The Worry Jar Experiment
Like Carla Rieger, I come from a family of worriers, and by seeing how it affected their lives I’ve worked hard on suspending worry from my own life. It’s hard, though, and Rieger offers a way to help you rid yourself of this wasted-energy activity.
One day I decided to do an experiment. I got an old cookie jar and cut up strips of paper. At the beginning of the week I wrote down one worry thought per strip of paper. I put the strips in the jar as a symbolic way of “letting them go”. At the end of the week I pulled the strips out, and put them in three piles.
- “Never happened”
- “Happened and the consequences were manageable”
- “Happened and the consequences were just as bad as I imagined”
Guess which was the biggest pile? The first pile contained 85% of the strips, the second pile 14%, and the third 1%. I did this for seven more weeks and the percentages remained similar. I proved Moliére’s theory. Now I do this exercise with participants in my longer programs and people prove it for themselves.
I think that’s a great experiment to practice if you’re a constant worrier. Rieger also offers some ideas on how to change your focus, so check out her site to learn more about how to stop worrying so much and to start living in the now.
Are you a constant worrier? If so, how do you manage it? Please share your tips in the comments.
(photo credit: Lisa Brewster via photopin cc)
Come Embrace Social Media With Us
Facebook continues to be the social channel of choice for most consumers and companies. In fact, according to a Gigya quarterly survey Facebook accounted for 51 percent of all North American social logins in the first quarter of 2014. Google Plus came in second with 31 percent of logins.
We here at IAVM embrace social media and all the positive opportunities it offers to help spread stories and ideas relevant to our community of venue managers and employees. Perhaps you’re already following us on social media channels. If so, thank you and please continue to do so. If you’re not, though, here’s a list with links of the IAVM social media channels. We’d love for you to be our friend on all of them.
VenueConnect 2014 Facebook Group
Twitter for the Front Row News Blog
We have on deck Instagram and Tumblr, so we’ll let you know when those are up and running, too. We look forward to interacting with you more in the social media world!
(photo credit: giulia.forsythe via photopin cc)
Here’s a New Way to Market Your Convention Center
Dede Mulligan has an idea—convention centers should advertise their walkability scores.
“Think about your average attendee at a convention. They typically have arrived in your city without a car. The hotel is adjacent or within a short walk of the convention,” Mulligan wrote in a blog post on Hospitality Marketing. “Many times they have never been to your city or it has been a long time since they have been there. Either way, at the end of a long day of being inside and/or sitting through meetings, they want to get out in the fresh air and walk. To dinner. To entertainment. To attractions.”
By now, I hope everyone is aware of the benefits of walking. If in doubt, search that phrase in Google, and you’ll receive approximately 225 million results.
You can find your city’s walk score by visiting, well, Walk Score. Check it to see where your city ranks, and please read Mulligan’s blog post for ideas on how convention centers can use walkability scores to market themselves to potential planners and attendees.
Creative Activities Outside of Work Boost Job Performance
Albert Einstein loved to play the violin when he wasn’t working on scientific equations. Even though it was a hobby, it fed his “day job.”
“The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition,” Einstein told the musical educator Shinichi Suzuki. ” My parents had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the result of musical perception.”
A new study out of San Francisco State University shows that pursuing creative activities outside of work can help you be more perceptive on the job and help you recover from stress. In addition, these pursuits help improve your work performance.
“It can be rare in research to find that what we do in our personal time is related to our behaviors in the workplace, and not just how we feel,” said Kevin Eschleman, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.
Study participants defined creative activities however they wanted.
“They usually describe it as lush, as a deep experience that provides a lot of things for them,” Eschleman said. “But they also talk about this idea of self-expression and an opportunity to really discover something about themselves, and that isn’t always captured with the current recovery experience models.”
In two surveys (one with 341 employees and one with 92 active duty U.S. Air Force captains), creative activity played a positive role in recovery experiences and performance-related outcomes. Because of these findings, Eschleman suggests that employers encourage employees to pursue creative outlets.
“One of the main concerns is that you don’t want to have someone feel like their organization is controlling them, especially when it comes to creative activities, because intrinsic motivation is part of that unique experience that comes with creative activity,” he said.
Some ways an employer can help employees pursue creative activities outside of work include, the study’s authors suggest, art classes, creative writing opportunities, and access to musical instruments.
“A lot of organizations carve time out where they talk about physical heath and exercise and eating habits, but they can also include in that a discussion of mental health and the importance of recovery and creative activity,” Eschleman said.
How do you encourage creative activities outside of work for your employees? Please share you tips with us.
(photo credit: tellmewhat2 via photopin cc)
If You Use Latest Tech Devices, You’re Perceived as a Leader
That high-tech device you’re wearing or using doesn’t mean you’re a geek. In fact, it means you’re perceived as a leader (you could be a geek, too, I suppose).
“Familiarity with and usage of new high-tech products appears to be a common manifestation of innovative behavior,” said Steve Hoeffler of Vanderbilt University and Stacy Wood of North Carolina State University. “Those who are tech-savvy are also perceived as authoritative on other subjects and as leaders.”
Hoeffler and Wood co-wrote a paper titled “Looking Innovative: Exploring the Role of Impression Management in High-Tech Product Adoption and Use.”
One part of their study included interviews with actors categorized by appearance and other variables.
“We taped them once where they took down a note using an old-fashioned calendar, then did another one where they whipped out an electronic calendar and did it that way,” Hoeffler said in Research News @ Vanderbilt.
Test subjects viewed the actors who used the electronic calendars as more authoritative.
In another part of the study, resumes that showed candidates were high-tech savvy were viewed more favorably compared to those who were not. Also, females who used high-tech devices benefited more than males who exhibited the same behavior.
“This finding runs counter to the backlash effect typically found in impression management research in business settings,” Hoeffler and Wood write. “Female job evaluations typically suffer after engaging in the same self-promoting impression management strategies that benefit their male counterparts.”
Finally, as with most anything in life, acting confident was the key in making a good impression. People don’t even need to know how to use a high-tech devices, as long as they looked like they knew what to do with them.
“Just possession is 90 percent of the game,” Hoeffler said. “And there are maybe 10 percent of situations where you have to display the ability to use it.”
(photo credit: gruntzooki via photopin cc)