Tools Of Engagement Quotes

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one's past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I've-seen/lessons-I've-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.

Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself.

The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.

Everyone had weaknesses. They just came in different sizes and shapes.

Expecting perfect can only lead to disappointment. Besides, it's the flaws that give a person character. That's where the beauty hides.

I wish we could erase all those—those atrocities,” she stammered, and was surprised by her father’s reply. “Never say that,” he insisted. “Say you want to make things right, to build a better future. But erasing the past—or worse, trying to rewrite it—is the tool of despots. Only by engaging with the past can we avoid repeating it.

Management is 5% instruction and 95% communication.

Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The two principles work in covert concert; though in most of us Eros dominates, in none of us is Thanatos completely subdued. However-and this is the paradox of suicide-to take one's life is to behave in a more active, assertive, "erotic" way than to helplessly watch as one's life is taken away from one by inevitable mortality. Suicide thus engages with both the death-hating and the death-loving parts of us: on some level, perhaps, we may envy the suicide even as we pity him. It has frequently been asked whether the poetry of Plath would have so aroused the attention of the world if Plath had not killed herself. I would agree with those who say no. The death-ridden poems move us and electrify us because of our knowledge of what happened. Alvarez has observed that the late poems read as if they were written posthumously, but they do so only because a death actually took place. "When I am talking about the weather / I know what I am talking about," Kurt Schwitters writes in a Dada poem (which I have quoted in its entirety). When Plath is talking about the death wish, she knows what she is talking about. In 1966, Anne Sexton, who committed suicide eleven years after Plath, wrote a poem entitled "Wanting to Die," in which these startlingly informative lines appear: But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. When, in the opening of "Lady Lazarus," Plath triumphantly exclaims, "I have done it again," and, later in the poem, writes, Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call, we can only share her elation. We know we are in the presence of a master builder.

How many times can you put something behind you . . . before all those incidents crowd you out the door?” “We’re in construction, darlin’. We’ll just build an addition to make them fit.

When I look at a child, I see a living, breathing person, made in God's image, for whom God has a plan. As parent educators, we need to embrace a new notion of learning...we need to engage the hearten order to effectively educate the child. Our vision of a well-educated child is a child who has a heart for learning, a child who has the tools he needs to continue to learn for a lifetime and a child who has the love to want to do it.

If I let you, you would make me destroy myself. In order to survive you, I must first survive myself. I can sink no further, and I cannot forgive you. There's no choice but to confront you, to engage you, to erase you. I've gone to great lengths to expand my threshold of pain. I will use my mistakes against you. There's no other choice. Shameless now. Nameless now. Nothing now. No one now. But my soul must be iron, 'cause my fear is naked. I'm naked and fearless, and my fear is naked.

Forgiveness is a form of LOVE. The ability to forgive is not achieved with soaring thoughts or intentions alone. It comes about by engaging several tools over a matter of weeks that release your body, mind, and soul, from the trapped wounding energy that has caused you to feel so much pain and then be able to replace it with new healing energy instead.

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy.

It’s unbearably shaming to have one’s pleas for comfort or connection rejected. When a child’s efforts to engage a parent fail, the child can feel hopeless,

What you have now then is the marketing of racialized identities as tools for consumption. And certain racialized bodies and images are associated with hipness, coolness, edginess. So all kinds of youth all over the world are appropriating that style as a way of, sort of, countering authority, stating their rebelliousness, and wanting to be seen as significant.

Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button. In inventing tools and weapons, in contriving civilization, we have disinhibited the controls - sometimes thoughtlessly and inadvertently, but sometimes with cool premeditation. If the beasts who are our nearest relatives engaged recklessly in … mass murder they would have rendered themselves extinct. If our non-human ancestors did it, we would not be here.

Before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned—the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted—nature's answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of the theorist, who finds himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics. Of course, this does not mean that the experimenter does not also engage in theoretical deliberations. The foremost classical example of a major achievement produced by such a division of labor is the creation of spectrum analysis by the joint efforts of Robert Bunsen, the experimenter, and Gustav Kirchhoff, the theorist. Since then, spectrum analysis has been continually developing and bearing ever richer fruit.

Be an informer, not a meformer: Focusing less on ourselves and more on engaging and connecting with others Cultivate humility: Admit to our failings and put our successes in perspective Focus on self-acceptance over self-esteem: Know our flaws and choose to like ourselves anyway Tool: Monitor your inner monologue

If I let you, you would make me destroy myself. In order to survive you, I must first survive myself. I can sink no further, and I cannot forgive you. There's no choice but to confront you, to engage you, to erase you. I've gone to great lengths to expand my threshold of pain. I will use my mistakes against you. There's no other choice. I'm shameless now, I'm nameless now. I'm nothing now, I'm no one now. But my soul must be iron, 'cause my fear is naked. I'm naked and fearless, and my fear is naked.

In a hardware store, a man only had to drop the barest hint about his project and dudes started pouring out of the aisles touting their best advice. This was a ritual that saved men from having to actually ask for help while also making other men feel useful.

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

[W]hat people truly desire is access to the knowledge and information that ultimately lead to a better life--the collected wisdom of the ages found only in one place: a well-stocked library. To the teachers and librarians and everyone on the frontlines of bringing literature to young people: I know you have days when your work seems humdrum, or unappreciated, or embattled, and I hope on those days you will take a few moments to reflect with pride on the importance of the work you do. For it is indeed of enormous importance--the job of safeguarding and sharing the world's wisdom. All of you are engaged in the vital task of providing the next generation with the tools they will need to save the world. The ability to read and access information isn't just a power--it's a superpower. Which means that you aren't just heroes--you're superheroes. I believe that with all my heart.

The technical term that is often used for this is “interpersonally exploitative.” In short, because of the singular focus on fulfilling their needs, especially external needs, narcissists will use other people as objects to get those needs met. Other people often do serve literally as objects—a tool to get a job done. Because you are not in on this secret in the beginning, it can feel a bit depersonalizing—as though you are only valued when you are functional. It can feel manipulative, because your partner may compliment you excessively and then hit you with a difficult request or ask you to make uncomfortable requests.

Generation Y is the first generation to spend more time on the Net than watching TV, with 10.6 hours per week watching TV and 12.2 hours surfing the Web.

The lack of short-term stress results in a lack of long-term health. When you always protect a human body from harm, you grow it to be fragile.

Healthier organizations are possible when you stop comparing them with machines and, instead, compare them with communities.

Meditation provides the tools not only to abide more comfortably in the present, but also to observe rather than engage with unhappiness-creating thoughts.

The ultimate test of agility is whether you can keep all your stakeholders happy.

If people were good at everything on the first try, they wouldn’t appreciate the journey to getting better,

Before you try to measure someone else’s performance, please explain how you measure your own.

It’s important to be socially active, engaged and connected with powerful tools like LinkedIn. These tools can be used in a myriad of ways to benefit you both personally and professionally.

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.   Quentin Crisp, English writer (1908–1999)

It’s behind us now,” he said, swaying her side to side. “And if you get pissed at me again in a couple of days and we argue or storm off to lick our wounds, we’ll put it behind us then, too.

Say you want to make things right, to build a better future. But erasing the past—or worse, trying to rewrite it—is the tool of despots. Only by engaging with the past can we avoid repeating it.

Narrative imagination - and therefore fiction - is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

Never say that,” he insisted. “Say you want to make things right, to build a better future. But erasing the past—or worse, trying to rewrite it—is the tool of despots. Only by engaging with the past can we avoid repeating it.

In the workshop, wishing won't make it so. The craftsman is forced to come to terms with the physical properties of materials, the mechanical properties of tools, and the real capacity and limits of his own dexterity, discipline and imagination. In this way, craft's materiality imposes cooperation on the sometimes discordant factions of the mind. By necessity, it reconciles the desire to interpret the world in ways that are emotionally gratifying with the countervailing need for accurate information to facilitate effective decisions. Thus the holistic quality of craft lies not only in engaging the whole person but also in harmonising his understanding of himself in the world.

These men, often elevated to the status of local heroes, served as the most violently effective tool of a democracy aroused against Native Americans: citizen-soldiers engaged in acts of self-interest disguised as self-preservation.

Design thinking has been associated with massive team collaboration, which in turn, fosters employee engagement and maximizes productivity. Hence, it is a tool that should be emulated and implemented for the success of any business.

They’re like Generation X on steroids. They walk in with high expectations for themselves, their employer, their boss. If you thought you saw a clash when Generation X came into the workplace—that was the fake punch. The haymaker is coming now.

Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful negotiating technique for transforming encounters from confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.

Your goal should be to keep the temperature within what we call the productive zone of disequilibrium (PZD): enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement, and forward motion, but not so much that the organization (or your part of it) explodes.

When a white woman starts to cry, I ask her to take some deep breaths as I invite the group to let her experience her feelings and not try to take care of her or rescue her in the moment. I clearly state that this person can easily be in her feelings and continue engaging and doesn’t need to be comforted or saved by anyone. I then refocus my attention onto the white woman and say how I really respect people who can express their emotions and talk through their tears. I then ask if she is ready to share her reactions to the feedback. In the vast majority of situations, white women are able to continue engaging effectively, and group members realize a number of things, including: people can cry and talk at the same time; jumping in to support someone may be more about trying to avoid our own feelings of discomfort; interrupting the learning moment by handing out Kleenex, rubbing someone’s back or challenging the person of color’s comments may deny the white woman a potentially important growth opportunity; and the entire group may benefit from fully experiencing and processing this emotional moment.

From an evolutionary standpoint, food that you don’t have is critically different from food that you do have. It’s the same for water, shelter, and tools. The division is so fundamental that separate pathways and chemicals evolved in the brain to handle peripersonal and extrapersonal space. When you look down, you look into the peripersonal space, and for that the brain is controlled by a host of chemicals concerned with experience in the here and now. But when the brain is engaged with the extrapersonal space, one chemical exercises more control than all the others, the chemical associated with anticipation and possibility: dopamine. Things in the distance, things we don’t have yet, cannot be used or consumed, only desired. Dopamine has a very specific job: maximizing resources that will be available to us in the future; the pursuit of better things.

if you want to set the tone or mood, make sure you get some of the first words in. Think about it, which meeting would you prefer to attend? One that starts with “Let’s get going because we have so much to do today and a lot of fires to put out” or one that starts with “I’m happy to see you all today—it’s great that we have such a strong team working on these exciting new projects”? Same reality but a very different outlook. Then sit back and watch how people’s engagement and motivation improve in response to your power lead. It’s one of the most effective tools in this book.

I seek to use the tools of the mind to overcome a narcissistic self and attain self-mastery. I aspire to engage in self-cultivation by making practical usage of the process of enduring privations, overcoming challenges, and rejecting illicit temptations in order to gain fortitude, courage, and wisdom. I shall reflect upon grievous personal mistakes and embrace the concept of repentance as a lifelong growth process through which humankind conscientiously learns to make better choices by forsaking vice, immorality, and wickedness. I must also unreservedly embrace fate by perceiving everything that happens in life including suffering and loss as good, and affirm a life filled with indignity, sorrow, and tragedy. I can only discover happiness – a meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value of existence – by living with dignity in the face of absurdity. When we affirm all aspects of being, we enjoy a tranquil existence.

The loss of nonverbal body cues is among the most overlooked reasons why employees feel so disengaged from others. If used properly, and at scale, empathetic body language equals employee engagement. Disengagement happens not because people don’t want to be empathetic but because with today’s tools, they don’t know how.

The physiological effects of hunger alone stop us from fully engaging in the world and reaching our full potential. Our bodies and brains just don't function properly when they're deprived of nourishment. And since diet culture has been aimed primarily at women for the past 100 years, hunger could be seen as one of the most effective tools for suppressing female advancement. It keeps us thinking about things like waistlines and sugar substitutes rather than the need for social, political, and economic equality. Which is what led Wolf to famously write, "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history." In other words, we cannot take on the world while we're hungry.

One tool of mindfulness that can cut through our numbing trance is inquiry. As we ask ourselves questions about our experience, our attention gets engaged. We might begin by scanning our body, noticing what we are feeling, especially in the throat, chest, abdomen and stomach, and then asking, “What is happening?” We might also ask, “What wants my attention right now?” or, “What is asking for acceptance?” Then we attend, with genuine interest and care, listening to our heart, body and mind. Inquiry is not a kind of analytic digging—we are not trying to figure out, “Why do I feel this sadness?” This would only stir up more thoughts. In contrast to the approach of Western psychology, in which we might delve into further stories in order to understand what caused a current situation, the intention of inquiry is to awaken to our experience exactly as it is in this present moment. While inquiry may expose judgments and thoughts about what we feel is wrong, it focuses on our immediate feelings and sensations. I might be feeling like a bad mother

Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.

Some days, it feels unreasonable to expect that an academic text can work as a form of movement assessment or to support social and political change, including the redistribution of power. Perhaps nonfiction & the arts--literature, poetry & film--are potentially much better suited to the work of politically engaging audiences than the staid tools of the academy.

We've got to simplify, pull back all these layers of supposed complexity , and get down to the essentials. If we want people to engage with government, we should use the same tools that are getting them engages with companies and institutions in private life. If we want people to care about political issues, we should give them a way to understand and get involved in them.

This might explain why the conspiratorial claims in the Mirror World so often seem to contradict one another. For this new political configuration, convincing people of their unproven theories was never the real point—it was only ever a tool. The point, consciously or not, is to foster denial and avoidance. The point is not to have to do hard and uncomfortable things in the face of hard and uncomfortable realities, whether Covid, or climate change, or the fact that our nations were forged in genocide and have never engaged in a remotely serious process of making repair. Denial is so much easier than looking inward, or backward, or forward; so much easier than change. But denial needs narratives, cover stories, and that is what conspiracy culture is providing.

A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply.

What is Strange and disconcerting about Jesus is the fact that he rarely makes demands. The style of teaching he engages in is not rote on memorization or indoctrination but Socratic, propositional and inductive. The listener is invited to explore and come to a conclusion. It is the desire of Christ for his audience to reach a conclusion and not be told what to think. Stories, sayings, reversals, parables and other forms of teaching used by Jesus are not good teaching tools for people who seek simplistic answers. Jesus teaches but requires more of a listener. We are invited to join the journey, wrestle with our assumptions, confront our spiritual bigotry and struggle with the humbling mystery and profound profundity of God. This is HARD faith, especially for the modern reader. We want the speaker to tell us what to think. We want our stories tidy, without complication, and we do not want questions designed to coerce us beyond easy answers. This is the LIFE and MINISTRY of Jesus. He was a walking mobile university, a theological gadfly, a spiritual teacher and Savior who cannot be contained by tradition, conformity or assimilation. Jesus is loose in the world quietly upending all assumptions, ideas and concepts we hold true.

Small rituals can be a joyous way to kickstart the day and at the same time provide powerful comfort. A walk, a cup of tea, breath work, making the bed, morning pages. I knew a daily ritual had the potential to be a tool to engage my mind, a way to clear the trash out of my head, a daily dose of beauty and physical satisfaction, an ongoing source of humility and a generous wellspring of contentment in the certainty of it; but I didn’t realise until years into this practice how essential it would become.

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.

Being “ordinary” means that we reject the idolatry of pursuing excellence for selfish reasons. We aren’t digging wells in Africa to prove our worth or value. We aren’t serving in the soup kitchen or engaging in spiritual disciplines because we long to be unique, radical, and different. When we do these things for selfish reasons, God becomes a tool for winning our lifetime achievement award. Our neighbors become instruments in the crafting of our sense of meaning, impact, and identity. What we do for God is really for ourselves.

Leading, not following We’ve been trained to follow. In fact, the very nature of training has following built right into it. We follow instructions. We follow the rules. We follow the leader. The challenge in a six-billion person world is that we don’t have a shortage of followers. Followers are easy to find, and the tools for compliance are more powerful (but less useful) than ever. Now the economy is demanding leaders. Human beings who can engage in what it really means to be a person—to forge connections, to see a path and to make a difference.

Adopting a career because it’s lucrative, or because your parents want you to, or because it falls into your lap, can sometimes work out, but often, after you settle in, it starts to feel wrong. It’s like someone else punched the GPS coordinates into your phone. You’re locked onto your course, but you don’t even know where you’re going. When the route doesn’t feel right, when your autopilot is leading you astray, then you must question your destination. Hey! Who put “law degree” in my phone? Zoom out, take a high-altitude view of what’s going on in your life, and start thinking about where you really want to go. See the whole geography—the roads, the traffic, the destination. Do you like where you are? Do you like the end point? Is changing things a matter of replotting your final destination, or are you on the wrong map altogether? A GPS is an awesome tool, but if you aren’t the one inputting the data, you can’t rely on it to guide you. The world is a big place, and you can’t approach it as if it’s been preprogrammed. Give yourself the chance to change the route in search of emotional engagement.

Define your limits: You must decide what you will or will not tolerate. Pay attention to feelings of resentment: Such feelings let you know when someone has been forcefully imposing their personal expectations, views, demands, or values on you without your consent or interest. Be direct or be silent: There are two ways to set boundaries. First, be direct with the person or people crossing your boundaries by telling them how you feel when they engage in the behaviors that create your discomfort. This method works best in relationships that are mutually reciprocal and open to feedback. With toxic people, the second method—

Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015): Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met. Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs. Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect. Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.

What the science of stress inoculation tells us is that we are all born with tools to get ourselves out of the stress/anxiety-provoking situation. Just to be clear, all anxiety-provoking situations will engage your stress response, but the act of exercising those responses helps inoculate you from future stress/anxiety responses. It is as if you are teaching yourself that you CAN survive these situations, and the better you get at first feeling that anxiety and then acting to mitigate the stress response, the better you will manage in the future. In a sense, this gives you the opportunity to retrain your stress response with every anxiety-provoking situation you encounter as long as you are aware of your options and tools to flip that bad-anxiety response to a good one.

Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person’s metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy. Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals. Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face of it, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, we don’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase. Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertisers look for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself. Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless. Managers scour books and magazines looking for greater understanding but settle instead for adopting a new terminology, thinking that using fresh words will bring them closer to their goals. When someone comes up with a phrase that sticks, it becomes a meme, which migrates around even as it disconnects from its original meaning. To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves. It is the responsibility of good leaders to make sure that words remain attached to the meanings and ideals they represent.

Much like Ella, I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I'd needed narrative space to to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I'd cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me--they did what I wouldn't, or couldn't, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter. Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls “human networks”—so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily.

...our job sometimes is to divorce ourselves from the fact that I've got to constantly be gifting young people with tools and equip them with - I'm imparting lessons upon them. Sometimes it about, look you hate reading, my job is to figure out how to help you not hate reading. The rest of it we can get to, but I got to figure out how to get you engaged. In order to do that sometimes you got to pull back. Right. You got to put a little grease in the pot. Right. So if that means you've got to have them reading rap lyrics in your class, then that's what it is. If that means you got to have them reading comic books or the athletes reading Sports Illustrated and the sports section in ESPN Magazine, then that's what it is. Our job is not just - it's not to just promote literature, which is what we all do. Our job is to promote literacy and there's a difference. Right. There's a difference. Literacy is what will help them way more than what literature will do.

This is an important tool that is unique to networked products. Traditional products that lack networks often struggle with this, because they rely on spammy emails, discounts, and push notifications to entice users back. This usually doesn’t work, and company-sent communications rank among the lowest clickthrough rate messages. Networked products, on the other hand, have the unique capability to reactivate these users by enlisting active users to bring them back. Even if you don’t open the app on a given day, other users in the network may interact with you—commenting or liking your past content, or sending you a message. Getting an email notification that says your boss just shared a folder with you is a lot more compelling than a marketing message. A notification that a close friend just joined an app you tried a month ago is a lot more engaging than an announcement about new features. And the more dense the network is around a churned user, the more likely they are to receive this type of interaction.

The extraordinary value of the I Ching is that it reveals the secrets of dynamic natural law. Working with its changes opens up access to the middle level of the Positive Paradigm Wheel, the “e” energy layer of Einstein's Unified Theory. This middle level serves as mediating, two-directional gate-keeper between the ever-changing surface rim and the universal, timeless center. You can't get from here to there, except through the middle layer which, in Western thinking, is effectively taboo, buried in the inaccessible "unconscious." To the extent that natural law is a blind spot in the prevailing, linear and exclusively empirical paradigm, we are left powerless to move beyond the surface level of experience. The realm of light and conscience which rests beyond, on the far side of the dynamic energy level, remains functionally inaccessible. Moral codes promoted by religionists or politicians are sometimes equated with conscience. But they're no substitute for direct experience. Only by becoming intelligently competent in managing the subtle energies of the middle level is it possible to travel further inwards for the immediate, personal experience of inner light. When the middle level becomes clogged with painful memories, negative emotions and socially taboo urges, it becomes a barrier to deeper knowing. The Book of Change is indispensable as a tool for restoring the unnecessarily "unconscious" to conscious awareness, so that the levels of human potential can be linked and unified. In Positive Paradigm context, survivors who prevail in dangerous times aren't those with the most material wealth, possessions or political power. They're the ones who've successfully navigated the middle realm, reached the far shore of enlightenment and returned to the surface with their new information intact. Those who succeed in linking the levels of experience are genius-leaders in whatever fields they choose to engage. They're the fortunate ones who've acquired the inner wealth necessary to both hear the inner voice of conscience and act on the guidance they receive.

Many of us have the false idea that a relationship’s purpose is to somehow fulfill our needs and desires. We look to see what we can get out of the relationship instead of what we can put in. Looked at like this, relationships are often little more than a needs exchange. We need this (safety, love, intimacy); a man needs that (security, companionship, sex). When we come across a good fit, both parties tacitly agree to do a trade and call it love. This transaction-based relationship model is why so many relationships feel empty and dead. They are completely devoid of anything real and intimate. After the initial rush of excitement is over, they’re more like business contracts than sacred unions. Let’s face it. We’ve all been conditioned to use relationships for the wrong reasons: to end loneliness, relieve depression, recover from a previous breakup, or find security. The problem is that this is not what relationships are for. Relationships are a spiritual opportunity for personal evolution. There is no greater arena for discovering your capacity for love, forgiveness, compassion, personal greatness, and full self-expression. Nowhere else will you meet the grandest and smallest parts of yourself. Nowhere else will you confront your self-imposed limits to intimacy. Nowhere else can you forgive so deeply or love so purely. This is relationship’s real purpose: to serve the mutual growth and soulful expression of each individual. It’s a chance to share your enthusiasm for being alive and give of yourself to another. Relationships provide the opportunity to shed light on any area within you that remains cloaked in fear and uncertainty, to hold a vision of another’s greatness so that he may step into the magnificence his soul is yearning to express. In this way, relationship becomes the ultimate tool for personal discovery and spiritual growth. When we engage in relationship to see what we can put into it rather than what we can get out of it, our whole lives transform. We no longer see our partners as antagonists. We see them as teachers and allies who are here to help us discover and experience our glory.

4. Your Ability to Self-Protect The ability to sense danger in your surroundings or untrustworthiness in other people depends on how well you listen to your gut feelings. To detect threat, you have to be aware of how situations and interactions make you feel. The primal instincts of the inner world are crucial to your safety. 5. Your Awareness of Your Life’s Purpose A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply. EIPs’ Attitudes Toward Your Inner World Now let’s look at how EIPs view your inner world. Understanding EI parents’ attitudes toward your inner experiences will help you trust yourself instead of deferring to them. They See You as Still Needing Their Direction EI parents see their adult children as

That trust takes time. But when you love each other, it shouldn't be scary to be vulnerable and it shouldn't be hard to compromise. I'd like to share with you what we like to call SACRED HEALING. We use it every day of our marriage, and it hasn't failed us yet! When you have something you need to communicate, those words are SACRED: 1. STOP when you register something's wrong. 2. ADMIT that you have an issue to discuss. 3. CALMLY express your feelings. 4. REFLECT on why you're feeling this way. 5. ENGAGE with your partner to actively fix the issue. 6. DEVOTE time after conflict to returning to a loving state. And when your partner is saying something SACRED, it's your job to get the leader of the HEALING: 1. HEAR your partner's words. 2. ENGAGE with your questions for clarification and understanding. 3. ACKNOWLEDGE that what they're saying is important. 4. LOOK BACK on your own role in the conflict. 5. INITIATE discussion without anger or defense. 6. NEGOTIATE a solution with pure intentions. 7. GROW as partners and individuals by fixing the problem as a team.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.

Making Requests Consciously Sometimes we may be able to communicate a clear request without putting it in words. Suppose you’re in the kitchen and your sister, who is watching television in the living room, calls out, “I’m thirsty.” In this case, it may be obvious that she is requesting you to bring her a glass of water from the kitchen. However, in other instances, we may express our discomfort and incorrectly assume that the listener has understood the underlying request. For example, a woman might say to her husband, “I’m annoyed you forgot the butter and onions I asked you to pick up for dinner.” While it may be obvious to her that she is asking him to go back to the store, the husband may think that her words were uttered solely to make him feel guilty. When we simply express our feelings, it may not be clear to the listener what we want them to do. Even more often, we are simply not conscious of what we are requesting when we speak. We talk to others or at them without knowing how to engage in a dialogue with them. We toss out words, using the presence of others as a wastebasket. In such situations, the listener, unable to discern a clear request in the speaker’s words, may experience the kind of distress illustrated in the following anecdote.

(Readings) My tower and clan think she and they are so clever… the tower she knew this and she used it meaning she knew what to look up. That is why it is so important to understand the signs and cards. Those that know can figure out what is going to happen in life or the beings around. If you follow the signs and cards, the stars can predict how things are going to turn out. I referred to this person as the tower mainly because they build and block, they cannot be stopped, this is only one solution that I know of… however you cannot blossom with any relationships or dating, and being social is over before it starts with any society around. Still, they are constantly watching over me. Just like I said they have eyes in the sky meaning, if they are not the ones following behind me, they make sure that they have someone that will. Their followers always report back to the main headquarters, they have to get the information to her so she can twist it and make everybody believe her lies. Some of the lies in which the tower has created for me include. Being gay, I am far from it… Engaging in activities with children, which is completely disgusting. Lewd acts, the list goes on and on. ‘Oh, the internet is a powerful tool; it was created for good, however, some use it for their evil.’ I had to pay with my time, for what I did not do, when is it going to end? I need to stop looking at ‘Blabber Book!

We have learned from Ludwig von Mises how to respond to the socialists’ evasion (immunization) strategy. As long as the defining characteristic— the essence—of socialism, i.e., the absence of the private ownership of the factors of production, remains in place, no reform will be of any help. The idea of a socialist economy is a contradictio in adjecto, and the claim that socialism represents a higher, more efficient mode of social production is absurd. In order to reach one’s own ends efficiently and without waste within the framework of an exchange economy based on division of labor, it is necessary that one engage in monetary calculation (cost-accounting). Everywhere outside the system of a primitive self-sufficient single household economy, monetary calculation is the sole tool of rational and efficient action. Only by being able to compare inputs and outputs arithmetically in terms of a common medium of exchange (money) can a person determine whether his actions are successful or not. In distinct contrast, socialism means to have no economy, no economizing, at all, because under these conditions monetary calculation and cost-accounting is impossible by definition. If no private property in the factors of production exists, then no prices for any production factor exist; hence, it is impossible to determine whether or not they are employed economically. Accordingly, socialism is not a higher mode of production but rather economic chaos and regression to primitivism.

The thing is, I don't really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitles to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn't call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I'm meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they post the inevitable, "So what do you do?" I respond as routinely as possible: "Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?" I'm not trying to be provocative; rather, I've always believed that being "out" is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included, I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We're pack animals, and we're constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I've just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It'd be a fascinating study if it weren't so disheartening.

As I write this, I know there are countless mysteries about the future of business that we’ve yet to unravel. That’s a process that will never end. When it comes to customer success, however, I have achieved absolute clarity on four points. First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business. Success will involve using these tools to understand your customers like never before so that you can deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences. The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success, whether it’s finding a better way to match investment opportunities with interested clients, or making customers feel thrilled about the experience of renovating their home. The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder. By that I mean employees who feel engaged and responsible and are growing their careers in an environment that allows them to do their best work—and this applies to all employees, from the interns to the CEO. The same goes for partners working to design and implement customer solutions, as well as our communities, which provide the schools, hospitals, parks, and other facilities to support us all. The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly. And that’s going to change everything. The future isn’t about learning to be better at doing what we already do, it’s about how far we can stretch the boundaries of our imagination. The ability to produce success stories that weren’t possible a few years ago, to help customers thrive in dramatic new ways—that is going to become a driver of growth for any successful company. I believe we’re entering a new age in which customers will increasingly expect miracles from you. If you don’t value putting the customer at the center of everything you do, then you are going to fall behind. Whether you make cars, solar panels, television programs, or anything else, untold opportunities exist. Every company should invest in helping its customers find new destinations, and in blazing new trails to reach them. To do so, we have to resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet. In the end, it’s a matter of accepting that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.

Franklin also combined science and mechanical practicality by devising the first urinary catheter used in America, which was a modification of a European invention. His brother John in Boston was gravely ill and wrote Franklin of his desire for a flexible tube to help him urinate. Franklin came up with a design, and instead of simply describing it he went to a Philadelphia silversmith and oversaw its construction. The tube was thin enough to be flexible, and Franklin included a wire that could be stuck inside to stiffen it while it was inserted and then be gradually withdrawn as the tube reached the point where it needed to bend. His catheter also had a screw component that allowed it to be inserted by turning, and he made it collapsible so that it would be easier to withdraw. “Experience is necessary for the right using of all new tools or instruments, and that will perhaps suggest some improvements,” Franklin told his brother. The study of nature also continued to interest Franklin. Among his most noteworthy discoveries was that the big East Coast storms known as northeasters, whose winds come from the northeast, actually move in the opposite direction from their winds, traveling up the coast from the south. On the evening of October 21, 1743, Franklin looked forward to observing a lunar eclipse he knew was to occur at 8:30. A violent storm, however, hit Philadelphia and blackened the sky. Over the next few weeks, he read accounts of how the storm caused damage from Virginia to Boston. “But what surprised me,” he later told his friend Jared Eliot, “was to find in the Boston newspapers an account of the observation of that eclipse.” So Franklin wrote his brother in Boston, who confirmed that the storm did not hit until an hour after the eclipse was finished. Further inquiries into the timing of this and other storms up and down the coast led him to “the very singular opinion,” he told Eliot, “that, though the course of the wind is from the northeast to the southwest, yet the course of the storm is from the southwest to the northeast.” He further surmised, correctly, that rising air heated in the south created low-pressure systems that drew winds from the north. More than 150 years later, the great scholar William Morris Davis proclaimed, “With this began the science of weather prediction.”4 Dozens of other scientific phenomena also engaged Franklin’s interest during this period. For example, he exchanged letters with his friend Cadwallader Colden on comets, the circulation of blood, perspiration, inertia, and the earth’s rotation. But it was a parlor-trick show in 1743 that launched him on what would be by far his most celebrated scientific endeavor. ELECTRICITY On a visit to Boston in the summer of 1743, Franklin happened to be entertained one evening by

There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound: choosing the right bread for instance. The Sandwich Maker had spent many months in daily consultation and experiment with Grarp the baker and eventually they had between them created a loaf of exactly the consistency that was dense enough to slice thinly and neatly, while still being light, moist and having that fine nutty flavour which best enhanced the savour of roast Perfectly Normal Beast flesh. There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the precise relationships between the width and height of the slice and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense sandwich experience. The proper tools, of course, were crucial, and many were the days that the Sandwich Maker, when not engaged with the Baker at his oven, would spend with Strinder the Tool Maker, weighing and balancing knives, taking them to the forge and back again. Suppleness, strength, keenness of edge, length and balance were all enthusiastically debated, theories put forward, tested, refined, and many was the evening when the Sandwich Maker and the Tool Maker could be seen silhouetted against the light of the setting sun and the Tool Maker’s forge making slow sweeping movements through the air trying one knife after another, comparing the weight of this one with the balance of another, the suppleness of a third and the handle binding of a fourth. Three knives altogether were required. First there was the knife for the slicing of the bread: a firm, authoritative blade which imposed a clear and defining will on a loaf. Then there was the butter-spreading knife, which was a whippy little number but still with a firm backbone to it. Early versions had been a little too whippy, but now the combination of flexibility with a core of strength was exactly right to achieve the maximum smoothness and grace of spread. The chief amongst the knives, of course, was the carving knife. This was the knife that would not merely impose its will on the medium through which it moved, as did the bread knife; it must work with it, be guided by the grain of the meat, to achieve slices of the most exquisite consistency and translucency, that would slide away in filmy folds from the main hunk of meat. The Sandwich Maker would then flip each sheet with a smooth flick of the wrist on to the beautifully proportioned lower bread slice, trim it with four deft strokes and then at last perform the magic that the children of the village so longed to gather round and watch with rapt attention and wonder. With just four more dexterous flips of the knife he would assemble the trimmings into a perfectly fitting jigsaw of pieces on top of the primary slice. For every sandwich the size and shape of the trimmings were different, but the Sandwich Maker would always effortlessly and without hesitation assemble them into a pattern which fitted perfectly. A second layer of meat and a second layer of trimmings, and the main act of creation would be accomplished.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

iSolve Technologies is an expert in typesetting services and having cutting edge in-house tools which is required to enhance profitability, reduce expense and drive customer .engagement in a rapidly changing digital environment.

Once this became clear to me, I began telling people that the phrase was meaningless. I told our staff that it had become a crutch that was distracting us from engaging, in a meaningful way, with our problems. We should trust in people, I told them, not processes. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool—a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals.

when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence.

when prominent individuals suggest that their political opponents are engaged in nefarious activities, they hedge by saying they are merely attempting to raise questions that should be considered—a way, experts say, of starting conspiracy theories. "One of the most common ways of introducing a conspiracy theory is to 'just ask questions' about an official account,'' says Karen Douglas, co-editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and a senior academic who has researched conspiracy theories at Britain's University of Kent. "It's quite a powerful rhetorical tool because it doesn't require any content, just the introduction of doubt about the official story.

Regret as a learning tool happens through something called counterfactual thinking—a dynamic with two razor-sharp edges.5 When we look back on a decision and think, If I had done A instead of B, then I wouldn't have to deal with horrible C, we are engaging in counterfactual thinking.

Life is very difficult. There's nothing to be ashamed of by reading self-help books. If you're stuck in a dark place it can be incredibly uplifting and hope providing to engage with those tools. So go out there and do it!!

The capacity to regulate stress is the elastic that provides safety and gives rise to the ability to be emotionally available and engaged. Stress compromises this ability. The first step in communicating with emotional intelligence is recognizing when stress levels are out of control and returning ourselves and our colleagues or partners, whenever possible, to a relaxed and energized state of awareness.

Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people’s mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate – using metaphor, analogy and other grammatical tools to picture points. Or they can illustrate how listeners can gain such awareness – a path to proceed on, techniques to engage, what to look for within.

Nir elaborates in this post: TriggerThe trigger is the actuator of a behavior — the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal. Habit-forming technologies start by alerting users with external triggers like an email, a link on a web site, or the app icon on a phone. ActionAfter the trigger comes the intended action. Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior – motivation and ability. This phase of the Hook draws upon the art and science of usability design to ensure that the user acts the way the designer intends. Variable RewardVariable schedules of reward are one of the most powerful tools that companies use to hook users. Research shows that levels of dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a frenzied hunting state, activating the parts associated with wanting and desire. Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries, variable rewards are prevalent in habit-forming technologies as well. InvestmentThe last phase of the Hook is where the user is asked to do bit of work. The investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all commitments that improve the service for the user. These investments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the Hook. We’ve found this model (and the accompanying book) to be a great starting point for a customer acquisition and retention strategy.

Signs resemble images in being concrete entities but they resemble concepts in their powers of reference. Neither concepts nor signs relate exclusively to themselves; either may be substituted for something else. Concepts, however, have an unlimited capacity in this respect, while signs have not. The example of the 'bricoleur' helps to bring out the differences and similarities. Consider him at work and excited by his project. His first practical step is retrospective. He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem. He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury* is composed to discover what each of them could 'signify' and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts.

Guided by standards and a knowledgeable teacher, students can set goals, monitor their progress toward those goals, and make adaptations as necessary to be more effective learners. Digital apps and tools, such as calendars and project management programs, help students organize and monitor their own learning. Giving students control over key aspects of their learning helps them develop self-efficacy and builds independent learners.

Giving students more ownership does not mean that teachers give up their responsibility to direct student learning. Many apps and tools, such as wikis and blogs, allow teachers to access student work and monitor their progress. Formative assessment also provides information that teachers can use to recommend goals and strategies. Cloud applications, like calendars, can also be shared so teachers can make sure students meet standards while building critical self-direction skills.

three major cities, Kiev, Novgorod, and Smolensk. The land in the southern regions of the principality was very fertile; so rich, in fact, that after one ploughing it produced excellent harvests for a number of years without any further tilling. The ax was the main agricultural tool, but ploughs were also widely used for the production of spelt, wheat, buckwheat, oats, and barley. Apple and cherry orchards were widespread in what is today Ukraine. Kievans also engaged in horse and cattle breeding.

The Prayer Process is a seven-step tool designed to help us develop a routine of prayer, and the routine within the routine.