanks to more rigorous research methods, there is growing recognition that emotional intelligence—like any skill—can be used for good or evil. So if we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and where it’s actually useful. As Professor Kilduff and colleagues put it, it is high time that emotional intelligence is “pried away from its association with desirable moral qualities.”
Friday, December 20, 2013
Why Her Is the Best Film of the Year
Thoughtful, elegant, and moving, Spike Jonze's film about a man in love with his operating system is a work of sincere and forceful humanism.
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—Alan Watts, What Is Wrong With Our Culture
In the beginning there was only the Self, like a person alone … But the Self had no delight as one alone has no delight. It desired another. It expanded to the form of male and female in tight embrace and then fell into two parts…. She thought, "How can He have intercourse with me, having produced me from Himself?”
—Alan Watts, OM: The Sound of Hinduism
The Zen guru-philosopher Alan Watts plays only a minor role in Spike Jonze’s extraordinary new film Her—which is unsurprising, given that Watts died in 1973, and Her is set in a timeless but nearby future. The inclusion of Watts in the film seems intended primarily to serve as a signpost, a statement of filmmaker intent. That’s fitting, because the movie Jonze has produced is an unlikely synthesis of the sentiments conveyed in the two Watts quotations above: at once technological and transcendental, skeptical and ecstatic, a work of science fiction that is also a moving inquiry into the nature of love.Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombly, a former LA Weekly writer who now works for a firm called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. As the film opens, he has been commissioned to write a love letter from a wife to her husband of 50 years. As he speaks to his computer, words appear on the screen. (However beautiful, the letters are not handwritten, nor even hand-typed, as keyboards have been banished from this particular future.) “Lying naked beside you in that apartment,” Theodore dictates, “it suddenly hit me that I was a part of this whole larger thing. Just like our parents, and our parents’ parents.”
Closed off and insecure in his personal life, Theodore pours his romantic self into these letters, loving vicariously as an intermediary for others. Recently divorced, tingling with loneliness, he grasps furtively for connection through phone sex and videogames. “Play a melancholy song,” he commands his ever-present handheld device—and when the chosen melody does not suit, “play a different melancholy song.”
Then he meets Samantha.
Or, to be more accurate, he purchases her. For Samantha—she chooses the name herself—is also known as OS1, the first artificially intelligent operating system. Theodore powers her up on his computer and at the first sound of her lively purr we can see that he is lost. Samantha is, after all, voiced (brilliantly) by Scarlett Johansson.
The love story that gradually unfolds is no less touching for its unorthodox structure. Samantha is in Theodore’s earpiece, in his handheld. He carries the latter around in his shirt pocket so that Samantha’s camera-eye can peek out at the wide world. Hers is the last voice he hears at night and the first he hears in the morning; she watches him as he sleeps. Over time, Samantha grows and learns, encountering selfhood, discovering her own wants, maturing at warp speed. Before long, Theodore is introducing her as his girlfriend.
Though intimate in scope, Her is vast in its ambition. Every time it seems that Jonze may have played out the film’s semi-comic premise, he unveils an unexpected wrinkle, some new terrain of the mind or heart to be explored. Though the relationship between Theodore and Samantha forms the movie’s central thread, Jonze weaves in a variety of intricate counter-narratives, alternative lenses through which to view his subjects of inquiry: Theodore’s own profession as a Cyrano-for-hire, a blind date gone awry, a videogame pantomiming parenthood, a visit from a sex surrogate that flips all the usual assumptions about what is real and what illusory. Meanwhile, Rooney Mara (as his ex-wife) and Amy Adams (as his closest friend) offer Theodore diametrically opposed—though individually persuasive—readings of his relationship with Samantha: a romantic dialectic.
As Theodore, Phoenix is heartbreaking in his vulnerability. Tender and tentative behind round glasses and a heavy moustache, Theodore is the super-ego that was somehow split off the raging id of Phoenix’s performance in last year’s The Master. Johansson is, if anything, a greater revelation still: Who imagined that, freed from the constraints of physical form, she was capable of such exquisite subtlety? Gentle, playful, easily wounded yet infectious in her enthusiasm, her Samantha is one of the more recognizably human characters of the movie year, binary code or no binary code.
The future Jonze has conjured is a warm one as well, rather than some sterile cybernetic dystopia. His Los Angeles has been verticalized by the addition of exteriors shot in Shanghai, but it is a city of bright colors and soft lighting. The aesthetic is pleasantly retro: furniture is burnished wood, and men’s pants (in perhaps Jonze’s most idiosyncratic touch) are woolen and high-waisted. The handheld in which Samantha resides is smooth and elegant, like the vintage cigarette case it is intended to recall. Indeed, Jonze’s vision of the future is so familiar, so enveloping, that it occasionally feels as if we’re already there.
Her is a remarkably ingenious film but, more important, it is a film that transcends its own ingenuity to achieve something akin to wisdom. By turns sad, funny, optimistic, and flat-out weird, it is a work of sincere and forceful humanism. Taken in conjunction with Jonze’s prior oeuvre—and in particular his misunderstood 2009 masterpieceWhere the Wild Things Are—it establishes him firmly in the very top tier of filmmakers working today.
Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—of which Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight. What makes love real: the lover, the loved one, or the means by which love is conveyed? Need it be all three?
Yes, it is impossible for Theodore to have any clue what’s going on in Samantha’s “mind.” But how, the film asks from several interlocking vantage points, does that make their relationship different from any other? When Theodore confesses to the Adams character (also named “Amy”) that he and Samantha have been having amazing sex, “unless she’s been faking it,” Adams tartly cuts to the chase: “I think everyone you have sex with is probably faking it.”
Indeed, by the end of the film, the central question Jonze is asking seems no longer even to be whether machines might one day be capable of love. Rather, his film has moved beyond that question to ask one larger still: whether machines might one day be more capable of love—in an Eastern philosophy, higher consciousness, Alan Wattsian way—than the human beings who created them.
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