Seeing the glass as half full: Taking a new look at cognition and aging 11-12

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From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question.

But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors — including motivation and crystallized knowledge — can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.

Motivation Matters

Lab data offer evidence of age-related declines in cognitive function, but many older adults appear to function quite well in their everyday lives. Psychological scientist Thomas Hess of North Carolina State University sets forth a motivational framework of “selective engagement” to explain this apparent contradiction.

If the cognitive cost of engaging in difficult tasks increases as we age, older adults may be less motivated to expend limited cognitive resources on difficult tasks or on tasks that are not personally relevant to them. This selectivity, Hess argues, may allow older adults to improve performance on the tasks they do choose to engage in, thereby helping to account for inconsistencies between lab-based and real-world data.

Prior Knowledge Brings Both Costs and Benefits

Episodic memory – memory for the events of our day-to-day lives – seems to decline with age, while memory for general knowledge does not. Researchers Sharda Umanath and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University review evidence suggesting that older adults use prior knowledge to fill in gaps caused by failures of episodic memory, in ways that can both hurt and help overall cognitive performance. While reliance on prior knowledge can make it difficult to inhibit past information when learning new information, it can also make older adults more resistant to learning new erroneous information.

According to Umanath and Marsh, future research should focus on better understanding this compensatory mechanism and whether it can be harnessed in developing cognitive interventions and tools.

Older Adults Aren’t Necessarily Besieged By Fraud

Popular writers and academics alike often argue that older adults, due to certain cognitive differences, are especially susceptible to consumer fraud. Psychological scientists Michael Ross, Igor Grossmann, and Emily Schryer of the University of Waterloo in Canada review the available data to examine whether incidences of consumer fraud are actually higher among older adults. While there isn’t much research that directly answers this question, the research that does exist suggests that older adults may be less frequent victims than other age groups.

Ross, Grossmann, and Schryer find no evidence that older adults are actually more vulnerable to fraud, and they argue that anti-fraud policies should be aimed at protecting consumers of all ages.

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Motivating People Starts with Having the Right Attitude 05-31

Most leaders know what strong motivation looks like. When I ask leadership development clients to describe the type of motivation they’d like to see in their teams, they mention qualities such as persistence, being a self-starter, having a sense of accountability for and commitment to achieving results, and being willing to go the extra mile on projects or to help other team members. But many leaders have little idea of how to boost or sustain that level of motivation.

Many leaders don’t understand that they are an integral part of the motivational ecosystem in their companies. The motivational qualities listed above appear most frequently when employees feel valued, trusted, challenged, and supported in their work — all things that leaders can influence. For better or worse, leaders’ attitudes and behaviors have a huge effect on employees’ drive and capacity to perform.

One problem that gets in the way is a mechanistic, instrumental view of the human beings who sit at our companies’ desks. Seeing compensation as the primary or only tool we can use to motivate high performance is like trying to build a house with only a hammer. What gets lost is that incentives, regardless of which ones are applied, filter through employees’ brains along with every other aspect of the employment experience. How employees experience work from day to day has a bigger influence on their motivation than their compensation and benefits package.

Another barrier to a leader’s capacity to motivate is the widespread, mistaken belief that motivation is an inherent property of the employee — “they either have it or they don’t.”  In fact, motivation is a dynamic process, not a stable employee characteristic. When we judge an employee to be irredeemably unmotivated, we give up on trying to motivate them. A vicious cycle ensues, in which our attitude and behaviors elicit exactly those behaviors we expect from an unmotivated employee, which in turn reinforces and justifies our verdict and approach. Everybody loses: The organization is deprived of the employee’s full contribution, the leader acts unskillfully, and the employee grows increasingly disengaged.
Managers generally start out with the best of intentions. After all, whenever we hire someone new, we expect that they will be motivated. Later, if performance or engagement lags, we experience frustration at the “unmotivated, entitled” employee. It often goes something like this: “As a leader, I started out caring very much about the emotional needs of staff. Unfortunately, all this brought about was overentitlement and making it OK to use your feelings to waste time and create a negative environment. I have evolved to care less about feelings and more about getting the work done, period. As long as my expectations are clear, people get paid, and they have a safe environment, there is no room for the rest of it in the workplace.” I found this comment on a leadership article posted on the HBR Facebook page, but it could have come from the mouths of the countless leaders I’ve met during my career. Even if a leader feels perfectly justified in taking this approach, giving the impression that employees’ subjective experience of work doesn’t matter will only serve to dampen employee motivation.
It is entirely possible for leaders to learn to motivate even those employees they’ve given up on. As an example, I recently coached a leader who’s responsible for a global organization’s operations in an Eastern European country. A man in his fifties with a military background, he complained of being saddled with an underperforming team member he couldn’t fire: “He’s basically useless. All I can do is contain him so he doesn’t screw anything up — and lean on my capable people to get our work done.” The leader gave the employee routine, low-value work to do, didn’t share important information with him, didn’t bother to meet with him, and never sought his input or contribution to important projects. “Why bother with him? I can’t change him, and I don’t have time to waste on someone who’s unmotivated,” he insisted at first. Through coaching, the leader came to appreciate that these choices, which he initially saw as rational responses to a motivational deficiency in the employee, actually worsened the problem. He realized that seeing his employee as useless was only one of many possible perspectives he could take — and that it limited his leadership effectiveness. After shifting his approach from containment to facilitation, he saw substantial gains in the employee’s outward motivation and performance, to the point where the employee became a valuable member of the team.
To make the shift that boosted his employee’s motivation, this leader had to be fearless in examining his own thinking and patterns of behavior. He recognized and admitted that he didn’t see his employee as a whole human being, but rather as an object and a problem. He had to develop curiosity about what the situation was like from the employee’s point of view. He had to experience that valuing his employee’s perspective opened up avenues for motivation. As he started talking more with his employee, giving him challenging work, seeking his input, and including him in important projects, the employee responded with increased enthusiasm and commitment. “I can’t believe what a difference it makes,” he told me after a few sessions.

I believe that most interpersonal problems that arise in the world, whether in relationships, companies, or nations, come down to the fundamental difficulty humans have in seeing things from others’ perspectives. When we make assumptions about what employees believe and value, interpreting their behaviors according to our assumptions, we reduce their humanity and their complexity. The very phrase “human resources” frames employees as material to be deployed for organizational objectives.

While the essential nature of employment contracts involves trading labor for remuneration, if we fail to see and appreciate our employees as whole people, efforts to motivate them will meet with limited success. Instead of thinking about how we can control our employees, let’s focus on how we can motivate them. A good place to start is by reflecting on the best boss you’ve ever had. How did this boss make you feel? What did this boss do to earn your admiration? Try to harvest some of that boss’s motivational strategies and make them your own.

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Bringing up the children. can we just shift from praise for achievement, effort,To, a learning reaction...It helps.... 01-010

The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point.

It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory.
Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable.

But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.

It seems the growth mindset has run amok. Kids are being offered empty praise for just trying. Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.

Teachers say they have a “growth mindset” because not to have one would be silly. But then they fail to teach in such a way that kids can actually develop growth mindset muscles. “It was never just effort in the abstract,” Dweck tells Quartz. “Some educators are using it as a consolation play, saying things like ‘I tell all my kids to try hard’ or ‘you can do anything if you try’.”
“That’s nagging, not a growth mindset,” she says.

The key to instilling a growth mindset is teaching kids that their brains are like muscles that can be strengthened through hard work and persistence. So rather than saying “Not everybody is a good at math. Just do your best,” a teacher or parent should say “When you learn how to do a new math problem, it grows your brain.” Or instead of saying “Maybe math is not one of your strengths,” a better approach is adding “yet” to the end of the sentence: “Maybe math is not one of your strengths yet.”

The exciting part of Dweck’s mindset research is that it shows intelligence is malleable and anyone can change their mindset. She did: growing up, she was seated by IQ in her classroom (at the front) and spent most of her time trying to look smart.

“I was very invested in being smart and thought to be smart was more important than accomplishing anything in life,” she says. But her research made her realize she could take some risks and push herself to reach her potential, or she could spend all her time trying to look smart.

She and other researchers are discovering new things about mindsets. Adults with growth mindsets don’t just innately pass those on to their kids, or students, she says, something they had assumed they would. She’s also noticed that people may have a growth mindset, but a trigger that transports them to a fixed-mindset mode. For example, criticism may make a person defensive and shut down how he or she approaches learning. It turns out all of us have a bit of both mindsets, and harnessing the growth one takes work.

Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.

In a follow-up, the kids who had more early process praise—relative to person praise—sought more challenges and did better in school. “The more they had a growth mindset in 2nd grade the better they did in 4th grade and the relationship was significant,” Dweck wrote in an email. “It’s powerful.”
Dweck was alerted to things going awry when a colleague in Australia reported seeing the growth mindset being misunderstood and poorly implemented. “When she put a label on it, I saw it everywhere,” Dweck recalls.

But it didn’t deflate her (how could it, with a growth mindset?). It energized her:

I know how powerful it can be when implemented and understood correctly. Education can be very faddish but this is not a fad. It’s a basic scientific finding, I want it to be part of what we know and what we use.

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The Difference Between Motivation & Inspiration 05-13

The Difference Between Motivation & Inspiration

When I was doing Life Coaching, every single client that I had, wanted one thing (in some form or another) – motivation! I believe that motivation is something that we all want. Yet, some people cannot seem to actually acquire it.

Motivation can be a very commonly spoken about subject. And, some people do not understand how motivation actually works.

The interesting thing is that some people seem to mistake motivation for inspiration. They think that both words have the same meaning, and they often use one word for the other.

Let’s look at motivation and inspiration.

One of my earliest mentors in personal development told me that motivation is a pulling force. For example, if you want to do exercise, and you feel that you don’t have the time, or that it is too cold outside, or that you will be in pain afterwards, you have to motivate yourself to go and do the exercise. That motivation will pull you towards doing exercise.

In an article on motivation (that I wrote in February 2010), I mentioned that the key to being motivated is to have a “motive”. Think about it for a moment, the word “motivation” comes from the word “motive”.

So, if you are to go and exercise, you have to motivate yourself by reminding yourself of the motive for doing exercise. It could be weight loss, fitness, getting fresh air etc. Whether you use the word “motive” or you use the word “reason”, motivation needs to come from that source. Without having a reason or a motive, motivation will be hard to come by.

Inspiration on the other hand, is more of a process. You may hear a speaker who inspires you, you may read a book that inspires you, you may hear a song that inspires you, you may meet a person who inspires you, or you may see something that inspires you. Whatever it is that inspires you, it touches you on the inside and connects you to a state of being more excited, productive, purposeful or anything that comes as a result of being inspired.

As a speaker, one of my goals is to give people insights into defining their life purpose. Once they realise their life purpose, something inside of them awakens. They are inspired to live their purpose with passion!

The word “inspiration” comes from the late Latin word “inspirare” which means “inspirit” or “divine guidance”.

So, inspiration is something that you feel on the inside, while motivation is something from the outside that compels you to take action.

Inspiration is a driving force, while motivation which is a pulling force.

Some people believe that motivation is for lazy people because they cannot be bothered getting things done. On the other hand, they think that inspiration is for productive people because they are always getting things done.

No, that is certainly not the case. We all can benefit from motivation and inspiration.

So, let’s look at some examples.

Motivation – I have to raise $500 for my favourite charity. They are in desperate need of funding because they need to get a new computer. To be able to afford the new computer, they need to raise $500 by the end of this month.

The ‘motive’ here is to make provision for the new computer. That is the pulling force that is making me raise money for my favourite charity.

Inspiration – I feel like helping my favourite charity to raise funds. When I am making a contribution towards others, I feel that I am in full alignment with my core values. That creates the essence of being congruent to who I really am.

The driving force here is to make a contribution towards others because it feels congruent to who I really am on the inside.

I clearly remember, I received a phone call in 2012. The human resources manager of an organisation asked me to come and give a speech to her staff so that her staff would be motivated, because she felt that they needed inspiration.

My response to her was this – “I can show your staff the steps to being motivated (which is to look for a motive). The rest is up to them. What I can also do is speak about how to awaken inspiration”.

The reason for me giving you the example above is this – I had to explain to this lady that motivation and inspiration are two different things. Also, motivation is no magic pill that someone can just give you. What you have to do is create a motive (or look for a motive) so that you can acquire motivation.

Some people think that motivation is bad, and inspiration is good. Please remember that neither motivation nor inspiration is a bad thing. They both can help to propel you forward!

Whether it is motivation that you are after, or inspiration that you want, gratitude always helps. Whenever I am driven by inspiration, I tend to look for things that I am grateful for, that will help me in feeling inspired.

Whenever I have a motive that I am working on, I tend to look for things that I already have in my favour that will help me work on my motive. I then express gratitude for the things that are in my favour.

So, gratitude can support you in feeling inspired and being motivated.

Quote: "Motivation is when you get hold of an idea and carry it through to its conclusion, and inspiration is when an idea gets hold of you and carries you where you are intended to go." Dr Wayne Dyer

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