Popular insights from the WiseAmigo Community
From cognitive bias to building resilience, the following articles delve into the inner workings of our minds. Whether you need to get to grips with mind tricks, reconfigure your attitude to failure or discover the secret of self motivation, the following are here to boost your personal growth.
Yet again, your brain is working against you, and it’s because of a phenomenon called the urgency effect. Our brains tend to prioritise immediate satisfaction over long-term rewards (you probably remember this from the famous marshmallow experiment). But a study from February found that subjects were more likely to perform smaller-but-urgent tasks that had a deadline than they were to perform more important tasks without one. This was true even if the outcome of the smaller task was objectively worse than that of the larger one…
Bias skews perception, leading to foolish decisions. There are so many biases that effect our everyday decisions, especially at work. And most of these biases we are totally unaware of. So in order to make better decisions, we must recognise our biases and reevaluate decisions. Luckily, Journalist Charles Orton-Jones breaks down nine examples of bias that every, especially risk managers, should know about.
“Your life comes down to your decisions, and if you change your decision you change everything”. This powerful conversation explores how the mind is wired to protect us from the uncomfortable and difficult. In particular, when we stop and hesitate. This micro-moment of hesitation sends stress signals to the brain, which then goes into protect mode. This is often done through the Spotlight Affect which is when the brain magnifies the risks…
“A few months ago, I spent an evening sitting on the sofa in my flat, cropping my head out of a series of wedding photographs. It was a fairly surreal experience excising my smiling face from the pictures taken outside the chapel. It was not something I had ever anticipated, because you don’t think about divorce when you’re walking down the aisle. You don’t imagine it will happen to you. You don’t believe that one day, you will be digitally altering your wedding photographs so that you can sell your mermaid-style gown and long-sleeved lace bolero to a stranger on eBay.” Elizabeth Day tell her story, revealing how the big moments in life come through crisis, like divorce, miscarriage and career knock-backs, and ultimately make use who we are.
It takes effort to get good at something, and then it takes effort to apply that skill, to create. But determination isn’t enough. You also need to apply yourself with focus. Here are three steps that you can take to increase your ability to persevere. Yes, the aptitude you bring is important, but few of us ever reach the limits of our natural abilities. Instead what holds us back is a lack of commitment or a lack of focus. “Enthusiasm is common,” Duckworth writes, “endurance is rare.”
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