{"id":37166,"date":"2024-04-03T15:48:36","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T22:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=37166"},"modified":"2024-04-05T07:47:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-05T14:47:48","slug":"if-you-eat-quiche-can-you-wear-a-scarf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/if-you-eat-quiche-can-you-wear-a-scarf\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Eat Quiche, Can You Wear A Scarf?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cReal men don’t eat quiche\u201d is a phrase from the 1982 book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche<\/em> by Bruce Feirstein.[1] The book is a satire of masculine stereotypes. In a clever tongue-in-cheek approach, Feirstein explained what was acceptably \u201cmasculine\u201d and \u201cfeminine\u201d behavior according to the era\u2019s societal standards. For real men, quiche was, apparently, a no-go, along with expressing emotions and being sensitive. Instead, real men ate meat, took risks, participated in \u201cmasculine\u201d activities, and wore only rugged clothes, which didn\u2019t include scarves. Being a child of th\"\"<\/a>e 80s with my primary role models appearing in shows like The Duke\u2019s of Hazzard, The A-Team, and He-Man, you can understand my internal conflict and confusion when my kids gave me a scarf this past Christmas…and I liked it! It\u2019s funny how the brain works sometimes. While not a neuroscientist, David Rock presents helpful insight into how our brains work in a very approachable way in his book Your Brain At Work<\/em>.[2] He introduces many practical thinking hacks that are immediately applicable (even while writing this blog article). In this post, I will look at two key insights and a couple of practical considerations from this book.<\/p>\n

Thinking Smarter, Not Harder – Prioritize<\/strong><\/p>\n

While thinking is a renewable resource, our ability to think well is limited. According to Rock, with insights from neuroscience, there are practical ways to conserve energy consumed by thinking. Rock explains, \u201cConscious mental activities chew up metabolic resources, the fuel in your blood, significantly faster than automatic brain functions such as keeping your heart beating or your lungs breathing.\u201d[3] This explains the feeling of exhaustion after a long day of emails, meetings, strategic planning, and problem-solving. We must conserve the brain’s energy for the most critical tasks to minimize exhaustion and maximize our thinking effectiveness. An essential step in this conservation effort is to \u201cPrioritize Prioritizing.\u201d Rock argues that prioritizing is one of the most brain energy-draining activities.[4] If we give ourselves to other mental activities, we may not have the energy to prioritize, which sends us down an unproductive path. Prioritizing has broad implications but is easier said than done. The notifications and red bubbles on my phone assault me the moment I awake. The desire to open my email and scroll through the inbox is a real temptation. It will require discipline to put that off until I have prioritized the day.<\/p>\n

Consideration:<\/em> I must consider how I can avoid the temptation to engage in thinking tasks that need to wait. This relates to what Rock later addresses with external and internal distractions in the book, which, if space allowed, I would explore further.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How to Wear a SCARF <\/strong><\/p>\n

Anot\"\"<\/a>her critical insight Rock offers relates to our interaction and leadership of others. Understanding how our approach triggers certain brain activities in others is very important. Key to this understanding is how emotions activate the brain and create specific responses. The brain is designed to help us survive and naturally identifies threats and rewards. Our brain gets us to move instinctively away from threats and toward rewards. For instance, one of the subconscious activities the brain is always running has to do with status, specifically, trying to maintain a high status compared to others. Rock states, \u201cYou can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter, funnier, healthier, richer, more righteous, more organized, fitter, or stronger, or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a \u201cniche\u201d where you feel you are \u201cabove\u201d others.\u201d[5] This means we naturally move away from things that threaten our status and toward things that secure or have the potential to elevate our status. In total, Rock identifies five domains of social experience that our brain treats the same as survival issues. These domains form a model, which he calls the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.[6] When a person perceives a threat in one of these areas, the brain triggers a survival response. This response involves a combination of chemical, hormonal, and emotional responses, lowering a person’s ability to reason clearly, learn new things, or remain calm.<\/p>\n

Consideration: <\/em>I have been working on the performance review process we will use as a staff team, and I want to explore how we can apply the SCARF model to the review process. How can we help our team notice what is good about themselves and raise their status? How can we make our expectations clear, increasing their certainty? How can we empower them to make decisions, increasing their autonomy? How can we create space to connect with them more personally, increasing their relatedness? How can we ensure we are being considerate and fair in our treatment?<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

[1 ] Bruce Feirstein, <\/span>Real Men Don\u2019t Eat Quiche, <\/span><\/i>(New York: Pocket Books, 1982).<\/span><\/p>\n

[2] \u00a0David Rock, <\/span>You Brain At Work<\/span><\/i>, (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).<\/span><\/p>\n

[3] David Rock, <\/span>You Brain At Work, <\/span><\/i>10. <\/span><\/p>\n

[4] David Rock, <\/span>Your Brain At Work, <\/span><\/i>13.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5] David Rock, <\/span>Your Brain At Work<\/span><\/i>, 132.<\/span><\/p>\n

[6] David Rock, <\/span>Your Brain At Work<\/span><\/i>, 134.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cReal men don’t eat quiche\u201d is a phrase from the 1982 book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche by Bruce Feirstein.[1] The book is a satire of masculine stereotypes. In a clever tongue-in-cheek approach, Feirstein explained what was acceptably \u201cmasculine\u201d and \u201cfeminine\u201d behavior according to the era\u2019s societal standards. For real men, quiche was, apparently, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":194,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3163],"class_list":["post-37166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlpg03-rock","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/194"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37166"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37184,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37166\/revisions\/37184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}