Mind Scripts

As we saw in the last post, making the first impression right is very important. But often we are faced with precarious situations where it’s not easy. It could be that we are going for the interview for the dream job in the dream company so we are nervous and being nervous can lead to a very bad first impression. How do we overcome this?
In his book ‘The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading’, Ian Rowland gives a very simple solution: ‘Mind Scripts’.
So what are ‘Mind Scripts’? It’s nothing but repeating a small positive statement about the upcoming encounter. So in this scenario it could be something like this: ‘I am prepared, I’ll do good and they will like me.’ Keep repeating this in your mind till the initial conversation starts. This makes a good impact on out mindset and body language.
You should also checkout the book for other interesting facts like how to ‘foretell’ someone’s past and future using some clever tricks.

First Impressions are Key

Roger is smart, intelligent proud and lazy.
Smith is lazy, proud, intelligent and smart.
So, of the two who do you think is the better person? Roger, right? Isn’t it obvious?
Well, not really. They both have the same qualities. Only difference being that in case of Roger adjectives like ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ were used first and for Smith they were used later. So our first impression of Roger was that of a smart person and that of Smith was of a lazy person.
So, you see. Even simple statements like the ones above can create a impact and these are not to be taken lightly. In the book – ‘Social Animal’ Elliot Aronson highlights a number of psychological experiments where the impact is clearly seen. For example, assume Roger and Smith are students in your class. Initially, Roger does well but over time Roger’s grades fall and Smith’s catches up. You are more likely to believe Roger is the true genius of the two but his mind is little diverted for the time being where as Smith is not that bright but is working hard these days.

Key to Success – How not to approach your supervisor

Here is a simple trick for success, whenever we are faced with a challenge, we should not go to our supervisor with that problem. The supervisor will soon start seeing us as another source of problem and would start to avoid us if possible.
What we should do instead is go with a possible solution to the problem along with the original problem and discuss it.
Suppose there are some quality concerns with the feature developed by a team member. The wrong approach would be to directly go to the manager and complain. By doing that we have placed the ball in manager’s court and the manager must figure out what to do. Everyone is busy and as people go higher in their career, they have less and less time. The manager now must take time out of his/her busy schedule and address the issue.
The proper approach to this would be that we try to identify where the gap is, if possible. Suppose we find that the employee actually has strong design and coding skills but given the fact that he/she is new to the domain, the employee is often not able to take the right decisions required for the problem. So, now when we approach our supervisor, we not only know the problem but also can suggest some potential corrective actions to it (like organizing domain sessions). Of-course, the supervisor may not always agree with the solution we provide, but the supervisor will be really happy that we saved a lot of his/her time and brainstormed some potential solutions up front.

How to beat Procrastination – A Stitch in Time saves Nine

Procrastination is definitely one of the bigger challenges we face when we start any work. We know something needs to be done but we just don’t feel like it, putting it off for another moment which becomes days and sometimes even longer.
The task is usually something that’s seen as less pleasurable like reading about a new technology (oh well, I don’t feel up to it right now, lets read a novel instead) or it could be a household chore or that presentation you need to prepare for office. We keep delaying it till the last moment and then scamper to finish it at the end. Well, they have a very old and true saying for that – ‘a stitch in time saves nine!’ and so what should have taken only a ‘stitch’ before now needs eight more ‘stitches’ to get it right.
So how do you beat it?
I read this great article few years back and it went like this:
– Why do we procrastinate? No, don’t worry, you don’t have to reason it out for every task. The reason is usually same for all and that is we think it’s mundane/boring and there are more pleasurable things to do instead of it. The mind is resisting devoting time to it.
– So, how do you fix it? As stated above we don’t wish to allocate time for it so don’t! Just do it for 5 minutes and stop. Take a break for as long as you want and then come back to it for another 5 minutes and then again take a break. So the initial resistance of allocating time is gone after all we are just going to do it for 5 minutes and usually after a couple of breaks we pick up the momentum and the thing gets done.
One thing to note though – the break truly can be of any duration you want so you are not getting committed to it. If you don’t believe it, your mind won’t believe it either and you’ll only end up procrastinating about breaking procrastination.