I have the right to feel nurtured

When are you most likely to think rationally and where are you likely to be overwhelmed by emotions? In situations where you become emotional, what direction do you take? What are the thoughts that begin to spiral in your mind? What are the different states you experience? Lucky for us, we are not clueless about rational thinking and have experienced it more and more in our lives since the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s. What scientific thinking has done is allow us to engage in a healthy amount of skepticism, enough for us to make room for good ideas while siphoning out bad ones. Galileo did this, as did Copernicus and Newton, and through their understanding of the world, we began to tread on a path of rational and evolved thought, leaving the ways of superstition behind. But the dangers still lurk for us if we are not guided by conscious reasoning. It is very easy to fall into the trap if we do not evaluate the root of our decisions. And I don't just mean impulse buys at the shopping mall or our questionable retirement plans. Miriam Schwartz-Ziv's analysis of Israeli companies suggests that critical mass mattered and that companies with at least three female directors had higher ROEs (returns on equity) and net profit margins. Others have found no or negative correlations between gender diversity and performance. Given the mixed evidence of individual studies, a meta-analysis combining the results of 140 studies is particularly helpful in this context. Across all studies, it finds a small positive relationship between female board representation and company profitability (accounting returns). Market performance, on the other hand, was only positively related to board diversity in countries with greater gender parity (as measured by the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap score) and negatively otherwise. Investors' evaluations of a firm's future performance may well be influenced by gender norms prevalent in a given country. In more gender-equal countries, they expected gender diversity on corporate boards to be a good thing; To put these findings into perspective, recall that generally there is little empirical evidence that any of the board characteristics we typically worry about, including board size, number of independent directors, time and effort spent by directors, director indemnification, director duties, or whether or not the CEO serves as board chair are related to firm performance. In addition, the above studies do not distinguish how diversity was brought about. Understandably, as gender quotas on corporate boards have only been introduced very recently, we know very little about their impact on company performance.

The process of NLP's mind-reading involves assuming that you're well aware of what someone else feels or thinks in any particular situation. The truth is no one could ever know the entirety of your thoughts and emotions. They may have a close match, but not the full picture. So, if you have ever felt certain you know how someone feels or what they're thinking, then you're mind-reading -a tricky thing that can get you into trouble. In reading minds, you must account for the parts of the other person's experience which you can actually verify with your own senses. Once you assume you know every little thought in their head, then you forget that thought you know it all is actually your thought, and not necessarily a reflection of objective reality. How to Mind Read Sometimes, we believe we know what other people's intentions are based on the way they act or don't act. We could assume that someone is really into us, or that they're not, or that they're out to get us. Reading minds with NLP reveals that the map is not the territory, as one NLP presupposition says. The decisions we make may perpetuate certain societal beliefs, especially if we base our decisions on ego and our biases. Without meaning to, we might inadvertently encourage many of the world's evils. We need to adopt a more rational point of view so that we don't have a bigoted view of the world, so that we don't promote racism, so that we don't keep making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Here is the point that I am certain I have lost you. Yes, racism, hatred, bigotry, all of them exist, but not with you. You are enlightened, you don't let emotions cloud your judgement, you are liberal in your beliefs. And maybe you are right. But what if you're not? As a rationalist, your behavior has to be guided more by conscious reasoning than your beliefs about that behavior. Through this article, we will understand how multiple systems exist in the world that are designed to make us make bad decisions.

The little we do know is based on Norwegian companies. There the evidence suggests that the introduction of quotas had negative short-term impacts, both on profits and on company valuation. One study compares the profits of Norwegian companies after the introduction of quotas with how well other Scandinavian companies did in the same time frame. It finds that the introduction of quotas led to an increase in spending on labor, driven by employment levels, not compensation packages. Survey evidence supports the notion that female directors may indeed be more concerned with employees than their male counterparts. Could this have hurt the performance of companies affected by the quotas in Norway at a time when many other companies laid off people due to the financial crisis in 2008? We will never quite know what the channels of influence were as the research does not allow us to recreate what happened in these companies. There are too many possible variables: perhaps the female directors were indeed decisive, or their presence influenced opinions of male directors, or management reacted negatively to the gender quotas or the increased diversity on their boards. It is also possible that all this had little to do with the specific composition of the boards and instead was the result of teams being newly formed. Teams, and in particular heterogenous teams, do become more effective over time. We've all made mistakes when it comes to jumping to conclusions about the way others feel or about why they chose to do certain things. With ourselves, we judge based on intention. With others, we judge based on actions. We also forget that no one is a mind reader in the actual sense of the term. We somehow expect our significant other to know without using our words that we're mad because they forgot to take the trash out again, or that we appreciate the amazing dinner they put together. This can cause a lot of trouble, because if both parties expect the other to somehow always know what's on their mind without checking in, then there's a lot of room for misunderstanding. How CAN You Read People's Minds? We need to discuss accessing cues. When people are thinking about something, they often will show some subtle action that lets them activate the right representation of what they're thinking. They might move their eyes, change their position, breathe differently, make certain gestures, change their intonation, and so on.

We will evaluate those systems, and our choices within those systems, to see how deeply and systematically irrational we all are in our choices. We will discuss how our need to find patterns makes our world view simplistic, how we'd much rather rely on coincidence than fact, how our emotions are based on memory and our predictive systems can fail us, how we are primed to make certain decisions through subliminal messages, fear, and loyalty, and how our group-think behavior is rooted in our survival mechanism. But I am not just here to tell you what's wrong with your belief system. I'm also here to show you how you can train yourself to ask better questions and then make better decisions. Not only will we evaluate how the world's system operates, but we will also evaluate our internal systems, what the biases are we fall victim to and why, when those biases are handy for decision making, and when we need to think a little more deeply to get the most out of life. Because ultimately, that is the reason you are reading this article. You want to make decisions that will improve the quality of your life, and that is what we'll aim for. You are a creature of nature, explaining away your actions, rationalizing your behaviors, answering questions about your life that you don't have the answers to. You have been telling yourself stories, the same anecdotes that I mentioned earlier, but they are all the more powerful because you are the narrator, and you know what you need to tell yourself to be convincing. You have been telling yourself a story for as long as you could use words, and you are so convinced of it that it will be difficult to talk yourself out. Richard Hackman, for example, reports that how long an airline crew has been flying together is a good predictor of aircraft incidents: 73 percent of incidents occur when a crew flies together for the first time. To be clear, quotas are not behavioral interventions, but they affect people through behavioral channels. Whether or not they should be introduced is a political decision, weighing their benefits and their costs. Their beauty is that they change numbers quickly, sparing the team the stereotyping and painful assimilation processes that go along with a more incremental approach, which can depress performance. Yet a two-stage process where candidates are first reviewed for merit, ideally in blind evaluations, seems advisable in order to address fairness considerations. The composition of groups clearly matters. And while getting it right is not easy, some behavioral design principles can help us move in the right direction. The most important one is critical mass. When forming diverse teams, make sure every subgroup is represented by at least three people or makes up about a third of the total. When you next appraise the performance of your team members, take a moment to reflect on this.

These behaviors are useful cues you can keep track of, so you know how they might be about to respond to an event or to you. These cues won't tell you the meat of what they're thinking, but it will let you know how they think. For instance, if you've ever seen someone who's making faces, scratching an itch, out of breath, using onomatopoeic sounds, or making familiar hand gestures, you may not ascribe any meaning to these actions all on their own. However, you can tell what actual process is going on with their mind when they do these things. As you practice NLP, you will decipher these behaviors easily, and this will put you in a position to affect the way others think. Here are patterns which you should know: Auditory mode accessing cues: Here, the eyes and head lean sideways, all gestures happen at ear level, and the breathing is diaphragmatic. The speed of their speech will switch between fast and slow, and their intonation will go up and down. Kinesthetic mode accessing cues: Here, the eyes and head are down. All gestures are directed to the body, and the breathing is down in the belly. You have created shortcuts and through that, your brain has created experiences that allow you to whizz through the day. And that's okay. But now let's add another layer to the story, the one that makes for compelling narration because you, the narrator of your story, will now observe your life and choices from an intellectual curiosity, one that will expose the underlying principles and thoughts behind your decisions. You will understand the battle in your mind between intuition and logic. You will understand that there is a place for both. You will dig deeper. You will make better decisions, because this time you will seek to understand both yourself and the world. Before we understand our biases, we need to rethink our understanding of emotions. When we realize that a lot of how we feel is drilled into us, not just something we are born with, it gives us a choice, a sense of control over how we function and the influence we exert over our daily decisions. Let's start by asking ourselves a simple question.