If you wake up in the middle of the night with your mind swirling with thoughts, my hope is that you can pick up Swirl and that it will soothe you, help you feel a bit more in control, bring you back to the here and now. It’s something you could read on the bus on your way to work that will give you the positive mindset that you are in control of your thoughts.

One of the most important assets a group can have is the expertise of its members. But research indicates that even when everyone within a group recognizes who the subject matter expert is, they defer to that member just 62 percent of the time; when they don’t, they listen to the most extroverted person. Another experiment found that “airtime” — the amount of time people spend talking — is a stronger indicator of perceived influence than actual expertise. Our brains also form subtle preferences for people we have met over ones we haven’t, and assume people who are good at one thing are also good at other, unrelated things. These biases inevitably end up excluding people and their ideas.

A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better.

We are each many things. Our identity is multifaceted and distinctly our own. It is a function of where we’ve come from, our vertical identity: our parents, race, gender, age, socioeconomic status and so on. Our identity is also shaped by what we’ve developed: those skills and interests into which we’ve poured our 10,000 hours, and often (but not always) shows up in our vocation. But it’s not just our past or our work that defines us, we can also have as our identity those things we dream as possible, what I sometimes label as horizontal identity because it is what pulls us into the future. And as we grow and adapt, that identity shifts also.

If you're looking for a new job but not having any luck, it could be your communication, adaptability or digital proficiency that's letting you down, according to a survey of 951 employers by recruiting specialist Hays.

The research shows that further down the list are emotional intelligence, technical skills, self-learning, data-based decision making and coding. It's important to future-proof your work so you're not being left behind in what's being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or digital revolution.

Jason Walker, Hays managing director for New Zealand, says there's one thing you can guarantee — that the workforce is going to change. And it's changing at a faster pace than ever before. "A lot of that is down to automation, artificial intelligence and other technology. It's changing how we do things, how we work with information, and it's providing employers with a lot of opportunity to reduce their workforce in certain areas and sectors."

BLOCKCHAIN, in many ways, appears to signify the dawn of a new era as it relates to the way we store and exchange value. In fact, it can be considered one of the biggest technology breakthroughs in recent history, similar to the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s. At that time, the Internet provided a new and more sophisticated way to search and share information, a way that was much more efficient and transparent.

Today, blockchain presents a similar value proposition and provides a way to transact in a secure, immutable, transparent, and auditable way. However, the understanding of the technology varies widely in terms of its potential and applicability. Through this primer, we aim to demystify blockchain and share our assessment of the current and future landscape, key drivers and impediments, potential applications, and considerations for companies.

There’s a notable distinction between being busy and being productive. Being busy doesn’t always necessarily mean you’re being productive. Despite what some might believe, being productive is less about time management and more on managing your energy. It’s the business of life. It’s learning how to spend the least amount of energy to get the most benefits. I personally learned how to reduce my work week from 80 hours to 40 hours, and get a lot more work done in the process. For me, less is more.

All leaders make mistakes. To be human means to mess up once in a while. But the difference between good leaders and great ones lies in how they handle those mistakes.

What are you modeling to those around you when you make a mistake? Your team will be watching, and what they see will affect their relationship with you and the level of trust they hold for you, so it's important to get it right. Here are four simple but impressive ways you can demonstrate great leadership when you make a mistake

Ask anyone about “conflict” and you’ll most likely hear negative descriptions such as: painful, damaging, draining, upsetting, disrespectful, demeaning and relationship-destroying.
Most people dread conflict and can’t imagine how they could turn conflict into an energy source because they don’t understand what it really is.
Conflict is simply energy – the energy caused by a gap between what you want and what you are experiencing. The energy of conflict can be misused in “drama” or it can be harnessed to create something positive and useful.

This study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention and response inhibition, with the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of cognitive change across a person's life. 

It turns out that many organizations are deactivating the part of employees’ brains called the “seeking system,” which creates the natural impulse to explore, learn, and extract meaning from our circumstances, and releases dopamine—a neurotransmitter linked to motivation and pleasure—that makes us want to explore more. Exploring, experimenting, and learning is the way we’re designed to live and work, but it’s not the way most organizations are built. When our seeking system is activated we feel more motivated, purposeful, and zestful. We feel more alive.

When it comes to activating our own seeking system and the stories we tell ourselves to find increased engagement in our work, the why of our behaviors is a more powerful story that the how. Both philosophy and empirical research suggest that the higher our level of interpretation or construal, the more we will stick with it when the going gets hard.

Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. Most demographers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 billion or a bit less. Around this time, our population will probably begin to level off. As a species, we will be at about “replacement level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly. The implication is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class.

Affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem.
Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives. But in the hospital parking lot, this suddenly seemed unlikely. Ten billion mouths, I thought. Three billion more middle-class appetites. How can they possibly be satisfied? But that is only part of the question. The full question is: How can we provide for everyone without making the planet uninhabitable?

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Sometimes anxiety is obvious (think: panic attacks and sweaty palms), but that’s not always the case. Many people live with a secret form of anxiety called “high-functioning anxiety.” Outwardly, they appear to have it all together. They may even lead very successful lives. No one can tell from the outside that they’re driven by fear. Sometimes they don’t even realize it themselves.

Although not an official diagnosis, high-functioning anxiety is something many people identify with. It’s closely related to Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which affects 6.8 million adults in the U.S., women being twice as likely to experience it as men.

How well do we understand what millennial alternative workers generally look like, do, and want? As more organizations begin to leverage this supply of talent, what story does the data tell about millennials working in the alternative workforce? In this article, we examine over a decade of data and research collected on millennials entering and exiting the alternative workforce to identify potentially notable or statistically significant trends over the years. The data appears to point to six emerging and notable trends that should be on the radar of any leader seeking to leverage the millennial alternative workforce:

Spending more time at work and on specific tasks can actually hurt our performance, reducing the quality of our work. Research has shown that when weekly hours worked exceed 50 or 55 hours, cognitive performance (e.g., emotional intelligence skills and  the capacity to reason and solve problems) and work engagement levels begin to decline, dragging down the quality of the work produced with it. The relationship between reduced quality and working more is not new. In fact, Henry Ford’s primary motivation for cutting weekly hours from 48 to 40 was to reduce the number of errors his employees were making. Employers in a number of manufacturing industries have similarly found that they could maintain output and quality while decreasing employees’ hours.

he helicopter has landed.

After 20-plus years of arranging everything in their kids’ lives, from playdates to summer internships, parents need to step back so their college graduates can step up.

No matter how “helpful” parents want to be, too much help can sabotage the process. It’s time for the grads to “graduate” to adult life.

Here are six things parents need to know and do — from the sidelines.

When women at Nike brought their concerns to managers who they were supposed to be able to trust, they were ignored. When they went through formal HR processes to report harassment and unethical behavior by male colleagues, HR also ignored them. While many executives were aware of the problems, they "looked the other way."

So the toxic work environment continued and women were repeatedly passed over for promotions by less qualified men, publicly demeaned and called things like "a stupid bitch," sexually harassed, and excluded from being part of an inner circle of male decision makers. 

But a couple of months a go a small group of women banded together and revolted. Six top executives have resigned in the last month, the brand's reputation is tarnished, and the CEO is under pressure. 

Afraid of conflict? You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t. However, if you train your brain to openly face conflict and negotiate win-win outcomes, you will grow your leadership effectiveness enormously. Managing conflict will create stronger bonds in a team, encourage beneficial business partnerships and improve your ability to inspire and engage. It is also a key to generating the creativity and innovation necessary to lead in today’s often turbulent markets.
As a hostage negotiator of over 45 years, my experience has taught me that what works in an extreme situation like a hostage-taking also works in a business setting. Hostage situations can be dramatic and intense, but you don’t hear about most of them in the news. That’s because more than 95% are resolved peacefully, without casualties, and with the hostage-takers accepting the consequences. Wouldn’t you like to enjoy this success rate in business?

Being well-liked by your colleagues will increase your likelihood of promotion, and will make your job more enjoyable.
Popular people are often good listeners, especially if they ask follow-up questions and exhibit friendly body language.
Studies show that apologizing for bad weather or traffic can make a colleague feel more positively towards you, as it suggests a sense of empathy.

We at PwC have spent some time envisioning four alternative future worlds of work, each named with a color. These admittedly extreme examples of how work could look in 2030 are shaped by the ways people and organizations respond to the forces of collectivism and individualism, on one axis, and integration and fragmentation on the other.

These scenarios can help organizations think through possibilities and how they will prepare to meet them. One prospect is that the world could move away from big company capitalism as technology enables small businesses and niche marketers to become more powerful. Or collectivism could take priority, as societies and companies work together through a sense of shared responsibility. Will “me first” prevail, or will societies come together for the greater good? Will digital technology mark the end for large companies, or will it enable large companies to slash their internal and external costs and become more powerful?

At the beginning of every meeting, a question hangs in the air: Who will be heard? The answer has huge implications not only for decision making, but for the levels of diversity and inclusion throughout the organization. Being heard is a matter of whose ideas get included — and who, therefore, reaps the accompanying career benefits — and whose ideas get left behind.

Yet instead of relying on subject matter experts, people often pay closest attention to the person who talks most frequently, or has the most impressive title, or comes from the CEO’s hometown. And that’s because of how our brains are built.

The group decision-making process, rather than aligning with actual competence, habitually falls for messy proxies of expertise, a phrase coined by University of Utah management professor Bryan Bonner. Essentially, when our brains are left to their own devices, attention is drawn to shortcuts, such as turning focus to the loudest or tallest person in the room. Over time, letting false expertise run the show can have negative side effects.

Older workers may not be as jaded as you might think.

New data provided to Business Insider from employee feedback platform Culture Amp found that employees between the ages of 55-64 are more likely than their younger counterparts to want a job that does good in the world.

Culture Amp, which is used by Airbnb, Lyft, and a number of prominent tech companies, gives employees a platform to give feedback to employers. The startup has raised $36.3 million in venture capital funding since it was founded in 2011.

Since the company has a wide user base, CEO Didier Elzinga tells Business Insider that he wanted to see if he could debunk some of the prevailing narratives about Millennial workers — especially the idea that younger workers want more autonomy and purpose than older ones. 

"It certainly surprised me," Elzinga said. "It's not just young people that want to make a difference in the world, it's us old fuddy duddies as well."

WHY YOUR BRAIN LIKES TO THINK STUFF IS TRUE
We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.

This is how we think we form abstract beliefs:

We hear something;
We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false; only after that
We form our belief.
It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way:

We hear something;
We believe it to be true;
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
Back in 1991, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert summarized centuries of research on belief formation this way: “People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”

And, after 30 years in business, I am proud of a company based on the core belief that people are good. Believe the best, we have found, and great things result.