Your Brain at Work Strategies for Overcoming Distraction Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long (Audible Audio Edition) David Rock Bob Walter HarperAudio Books
Download As PDF : Your Brain at Work Strategies for Overcoming Distraction Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long (Audible Audio Edition) David Rock Bob Walter HarperAudio Books
Meet Emily and Paul The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.
In this book, we travel inside Emily and Paul's brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they're presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they're in good hands David Rock knows how the brain works-and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. Rock shows how it's possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today's overwhelming work environment but succeed in it-and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.
Your Brain At Work explores issues such as
- why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources
- why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
- how to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable problems
- how to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible
- how to collaborate more effectively with others
- why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier
- how to be more effective at changing other people's behavior.
Your Brain at Work Strategies for Overcoming Distraction Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long (Audible Audio Edition) David Rock Bob Walter HarperAudio Books
In this review I will:a. summarize the book's content,
b. provide an overview of the amazon reviews of this book, and
c. evaluate the book's merits.
CONTENT
The overarching message is that we benefit ourselves when we engage in metacognition (Rock's term). We improve ourselves by becoming more aware of how our power of awareness functions. Rock often expresses this idea metaphorically by telling us that it is to our advantage to develop a strong "director."
When we enhance our self-awareness, we appreciate that human beings are motivated by five types of phenomena: Social status, Certainty, Autonomy (independence), Relatedness (social connections), and Fairness. Enhancement of these five dimensions is experienced as rewarding. Diminution along any of these dimensions is just as aversive as physical pain.
When we are suffering because one or more of these dimensions has been threatened, we can use three procedures to restore our mental well-being.
The first is labeling. By describing an emotion we can reduce it. If someone insulted me, I can tell myself that I am angry. That will make me feel better.
The second procedure is reappraisal. By changing our perspective or our interpretation of a situation, we can lessen the negative emotion. If someone insulted me, I can take his perspective and realize that he is so upset that he is not responsible for his actions. Or, perhaps I could reinterpret the situation and realize that what I took to be an insult might not have been one after all.
The last procedure is lowering expectations. Decades ago I discovered that if many people told me that I must see a movie because it was amazing, I would often be disappointed, because it failed to be as amazing as I had expected it to be. On the other hand, if I just saw some random flick on a whim, and it was decent, I was really happy, because it was much better than I thought it would be. We experience exceeded expectations as highly rewarding, and unmet expectations as painful. We can develop the ability to set our expectations lower, allowing them to be exceeded more often.
In business and in life in general, we often confront difficult problems. Rock offers a number of methods for helping us develop better solutions.
First, we can simplify the problem to the greatest extent possible by using few words to state it.
Second, we can get our mind off the problem by quieting the mind-- e.g. by taking a shower or a walk.
Third, we can focus the mind on potential solutions and, as much as possible, stop thinking about the problem.
REVIEWS
I bought this book because it had some of the most forceful, positive reviews that I have ever read for a self-improvement book. Since I have read books that have deeply affected my own life, I was pleased to read the reviews of so many readers whose lives were positively altered by the methods they learned from this book. I actually stopped reading a couple of books that I am in the middle of, because the potential impact of this book seemed so much greater.
EVALUATION
It should come as no surprise to readers of Rock's book, that the over-the-top reviews of his book lessened my appreciation of it. Reading these reviews stimulated very high expectations in me. Unfortunately, those high expectations were not met. This book has had very little, if any, impact on my life. Very few of the reviewers have indicated what particular and specific changes they made based on the book's recommendations, and how that helped them. I have found it quite difficult to translate the insights given in the book into practical changes in my life.
As I stated at the beginning of the Content section, the overarching message of the book is the importance of metacognition, which is usually called "mindfulness." If your goal is to develop your powers of mindfulness, I can recommend books that give much more practical, useful advice than Rock's book. I started doing mindfulness practice about six months ago. To be perfectly frank, it's not at all clear to me that I have become any more mindful than I was before I started. But I am aware of the fact that there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness practice benefits most people who engage in it, so I soldier on hoping that at some point I will notice that mindfulness is benefiting me as well.
As far as lessening negative emotions using labeling, reappraisal, and lowered expectations, you would be better served by reading a cognitive-behavioral therapy book with practical exercises that help you develop those skills. David Burns's The Feeling Good Handbook is an excellent choice.
If you want to know more of the science Rock discusses, Heidi Grant Halvorson's Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, covers some of the same studies Rock does, but she presents it in a more accessible manner, making it much easier to implement changes in my life.
If, instead of self-improvement, your goal is to be stimulated intellectually on the subject of awareness and thought, take a look at Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, or Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
In conclusion, Rock's book does a decent job synthesizing a lot of content into a relatively coherent presentation. But I had trouble translating this content into practical changes in my life. There are other books on psychology and mindfulness that do a better job demonstrating exactly what the reader needs to do to bring about positive behavioral and emotional changes.
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Your Brain at Work Strategies for Overcoming Distraction Regaining Focus and Working Smarter All Day Long (Audible Audio Edition) David Rock Bob Walter HarperAudio Books Reviews
I read this book over the course of a few weeks on the way to work, roughly about a chapter per day. I found that this timing allowed me to process and practice the lessons shortly after reading them. The theme off this book is around self-awareness and accessing our "director" to actively choose how we spend our time, interact with people and ourselves. I found it helpful and hope you do too. On a side note, I recommend reading the Surprises about the brain and tips to try at the end of each chapter before you begin reading each chapter.
This is a great book.
It explores the limitations of the brain and its ability to prioritize, remember, and recall information. Sounds pretty dry right? Well actually it isn't. The author uses a very easy to understand analogy and real life situations that turn these complex topics into a fairly quick read.
I took a lot from this book. I have put several of the ideas into practice and have seen results in my overall capacity to prioritize and process information. If you are a busy professional, I see no reason why you cannot get at least something out of reading Mr. Rock's book.
My only complaint is that through the situational analogies recommendations are sometimes given that would be very difficult to follow in a fast paced corporate world...but I was even able to take some of these business situational ideas and apply them to personal tasks. It really is a valuable book. So much so, I read it twice.
It is a very interesting book, very informative, but was a somewhat difficult read for me. Maybe it was just me, but I had to read some of the passages a few times to get the full understanding of the authors message. Then, I always felt I was still missing something. As a person with both Left Brain and Right Brain capabilities my creativity is sometimes living in different world. And the problem of better understanding the book, "Your Brain at Work" rests in my ability to sort things out in a rational manner, and at a higher Fog Index than I'm
used to.
DCS - CARMAN Author LOOK OUT AMERICA
I have bought this book for many of my fellow solo lawyers. This one of the top 3 most important books I have read in the past 3 years - and I read a lot of books. It will cause you to reorganize how you approach each work day. Most importantly, it helped me overcome the feeling that I had at the end of each work day that I hadn't done enough. Once you understand the limitations of your brain, you stop expecting yourself to perform beyond the actual capacity of your brain. So instead of feeling defeated everyday, your performance is "just right." I'm grateful for this book.
In this review I will
a. summarize the book's content,
b. provide an overview of the reviews of this book, and
c. evaluate the book's merits.
CONTENT
The overarching message is that we benefit ourselves when we engage in metacognition (Rock's term). We improve ourselves by becoming more aware of how our power of awareness functions. Rock often expresses this idea metaphorically by telling us that it is to our advantage to develop a strong "director."
When we enhance our self-awareness, we appreciate that human beings are motivated by five types of phenomena Social status, Certainty, Autonomy (independence), Relatedness (social connections), and Fairness. Enhancement of these five dimensions is experienced as rewarding. Diminution along any of these dimensions is just as aversive as physical pain.
When we are suffering because one or more of these dimensions has been threatened, we can use three procedures to restore our mental well-being.
The first is labeling. By describing an emotion we can reduce it. If someone insulted me, I can tell myself that I am angry. That will make me feel better.
The second procedure is reappraisal. By changing our perspective or our interpretation of a situation, we can lessen the negative emotion. If someone insulted me, I can take his perspective and realize that he is so upset that he is not responsible for his actions. Or, perhaps I could reinterpret the situation and realize that what I took to be an insult might not have been one after all.
The last procedure is lowering expectations. Decades ago I discovered that if many people told me that I must see a movie because it was amazing, I would often be disappointed, because it failed to be as amazing as I had expected it to be. On the other hand, if I just saw some random flick on a whim, and it was decent, I was really happy, because it was much better than I thought it would be. We experience exceeded expectations as highly rewarding, and unmet expectations as painful. We can develop the ability to set our expectations lower, allowing them to be exceeded more often.
In business and in life in general, we often confront difficult problems. Rock offers a number of methods for helping us develop better solutions.
First, we can simplify the problem to the greatest extent possible by using few words to state it.
Second, we can get our mind off the problem by quieting the mind-- e.g. by taking a shower or a walk.
Third, we can focus the mind on potential solutions and, as much as possible, stop thinking about the problem.
REVIEWS
I bought this book because it had some of the most forceful, positive reviews that I have ever read for a self-improvement book. Since I have read books that have deeply affected my own life, I was pleased to read the reviews of so many readers whose lives were positively altered by the methods they learned from this book. I actually stopped reading a couple of books that I am in the middle of, because the potential impact of this book seemed so much greater.
EVALUATION
It should come as no surprise to readers of Rock's book, that the over-the-top reviews of his book lessened my appreciation of it. Reading these reviews stimulated very high expectations in me. Unfortunately, those high expectations were not met. This book has had very little, if any, impact on my life. Very few of the reviewers have indicated what particular and specific changes they made based on the book's recommendations, and how that helped them. I have found it quite difficult to translate the insights given in the book into practical changes in my life.
As I stated at the beginning of the Content section, the overarching message of the book is the importance of metacognition, which is usually called "mindfulness." If your goal is to develop your powers of mindfulness, I can recommend books that give much more practical, useful advice than Rock's book. I started doing mindfulness practice about six months ago. To be perfectly frank, it's not at all clear to me that I have become any more mindful than I was before I started. But I am aware of the fact that there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness practice benefits most people who engage in it, so I soldier on hoping that at some point I will notice that mindfulness is benefiting me as well.
As far as lessening negative emotions using labeling, reappraisal, and lowered expectations, you would be better served by reading a cognitive-behavioral therapy book with practical exercises that help you develop those skills. David Burns's The Feeling Good Handbook is an excellent choice.
If you want to know more of the science Rock discusses, Heidi Grant Halvorson's Succeed How We Can Reach Our Goals, covers some of the same studies Rock does, but she presents it in a more accessible manner, making it much easier to implement changes in my life.
If, instead of self-improvement, your goal is to be stimulated intellectually on the subject of awareness and thought, take a look at Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, or Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
In conclusion, Rock's book does a decent job synthesizing a lot of content into a relatively coherent presentation. But I had trouble translating this content into practical changes in my life. There are other books on psychology and mindfulness that do a better job demonstrating exactly what the reader needs to do to bring about positive behavioral and emotional changes.
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