 |
|
|
|||||
When we make mistakes at work, it can lead to a cycle of negative thinking.The damaging thoughts swirl: “I’m an impostor.” “I’m not smart enough.” “I’m failing at my job.”Feeling like an impostor doubting one’s own abilities despite a track record of success is common, especially among women and members of marginalized groups. Even on days when everything’s going right, it can be hard to shift out of a cycle of self-doubt.But there are ways to interrupt that downward spiral.Many people have found cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of talk therapy, helpful to examine internal monologues such as “I’m going to say the wrong thing” or “I’m not good enough” and replace them with neutral or positive mantras.“What we do in cognitive behavior therapy is help people identify these negative thoughts, and then we teach them to evaluate those thoughts and see how accurate they are,” said Judith Beck, president of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy, based in Pennsylvania.“If they’re not accurate, we discuss what’s a more realistic perspective on this,” she said.To reach students with social, emotional and behavioral challenges, Randolph Public Schools, a district outside of Boston, held a recent seminar about helping children reframe their negative feelings using cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT.“We want our students to really have the mindset that they can do things confidently,” said Alpha Sanford, chief of development and student services, who started the initiative.During the training, Christin Brink, an assistant principal for special education, thought to herself, “Wow, I need this just as much as the kids do.”“Being a younger administrator in this role, it’s something new to me,” Brink added. “A lot of times I’ll have impostor syndrome, and I’ll make a choice that I later regret.” Why we might focus on the negative If you find yourself having negative thoughts frequently, you’re not alone. There are evolutionary reasons for it.“When we were cavemen, it was very important for us to be alert for danger,” Beck said. Preparing for the worst possible outcome helped people stay alive. Some worries such as “I don’t have enough time to complete this project” can motivate people to get things done, she said.But lingering on what’s going wrong can be unhealthy. We sometimes filter out positive reinforcement, downplaying recognition we’ve received and overemphasizing mistakes, said Kristene Doyle, director of the Albert Ellis Institute, a psychotherapy training organization based in New York.Practicing your positive beliefs by saying them to yourself with force, vigor and frequency can help you build a healthier thinking muscle, she said. Hold that thought. Is it really true? One of the first steps to reframing unhelpful thoughts is to identify those that are recurring in your mind. Examine whether they have any validity. What evidence is there to support them?“Telling myself ‘I’m not good enough to be here’ is only going to lead me down a path of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you make that worst-case scenario happen,” Doyle said. “What makes somebody good enough to be in the room? What makes somebody good enough to have a job?”When someone is thinking they’re an impostor, “look for reasons why they’re not an impostor. What are their strengths? Why were they hired?” Doyle asked.For example, when high school teacher Catherine Mason of New York was asked to reexamine a section of her lesson plan, she had some damaging self-doubt.“I just heard, ‘You’re a terrible teacher. You’re so bad at this. Why can’t you just get it?’ And that was all internal,” Mason said. Acting out of fear, she rewrote the entire lesson plan, when she only needed to make minor changes.Now, instead of jumping to the worst conclusion, she pauses to examine the thought. “What did they actually say to you?” she asks herself. “Did they say the actual words, ‘You’re terrible?’ Did they actually say, ‘You have to throw out the whole lesson?'”People who are thinking “I’m not good enough” can challenge that thought by asking, “What does ‘good enough’ actually mean?” Doyle suggested. Throw it under a microscope Some therapists get creative when working with clients to identify negative feelings or beliefs. Avigail Lev, a psychologist with the Bay Area CBT Center in San Francisco, has clients write down the phrases, such as “They don’t value the work that I’m doing” or “I haven’t done enough to get a raise.”After that, she leads clients through exercises to diffuse the strength of those thoughts, such as reading the sentences backward, counting the words in the statement, or writing the phrases on a cloud.It can take time and practice to successfully reframe negative thoughts that have been replaying in our mind for years. When Renee Baker was studying architecture in college, professors and instructors frequently tore into her work. The critiques were designed to thicken her skin. But they had a lasting impact.“There’s the self-doubt that comes with being told, literally, ‘You’re not good enough. Your ideas aren’t good enough. Your work isn’t good enough,'” said Baker, who’s now director of project management at Inform Studio, a design firm. “At the heart of a lot of my self-doubt is feeling like my voice, and what I think, what I believe, what I am passionate about, isn’t as important as the next person’s.”So Baker worked with a therapist to challenge her damaging core beliefs, exchanging them for more neutral thoughts. At work, she practiced speaking up even when her throat felt tight with anxiety. Over time, she became less anxious and more comfortable sharing her ideas. Find a replacement thought You can get specific when you’re searching for alternative, healthier mantras.“When we look at this sentence, ‘They don’t value the work that I’m doing,’ do you have any examples of when you felt your work was valued? Do you have examples of when people appreciated your work?” Lev asked.You can also reframe your thoughts about other people who are part of your workday.Eleanor Forbes, a social worker in Randolph Public Schools, helps teachers and administrators learn to apply CBT techniques. When staff members complain that a young person is being manipulative, she helps them reframe the thought. “How about we just say that this young person is just using survival skills?” she said.Brink, the assistant principal, learned to reframe her own negative thoughts, saying to herself: “I made a lot of great choices today,” or “This was what went well,” and “Tomorrow we can try again with x, y and z.”Having scripted phrases ready togo helps when negative thoughts resurface, she said.“I’ve got this,” she tells herself. “One step at a time.” Have you overcome an obstacle or made a profound change in your work? Send your workplace questions and story ideas to cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well. Cathy Bussewitz, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Alphabet’s Waymo will offer its autonomous rides on Via Transportation’s public transit platform, starting with Chandler city in Arizona, the companies said on Thursday. The service will be introduced this fall in the city’s on-demand small-scale public transportation service, Chandler Flex, which is powered by Via’s software. The transit technology makers suite of software and technology-enabled services powers public transportation systems in hundreds of cities across more than 30 countries, the company said. “We’re delighted that this partnership with Waymo paves the path for AVs (autonomous vehicles) to become accessible to millions of global public transit riders, enhancing mobility, lowering operating costs, and improving safety outcomes,” said Daniel Ramot, Vias co-founder and CEO. Waymo has been ramping up operations in the U.S. as the robotaxi race heats up. On Wednesday, it said that it plans to start offering autonomous cab rides in Nashville, Tennessee, next year in collaboration with ride-hailing firm Lyft. After starting in Phoenix in 2020, Waymo now offers paid driverless rides to the public in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with parts of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. EV maker Tesla deployed a limited robotaxi service in Austin in June. The company has said it plans to expand the service to the San Francisco Bay Area. Yazhini MV, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Nvidia said on Thursday it would invest $5 billion in Intel, throwing its heft behind the struggling U.S. chipmaker just weeks after the White House engineered an extraordinary deal for the U.S. government to take a massive stake in the company. The stake instantly will make Nvidia one of Intel’s largest shareholders, giving it roughly 4% or more of the company after new shares are issued to complete the deal. Nvidia’s support represents a new opening for Intel after years of turnaround efforts at the famed U.S. manufacturer failed to pay off, and it triggered a 30% jump in the troubled chipmaker’s shares in premarket action. The company once the chip industry’s flagbearer that claimed to put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley appointed a new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, in March. He came under fire from U.S. elected officials, including U.S. President Trump, who called for him to resign due to concerns about his connections with China. That led to a swiftly arranged meeting in Washington that ended with Intel’s unusual arrangement to give the United States a 10% stake in the company. The pact includes a plan for Intel and Nvidia to jointly develop PC and data center chips, but crucially will not involve Intel’s contract manufacturing business, known as a “foundry” in the chip industry, making chips for Nvidia. Most analysts believe that for Intel’s foundry to survive, it would need to eventually win a large customer such as Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm or Broadcom. Nvidia, whose must-have chips are powering a global artificial intelligence boom, said in a statement it would pay $23.28 per share for Intel common stock, a price slightly below the $24.90 at which Intel shares closed on Wednesday. However, that is higher than the $20.47 price per share that the United States government paid for an extraordinary 10% stake it took in Intel last month. “It’s a reflection of Nvidia looking to diversify to an extent its investment within the U.S. and as well to gain some brownie points with the U.S. government,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG Group in London. “It doesn’t change the bigger problem which Nvidia is facing with China, but it keeps it in favor with the U.S. government.” The pact represents a potential risk to Taiwan’s TSMC. TSMC currently manufactures Nvidia’s flagship processors, a business that the world’s most valuable company could one day extend to Intel. AMD, which competes with Intel for supplying chips to data centers, also stands to lose thanks to Nvidia’s backing. Shares of Nvidia rose more than 3%. AMD slipped nearly 4%, while U.S.-listed shares of TSMC slid 2%. TSMC and AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The deal adds to a growing reserve of capital that Intel has accumulated weeks after it announced a $2 billion investment from Softbank and received $5.7 billion from the U.S. government. David Zinsner, Intel’s chief financial officer, told investors at a Deutsche Bank conference last month that the company was in a “good cash position” and would not require much more capital until it saw significant demand for 14A, a next-generation manufacturing process that it expects to invest heavily in building. CEO Tan has vowed to make Intel’s operations lean and build factory capacity only when there’s demand to match it. SPEEDY LINKS Under the deal announced Thursday, Intel is planning to design custom data center central processors that Nvidia will package with its AI chips, known as GPUs. A proprietary Nvidia technology will let the Intel and Nvidia chips communicate at higher speeds than before. Speedy links are a key differentiator in the AI market because many chips must be strung together to act as one to chew through massive amounts of data. At present, Nvidia’s best-selling AI servers with those speedy links are only available using Nvidia’s own chips, but the deal would now put Intel on equal footing, giving it a chance to make money off each Nvidia server. The combined Nvidia-Intel chips could provide a major competitive challenge to AMD, which is developing its own AI servers, and Broadcom, which also has chip-to-chip connection technology and helps companies such as Google develop AI chips. “Anything that NVIDIA decides to endorse just by association will make that stock of Intel appear attractive because it implies that Nvidia sees value in Intel,” said Peter Andersen, founder of Andersen Capital Management in Boston. Broadcom did not immediately respond to a request for comment. For consumer markets, Nvidia will provide Intel with a custom graphics chip that Intel can package with its PC central processors with the same speedy links, potentially giving it an edge against rivals such as AMD. While Intel’s x86 computing architecture has lost ground in both data centers and PCs to chips with technology from Arm Ltd, it still has a majority market share. “This historic collaboration tightly couples Nvidia’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.” The two companies did not disclose the financial terms of their technical collaboration but said they would make “multiple generations” of future products. Nvidia and Intel officials described the collaboration as a commercial arrangement under which they will provide chips to one another to create products and said there was no licensing component to the deal. “For Nvidia, the financial impact is small, but the political upside is big: this move aligns with U.S. policy and could help ease restrictions on selling advanced chips to China,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Nvidia has struggled to sell its H20 chips in China, with the company trying to navigate demands from Washington and Beijing at the same time. In mid-August, Trump engineered a deal that granted Nvidia licenses to sell H20 chips to China in exchange for a 15% cut of those sales, but Nvidia has said it has not sent any H20 chips to China. The companies declined to give a date for when the first joint products would come to market but said that their product plans prior to the joint deal had not changed. Nvidia, in recent years, has entered both the PC central processor market and the data center central processor market. Meanwhile, Intel has tried to sell several AI chips that compete with Nvidia and has said it plans to develop an AI data center server that would compete with Nvidia. Stephen Nellis, Jeffery Dastin and Max Cherney, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||