When I started working, I limped through a few pages every night of "English Creek" as a soothing balm before going to bed. When that was done, I got through a few magazines that had piled up, mostly New Yorkers, mostly the comics.
But my library wait list finally coughed out a few books and I spent the last few weeks flying through two of them. The first one I read was "What Shamu Taught Me About Life Love And Marriage" by
Amy Sutherland. It's a quick fun read about animal training and how you can apply these techniques to people. It's not about manipulation but more about how you change your own behavior to get the best out of people around you. It's about positive reinforcement. Mostly I like the animal training anecdotes which is fascinating stuff. Animals learn so fast that trainers have to train themselves not to accidently reward behavior they do not want. If a non-wanted behavior gets a laugh or a sigh or a frown or some kind of body language, the animal will do the same unwanted behavior when the trainer laughs or sighs or frowns or whatever. Talk about intense!
Speaking of intense, the next book on my list was "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes" by Amanda Ripley. She writes about what happens to people while in the midst of an emergency - plane crashes, hostage situations, fire, etc. The human mind works in a variety of ways, and how you would respond is based on your genetics and your upbringing. But the key thing to getting out alive is training. How would you get out of a situation. Of course you can't plan and train for all possibilities, but even doing something as simple as looking for your nearest exit on a plane, reading the emergency card and watching the demo before the flight takes off can save your life. It really can. On 9/11 in the twin towers, Morgan Stanley had about 3000 employees in their offices that morning. Only 11 of them died. Why? Training. They had a security expert who warned the company in 1992 that the towers were vulnerable, especially in the parking area,and he wanted better training for all the employees. But he was ignored, it would be too expensive. Then the truck bombs went off and people evacuated, but way too slowly. So the expert got permission to begin hard core training. Part of that training was FULL ON drills where everyone had to walk down all 40 - 50 floors to the ground. They trained to overcome common emergency behavior: panic, paralysis, politeness. And when the planes hit, after years of training, they all got out safely, except for the security chief and other safety personnel. That is amazing and really made me conscious of exits and emergency plans. I might just hold a safety drill at work...
I highly recommend reading it. I found this book made me feel in some ways safer, more conscious of how I could prepare, even in small ways, for the Unthinkable.
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