Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Confidence

The Dark Side of Selfies

By Leave a Comment

Selfies are generally acceptable to a certain extent. They provide a means to chronicle oneself and curate the highlights of one’s life, and as humans, we have an innate need to feel acknowledged and seen.

Selfies can be a tool for self-love and expression, allowing individuals to communicate something about themselves and present themselves in a certain way. When taken intentionally, a selfie can give the illusion of control over one’s fleeting identities, which is a natural desire. It’s perfectly fine to create a persona and seek others’ approval, as a healthy self-identity depends on it.

However, when taken too far, the desire to be liked and accepted can quickly become a constant need for validation and status. Self-objectification can cause one to forget that self-identity is primarily based on subjective, biased perceptions of others. Using selfies as the ultimate self-expression can lead to overinflated self-importance and shameless self-promotion.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  2. No One Has a Monopoly on Truth
  3. I’ll Be Happy When …
  4. How to Turn Your Fears into Fuel
  5. Care Less for What Other People Think

How to … Strengthen The ‘Asking Muscle’

By Leave a Comment

Many people are afraid to ask—even negotiate—for what they want. Just because you ask for something doesn’t mean you’ll get it, but you must keep trying. In the same way that your body’s muscles need regular exercise to stay strong and flexible, the voices in your head do too. The more you practice asking (rehearse with a friend if needed,) the more comfortable it becomes.

Idea for Impact: Don’t wait for good things, as you may have been taught. Ask for what you want. With each triumph, you’ll gain confidence; with each disappointment, you’ll learn something. You’ll overcome the dread of asking for too much. You’ll conquer the fear of rejection or reprisal. Besides, you’ll be less deprived of what you’re reasonably entitled to.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Turn Your Fears into Fuel
  2. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  3. You’ll Never Get a ‘Yes’ If You Never Ask
  4. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression
  5. This Manager’s Change Initiatives Lacked Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Case Study on Aristotle’s Persuasion Framework

The Streisand Effect: When Trying to Hide Only Makes it Shine

By Leave a Comment

In a famous episode of the beloved British sitcom Father Ted, the main character and his fellow priests embark on a protest against the airing of a film titled “The Passion of Saint Tibulus.” The movie portrays a Catholic saint disrespectfully, causing outrage among the Vatican and local bishops. However, despite the priests’ efforts, their parishioners do not heed to the boycott. To their dismay, media coverage of the priests’ pickets only amplifies the controversy, inadvertently making the film even more popular.

This comical scenario perfectly exemplifies the Streisand Effect, a phenomenon wherein attempts to suppress something end up drawing more attention to it.

The term “Streisand Effect” originated in 2003 when singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for including an aerial photo of her Malibu home in a collection of images documenting coastal erosion. The lawsuit garnered significant attention to the photo, which had only been downloaded six times before the legal action. Suddenly, the photo went viral, accumulating millions of views and symbolizing the Streisand Effect.

A more recent example of this phenomenon occurred in 2017 when then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer attempted to quash a story about his meeting with reporters. Spicer had requested that the reporters keep the meeting private, hoping to prevent it from being reported. However, his efforts backfired spectacularly when the journalists went ahead and wrote about the meeting. During a press briefing, Spicer scolded the journalists for disregarding his wishes, inadvertently bringing even more attention to the original story. Had Spicer ignored the reporting, the story might have fizzled out quietly. Instead, it became a viral sensation, sparking numerous memes and jokes.

These examples serve as a powerful reminder to carefully consider the potential consequences before attempting to suppress or control information.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Ethics Lessons From Akira Kurosawa’s ‘High and Low’
  2. Presenting Facts Can Sometimes Backfire
  3. Fight Ignorance, Not Each Other
  4. No One Has a Monopoly on Truth
  5. The Problem of Living Inside Echo Chambers

Trying to Be Perfect is Where Your Troubles Begin

By Leave a Comment

Fear of failure is one of the insidious confidence killers. Instead of living life in a place of self-acceptance, many folks try to live up to unrealistic ideals. They’re on a continual treadmill, chasing the illusory feeling of urging on everything in their lives to be “perfect.”

When you cling to the all-or-nothing standard, all your endeavors result in perfection or failure. This mindset drives you to see yourself as a disappointment again and again.

Let go of dichotomy. You needn’t be “perfect or failure.” Don’t build yourself up to fail with the unattainable goal of always being perfect. Instead, set goals that are very achievable and within your control. Make your goal just to take action. Not to achieve a perfect outcome, not even to a positive outcome, but just to be done. Completed with a satisfactory result. Checked off.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give 110% or even 100% to everything you do. Be very selective about when you want to push yourself to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when your perfectionism is thoroughly justified.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  2. How to Turn Your Fears into Fuel
  3. How to Face Your Fear and Move Forward
  4. What You Most Fear Doing is What You Most Need to Do
  5. Just Start

Risk More, Risk Earlier

By Leave a Comment

Some of the best careers are crafted by those who use their initial working years to gain diversified on-the-job business education.

The compounding returns of vetting opportunities wisely and taking sensible risks are particularly valuable today. Business is more complex than ever, and competition for top positions is intense.

Idea for Impact: Take on as much risk as possible early in your career. You may have less to lose than you think—and a great deal to gain. Your older self will not have the energy, time, autonomy, or temperament that you contentedly have now. Plus, you’ll have more time to make up for mistakes.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Be More Confident at Work
  2. “Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Career Advice
  3. Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life
  4. Five Ways … You Could Elevate Good to Great
  5. Before Jumping Ship, Consider This

Public Speaking is Traumatizing Vulnerable Students

By Leave a Comment

For decades, universities have forced presentations and class participation to be integral to students’ grades. Sure, employers are interested not only in graduates’ subject knowledge but also in their ability to communicate, work in teams, problem-solve, build consensus, and so on.

However, public speaking anxiety is too common in college students, particularly those suffering from chronic social anxiety. Some even dread the sheer prospect of raising their hands in class for fear of being judged.

Sadly, our academic institutions aren’t doing enough to support such students. College is, after all, a place to practice in a supportive environment—it’s better for students to confront their fears in a relatively low-stakes classroom setting than in the real world. One lecturer I know of accommodated a nervous student by dismissing everyone else and making her present only to the professor.

Colleges must emphasize that anxiety and fear of public speaking are entirely normal—Mark Twain famously noted, “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Colleges should assess individual students’ natural ability and teach public speaking as part of university learning, starting with systematic desensitization and conditioning confidence until the students feel they can tackle entire presentations.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  2. How to Encourage Yourself During Tough Times
  3. This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”
  4. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  5. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong?

By Leave a Comment

We spend so much of our lives being right that, I wonder if, we’re ill-prepared for being wrong.

Since childhood, we’ve been inured that being right is more acceptable than being wrong. Being wrong feels so unpleasant—repulsive even—that we instill a series of strategies to salvage ourselves when we are exposed as being wrong. We learn to trip from our forked tongues explanations, justifications, excuses, and blames for our errors and oversights.

What’s worse, we develop a deep-seated impulse to shirk responsibility and accountability for our actions. We become loath to change our beliefs or behaviors because change takes effort. We envisage change as a challenge to our identity. In the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot. They wake up and re-analyze things and change their mind. If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot. People who are right a lot want to disconfirm their fundamental biases.”

Idea for Impact: What’s lost in all this is that being wrong is not only a central feature of being human. It’s one of the most potent ways of learning. Admitting we were wrong—and conceding we’ll be wrong again—can be so liberating and welcoming.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking
  2. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  3. How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt
  4. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  5. 3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

3 Ways to … Avoid Overthinking

By Leave a Comment

Overthinking and over-analyzing the causes and meaning of your thoughts can be tamed through greater self-awareness and mental disengagement.

  1. Set a time limit for your “thinking time,” then make yourself move on to something else or force your decision. Vent your worries to the world, but there’s a risk that you’ll end up even more confused if you keep asking everyone’s opinion. Most of the time, things aren’t as complicated as you perceive them.
  2. Pause and take a step back. Interrupt the thinking process or distract yourself by diverting your attention to something very different. Focused distraction can calm your mind and help you have a coherent view of the whole situation.
  3. Accept that uncertainty is part of this life, and you’ll never have all the facts or know what’s further down the road. Studies suggest we fear an unknown outcome more than a known bad one. Not everything you plan will work out, and that’s ok. It’s often better to set a clear course today and tackle problems that arise tomorrow.

Idea for Impact: Right-size your expectations. Overthinking comes from trying to control what you can’t control.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking
  2. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  3. It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think
  4. Are You Ill-Prepared for Being Wrong?
  5. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process

By Leave a Comment

There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.

A decision conflict is about a choice or another to be made. But a process conflict is about the approach, e.g., where making a choice has lacked rigorous deliberation (haste, a lack of participation from essential stakeholders, contempt for shared priorities, lack of attention to the tradeoffs, and so forth.) A sound decision has ensued from a meticulous-enough thought process, even if the decision emerges to be defective in the fullness of time.

Idea for Impact: Worry about bad decision processes. Make the “how” the anchor for your decision-making process. Improving the quality of decisions is developing better frameworks for making those decisions.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  2. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  3. Be Smart by Not Being Stupid
  4. Risk Homeostasis and Peltzman Effect: Why Risk Mitigation and Safety Measures Become Ineffective
  5. Under Pressure, The Narrowing Cognitive Map: Lessons from the Tragedy of Singapore Airlines Flight 6

A Quick Way to Build Your Confidence Right Now

By Leave a Comment

Guilt, anxiety, and fear usually manifest as a creeping mindset of what’s lacking. You feel you’re not enough, and you don’t have the resources you need to achieve your goals.

Lack of confidence will probably hold you back more than you may acknowledge. Be mindful of your thoughts and address these negative thinking patterns. Notice how you speak to yourself—harping only on what isn’t enough of or what isn’t working doesn’t instill your self-assuredness.

When you spiral about what is lacking, try the Abundance Mentality—it empowers you to believe in your extant ability. You can make do with what you have and overcome any difficulties. This isn’t some naïve “can do” temperament, but it’s an earnest endeavor to muster hope and agency instead of doubt and helplessness.

Idea for Impact: The less you do, the less confident you’ll feel.

Don’t wait until you feel more confident—often, more ruminating leads to analysis paralysis. Self-confidence comes from successful experiences, and to create these successful experiences, take action.

Take a low-risk action to increase your confidence. Assume you’re the most confident self you’ve ever been and do what that self would do. Prioritize your choices and direct your resources to pressing needs, ignoring other goals.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think
  2. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  3. How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt
  4. You Can’t Know Everything
  5. Smart Folks are Most Susceptible to Overanalyzing and Overthinking