In the late 1960s, an MIT student went to a meditation class by Philip Kapleau, author of the classic, The Three Pillars of Zen. The student only went because his Ph.D. advisor had invited the speaker to campus.
No word on whether Roshi Kapleau was discouraged to see only four listeners in the large lecture hall, the organizer, his student, and two others. We do know that he effectively delivered his message because that student became Jon Kabat-Zinn, the most influential promoter, teacher, and scientific researcher of meditation in the history of the West.
It is not a speaker’s job to judge the audience. We save the world one speech, sometimes one listener, at a time.
Learn the one common mistake to avoid if you are tired of feeling overwhelmed by listening to this quick audio message from Tony Mayo, The Business Owner’s Executive Coach.
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Thanks to MusicOpen for providing public domain recordings of Beethoven.
Tony’s short book on building community is now available
with an extra chapter and a guide to additional resources.
The new chapter is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home. The focus of the book is the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new section is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life.
This expanded edition also includes links to recommended books and articles for further study and practice.
“Powerful, simple message we can all immediately apply to our lives.”
“More of an invitation than a sermon, the message is not religious in nature and the message is universal. Tony leaves us with an opportunity to live richer, more expressive lives.”
“Covers a lot of meaningful ground in a handful of pages – brings together courage, bravery, belonging, acceptance, compassion and more–and backs it up with insights, experience, resources, and references!”
“You did not speak just to fill the time; each sentence added to the whole.”
“Tony, I have it on good authority that your sermon this last Sunday was about the best ever.”
“We were inspired by what you shared and how you shared it. Thank you.”
The Courage to Be in Community, 2nd Edition:
A Call for Compassion, Vulnerability, and Authenticity
by Tony Mayo
The word courage originally meant “to speak and act from the heart,” or cour in Latin. Courage is required to express our deepest and most authentic selves because we so often fear judgment, rejection and exclusion. How do we balance the universal human needs of authenticity and acceptance in our personal lives? How might we foster communities where others have the courage to be truly themselves with us?
Executive Coach Tony Mayo drew on the research of Brené Brown, Joseph Campbell, and others to compose this enthusiastically received non-sectarian sermon. Originally delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston at their Sunday services on January 26, 2014, it has now has been revised and expanded for publication.
Everyone loves to hate performance evaluations, and with good reason: Research has shown them to be ineffective, unreliable and unsatisfactory for seemingly everyone involved. They consume way too much time, leave most workers deflated and feel increasingly out of step with reality.
…more than half the executives questioned (58%) believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance. [Click here to see the survey.]
…conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance.
Three items correlated best with high performance for a team:
I have the chance to use my strengths every day
My coworkers are committed to doing quality work
The mission of our company inspires me
It’s not the particular number we assign to a person that’s the problem; rather, it’s the fact that there is a single number. … we want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be compressed into a single number.
The new approach focuses, alternatively, on how to develop employees in the future given their current performance.
–What if you could replace performance evaluations with four simple questions? Deloitte has come up with them (and two only need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer). By Jena McGregor in the Washington Post
The founder and driving force of “Positive Psychology” has summarized his lifetime of research in this accessible book for the lay reader. Though padded with the usual flab of today’s nonfiction–refutations of criticisms most readers have never encountered, tangential personal anecdotes, and repetition–the substance of his findings are practical and enlivening. Dr. Seligman even summarizes the components of a life well lived in a mnemonic acronym.
Click here for an up-to-date review of what science knows about healthful diet, written by two public health experts at Yale. The gist: don’t be distracted by the latest popular diet or the tendency of publicized studies to contradict details of previous advice. The basics have been established and understood for a long time. As Michael Pollen has said, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Diet is established among the most important influences on health in modern societies. Injudicious diet figures among the leading causes of premature death and chronic disease. … The weight of evidence strongly supports a…diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants. Efforts to improve public health through diet are forestalled not for want of knowledge…but for distractions associated with exaggerated claims, and our failure to convert what we reliably know into what we routinely do.
AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907,… (p. 18)… His publicity department had come up with a slogan that was meant to rally its public image, but Vail himself soon adopted it as the company’s core philosophical principle as well. [16] It was simple enough:
“One policy, one system, universal service.”
That this was a kind of wishful thinking seemed not to matter. (p. 20)
…in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise. (p. 186). [See also on this blog, Your greatest strength is your #1 blind spot.]
On Management:
Measurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created— for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured. (p. 48).
“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but (more…)
Here’s a useful site, paid for by the foundation established by the founder of Health Valley Foods. The World’s Healthiest Foods List at: http://www.whfoods.com/foodstoc.php
In addition to featuring a host of vitamins and minerals, eggplant also contains important phytonutrients, many which have antioxidant activity. Phytonutrients contained in eggplant include phenolic compounds, such caffeic and chlorogenic acid, and flavonoids, such as nasunin.
Tony’s short book on building community is now available
with an extra chapter and a guide to additional resources.
The new chapter is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home. The focus of the book is the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new section is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life.
This expanded edition also includes links to recommended books and articles for further study and practice.
As I discussed in my popular article, Truth or Consequences: Beyond the Punishment Model, employers are too quick to act like cops with the result that employees respond like criminals. Here is more support for my advice, this time from a rigorous study of new restaurant software. Instead of using the software mainly to fire workers suspected of theft, all employees were made aware that the software was looking for misbehavior. The results were positive and–to those not familiar with my approach–surprising.
The same people who are stealing from you can be set up to succeed.
–Prof. Lamar Pierce
Washington University
“The savings from the [monitoring software’s] theft alerts themselves were modest, $108 a week per restaurant. However, after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of $2,982 a week, or about 7 percent.
“The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.”
Would you like to more than triple the chances that your employees will volunteer to help a colleague or a customer? In just two months. For free.
Easy. Encourage your staff to meditate for 20 minutes per day. That is the conclusion from a recent study.
The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help.
From Grey Matter: The Morality of Meditation
by David DeSteno, Ph. D. in The New York Times
describing research
by Paul Condon, Ph. D., Northeastern University
published in Psychological Science
You are welcome to use all this in your work and to pass any of my posts along to your colleagues. I only ask that you preserve the attribution to me and not alter the content.
To contact me by telephone or email, click here for the “About Tony Mayo” page.
A video that answers the most common questions asked by prospective clients is also available here..
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You can read what some of my clients have said about my coaching by clicking here for “Client Comments.”
Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.
…
The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book Drive offers a nice summary of this literature.)
These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”
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