Category Archives: Coaching

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One Country, One Destiny

Brooks Brothers created a coat for Lincoln. Lincoln asked that they embroider a large eagle and the wording: One Country, One Destiny so that that symbol and those words would be against his skin at all times. Seeing this coat with the visible blood stains across the embroidered eagle was the most powerful moment for me in my visit last week to Washington D.C. It was a reminder of my favorite president, his incredible convictions, his life, and his tragic death. It was also an amazing illustration of a structure. A structure is a tool used by someone as a reminder of something that is important, a goal, a vision, an action step (like tying a ribbon around a tree, or a string around a finger, or carrying a trinket in your pocket, or a sticky note on your mirror, etc). Leave it to Lincoln to have such a inspiring, moving, visionary structure.

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Love Our Neighbors

In today’s excerpt – in 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the religious colonists who would establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered to them a sermon that is now considered one of the most important documents in setting forth a vision of America, “A Model of Christian Charity”. Anticipating the hardships they will encounter during the coming months and years, it centers on the impossible idea that we should love our neighbors as ourselves:

“It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.

“[It presages] Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the ‘loving your enemies’ sermon this way: ‘So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America , and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

“Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’

“The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending ‘enhanced investigation techniques’ is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

” ‘Man,’ Winthrop reminds his shipmates in ‘Christian Charity,’ is ‘commanded to love his neighbor as himself.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: ‘Love your enemies … do good to them that hate you.’

“He also cites Romans I 2:20: ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’

“The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christ-like Christian to know that he’s supposed to.

“Winthrop’s future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn’t cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent’s attack ad come the next election. John Winthrop: soft on crime.

“This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn’t just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: ‘justice and mercy.’

“For ‘a community of perils,’ writes Winthrop, ‘calls for extraordinary liberality.’ One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls ‘enlargement toward others,’ Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ’s excruciating mandate to share. If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”

Author: Sarah Vowell
Title: The Wordy Shipmates
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2008 by Sarah Vowell
Pages: 45-47

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C.U.L.P. Initiative Assignment #2: Eat, Pray, Love

Earlier this year (2011), I posted on C.U.L.P.–Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem–a ‘club’ or challenge for any adventurous and/or willing individuals.  The first movie to play with was: King’s Speech.

This is the second “assignment” for those of you following along with the C.U.L.P. initiative (Conspiracy {lit. breathing & walking together} to overcome the Upper Limit Problem). I don’t agree with all that is said and done in this movie, but it holds some magical concepts.

What is the word(s) for your town/city?

What is YOUR word(s)? (to describe who you truly are)

What is your spouses word(s)?

Describe/explore your favorite meal.

Who is God?

What do you want?

What thrills you?

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Perception From Memory

In today’s excerpt – even a Jeopardy uberchampion like Ken Jennings uses basic ‘associative’ reasoning techniques to answer many of the contest questions. Because only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second, all of us regularly rely on the “gist” of things in our reasoning: “A century ago, the psychologist William James divided human thought into two types, associative and true reasoning. For James, associative thinking worked from historical patterns and rules in the mind. True reasoning, which was necessary for unprecedented problems, demanded deeper analysis. This came to be known as the ‘dual process’ theory. Late in the twentieth century, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton redefined these cognitive processes as System 1 and System 2. The intuitive System 1 appeared to represent a primitive part of the mind, perhaps dating from before the cognitive leap undertaken by our tool-making Cro-Magnon ancestors forty thousand years ago, Its embedded rules, with their biases toward the familiar, steered people toward their most basic goals: survival and reproduction. System 2, which appeared to arrive later, involved conscious and deliberate analysis and was far slower. When it came to intelligence, all humans were more or less on an equal footing in the ancient and intuitive System 1. The rules were easy, and whether they made sense or not, everyone knew them. It was in the slower realm of reasoning, System 2, that intelligent people distinguished themselves from the crowd. “Still, great Jeopardy players like Ken Jennings cannot afford to ignore the signals coming from the caveman quarters of their minds. They need speed, and the easy answers pouring in through System 1 are often correct. But they have to know when to distrust this reflexive thought, when to pursue a longer and more analytical route. In [one] game, … this clue popped up in the Tricky Questions category: ‘Total number of each animal that Moses took on the ark with him during the great flood.’ Jennings lost the buzz to Matt Kleinmaier, a medical student from Chicago, who answered, ‘What is two?’ It was wrong. Jennings, aware that it was supposed to be tricky, noticed that it asked for ‘each animal’ instead of ‘each species.’ He buzzed for a second chance at the clue and answered, ‘What is one?’ That was wrong, too. The correct answer, which no one came up with, was ‘What is zero?’ “Jennings and Kleinmaier had fallen for a trick. Each had focused on the gist of the clue – the number of animals boarding the biblical ark – while ignoring one detail: The ark builder was Noah, not Moses. This clue actually came from a decades-old psychological experiment, one that has given a name – the Moses Illusion – to the careless thinking that most humans employ. “It’s easy enough to understand. The brain groups information into clusters. People tend to notice when one piece of information doesn’t jibe with its expected group. It’s an anomaly. But Noah and Moses cohabit numerous clusters. Thematically they are both in the Bible, visually, both wear beards. Phonetically, their names almost rhyme. A question about Ezekiel herding animals into the ark might not pass so smoothly. According to a study headed by Lynn Reder, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, the Moses Illusion illustrates a facet of human intelligence, one vital for jeopardy. “Most of what humans experience as perception is actually furnished by the memory. This is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four ‘items,’ either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany’s Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they’re measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It’s as if each person’s senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound – only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call ‘schemas.’ “In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It’s only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said. Author: Stephen Baker Title: Final Jeopardy Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Date: Copyright 2011 by Stephen Baker Pages: 45-47

Because of our slow processor (brain) aka 50 bits per second, many/most of our perceptions are furnished by our memories that ‘fill in the gaps’ in our brain’s ability to process information coming in to it.  Our sensory system aka 11 million bits per second, on the other hand, literally floods our system 24/7.  As a coach, this information is fascinating as well as useful to confirm the power (and weaknesses) of our perceptions and to reaffirm the power of coaching methods that work with our senses, memories, and perceptions.

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What I Didn’t Know About The Civil War

I recently finished an extensive college course on the civil war offered by the teaching company.  A few things that I didn’t realize (or forgot from my school days):

the vote to succeed was close in many confederate states at least closer than I thought…in fact, I didn’t even realize there was a vote.

It was ALL about slavery.

2 key players who exhibited high EQ Emotional Quotient): Lincoln–Throughout his life, he showed incredible EQ, and it was exhibited with, at times controversial, full pardons for the confederates.  Longstreet–While many of his confederate General peers remained loyal to the confederate causes and looked down upon him as a turn coat, he went on to join the Northern political party of the time period: Republicans, remained politically active, moves on with his life to assimilate with the United States.

Finally, I am once again struck by origin sin.  An ancient Christian principle that points to all of us having some inherent sin (lit. missing the mark) nature.  This ubiquitous finding is seen over and over again, and it is especially prominent in any conflict–especially the Civil War.

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Robbie Tribute: Words of Wisdom

My friend and partner’s son died 2 weeks ago.  He was 14 with severe cerebal palsy.  At his funeral, it was mentioned that he only spoke 4 words.  “Good” and “I love you.”  Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all only spoke those few words?!

My friend and partner spoke at the grave site and said that he has been angry and questioning God only 2 times in his life: The first when Robbie was born, and the now the second when God took Robbie from him.  WOW! The powerful truth that so often the only way to the mountain tops is through the valleys of life.

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Top 10 Book: Present Perfect by Greg Boyd

As most of you know, I am a crazy reader.  It is rare for me to come across such a powerful book.  I place this one in my top 10 best books that I have every read!  It is short and simple, and as the author states:  “I’ve become absolutely convinced that remaining aware of God’s presence is the single most important task in the life of every follower of Jesus.” (location 143-156)

“…we must first seek to submit to God’s reign in each and every moment.  When we do this, de Caussade proclaims, we transform ordinary moments into sacred moments, and our life becomes a living sacrament.  He and millions of others have discovered that this continual submission is the key to experiencing the fullness of God’s love, joy, and peace.”” (location 169-183)

“All that matters is…to belong totally to God, to please him, making our sole happiness to look on the present moment as though nothing else in the world mattered.”-J.P. de Caussade

“I have found that we can establish ourselves in a sense of the presence of God by continually talking with Him.”-Brother Lawrence

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Short Term Memory Loss

We have always been enamored by the really smart people that are able to remember so many things, but the truth is that we ALL have roughly the same short term memory capacity. It is how we use our short term memory that makes the difference.

Studies show that those who have what appears to be an incredible memory actually use tricks. They use what they know (long term memories) to turbo boost their short term memories. All of us if asked to remember a list of numbers are limited to about a list of 10 numbers. But chunking the numbers together, an average person can learn to remember a list of up to and beyond 80 numbers! People with this skill will use their long term memory. For example, a runner will remember the sequence of numbers: 5, 3, 2, 8 as a timed run of 53 minutes 28 seconds. A school teacher will memorize all her students names rapidly if she learns to associate each name with a different room in their house…etc.

So don’t sell yourself short, don’t think that you can’t memorize, don’t worry about not having the capacity to remember all those things for the next test….instead KNOW that you will be able to remember all those important things by being creative and using your long term memory to turbo boost your short term memory via neumonics, etc.

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Resilience in the Face of Trauma

In today’s excerpt – resilience in the face of trauma. One of the most active areas of psychological research is to determine how people cope with trauma, and what characteristics enable some people to move successfully past grief while others remain mired in it:

“Behavioral scientists have accumulated decades of data on both adults and children exposed to trauma. George A. Bonanno of Teachers College at Columbia University has devoted his career as a psychologist to documenting the varieties of resilient experience, focusing on our reactions to the death of a loved one and to what happens in the face of war, terror and disease. In every instance, he has found, most people adapt surprisingly well to whatever the world presents; life returns to a measure of normalcy in a matter of months. …

“Bonanno started researching how we respond emotionally to bereavement and other traumatic events in the early 1990s while at the University of California, San Francisco. In those days, the prevailing wisdom held that the loss of a close friend or relative left indelible emotional scars – and Freudian grief work or a similar tonic was needed to return the mourner to a normal routine. Bonanno and his colleagues approached the task with open minds. Yet, again and again during the experiments, they found no trace of psychic wounds, raising the prospect that psychological resilience prevails, that it was not just a rare occurrence in in- dividuals blessed with propitious genes or gifted parents. This insight also raised the unsettling prospect that latter-day versions of grief work might end up producing more harm than good.

“In one example of his work, Bonanno and his colleague Dacher Keltner analyzed facial expressions of people who had lost loved ones recently. The videos bore no hint of any permanent sorrow that needed extirpation. As expected, the videos revealed sadness but also anger and happiness. Time and again, a grief-stricken person’s expression would change from dejection to laughter and back.

“Were the guffaws genuine, the researchers wondered? They slowed down the video and looked for contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscles around the eyes – movements known as Duchenne expressions that confirm that laughs are what they seem, not just an artifact of a polite but insincere titter. The mourners, it turns out, exhibited the real thing. The same oscillation between sadness and mirth repeated itself in study after study.

“What does it mean? Bonanno surmises that melancholy helps us with healing after a loss, but unrelenting grief, like clinical depression, is just too much to bear, overwhelming the mourner. So the wiring inside our heads prevents most of us from getting stuck in an inconsolable psychological state. If our emotions get either too hot or cold, a kind of internal sensor – call it a ‘resilience-stat’ – returns us to equilibrium.

“Bonanno expanded his studies beyond bereavement. At Catholic University and later Columbia, he interviewed survivors of sexual abuse, New Yorkers who had gone through the 9/11 attacks and Hong Kong residents who had lived through the SARS epidemic. Wherever he went, the story was the same: ‘Most of the people looked like they were coping just fine.’

“A familiar pattern emerged. In the immediate aftermath of death, disease or disaster, a third to two thirds of those surveyed experienced few, if any, symptoms that would merit classification as trauma: sleeping difficulties, hypervigilance or flashbacks, among other symptoms. Within six months the number that remained with these symptoms often fell to less than 10 percent.”

Author: Gary Stix
Title: “The Neuroscience of True Grit”
Publisher: Scientific American Magazine
Date: March 2011
Pages: 31-32

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Valentine’s Day Hormones

I found this book excerpt, and it is an important reminder of the importance of bonding, intimacy, etc in our relationships with our spouse and children.

In today’s excerpt – Valentine’s Day tidbits. Where to we find enduring love? Answer: Oxytocin. Infidelity? Testosterone. Heartbreak? Low serotonin and endorphins. In fact, our loved ones are actually present in our brains – neurochemically – and when lost it results in chemical trauma for the brain:

“An American study of over four thousand men found that husbands with high testosterone levels were 43 percent more likely to get divorced and 38 percent more likely to have extramarital affairs than men with lower levels. They were also 50 percent less likely to get married at all. Men with the least amounts of
testosterone were more likely to get married and to stay married, maybe because low testosterone levels make men calmer, less aggressive, less intense, and more cooperative.

“The desire to commit to someone is strongly linked to … oxytocin. … Oxytocin is released by the pituitary gland and acts on the ovaries and testes to regulate reproduction. Researchers suspect that this hormone is important for forming close social bonds. The levels of this chemical rise when couples watch romantic movies, hug, or hold hands. Prairie voles, when injected with oxytocin, pair much faster than normally. Blocking oxytocin prevents them from bonding in a normal way. This is similar in humans, because couples bond to certain characteristics in each other. This is why you are attracted to the same type of man or woman repeatedly. In general, levels of oxytocin are lower in men, except after an orgasm, where they are raised more than 500 percent. This may explain why men feel very sleepy after an orgasm. This is the same hormone released in babies during breast-feeding, which makes them sleepy as well.

“Oxytocin is also related to the feelings of closeness and being ‘in love’ when you have regular sex for several reasons. First, the skin is sensitized by oxytocin, encouraging affection and touching behavior. Then, oxytocin levels rise during subsequent touching and eventually even with the anticipation of being touched. Oxytocin increases during sexual activity, peaks at orgasm, and stays elevated for a period of time after intercourse. … In addition, there is an amnesic effect created by oxytocin during sex and orgasm that blocks negative memories people have about each other for a period of time. The same amnesic effect occurs from the release of oxytocin during childbirth, while
a mother is nursing to help her forget the labor pain, and during long, stressful nights spent with a newborn so that she can bond to her baby with positive feelings and love.

“Higher oxytocin levels are also associated with an increased feeling of trust. In a landmark study by Michael Kosfeld and colleagues from Switzerland published in the journal Nature, intranasal oxytocin was found to increase trust. Men who inhale a nasal spray spiked with oxytocin give more money to partners in a risky investment game than do men who sniff a spray containing a placebo. This substance fosters the trust needed for friendship, love, families, economic transactions, and political networks. According to the study’s authors, ‘Oxytocin specifically affects an individual’s willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions.’ …

“What happens in the brain when you lose someone you love? Why do we hurt, long, even obsess about the other person? When we love someone, they come to live in the emotional or limbic centers of our brains. He or she actually occupies nerve-cell pathways and physically lives in the neurons and synapses of the brain. When we lose someone, either through death, divorce, moves, or
breakups, our brain starts to get confused and disoriented. Since the person lives in the neuronal connections, we expect to see her, hear her, feel her, and touch her. When we cannot hold her or talk to her as we usually do, the brain centers where she lives becomes inflamed looking for her. Overactivity in the limbic brain has been associated with depression and low serotonin levels, which is why we have trouble sleeping, feel obsessed, lose our appetites, want to isolate ourselves, and lose the joy we have about life. A deficit in endorphins, which modulate pain and pleasure pathways in the brain, also occurs, which may be responsible for the physical pain we feel during a breakup.”

Author: Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Title: The Brain in Love
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Date: Copyright 2007 by Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Pages: 64-68

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Encarta vs. Wikipedia & Inspiration

Imagine it is the 1990’s and a group of economists and scholarly types were asked what the best encyclopedia in 2010 would be: Microsoft Encarta vs. Wikipedia. We would all say that is obvious: Microsoft Encarta, an encycylopedia created by a high powered, high paid, group of scholars, but we, and the economists et al, would be wrong. Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia ever created, but it is created by a group of volunteers who have given hours and hours to its creation.

This example illustrates the power of motivation 3.0–motivation generated by inspiration et al vs. motivation 2.0–motivation generated by the carrot aka incentive based via money or other perks. David Shenk in his book: The Genius in All of Us does a profound job of illustrating to us this new found revelation: inspired motivation can truly move mountains.

As I continue to venture deeper and deeper into the adventure that is coaching, I find the scientific evidence for why coaching is important and why it works to be encouraging, fascinating, and powerful.

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Shift In Physicians Top Desires List

Emergency Medicine News:
December 2010 – Volume 32 – Issue 12 – p 28
doi: 10.1097/01.EEM.0000391513.92946.d3
Career Source
Career Source: Millennial Physicians Put Lifestyle at the Top of their List
Kartz, Barbara

Free Access
Author Information
Part 2 in a Series

Only 26 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say they are happy, according to a Harris Poll in the September-October AARP magazine, with 55 percent of them saying they’re frustrated by work. But that may be changing if my research about millennial physicians is any indication.
Image…
Image ToolsEarly this year, I sent a three-section questionnaire to the 147 emergency medicine residency programs listed in the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s directory, requesting that it be distributed to all residents, preferably third- and fourth-year students. The response rate was just more than eight percent, based on approximately 3,100 residents in their junior and senior years combined. This wasn’t a state-of-the-art research project with control groups, and the conclusions drawn are mine based on the information collected.
A whopping 81 percent ranked lifestyle as most important, with nine percent ranking position profile first, and eight percent ranking compensation first. Compensation was second most important to 67 percent of respondents, with position profile at 17 percent and lifestyle at 13 percent. The least important category, chosen by 73 percent of respondents, was position profile, with 13 percent choosing compensation and only two percent choosing lifestyle as least important. The Millennial physician is considerably more concerned with his time off the job than on. And these physicians have a lot to say about the parameters of their job search.
I also asked them to rate 14 job search parameters in order of importance. The results showed a distinct leaning toward lifestyle as a primary motivating factor. The parameters were:
* Geographic location
* Peer group of physician colleagues
* Partnership opportunity
* Equal equity ownership opportunity
* Proximity to major airport
* Hourly income
* ED trauma level
* Benefits
* Proximity to recreational venues
* Shift length
* Incentive income (based on production)
* ED volume
* Schools for kids
* Spouse’s job

Location, location, location was the number one choice of 67 percent of respondents with 88 percent putting it into their top two choices. This is such an overwhelmingly obvious response that I think we are looking at an entire generation of young physicians who place their primary emphasis on location and lifestyle. Will this change over time? It might; my experience has shown that a large number of physicians change their priorities after three to five years of work experience. Some decide to chase a title while others seek higher earnings or better lifestyle, and all are more open about where they go to get it. But, of course, that was over the past 20 years; that may be changing now.
Hourly income was of primary concern for 29 percent, with more than 69 percent putting it into their top three. Fifty percent also put ED volume and trauma level as one of their top three. A peer group of residency trained physicians was the primary position-related item important enough to feature in the top three for more than 67 percent of physicians. Also of importance was shift length, with 54 percent placing it in the top three positions of importance.
Noticeably missing in the top three were both partnership and equal equity ownership potential with less than four percent placing these in the top two positions of importance, and a few respondents leaving these two items off their lists altogether. Equally interesting were the incentive income results. Not one physician rated it as most important, with less than 36 percent putting it into the second or third level of importance. In contrast, hourly income was ranked in the top three by 69 percent of physicians, demonstrating a desire for guaranteed compensation. This is backed up by the 58 percent placing benefits in the top three positions of importance. I believe this shows a stronger desire for employee status than independent contractor status or partnership. This is the exact opposite of what physicians graduating between 1997 and 2007 were seeking. Their catch phrase was “fee-for-service,” and their favorite word was “partnership.” It seems pretty clear that attitudes are changing in this area as well. Young physicians seem to be seeking guarantees with their incomes as opposed to relying on their own abilities to move patients and generate billing in order to earn.
The spouse’s job was the number one concern for 37 percent of the physicians and in the top three for more than 48 percent. I believe this demonstrates a rise in dual-income physician families as well as an increase of female physicians with husbands who work. With this category figuring so highly in the primary importance ranking, I would surmise that physicians consider the spouse’s job more difficult to find than their own, and have a willingness to defer to the spouse when it comes to selecting a job market. This also could be showing an understanding on the part of the physician respondents that the emergency medicine job market is wide open. Schools figured into the top three choices of importance for 52 percent of physicians, with 48 percent spread fairly evenly across the board from fourth to last place.
Proximity to major airports figured prominently in the top three for 31 percent of physicians, with an equal amount of respondents placing it in the fifth position. Also note the strong showing for proximity to recreational venues: Half placed this in their top three categories of importance, with more than 37 percent ranking it in their top two. Interest in time off the job is important for a large percentage of young physicians.
Comments about this article? Write to EMN at emn@lww.com.

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Tips on Emotionally Intelligent Email Writing

Another GREAT insight from Talentsmart:
By Dr. Travis Bradberry

These days, we’ve all been on the receiving end of a scathing email, as well as its mysterious, vaguely pejorative cousins. You know the messages to which I refer. They don’t need exclamation points or all caps to teem with anger and drip with sarcasm. Dressing someone down via email is tempting because it’s easy—you have plenty of time to dream up daggers that strike straight to the heart, and you lack the inhibition that is present when the receiving party is staring you in the face. This type of email is known in cyberspace as “flaming,” and all such messages have a single thing in common—a complete and utter lack of emotional intelligence.

A recent survey (sponsored by communications device manufacturer Plantronics) reveals that 83% of today’s workforce considers email to be “critical” to their success and productivity. That’s more than the phone (81%), audio conferencing (61%), instant messaging (38%), or social media (19%). That’s probably because 90% of the workers surveyed reported that they regularly perform work outside of the office—whether in different company locations, client sites, off-site meetings, or when working remotely from home.

Since its inception, the role of online communication in how we interact with other people has been expanding—with no sign of slowing down. Email has been around long enough that you’d think that by now we’d all be pros at using it to communicate effectively. But we’re human and—if you think about it—we haven’t mastered face-to-face communication either. In fact, we’re hard-wired to struggle when it comes to keeping our emotions from obscuring our intentions (and sometimes derailing our progress in achieving our goals).

The bottom line is that we could all use a little help. The five strategies that follow are proven methods for keeping your emotions within reason, so that you don’t hit “send” while your emails, tweets, comments, and virtual chime-ins are still flaming.

1. Use Honest Abe’s First Rule of Netiquette. I know what you’re thinking: How could someone who died more than a century before the Internet existed teach us about email etiquette? Well, in Lincoln’s younger years, he had a bad habit of applying his legendary wit when writing insulting letters to, and about, his political rivals. But after one particularly scathing letter led a rival to challenge Lincoln to a duel, Lincoln learned a valuable lesson—words impact the receiver in ways that the sender cannot completely fathom. By the time he died, Lincoln had amassed stacks of flaming letters that verbally shredded his rivals and subordinates for their bone-headed mistakes. However, the important thing is that Lincoln never sent them. He vented his frustration on paper, and then stuffed that sheet away in a drawer. The following day, the full intensity of his emotions having subsided, Lincoln wrote and sent a much more congenial and conciliatory letter. We can all benefit from learning to do the same with email. Your emotions are a valid representation of how you feel—no matter how intense—but that doesn’t mean that acting on them in the moment serves you well. Go ahead and vent—tap out your anger and frustration on the keyboard. Save the draft and come back to it later when you’ve cooled down. By then you’ll be rational enough to edit the message and pare down the parts that burn, or—even better—rewrite the kind of message that you want to be remembered by.

2. Know the Limits of Virtual Humor. Some people show their displeasure with words typed in ALL CAPS and a barrage of exclamation points. Others, however, express dissatisfaction more subtly with sarcasm and satire. This latter kind is no less of a breakdown in the core EQ skill of self-management, and can be even more dangerous because it’s harder to detect. The sender can always convince him or herself that the spite was just a little joke. While a little good-natured ribbing can sometimes help to lighten face-to-face interaction—interaction with an arsenal of facial expressions and voice inflections to help you to convey the right tone—it’s almost never a good idea to have a laugh at someone else’s expense online. Online your message can too easily be misinterpreted without your body language to help to explain it, and you won’t be there to soften the blow when your joke doesn’t go over as intended. In the virtual world, it’s best to err on the side of friendliness and professionalism. For those times when you absolutely cannot resist using humor, just make sure that you are the butt of the joke.

3. People Online Are Still People (So Take the Time to Feel What They Feel). While entranced by the warm glow of a computer monitor, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that a living, breathing human being will end up reading your message. Psychologist John Suler of Rider University has found that people who are communicating online experience a “disinhibition effect.” Without the real-time feedback between sender and receiver that takes place in face-to-face and telecommunication, we simply don’t worry as much about offending people online. We don’t have to experience the discomfort of watching someone else grow confused, despondent, or angry because of something that we said. When these natural consequences are delayed, we tend to spill onto the screen whatever happens to be on our mind.
Averting such messages requires you to be intentional in applying your social awareness skills. Without being able to physically see the other person’s body language or hear the tone of his/her voice, you must picture the recipient in your mind and imagine what (s)he might feel when reading your message as it’s been written. In fact, the next time you receive a curt or outright rude email, put the brakes on before firing back a retort. Taking the time to imagine the sender and considering where he/she is coming from is often enough to extinguish the flames before they get out of control. Could the sender have misinterpreted a previous message that you sent to him/her? Could (s)he just be having a bad day? Is (s)he under a lot of pressure? Even when the other party is in the wrong, spending a moment on the other side of the monitor will give you the perspective that you need to avoid further escalating the situation.

4. Show How the Internet Feels ( ). Emoticons have a mixed reputation in the business world. Some people and even organizations believe that smiley faces, winks and other symbols of digital emotion are unprofessional, undignified, and have no place outside of a high school hallway. When used properly, however, a Dutch research team has shown that emoticons can effectively enhance the desired tone of a message. The team led by Daantje Derks at the Open University of the Netherlands concluded that “to a large extent, emoticons serve the same functions as actual nonverbal behavior.” Considering that nonverbal behavior accounts for between 70 and 90% of a message when communicating face to face, it’s time to ditch the stigma attached to emoticons in the business setting. For those leery of dropping a smiley face into your next email, I’m not suggesting that you smile, wink, and frown your way through every email you write. Just don’t be afraid to peck out a quick semicolon-dash-right parenthesis the next time you want to be certain that the recipient is aware of your tongue planted firmly in cheek.

5. Know When Online Chats Need to Become Offline Discussions. Managing online relationships will always be a somewhat difficult task for people programmed to communicate in person. However, managing critical email conversations is even more difficult for those programmed to communicate via email. Significant, lengthy, and heated email exchanges are almost always better taken offline and finished in person. With so much communication via email these days, it can be hard to pull the trigger and initiate a face-to-face conversation when you sense that an online interaction is becoming too heated or simply too difficult to do well online. Online technologies have become enormously useful for increasing the speed and efficiency of communication, but they have a long way to go before they become the primary source for creating and maintaining quality human relationships.

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Play in the Now

Recently, I have been learning a great deal about time. The best time, and many would argue, the only time is in the now. This book excerpt is a fun reminder to live in the now. Play in the now. Stop rushing around this season. Be IN the NOW.

It comes as no surprise that the God of the universe’s earliest name for us to call Him was/is: I AM. The great eternal now.

In today’s encore excerpt – for those who are already expert at their craft there are perils to rushing or overrehearsing. Here Paul Shaffer frantically tries to reach Sammy Davis Jr. to select a song and schedule rehearsal before his appearance on the David Letterman show:

“Every time I called [Sammy Davis Jr. to try and select a song or discuss rehearsal] he was either working or sleeping. He never did return my calls.

The morning of the show I was feeling some panic. Sammy was flying in and we still didn’t know what he wanted to sing. At 10 a.m. the floor manager said I had a backstage call. It was Sammy calling from the plane.

‘ ‘Once in My Life’ will be fine Paul’ he said. ‘Key of E going into F.’

‘Great!’ I was relieved.

I was also eager to work out an arrangement. We whipped up a chart, nursed it, rehearsed it, and put it on tape. That way when Sammy arrived he could hear it.

Then another backstage call. Sammy’s plane had landed early and he was on his way over. When I greeted him at the backstage door with a big ‘We’re thrilled you’re here,’ I was a little taken aback. He looked extremely tired and frail. He walked with a cane.

‘We have an arrangement, Sam. You can rehearse it with the band.’

‘No need baby. Gotta conserve my energy. I’m just gonna go to my room and shower.’

‘I wanna make it easy for you. So I’ll just play you a tape of the arrangement on the boom box. That way you’ll hear what we’ve done and tell me if it’s okay.’

‘Man I know the song.’

‘I know Sam,’ I said ‘but what if you don’t like the chart?’

‘I’ll like it, I’ll like it.’

‘But what if the key’s not right?’

‘Okay, if you insist.’

I slipped the cassette in the boom box and hit ‘play.’ To my ears the chart sounded great. Sammy closed his eyes and in Sammy style nodded his head up and down to the groove. He smiled.

‘It’s swinging man,’ he said ‘but think of how much more fun we could have had if I hadn’t heard this tape.’

His words still resonate in my ears; the notion still haunts me. Sammy sung that night but as he was performing, I couldn’t help thinking that his carefree feeling about time – as opposed to my lifelong notion of the pressure of the time – was coming from a higher spiritual plane. As a musician, I’ve always thought I rushed. I still think I rush. The great players never rush.

It reminds me of that moment when I watched Ray Charles turn to his guitarist just as the young guy was about to solo and say, ‘Take your time son. Take your time.’ ”

Author: Paul Shaffer
Title: We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives
Publisher: Flying Dolphin Press
Date: Copyright 2009 by Paul Shaffer Enterprises Inc.
Pages: 234-235

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C.U.L.P. Initiative Assignment #1: King’s Speech

This year a few of my friends are helping me to explore the Upper Limit Problem(s) in our lives. I hope to share a few thoughts via movies etc. to explore this concept throughout 2011. The 1st “assignment” is watching the movie titled: King’s Speech.

WOW! This is a MUST see movie. It is about relationships, friendship, and a new concept that I am just starting to explore based on The Big Leap by Hendricks.

The Upper Limit Problem is the concept that we all live in our little box of excellence: we have acquired through experience a comfortable space of expertise.

The Upper Limit Problem is the human tendency to put the brakes on our positive “energy”/feelings when we’ve exceeded our unconscious thermostat setting for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel.

Questions to explore:

What was the King’s Upper Limit Problem(s)?

How did he overcome them?

What are your Upper Limit Problem(s)?

How can you overcome them?

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C.U.L.P. Initiative: Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem

C.U.L.P. New Year’s Initiative

Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem (concept from the book titled: The Big Leap)…

Conspiracy is from 2 latin words; and it literally means to breathe together. I think that is cool.

I definitely suffer from The Upper Limit Problem.

The Upper Limit Problem is the concept that we all live in our little box of excellence: we have acquired through experience a comfortable space of expertise.

The Upper Limit Problem is the human tendency to put the brakes on our positive “energy”/feelings when we’ve exceeded our unconscious thermostat setting for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel. The items to explore are:

1. What keeps us from going up? Getting beyond our upper limit…For me it is that I am not enough so I am not worthy, not deserving, and not willing to let go of staying in the box (ex. not truly embracing/accepting compliments/good moments that happen to me).

2. What can we do to stay above our upper limit? Or better yet, what can we do to eliminate our upper limit completely? What can we do to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives in the now? What can we do to celebrate and embrace the space above and beyond our upper limit?

3. What does it feel like when we break through the top of our upper limit box?