Standing Up for Sex

Standing and walking is, for us, so easy, so natural, that we take it for granted. Many mammals can stand upright for a short time, and even walk. But it takes effort, and they soon slump back to all fours, the typical mammalian state. Hominins—species in the human family—are different. Walking upright is their default. Locomotion on all fours, using hands and feet to walk, is, in contrast, unnatural and difficult. The adoption of bipedality, by a lineage of apes living in Africa 7 million years ago, was one of the more remarkable, unlikely, and puzzling events in the entire history of life. It required a complete re-engineering of the entire body, from head to toe.

When the backbone evolved half a billion years ago, it was a structure held horizontally, in tension. In hominins, it moved through ninety degrees, to be held vertically, in compression. No more radical alteration in the engineering requirements of the backbone has happened since it first evolved, and it can only be regarded as maladaptive—witness that back problems constitute one of the most costly and frequent causes of illness in humans today.

The question remains—why? The easy answer is that bipedality is just one of many peculiar modes of locomotion that apes have tried over millions of years, including swinging using elongated arms, as in gibbons; clambering using all four limbs as hands, as orangs do; and the unique quadrupedal knuckle-walking of chimps and gorillas. But why hominins tried bipedal walking, rather than any other mode of getting from one place to another, remains an open question. Certainly, life in open country does not require it. Many large monkeys, such as macaques and baboons, live in open country and remain with all four feet firmly planted on the hard, dry ground.

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Surrounded By Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees: Interview with Thomas Erikson

 

Work would be a breeze…if not for all the bad bosses and lazy employees out there. Right?

 

But in all seriousness, with so many hundreds (millions?) of books out there on leadership and performance, how is it possible that so many bad bosses and lazy employees continue to exist?

 

I had the opportunity to pose this very question to behavioral expert and bestselling author Thomas Erikson as we discussed his latest book Surrounded By Bad Bosses (and Lazy Employees); How to Stop Struggling, Start Succeeding, and Deal With Idiots at Work.

 

For more than 15 years, Erikson has been traveling all over Europe, delivering lectures and seminars to executives and managers at a wide range of companies including IKEA, Coca Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and more.  

 

Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or just click the audio player above.

With so many books out there on leadership, how are there still so many bad bosses out there?

Erikson listed a number of reasons which made perfect sense. A couple that stood out for me were:

1. Bosses aren’t mind-readers

Erikson described various conversations in which people come to him frustrated by a boss’s behavior or a style of leadership that just feels scratchy.  

 

“Some people come to me and say, ‘my boss is so bad and he doesn't know what I want.’ And then I ask, ‘have you told him or her? No. Okay, there you go.’ 

 

It may sound oversimplified, but the truth is that too many people just assume bosses should know what we want and how we want to be communicated to or managed or recognized. But bosses aren’t superhuman. They aren’t mind readers. So one strategy for improving your experience with your boss? Simply tell them what you’re looking for.

2. Leadership isn’t intuitive

Many people seem to believe that “leadership should be intuitive… [but] just, that's just wrong. That's a myth. Some people have good natural skills when it comes to communication, [and] leadership is basically a communication process.”  But even with skills and capabilities, the act of leadership still needs to be learned over time and with practice.

Speaking of practice… what skills should we practice if we want to be better leaders?

There are many for sure. But here are some of the most critical, according to Erikson:

 

• Practice listening – hearing...

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How Exercise Can Combat Depression

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on mental health. Recent surveys show that nearly a quarter of adults in the United States currently report symptoms of depression, more than doubling pre-pandemic levels.

You’ve likely seen this with friends, family, or colleagues. You might have even experienced it yourself. I’ve certainly noticed the stress of the pandemic weighting on me and several of my clients. 

The good news is that moderate intensity aerobic exercise has been shown to be an effective way for preventing and relieving depression. Although not the end-all-be-all to treating depression and reaching out to a mental health professional is highly encouraged, 30 to 45 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise 3 to 5 days a week can help significantly. 

Effects of exercise on depression

Scientific studies have consistently shown that exercise has antidepressant effects. A review that analyzed data from 49 studies found that people with higher levels of physical activity had a 17% lower odds of depression than people with lower levels of physical activity. Another review found that low cardiorespiratory fitness, a sign of physical inactivity, was associated with a 64% higher risk of depression. 

Now I know some of you may not be convinced by these studies that exercise has antidepressant effects. It’s reasonable to believe that what the results of these studies actually show are that depressed people exercise less. 

However, one study with over 60,000 participants showed that replacing sedentary behavior with moderate-to-vigorous activity in people with depression lowered depression symptoms significantly more than compared to either sleep or light activity.

How exercise may combat depression 

How does exercise offer protection against depression...

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NaNoWriMo Bonus Excerpts: "Never Say You Can't Survive'

From award-winning author, Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever hear.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tordotcom. 

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10 Tips for Parenting Kids with ADHD

Parenting kids with ADHD can be a challenge, but your role as a parent is crucial for your child's success as an adult. In his book Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, Dr. Gabor Mate describes how the quality of the parent-child relationship can be used to help promote the emotional and cognitive skills that are underdeveloped in a child with ADHD.

A diagnosis of ADHD requires two of the following three features: deficient attention skills, poor impulse control, and hyperactivity. Your child may be easily distracted unless engaged in activities that they are highly motivated for or interested in. And then, when they’re involved in these high-interest activities, they might hyperfocus to the extent that they are completely unaware of the environment around them.

Your child may also have great difficulty inhibiting their speech or behavior. They might chronically interrupt others or have a hard time waiting for a turn. Regardless of negative consequences, they act impulsively and without forethought.

Your child’s reactions are influenced by your reactions to them.

If your child is also hyperactive—not all kids with attention deficits are—they may also have trouble being physically or mentally "still." This might look like constant fidgeting, nail biting, and excessive talking and explaining. Other symptoms might be low motivation, poor memory, and social problems. People with ADHD also tend to have high emotional sensitivity, which can make for unpredictable and outsized mood swings and angry outbursts when interrupted or thwarted.

Parenting a child with ADHD can be anxiety provoking and frustrating, but reacting with your own impulsiveness, verbal and/or physical aggression, or helplessness will only escalate the situation in a vicious cycle. By the time families receive a diagnosis, this cycle has usually been in place for a while. Before embarking on any plan to help your child learn missing skills, it’s important to work toward stabilizing your relationship with your child by doubling down on emotional connection. The closer you and your child feel to each other, the easier it will be to work together toward positive change.

Here are 10 tips for parenting ADHD kids

1. Be conscious of your own emotional regulation

As the person with the fully developed brain in the parent-child relationship, your moods set the emotional atmosphere in your home. Your child’s reactions are influenced by your reactions to them.

Model taking responsibility for...

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How To Make a Long-Distance Relationship Work

I met my husband when I was a freshman in college. We sat across from each other in our computer science lab during the first week of class. We started dating officially a few months later and spent the rest of the school year practically inseparable. Like a lot of freshmen, I struggled greatly to effectively acclimate to college, and perhaps not like a lot of freshmen, wound up being dismissed for poor academic performance over the next summer. I was faced with a decision about my relationship at that moment—moving home to attend community college would mean I would be 9 hours away from him.

It wasn’t really even a question for us that we would stay together, and I don’t recall ever having an explicit conversation with him about what we would do. I traveled to my old college town to see him maybe once a semester, and then we visited each other when he was home on breaks from school. We video chatted every night and texted as often as we could throughout the day. That year, I applied to transfer back to a four-year school and ultimately made the decision to attend a university only three hours away from my then-boyfriend. We were able to see each other more frequently during that time, but it was still another three years until we lived in the same place. So, for those doing the math, we were long-distance for about four years.

I often get asked about how to make long-distance relationships work. The truth is, it won’t always work—long-distance relationships are notoriously difficult for some people. The reality is that long-distance relationships typically stem from necessity, such as military deployment, going away to college, or work availability constraints. The stress of transitioning to long-distance can be difficult to overcome. 

To understand your long-distance relationship, we should first talk about how we make our relationships work when we live in the same place.

What is relationship maintenance?

The things that we do to keep our relationship in “good repair” are called relationship maintenance behaviors. What behaviors qualify as relationship maintenance? Research...

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What Should an Internal Ticket Management System Do?

Wouldn't it be nice to have better all-around team productivity from your web help desk? A help desk that is up to speed can do all sorts of valuable things, like deliver lightning-fast support responses to all your internal customers, save time for all team members by offering a vast knowledge base, and much more. But getting an excellent web help desk up and running isn't as easy as wishing it to be. The task calls for specific skills, determination, and a mission-oriented attitude on the part of those who set up the help desk.

One of the core functions, among many, that the help desk performs is related to internal ticket management. Before setting out to create a desk with top-notch ticketing capability, make sure that your own, or your team's, skill levels are where they should be. That's because you're really doing several tasks at once. When the job is done, you should be able to check off, in the affirmative, each of the following capabilities of your new system.

General capabilities

If you've set up your internal ticketing system correctly, you can look forward to a company that is highly organized and able to stay abreast of a large volume of internal service requests. With the right software in place, and a team that knows how to use it, you'll be able to turn each support request into a ticket in a matter of seconds. Your new ticket management system lets you both assign and carefully track every ticket, and make sure each one gets to the right team member based on their skills and ability to resolve specific issues.

Between the initial request and final resolution of all issues, managers can easily deal with the entire life cycle of all tickets.

Full-Scale internal support

Full support means all-around capability to deal with any employee's need for assistance at any time. If you want your ticketing to reach its potential, include not only internal customer survey forms and live chat capability, but also a comprehensive resource for self-help (usually in the form of an easily searchable knowledge base). Some corporations add how-to tutorial videos, detailed self-help content, research papers, customer case studies, and hundreds of relevant FAQs to their knowledge bases. As a result, they see a decrease in the need for support tickets by as much as 85 percent.

If you want your ticketing to reach its potential, include not only internal customer survey forms and live chat capability, but also a comprehensive resource for self-help.

Automation means higher productivity

Many AI-based ITM apps automatically assign tasks based on recent history,...

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