Tag Archives | emotional intelligence

THE ‘NOT ENOUGH’ SYNDROME

By on September 8, 2005 in Living fully, Ways of thinking

I have had a lovely week this week: I have spent time with friends that I love and haven’t seen for a while, I have been working with people I really enjoy working with, and I have seen a wonderful art exhibition as a special treat. There are also all the everyday miracles: my cat is now well, the vegetables from my garden are delicious, the sun has warmed me, the rain has watered my garden for me, and lots of things have made me laugh. And this is an ordinary week, which also had some not so good moments.

Like all of us, I can look at this week in a lot of different ways, depending on my mood, and the things that have affected me most. Yet culturally, we are trained to notice more of the everyday lacks and irritations, rather than the delights and abundances. So it takes a conscious effort to choose to view our world and our lives as abundant and pleasurable.

When I switch on my tv, I am shown all the things I don’t have, and what is wrong with others and myself, how we are all not good enough, how we all don’t have enough. When I ask people how they are, they tend to tell me the things that are not right, with them or the world. It is the ‘not enough’ syndrome gone mad! Not done enough work, not got enough money, not been kind enough to others ( or ourselves!), not good enough at what I do – the list goes on and on.

And yes, there are many areas where we are not as good as we might be, where the world is not as good as it might be, where we feel lacks, in ourselves, in others, in the world. Yet there are also many moments of abundance, when we are just lovely, when others are kind and delightful, when the world shows its wonder rather than its horror.

When we pay attention to what’s wrong or lacking, we make ourselves feel bad, and risk missing the opportunities for miracles to occur. It doesn’t help us to live our lives well, because it sends us back into the sort of mood that perpetuates the feeling of lack and wrongness.

This is not about wearing rose-tinted spectacles – we don’t have to pretend that everything is rosy, and nothing is wrong. We can recognise the bad bits, without getting caught by them. If we are going to get caught on something, let’s get caught on the good bits! They will help us keep a good frame of mind, so we can deal with the bad bits more constructively, and they will remind us to keep the bad bits in perspective.

Why not join me for a few days in choosing to notice the gifts of your life, the everyday miracles that occur. We may not need to change the world, just view it differently!

 

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WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

By on August 11, 2005 in Leadership, Self awareness, Working smarter

It is easy to be an inspiring leader, full of enthusiasm, when things are going right. It is when things start to go wrong that our true mettle shows through..

When we work with leaders, we find that they really understand the principles of leadership, and have a genuine desire to put them into practice. Yet they slip back into old habits of control and blame when things get tough, back in the workplace.

Why does this happen? Two reasons:

  1. We have all been well trained in the old habits, so they are your default position,. When we have time to think, we can switch on a different behaviour, but when the pressure is on, we have an automatic response.
  2. Other people expect us to behave as we always have done. Even if it is not particularly constructive behaviour, they at least know how to react if we do what we have always done. So if we step out of that, they often try to push us back into the familiar.

So how do we change our habits?

The easiest way to change a habitual behaviour is to consciously practise at regular intervals. So if you say to yourself that this morning is going to be my time for being the excellent leader I know I can be, and set yourself a time limit, it begins to get into the muscle. Don’t make the time too long – then it begins to get strenuous, just like when you take up a new form of exercise, and you will get disheartened.

There is one caution to this – sometimes we slip even when we have made a conscious decision not to, and then we tend to beat ourselves up for it even more than usual! This is not at all helpful, because the way our brain works is that every time we go through an experience again in our memory, we are rehearsing to do the same thing again, so reliving the not so useful behaviour is a great way to train yourself to do it again next time! Instead, just recognise that your behaviour was not what you intended, and run through the scenario as you would have liked to play it. This is excellent training for handling it better next time.

It also really helps if you can find a mentor – someone whom you respect and trust, who is further along on the path to being an excellent leader. Such a person provides the encouragement, advice and support that can make it so much easier to grow yourself.

Most of us don’t suddenly turn into excellent leaders overnight – it takes practice. Go gently with yourself, gradually introducing more and more of the behaviours you want to demonstrate and you will be surprised by how the ‘new you’ begins to grow!

 

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DO WE NEED A CRISIS FOR CHANGE?

By on February 11, 2005 in Change, Excellent organisations, Leadership

There is no doubt that a major crisis is often the prompt for fundamental change of some sort, whether that be in our personal lives, in organisations, or globally.

What I wonder is if that is the most effective way to be prompted to make a change.

Britain  suspends the debt repayments for the countries hit by the tsunami for ten years – if we had suspended the repayments five years ago, would those countries have been able to deal with the disaster better?

A person is told they have a life-threatening illness and changes the way they live their life – would they have even had the illness if they had been prompted to change their lifestyle earlier?

A business makes a loss and can make no payments to its shareholders, so changes its structure to become more efficient, cutting staff in the process – if those staff had been motivated to become more productive, would the business have made a loss?

As leaders, we are often in the position of responding to some form of crisis at work: a supplier lets us down, key staff are off sick, a customer is threatening to withdraw their custom. Many leaders say that they do not have time for forward thinking, because they are too busy firefighting.

Yet what could we achieve if we concentrated on the possibilities rather than the contingencies?

As a leader you have the opportunity to make a significant difference to how we approach change.

  • You can look forward and try out ways of improving what you already have, so that it becomes more robust and able to ride the crisis.
  • You can inspire your people to give of their best at work, so that there is less need for fire-fighting
  • You can aim to have the best possible service rather than one which is generally good enough, so that customers want to stay with you.

In our personal lives, we achieve most of our change and growth gradually, driven not by crisis, but by a desire to make things even better. If we applied the same principle at work, perhaps change would become an automatic gradual part of our work lives as well and there would be less crisis.

 

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BEING HONEST

By on August 11, 2004 in Excellent organisations, Leadership

We were recently working with a group, exploring the characteristics of an excellent leader. When we had identified a list of those characteristics, we asked people to choose two that they felt they were good at, and that mattered. A significant number of them chose ‘honest’, explaining that it was vital for trust and good relationships and that dishonesty was something they could not tolerate in others.

I was delighted that this had become so important to people – we have done this activity many times before, and I have never seen so many people choose honest as their quality. Maybe the whole sorry business at Enron, not to mention the questions over the US and British governments’ reasons for going to war with Iraq have brought this issue up to the forefront of people’s minds recently. If so, then there is some good come out of so much unacceptable behaviour!

It is common sense that honesty is the best policy, yet so often leaders are ‘economical with the truth’. This may seem easier at the time, but we all know that longer-term, we win more respect from others when we are honest with them, and they come to know that they can trust us to play straight with them.

We also know that we feel better in ourselves when we are not deceiving others, and on a purely practical level, you don’t have to remember what you were dishonest about if you simply stay honest!

We often misinterpret what being honest means in practice. This is a sad reflection on how common deception is in different forms. Whilst we may all recognise and choose to despise the out-and- out lie, we are often living with the everyday deceptions without even being aware of it in ourselves. We do after all, have a culture of politeness, so we spend a lot of time censoring our thoughts when interacting with people to make sure we don’t offend them, and this is also sometimes a form of dishonesty.  Whereas we react to others who are not playing straight with us, we often don’t realise how much we are doing the same thing.

What we particularly remember in ourselves is the times when we have not told people something negative – where we have ‘held our tongue’ – so when we talk about being honest, we think of telling people what we really think of them – and we don’t think of the nice things we would have to say!

As a leader, I believe we have to wake ourselves up to the full meaning of the principle of being honest, and demonstrate how it works to all our advantages for our staff.

Honesty with ourselves.

  • Are we living our own values?
  • Are we leading others as we would like to be led?
  • Are we being straight with ourselves about the state of our business?

Honesty with our staff

  • Do we tell them both good news and bad news about the company?
  • Do we tell them when they perform well, and when they need to improve?

It is not hard to be honest – it’s easier than deceit or lies!  I’m sure you would prefer to have others honest with you, so apply the same principle in your dealings with others.

 

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THE ESSENTIALS OF LIFE ‘ HEALTH

By on May 1, 2004 in Meta Org Blog, Resourcing yourself

This is the time of year when we make resolutions to eat more healthily, take more exercise, and then have a really unpleasant cold, wet day, and curl up in front of the TV with a box of chocolates!

It is curious that we are obsessed with health, yet are now far more unhealthy than our predecessors. Their way of life involved much more physical activity as part of the everyday living and we can decide to compensate for our sedentary lives by taking the odd walk, climbing stairs instead of taking lifts or escalators, and just moving our bodies a bit more.

And there is more to health than just being physically in shape. The word health comes from the same root as the word healing, and it means being whole. When we only pay attention to the physical side of our health, we are ignoring the wholeness of ourselves. All the different aspects of us are interlinked, and whilst keeping myself in physical good shape can help with the other parts, it is not enough, as the other parts can also dramatically affect our physical state.

So we also need to ask: what state is my mind in? what state is my heart in? what state is my spirit in? these are not questions that we are taught to ask of ourselves, and we often have no conscious awareness of what is happening with our minds, hearts and spirits. This is exacerbated by the fact that they are parts of us that can keep going despite the knocks for longer than our bodies. The damage to them tends to be slow-growing and we only notice when it has reached crisis proportions, or when some life-threatening event happens to us or someone close to us, and prompts us to consider the bigger picture of our lives.

An easy way to discover how those parts of you are feeling is to describe them as metaphors. For example, my mind feels like a sleepy bear ready to hibernate, or my heart feels like a blossoming scented flower, or my spirit feels like it is in a cage, wanting to be free.

If you like the metaphor, then that part of you is fine, if you don’t, imagine how you would like to change the metaphor to be how you want to be. For example, I would prefer my mind to feel like the bear ready to come out of its hibernation, hungry and motivated. Imagine what that would feel like, and then ask yourself to move towards that over the next few days. If you feel resistance, you can ask yourself, what would help me to be like that? And add that into your life!

This year, when you make those new year resolutions, remember to include one for your mind, heart and spirit, to encourage them to thrive as well!

 

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THE ESSENTIALS OF LIFE ‘ COLOUR

By on March 7, 2004 in emotional intelligence, Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Resourcing yourself

I was in my garden this weekend, enjoying the sunshine.  The blues, reds, oranges and yellows of the flowers contrasted beautifully with different shades of green in the leaves, stems, trees and grass.  And it was all enlivened by the light of the sun.  This stunning spectacle is free, and available in some form to all of us, because our world is coloured – aren’t we lucky!

And colours give us more than just a spectacle – they evoke words and feelings.  It is interesting to me that a long time ago, colours were linked to our chakras – the energy centres in our bodies.  Yet it is only relatively recently that we in the west started considering the effect that different colours have on our moods and energy.

I recently redecorated my living room.  It had been red and stone colours, and now it is in all shades of green.  Everyone who comes into it remarks on how tranquil it feels, even if they know nothing about the effect of colours – the power of a colour change!

We are lucky to have such a remarkable range of colours available to us and can use them, not just to delight the eye, but also to help us enhance or change our mood.  What colours delight you?  What colours make you feel good?  Do you allow yourself to enjoy them enough?

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CARING

By on January 6, 2004 in Excellent organisations, Leadership, Meta Org Blog, relating to others

We tend to think of being caring with others at work as being ‘soft’, and not very business-like. I don’t know where we got this from, since we all like to be cared for, and we spend a lot of our time at work, so some caring there is a delightful extra!

I remember my first visit to a particular manufacturing company. I was escorted round the factory by one of the manufacturing directors. It took us quite a while to go round, because he stopped and spoke with so many of the people working there. He knew the names of everyone who worked in his area of the business, but more than that, he knew what was going on in their lives, and could sense what sort of mood they were in, and gear his greeting to them accordingly. He cared – not in a ‘soft’ way, but in a way that made his people feel valued, and motivated.

When I worked with the company, I realised the level of loyalty and commitment that he had created. His name always made people smile, and these macho men would declare that they loved working for him.

This caring came naturally to him – it just seemed to be the obvious thing to do! And it produced very noticeable results for the business. His area stood out in the business for low absence, low turnover of staff and high quality standards, and one of the tasks I had been given as a consultant was to discover why there was this discrepancy between his area and others!

I am still shocked that we don’t generally show the same degree of humanity at work as we do at home, because somehow we have come to think of it as a weakness. Yet all of us prefer to be treated like human beings and respond more positively to someone who shows some care for us as individuals. It is time this myth of being business-like – or is it robot-like! – at work was dispersed, and we all allowed ourselves and others to be real feeling caring human beings.

We don’t have to be ‘soft’. We are sometimes quite tough with our children, our friends, but underlying the toughness is a desire for the best for them, to help them to be at their best. Why not apply the same principle to the workplace? It would make it so much more likely that our staff gave of their best at work, and it would make us feel more human and cared for as well.

 

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BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND

By on March 7, 2003 in Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Self awareness, Ways of thinking

It’s so easy to be hard on ourselves! We have all been well-trained in being critical, and we are great at turning that ability on ourselves. So we notice what we haven’t done rather than what we have done in a day, or we beat ourselves up for saying the wrong thing instead of remembering how often we say the right thing.

I bet you not only criticise yourself, you also sometimes reject praise or compliments by running yourself down! I know I can say things like, ‘ Oh it’s really someone else’s idea’, or ‘ no, I don’t look good today – your eyesight is obviously not as good as it was!’ This is not just insulting to the complimenter, it is also a less than useful message to yourself.

All this is telling ourselves that we are no good, and that is a lousy message to give anyone! So I want you to consider another possibility. Just for a while, imagine that you are your best friend. I bet the description of you would be different if they gave it! Friends are kinder to us than we are to ourselves, and they set us a good example of how we deserve to be treated. When we are treated kindly, we don’t get arrogant, we get even nicer! It reminds us of us at our best, and helps us to be like that more often.

So why not decide to be your own best friend for the rest of the month?

Homework

  1. Spend a few minutes describing your characteristics as if you were your own best friend.
  2. At the end of each day, find something to praise yourself about
  3. Next time you criticise yourself, remind yourself to be kind to you!
  4. Dare to give yourself a present for being such a lovely person!

 

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VITALITY

By on March 6, 2003 in health+well being, Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Resourcing yourself, Ways of thinking

The sun is shining this morning as I write this, and if I were a child, I would know that it was a wonderful day.

Yet as an adult, my view of the moment is coloured by all the other things I am told about how the world is working, through the news, magazines etc. so rather than celebrate the glorious day, I can easily get caught up in the difficulties and doom and gloom and forget to just live today.

Who has it right??

It seems that we normally need a life threatening event to wake us up to the beauty of the moment by moment of life, but there is no rule that I know of that says that we have to wait for something traumatic to be able to really appreciate and delight in being alive.

When I was little, I went to Sunday school, and I can still remember being told that I should count my blessings each day. What a lovely concept! And over the years, I have come to understand how useful that can be. We always have a choice: to moan about all the things that are wring, for us personally and in the world in general, or to count our blessings. Which makes me feel better? Which makes me more able to handle whatever comes my way? The answer seems so obvious!

I went to see Bruce Springsteen perform this week. I had a bad back, and could have made it worse by standing in a stadium with thousands of others. But I knew better. I knew that there are few better cures for feeling miserable than to go and be inspired by the sheer joie de vivre of this performer! For three hours, I danced, sung and laughed with delight, as he took us on a journey of celebrating being alive.

As Bruce would say: ‘ How can we get this thing started? Let’s have a party!’ So come on, count your blessings and celebrate being alive!

Homework

  1. Stop for a moment and count your blessings today
  2. Find four things to delight in today
  3. Give yourself a present today
  4. Do this every day for a month, no matter what is going on in your life

 

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FREEFORM WRITING

By on February 10, 2003 in creativity, Self awareness

When I was at University, doing my Contemporary Arts BA Degree, we were exposed to many different ways of expressing yourself. We were shown many different ways to access our creativity. One such tool we were given was freeform writing. Freeform writing has many names; Creative Writing, Free Writing, Spontaneous Writing, Speed Writing. Its name has many variations, but it is essentially the same – writing without thinking about it.

The idea is that you just put pen to paper and begin to write, not editing any of what you put down, just allowing to flow and ebb as your thoughts flow and ebb. It is a great way to get stuff out of your head and a great way to brainstorm ideas, by allowing them free expression. To further the brainstorming idea, why not select a topic and Freeform write on that topic?

When you have a creative block, sometimes this can be a useful tool to help vent some of the frustration and work past the block, by accessing not only your conscious but unconscious creativity too. Freeform writing every morning as soon as you wake up can be a good way to access the creative visions of your dreams..

Not only is freeform writing useful for creativity, but I find it incredibly useful for emptying the mind of unwanted thoughts. In fact this is where I use this process most! When you are having difficulty sleeping or you have many negative thoughts in your head that are getting you down, just let rip on a piece of paper, just get all the nasty stuff out! Once you feel that you have emptied your brain of all the ‘stuff’ then throw the paper away, and hopefully you’ll feel a little better and sleep more peacefully!

Homework

Try your hand at freeform writing

  1. Always have a little notepad with you – to capture starting points for freeform writing
  2. Using these starting topics spend two full minutes writing everything you can about the topic – don’t edit anything, if your hand stops writing, stop and try another topic
  3. Keep a notepad by your bed – to capture the weird and wild creativity of your dreams, just 3 minutes as you wake up each day
  4. Spend 10 minutes a week just writing anything down that comes into your head – don’t edit it! Just allow it to flow, it may well look like nonsense but in it could be some gems of creative wisdom!
  5. When you are experiencing a creative block – use freeform writing to write out all the angst and maybe tap into some unconscious creativity!
  6. When you are emotionally low, or your head is just full of ‘stuff’, maybe you have difficulty sleeping – use freeform writing to clear your head, write it all down, then throw it away, don’t re-read it or it will start you off thinking again!

 

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