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?

Academic Rigor Without Barriers
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Supporting Kids to Thrive: Are Kids Thriving Equally?
Six Seconds gathered this data by having kids age 7 to 18, all over the world, take the youth version of the SEI, the world’s leading emotional intelligence assessment. The good news is that youth wellbeing is on the rise: from 2015 to 2017, we saw a 4% increase in youth wellbeing scores. The bad news is that, on average, wellbeing scores seem to drop as kids enter their teenage years. Check out this graph of youth wellbeing scores, broken up into 3 age groups. 
 
The particular challenges for teenagers are something that many of our Six Seconds team members have noticed in schools and in their own homes. Freedman says that “the level of anxiety and stress for teenagers is a pandemic, all over the world.”  
Why would teenagers be struggling more?

LinkedIn founder and Greylock investor Reid Hoffman counts among his friends Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and also celebrities and some of theUnited States' most powerful Democrats.

In a recent interview for Business Insider's podcast "Success! How I Did It," Hoffman explained how building meaningful relationships with people have made him one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley.

His 2014 book "The Alliance," cowritten with entrepreneurs Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, is a career and management guide that demonstrates why networking is essential for the success of both individuals and the companies they work for.

Hoffman and Casnocha sent us their presentation on "network intelligence," explaining why managers should create a culture that promotes connections both among their own employees and with a wide variety of external contacts.

We have all heard the cliche: Nice guys finish last. The idea behind the saying is that good deeds go unnoticed and you have to be selfish to succeed. After all, there are two kinds of people: a nice person and a selfish person.
A nice person is kind and selfless. They are givers who are willing to help others and don’t mind helping without giving something in return. But a selfish person is a taker. They only think of themselves and aim to get more through doing less.
While a selfish person seems to be the one more people hate, “nice guys finish last” is still a common belief. So can nice guys actually finish first?

An interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other.

There are mountains of research to support how important social ties are for well-being. Feeling connected to others gives meaning and purpose to all of our lives. Social ties can increase longevity, reduce stress, and even boost our immune system. By dedicating specific time to “hygge” we can create a safe space for families and friends to be together without stress. However, it takes everyone wanting this and working together to achieve it.

Researchers also find that Denmark’s egalitarianism plays an important role. For example, a 2009 study by Robert Biswas-Diener and colleagues found that while rich Americans and Danes were equally happy, what really made the difference is that low-income Danes were much, much happier than their American counterparts. This is consistent with findings that high levels of equality translate into happier societies. Unsurprisingly, egalitarianism is also a core value of hygge, according to anthropologists. In this way, perhaps, the rules governing private life in Denmark translate into the kind of public gains cited by Bernie Sanders.

The technology-driven world in which we live is a world filled with promise but also challenges. Cars that drive themselves, machines that read X-rays, and algorithms that respond to customer-service inquiries are all manifestations of powerful new forms of automation. Yet even as these technologies increase productivity and improve our lives, their use will substitute for some work activities humans currently perform—a development that has sparked much public concern.

Building on our January 2017 report on automation, McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation (PDF–5MB), assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation.

The results reveal a rich mosaic of potential shifts in occupations in the years ahead, with important implications for workforce skills and wages. Our key finding is that while there may be enough work to maintain full employment to 2030 under most scenarios, the transitions will be very challenging—matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

Naturally, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ve lived a relatively narrow life, a vertical rather than a horizontal existence. So it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do. But a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Embracing digital culture, tools, and approaches

A Deloitte survey (sponsored by Facebook) asked C-suite executives for their perspectives on the future of work. Their responses reveal six themes about the future workplace—and six lessons to help leaders ease the transition.

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.

I continually emphasize that the future of work is for us to create. Nothing is inevitable. Enormous positive possibilities are open to us.

I for one will be working for the rest of my life in some guise, and most of the people I know will want to work, to be the best they can be, to create value for the world for the indefinite future.

Thinking about the work that we both want to do and will have value, potentially even when machines can transcend human capabilities, is critical.

There will always be work for humans, and if we go about it the right way it will be exactly the work we most want to do.

Our limits are rarely what we think they are. And seldom what others tell us they are.

Alden Mills is my guest on the Disrupt Yourself Podcast, a former Navy SEAL, champion rower, inventor of The Perfect Pushup and Founder of Perfect Fitness. As a serial entrepreneur, he’s since founded a second company, Fetch Fuel Pet Food, moved his family to Spain and written a book: Be Unstoppable: The Eight Essential Actions to Succeed at Anything.

Alden knows about the subjectivity of limitation; he was only 12 when a doctor told him that his asthma was going to keep him from doing, well, pretty much everything.

What does rebellion really mean? If it means anything, it means scorning the false idea that the past must ever be like the future, because that is what the fates and furies and gods ordain, and we, miserable mortals, are limited by blood and tribe to death and dust. History’s great teaching is precisely that none of that has ever been true: there is a thing called the future, in which progress has stumbled onwards, but creating it is the most difficult work of all, because it is elusive, made of things we cannot touch or even see: human possibility.
So: we need more, better rebellion. We must learn how not to give up precisely. It isn’t enough, what we’re doing now. We are not learning from history what it means to have genuinely big, disruptive, transformative ideas. Such ideas are life-giving, not merely convenience-dispensing. Yet we have shrunk our expectations so low that such ideas mean a tighter window to deliver designer food now. Our vision is so narrow and cloudy now that life-giving, challenging ideas have come somehow mean drone-tacos instead of healthcare for sick little babies. What a pity. We have forgotten the sweep of human history, such ideas are only ever little, forgotten ones. Do you remember who sold designer lunches a century ago, or how? Nobody does. This broken age demands much more rebellion than we are giving it.

With a new generation poised to enter the workforce, organizations are simultaneously forced to combat two converging trends. First, Generation Z (Gen Z), consisting of those born after 1995, is entering the workforce. While Gen Z is anticipated to bring an unprecedented level of technology skills to the workforce, they also express apprehensions about their interpersonal communication skills. Throughout the article we will be following a prototypical Gen Z member, Emily, to illustrate the shifting experiences and expectations Gen Z brings to the workplace. (See sidebar: Meet Emily, a prototypical Generation Z member).

Second, emerging technologies, particularly automation, are expected to further disrupt the nature of the entry-level roles that this generation is poised to fill. Complicating this dynamic is the ambiguity surrounding this technical shift, in addition to the inherent uncertainty involved in predicting how today’s teenagers will behave in 10 years.

Given these new realities, this article explores how organizations can redesign entry-level jobs in a way that can both attract and engage Gen Z, while ensuring that the entry-level job continues to serve as the necessary training ground for incoming professionals. This will be essential for organizations seeking to generate a pipeline of future talent to help meet the organization’s evolving needs.

Although breakthroughs have been made in explaining why people think and behave as they do, these insights have in general been applied to business only piecemeal and haven’t had a widespread effect. Recently, however, several companies have found that linking all of the major discoveries together in programs to improve performance has brought about startling changes in the behavior of employees—changes rooted in new mind-sets. Performance-improvement programs that apply all of these ideas in combination can be just as chaotic and hard to lead as those that don’t. But they have a stronger chance of effecting long-term changes in business practice and thus of sustaining better outcomes.

Sharing your strengths is not bragging – it’s crucial, says The Strengths Book.

Consider, it urges the reader, how leaders can ever know the motivations, efficiencies, skills and personalities of a large staff? If they had quick and easy insight into such things (i.e. their strengths and weaknesses), teams could be quickly assembled, workspaces, money and projects allocated to the correct configurations.

When you expect to see something, you are more likely to notice it. The reticular activating system in our brains causes us to notice the things we expect to see, and not notice things we are not looking for.
And seeing is believing! Literally. Research shows that when we see something, we are likely to believe it.
If your attention is focused on negative images, you’re more likely to see and believe them.
If your attention is focused on positive images, you’re more likely to see and believe them.
What you see shapes the reality you experience.
The problem is it’s not so easy to see positive images. On a daily basis we are bombarded with images of war and destruction in movies, on television and even in electronic games that children play. In contrast, there are few images of what world peace looks like.

It seems a reader can barely go a week without seeing at least one news headline about how Millennials are "killing" some industry or product. Generation Y is purportedly wiping out casual dining, golf, diamonds, homeownership, and bars of soap, among other consumer products; news items have also characterized the generation as lazy, vain, and always looking for a handout.

According to Philadelphia-based writer (and Pacific Standard contributor) Malcolm Harris, this hand-wringing disdain toward Millennials unfairly ignores the material conditions that created the generation. In his new book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Harris argues that Millennials have set themselves up for success (Harris' book notes that Millennials are the most educated generation) with very little payoff. Millennials carry most of the burden of the nation's $1.4 trillion student-loan debt crisis; their unemployment rate is more than double the national average; they earn 20 percent less than Generation X; and Millennial employees face a higher level of depression than any other generation. Negative stereotypes, Harris argues, point to the economic and sociological forces that have shaped Millennials, not characteristics endemic to the generation itself.