When a system’s complexity overwhelms its benefits

One of my fantasies – yes, this is my life, and this is a fantasy – is to really organize the monkeys’ toys. We have a bunch of bins, but I want bins with labels. I want the boxes in the bins to have labels. So that everyone involved in putting stuff away knows exactly where to put stuff. [...]

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Made to Stick, Lesson 5: Credibility

Unfortunately, even if you’re sharing a great idea, you can’t just walk into a boardroom and tell people what to do and know that they’ll do it. There’s this little thing called credibility that you need to ensure that people listen to your idea, and that they give it weight.
Some common techniques that people in the [...]

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Made to Stick, Lesson 4: Emotion

I’ve written before about the power of emotion, and about the importance of leaders not hiding their emotions but using them to motivate and inspire others. The Heaths say that good ideas and good messages, too require emotion. 9 out of 10 dentist agree that a healthy dose of emotion helps get your message across [...]

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Made to Stick, Lesson 3: Concreteness

This is one of my favorite of the Heath’s suggestions because it is so true. I tend to be an abstract thinker, and often, no one has a clue what I’m talking about. Until I take the time to get specific and concrete. And then, of course, everyone sees how brilliant I really am.
I’ve actually [...]

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Made to Stick, Lesson 2: Unexpectedness

It might surprise you that the second principle of stickiness is unexpectedness.
According to the Heaths, the element of surprise is a way to keep people engaged with an idea long after the first telling. Unexpectedness can drive repetition, turning an idea from something you heard once to a legend that continues to be told over [...]

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Making it Stick, Lesson 1: Simplicity

I’ve been reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is about how to make your ideas sticky, so that people immediately get them, remember them, and act on them. The Heaths describe 6 ways make your ideas more sticky: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and stories.
I [...]

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little voice vs. open mind

I like to think of myself as open minded. But sometimes I realize that, well, my mind isn’t as open as I’d like.
Over the course of several weeks, I read several mentions of the same book, Momma Zen. I’ve been writing about parenting and yoga and how one informs the other in my life, and the book seemed [...]

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What we can control

I pretty much stopped reading books about parenting after the first year of the monkeys’ lives. In part, I stopped reading because I was less desperate for help. In part, I stopped because I finally realized that there was no answer in any book that would really help me figure out my kids and figure out [...]

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Does my butt look good?

I was trying out a new pair of jeans by wearing them around the house the other day, and I asked Mr. Daddy if he thought I should keep them. He commented on the length and the color, but the crux of the question for jeans is all about one critical component: how my butt looks.
 ”They’re good,” he said, “better than some [...]

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Facilitate your husband, or, how to have a conversation and not a fight

After the monkeys went to bed tonight my husband and I had an invigorating, um, discussion. I learned a few things.
One – not having a nanny is hard. Two careers, two kids, one dog and one preschool schedule, not to mention dinner, household repairs, laundry and a delightful 5:30 AM wake-up call this morning, leads to [...]

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