Media training 101 for small businesses

-
Image
Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
1 comment

Self Care 101: Reward Yourself with Negative Reinforcement

-

TL;DR: It’s important to reward yourself by getting bad things out of your life. Doing that is just as valid as bringing good things into your life.

Recently, many of us at Zaper were talking about motivating yourself through reinforcements and how finding the right reinforcements is really hard. It reminded me of a concept from operant conditioning. You might remember operant conditioning from Psychology 101. It’s all about B.F. Skinner and his boxes.

In operant conditioning, the concepts of reinforcement and punishment are a bit more complex than we usually think. We generally think of those terms as meaning “+1 good thing” or “+1 bad thing,” respectively. In operant conditioning “+1 good thing” is called a positive reinforcement and “+1 bad thing” is called a positive punishment.

However, positive reinforcements and positive punishments are only half the equation. The other half is negative reinforcement and negative punishments. If you’re thinking, “How can a ‘reinforcement’ be negative and how can a ‘punishment’ be positive?” fear not! We were all thinking the same thing. It’s a bit confusing because, here, “positive” means “additive” and “negative” means “subtractive.”

What Are Negative Reinforcements and Negative Punishments?

If that’s too heavy, here’s an example with a cat. When your cat screams at you to feed them, that’s a positive punishment because they are influencing your behavior by adding a noxious stimulus (their caterwauling) into your environment. By the same token, your cat provides you a negative reinforcement when they stop screaming and chomp down on their food because they have subtracted that same noxious stimulus.

Two cats
2007-01-07T01:27:54-05:00 by Joe Deer

To extend the metaphor, when your cat purrs because you're scratching their ears, that’s a positive reinforcement because they’ve introduced a pleasant stimulus (their adorable rumbles) into your environment. When your cat darts out of the room because you stepped on their tail, that’s a negative punishment because they’ve taken a pleasant stimulus (themself) out of your environment.

Human Examples of Negative Reinforcement

A more human example might be me making my bed. I don’t make it because I enjoy making it. Instead, I make my bed because a messy environment is noxious and makes me feel bad. The feeling I get from having a tidy bed is a negative reinforcement.

It’s important to remember that reinforcements and punishments can be tied to unhealthy habits too. For example, when a person smokes a cigarette, the nicotine causes their brain to produce a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine makes the person feel good and creates a positive reinforcement. When the nicotine leaves the body, a drop in dopamine causes distress. Withdrawal symptoms kick in creating a negative punishment. The smoker feels compelled to smoke another cigarette to remove those symptoms and restart the cycle with another positive reinforcement. Alan Carr, the author of Easy Way to Stop Smoking, says "Smoking is like banging your head against a brick wall because it feels a bit better when you stop."

The reason this all occurred to me over in that Slack thread is because it can be really motivating to remember that negative reinforcements exist and are just as important as positive reinforcements. They’re a bit harder to notice, but it’s worth the effort to look for them and nurture your appreciation of them. Whether freshly-cleaned rooms or well-fed kittens sleeping silently in sunbeams, negative reinforcements can be a great motivating factor and are important to your health.

Some ways I negatively reinforce myself:

  • Taking my car to get an oil change so I can stop worrying about it.
  • Shaving off my beard in the summer so my face doesn't get itchy.
  • Stopping watching a show or movie that I'm not really enjoying.
  • Putting on my noise-canceling headphones while I'm working (without turning music on) to enjoy some silence.
  • Turning off Slack notifications at the end of the day to alleviate anxiety.

What about you? Think of all the ways you can remove things from your day-to-day to improve it and reward yourself.

Want to get bad things out of your life? Eliminate your boring, routine tasks with automated workflows from Zapier. Learn more and start your free two-week trial.



from The Zapier Blog http://bit.ly/2M2bBzX

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If Time-Tracking Apps Don't Work for You, Try a Productivity Journal

-
Image
Monitoring how you spend your time leads to a wealth of useful information: It can tell you what time of day you're most productive , help you create better estimates for how long tasks will take, and show you what activities you'd have to cut to focus your energy on a new idea or project. The most precise way to monitor how you spend your time is to use a time-tracking app . But these apps require a lot of overhead. You have to diligently log your hours (or make sure your app is logging them correctly) and sort your tracked time into categories. You have to pause after every task—no matter how brief—to capture time spent accurately. If tracking your time at such a granular level sounds like a punishment, but you still want insight into how and where you spend your time, consider the less menacing sibling of time-tracking apps: a productivity journal. What Is a Productivity Journal? I kept a journal as a preteen, though in those days I called it a diary. Snoopy and Woods...
Read more

The 25 Best Productivity Apps for iPhone in 2018

-
Image
The best productivity apps for iPhone make possible something that would otherwise be impossible, or they make something you need to do simpler and faster. Imagine being asked, unexpectedly, for a copy of a tax form from last year as proof of address during an important appointment that you traveled many miles to attend. In fact, it happened to me, and thankfully I had a copy of the document I needed saved to a file syncing application, which meant I could pull it up on my phone and show it to the gracious Customs and Border Protection officer who demanded to see it. If that's not productivity by way of efficiency, I don't know what is. Perhaps a more routine example is keeping track of time spent in an off-site meeting so that you can claim it as an expense later. If you have the right time-tracking mobile app, you can record the time on the spot rather than having to estimate it and remember to record it later. The use cases for productivity apps are infinite, and sometimes...
Read more

What's the difference between the Wiki and OneNote tabs in Microsoft Teams?

-
Image
It's easy, in a team chat app, for key points to get lost in the ongoing flow of conversation. That's why every channel in Microsoft Teams has a Wiki page, where you can store things like meeting notes or outline the current state of a project. You can also add a OneNote tab to every channel for similar purposes. The Wiki and OneNote tab are pretty overlapping features, so you might be wondering which one you should use. My answer, unhelpfully, is "it depends." Here's a quick overview: The Wiki is fast and simple but only works inside Teams. OneNote offers more features and can be used outside Teams. My advice: if the Wiki works for you, that's great. Use it. If you want more out of your note-taking, and the ability to reference notes outside of Teams, use OneNote. Let's go over both features with more detail, so you can choose the tool that works for you. The Wiki is fast and functional—but only exists in Teams You can probably find the Wiki in ...
Read more