⚒️ Toolbox #6: Achievement Folders, Healthy Conflict & Stationary Active-Thinking

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

1. Unhealthy VS Healthy Conflict | Adam Grant

A great primer on the art and science of disagreeing well. When it’s between two people, it’s too easy to make it personal. You depersonalize conflict when you co-define, co-ideate and co-create solutions to the problem you face. It’s about challenging directly and caring personally, to create win-win situations.

2. Dancing - A Cure for Sadness?

This ground-breaking new study tells us two important things:

1. Exercise is top of the list for fostering wellbeing

2. We should all be dancing MUCH more

Dancing was found to be dramatically more effective than therapeutic methods of treating depression, both pharmaceutical and psychological. Dancing clearly has enormous health and wellbeing benefits. The only question is: why aren’t we all dancing more?

3. The Brain Science Behind Productivity | BrainTools #40

What do you do when you hit the procrastination wall? Likely, nothing. And we don’t blame you. The inertia to get started, grind through cognitive difficulty and ultimately complete something, anything, is bloody tough.

It doesn’t need to be this way. If you can use simple, yet effective tools to make tasks feel easy, then you’re more likely to do it. We cover this in our Productivity episode, with six juicy tools for you to deploy to get s**t done:

• Tool 1: Track Your Productivity

• Tool 2: The 5-Minute Hack

• Tool 3: Batch Tasks, Not Time

• Tool 4: The Rule of One

• Tool 5: Set Your Systems Free

• Tool 6: Morning Fuel

Listen on Apple or Spotify.

🤔 Brain Riddle

A butcher stands six feet and one inch tall and wears size 12 shoes. What do they weigh?

Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!

☕️ Stationary Active-Thinking

Struggling for ideas and focus? Einstein, Rick Rubin and other creative geniuses have used this BrainTool to produce ideas: they sit-still, allow their mind to move forward and force themselves to think in complete sentences.

This acts as a forcing-function for your brain to hone focus and creativity.

Implementation

1. Sit-still and set a 30 minute timer

2. Allow your mind to wander through ideas

3. Force yourself to think in complete sentences

4. At the end of the period write down your thoughts

Further Reading

• Observations about sit-still thinking | Andrew Huberman

• Unlocking Creativity: The Power of Stillness and Active Thinking | Rick Rubin & Andrew Huberman

📁 Unforgettable Achievement Folder

When you’re down in the dumps, it’s SO easy to be overly critical of yourself. You suck at this, you can’t do that - you feel like you can’t get anything right. This quickly turns into rumination. And that rumination traps you in a vicious vortex of self-doubt.

You need a way to smell the roses. To get out from the weeds, see the entire garden and remind ourselves that no matter how small, we’ve still accomplished plenty. This is why you need an unforgettable achievement file. And it’s oh-so-easy to create.

Implementation

1. Create a document and title it [Your Name] Achievement File/Folder/Reminders.

2. Add all the achievements, things you are proud of, people you felt you’ve impacted, nice things people have said about you, moments you’ve felt…joy.

3. A bonus if you can take screenshots of great feedback you’ve received, kind emails, texts, photos of moments. Visuals pack a more powerful reminder punch.

4. When you’re feeling down, low on confidence or hyper critical of yourself, look at the list. This is evidence that you have achieved more than you feel in that moment.

5. A cherry on top is to leverage this to cognitively reappraise your situation e.g. “I feel like I can’t get anything right at the moment. But when I see these achievements, it’s clear that there is evidence that I have done things that I am proud of, even if I don’t feel like that right now. So if I take this situation, and re-frame it, what could I learn from this?”

Research & Further Reading

• How to Develop Confidence When You Feel Worthless | Big Think

• Priming Power Improves Interview Outcomes | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2013)