Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
The past month took us from a five-minute breathing technique that beat meditation in a Stanford trial, to the questions that make strangers remember us, a 1930 rat maze experiment and the first episode of our founders docu-pod!
If you missed an issue or want a refresher before the next one, here's a recap of the last few.
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In case you missed it:
We went back to a 1930 Berkeley experiment where rats explored a maze for ten days with no food at the end, then caught up with the rewarded rats within days once food appeared.
The piece explains Edward Tolman's idea of latent learning, and a shadowboxing exercise for rehearsing the loss of your biggest client or sales channel before it happens…
We looked at a 2012 Harvard study that found talking about ourselves activates the same reward regions in the brain as food and money.
The piece covers why follow-up questions made people better liked in speed-dating research, and seven personal questions to use at your next event, for a memorable impression…
We broke down a 2023 Stanford trial that compared three breathing techniques for five minutes a day against mindfulness meditation over a month.
Cyclic sighing lifted positive mood the most, and the piece walks through how to do it at your desk, in a parked car, or on mute before a call…
We released our founders’ documentary podcast! The first episode features Olia Sardarova, who turned her MBA dissertation into BXR, a luxury boxing gym in London.
BXR had just signed for a second site when COVID hit. Around 5,000 UK gyms shut down, while hers survived and now grows 30% year on year. The episode comes with a free business psychology playbook of her 11 principles…
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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