Inspired Project Teams

Audio:  Learn to Be Optimistic… Learn to Succeed [Time - 9:35, File Size - 9 MB]

“One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think…. On a mechanical level, cognitive therapy works because it changes explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, and the change is permanent. It gives you a set of cognitive skills for talking to yourself when you fail.” – Martin Seligman in Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind & Your Life.

Martin Seligman, former APA president and one of the founders of the research-based Science of Happiness tells us that individuals and teams can learn to be optimistic (and ultimately achieve greater success) by adopting an optimistic explanatory style. In his book Seligman provides examples from sports and business in which teams that have developed optimistic explanatory styles have shown a greater ability to “bounce back” from defeat and return to their winning ways more quickly than their pessimistic competitors. This is great news! But how, exactly, can you change (or control) your explanatory style? Well for starters, you need to understand its key dimensions and how these influence your self talk.

Read the rest of this entry »

Audio: Change Your Mind [Time - 6:43, File Size - 6.3 MB]

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance

Here is something paradoxical about projects:  On the one hand, we labor mightily to create well-thought-out project plans and stick to them. On the other hand, as our deliverables unfold from preliminary concept to detailed design to prototype and beyond, we inevitably make changes as we learn that our original plans didn’t account for this or that factor that we now have discovered is important.

Still, our plans haunt us. We sometimes feel guilty when we deviate from them. Or worse, we stubbornly ignore that nagging new bit of information or overlooked detail that we know in our hearts is going to come back to haunt us later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Announcement: Below are links to the final four of 12 Inspired Project Teams posts to be made available in MP3 (audio podcast) versions. Now all 12 of my previous online text posts are available as audios.

Read the rest of this entry »

Announcement: Below are links to the second four of 12 Inspired Project Teams posts to be made available in MP3 (audio podcast) versions.

Read the rest of this entry »