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Listening takes time or, more accurately, you have to take time to listen. A life programmed with back-to-back commitments offers little leeway for listening. Similarly, a mind constantly buzzing with plans, dreams, schemes and anxieties is difficult to clear. Good listening requires the temporary suspension of all unrelated thoughts -- a blank canvas. In order to become an effective listener, you have to learn to manage what goes on in your own mind. Technology, for all its glorious gifts, has erected new barriers to listening. Face-to-face meetings and telephone conversations (priceless listening opportunities) are being replaced by email and the sterile anonymity of electronic meeting rooms. Meanwhile television continues to capture countless hours that might otherwise be available for conversation, dialogue, and listening.

Other barriers to listening include:

worry, fear, anger, grief and depression individual bias and prejudice semantics and language differences noise and verbal "clutter"
preoccupation, boredom and shrinking attention spans

Five educated, successful professional women are car-pooling to a seminar. It's a two hour drive. The din inside the vehicle is reminiscent of an orchestra tuning up. Several women are talking at once -- each with an idea to express concerning the issue under discussion. When any is determined to make a point, she cranks up her volume, trumping competing ideas with decibel power.

Is any of these women listening? Can any repeat back or summarize the ideas of the other women in the car? Probably not. And if not, what's the point? Competition? Catharsis? Communication it's not -- without listening there is no communication.

Listening is rarely taught in schools because educators (along with almost everyone else) assume listening is tantamount to breathing -- automatic. But effective listening is a skill. Like any other skill, competency in listening is achieved through learning and practice. The scarcity of good listeners is self-perpetuating; if you didn't have good listeners to learn from and (especially) models to emulate, you probably didn't master this "master" skill. Instead, you learned whatever passed for listening in your environment: distracted half-attention, constant interruptions, multi-layered, high-volume, talk-fest free-for-alls with little listening at all.

If you’re not getting paid what you’re worth, there are only two possible reasons:
1. People don’t know what you’re worth, or
2. You’re not (currently) worth as much as you believe

The first situation can’t happen unless you permit it to. If you’re undervalued, then you have a communication problem, one that you can solve by telling accurate stories that resonate.

Far more likely, though, is the second problem. If there are reasonable substitutes for your work, and those substitutes are seen as cheaper, then you’re not going to get the work. 'Worth' in this case means, "what does it cost to get something like that if something like that is what I want?"

“Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us” by Seth Godin
Posted on February 10, 2011 by Michael A. Robson|

A heretic, as defined by Merriam Webster’s dictionary is: “a dissenter from established religious dogma; especially, a baptized member of the Church who disavows a revealed truth; one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine; a nonconformist”

If you understand why this actually a very good thing, and not a very bad one, you’ll understand where tribes come from. In a way, it’s Heretical to start a new religion. But that’s what great leaders do. Let me explain.

We’ve seen a lot of marketing trends in the past 10-20 years. The question is obvious: how do you get people excited about buying stuff? Well as it turns out, people aren’t really exciting about stuff, they’re excited about human achievement, like breaking rules, changing the world, it turns out people don’t care about buying stuff, what they really want is to be inspired.

And what’s inspirational about doing the laundry with Brand X over Brand Z. Not much. It’s not exactly William Wallace taking on the English.

So ask yourself this question: What evil empire are you trying to overthrow? If you don’t know, or can’t answer that, you just answered why your job/company is so dull, and why it’s so hard to get your customers amped. We have to have big huge massive hulking challenges here: Think Death Star huge. Think Microsoft huge. Think Egypt huge.

This book is not about getting ‘tribes’ of people (eg. lunatic customers) talking about the TVs your company makes. Forget it. It doesn’t make sense, and wouldn’t work. What you want them to do is carve the company logo in the back of their heads, because being a customer means being part of a group of cool, smart, confident, independent people. Or maybe it means something completely different.

We are hard-wired to belong to a group. Think of a fraternity. It’s exclusive, it’s important, and you have to go through an embarrassing/painful test to get in. It actually means something to be on the inside, and it means something to be on the outside. It means something qualitatively whether you’re in or out. And we wanna be in. Why? Because there’s something exciting going on. THere’s a group of people that are fired up. They’re going somewhere exciting and groundbreaking. That’s why you want to join the journey.

So who gets these crazies together? Godin discusses huge difference between Leaders and Managers. I could have sworn Manager was a cool job title. Turns out, according to Seth, it’s totally lame. Organizing things so that nothing gets out of control. Keeping people in check, making sure they’re doing the same thing (essentially) they did last month. Mediocrity.

Instead, as a leader, your responsibility as the leader is to:

a) transform a shared interest into a super passionate goal. Specific. Not just wild arbitrary angst.
b) Give people the tools to do this, and tighten communications. Yes you can sell them the tools, if you must, but remember, any barrier to entry is gonna keep the tribe small.
c) Help the tribe grow.

As a leader you don’t just tick these 3 boxes, done, done, got it. Nope. You keep pushing your tribe to do something bigger, and better. You exist not to keep the tribe ‘managed’ or ‘status quo’ but to keep the passion alive, so the tribe can grow.

As I said, it’s a Heretocracy out there. We need nutjobs like Arnold Schwarzzenegar, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. People with principles are considered crazy, because humans are expected to break, to trip, to have weaknesses. Great leaders may have weaknesses, they may be unattractive, they may be ditzy, but they do not break when it comes to character. Their tribe aspires to have that resilience, and thus keep coming back for more.

Heretics don’t ask for permission, as for forgiveness. They are needed not just for their electricity and their energy. They are needed because they are solutions to a problem that the status quo can’t solve!

They don’t ask for money (unless they’re selling books, making movies, touring around the country giving speeches). Heretics don’t even ask for credit (even though much is given). Credit isn’t the point, Change is. As long as the Heretic is trying to change the world, the crowd of supporters, the fans, the tribe will follow. Not because they have to, but because they have faith.

In sum, to get your team inspired, take a look at your target. Are you just another laundry detergent? Or are you changing the world, one customer at a time? Your tribe will fight for you, given just the right enemy.

rebut

refute disprove

Our vicar is always raising money for one cause or another,
but he has never managed to get enough money to have the church clock repaired.
The big clock which used to strike the hours day and night was damaged many years ago and has been silent ever since.
One night, however, our vicar woke up with a start: the clock was striking the hours!
Looking at his watch, he saw that it was one o'clock, but the bell struck thirteen times before it stopped.
Armed with a torch, the vicar went up into the clock tower to see what was going on.
In the torchlight, he caught sight of a figure whom he immediately recognized as Bill Wilkins, our local grocer.
'Whatever are you doing up here Bill?' asked the vicar in surprise.
'I'm trying to repair the bell,' answered Bill.
I've been coming up here night after night for weeks now.
You see, I was hoping to give you a surprise.
'You certainly did give me a surprise!' said the vicar.
You've probably woken up everyone in the village as well.
Still, I'm glad the bell is working again.
That's the trouble, vicar,' answered Bill.
It's working all right, but I'm afraid that at one o'clock it will strike thirteen times and there's nothing I can do about it.
We'll get used to that, Bill,' said the vicar.
Thirteen is not as good as one, but it's better than nothing.
Now let's go downstairs and have a cup of tea.

Letting students choose books could make them better readers

•The new bedtime story? Let’s draw superheroes, Dad!

When she first started teaching high school English 15 years ago, Tina Gordon enthusiastically assigned her students To Kill a Mockingbird, making all of Calpurnia's dishes so they could experience the classic's Southern setting. “I wanted them to live and breathe and love it,” she recalls. When the class read Wuthering Heights, she taught them to memorize its famous, passion-filled lines.

•The new bedtime story? Let’s draw superheroes, Dad!

But she eventually noticed that not all her students were so enamoured with her love of the classic, that more than a few of them were turning the pages not with anticipation but with groans. So she changed tactics, giving them more choice, creating literary circles that explored books in different ways, such as with movies – with more engaged students as a result.

Being assigned one book to read as a class was once the traditional, often painful, rite of passage for students.

It was also a surefire moneymaker for Coles Notes versions of Great Expectations and Hamlet. But it has been the subject of continuing debate among educators trying to balance the desire to expose a new and increasingly diverse generation to those great old reads with the need to just turn students into great readers.

Reading for pleasure – and not because there’s an essay due tomorrow – has been linked to improved scholastic achievement. Some education researchers have argued that means letting students – particularly in middle school and especially boys – freely choose what pages they want to turn.

“There’s this belief that if you are going to go to college you have to read certain things,” says Gay Ivey, a professor of reading education at James Madison University in Virginia. “When you think about the kinds of things that very successful, educated, productive people read in their adult lives, they aren’t breaking down the doors of Barnes & Noble to get a copy of The Scarlet Letter.”

For the past three years, Dr. Ivey has been involved with a project at a Virginia school in which 300 Grade 8 English students were allowed full choice over their reading with few strings or work attached, other than classroom discussions about shared themes and small group conversations if several students had read the same book. The goal was to get every student engaged in reading – the kind that you do in your own free time.

“It’s [about] the experience we have all had as adults when we forget to eat or go to the restroom because we are so into what we are reading,” Dr. Ivey says. “And that so rarely happens in school, and it certainly hardly ever happens with the whole-class-assigned novel.”

The results, she says, have been overwhelming. “We couldn’t keep up with the need for books,” she says. Even in classes with struggling readers, students read an average of 42 books over the course of the school years, some as many as 100. And even with their options open, students didn’t stick with Twilight and Gossip Girl series for long – as their appetite for reading grew, so did their interest in more challenging reads, coming to class for example to debate the ending of Walking on Glass by science fiction writer Iain Banks.

There’s a perception, Dr. Ivey says, that “when you give choices, they will choose something that’s not good for them. But that is not the case at all. We wouldn’t have kept kids from reading Captain Underpants. But quite frankly even our least experienced readers didn’t choose books like that.”

Instead, she argues, students learned a more important lesson. “Sometimes really hard thinking can be pleasurable – that’s what our kids experience. Pleasure doesn’t have to be a no-brainer.”

Dr. Ivey argues that schools would do well to abandon the whole class novel, which, she says, despite new styles of teaching literacy still remains a common approach in North American schools. And to those who argue in favour of a common base of knowledge through class-assigned novels, she scoffs: “The experience of being assigned a book is extremely common. Having knowledge of [that book] is rare.”

Pam Allyn, a literary expert and the author of What to Read When who runs an organization that educates teachers, agrees that the time has come to abandon the class novel – leaving it to selected high school English classes designed to teach the classics. While some teachers can be effective with the approach, she says that often students tell themselves: “I have to get through this book. I’ve got to learn to understand it the way my teacher wants me to.” That can be boring for good readers, she says, and “devastating” for struggling students.

Tina Gordon, president of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English and a resource teacher at a Winnipeg-area high school, says many teachers are trying new approaches – such as introducing one book in many different ways, or reading excerpts out loud – and seeing the value in choice in English class. She understands why many teachers still love the class novel, wanting to expose young people to the books they love. But, she says, “some of our practices we keep because they’re tradition.” And because, she adds, both teachers and parents hold on to the idea that “what makes a more educated person is if they can quote Hamlet.”

I like it.
I love it.
I bought it.
I made it.

Though the clouds were dense, it was not raining today.
It was not cold enough to need a heater.
One of my students came to the cram school in T-shirt and knee length trousers.

When I was a college student, I majored in Danish language and society.
But I found it impossible to pronounce Danish words in the first class.
Japanese has only 5 vowels so 17 vowels is a surprising amount.
Besides , Danish people don't open their mouths wide so it is really hard to tell the difference between vowels.
I wish I was the kind of person who has talent in pronounciation.
If so , I would surely start learning Danish again.
Danish is a very beautiful language.