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Articles by Rick Heller
CX driver analysis: How to turn statistics into a visual CX roadmap
Key driver analysis research is not new. The goal is to identify the different customer touchpoint experiences, which are drivers of an organisation's overall performance measure (e.g. NPS, overall satisfaction, customer effort/ease, etc.). Essentially, a driver analysis computes importance scores, which then prioritise the touchpoint experiences that have the greatest impact on performance measures.
Leftists Who Defect to the Right: Then and Now
What are we to make of the so-called red-pill phenomenon of recent years? Taking the red pill—an allusion to a plot element in The Matrix film series—is meant to suggest that a liberal has awakened to the truth of conservative views. Amusingly, the same metaphor is applied to a political reversal in the opposite direction: the left coined the phrase becoming woke—originally a term of approbation—to describe awakening to the truth of left-wing views.
The Science of Snowflakery
Every few days, the public square is roiled by another round of offense taken and apologies given. Sometimes the stakes are incredibly low, as when Bon Appétit issued an apology for publishing an irreverent piece about a Jewish pastry. Sometimes the stakes are greater, as when Apple canned a new hire after more than 2,000 employees signed a letter claiming they were “profoundly distraught” by misogynistic statements in his critically acclaimed gonzo-style memoir.
The Science of Snowflakery
Every few days, the public square is roiled by another round of offense taken and apologies given. Sometimes the stakes are incredibly low, as when Bon Appétit issued an apology for publishing an irreverent piece about a Jewish pastry. Sometimes the stakes are greater, as when Apple canned a new hire after more than 2,000 employees signed a letter claiming they were “profoundly distraught” by misogynistic statements in his critically acclaimed gonzo-style memoir.
Mindfulness of Bird Songs
A guided meditation follows this essay. I’ve tried being a birdwatcher without much success, as they move so fast and its hard to get a fix on them before they flitter on. But I’ve learned to become a bird listener, and if you know how to recognize the songs, that’s much easier, because birds keep belting them out over and over again. My bird listening started after I dropped by a local bookstore aiming to spend some of my COVID stimulus check.
Finding Lovingkindness on a Busy City Street
Trike Daily Meditation MonthMeditation & Practice Finding lovingkindness on a busy city street By Rick Heller Mar 09, 2016 Image by Kevin Doncaster | http://tricy.cl/1RPaRHl Lovingkindness in Buddhism is considered to be part of a constellation of four worthy attitudes called the Brahma viharas. Besides lovingkindness, the other attitudes are compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Sympathetic joy is a curious attitude that is not a distinct concept in American culture.
Finding lovingkindness on a busy city street
Image by Kevin Doncaster http://tricy.cl/1RPaRHl Lovingkindness in Buddhism is considered to be part of a constellation of four worthy attitudes called the Brahma viharas. Besides lovingkindness, the other attitudes are compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Sympathetic joy is a curious attitude that is not a distinct concept in American culture. It’s the idea that you can derive joy from someone else’s joy. Sometimes seeing another person having a good time can make you feel jealous.
Finding Meaning with Science and Mindfulness
How do we find meaning in our lives? Can mindfulness help? That’s the subject of my discussion with Gleb Tsipursky of Intentional Insights, author of Find Your Purpose Using Science. VIDEO In my book, Secular Meditation, I claim that mindfulness can be half the secret to happiness. I cite a paper in which psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton(both Nobel Laureates) discuss happiness in terms of two components—moment to moment emotional well-being and long-term life evaluation.
Science Must Always Be Skeptical of Its Own Findings
Secular Meditation One of the reasons that science is such a useful guide to reality is that, over time, the body of scientific knowledge updates as new information comes in. So, it turns out that one of the studies I reference in my book, Secular Meditation, has been falsified by the very people who originally produced it.
Mindful Leadership
Lately, there has been quite a bit of controversy about the use of mindfulness training in the corporate world. Are mindfulness programs just a way of making workers more stress-tolerant and thus more easily exploited? This is a question I discuss with the authors of the new book, The Mindfulness Edge, in the audio below. To give you the quick answer, if your goal is to exploit workers, having a mindfulness program is probably a poor investment.
Cultivating Kindness During the Holiday Season
Secular Meditation Though this is the season for good will, holiday shopping madness sometimes points people in another direction. Then there are the family gatherings that bring loved ones together to dredge up arguments about who said what in 1987. In such times, it’s good to have a tool that helps you cultivate good will. One way to do this is through loving-kindness meditation, also knows as metta, from a word in the Pali language of ancient India that means friendliness or loving-kindness.
Atheist Meditation: Mark W. Gura and Rick Heller in Dialogue
Three’s a crowd, and we now have three offerings for atheists interested in meditation. Is that too many books on one topic or rather, an indication of burgeoning interest? I think it’s the latter. Besides Sam Harris’s Waking Up, the others are Atheist Meditation Atheist Spirituality by Mark W. Gura and my book, Secular Meditation. Mark and I recently talked by phone about our books.
Enjoying The Happiness of Others
Is Humanism about reason or about emotion? It might seem that reason is all we need, but as scientists such as Antonio Damasio have demonstrated, without feelings, we are unable to make choices. Reason guides us toward our goals, but to have goals and values, we need preferences, which come from emotions. So, is it all about the pursuit of happiness? In some sense, it is. But not just our own personal happiness. The happiness of others matters.
Using Mindfulness to Break Bad Habits
Practicing mindfulness can help you recognize habits and replace them with newer and better ones. This is a core element of mindfulness, and indeed why mindfulness is itself called a “practice.” As the story goes, after the Buddha’s enlightenment, he was asked whether he was a god. He answered that he was not a god; rather, he was awake. In fact, the term Buddha means “Awakened One.” What does it mean to be awake? Obviously, it doesn’t mean that the Buddha was sleeping and just rolled out of bed.
GrubStreet Launch Lab: Meaning and Mindfulness without Religion
Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome former senior editor at National Geographic KATHERINE OZMENT and journalist RICK HELLER for a discussion of their books Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age and Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy—A Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard.
Introducing Life Downeast
I am here now and I am not leaving. It certainly has been a long road to get here, but I am here in Maine, specifically Starboard Cove, Maine. More specifically, I live Downeast. Having arrived here from Pennsylvania over a year ago, there has been plenty to learn and even more to observe. This place is different, but I mean that in a good way.
When Keeping a Quiet Mind is Inappropriate
Having a quiet mind is lovely, and there are some simple manual tasks that you can do with a quiet mind: washing dishes, raking leaves, sweeping floors. But there are other tasks that are a bit more complex, where keeping a perfectly quiet mind may be inappropriate or even unsafe. For instance, imagine you are driving a car, and a ball rolls out into the street.
Making a Habit of Mindfulness, One Minute At A Time
Making mindfulness a habit seems paradoxical: habits are things that we do automatically and with little attention, whereas mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment. Yet we can develop a habit of paying attention to the present. One purpose of meditation practice is to cultivate habits. Josh Bartok, a Zen priest who leads a sangha, or Buddhist community, in Boston, says that meditation practice is just that. “It isn’t a matter of blissing out or being relaxed,” he told me.
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