Happy Friday! We’ve scoured the web for thought-provoking articles and essays for you to enjoy over the weekend.
In The Atlantic, Bouree Lam interviews Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of the book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life which looks at “how companies and employees can acknowledge uncomfortable experiences and react appropriately.” David argues that expressing negative feelings like fear, grief and resentment in the workplace may actually make for better productivity and a more fulfilling work environment. Lam asks David if the old mandate that people should be happy at work is important:
“A core part of emotional agility is the idea that our emotions are critical; they help us and our organizations. For example, if a person is upset that their idea was stolen at work, that’s a sign that they value fairness. Instead of being good or bad emotions, we should see emotions as containing useful data.
Positive emotions, like being happy, can help with particular kinds of thinking and particular kinds of work. But negative emotions can help us in the workplace to be more effective thinkers, to dig into the facts of what may go wrong. To mandate that we should just be positive at work takes away from the idea that emotions have evolved to help us adapt.”
Elsewhere on the Internet:
The National Book Foundation announced Barbershop Books as the recipient for their 2017 Innovations in Reading Prize – and Books@Work was selected as one of four honorable mentions!
The Association of Talent and Development blog shines a light on recent discoveries in neuroscience and the brain’s untapped potential to build better and more effective teams.
Brain Pickings shares Books@Work favorite Franz Kafka’s thoughts on why we read and how “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
Farnam Street blog looks at the difference between “schooling” and “learning” and what it means for the way we learn as adults.
Gordon Tredgold at Inc. writes on the ingredients for strong leadership, including clear direction, support, space and a good amount of praise.
Jen Christensen writes for CNN on the rising trend of bibliotherapy and new research that demonstrates how reading “can actually develop neural networks in your brain that help you understand even more complex thought.”
Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, [Public Domain] via WikiArt.org
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