Colorado Animal Welfare Conference Session

Sticky Frames: Why Negatives Lodge in the Mind and What To Do About It

General Session

We’ve all been there: a single bad experience in the morning lodges in our minds and it’s impossible to shake—even if the rest of the day brings good experiences.  This talk explores why it’s so easy to get stuck in negatives and how to get unstuck.  Drawing from social science research, this talk explains why it is significantly more difficult to shift from negative to positive thinking than vice versa.  Particularly relevant for people in the area of animal welfare where negative experiences are all too common, this talk offers concrete tips for recasting our thinking in a positive direction.

Leadership

Attention: Our Most Precious Resource

Of all the resources in our lives, our attention is the most precious. If we could just spread our attention proportionally across all the things that need attention in our lives, we’d probably solve problems better, drop fewer balls, and maybe even be happier and more relaxed. But that’s not the way the human brain works. Left unchecked, we tend to flit from one crisis to the next, always playing defense. This talk explains the underlying problem of “disproportionate information processing” and how it plagues both individual people and organizational systems. Relevant for anyone seeking a better way of spending their own attention budget or that of their organization, this talk offers concrete tips for macro-level attention allocation and corresponding day-to-day time management