Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

Mine was the Depression generation of journalists. Many of the best people were not educated. When I went to London as a sportswriter, I didn’t even know the difference between the Baltic states and the Balkans. But I learned the advantage of the dumb-boy technique. I found that people love to talk about themselves. You get more news by trust than by tricks.

But that is not a very popular idea with this generation. Because they went to college, they think that they know more than the guys who run the joint, and that’s a pretense that doesn’t work. Also they like big shots. I always felt that the way to gather news in Washington is at the periphery not at the center. You get it from the people who tell the big shots what to say.

 

– James Reston
interviewed by Alvin P. Sanoff
US News and World Report

 

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share it!

“People, quite literally, see themselves as more desirable than they actually are,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. (Click here for another post on his research.) “When people rate themselves on any dimension that’s ambiguous – their managerial skills, their interpersonal skills, their grammar, or their test-taking ability – there’s zero correlation between their self-perception and their performance. When the picture is ambiguous, people give themselves the benefit of the doubt.” …

The researchers discovered this nearly universal self-distortion by photographing university students, then altering the digital images in tiny increments. Using the real photograph as the model, they created 10 other photos, five approximating an idealized version of the student’s face, and five approximating an unattractive version. When the students returned to the lab several weeks later they were asked to pick out their own face from the 10 other photos in the lineup.

The result? Two-thirds of the students selected a photo that was artificially enhanced by 20 per cent.

–Susan Pinker
in The Globe and Mail

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share it!

The pace is slow for an online video but the message is deep and true. Use the extra time to think about your own life, relationships, and desires.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share it!

I have been very happy with an easy, free, browser-based screen sharing facility called Join.Me.  That is also the web address: join dot me (not dot com).

I often “dig into the numbers” with my CEO executive coaching clients, sometimes with the help of my free Excel templates (see them here). This tool allows us to see and work on the same screen together though we are miles apart.

Join.Me is so simple, with no software to download or install and no firewall or security issues, that even top executives can use it on the fly.

–join.me – Free Screen Sharing.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share it!

You may have heard about the cool new research tool Google has made available. You can graph the frequency of use for any word or phrase in “500 billion words from 5 million books published over the past four centuries.“

I asked it to chart “executive coaching.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

Share it!

Consciously increasing tension in a muscle can help people carry out unpleasant tasks and avoid unhealthful foods.

Firming one’s muscles [e.g., clench fist, contract calves, tense bicep] can help firm willpower and firmed willpower mediates people’s ability to withstand immediate pain, overcome tempting food, consume unpleasant medicines, and attend to immediately disturbing but essential information, provided doing so is seen as providing long term benefits.

From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower:
Understanding the Role of
Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation
Journal of Consumer Research 2010

–IRIS W. HUNG
University of Singapore

–APARNA A. LABROO
Booth School of Business University of Chicago

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share it!