“It’s interesting how a book written 12+ years ago has such increasing relevance here and now; especially with regard to social media networking today. Tingley and Robert’s foresight was on point then and is right-on now!

GenderSell reminds us that serious, lasting sales are based on good old-fashioned relationship building (in both the physical & virtual worlds). It draws our attention to the fact that women in particular (with rapidly increasing spending power) want to be listened to and taken seriously by sales organizations, and that sales organizations who don’t invest time in the relationship-building process will miss the boat.

GenderSell’s timelessness and relevance to today is evidenced by time itself (see: ‘The Rise of the Sheconomy’ – Time magazine Nov 22, 2010, page 58 – [....] ). If women are increasingly represented in traditionally male markets, and they are (44% of NFL fans, 45% of consumer electronics business, and 41% of home-improvement business in 2007), then Dr. Tingley’s crystal ball like accuracy from 1999 is just scary. If your business relies on sales to anyone (pun intended), buy it & read it. Any questions? ”

An earlier book, Genderflex, was the foundation of GenderSell. Here’s one review of the former book.

“The book gives a pragmatic, easy-to-remember approach to the communication problems that continue to hamper male-female communication in the workplace. It is written with clarity of ideas, and with enough humor to make it enjoyable reading. This a standout among the books on communication that belong in a workplace library.”

Sherly Sandberg may label this as leaning in. Probably it’s just bragging about myself and my writing! I’ll probably start adding some gendersell tips to my blog posts since I’m suddenly trendy.

The post GenderSell May Ride Again! appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

This picture may be more idealistic than realistic, but certainly if women can be excellent service advisers, they probably can be good service providers too. A new, upcoming, interesting, non-traditional job for women?

Below is an entirely different slant on gender communication in the workplace as well as an interesting look at subtle, collaborative, leadership by women in a male-dominated field — the automobile industry. It’s also a story about male leadership. The manager, Pipher, is problem-solving. He’s just being observant, smart, aware of vicarious learning, and recognizing the benefits that women can bring to his organization. It helps him, the dealership, the women, and the men.

Amy Wilson

“Soon after employing his first female service adviser, Roger Pipher had an epiphany: He should hire more women.

‘I just watched her and the customers start to develop relationships that I never saw with men before,’ said Pipher, fixed-operations director of Coleman Buick-GMC-Cadillac in Lawrencevill, N.J. ‘I saw her ability to calm a situation down. It was very easy to sell stuff. It’s just an instant connection.’

With more female customers bringing cars in for service, Pipher wanted to explore how such connections could improve customer loyalty and subsequently sales and profits for his department.

After hiring a second female adviser a year later, he said, he ‘watched the same magic start to happen again.’ . . . Pipher ties the increase in female employees to improved performance. As a result of the relationships they build, the female advisers generally sell more than the male advisers. Monthly customer-pay sales per female adviser can be as much as $20,000 higher, Pipher said. He also noted that when he paired women and men service advisors, the women’s communication skills seemed to rub off on the men.

 That’s called vicarious learning. An observer learns by hearing and seeing behavior rather than being instructed or trained. We all do it. It’s a powerful way for people to learn — productive as well as harmful behavior. I would think that the pairing approach would improve men’s communication, but perhaps also improve women’s communication with service customers; just in different ways. What do you think?

Here’s the whole article!

The post Women’s Communication Skills Get Good Marks — Again appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

Mutual regard would help mitigate the damage of NST.  Here’s an example of specificity and mutual regard done right to myself. “I do have a tendency to be too direct even brusque sometimes in my communication. When I notice that my words created discomfort or even offense, I quickly amend my approach and smooth things over, usually but not always satisfactorily.” Another way to reframe dealing with yourself is thinking about critiquing a book, person, or a movie. Are you that harsh with

When film critic Roger Ebert died April 4, he was lauded for many things – his versatility, longevity, savvy, wit. But one virtue in particular stood out. As Chicago photographer Art Shay put it, “Even with movies he panned, he invariably found something worth going to see in them.”

Take his review of a film that regularly made his “worst films” lists: Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy. Ebert called Sandler’s character “insufferable,” described the plot as an “exhausted wheeze of a sports movie formula,” and gave the film one star.

Nevertheless, he praised the performance of actress Kathy Bates, writing that she “makes her character work as a comic creation, and knows the line between parody and wretched excess.” And he resisted the urge to hurl insults at Sandler. Instead, he wrote, “I suggest he (Sandler) is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.”

What Ebert demonstrated in that review and countless others is what the critic Judith Crist called mutual regard, and she included it as one of her four essential elements of any good work of criticism. (The other three are passion, frankness, and specificity.)

Mutual regard, she said, is showing respect for the creator of any work you’re evaluating, as well as respect for your readers.

When Crist talked of mutual regard, you never suspected the notoriously acerbic critic was trying to tell other would-be reviewers, “You kids play nice.” Rather, she cautioned writers to balance their obligation to be honest, even blunt, about a work’s quality with their obligation to acknowledge the effort, and struggle, invested in it by fellow artists.

In her famous review panning the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film Cleopatra, Crist identified a litany of its failures: The script: “a mélange of clichés and pompous banalities.” The sets: “Cardboard and paint.” Liz Taylor: “Fishwife.”

But even though the movie was a four-hour epic that she called an “extravagant exercise in tedium,” she still found much to praise: the “lilting speech of Richard Burton;” the “fine performances” in minor roles by Roddy McDowell and Rex Harrison; the costumes that were “nothing short of sensational.”

And she conceded some moviegoers would enjoy the film. “Certainly,” she wrote, “if you want to devote the best part of four hours to looking at Elizabeth Taylor in all her draped and undraped physical splendor, surrounded by elaborate and exotic costumes and sets, all in the loveliest of colors, this is your movie.”

Though we don’t always identify it as such, mutual regard is something Gotham teachers train our students to use. When Gotham students are workshopping something, they must open their comments by identifying one thing that works in the piece they are reviewing. We don’t require this solely to put writers at ease in our classrooms, nor because writers often struggle to identify what works in their own writing, though both of those are true. We require it because mutual regard is essential to editing one’s own work, to reading the work of others, and to becoming a successful writer.

Mutual regard shows that you recognize the inherent merit in creating a work of art. It gives readers a sense of where your standards lie, as it allows them to compare your evaluations of what works against your evaluations of what does not. And it lends you authority, by demonstrating that you have put thought into your evaluations, and weighed things fairly.

We live in an age of ever-more criticism – a cursory search for reviews of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, for example, yielded 40,900 results, and that doesn’t count the opinions we’ll hear on Facebook or Twitter or out to dinner with friends. Writers who manage to rise above the noise, as Crist and Ebert did, understand that mutual regard is key, because ultimately it cultivates between writer and reader something crucial – trust.

Cheers,

Kelly Caldwell
Associate Dean of Faculty
Gotham Writers’ Workshop

The post Mutual Regard in Critiquing — by Kelly Caldwell appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

• Typical office worker gets 11 minutes between interruptions.

•  It takes 25 minutes after an interruption to return to the original task.

•  A study designed by the authors showed that it’s possible to train yourself to deal with distractions (which is an example of information overload in my opinion). Even if you don’t know when they’ll occur, most of us know that they will occur and can prepare a plan that somewhat improves recovery-from-interruption performance.

(Just think about how distracting NST, negative self-talk is on top of all the regular everyday distractions that occur. Another good reason to lose it as quickly as you can. Check out previous posts about eliminating negative self-talk and understanding negative self-talk.)

A subtitle of the article is “How distractions make us dumber”, although no research is offered that proves that you’re dumber, just that you’re not so productive. I’ve been working on my own self-training. So far, no good.  OOPS! I just was interrupted by a phone call, then saw something that I needed to do, which resulted in a dishwasher disaster, and now it’s time that I have to leave and thus leave this post.

Now I’m back, 7 hours later and trying to finish the post, but I’ve lost my train of thought and I’m also very tired. I don’t think I’m dumber, but I certainly see the validity of the authors’ points.

The post Information Overload Plus Ongoing NST Causes Stress — No Surprise appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

This is the first paragraph in an article by Suzanne Lachmann, Psy.D. on her Psychology Today blog. I really liked its gentle approach to what she paints as a gap and I see as an attack of negative self. She finishes with this paragraph which warmly suggests acceptance of self. Hope you try it and enjoy the comfort of knowing we are all works in progress.

“There are ways to manage this divide, but it’s not easy. That’s because the divide hurts. And this state of hurt along with an idealized self that continues to climb further away means that just chasing that ideal rarely works. Instead, real, substantive, and lasting change comes from working to disengage from the idealized self – the “I should be” self – and working toward acceptance of self, as you are right here, right now. You’re a work in progress, but recognizing and acknowledging your actual self dilutes the power of these emotional obstacles that keep you stuck.”

Give yourself a good weekend off — off of inner criticism, off of focus on the gap and off of negative self-talk. Take a vacation and relax yourself with acceptance of yourself at least for a day — or even two. Then you can always go back to high levels of criticism on Monday if you absolutely miss the misery.

here’s the link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/me-we/201305/heal-the-hurtful-divide-between-actual-and-idealized-selves

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The Confidence Questions

By DAVID BROOKS

By now, many of you have seen the main Web video in the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign. It shows a police sketch artist sitting behind a curtain. He interviews women he can’t see about their own faces and he draws them, based on their descriptions. Then he asks other people to describe the faces of those same women and makes another sketch

The portraits based on the women’s own descriptions are sadder, less attractive and more closed-off than the portraits based on descriptions from others.

But the real payoff comes as we watch the women first look at the two portraits side by side. They approach the sketches with self-conscious smiles on their faces. But when they notice how much darker and unattractive the portraits based on their self-descriptions are, the smiles collapse into looks of shocked self-realization. One woman sheds a tear.

As social science, this video wouldn’t pass muster (a lot depends on the biases of the artist and the editors). But it does highlight a phenomenon most of us recognize: many women are too self-critical about their looks while many guys are too self-flattering.

For me, the video raised questions that go beyond body image, questions about self-confidence. I was going to write a column about these questions, but I realized I didn’t know the answers and the studies I consulted weren’t helping. So I thought this might be a job for crowd-sourcing sociology. I’m going to throw out some questions. If you (women and men) send answers based on your experiences to confidence@nytimes.com, I’ll quote them in future columns. Please describe personal incidents, along with general observations.

The first question: A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?

You can find the entire article in the NYTimes, April 22, 2013.

The post David Brooks Takes on Women’s Negative Self-Talk and Lack of Confidence appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

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Many examples of overparenting can also be tied to restricting the child’s ability to develop an agile mind: no challenges, little problem-solving, no conflicts to ameliorate, relationships to straighten out. Parents do it all for their children!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/nation-wimps

The post Consequences of Overparenting? appeared first on Intelligent Women Only.

Spira defines information overload as an excess of information that results in the loss of ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.   He quotes Peter Miles, executive vice president of BMW of North America, who said, information overload is “a scourge of modern day society”.

In addition, it’s bad for our health. Thirty-five percent of knowledge workers experience neck and back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, eyestrain, headaches, or stress-related symptoms — in addition to not being able to think! And it cost billions of dollars in lost time for individuals, corporations, and all information workers — which is the category that most of us are in.

The important questions are not what is it? Or what are the consequences of information overload, but HOW CAN WE COPE WITH INFORMATION OVERLOAD?

Are you coping?  If so what are your solutions, techniques, systems, approaches? I still don’t have a plan although I’m sure my daily meditation, which I started doing for stress reduction and brain fitness helps with information overload too. What do you do that helps? I’d be happy to publish a guest post from a reader who’s conquering the consequences of IO.

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