Month: October 2021

You don’t have a ‘right’ to endanger others (letter to the editor)

It is well established in American law that “your freedom to swing your fist ends at another person’s nose.”

www.silive.com

Freedom is not the issue here. It is well established in American law that “your freedom to swing your fist ends at another person’s nose.” Similarly, the “freedom” to spread a potentially deadly virus ends when you are endangering others. Object to mandates? Quit. Think your “freedom” is being infringed upon? Stay out of public places. You don’t have a “right” to endanger those around you, either by driving 100 mph through a school zone or spreading a potentially deadly virus.

Of course when you bring up the virus being deadly, the next response you get back is a denial that it’s deadly. Thus the primary issue here is not a lack of facts but psychological stress causing people to intentionally deny the facts and reality before them, detaching any sense of responsibility for their actions because in their mind, “they’re doing the right thing and trying to save lives.”

4 Ways Trusting Your Intuition Is A Superpower

Have you ever had a difficult decision to make, and you didn’t know what to do? You create a pros and cons list to no avail. Any choice you make comes with consequences and questions. But you know you have to make one. In those moments, you know you have to ask yourself what you really want.

www.forbes.com

There are a few things that get in the way of intuition. They are overthinking, ‘shoulds,’ bias, approval seeking, when you really want something, and even trauma. To get through those obstacles, become self-aware, scan your body, and examine your beliefs. Getting out of your own head can actually lead to more intuitive thinking. The benefits are that you find yourself, you make the right choice, you take chances, and you take action where others will not.

Intuition can come from pattern-matching, seeing correlation in patterns from experience to present moment. The brain processes patterns of information through explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is when you are consciously aware of what you know. Tacit knowledge is unconscious. According to Situational Awareness Matters, tacit knowledge is “knowledge that resides outside of everyday awareness.” Intuition can be deemed ‘tacit hunches.’ It pulls from that unconscious knowledge and patterns we pick up. The insights we get from intuition enter the conscious awareness of what we know or think we know.

Exploring Your Mind says brain areas involved with intuition may be the precuneus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the caudate nucleus, and “it’s hard to chalk all these processes up to accidents or a product of our imagination. Not only is there a neurological foundation to intuition, but it also involves your past experiences, your personality, and your subconscious, or the place that contains the essence of who you are.”

A Process for the Transfer of Energy and Feeling: George Saunders on the Key to Great Storytelling

“What a story is ‘about’ is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.”

www.brainpickings.org

We move through a storied world as living stories. Every human life is an autogenerated tale of meaning — we string the chance-events of our lives into a sensical and coherent narrative of who and what we are, then make that narrative the psychological pillar of our identity.

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time… The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

That last sentence above is quite poignant for the paradoxical times we are living within. So much change is occurring that it’s causing people discomfort, thus they want to deny the reality before them, like someone grieving the loss of someone but in this case it’s their own way of life that is being lost.

Yet at the same time, this epic challenge is causing some people to re-examine their lives, what they believe, and the way they do things. In effect, they are re-examining their identity. And in doing so, they are questioning and questing towards a newer narrative that will redefine their life and identity as a whole. This is more commonly known as post-traumatic growth.

COVID-19 driving ‘transformative’ changes to workplace culture, says expert

Organizations that prioritize worker safety and mental health will lead the charge

www.northernontariobusiness.com

Shaw believes that, as health and safety policies evolve, “the workplace of the future is going to be a very different place” from those we recognize today.

She envisions postsecondary and graduate programs that guide future leaders away from graphs and charts and numbers and toward organizational culture, which she believes will be essential to a company’s longevity.

Workplaces in which employees feel safe and comfortable will be able to attract highly skilled talent, while those that fail to change with the times will be left behind.

“We’ve got a generation coming into our workplaces who simply aren’t going to put up with any garbage, and they can tell if you’re being genuine or not,” Shaw said.

“It’s a time when leaders are going to have to be putting organizational culture first, so they’re going to be using cultures of organizations in order to attract people, because that’s where people are going to want to go.”