David Rock (1)Besprekingen

Might have to read Quiet Leadership next.

The title says almost everything: this is a psychological / neuroscientific book about the brain dynamics at work when you are at work. And it is one of the best, thanks to its nice structure and clarity.

This is a great overview of lots of good advice in terms of focus, emotional regulation, understanding your own thought process, mindfulness etc.

What's unique about it is that it takes it from a basis of neurobiology, then brings it in to practicality, and drives it home with a little story about people struggling with everyday work problems.

Granted, this isn't the most in-depth overview of these kinds of techniques, but the format and real attempt to drive these points home to actionable techniques towards solving actual daily problems... that was something unique.

Yet another take on brain science with very relatable examples - analyzing situations gone wrong from a particular family, explaining brain science rationale behind it, and then replaying the situation and showing how it could be applied to the situation to make it great. The book could have been more condensed and some of the situations seemed a bit far-fetched thus 4 stars. Great read nevertheless.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #1: Your ability to think well is a limited resource, so conserve the resource at every opportunity.

Focus only on the most important things. Turn the recurring tasks into a habit and do them automatically without wasting brainpower.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #2: Our attention is very easily distracted, but there are strategies for staying focused.

As we know from the famous marshmallow experiment, people who manage to resist distractions reap huge benefits in the long run. Distractions will pull you out of the flow state. Try to eliminate as many of them as possible.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #3: Optimal mental performance requires just the right level of arousal of your brain.

Being alert (norepinephrine) and interested (dopamine) sharpens our focus. We need just the right amount of these chemicals in the brain. To increase the level of arousal (try imagining what will happen if you miss a deadline), write things down or take a walk to decrease it.

To increase dopamine think about the rewards of doing really great work.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #4: Insights make it possible to overcome mental blocks that limit you to the same small set of solutions.

Sometimes we reach a mental impasse (hit a wall) when a creative solution is needed. We need the insight (which depends on the unconscious mind ) to break through it rather than conscious logical reasoning. Take a break, move, exercise, or meditate to turn off your conscious reasoning.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #5: Mindfulness can help you focus by actually changing the structure of your brain.

To improve your brain it is important to see what's happening there and where your attention goes - mindfulness. It gets better with practice and can even alter the brain. Focusing on physical sensations, meditating, can help a lot with that.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #6: Feelings of certainty and control are very rewarding to the brain, and you can activate these feelings yourself.

If we feel in control (have certainty) there is less stress in unexpected situations. It comes from our outlook on the situation. To have this feeling we need to interpret hard situations from another perspective - reappraise.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #7: Regulating your expectations is key to a general feeling of happiness.

We need to manage and regulate our expectations. We can do it by having a habit to evaluate our expectations constantly. Always keep them low and you'll not be disappointed.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #8: A feeling of relatedness to others and a sense of being treated fairly are primary rewards for the brain.

For our brain, our sense of relatedness is a crucial basic instinct, just like food. When we feel connected, our brain releases oxytocin thus decreasing stress levels. Fairness is an important part of this. In the Ultimatum game, people would reject an unfair offer even though it still would be a better outcome for them.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #9: We are wired to feel rewarded for increases in our status, and can trick our brains into status rewards.
We're driven by how others perceive our status. If it increases, not only our happiness but also our ability to think. Increase status by finding areas where you are superior. The best way is to do it with yourself (competing from yesterday's you) and doing something better.

Your Brain at Work Key Idea #10: Feedback rarely creates positive change in others; instead, try helping them arrive at their own insights.
Feedback often is taken as a threat, the real change occurs when people see errors for themselves. A better approach is to guide/coach the person to find the issue/solution. By doing this we not only remove the threat but also increase their status (see #9). The next level is to coach them to give feedback for themselves (e.g. they should reflect on their work and iterate on their own feedback)

This book is a good choice for anyone who wants to delve more deeply into a communication style that genuinely supports others in performance improvement, growth and development. The many models described are based on the findings of neuroscience and are simple to understand, yet will require practice to master.

I am always reluctant to give books 5/5 because I worry that someday I will come across the most excellent book ever and not have a higher score to give it. If that day comes, I'll deal with it. Until then, this book deserves a 5/5 for its wealth of information and potential for a positive impact on my life.

Quiet Leadership is a book about communication. The core idea is that the best leaders are those who help others to think for themselves. This would amount to nothing more than common sense advice if it weren't for the way Rock backs this up with a process for helping get others to think for themselves. Although the book claims to have 6 steps to help improve your communication skills, each step is actually broken down into multiple parts, so it is probably more like one to two dozen small ideas which group into broader skills.

It is that level of detail which makes this book work so well for me. I will need to reread parts of this book several times before they start to get dry, and I am going to have to invest real time and effort into effectively using the techniques Rock presents. This isn't another magic bullet communication book.

I'm not going to bother with an overview of the content. The table of contents (which you can see on Amazon) provides as good an overview as I would give here, and the details are too numerous to make sense without reading the book. Instead, if you are interested in effective communication techniques, read it!

Other books go in more depth, but they lack the breadth of Your Brain at Work. I enjoyed the mix of background science with practical application. In terms of the topics covered, this book is the most comprehensive single source I have read on practical application of our understanding of how the brain work.

At first, I was skeptical of the "scenes" involving two characters, Paul and Emily, going about their day. But the scene, background, redo, recap structure worked really well for helping to cement the ideas presented in the book.

Great book on how to do work better - really enjoyed this

En suivant le quotidien d'Emilie et Paul, cadres des temps modernes et parents de deux enfants, vous allez découvrir à travers les diverses tâches et compétences que requiert une journée, comment mettre, à chaque fois, votre cerveau au travail au mieux de ses performances. Et en retirer un grand bien-être.

Your Brain At Work utilizes cutting edge (circa 2009) brain science to discuss how to improve your work life. Using Emily and Paul, a married couple with teenaged children, we explore a typical day in their lives as they deal with issues that come with being adults. Emily recently got a promotion and is now an executive at her company and Paul works at home designing software for businesses.

All of this is the setup for exploring the brain and what it can and cannot do. For example, the book explains that we only have so much space in our short term memories and compares it to a play in a theater of limited size. Only so many characters can be on stage at once and you only have so many resources to use.

All in all the book is quite relatable and could apply to many people in many different situations.

Great advice but the presentation via examples made the material hard to endure. Also the examples were so extreme I found them to be a bit off-putting. They followed a pattern of saying that without the miracle techniques being presented in the book you would end up poor and unloved and it would be your own fault. But by applying the strategies from the book you would be successful in business, friendship, parenthood, and you would have more sex.

Don't get me wrong. There is undoubtable good advice in this book but results will vary. Some of the strategies will likely offend other people because they might feel that they are being manipulated. Read this book with a large pinch of salt.

The owner's manual for your brain. If you have a brain and want to learn how it works and how to use it better then you must read this book!

Practical advice how to work better by recognizing human cerebral limitation.

Pleasantly surprised with this one. Saw it referenced in a webinar a few months back, looked it up and decided to put it on "the list". I wasn't keen on the actors device Rock used to bracket his point...thought them rather juvenile and distracting to the meat of the text...but I expect that he can reach a larger audience with it. Anyway, the science is good and he writes well.

This is a book that assists the reader in becoming more aware of how our own brain works. Written with the lay person/non-medical person in mind, David Rock shares his research, insight and experience into common problems in processing thoughts and emotions. He names the "main character" of the brain the "director" . A "stage and actor" metaphor is used for explaining the brain processing information as it comes at us in our everyday lives, both personal and at work. Very easy to relate to the situations given.

This pertains to the audiobook version. The book felt like it held a lot of good information and maybe someday I'll pick it up and read it a second timeandappreciate the contents that you can find here.

But when the narrator has a very orang professor feel throughout the recording any student or reader will fail to stay glued toll the facts being expressed here especially when your start referencing facts about the brain that the majority of those who picked this up withno beforehand knowledge of the biology of the brain would be put off by such a attempt.

This pertains to the audiobook version. The book felt like it held a lot of good information and maybe someday I'll pick it up and read it a second timeandappreciate the contents that you can find here.

But when the narrator has a very orang professor feel throughout the recording any student or reader will fail to stay glued toll the facts being expressed here especially when your start referencing facts about the brain that the majority of those who picked this up withno beforehand knowledge of the biology of the brain would be put off by such a attempt.

What good is knowledge if you can't do anything with it? Statements like we only use ten percent of our brain capacity are frustrating because they don't offer a solution for accessing the other ninety percent. Basically, what they amount to is like hearing: your brain function is roughly equivalent to that of the Geico caveman. You might as well make peace with the stultifying universe of mediocrity and ennui you're doomed to inhabit.

Then along comes a book like David Rock's Your Brain at Work and the neurons start firing all over the place. The synapses start connecting so rapidly that my shriveled cerebrum can hardly keep pace. Answers, at long last!

It's like a Christmas miracle. All over again.

In clear, concise language Rock explains the physiology behind our lack of focus, constant frustration and befuddlement at missed cues, lost opportunities and the sense of feeling overwhelmed. Or as an old lady shuffling down the soup aisle in my local grocery store called it, "a brain fart".

Couldn't have said it better myself.

And yet. Rock offers hope in the form of lucid metaphors that expose our "stinkin thinkin" for what it really is. His central premise is that all the brain's a stage and all the thoughts merely players. It's up to us to get the most important players on stage at any given time. And keep the least helpful players off or on for the shortest amount of time. Once the brain latches onto an unhelpful thought, it quickly spirals down into more unhelpful thoughts until we're caught in a quagmire of our own making.

Rock offers a plethora of friendly suggestions:

...become aware of your own mental energy needs and schedule accordingly. Experiment with different timings. One technique is to break work up into blocks of time based on type of brain use, rather than topic. (p. 15)

When you sense a strong emotion coming on, refocus...quickly...before the emotion takes over. (p. 118).
Playing against yourself to improve your understanding of your own brain can be a powerful way of increasing your performance (p. 200)

Chapters are structured with dual scenarios; what happens when you're on autopilot (translation: using the same old ten percent) vs what happens when you understand how the brain works and capitalize on that. Each chapter ends with (a summary) "Surprises About the Brain" and "Some Things to Try".

I've been trying them. Rock's strategies work. With continued practice the other ninety percent of my brain might kick in more frequently, increasing my chances of completing all those unfinished projects.

Hold on world, here I come.

Fantastic book - I am using the techniques to live. excellent.simple metaphor with good working examples - I didnt think it was a taex book/tutorial book but it worked out that way. very helpful for me. recommed to otheres to assist with focus. I wonder if the courses he does are as good?

David Rock has written an entertaining book with immediately practical application for one's working and non-working relationships. He has synthesized much of the latest neuroscience, applying it, in particular and in a heretofore unique way to improving one's use of one's brain/mind, in working situations.

That the eminent neuroscientist and mightsight expert, Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., wrote the Forward for the book is further testimony to the quality of David Rock's synthesis and application of the concepts.

Mindfulness is a key concept of the book - using one's "director" to observe one's mental processes and that the neuroscience explains how this works to improve ones mental functioning while at work.

I was, at first, concerned when I read that David Rock had structured the book like a "play" with"acts", thinking that such a construct would only distract and/or add "filler" to the concepts. However, I found that after reading only a few pages, I immediately liked his use of the play, because he did this so well. Furthermore, as David Rock points out (and I believe Daniel Siegel would agree) the brain "likes" stories, which help integration in the mind/brain.