Karen Lang

www.YourBrainPro.com

Nate Solder Patriots Number 77

Nate Solder # 77 is a Patriot Super Bowl Football Player AND  he was the #  17 first-round draft pick in 2011, started in 13 of 16 regular season games in his rookie year playing football in the NFL, allowed only three sacks in 880 snaps, and now playing in his first Super Bowl in his first career year in the NFL.  AND Nate Solder grew up in my hometown of Buena Vista, Colorado.  WOW, what a great Rookie NFL Super Bowl story.

I took the above picture of Nate Solder in the Patriot huddle on game day when the Patriot’s were in town playing the Bronco’s in Denver, Colorado. 

I would also like to share another story about Nate Solder.  Nate graduated in 2006 from Buena Vista High School and he had a classmate with a mental challenge.  Nate was one of the students who always made an effort to stop and say hello to Brandi when they would pass each other in the hallway or in class.  Someone even took a picture of Nate and Brandi when they were in high school and Brandi still keeps this picture posted on her refrigerator door at home. 

How do I know about this story?  Because I volunteer and visit with Brandi Bushnell every Friday afternoon to help her with her reading skills.  Brandi has been telling me about Nate since I met her AND before he was drafted into the NFL.  I’m thrilled Brandi gets to watch Nate Solder play football in the Super Bowl on Sunday as she is a mighty FAN. 

I have been coming to Buena Vista for years to hike in the mountains and raft on the Arkansas River and for the past two years I have been very lucky to call Buena Vista, Colorado my home.  I will also be cheering for Nate Solder on Super Bowl Sunday along with his coaches, teachers, friends, parents and the whole town of Buena Vista, Colorado!

Karen Lang

www.YourBrainPro.com

Cajal was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906.

You may view a bouquet of rosettes in Carl Schoonover’s book, Portraits of the Mind, pg 95.  I invite you to visit Schoonover’s website at www.carlschoonover.com 

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Karen Lang – Sharing information for your brain

www.YourBrainPro.com

James Dewey Watson, MD., PhD., and Author was born in 1928 and lives in Cold Springs Harbor, NY.

When I hear myself say, I’m busy, I like to think of Dr. James Dewey Watson’s bio on Wikipedia.  I have nicknamed Dr. Watson, Mr. DNA, because he (along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkings) discovered deoxyribonucleic acid commonly called DNA.  What is so remarkable is that Watson was only 25 years old when he made this discovery with Crick and Wilkins.  This is a perfect example of the success you can have when working together on a team as each of these men received a Nobel Prize Medal in 1962 for their DNA discovery.

Watson made a career in the field of genetics as a molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist.  I bet Dr. Watson gets a chuckle everytime he hears the phrase ‘Let’s get a DNA sample’ when watching CSI on TV.

I invite you to just take a look at Watson’s bio, compliments below from Wikipedia, along with his awards to give you encouragement to continue to make your own discoveries in your life and work. Remember when feel the urge to say you are too busy, just know you can accomplish much by organizing your time from the Structural part of your brain.

James D. Watson Awards and Decorations

Honorary degrees received

Professional and honorary affiliations

Selected books

• Watson, J. D. (1968). The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Atheneum.
  • Watson, J. D. (1968). Gunther S. Stent. ed. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-95075-1. (Norton Critical Editions, 1981).
• Watson, J. D.; Baker, T. A.; Bell, S. P.; Gann, A.; Levine, M.; Losick, R. (2003). Molecular Biology of the Gene (5th ed.). New York: Benjamin Cummings. ISBN 0-8053-4635-X.
• Watson, J. D. (2002). Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-41283-2. OCLC 47716375.
• Watson, J. D.; Berry, A. (2003). DNA: The Secret of Life. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-41546-7.
• Watson, J.D. (2007). Avoid Boring People and Other Lessons from a Life in Science. New York: Random House. p. 366. ISBN 978-0-375-41284-4.

See also

• Full genome sequencing
• History of molecular biology
• History of RNA biology
• List of RNA biologists
• Predictive medicine
• Behavioral genetics

Seven Attributes Defined

1. Analytical thinking happens in the left hemisphere of the brain and is essential to making more objective, less biased decisions. As a leader, this is the function that helps you look at existing research and data, examine options, and question what will or will not work.

2. Structural thinking also takes place in the left part of the brain and ensures that you come up with a plan that is doable. It is the methodical, sequential process that helps maximize results, and minimize pitfalls.

3. Social thinking is a right-brain tendency that allows a leader to listen, build successful teams, relate to people, and develop and inspire others.

4. Conceptual thinking is right-brain, visionary thinking that jumpstarts innovation. Ideas that connect the dots and come out of left field can invigorate your organization.

5. Expressiveness is a behavior style you use to communicate your ideas. It affects how you relate to people and sets the course for the way you speak with others.

6. Assertiveness is a behavior style you use to put your ideas to work. An effective leader is assertive enough to make things happen, but not so assertive that others are stymied.

7. Flexibility is a behavior style you bring to the way you get things done. It determines not only your openness to other points of view, but also your ability to thrive in undefined (or very defined) situations.

Visit www.YourBrainPro.com to learn more about your brain by working with Karen Lang, Your Brain Pro

Profiting from the Golden Rule

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Fred Reichheld

The following post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.

Listen in on MBA classes and corporate conferences and you will hear a lot of talk about the need for inspiring missions, ethical behavior and transcendent purpose. And judging from the “core values” statements in most annual reports, the vast majority of business leaders want their companies to grow by enriching the lives of their customers and employees.

And yet, this can often sound like so much fluff in the real business world. Our system of financial accounting rewards quarterly profits, but struggles mightily to place a value on ethical behavior. Even accounting rules specifically dealing with reputation — goodwill and intangible assets — are subject to frequent rule changes and endless debate.

Perhaps the accountants are just overcomplicating a basic idea. Reputation is earned through the simple, age-old concept of the Golden Rule: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. Each time you live up to the Golden Rule, your reputation is enhanced; each time you fail, it is diminished. And the mathematics of long-term financial success — revenues, profits, cash flow — square perfectly with this scorecard.

We all want to be treated with honor and respect in ways, large and small, that enrich our lives. Such experiences not only make us happy, we want to share them with people we care about. By recommending an experience, we’re signaling our trust that our friends will be treated similarly. Recommendations also signal to businesses how customers view their relationship with the company. When customers feel so well treated that they enthusiastically recommend a company to friends, they are promoters. When treated so badly they recommend avoiding the company, they are detractors. Both have direct and measurable economic consequences.

This is the concept at the heart of the Net Promoter system, which my colleague Rob Markey and I describe in our book, published last month. The Net Promoter system focuses the entire organization on generating promoters, who buy more, stay longer, refer friends and even provide useful feedback and ideas. It also helps minimize the number of costly detractors. A recent research project we conducted found that across multiple industries, the company with the leading Net Promoter score typically grew more than twice as fast as their competitors.

That should keep the accountants happy. But for companies, executives and employees, there’s also an inspirational dimension: the system provides them with a practical way to measure how consistently they treat people right. You might call it the Golden Ruler.

That’s how Walt Bettinger, chief executive of Charles Schwab, describes his company’s Net Promoter system when recommending it to other CEOs:

“First, I ask them if they believe in the importance of the Golden Rule — that ancient moral and ethical principle that we should treat people the way we would want to be treated. They always nod emphatically and say, ‘Yes, of course.’ So then I ask them what they do to measure how consistently they and their organization are living the Golden Rule each day. Their typical response: ‘Well, it would be great if we could measure it, but there’s no practical way to do that.’ To which I reply that there most certainly is a way. In fact, at Schwab, we have been using the Net Promoter System to measure our Golden Rule compliance for more than five years, and it works brilliantly. Net Promoter is the first screen I open when I boot up my computer each morning. It lets me know for each part of our company how we are performing in living up to our core values. By making NPS a top priority, we have become a better company — not just in terms of living our core values, but also in terms of profitable growth.”

Bettinger is not alone. CEO Dan Cathy explains the winning strategy at Chick-fil-A in similar terms: “We strive to deliver something for which there is unlimited demand–being treated with honor and respect. There seems to be a very limited supply of that in today’s world.”

These CEOs have not discovered a new concept: in one form or another, the Golden Rule is a pillar of most of the world’s great religions and it also lies at the heart of secular ethics. Business ethicists Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria describe the Golden Rule as an expression of the basic human instinct to bond with others.

The challenge executives face is how to put the Golden Rule into practice, especially when the lingua franca of financial accounting pushes the business to focus on short-term profits. “[M]orals are such a central and pervasive aspect of human life that we badly need a scientific way of understanding them,” Lawrence and Nohria write.

As CEOs Bettinger and Cathy have discovered, a Net Promoter system provides one framework to do that. When properly installed and operated, it delivers financial growth. But it also shows that those MBA class discussions and annual report rhetoric aren’t just fluff. If you build a way to measure it, you’ll find that it really does pay to be good.

Thank you to our blog guest, Fred Reichheld, Author of The Ultimate Question and The Ultimate Question 2.0 for sharing some of his profitable words with us today.

Karen Lang, Owner and Founder, Your Brain Pro, LLC

www.YourBrainPro.com

Playing Golf with Your Brain in Mind

Congratulations to my friend Kelvin Redd and I invite you to check out his video here:

And, below is a video from his competition…

And, one last video for your entertainment viewing more about information about Emergenetics and Your Brain…

To learn more about YOUR BRAIN in invite you to visit my website at www.YourBrainPro.com

Warmly,

Karen Lang, Your Brain Pro

How to Present Like Steve Jobs: 10 Tips for More Effective Presentations by Carmine Gallo

Steve Jobs is a masterful presenter, but he wasn’t always. Presenting is learned, just like typing or any other business skill. What makes Jobs so good? Communications expert Carmine Gallo has a few ideas.

In a recent Webinar sponsored by GoToMeeting Corporate, Gallo shared 10 presentation tips he learned from observing Jobs.

1.    Make a plan on paper. Jobs’ presentations are planned out like movies, with story development and climaxes.

2.    Set the theme. MacWorld 2008′s theme was, “There’s something in the air” – which built anticipation for the unveiling of the new MacBook Air™, but didn’t give away the surprise.

3.    Show enthusiasm! Jobs shows genuine pride and excitement as he discusses Apple achievements, which inspires his audiences.

4.    Provide a roadmap. Jobs gives his audiences an agenda to follow to help them remember his main points.

5.    Make numbers meaningful. “Enough memory for 6 movies” is more impressive and easier to understand than “X number of gigabytes.”

6.    Deliver a Spielberg moment. When Jobs pulls the MacBook Air out of the manila envelope, you know that’s the climax of his talk, because Jobs created such drama around it.

7.    Keep slides simple. One bold image and very little text is enough for Jobs, and enough for the audience as well.

8.    Sell the benefit (not the features). People care about what they can do, not what the product can do.

9.    Rehearse. Jobs’ delivery seems effortless because he practices, out loud, for days before his event.

10.  Don’t sweat the small stuff! Panicking just draws attention to a problem. When something goes wrong with a video, Jobs makes a joke and moves on.

I invite you to visit communications expert Carmine Gallo’s website at  www.gallocommunications.com

Karen Lang

Founder, Your Brain Pro