by Marion Aufseesser | Jun 23, 2020 | Training
Dear Readers,
Once again thank you for joining me.
Covid-19 is creating havoc. We are all reading about anxiety, depression, PTSD and other psychological symptoms.
If you need professional help, do get in touch with your MD first. If you don’t have a GP reach out to a professional helpline, a trained psychologist or psychiatrist.
Remember, a psychologist has full university training and a psychiatrist is a medical doctor, who in many countries is allowed to prescribe medication. Psychologists in most countries are not authorised to prescribe medication. Check your national authorities.
Today I want to introduce you to DOSE ©
As you know from my previous Covid-19 posts, we are ALL experiencing the emotional roller coaster I presented in March (link)
It is now time to provide more useful tools to have in your toolkit to be able to cope with the emotional wave I described. I don’t want anyone to drown!
Most of you will have experienced the wave gush of emotional flooding since the beginning of the pandemic. The timeline is personal: for some it started in December following the news coming from China, for some it hit home later.
If you have been personally hit hard by the wave, I extend my thoughts to you. If you have been an onlooker to hard hits, you also get my sympathy of course.
We are ALL in this together in one way or another. So, we all need efficient tools to ride the waves to prevent going under. Positive psychology, meditation and mindfulness, are current buzz words. However, I find that in conveying them, in my opinion, something’s still missing.
I was lacking some form of understanding, which in my case prevented me from letting go and using mindfulness for example to its full extent. And let’s face, it I don’t always have the patience and time to meditate for 45 minutes per day, which when I was trained was what you were supposed to do!
Already 15 years ago, I “secretly” modified my practice in how I introduced and taught mindfulness to my candidates looking for jobs.
There was no way was I going to tell candidates, who had recently learned that they had lost their job to spend 45 minutes per day “meditating” when they had bills to pay and a job to find!
Based on the book of my acquaintance Loretta Graziano Breuning, “Habits of a Happy Brain” (also available in French), I created DOSE© an easy to remember acronym.
By learning how to use DOSE© you will be able to master positive stress better, use it to advance and you will learn how to understand your negative stress better. This is important as your hyper negative stress is what will get you into the mental lockdown… procrastination, anxiety, fear blocking you from moving forward.
Let’s dive into the emotional roller coaster.
Our brain is designed to cope with life’s ups and downs: it’s an amazing 2kg blackbox which stores all the information it needs to get us through the GOOD and the BAD times.
For many of us right now, it is partially a bad time.
The Covid-19 tsunami has thrown us out of our comfort zones. Some of you have lost everything and loved ones. That is the worst-case scenario and I know it’s happening to millions of people around the world.
Some of you have lost not everything, but a lot. Your job? Your security? That is quite enough to lose in such a short time to lose ones bearing.
Some of you, on the other hand, are on the top of the wave and surfing. For sure, some people are in areas where business is thriving… some in an honest way, some maybe in shadier ways. Human nature…
Where ever you stand, DOSE© will come to your rescue. Because understanding DOSE© will allow you to better fend for yourself. It will, in my opinion, also help you better let go, appreciate positive and Realistic© psychology (my definition) and benefit from the likes of mindfulness, yoga, praying sincerely and other practices.
Just practicing mindfulness, yoga, praying, etc. won’t bring the quick fix results you are looking for. People with years of experience sometimes get there. Right now, we need something more EFFICIENT to alleviate the anxiety, pain, fear and hurt NOW.
Dopamine
Oxytocin
Serotonin
Endorphin
How D-O-S-E helps you survive?
DOPAMINE:*
Helps you seek rewards and motivates you to get what you need, even when it takes a lot of effort
OXYTOCIN:*
Helps you build social alliances and motivates you to trust others, (link to trust vs mistrust) to find safety in companionship
SEROTONIN:*
Helps you get respect from others and motivates you to get respect, which expands your mating opportunities and protects your offspring.
ENDORPHIN:*
Helps you ignore physical pain so you can escape from harm when you are injured.
*In Habits of a Happy Brain (L. Graziano Breuning)
You can’t see your “DOSE”, because these HORMONES are invisible to the eye, but you feel them – they are the ones responsible for your “yes I did it” feeling (dopamine), your hug and smile (Oxytocin) your happiness and confidence (Serotonin) and your boost (Endorphin)
You can learn to react more rationally (system 2) and not on the spur of the moment when they hit you (System 1 = irrationally)
Once you understand which Hormone is pulling you either to positive energy or negative energy (negative stress) you will be able to take the first step to stay calm and make rational (system 2) decisions (see link to cognitive bias article)
Next week I will go further into how you can learn to DOSE© better thus getting a new hold on your life. It’s once again an amazing tool. Using it in conjunction with the other tools from Transitionkit’s toolkit, you will transform your life forever.
We are giving all this away free of charge as part of our modest support to the global community.
Please share, like, comment my articles.
Needless to say we are also open to support your companies and you individually.
For that do get in touch with us (Contact Us)
Wherever you are, stay safe.
Marion
by Marion Aufseesser | Jun 13, 2020 | COVID-19, Deconfinement
Dear Readers,
Thank you for joining me again.
To Trust or not to Trust?
Last week I wrote about cognitive bias based mainly on the Kahneman’s work. Click here for the link.
Today, I share with you the literature scan I have made, digging further into the phenomenon trying to better understand the diverse human reactions I have experienced in my clients, family and friends before and during lockdown and now during the deconfinement period.
How can I trust the info that is delivered to me?
Depending on your information source, you trust your source or not because of your cognitive bias filter.
Who can you trust?
Digging into the readings, it appears that it is vital to understand the trust versus non-trust aspects of information sourcing.
Stephen Pinker, Dan Ariely and Yuval Harari share with us their understanding of Covid-19. All three of these important scholars are telling us, how influenced we all are by our different biases.
For Pinker, many of us went into “overdrive” meaning our stress (system 1) went totally out of control. Pandemics are “part of life” and not “divine coercion” as was believed in the middle ages and as some groups may still believe today. Ariely points this out, when telling us how special efforts need to be made to get certain groups of people to adhere to the necessary shutdown rules.
Steven Pinker points out that when we are sick and/or threatened by epidemics/ pandemics we tend to become more introverted, xenophobic and prone to emotional disgust
= non-trust.
He explains that in today’s 21st century, our intellectual, cognitive system allows us to act fast. Within 2 weeks the virus’s genome had been identified, hundreds of world class scientists are working round the clock to develop vaccines. Public health care programs are being rolled out all over the world.
Steven Pinker asks why we had no well-functioning “firefighter” brigade ready. Share your thoughts or comments with us!
If I take the liberty to summarise my thoughts after having reread Pinker, Ariely, Kahneman and Harari, I would argue that the main problem today is the fight of misplaced egos of world leaders on one hand, and the scientific community on the other. And even within the scientific communities, opinions diverge.
Right now, it would appear that the population overall would listen more to the scientific leaders (system 2 rational scientists) and even more so when the political and scientific leaders act together as in Switzerland.
Steven Pinker further points out that “your political standing predicts your behavior to health measures” he adds that depending on what “tribe” you belong to, your behavior towards authority will change in the face of a crisis like Covid-19.
The very big question is how to get a large number of the population to be more rational.
Did you know that more people die from bee stings and drowning in the swimming pool for example than from terror attacks and epidemics/pandemics? Check our last week article
Our brain has a hard time to compute the exponential character of the pandemic. Somehow at the outset we had a problem to compute the numbers.
The main effort is to reduce the Fear impact which is what gets system 1 irrationality skyrocketing. An old proverb says “Fear is not a good counsellor” and in the case of Covid-19 the pictures and stories told from China and Italy at the beginning of the pandemic seem to have “frightened us to death”, making many of us, as Pinker, Ariely and Harari all say overreact. Fear induced reactions to events are often irrational.
Now it’s time for us all to “calm down and reset our brains” using our rationality.
Going back to the office is a huge step for those who went into Pinker’s “overdrive” during the crux of the crisis.
If you feel that you cannot cope and that your anxiety and stress levels are still out of control, you may want to get professional help.
It would be a shame for society and individuals to recover from Covid-19 but remain vulnerable and develop lasting psychological and somatic damage. Preventing an outburst of phobias, stress and anxiety disorders is now highly recommended.
Many companies are therefore putting in place our webinars as well as offering personalised help lines to accompany staff.
In many languages there’s a saying that translates into “trouble never comes alone”. This appears to be true in some cases now. Many of the clients calling our help lines, call for personal reasons that got out of hand during lockdown and conflictual relations at work. In my personal experience few are complaining about home working. Those suffering from home working are mainly doing so either because of the work load especially at the beginning of the crisis and child care issues. In our sample we find that many people actually have a longer list of positive outcomes from the lockdown than negatives. Our tool PNKR© allows to analyse this in a qualitative and quantitative SWOT analysis.
Finally, it is always a good idea to cross check information and never rely on one source only. Whether political or scientific.
We wish you all a great week,
Marion
by Marion Aufseesser | Jun 3, 2020 | COVID-19
Dear Reader,
Thank you for joining me once again.
Over the last 15 days we created and rolled out some 50 interactive webinars in English and French, with several hundred participants on
“How to bounce back serenely from Covid-19” https://www.transitionkit.com/interactive-webinar-how-to-bounce-back-serenely-from-covid-19/
In today’s article, I share one aspect of the webinar which appears paramount to me which is the cognitive bias based on Daniel Kahneman work (with Tversky) which earned Kahneman a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Shared with Vernon L. Smith in 2002) on the psychology of judgement and decision making and behavioural economics.
Based on Kahneman’s as well as on Olivier Sibony’s (HEC Paris) work, I am inclined to describe what we are experiencing as a BC and AC time period (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/going-from-bc-19-ac-19-new-era-marion-aufseesser-stein) and therefore I am talking about the “AC era” rather than a “new normal”.
Why and how is Cognitive Bias influencing our world?
According to Wikipedia’s definition:
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own “subjective reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.
We are totally subjective when under emergency stress. Saving lives is the prime objective.
We tend to take irrational, system 1 and not system 2, rational decisions as described by Kahneman in his book.
What are system 1 and system 2?
According to Kahneman definitions:
System 1: is fast, automatic frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious.
System 2: is slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious.
In essence, thinking fast and slow makes most of us realize how strongly we are influencedby our former assumptions and patterns and how little we really analyze new albeit uncomfortable data.
Our behaviour is much more influenced by the environment of the moment than we know or want.
Given the information gathered, that most of us make up our minds from, we easily understand how strongly we are influenced and how little we take the time to find reliable sources. (If we find sources we believe we can trust, which in the case of Covid-19 is a major problem given that we should be able to trust for example WHO, but given the politics can we trust WHO? What about Bill Gates? To trust or not to trust – that is the question! Many of us don’t know whom to trust (anymore?).
Studies show that people tend to trust the scientific community more than the politicians. Then again there are varying scientific communities with very different approaches. In addition to this, studies show that certain populations will trust celebrities more than politicians and the scientific community.
In summary: I am drawing our attention to the fact, that what you think is your personal analysis and judgement (system 1) needs to be seriously challenged by yourself and become a concerted (system 2) reflection. Then and only then, will you be making your own personal judgement.
My LinkedIn articles are voluntarily short teasers and non-exhaustive. On a subject as complex as our thought process I invite you to read original Kahneman articles. I also invite you to follow Olivier Sibony (HEC, Paris) in English and French
Wishing you all a great week and take care of each other,
Marion
(Thanking Cyrille Gay, my business partner for being the best sparring partner, editor and visual designer you can wish for)
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