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How to Write a Win Sheet, Tools for Better Thinking, Dream Recall and Creativity, and More
Bring Ambition Newsletter - June 16, 2022
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The Bring Ambition Newsletter is like having a personal executive coach in your inbox every 2 weeks. You’ll receive 3-5 quick bulletpoints (~3 min. read) related to professional development, peak performance psychology, leadership, productivity, and much more.
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1.) New Article: How to Write a “Win Sheet”
https://www.bringambition.com/post/win-sheet. People have a hard time advocating for themselves and promoting their wins at work. They often equate it to being braggadocious or “political.” Instead, hope is their only strategy: they hope others notice their great work, they hope senior stakeholders do the advertising for them.
Unfortunately, it seldom happens that way. (As director James Cameron once said, “Hope is not a strategy.”) As a result, this leaves people disappointed, disengaged, and inadequately recognized and rewarded.
The first step to “working out loud” and getting the recognition you deserve is regularly tracking your accomplishments, both large and small. A “Win Sheet” is a running document where you continuously track your positive impact at work. It helps you remember and celebrate your “wins,” and makes it easier to promote your work product to the right people. It also helps you prepare for important performance discussions (and many of us are getting ready for midyear reviews as we speak!)
Our new article explores the benefits of maintaining a Win Sheet, how to do it, and some tips and best practices to keep in mind. This small habit can have an outsized impact on your career development and only takes a few minutes per week.
2.) Fascinating new research on dream recall and creativity
https://www.psypost.org/2022/05/heightened-dream-recall-ability-linked-to-increased-creativity-and-functional-brain-connectivity-63139. Here’s an article summarizing interesting research published earlier this year — it suggests that individuals who can more readily recall dreams tend to be more creative and exhibit “increased functional connectivity within the default mode network.”
With these findings in mind, is it too much of a stretch to wonder how this can be used to our advantage? Could strategies for improving dream recall - e.g. writing down dreams immediately upon waking - actually improve creativity? Even the researchers find it hard to determine the causal relationship between dream recall, creative thinking, and brain ‘wiring’, but it could be a worthwhile experiment.
3.) Tools for better thinking
https://untools.co/. If you’re looking for an easy-to-access toolkit to improve your thinking and problem-solving ability, this website is an amazing resource (and very well-designed). I was happy to see a page for the Eisenhower Matrix which I often reference in development workshops on productivity / time management.
Description: “Untools is a collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.”
I look forward to combing through more of their content and hope the creator keeps adding new tools.
Similar resource if you want even more tools (and can tolerate a comparatively worse UX): https://fs.blog/mental-models/
4.) Quote of the week
“Build small habits. Make big plans… Start small, but never dream small.” — James Clear
Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter! I’d love to hear your feedback — reply here or reach me via the links below.
Have a great weekend!
Jon D'Alessandro
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