⚒️ Toolbox #2: Supercommunicators, Psychology of Human Misjudgment and User Manuals

🛠️ Welcome to the Weekly Toolbox. Our most practical resources, tools and strategies so you can level up each week in minutes.

1. Tools for Leadership At Work | BrainTools #51

You’ll learn tools like giving advice-permission feedback, crafting compelling visions and being a teaching coach. Use these immediately to become a more effective, compassionate and useful leader. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

2. The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie T. Munger

Charlie Munger is one of our GOAT thinkers. He was Warren Buffet’s right-hand man and sadly, died at 99 a few months ago. R.I.P. This is a practical exploration of 25 human tendencies that lead us to make short-term, narrow and sub-par decisions. If you read or watch this, you will literally have the knowledge of a top 0.1% decision maker.

3. Supercommunicators with Charles Duhigg

Best selling author Charles Duhigg digs into the neuroscience around what makes a super-communicator. This episode is packed with practical tools and strategies for effective communication. Listen here.

🤝🏼 Random Acts of Kindness

Feeling down? The solution can be kindness. Through her work, Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett found that when you perform random acts of kindness you derive a body budgeting benefit of feeling better. You can pick yourself up by being kind (randomly) to someone you care about.

Implementation

1. If you’re feeling down, perform a small act of kindness:
   
   - Bake something for a friend
   - Grab a coffee for a co-worker
   - Write a heartfelt note to loved one

This is a great tool to keep in your emotional regulation toolkit. It provides a near instant pick-me up and fosters social connection with people you care about. Also works as a great intervention for dis regulated students and team members.

Research & Further Reading

• Lisa Feldman Barrett Offers These Tools for How to Cope

• Kindness as an Intervention for Student Social Interaction Anxiety, Resilience, Affect, and Mood: The KISS of Kindness Study II

📒 Manual of Me

When you get a new electronic of any kind, what normally comes with it? A user manual. It should be the same with us humans. Why don’t we have a user manual for everyone of us? A guide to using well…us. Whether at home or at work. That’s where the Manual of Me comes in.

Implementation

1. Take a few personality tests as a self-awareness audit. Examples are Big 5 and Principles You.
   

2. Read the reports and ask yourself: In what situations might this be true? False? An Advantage? A disadvantage? These are simple platforms to self-reflect, not objective truth.
   

3. Now you channel your introspection into the manual. Answer simple, but pointed questions in your favourite word processor like:
   
   

   - What is true when you operate at your best?
   - What is true when are you operate at your worst?
   - How do you prefer to learn / communicate / work?
   - What frustrates you? What motivates you?
   
   

4. If you work in a team, share these manuals. Discuss them. Look for points of tension, overlap, similarities and differences. The utility is in the conversation, not just the manual.

This is a great tool to create shared understanding and alignment in relationships and teams. But ultimately, it’s an artefact of your self-awareness. As Socrates says: “The unexamined life is a life not worth living”. Dramatic, but true.

Research & Further Reading

• What Makes Some Teams High Performing? 

• The Indispensable Document for the Modern Manager

• Manual of Me Example