Newsletter - Prolonged Focus, Rewards, and the Brain

Ideas To Capitalize On For Your Cross-Country Trip

Welcome to the latest copy of our newsletter - Skills for the Future of Work. As ever, thanks for spending your time with us each week. You might have noticed the weather is with you a day earlier this week! Expect to see us each Thursday from now on.

Everything else is the same - a tip, an insight, and our favorite new thing. So dive in and see what's in store!

The Tip - Virtual Flights for Prolonged Focus

A few weeks we spoke about a virtual commute - well, here's an idea we came up with on a cross-country trip called a Virtual Flight. We've tested it on some willing BillionMinds volunteers, and guess what, it works! You can use this any time you want to need to be focused for a longer period - and you don't even have to go through security beforehand!

Check out the video below to discover what a Virtual Flight is, and how to make it work well for you.

The Insight - About Rewards

If you are a dog owner, you probably have a deep understanding of how powerful rewards can be. The promise of a treat, or play can persuade them to do just about anything. But not only that, rewards are hugely helpful in training the future behaviors of your dog.

In the workplace, rewards are used extensively as well, with employers using money, recognition, growth opportunities, and time off as ways of rewarding employees.

Over the past few months, we've been looking into these rewards to understand what works well and what doesn't. As you might expect, different rewards work very differently for different employees. As an example, some employees love public recognition, others are embarrassed by it.

But our most interesting finding was in how we reward ourselves. In our interviews with BillionMinders, we found almost everyone understood that rewards are powerful motivators, but only a tiny subset of users actively USED self-created rewards consciously to try and improve their performance.

Not using rewards on yourself is like trying to be effective with one hand tied behind your back, so we suggest you fix that. Here are three recommendations on how to do it well.

1) Find the types of rewards that will resonate well with you and have a combination of smaller and larger meaningful rewards available to you. These will be different for different people, but clues could be rewards you have received from others you have particularly appreciated.

2) Reward yourself more for process than results. If things work out unexpectedly well that is reward in itself, but when you do great work but things don't work out so great, that might be when you need an extra reward.

3) Don't forget peer rewards. I.e. when a colleague does something you really appreciate, make sure that you do something to acknowledge it. Now that might not sound like a reward for yourself, but actually reserch shows that rewarding a peer has a strong positive effect on the giver as well as the receiver.

So, next time you are struggling for motivation, remember, rewards are not something to passivley wait for, they are a powerful tool you can use to help you every day.

Our Favourite New Thing

As some of you will know, one of the reasons WHY rewards are so powerful is that they are associated with systems in our brains that cause us to seek out specific behaviors and substances. These systems can cause us to do amazing new things, and bond effectively with others, but they can also lead to addiction and destructive behaviors. Figuring out how to work with these systems at work in our brains can be incredibly effective.

In the most recent episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Rob Malenka discusses how our reward circuits drive our choices. As with all Huberman Lab podcasts, it's very long, but we'd highly recommend it for anyone that wants to get into the science of this stuff.

About Us

BillionMinds brings you this newsletter each and every week. But that’s not all we do. We also help employees and managers in companies around the world embed key soft skills to thrive in the modern workplace and get certified in those skills. Each of our Learn/Do experiences is less than 10 minutes a day and you can see meaningful change within two weeks.

We work with both companies and individual employees. Certification programs start at $200 and we provide discounts for those seeking work, alongside the option for current users to nominate low/no-income people to access the program for FREE. For more information, visit us here.