February 26, 2015
Resiliency. The ability to spring back from and successfully adapt to adversity. A return to balance. Emotional Buoyancy. Flexibility. Are we what we feel? While that may be a rhetorical question, there is truth behind it. Because advancing emotional understanding is a central theme in my work, these pages have often explored many facets of expanding emotional awareness. First […]
February 3, 2015
“Employees are not emotional islands. Rather, they continuously spread their own moods and receive and are influenced by others’ moods. When they work in groups, they literally can catch each others’ emotions like viruses, a phenomenon known as emotional contagion.” Wharton @ Work, University of Pennsylvania In the past decade, there has been an important finding in neuroscience that should […]
November 1, 2014
Worry is a trap. Lately, I’ve been falling into the worry trap too often. I’ve found myself worrying about many things. I worry about ________________. I worry about the ______________. I worry when _________________. I worry about – OK, that’s enough because mental rehearsal is the engine that powers worry. Despite many years of dedicated effort to raise my level of […]
February 20, 2014
“The problem with business is that it is afraid of dealing with the business of people.” W. Edwards Deming Honestly, I don’t get it. Why is so much of business still in the dark about the basics of human dynamics? Appyling awareness of human psychology to work is moving at a glacial pace while technology flies by it at […]
February 8, 2014
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Albert Einstein Most people have experienced the often vague feeling of knowing something without having any memory of its source. This phenomenon is known as a “gut feeling,” a “hunch” or “intuition.” According […]
January 27, 2014
The scene – the window from my midtown Manhattan hotel facing an office building. The time – 6 am – the usual time I wake up when working in New York City (unless I can help it!) More than a decade ago, when I started staying at this hotel, the offices were mostly dark at 6 am. But in recent years, more lights […]
October 14, 2013
“Fear is an aggressive predator of joy and creativity in the workplace.” Terence Deal & M.K. Key The price tag on fear is high – for business and our own well-being. Emotional contagion is real. Fear is catchy. Old fears get easily activated. The way we talk to ourselves is a critically important factor in how we activate our fears. External […]
April 18, 2013
Everyone gets caught in a whirlwind of contradictory feelings and wonders – how can so many potent emotions sit side by side within me? It’s easy to get lost in anxiety, sadness or even despair, when times are hard. It’s not uncommon to feel a sense of vulnerability because of the limitations of our power to effect external change. The Popular TED […]
February 13, 2013
Note: In my last post, I Want to Know More About You, I referenced research that looked at the ways in which emotional repression is built into our social landscape, especially affecting men. So I decided to reprise the article below because the more I experience, the more emotional suppression I see in every type of workplace. It’s woven into […]