Notes about Quiet Leadership by David Rock, Part One

I’m finally reading Quiet Leadership by David Rock, which has popped up in many situations lately.

End of part one in the book proposed to write down some things that I have learned so far, to “cajole the delicate new wiring into hard wiring; to ensure an insight becomes not just a good idea but a part of who we are”. So this blog post is about my highlights from the book, not so much of a concise summary. Blogging about this happens to also enforce the habit that I’m hoping to develop, which is, well, blogging more about the stuff that I think about.

Now to the highlights:

• The way to develop a habit of something is to do and think about this new stuff enough in order to make it a habit. I.e. spend energy to it.
• It’s nearly impossible to undo old wirings in the brains; it’s easy to create new wiring in the brains.
• Positive feedback is essential in supporting the new habits.
• “People don’t need to be managed, they need to be unleashed.” – Richard Florida
• Professional athletes actually think less about their actions consciously than amateurs, even though one might think it’s another way around. They have developed this by practicing also their brain through the physical exercise. To me, this raises two separate thoughts:

1. Developing more and more complex tasks to hardwired, automatic actions frees the conscious mind to think about something else, like even more complex actions.
2. This has relations to intuitive decision making and for example Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; people should trust also their instincts and intuition as the brain might know something we don’t consciously know. This is something to study more.

• When external realities change, people’s internal realities don’t often change as quickly.
• Two different people can see the same situation totally differently.
• Mental map can be out-of-date, and it might be valuable just to understand this.
• Brains are good for creating connections even where they don’t exist, to enforce our own perceptions. This might be very restrictive, even if the connections are actually there. Like imagining some disease that you might have, thinking about all possible symptoms that go along with it and searching for them in yourself.

So, lot of good stuff so far, albeit a bit miscellaneously. Hopefully at least part of it sticks to my brain, too!