Professor Elizabeth Blackburn is the discoverer of telomeres, tiny units of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect and stabilize our genetic blueprints. Telomeres seem to act as a biological clock that limits the lifespan of cells–and of ourselves.
… psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres. … We looked at the measures for cardiovascular disease — bad lipid profiles, obesity, all that stuff. The women with those had low telomerase. … Researchers have found that the brain definitely sends nerves directly to organs of the immune system and not just to the heart and the lower gut.
A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH H. BLACKBURN
Finding Clues to Aging in the Fraying Tips of Chromosomes New York Times July 3, 2007
… mindfulness meditation techniques appear to shift cognitive appraisals from threat to challenge, decrease ruminative thought, and reduce stress arousal. Mindfulness may also directly increase positive arousal states. … meditation may have salutary effects on telomere length by reducing cognitive stress and stress arousal and increasing positive states of mind and hormonal factors that may promote telomere maintenance.
A small group of leaders in the DC Metro area is interviewing potential new members for their coaching group. Details below or you can download a brochure here: http://tiny.cc/gsvsop
Your organization and your responsibilities can grow only as fast as you do. Participate in Genuine Success: Vitality, Service, and Outstanding Performance (GS:VSOP) to develop your expertise in the only career strategy that is endlessly scalable. Leadership: the ability to get things done with and through other people.
GS:VSOP is a continuing program to provide business people with structure, tools, and support to produce nonlinear, unpredicted, massive results at work while enjoying a high level of personal satisfaction, fulfillment, and vitality.
GS:VSOP’s unique mix of traditional business principles, cutting-edge brain science, powerful one-to-one coaching, and ancient disciplines assures you a productive and profitable experience.
Each month, you will grow as a leader through a full day of group learning with other successful leaders; participate in one-to-one coaching sessions with your group leader; be held accountable for implementing your vision with follow-up sessions and field practice.
Program topics include influence and persuasion, organization and planning, finance, self-management and growth, focus and concentration, integrity, communication, health, and fitness. See brochure for more details.
This program is for leaders who:
Aim to achieve transformational growth & breakthrough results.
Want to improve ROI & speed growth.
Are frustrated with “business as usual” & just know “there’s got to be a better way.”
Are ready to get more done with less stress.
Apply their knowledge to innovate & make things happen.
Strive for a greater clarity & confidence.
Are ready to take bolder action, to employ their talents & resources thoroughly.
You’ll learn why you behave the way you do and how to alter your conversations for greater performance and how to consistently achieve significant measurable organization-wide improvements.
Schedule a conversation with Tony Mayo to find out if this program is right for you by clicking here.
To me, leadership is a journey toward wholeness.
A leader’s journey starts by looking inward to understand, “Why am I here?” and “What is it that I’m here to do?”
–- Joe Jaworski, MIT
Society for Organizational Learning
Making change in organizations is central to my work. The nature of organizations, however, is to resist change. That’s why we call them organize-ations, not random-izations or adapt-ations,
One common way for organizations to resist innovation and change is for people to collect evidence that any novel tool or procedure is causing problems–even if the problems predate the change.
Waterless Urinals
Craig Hansen, the Army base’s energy engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”
Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle?
In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean. He suspected there was something else going on and decided a little experiment might flush out the problem. He bought a smoke bomb, lit the fuse, dropped it down the main sewer line, and waited. Hansen observed that the sewer vent outside the building was placed directly in front of the structure’s air intake. Smoke flowed out of the vent and was immediately sucked back into the building. He also found a cracked toilet in the women’s rest room that spewed smoke. The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job.
Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived.
I encountered today a wonderful expression of the same insight that I shared in my video, Roadwork for Enduring Success.
You may recall that in 2003 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created in New York’s Central Park a huge art installation called The Gates. You may not know that it took more than twenty years to get permission to erect this work; they began in 1979. HBO produced a documentary that covers the decades of work and persuasion that ensued. The film includes a conversation early in the process in which the artists were sternly warned about the many steps and barriers likely to occur, given the state of NYC politics and finances–despite the fact that the artists would pay all of the millions of dollars the project cost.
Christo invited those cynical insiders into his point-of-view. “The project is growing from the bottom. That is the very point. Think of it positively.” Please do not regard this as a bureaucratic horror or a political monstrosity. Art is not about the final object seen at the end. Art is a creative process. The preparation, the protests, the persuasion, and postponements are all part of the poetry; necessary and constitutive parts of the artistic expression.
So much of daily lives, our families and careers, can be regarded either as delays and obstructions or as essential parts of the process, lines in the poem, the second act of the drama, the background that makes the foreground visible –and beautiful.
If you can swing and you’ve got your health, you can get through things. If you view the antagonist as cooperative, struggle becomes opportunity. Is the jazz soloist struggling or is he being creative? Why was Louis Armstrong always smiling?
Knowledge at Wharton published a very well-done summary article on the problems with and alternatives to the traditional annual performance review. Here are my favorite excerpts.
“an overall performance management process — one that focuses on goal setting, feedback, coaching and clear statements of the company’s performance expectations — is absolutely critical” and indeed, is found in the highest-performing companies.
–Sibson Consulting/WorldatWork survey
Good managers provide feedback and direction that will help individuals achieve success. Bad managers don’t. They worry about (more…)
Wired Magazine published a fascinating photograph of the high-technology, luxurious bridge aboard the world’s longest cruise ship, the 1,187 foot Oasis of the Seas. Even more interesting is the leadership wisdom the ship’s captain shared.
How does the captain steer? “The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship,” Wright says. But those are typically operated by other officers. “Captains should be mentoring and teaching.“
Participating effectively in trade shows and conferences requires significant investment of time and treasure. I always encourage my clients to do only as many as they can afford to do thoroughly. What does “thoroughly” mean?
Essentially, have a plan and a purpose. Start early, months before the conference. Have the right people at the conference with the time, attention, and resources necessary to work the plan. Be ready to follow up after the conference. Everyone returns from these with lots of ideas and good intentions that whither the first day back at the office. It’s up to you to pick up the thread and maintain the momentum.
Have a clear goal or purpose that is consistent with your marketing message and sales targets. One way to formulate the goal is to answer the question, “If I (more…)
I have been working with Tony for years to increase my ability to make an impact in my personal and professional life. With his coaching and through his GS:VSOP course, I have articulated my life purpose, focused on ways to lead a more vibrant life, and am achieving things I never thought possible.
People continually and automatically evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value …
The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emotion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans by nature …
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect…
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize something is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communicate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003), so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect…
The conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes (more…)
I have been working with Tony for years to increase my ability to make an impact in my personal and professional life. With his coaching and through his 
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