WIN Without Competing! With Dr. Arlene

Both campaigns are vigorously fighting to win. The undecided voters could determine the election. Why? Neither candidate has closed the deal yet. The horserace continues. November 4th is almost here and the voters must decide who will be our next president.

Capturing the undecided voters could significantly impact the outcome of the election. Here’s the untold story. To evaluate a candidate’s ideas, the voter must first perform five intellectual behaviors, from the simplest to the most complex, in sequence: recall information (knowledge), understand a concept (comprehension), use a concept in a new situation (application), compare and contrast ideas (analysis), combine concepts (synthesis). To make judgments (evaluation) our minds must go through all of these five steps first, according to educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom. He created Bloom’s Taxonomy, which has been the standard classification system for intellectual behavior since the 1950’s.

Let’s apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to capture the undecided voters. They are intellectually stuck somewhere between steps one and four. The pundits and the media focus on step four, analysis. They compare and contrast the candidates which adds to the voters’ confusion. The candidates compare and contrast each other, creating more confusion. Moreover, the candidates’ messages are inconsistent, contain factual errors and misleading statements.

One candidate talks about reading every line of the Federal budget if elected. That’s impossible. How is he going to read more than 50,000 pages? Read More 

We are obsessed with asking the wrong questions. Who will be the “best” president? Who will be the “best” vice-president? What is the “best” bailout bill? To determine the “best” we compare and contrast searching for similarities and differences. An intelligent 12-year-old can create these laundry lists. Hasn’t anyone figured out that the mindset of competition, which leads to the mentality of “best,” doesn’t work? If you compare and contrast two rotten apples, and pick one, you have selected the “best” which is still a rotten apple.

Now we are confronted with the consequences of the competition mindset. Nothing works. The economy, healthcare, and education are products of the rotten apple decisions. If we insist on relentlessly searching for the rotten apples, we will never restore the health of this country and we can forget about restoring the world’s confidence in us.  Read More