You’re More Resilient Than You Give Yourself Credit For

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In my role as a professor at the Brandeis International Business School, I teach a course each fall about acting outside your comfort zone. Each student in the class chooses a behavior outside their comfort zone to work on. For some, it’s public speaking; for others, it’s networking, making small talk with strangers, or being assertive. Students have to go to actual networking events or give speeches in front of real audiences. After the fact, they compile a diary about their experiences, and we discuss and debrief as a class.

As you can imagine, it’s a pretty terrifying experience for most of them. One of my students, an Indian MBA learning to make small talk with strangers, described it like this: “The nervousness, anxiety, thumping heartbeats, and panic attacks I got before the event were similar to if someone asked me to walk on a tightrope.” She’s not alone. For many of my students it’s terrifying to step outside their comfort zones in these consequential situations — and if you think about it, that’s completely natural. Many of us feel similarly in situations outside our comfort zones, so much so that we often avoid these types of situations altogether.Continued here

How to Work for a Boss Who Has Unrealistic Expectations

It can be frustrating to work with a boss who has unrealistic expectations. Instead of just caving in or deciding it’s time to update your resume, there are a few approaches you can try to preserve your sanity and forge a stronger relationship with your boss. First, calm yourself so you can gather your thoughts and take measured, appropriate action, rather than reacting impulsively. You might try grounding techniques (also known as anchoring), which bring the overly reactive mind back to the body. Then, keep in mind that your boss and you presumably have shared goals. Showing that you’re on the same page may give you the leeway to explain some of the practical realities. You can acknowledge the requests without labeling them as unrealistic. Check to be sure you understand and are delivering on what your boss actually wants. Ask questions and lay out iterative plans that you feel are realistic. You might say something like, “Take a look at these scenarios, and let me know which aspects match your sense of things, and then I can build them out.” This approach can feel time-consuming, but it keeps you from straying far off-base and fosters a sense of partnership that will help you develop trust for the future.

Whether your manager is a front-line supervisor or the CEO, every leader occasionally has unrealistic expectations. But some bosses are unrealistic most of the time. They don’t take into account the facts on the ground, or they habitually refer to their past experiences at other companies rather than to the people and events in the current organization, or perhaps they report to someone who’s even more aggressive or overly optimistic than they are.

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A new book explains the intellectual legacy of four women

The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times. By Wolfram Eilenberger. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Penguin Press; 400 pages; $32. Allen Lane; £25

In February 1933 the Reichstag, home of Germany’s parliament, caught fire. The country’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, claimed arson and used it as an excuse to revoke civil liberties. For 26-year-old Hannah Arendt, toiling in an archive to collect “everyday anti-Semitic expressions”, Hitler’s reaction demonstrated the ruthlessness of totalitarianism. Soon she was interrogated by the secret police—an experience that catalysed a long career as a scholarly observer of persecution and mob rule.

Arendt is one of four women whose lives and thoughts Wolfram Eilenberger, a philosopher, recounts in this lively book, which spans the turbulent years from 1933 to 1943 (when Hitler was staring down defeat). The others are Simone de Beauvoir, a pioneering feminist; Simone Weil, a trade-union activist who combined mysticism with a yen for social justice; and Ayn Rand, a Russia-born critic of communism who immigrated to America and later shaped the doctrine of libertarianism (although she did not identify with it).

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