How to take action
Chapter 3 - Experiential Growth Method®
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Welcome to the action page
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| Nature never betters one characteristic. It enhances the whole. In business, optimisation of the individual (with productivity as a goal) should be replaced by improving the team, the department, and the entire organisation. |
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What we can leave behind
Exit willpower
| Once you have your goal, how do you go about pursuing it in your day-to-day life? There is a popular belief that what is needed is willpower. Indeed, a recent poll in the US found that people cited a lack of willpower and ‘being lazy’ as the main reasons they would fail at their New Year’s resolutions. It’s true that willpower can work in the moment. Studies show that when people report more effort at resisting a temptation, they are less likely to give in. But over the longer term, it’s a different story. Consider one of my studies published in 2017 in which I asked 159 participants to set themselves four personal goals and then use their smartphones to track throughout each day, for a week, the desires and temptations they experienced (more than 2,300 collectively), and the extent to which they used self-control to resist them. Three months later, the participants reported their progress on their goals, and it turned out that using more self-control, or using it more frequently, was unrelated to goal progress. In other words, repeatedly using self-control to resist desires that interfere with your goals is unlikely to help with goal attainment down the road. |
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| Marina Milyavskaya - To meet your goals, forget willpower and fill your toolbox - Aeon - 2022 |
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Exit to much
| A decade ago, the American psychologist Adam Grant argued in a journal paper that this ‘too much of a good thing’ phenomenon might be a general rule. Some motivation produces excellent performance; too much motivation produces choking. Some group collaboration produces cohesion and enhances productivity; too much of it leads to staleness. Some empathy enables you to understand what another person is going through; too much could prevent you from saying and doing hard things. |
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| Efficiency - Aeon |
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Taking the next step
(Active) Experiential (thinking)
Experiential is a far more rich concept than experience. Experiential is in the first place about creating the proper context where people can start learning. Inducing a sole dominant narrative becomes a burden if it is not adaptable to changing situations because between purpose and productivity stands a relational process. This process is about the intended active use of memory, knowledge, thinking and imagination to compass primary experiences to create a model of a foreseeable future. This includes, among other things, Bayesian, complex, systems, causal and model thinking.
Being human, we tend to treat our experiences through one of these four perspectives:
- A constructivist perspective holds that what we experience we can conveniently group in sets of manifestations
- A diagnostic perspective holds that we divide what we experience into latent classes underlying the manifestations
- A dimensional perspective holds that what we experience we measure with latent continua
- A causal systems perspective holds that we experience causal networks consisting of manifestations and direct causal relations between them
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Growth
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Comming soon
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Method
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Comming soon
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