Author Archives: Kerch McConlogue

Decision Making in Three Steps: Part 1

“All literature on ‘effective decision making’ can be reduced to: Look before you cross the street. The academic solution is sufficiently broad to analyze everything, and thus nothing.” So says Dale A. Duten in Quitting: Knowing when to leave… a job, a marriage, or any other unhappy spot you’re in (1980, Beaver Books Ltd., Canada.) It’s a great little book, out of print, I believe but often available at Amazon as a used book. I particularly love the mathematical formula he devised for knowing when you might be successful at quitting. I’m not talking about making the right choice, but at least making a choice that you won’t revisit over and over.

But for the actual priorities of choice, I have just three simple rules. I’ll cover them in the next couple of posts.

First I always ask, “Is there blood?” I’m talking real-red-coming-out-of-your-arm blood? Not that you think there might be blood. Neither that you imagine really bad things will happen.. but real blood.

Real blood flow must be stopped immediately. This is a first aide kind of problem. And all other activities must wait until the blood is stopped.

This is a reactive position. If you’re in a planning phase the question is better asked: “Will any babies die?” I saw this in the newspaper once. OK, not exactly that phrase but I know the woman was misquoted. The reporter wrote something like: No serious harm would be caused to small children. I know she really said no babies will die if we do this.

Of course, if actual babies will die, the decision should be obvious. If it’s not, that’s a whole different problem, in my opinion.

Go with your gut. Just decide

As an AD/HD coach, lots of my clients have trouble making decisions. So finding ways to make it easier has become pretty fascinating to me. I came across this article in News@Nature about a recent study done at the University of Amsterdam on people shopping for bigger ticket items.

Published online February 16, 2006, author Helen Pearson reports “ Studies say you should list the pros and cons, then sleep on it. … The best way to make a tough decision is to put your feet up and think about something else.”

The article goes on:

For the simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for the more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science1.

My teachers have been telling me since grade school days that I don’t use enough of my brain. It seems like a brain can only hold so much information on its front page, so to speak. So it’s comforting for me to know that the parts of my brain I’m not using right now are off doing something that I’ll be able to use later.

If you’d like to know more about what I know about making decisions, you can buy a recording of a teleclass I gave called Decision Making: Can’t You Just Make Up Your Mind? It’s part of a series of audio classes in the library at www.addclasses.com

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Dollar bills move disease?

dollarbillIn the Jan. 26, 2006 online issue of Discovery News, the article Dollars Reveal How Flu Could Spread outlined a pretty interesting fact about the spread of this year’s dreaded Avian Flu.

Flu pandemics generally spread slowly in the past. But now people travel farther and more often. So it made sense this year to fear that the Avian Flu might spread around the globe seemingly in an instant.

But that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Here’s what some German physicists are suggesting based on what they learned from the Where’s George website’s tracking of the movement of U.S. dollars.

They found that the banknotes mainly dispersed in a series of random steps over small distances, with occasional long hops, and there were long waiting times between displacements.

What emerges to replace the one-size-fits-all model is the belief that human movement, despite all its apparent randomness, can be mathematically predictable if important local parameters are factored in.

I love it when math is the answer… or at least part of it. And it is nice to be reminded that everything bad in the world won’t blow up tomorrow!

The study appears in Nature, the British weekly science journal.

Risk Takers Live Longer

The Times OnLine, the UK’s most respected newspaper, published an article in the February 18, 2006 online edition, Who dares usually wins: Risk-takers will live longer, have more friends and are less likely to get Parkinson’s.

Quoted in part:

A study published this week in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry showed that people with a strong streak of sensation seeking were less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, a disorder caused by the death of brain cells that make dopamine, a chemical that activates pleasure centres in the brain and which is involved in whether we feel a reward or motivation.

And further:

High-stimulus seekers actually drop their heart rate briefly and become more alert, which allows them to process all the information needed to stay upright on a black ski run. For the rest of us, heart rate immediately soars and our dominant thoughts are freeze or flee An appreciation of the benefits of pushing ourselves to extremes may be just what we need to fend off the rigours of ageing. “Quite the worst thing you can do is to avoid stress to either mind or body,” says Professor Mario Kyriazis, a GP specialising in anti-ageing medicine. “Ageing is due to the loss of complexity in our system and the way to boost complexity is to challenge the system. Don’t let it know what to expect if you want to live long and healthily; don ’t settle into routines.”

People who don’t know me but talk to me on the phone often think I am much younger than my 50 something age. Heck, I can’t really remember my ACTUAL age so I just claim 50. I’ll claim it ‘til I’m 60. It’s not about not wanting to get old, it’s really about not remembering the numbers.. But wait, I digress.

Some people in my family think I attract stress. Not the kind that makes it hard to manage my life, but the kind that really does a number on a routine. A plan of action that is sending that skier on the black slope to certain death, a complex organization structure that is careening out of whack, missed details in an event plan. These are the things that really put me on the jazz, as Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith used to say on the A-Team.

I can’t speak to the part about reduced Parkinson’s disease, but the rest of this sounds to me a lot like people with AD/HD: high-stimulus seekers, processing a whole situation in a flash, trying new things. I can’t say that all people with AD/HD have more friends. But I bet the ones who are most centered in themselves, the ones who know who they are and who they’re not – AD/HD and all – are more passionate about enjoying life and trying new things. People want to be with people like that.

I think it was Gail Sheehy who talked about passion, not sex, being the thing that keeps a person young. Passion keeps you looking at your world with open eyes and seeing what’s new. So, if you don’t have AD/HD, and therefore a natural bent toward seeing it almost without looking, make it a point to shake up your life. You’ll live longer. Or as they say in the movies.. Die tryin’!

Forgetful? or maybe I never learned it?

An interesting new study by a team at the University of Rochester Medical Center seems to indicate that perhaps when women think they can’t remember something, it’s really that they may never have really gotten it in the first place. “The team found a link between complaints of forgetfulness and the way middle-aged, stressed women learn or ‘encode’ new information.”

Mapstone and Weber liken the problem of encoding new information to a situation where a doctor tells a patient that something serious may be wrong and gives a lot of detail. Afterwards, the person gets home and can hardly remember what the doctor said. It’s not that the person necessarily forgot what was said; it’s more likely that they never really heard the doctor the first time, because they were so anxious and worried.

Here’s the rest of the article.

This may be the best reason to take someone with you to the doctor’s office if you’re worried about what he may say. Or why it’s a good idea to take an advocate with you to your child’s IEP meeting. It’s not an indication of your ability to speak for yourself, but might sure be a help when you are trying to remember later what went on. I wonder if there may be a further link to the ability to ask good questions of care providers when you are stressed or worried. Take advantage of the dispassionate third party when you can. That’s what friends are for!