Understanding climate change (SOP9)

From roaring leaf blowers to screeching trains, the world is full of unwelcome noise – and researchers have found that noisy environments can take a real toll on people’s mental and physical health. Arline Bronzaft, PhD, talks about how noise affects health and well-being, how it can harm kids’ learning, why it’s not just a problem in big cities, and the most unusual noise complaints she’s heard in her five decades of advocacy combating noise pollution.

Last year -- 2023 -- was the world’s warmest on record, and 2024 could bring another record-shattering summer. Psychologist Kim Meidenbauer, PhD, and public health researcher Amruta Nori-Sarma, PhD, discuss how heat affects people’s mental health, emotions and even cognitive abilities; the link between heat, violence and aggression; who is most vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat; and what policy makers could be doing to mitigate its effects.

Why can’t I get myself to run that 5K? Why isn’t my child getting better grades? We all have things that we struggle to accomplish – or that we struggle to get someone else to accomplish. Frank Worrell, PhD, and Wendy Grolnick, PhD, co-authors of “Motivation Myth Busters: Science-based Strategies to Boost Motivation in Yourself and Others,” discuss how our misconceptions about motivation get in the way of reaching our goals, why there’s no such thing as an “unmotivated” person, and the merits and drawbacks of strategies like rewards, competition and praise.

The average American adult spends up to one-third of their waking hours alone. Psychologists are exploring how those hours spent on our own affect us – including the potential benefits, as well as the challenges, of solitude. Thuy-vy Nguyen, PhD, and Netta Weinstein, PhD, discuss the difference between solitude and loneliness, how solitude affects our emotions and stress levels, why some people crave solitude more than others, and why the stigma against solitude can make us uncomfortable with being alone.

The 2024 World Happiness Report, which ranks the happiness levels of countries around the world, found that young Americans are less happy than their peers in many other countries. Psychology professor Lara Aknin, PhD, an editor of the report, talks about how the report defines happiness, why young people’s happiness levels may have dropped in the U.S, what drives happiness, and why being generous makes people happy – even when they don’t have much to spare.

A growing number of adults in the U.S. are choosing not to have children. Jenna Watling Neal, PhD, of Michigan State University, talks about her research that’s found 1 in 5 adults are child free, why people are choosing not to have kids, the stigma child-free adults face, whether people who decide not to have kids early in life usually stick with that choice, and how the prevalence of child-free adults in the U.S. compares with other countries.

If the thought of the upcoming election sends your stress level through the roof, you’re not alone. Psychologist Brett Q. Ford, PhD, and political scientist Kevin Smith, PhD, talk about how political stress affects people’s well-being; what high levels of political stress mean for people’s lives, for the U.S. and for democracy; and how to stay politically engaged while still maintaining your mental health.

For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage.

Sesame Street has entertained and educated generations of children. Developmental psychologist Rosemarie Truglio, PhD, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of curriculum and content, talks about why the show has a new focus on young children’s emotional well-being; how Sesame Street translates complicated concepts into stories that young kids can connect with; the research that underpins all of the content on Sesame Street; and why the Sesame Street characters still resonate with so many adults.

For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage.

The eerie sensation of “déjà vu” -- feeling a strong sense of familiarity in a new place or situation -- is one of memory’s strangest tricks. Researcher Chris Moulin, PhD, of Grenoble Alpes University, talks about why déjà vu happens; why both déjà vu and its lesser-known opposite, jamais vu, may actually be signs of a healthy memory at work; why young people are more prone to déjà vu; how he and others study déjà vu and jamais vu in the lab; and what these experiences can teach us about memory more broadly.

For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage.

Are you a sports “superfan”? Or do you wonder what’s driving the superfans in your life? Daniel Wann, PhD, of Murray State University, talks about why being a fan is usually good for people’s mental health, how they choose the teams they root for, why some are fair-weather fans while others love to cheer for the underdog, how fandom is changing among younger people, and whether a crowd of supportive fans can affect the outcome of a game.

For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage.

In this episode, Lisa answers the question: What do strengths look like under stress? She shares the three things that will highlight the shadow side of your strengths under stress, and then gives you ways to reframe them from bad to better.

Have You Downloaded Your Strengths Tools?

One of the best ways leaders can build a strengths-based culture is to offer an appreciation of strengths in action. If you’ll notice what works, you’ll get more of what works because people can replicate what they’ve already done well. Get started by downloading this awesome tool that offers you 127 Easy Ways to Recognize Strengths on your team.

What Do Strengths Look Like Under Stress?

Today the question is about whether strengths look or act different when they’re under stress.  

This is such a timely question because I woke up today ... well, not at my best. After an awesome team StrengthsFinder event in NYC last week, I sat next to a prolific cougher and sneezer on the plane. I’m pretty sure he’s the one that passed me this horrible funk that has taken over my body.

Today, I woke up out of sleeping hard. My head hurts. My throat hurts. My ears ring. I coughed all night — as you can probably hear in my voice. And to top it off, my comforter was covered in puke. Not my puke. My dog’s. Apparently, my dog Monkey is also sick today and she jumped in the bed to get me to let her out. I slept through that.

So, why are you hearing this gross story right now? It’s because, no matter how great your life is — no matter how much you love your job, you’ll still have bad days. And you need to know how your talents show up when you’re under stress, when you’re sick, and when you’re burned out. It’s good to know what do to with them on the days that you want to hide under the covers and do nothing. 

Like me, you probably have client meetings, deadlines, and commitments that lead you to get out of bed anyway — even on a really bad day. You tough it out. I know you’ve had days like this — where it all seems to be going wrong before the alarm even goes off.

Well, those days can definitely bring out the shadow sides of your strengths. Those days can expose ugly sides of your talents — the side that doesn’t normally show up, even though you haven’t invested fully in that talent. The ugly side doesn’t show up day to day, yet it will rear its ugly head when you’re having a terrible week at work. 

For example, if you lead with Activator, you might snap at someone because you’re feeling exceptionally impatient with her lack of movement. If you lead with Consistency, you might throw the rule book at someone who constantly asks for exceptions and today, you’re so done with it. If you lead through Intellection, you might “hole up” in your cave and isolate yourself from the team.

You get the idea here. Now that you have a couple of examples in mind, here are three stressful situations that might expose the dark side of your talent themes.

Three Things That Will Highlight Your Strengths Under Stress (And How To Reframe From Bad To Better)

Three things that will highlight the shadow side of your strengths when under stress are:

1. Having A Bad Day 
2. A Person (or Team) Who Frustrates You
3. An Environment Where You Feel Mismatched

1: Having A Bad Day Or Week —> Your Strengths Can Strengthen You

When things are frustrating, what’s your typical response? For example, maybe you lead through Restorative and you resent the very problem that gave you the bad day. Maybe your Learner talent is annoyed because your team moves too fast to give you a chance to become the deep subject matter expert you want to become to put you at your best.

Think of yours. You probably have a thing you get frustrated about or have a typical reaction, regardless of the cause of the bad day. 

One way to use your strengths in this situation is to rely on old faithful. Of your Top 5 talent themes, you probably have one that’s easy to call on in tough times.

Maybe your Strategic talent allows you to see simplicity through the overwhelm. So turn up the dial on your Strategic talent today. Maybe your Empathy theme gives you unlimited doses of patience. Or your Focus talent allows you to feel some calm in knowing that you’ll knock out today’s list one item at a time, and that it can keep you on task even with the urgent issues exploding all around you.

So that’s it. When you’re having a bad day or week, rely on one that’s easy to call on. Crank up the volume on a different virtue that can shine through despite the craziness around you.

2: A Person (Or Team) Who Frustrates You —> You’ll Make Partners

Think of someone at work who you don’t love working with. If you lead through Responsibility, maybe it’s someone who constantly misses deadlines. For me, I remember feeling eternally frustrated with a woman who treated our sales team poorly.

If you lead through Context, maybe it’s a person on the team who refuses to acknowledge and learn from the failures the team already experienced and you feel that they put the vision out to the organization foolishly because that same vision has failed four times, the only difference is that they called it by a different name each time.

Think about that person for you. Try to concretely imagine a specific person who has been tough for you during your career.

So what do you do about it? One is to identify where, specifically, you think the person is different from you. Even if you don’t know their StrengthsFinder talent themes, just think about what they seem to value and where they’re coming from. As tough as it might seem, assume they have positive intent and imagine a possible positive thing they could bring to the situation.

For example, the person who is frustrated because her teammate misses deadlines could notice (when she looks carefully) that it’s because her colleague wanted to be absolutely sure that the data is correct. He delayed because new information became available, and because he leads through Analytical, there’s no way he would put out misleading data. He’d rather be late than wrong.

In my personal example, think back to the woman who treated the sales team with constant snarky and dismissive comments. Well, when I looked carefully and open-mindedly (and assumed positive intent), I noticed that my team member had an operational focus. She was great at standardizing processes and making us efficient.

So rather than coming at the angle with the frustration about how she treated sales people, we could first find common value in the fact that she made those rules in order to create a good customer experience. We both valued that. When it came time to solve her problem of the sales people not filling out her forms (which is why she was rude to them), we could use the customer experience to keep our conversation aligned to something we both wanted.

The idea here is that even when someone drives you crazy, there’s a thread of something good that they bring to the team. Look for that thread rather than the irritant.

In many ways, you get what you look for. If you see the good that this person brings and you acknowledge it, they’ll bring you more of that good stuff. And you’ll notice that their way of bringing good stuff is probably not how you love to operate. So you should be celebrating it. You can think, “Wow, I’m so happy someone wants to obsess over the data because I’d rather brush over that and get to the customer messaging” or “Wow, I’m thrilled that someone likes to deliver presentations to customers because I’d rather be off in my R&D think tank, speccing out the next product.”

This is the ultimate case of how one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. You probably have a few tasks or responsibilities that you’d like to throw in the trash. And you probably have a few that you treasure.

And amazingly, these are different for each person, so it’s possible to literally swap out your trash tasks for treasured ones. Or you can partner up with someone where you divide out the parts of a project or task so that you each take the part that lights you up rather than the one that highlights your dark side.

3: An Environment Where You Feel Mismatched —> Your Differences Are Your Differentiators

Think of one of your talent themes that you didn’t want to own when you first saw your Top 5 StrengthsFinder talent themes. I often hear things like, “This description of Input makes me sound like a hoarder” or “This description of Competition makes me sound super judge-y with all of these notes about how I love comparison.”

Or someone tells me they don’t think their talent is good for them in their environment. For example, a woman recently told me that she gets negative feedback about her Communication talent theme. Her manager told her she talks too much and that she’s coming on too strong for her teammates.

Looking at the team DNA charts, we saw how that could be an easy place for her to feel mismatched because her team was exceptionally high in Relator and Intellection. Most people on the team were academics who were used to communicating formally, and only after having thought deeply on a topic. On the other hand, she likes to talk things out. She actually does her thinking through the act of talking. And she felt like a fish out of water.

When you feel mismatched, think about how the team needs the diversity of thought. Think about how the team could benefit from other ways of solving problems and interacting with the world. In the case of the woman with the Communication talent we just talked about, she was able to use this as a differentiator.

She became the go-to on the team for PR and customer communications because her teammates preferred to stay behind the scenes. It was a way for her create value for the organization rather than deciding she should squash it or hide it. As she put it, “Now they like it when I talk a lot because it means they don’t have to talk to customers as often."

Another women with the Competition talent decided to use her constant comparison to become a cheerleader for the team. She would dig into the metrics, both inside and outside the company, to highlight where other people were their best in their roles or in their industry.

She helped people see that they were good at something that they didn’t even know about. And it showed the team that Competition didn’t mean she wanted to beat them, it meant that she gets a charge out of winning. And that includes helping the company win and helping other team members win in their roles.

Strengths Resources

To take the “Under Stress” exercise further, explore your talents at the Yucks page. Ask yourself which 1-2 of the words or phrases are big hot buttons for you. Then consider what situations call on that “Yuck” often.

It will give you clues about how to avoid it, get less of it, or to reframe it like you did in this episode. Very often, you can address that same situation through another one of your talent themes. Or you can partner with someone who doesn’t see it as a Yuck at all. 

Enjoyed The Podcast?

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

I get a whole lot of questions about how to align your CliftonStrengths talent theme of Responsibility with your career.

In this series, I break down one strength per post — so that you can add to the insights from your StrengthsFinder report and make a better match between your job and your strengths.

– If you’re exploring this concept as a manager, use this series for career development ideas and even new clues about responsibilities you could give a person with this talent theme so that they can show up at their best.

– If you’re exploring this concept for yourself, use this as a chance to build a reputation for your strengths so that you’re more likely to be given assignments that live in your strengths zone.

Today, the talent theme of the post is Responsibility.

You’ll get three layers to chew on:

1. Career Branding
2. Red Flag Situations At Work
3. Fresh Application Ideas

Career Branding When Responsibility Is Your Strength

Let’s start with career branding. You probably already have a reputation for what you know. If you imagine your resume or your LinkedIn profile, I bet it’s full of “the what,” which are things like job titles, skills, knowledge, expertise, or the degree you earned. Now, what’s missing in most of them is “the how,” and this is where your StrengthsFinder talent themes live. This is an overlooked use for LinkedIn, which is not just for job seekers.

I bet you are just like my StrengthsFinder training clients, where you don’t see your teammates and customers every day. That’s why LinkedIn has become so important for career branding. It’s how your teammates, customers, and vendors go look you up before a meeting – to see who they’re about to talk to. And rather than only telling them what you know, you should also give them a peek at howit is to work with you.

With that in mind, here are a bunch of adjectives you can use in your career branding and your LinkedIn profile. People who lead through Responsibility are often:

• Trustworthy
• Loyal
• Diligent
• Dependable
• Accountable
• Conscientious
• Promise-Keepers
• Honest
• Committed
• Responsive

Red Flag Situations For Responsibility

These are the cultures, interactions, or situations that feel like soul-sucking drudgery to someone with the talent theme of Responsibility. They might even make you want to quit the team. So I’ll give you a couple of these to be on watch for — because if they fester, you might get the urge to quit the job or become detached and disengaged at work.

Here are two Red flags for Responsibility:

1. Chronically Missed Deadlines. If you lead through Responsibility and your team culture is one that is cavalier with deadlines, it will suck the life out of you. To you, your word is your honor, and you expect other people to honor their commitments as well. So when people miss their deadlines and treat it like no big deal, you’ll likely feel like it’s a place where mutual respect is severely lacking.
2. Imposed Urgencies. You’re conscientious and dependable. You plan things out diligently so that you can keep your promises. So when other people constantly blow up your day with their lack of preparation, you’re likely fuming. If you work in a place where people tend to launch their hand grenades at you — which puts you at risk of not keeping your promises, this will suck the life right out of you.

3 Fresh Application Ideas for Responsibility

These are ways to apply the talent theme of Responsibility at work, even when the job duties on the team feel pretty locked in. If you’re exploring this concept as a team manager, be sure to have a conversation around these ideas. You’ll both be able to come up with places to apply them.

For someone who leads through Responsibility, put this talent to good use with one of these options:

1. The long haul. When you need someone who will consistently chip away at a project over time, assign it to someone with Responsibility. They are self-starters who will diligently follow it through the long term.
2. Trust. When you need to hand something off to someone you can trust, assign those responsibilities to someone with Responsibility. When you know you can’t babysit the process, the person who leads with Responsibility will keep you posted on timelines, deadlines, and progress without any hand-holding necessary.
3. Ownership. Think of a project or process that no one has really owned before — one of those things that sort of gets done, but never that well. Change that up by assigning clear ownership to someone with the Responsibility talent theme. They’re great at covering it from soup to nuts when they know they can take charge and bring order to a neglected part of the business.

So there you have it. It’s a quick tour for building your career through the talent theme of Responsibility. So, here’s your homework:

1. Go take action on your LinkedIn profile with the career branding section. Challenge yourself to write one sentence in the Summary section of LinkedIn that captures how you collaborate as a teammate at work.
2. Then think over the red flags to see if there’s anything you need to get in front of before it brings you down.
3. And finally, volunteer your talents through the application ideas. And if you’re a manager, have a conversation with your team members about which of these things sound like something they’d love to have more of.

Rock Your Talents As A Team

If you’re thinking about doing a virtual or in-person event to kick off your strengths-based culture, head on over to our training page to see if our current offerings are a good fit for you. Until next time, thank you for being part of this powerful strengths movement that helps people unleash the awesomeness already inside them.

Enjoyed The Podcast?

To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can also stream any episode right from this website. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode. Let the app notify you each week when the latest episode gets published.

Extreme weather events dominate the news -- tornadoes, hurricanes, winter snowmageddons, floods. What is fantasy and what is reality in the cultural conversation about climate?

Professor Of Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making At UCLA’s Anderson School Of Management. Professor Hershfield Is Nationally Recognized For His Research On Experiencing Mixed Emotion.

I’m honored to be on the UCLA campus to interview Professor Hal Hershfield. Professor Hershfield has dedicated his career to understanding how experiencing positive and negative emotions simultaneously can be beneficial to your health.