February 2023
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TD Magazine

Tap Into Neuroscience to Be Your Best

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Tomorrowmind: Thriving at Work With Resilience, Creativity, and Connection—Now and in an Uncertain Future
By Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin Seligman
Atria Books, 288 pp., $28.99

This is essentially a neuro-science book about how you can identify your neurological strengths and weaknesses and ultimately improve and thrive in the increasingly fast-paced work world. It also touches repeatedly on how organizations help or hurt your ability to be your best self, so it's doubly useful for leaders.

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Kellerman and Seligman open the book with some cool evolutionary biology and neuroscience. As a neuroscience major, I found it a fascinating, concise review, but skippable. However, the authors do an incredible job of giving names, measurements, and actionable tools for things I can feel are working and not working.

For example, between two teams, I can feel some individuals working creatively, effectively, and unbelievably smoothly while others struggle. I could feel it but not name it. I can tell you why Team A can suggest freely and rip ideas to shreds with creative abandon while nothing creative is happening with Team B. Team B needs to build rapport, help support creative time for incubation, and coach its youngest team members on how to get more comfortable with the unknown. The authors give actionable steps to build those skills.

I also learned how to diagnose my own resilience. It's not a question of whether I am resilient or not. Instead, I'm strong in optimism, agility, and self-efficacy but much weaker in emotional regulation and self-compassion. Kellerman and Seligman outline actionable strategies to improve ourselves.

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My final significant takeaway: Meaningful work matters. I'm currently working on a program while my manager is talking about an upcoming new project. Until reading this book, I didn't have the tools or the language to express why I didn't want to shift to the new project. My manager is trying to take me from a 31 on the Organizational Mattering Score, which references how much influence and impact my work has, to a 15. With this book's guidance, I now have the measurement and language for my feelings at work, from mattering and teaming to creativity and resilience.

There are numerous future-of-work books. This one is for humans more than workers. It's measurable, science-based, and actionable, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to grow into a more resilient, happy, connected, and thriving human being.

About the Author

Marci Morford manages Onboarding, Culture and Innovation Programs at Salesforce. She specializes in eradicating lecture-based learning programs from the planet, and currently runs Engineering Onboarding for Salesforce's software engineers globally.