Author: Joshua

What Is Empathy? The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

I like to consider myself a person with a high emotional intelligence capable of experiencing as many feelings as there are colors of the wind. Sometimes even all at once, or at least in rapid succession. But a new study out of Glasgow is set on challenging my rainbow of emotions.

“there’s no substitute for the magic of a face-to-face interaction with someone else who cares”
What’s the crucial career strength that employers everywhere are seeking — even though hardly anyone is talking about it? A great way to find out is by studying this list of fast-growing occupations, as compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sports coaches and fitness trainers.

According to the 2014 Conference Board CEO Challenge, “Building a culture that supports engagement, employee training, leadership development, and high performance is something companies can control, and can mean the difference between growing market share and simply surviving in 2014.” But that lofty statement includes more than just the CEO’s effort.

Raising Happiness One of the greatest things about our long-term romantic relationships is that they can provide comfort and predictability in this wild world we live in. But let’s face it: Long-term relationships can get a little boring. Within nine to eighteen months, research suggests, 87 percent of couples lose that knee-quaking excitement they felt when they first fell madly in love.

The entrepreneur stereotype has permanently changed. The old school business archetype is all about smooth talking, pinstripe-suited, cigar smoking, deal brokering, power tycoons. These captains of industry weren’t afraid to scream at subordinates, drown their sorrows in mid-afternoon whiskey or mortally wound their opponents at the negotiating table.

Passion to change things – to make a difference – eats away at you. Show me a leader who’s always content and I’ll show you a lousy leader. Finding happiness as a leader means learning to navigate tensions between: Dissatisfaction and satisfaction. Discontentment and contentment. Unhappiness and happiness.

By focusing on positive interactions with your employees and encouraging an upbeat emotional state as often as possible, you’ll be more likely to have a happy, productive and efficient team.

HOW POSITIVITY AFFECTS OUR BRAINS
To start with, let’s look at how positive and negative emotions work in our brains, and what we can learn from that.

Positive emotions generally work in an opposite way to negative emotions. So, while emotions like fear, anxiety, stress and anger narrow our focus, inhibit our concentration and decrease our cognitive abilities, positive emotions can do the opposite. When we’re feeling upbeat and happy, we’re more likely to have an inclusive focus than a self-centered outlook, and to perform better on cognitively demanding tasks.

Psychology’s Greatest Advice
Seven of psychology’s greatest lessons and what makes them great
Published on January 21, 2014 by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D

1. LET YOURSELF BE TERRIFIED.
When Watt and his partners decided to jump from branding and leadership training to buying up property and opening their own restaurants, he admits he was a bit terrified. It could all be a giant flop. But that terror is a feeling he’s grown familiar with. “There needs to be a feeling of terror that you have to get over every day,” he says. “That to me is a good sign and not a bad sign.”

2. DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING? FIND SOMEONE WHO DOES.
Today Smith has more than 350 employees and is growing by the day. When Watt is hiring, he could care less what was on a person’s resume. If your personality isn’t a good match, all the experience in the world won’t help you get hired. But beyond personality, he says: “You must surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. That is absolutely key.” When the idea of starting a restaurant first came up, Watt and his partners turned to his brother, architect Jim Watt to design the space. He has since partnered with Smith in designing all its restaurants.

3. QUIT BEING A CRITIC.
If Watt and his partners had been too quick to judge their idea, they never would have opened their first restaurant. After all, none of them had ever built or opened a restaurant before, besides one partner who’d run her family’s deli. “Being judgmental too quickly is the downfall to almost every brand,” says Watt. “Judgment gets in the way of design.” Early on, you’re better off imagining that all your ideas are great ideas. Write them down. Let them get a little crazy. “You have to let people dream and say crazy shit before they decide what they want to do,” says Watt.

Alcohol and Other Drug abuse in adolescents and adults continues to be a major public health problem in the United States. Care in intervention programs aimed at high risk populations identified occurs after the maladaptive behavioral delinquency has occurred, and only then is an individual afforded the opportunity to join an intervention program. The focus of this paper is to illustrate and highlight the value of prevention programs which emphasize altering maladaptive behavior before the behavior becomes problematic. Emotional Intelligence is not only an indicator of alcohol and other drug abuse, but is linked to emotional competence, social and emotional learning, the development of healthy and life promoting behavior, and has been proven to reduce some of the risk factors associated with alcohol and other drug abuse in adolescents and adults. This paper seeks to recognize the significance of Emotional Intelligence as a desirable health promoting attribute and to establish the importance of its conceptual use in a prevention based model for reducing associated high risk behaviors.

“Niceness is the psychological armor of the people-pleaser.” ~ Harriet B. Braiker

Do you act on a daily basis on any of these internalized beliefs?

“I should never say ‘no’ to anyone who needs or requests something of me.”
“I should never disappoint anyone or let others down in any way.”
“I should always be happy and upbeat and never show any negative feelings to others.”
“Other people should never hurt me or treat me unfairly because I am so nice to them.”
“Other people should never be angry with me because I would go to any length to avoid conflict, anger, or confrontation with them.”1
Some of the most intense pressure I feel is not from my work or my personal goals or even society. The pressure I have the hardest time managing and resisting is the pressure to please. Everyone. All the time. I know I’m not alone.

As you may know from Star Trek, Spock is half-Vulcan and Vulcans are purely logical: they don’t let fluffy stuff like emotions get in the way of making coolly rational choices.

But here’s a counter-intuitive truth, care of neuroscience: emotions are essential to making rational decisions.
In his book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes Elliot, a patient who had it all; he was a successful businessman, a good husband and father. Then he developed a tumor in his brain that had to be surgically removed. It resulted in damage to a part of the brain associated with emotion, called the ventromedial frontal lobe.

Soon, Damasio says, Elliot became an “uninvolved spectator” in his own life: Even though his marriage collapsed and each business venture folded, he remained controlled. Damasio spoke with Elliot for many hours, but he never noticed sadness, impatience, or frustration.

Nor did he see any decisiveness. Small choices like which pen to use, when to make an appointment, or which restaurant to eat at led to circling deliberations.

Which, curiously enough, sounds a lot like a decision-making meeting run purely on logic. As Damasio writes in Descartes’ Error:

In the high-reason view, you take the different scenarios apart… and perform a cost/benefit analysis of each of them. You infer logically what is good and what is bad. For instance, you consider the consequences of each option at different points in the projected future and weigh the ensuing losses and gains.
Sounds great, right? A Spock-like precision of decision-making, clean of the messiness of emotions. The only problem is that it won’t work.

London, England (CNN) — If you thought effective leadership was all about cracking the whip and relentlessly focusing on targets, think again. A people-centered approach is far more effective, argues a new report.
“Exceeding Expectation: the principles of outstanding leadership” published by UK employment organization, The Work Foundation argues that the best leaders have an “almost obsessive focus on people” which they ally to “a drive for high performance.”
The report took two years to complete and examined the leadership practices of six high-profile UK organizations, including multinational consumer goods company Unilever and supermarket giant Tesco.
More than 250 in-depth qualitative interviews — including nearly a third with senior leaders — were conducted for the report. Leaders were classed as either “good” or “outstanding,” with their differences split into 17 categories.
For example, good leaders were those who would “give time to others” or “tends to focus on work,” whereas outstanding leaders would “focus on people as a route to success” or “seek to understand people and motives.”
The authors conclude that “outstanding leaders focus on people, attitudes and engagement, co-creating vision and strategy.”

You might already know that your emotional intelligence can influence your job success. But what about your callously oblivious boss or your ambiguously rigid colleagues?

Boosting your emotional intelligence might mean you are better at your job–but what can you do if your boss or colleagues don’t exhibit anything close to emotional intelligence?

The good news is, the situations more hopeful than you think. The bad news is, you might have to have a difficult conversation. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

WHAT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE REALLY IS
When you say that your boss has low EI, it could mean several things: that she’s unconsciously cruel, she’s naively stoked about everything, or she doesn’t know what her team needs to do their best work.

If they can’t read your emotions, they won’t be getting all the info you’re naturally sending them.
As University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Sigal Barsade told us, emotional intelligence is thought of in two ways: the mixed model, a holistic approach espoused by EI superstar Daniel Goleman, and the ability model, in which particular emotional competencies are identified. According to the ability model, emotions (and emotional intelligence) help you to make sense of the world.

To that end, someone solid in EI will have four basic skill sets:

They can accurately read their own emotions: they can perceive the emotions with their and others experiences
They can use emotion to facilitate thinking: if they need quiet to focus, they put themselves in a quiet place
They understand how emotions progress: they know how irritation leads to frustration, frustration leads to rage
They can regulate their emotions: they don’t suppress their emotions, but they don’t become overwhelmed, either
BUT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ISN’T GOODNESS
While Martin Luther King demonstrated tremendous EI through the resonance of his speeches, so did Adolf Hitler. It isn’t so much about being virtuous: it’s more about being able to understand your and others’ interior lives and how your actions and environments affect them. To work well with people with low EI, then, you need to accommodate that misapprehension.

“Emotions are information,” Barsade says. “In essence, people who are low in EI are lacking the ability to take in, understand, or process a really critical part of the way that we communicate in the world. If they can’t read your emotions, they won’t be getting all the info you’re naturally sending them.”

We tend to vilify people with low EI, she continued, but that doesn’t make much sense: it’s faulting them for a skill set that they don’t have.

“They’re missing this information,” she says, “so you have to clarify.”

GAINING CLARITY
Clarity comes in several flavors.

Let’s take the case of sarcasm: if you’d usually use sarcasm to show that what you’re saying is different than what you feel, you might want to speak a little more directly, Barsade says. Since they’re not going to pick up on the sarcasm, you have to spell it out for them.

Similarly, you can take advantage of behavioral mimicry, the phenomenon where the person you’re talking with takes on your tone and body language. So if your boss is super stoked about an idea you think is terrible, don’t dump a bucket of water on him–just maintain a calm demeanor and he’ll calm down, too.

The last suggestion might be the toughest: giving feedback, whether in real time or as a follow-up. To give a constructive critique, you’ll need to sharpen your conversation skills.

The most surprising, provocative, and inspiring research findings on meaning & wellbeing published this past year.

“People aren’t as rational as we would like to think.
From attentional bias — where someone focuses on only one or two of several possible outcomes — to zero-risk bias — where we place too much value on reducing a small risk to zero — the sheer number of cognitive biases that affect us every day is staggering”
The article goes onto say, “Understanding these biases is key to suppressing them — and needless to say, it is good to try to be rational in most cases. ” — given how irrational we are, is it really good?

It turns out that those who SEEK happiness are less happy… and find less meaning.
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. “It is the very pursuit of happiness,” Frankl knew, “that thwarts happiness.”