Tag: jane mcgonigal

Mindset Research – Amazing Presentation

I am reading Kelly McGonigal’s book, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It. So far it is great. I will post more about her great work soon – I am still reading – this post, however, is about the work of Dr. Alia Crum. Her amazing work focuses on Mindset. Kelly McGonigal cites her often in her book so I looked up Dr. Crum.

Below is Dr. Crum’s TED Presentation: Change Your Mindset, Change the Game. She explains how our belief actually changes our physiological reality, not just our mind. She even documents how our mind can alter our feelings associated with the ingestion of food based on what we believe we are eating. Much of this has to do with the placebo effect. Enjoy, I will post again as I learn more.

Dr. Crum’s excellent work on Mindset builds on Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset work she outlined in her TED Presentation and her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. You can get more information about Dr. Dweck’s ideas on this post here.

Getting back to Kelly McGonigal, I am reading her book after seeing and posting here about her fantastic TED presentation, Stress Can Improve Your Health – see below.

By the way, did you know Kelly is one of the amazing identical twins? Her twin sister, Jane McGonigal is the author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient and Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

Books by both of these professionals are excellent. Most useful in both their books is their excellent use of existing research to support their unique hypotheses in all their books about how to be better and foster improved results.

Of course I love this work because they provide great information about how to practice paneugenesis or how to generate comprehensive improvements by creating interactions so everyone and everything benefits.

I have already posted many times about Jane’s work, if you are interested you can access those posts here, here, and here.  I look forward to learning more and hearing about how you use these ideas in your life. Enjoy!

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Be Well’r,
Craig Becker
Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!

A Problem Focus Creates Mediocrity…Not Greatness

If we want to be better, I mean really better, SUPERBETTER, we must focus on what we want to create instead of what we want to avoid. I discuss this with the paneugenesis process:

1. Operationalize an Idealized Outcome – make sure all involved parties know what is to be created and be sure that it is better than what can be now. The outcome should have pervasive and reciprocal effects that carry meaning and impact to and beyond the individual.

2. Discover Precursors – what must exist now to make the idealized outcome a reality. Discover what skills, abilities, traits, environments are necessary and or must exist to realize the idealized outcome. These precursors are conditions that must be created and not currently present.

3. Optimize the Process – what must be done to create those precursors that will enable the idealized outcome to be realized – go do that now! Do what must be done to create and put in place the necessary precursors discovered.

4. Plot Progress – find measures that document and demonstrate progress is being made toward the creation of discovered precursors and or idealized outcomes. Progress measures that indicate movement is being made toward the creation of the new, desired reality are necessary to give meaning and purpose to the process and to help participants maintain motivation.

I am currently reading SuperBetter: A revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient by Jane McGonigal and  related TED Presentation. Jane also wrote the great book, Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world and related TED Presentation.

I relate to her approach because she explains in the beginning of the book, she didn’t want to just be better or not bad, she wanted to be SuperBetter and explains how to make this happen with extensive support. I am still reading SuperBetter and got a lot out of Reality is Broken which I presented about several years ago.

Link to Play SuperBetter – Enjoy!

I look forward to hearing how you get not just better, but SuperBetter!

 –
Be Well’r,
Craig Becker
Be selfish, selfless, & synergistic so everyone and everything benefits!