Ten Things Fathers Can Teach Their Daughters

I’m doing some volunteer work for Children of the Street Society, which fights child exploitation by educating children, parents, police, teachers and others. So I got to thinking, what I could do at home, every day, to reinforce these teachings. So I made this list after giving it a little bit of thought.

It’s your job as a father to make sure your little girl doesn’t get exploited.

Here’s 10 things you can teach your daughter that’ll reduce the risk of exploitation:

1.  Father is a verb. I will ‘father’ you by loving you unconditionally and forever.
2. You are smart. I will teach you all I can, and help you learn from your mistakes.
3. You are beautiful. Just the way you are. Full stop. Period. No Exceptions.
4. You are capable. Women before you built a launch pad for your unlimited adventures.
5. You are priceless. What makes you “you” cannot be bought for any price.
6. You have authority. The security of your body is not debatable. No means No.
7. There is right and wrong. I will teach you the difference, and how to respond.
8. You are responsible. Don’t let alcohol or drugs reduce your ability to act responsibly.
9. Life is a journey. Don’t rush or you’ll miss important things.
10. Family is forever. You are an extension of me, so I am always with you.

And Dads, please remember not to be scared. You might not have had a daughter before, but she’s never been one before either.  You don’t have to be perfect, just persistent. She might not always like you for it, but in the long run she’ll love you for it.

Seven daily essential mental activities

Seven daily essential mental activities to optimize brain matter and create well-being

Focus Time	When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, we take on challenges that make deep connections in the brain.
Play Time	When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, we help make new connections in the brain.
Connecting Time	When we connect with other people, ideally in person, and when we take time to appreciate our connection to the natural world around us, we activate and reinforce the brain’s relational circuitry.
Physical Time	When we move our bodies, especially aerobically, we strengthen the brain in many ways.
Time In	When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings and thoughts, we help to better integrate the brain.
Down Time	When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, we help the brain recharge.
Sleep Time	When we give the brain the rest it needs, we consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day.

 

The Healthy Mind Platter Overview

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently replaced its food pyramid with a needed revision, a “choose my plate” pictorial example of a dish of food groups to remind us of what a daily diet should consist of to optimize physical health. What would be the equivalent of a recommended daily diet for a healthy mind?

With an obesity epidemic rampant in the US, this change is welcome and hopefully will inspire people to be aware of how they compose their day’s food intake. Our mind, embodied in our extended neural circuitry and embedded in our connections to others and even the way we relate to our planet, is also in need of careful attention to establish and maintain mental health. Poverty, hunger, and homelessness threaten the essential needs of many throughout the world.  War and natural disasters fill many lives with fear and suffering. And even for individuals in more stable environments, modern life can be filled with an overwhelming focus on the outer world and an experience of being isolated from meaningful connections with others. Multi-tasking with its fragmented attention and the sense of becoming overwhelmed with information overload frequently fracture a sense of wholeness. In each of these conditions, the embodied and socially embedded requirements for a healthy mind are not being created in daily life throughout the world. Many are deficient in a daily regimen necessary for mental well-being.

So what would be included in The Healthy Mind Platter? In the field of interpersonal neurobiology, we define a core aspect of the mind and also propose that a healthy mind emerges from a process called “integration”— the linkage of different components of a system. That system can be, for example, the body as we connect upper and lower regions to one another. Integration can also include how we connect with others in a family or a community, honoring differences and promoting compassionate linkages with each other. If we embrace interpersonal neurobiology’s proposed definition of a key facet of mind as an embodied and relationally embedded process that regulates energy and information flow, how can we make a practical definition of mental habits that can help people with their diet of “daily essential mental nutrients”? How can we use the focus of attention to strengthen integration in our bodies and in our relationships on a daily basis?  What would the fundamental components of such a health-promoting daily regimen of mental activities be?

To address these questions, my friend and colleague, David Rock, a leader in the organizational consulting world, and I got together and created what we’re calling The Healthy Mind Platter. Here is how we describe the elements of this plan for a healthy mind.

The Healthy Mind Platter has seven daily essential mental activities necessary for optimum mental health. These seven daily activities make up the full set of “mental nutrients” that your brain and relationships need to function at their best. By engaging every day in each of these servings, you promote integration in your life and enable your brain to coordinate and balance its activities. These essential mental activities strengthen your brain’s internal connections and your connections with other people and the world around you.

We’re not suggesting specific amounts of time for this recipe for a healthy mind, as each individual is different, and our needs change over time too. The point is to become aware of the full spectrum of essential mental activities, and as with essential nutrients, make sure that at least every day we are bringing the right ingredients into our mental diet, even if for just a bit of time. Just as you wouldn’t eat only pizza every day for days on end, we shouldn’t just live on focus time alone with little time for sleep. The key is balancing the day with each of these essential mental activities. Mental wellness is all about reinforcing our connections with others and the world around us; and it is also about strengthening the connections within the brain itself.  When we vary the focus of attention with this spectrum of mental activities, we give the brain lots of opportunities to develop in different ways.

One way to use the platter idea is to map out an average day and see what amounts of time you spend in each essential mental activity. Like a balanced diet, there are many combinations that can work well.

In short, it is important to eat well, and we applaud the new healthy eating plate. As a society we are sorely lacking in good information about what it takes to have a healthy mind. Since the mind is both embodied and embedded in our connections with others and our environment—both natural and cultural—these seven essential times help strengthen our internal and relational connections. And since the brain is continually changing in response to how we focus attention, we can use our awareness in ways that involve the body and our connections to create a healthy mind across the lifespan!  We hope that The Healthy Mind Platter creates an appetite for increasing awareness of how to nourish our mental well-being each day too.­­

 

The Healthy Mind Platter was created by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute and Clinical Professor at the UCLA School of Medicine in collaboration with Dr. David Rock, Executive Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute.

[This is brilliant, which I why I'm posting it here; so I never lose it]

What To Do With Your Hood-Rat Employee

Acme Glass Company (Hope Not)

People think its not fair that you can get fired for actions outside the workplace. This article is not for those people. This article is for the business owner who comes in on Monday morning only to find that one of her hood-rat employees is on the front page of the newspaper rioting in a company shirt. Not exactly the coverage your company was looking for. Do you fire them? Here’s some things to consider:

1.Is the misconduct illegal and proven in a court of law? No matter how bad it looks, each employee deserves their day in court. Later on in this article, I’ll get to what you can do in the meantime.

2.  Is there a connection between the misconduct outside the workplace and this person’s role in the company? Did they use any company assets to misbehave? Did they damage company property or assault company employees, patrons or vendors?

3. Is there a fundamental effect this misconduct might have on the workplace or working relationship with this employee? Did they burn an effigy of the boss in the town square? Did they engage in violence targeted at a protected group prevalent in your workplace?

4. Is this employee in a position of trust or prominence that is undermined by their misconduct? Did your head cashier get caught shoplifting? Did your head of security get caught stalking? Has your head of IT been identified as “the masked bomber”?

5.  Did they illegitimately present themselves as acting as a representative of the company? Did they wear their company work shirt to the riot?

Here’s what to do if you want to discipline or fire them:

1.  Talk to your HR expert or legal counsel. If none is available, call the agency in charge of applicable labour law. They can at least tell you what part of the law to read, but should not give you advice on what to do.

2.  Follow you internal procedures. If you have a company disciplinary policy, follow it.

3. Carefully consider your actions and their impact on the employee and the company. Compassion is a virtue, but so is consideration for your other employees, who will be watching.

4.  Remember in most jurisdictions and for most non-union jobs, so long as appropriate notice and/or compensation is made, no advance notice of termination is necessary. No reason need be given in many cases, just whatever required paper work and a severance check or other due compensation.

In the meantime, if you have a hood-rat employee you’d rather not have around, but who is an “unindicted co-conspirator” you might consider the following:

1.  Again, refer to your disciplinary policies. Follow them. Again, consult legal counsel or HR if you can.

2. Depending on the employee and how critical they are to the day to day operations of the company, it might be in the best interests of both the employee and company if he/she took a few days off. If they have unused leave, you might encourage them to take it.

3. Depending on how public or widely known within the company the misconduct is, you might want to address it. “Chris has found himself in a situation none of us would wish for ourselves. This company believes in both personal freedom and personal responsibility, and until this situation is judged by the authorities……”

How to deal with the public:

1.  No comment won’t get you very far. Start with “we will not discuss individual personnel matters publicly”. Then try “we will address this matter according to the terms of our employment agreement (or company policies).”

2. Be clear, concise and as transparent as you can be without commenting specifically on your employee or their actions. It is never wise to do so, and particularly so in a situation likely charged with emotion and opinion. You cannot win if you go down that road.

3. Cite your company’s core beliefs and fairness in dealing with all employees. Express sympathy and compassion to those effected. Lay no blame, condemn no one.

Wildcard situations:

1.  Each employee and each situation is different. Be flexible.

2. Respond to safety concerns. If there is a threat to public or workplace safety if this person is on the job, or not promptly dealt with internally, then immediate action is critical.

3. Keystone support is critical. If you are at risk to lose a key staffer, vendor, or customer; act faster than perhaps you might otherwise.

4. Stay abreast of your legal responsibilities. If you have a situation that requires notification of the authorities, or regulatory issues, by all means, take care of that first.

Above all, act with appropriate force. Make sure your response is proportional to the misconduct and effect on the company.

You have an opportunity to act with fairness and wisdom, make good use of that opportunity.

Something My Daddy Taught Me

I spent most of my life in and around Chicago. I thought about it the other day and realized that 90% of my life has been spend within 100 miles of The Loop.  It was, if not my hometown, the touchstone for my youth, the place to which everything was compared.

And Chicago is a tough city.

As a kid, I may at times have fallen in with a bad crowd, or made some bad decisions regarding my friends. It was at one of these times that my father gave me a piece of advice.

Miraculously, I seemed to have paid attention and taken it to heart.

Now I’ll share it with you, because it goes to the heart of my attitude about the punishment of the rioters in Vancouver.

Dad said, “When there’s trouble on the block, and the police come rolling up on you and your friends on the corner, they’re not going to care that you weren’t the one in the group causing trouble, you’re going downtown. If you were there, you are responsible. If you did nothing, you are responsible. If you didn’t stop it, you are responsible.  When the trouble comes down, you have two choices: get out or stop it. Otherwise you are responsible.”

A simple solution, and one that has served me well.  Subtle? No. Nuanced? No. Effective? Yes.

Some of my friends ended up in prison. Some are dead.

Me? I’m not brave and I claim no moral high ground. But my Dad’s advice has served me very well on many occasions.

The best way to avoid trouble is to not be there when it comes-a-knockin’.

And I do believe that my father was passing on wisdom from his father, who saw first-hand what happens when good men do nothing in the face of evil:  If you see a wrong being committed and do nothing, you are just as guilty as those who did the deed.

My grandfather had a right to live in a black and white world. For him, you either fought evil or were consumed by it.

There were no innocent bystanders in my grandfather’s world. Just villians, victims, and the righteous.
In my grandfather’s world there was only one choice when trouble came – fight.

For my dad, there were two options – fight or flight. Still not innocent bystanders, but at least he allowed for witnesses to flee.

And in my generation, I’m not prepared to add “pose for picture” to the list of choices. There will be no terror tourists in my family, no vandal videographers, no poseur protesters.

As for me and mine: If you see wrong being done you have two choices: try and stop it; or GTFO.

A Defense of Crowdsourced Surveillance

In Canada there is no crime of misprision, that is the failure to report a crime of which you have witnessed. With certain exceptions, there is no affirmative duty to report a criminal to police.  However, in the aftermath of crimes against an individual and crimes against property many (including me) have called for active efforts by the online community to identify and report criminals to police.

I’ve dubbed such a group a “tweetgang”, which I define as any group organized by twitter for real world action. As such, a “tweetgang” could also be used to describe a group organized to clean up a park. In the case of the Vancouver riots however, it is invoked as an online group encouraged to assist police in the identification of criminals responsible for the destruction caused by the riots.

Alexandra Samuel in the Harvard Business Review was quite eloquent in her warning against what she called citizen surveillance: “After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance“

“But it’s one thing to take pictures as part of the process of telling your story, or as part of your (paid or unpaid) work as a citizen journalist. It’s another thing entirely to take and post pictures and videos with the explicit intention of identifying illegal (or potentially illegal) activity. At that moment you are no longer engaging in citizen journalism; you’re engaging in citizen surveillance.”

I don’t think the type of reporting that is going on can be considered “citizen surveillance” for the following reasons:

Surveillance implies stealth, infiltration, coercion or the passive-aggressive force of the state channeled through informants, applied against a person or group acting in a private, rights-protected, subversive, or criminal manner.

- If you are present at a crime, you are not conducting surveillance, you are a witness.
- There was no infiltration of the criminal element, witnesses happened to be in the area, or arrived during the crime, drawn by curiosity.
- There was no coercion by the witnesses of the criminals involved. The witnesses were bystanders.
- There was no application of the state monopoly on violence via these witnesses. The criminals were clearly not intimidated.
- To seek out and obtain evidence of a crime and forward it to police is not operating as an informant unless there is some           personal gain.

A witness reporting a crime or a crowd pointing out a criminal is not surveillance and not informing – it is citizenship.

The Canadian Oath of Citizenship states in part:
… that I will faithfully
observe the laws of Canada
and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

According to the Canadian government, those duties include:
- understanding and obeying Canadian laws
- helping others in the community
- eliminating discrimination and injustice
I’d say being able to identify when a crime is being committed is “understanding Canadian laws”, that identifying the criminals would directly “help others in the community” who suffered at the hands of those criminals, and reporting this information to the police might go pretty far in “eliminating discrimination and injustice”.

Samuel then goes on to list some specific actions she would hate to see:

“I am much less comfortable when I think about other ways that crowdsourced surveillance has been or might be put to use: By pro-life demonstrators posting photos of women going into clinics that provide abortions. By informants in authoritarian states tracking posts and tweets critical of the government. By employers that scan Facebook to see which of their employees have been tagged in photos on Pride Day or 4/20.“

All these are good examples of potentially dubious uses of social media, but Samuel overlooks some things and attempts to create an Avalon of purity for social media that simply does not, never did, and cannot exist.

Pro-life demonstrators already post photos of women going into clinics. While this is dubious, it is not the posting of the photo that is problematic, but the inciting of violence towards those pictured which is unacceptable.

It is a false analogy to compare informants of a repressive government trolling the social media sphere or online communications on behalf of the state and the witnessing of a public crime against persons or property.

And as for employers scanning Facebook looking for Pride Day or 4/20 celebrants; Samuel is deluded if she thinks this does not currently occur.  This is a good analogy to the abortion clinic, except that the celebrants most likely posted their information to share online.  And so long as the employer takes no action contrary to labor law, there is nothing illegal in the act of seeing what your employees are up to in their free time.

Bosses get bored on Facebook late at night too, to suggest that their employees online profiles are off-limits seems to me to be overly pro-active in the area of privacy protection.

One could also argue that despite the poor history of providing security to their customers, Facebook and other online sites do provide opportunities for a person to shield a good deal of their public actions from unwanted review. I’d suggest, finally, if you don’t want your boss to see your picture at Pride Day or 4/20, take care not to post any photos of yourself, and take reasonable precautions against others doing so.

Samuel’s extensive writing may in fact provide you with ample direction in these areas.

Moreover, Samuel appears to desire a fencing off of social media for the uses already ascribed to all other forms of media, namely the dissemination of information and opinion accessible to both public (government) and private (individual) use. Would she suggest that in the 1920′s the new technology of radio not be monitored by the police, or that they not read websites and blogs for indications of criminal activity?  Why not then Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube?

I see great comparison between the use of social media and previous means of communication within and between communities in warning of, sharing information about, and identifying criminals at work in the area.  Is it OK for me to call my friends, but not OK to use twitter to tell them to help catch a vandal? Is it OK for me to walk door to door to ask for assistance in finding the thieves breaking into houses, but not OK to post such a request on Facebook?

Samuel goes on to imply that users of social media hold a special place as citizens, a community apart it seems:

Social media users need to decide whether surveillance is going to be part of our collective mission and culture online. We need to distinguish between the opportunity (and perhaps even responsibility) that comes with widespread ownership of camera phones, and the decision to post what we snap or film… 

But passing along the odd photo isn’t the same as turning yourself into a security camera. And it’s certainly not the same as tweeting, Facebooking or blogging your way to a comprehensive portfolio of public crimes and misdemeanours.

So does she think that as users of social media that we form a collective, more so than say, readers of the local paper, or users of the telephone?  And while certainly there is an ethical, legal and moral decision that must be made to distinguish between what is possible to capture and what is possible to share publicly or with authorities, I don’t think that it is the same decision as that which leads one to serve as an agent of the state.

And I wonder, since Samuel seems uncomfortable with the use of social media to create a “comprehensive portfolio of public crimes and misdemeanours” how she feels about those same tools being put to use to uncover crimes of far greater significance, or those committed by the state itself.  Is she equally uncomfortable with Kris Krug’s efforts to document the crimes and misdemeanors related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or my efforts to document the crime of human trafficking on my own (separate) site?

Samuel closes with a statement I mostly agree with:

What social media is for — or what it can be for, if we use it to its fullest potential — is to create community. And there is nothing that will erode community faster, both online and off, than creating a society of mutual surveillance.

I might argue that a community will be eroded faster by discrimination and injustice, but what I think Samuelson unfairly equates are the actions of citizens to maintain their community using the newest means of communication, and the cold hand of a state security apparatus to which these new technologies have shown in recent history to be remarkably resistant.

Popular Local Blogger Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604) repeated the call from authorities to assist in the identification of rioters:

How To Help

I encourage you to embrace this call to citizenship in action and maintain your community both online and in real life by using the technology you have available to you to identify and report the criminals responsible for the June 15th riots in Vancouver.

UPDATE:  A fantastic article by Christopher on Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets “Vancouver’s Human Flesh Search Engine” adds great nuance to this conversation and it worth a read.  I disagree, but have more things to think about based on his excellent points.

Tao of Management: Verse Nine

Can Taoism, a philosophy over 2,000 years old, be applied to 21st Century management issues? This series examines the verses of the Tao Te Ching and attempts to translate them into modern management advice. Today we examine “Enough is Enough”.

Verse IX

As for holding to fullness,

Far better were it to stop in time!

Keep on beating and sharpening a sword,
And the edge cannot be preserved for long.

Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can no longer be guarded.

Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.

Here is the Way of Heaven:
When you have done your work, retire!

My Interpretation:

Sometimes enough is enough
Know when to stop and enjoy.

Keep on planning and measuring
and your plan will be useless.

Hoard your assets, whatever they may be
And you’ll make yourself a ripe target.

Set yourself up as a “guru” or an “industry leader”
And the world will come gunning for you.

There is a “Middle Way” that leads to success:
Do your work well, and when you have, enjoy it.

Hiatus

Sorry, I’ve not posted recently, but I’ve nothing interesting to add.