New York Times columnist David Brooks, alumnus of my college and our off-campus newspaper, explains beautifully some of the reasons I advise my executive coaching clients to put away popular business books and get into great novels.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. … Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. … If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
I realized how important it was to connect with your spirit in doing the things you do. Life is not just all details and logistics. You have to know why you’re doing things and understand that there are other people involved. You can’t get it from just going through the motions everyday. There’s the whole spiritual thing that some of the V.S.O.P. exercises made me realize, along with some of the things that Tony says. He doesn’t talk about it a lot, but that was one of the many things I took away.
It’s really amazing that such a short period of time could do so much and be so positive.
–Ann Lohmann
High Tech Executive on
Tony Mayo’s executive coaching program Genuine Success: V.S.O.P.in 1997
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.
The final idea for civic life is that every man and every woman should set before themselves this goal–that by the labor of their lifetime they shall pay the debt of their rearing and education, and also contribute sufficient for an handsome maintenance during their old age.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatsoever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Much too often, business owners and salespeople eagerly run off to complete assignments given to us by employees, prospects, or clients. We are asked for something, we feel like we should know how to provide it, and we eagerly set to work trying to produce something that might please them.
My experience is that it pays big dividends to slow things down by asking many clarifying questions. Exactly what information will satisfy a prospect who is looking for a reference? Or comparable experience? Or assurance of financial stability? How much ownership or participation in an eventual sale will satisfy a key employee? What commission, recognition, or work/life adjustment will motivate our best salesperson?
My CEO executive coaching group members have learned that (more…)
I noticed something interesting about executive effectiveness while reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? The researchers identified specific traits of the most effective teachers, traits that I immediately recognized as characteristic of exceptional business leaders. Try reading the following excerpt from the article while substituting “manager” for “teacher” and “employees” for “students.”
First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly (more…)
Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula, areas shown to be involved in the integration of emotion and cognition. Meditators may be able to use this self-awareness to more successfully navigate through potentially stressful encounters that arise throughout the day.
Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. Connections between sensory cortices and emotion cortices play a crucial role in processing of emotionally salient material and adaptive decision making.
The main focus of Insight meditation is the cultivation of attention and a mental capacity termed ‘mindfulness’, which is a specific nonjudgemental awareness of present-moment stimuli without cognitive elaboration. This form of meditation does not utilize mantra or chanting. Participants were not monks, but rather typical Western meditation practitioners who … meditated an average of once a day for 40 minutes, while pursuing traditional careers in fields such as healthcare and law [some were meditation or yoga teachers].
The research suggests that the brain has more control over its own perception of passing time than people may know. For example, many people have the defeated sense that it was just yesterday that they made last year’s resolutions; the year snapped shut, and they didn’t start writing that novel or attend even one Pilates class. But it is precisely because they didn’t act on their plan that the time seemed to have flown away.
By contrast, the new research suggests, focusing instead on goals or challenges that were in fact engaged during the year — whether or not they were labeled as “resolutions” — gives the brain the opportunity to fill out the past year with memories, and perceived time.
Finally, the mind is perfectly capable of interpreting a fast-forward year, or decade, as something other than a frittering away of opportunities for self-improvement. In another series of experiments published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks.
The mind is a wonderful sense-making device: it takes ambiguous or confusing information and simplifies it according to rules of thumb.
A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
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One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu – the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity.
We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) consists of multiple forms of mindfulness practice, including formal and informal meditation practice, as well as hatha yoga.
Although there is no explicit instruction in changing the nature of thinking, or emotional reactivity, MBSR has been shown to:
diminish the habitual tendency to emotionally react to and
ruminate about transitory thoughts and physical sensations;
reduce stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms;
modify distorted patterns of self-view;
amplify immune functioning;
enhance behavioral self-regulation; and
improve volitional orienting of attention.
Recent functional neuroimaging studies of MBSR have provided evidence of reduced narrative and conceptual and increased experiential and sensory self-focus at post-MBSR and decreased conceptual–linguistic self-referential processing from pre- to post-MBSR.
The formal practice consists of:
breath-focused attention,
body scan-based attention to the transient nature of sensory experience, (more…)
New York Times columnist David Brooks, alumnus of my college and our off-campus newspaper, explains beautifully some of the reasons I advise my executive coaching clients to put away popular business books and get into great novels.
I felt more productive.
Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula, areas shown to be involved in the integration of emotion and cognition. Meditators may be able to use this self-awareness to more successfully navigate through potentially stressful encounters that arise throughout the day.
The research suggests that the brain has more control over its own perception of passing time than people may know. For example, many people have the defeated sense that it was just yesterday that they made last year’s resolutions; the year snapped shut, and they didn’t start writing that novel or attend even one Pilates class. 
A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) consists of multiple forms of mindfulness practice, including formal and informal meditation practice, as well as hatha yoga.
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