Most of our internal narrative is fictitious, repetitive and negative. The internal narrative of children can be all of that – heightened. They don’t have the skills of experience to recognize the thought/emotion connection. How can educators help students become more aware – and in control – of their internal world?
Physical movement, including basic yoga postures, is a fun, practical way to help students strengthen not only their physical muscles, but their mental muscles. The goal is to cultivate a multitude of traits:
Awareness
Embodied attending
Emotional intelligence
Self-regulation
Recognition
Here’s how it works. Take a break for physical activity, perhaps when you notice they’re getting restless. Try something very simple such as tortoise pose, to camel, to triangle, to warrior, to mountain, and back down again. Or walking slowly around the room.
Ask the children occasionally throughout and after the sequence: what do you feel in your body? Then you can ask them to name an emotion they might be feeling: tired, happy, angry, bored, etc. This will help them to start recognizing emotions such as impulses of anger when they arise. When children learn to handle their anger (or any emotion) as an impersonal entity, they’ll be less inclined to deal with it violently either to themselves or others.
“So we’re on the upward facing dog. Now what? Nothing!” said Jon Kabat-Zinn at his keynote speech at the 2013 Bridging Hearts and Minds of Youth conference. “This is a curriculum already: being. Just be here! We’re learning how to inhabit being – in school. All of a sudden it wakes something up.”
The basic practices of mindfulness and yoga are a great way to show students how to free themselves from paying too much attention to the movie in their minds – and focus on the task at hand.
Jon’s full speech is available for purchase in an exclusive streaming video here, and the entirety of the 2013 BHMY conference is available here.
As the levels of stress, difficulty, and pressure increase in the workplace, it’s even easier to make the wrong decision. This puts leaders and other decision-makers in a fight-or-flight mode. That mindset does not allow them to use the executive functions of their brains well. The result is inefficiency – for them, colleagues and clients.
The Harvard Business Reviewpublished an article called, “What VUCA Really Means For You.” V-U-C-A is an acronym representing the environment of today’s working world. It stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Here’s how to use these four letters to better manage the unexpected.
Volatility
A volatile situation is the best-case scenario you could have for a challenge. You are best able to predict the results of your action, and you have a lot of knowledge about the situation. It most likely arises unexpectedly and leaves you on unstable ground for an unknown duration. It’s not hard to understand, but hard to deal with.
The best response:
Prepare for these situations.
Make sure you’ll have the proper resources and talent to deal with these events.
Be wary of expenses, however. Your investment should match the risk.
Uncertainty
An uncertain situation arises when you have no information about a challenge, but the likely cause and effect are known. The situation is not permanent and could change quickly.
The best response:
Find out all the information you can, and do not keep it to yourself.
A complex challenge involves multiple interconnected moving parts and variables. Your knowledge of the situation is most likely limited (although probably predictable), and it can be hard to know which actions will solve the problem without gathering knowledge. However, the volume or nature of this challenge is overwhelming, making the process of gaining knowledge about it difficult.
The best response:
Approach a complex situation by restructuring and bringing in specialists.
Develop resources that can help you deal with these problems in the future.
Ambiguity
An ambiguous challenge is intimidating because no precedents exist. You have little knowledge of the situation and how your actions will impact your organization.
The best response:
Use an ambiguous problem as an opportunity to experiment.
Understand your environment, the competition in other fields, and experiences similar organizations used to change their course.
Cater your experiments and decisions so that they can be broadly applied, and help you in the long run.
Stress. Distraction. Indifference.
These are common ailments brought on by a rapidly changing global business environment. If untreated, they negatively impact your team’s performance – and the bottom line.
How Will You Adapt?
Thriving on Change is an online course that teaches the proven-effective methods that will ensure your team can expertly respond to uncertainty, conflict, and inevitable distraction.
The material is delivered incrementally to align with busy schedules. It’s designed for individual participation or group training sessions.
Daniel Goleman: The main task of so many leaders today is leading change. And there’s a saying””which I’m not sure is true””that people resist change. But how can this insight about the mind’s eye and so on help a leader make the change that they’re trying to make?
George Kohlrieser: Well, this is one of the very destructive myths around””that people naturally resist change. They do not naturally resist change. They resist the pain of the change. They resist the fear of the unknown. Now, the brain naturally is going to seek””be curious, explore, do new things””and it actually creates new neurons. It’s how the brain thrives. But to do that, you have to feel safe. You have to be able to have your survival needs taken care of. So when you’re defensive, you can’t change. When you feel safe enough, then you go out and you want to explore. That’s what a leader has to do. A leader has to be able to give that trust, that sense of security, and then explosions of creativity will occur.
The failure for many leaders is that they are creating negative states in other people because they’re in a negative state. They cannot hold on to the positive energy, the positive focus, and change is painful. We’re not denying that, but with the flashlight””the mind’s eye””you have to seek beyond the pain, beyond the frustration, to what the opportunity is. And you know the great stories of people in life who had catastrophes””personally, professionally””who have been able to overcome it by seeing opportunity. They can live with what they have and be able to get beyond setbacks, so that in the end they come back to the joy of life.
Goleman: It seems what you’re saying that if a leader is held hostage by his or her emotions, it really limits that leader’s potential. How can you tell if you are being held hostage, and what can you do about it?
Kohlrieser: Well, you can tell when you’re playing life defensively as opposed to playing offensively. Playing to win is a special attitude. This does not mean competition. It means that you take the right risks at the right time. You focus the mind’s eye on possibilities and opportunities””not on regrets and fears. Anytime you’re speaking about yourself””or people, or life””with a sense of regret, a sense of complaining, a sense of you are not able to do what you want, then the possibility is very strong that you are held hostage. So you can be hostage to a person, to a place, to an event, to an experience, to a memory.
And a highly performing leader who isn’t held hostage is always thinking of talent development. For instance, how can I learn something new? How can I expand what I already know? And using Ericsson’s research, we know that you need 10,000 hours of practice. But to be able to do that, you can’t be held hostage by frustration, by failure, by all the things that stop you. You need to be able to practice correctly”””deliberate practice,” he calls it””and do that over and over again, without complaining. Enjoying learning a musical instrument, learning a language, or learning something new regarding how you deal with people. And emotional intelligence provides the greatest learning there is: discovery of people. People are really wonderful! But they’re also complex.
Then lastly, having somebody to help teach you””a mentor or coach””who is emotionally intelligent and can help develop your talent. Then you can stop feeling like a victim. I think when people haven’t gotten over something, when they feel like victims, there’s something wrong in the way they’re looking at life. It’s in the mindset, and the most powerful thing that we have is our mindset: having that be clear and focused, and being adaptable and being flexible, and always being willing to learn.
Every leader needs threshold abilities to get by at work. But in today’s complex business landscape, getting by isn’t enough. It’s the distinguishing competencies that are crucial for success. You need elements that will give you “the executive edge.”
As a collection of Daniel Goleman”˜s in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, organizational research, workplace psychology, negotiation, and senior hiring; The Executive Edge contains the necessary research findings, case studies, and shared industry expertise every motivated leader needs.
There are six leadership styles that are vastly underused: affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, coaching, coercive, and authoritative. Employing the right approach at the right time could make all the difference when it comes to closing a big deal, improving production quality and speed, or managing conflicts. Even though most leaders would say they only use two or three of the styles, it is important to understand that all of them can be mastered and used to your advantage.
Short-Term Solution
A simple solution to making up for the leadership skills you currently lack is to surround yourself with people who possess the style you need. For example, let’s say you’re the vice president of a food distribution corporation. You successfully did business in your home state of New York and expanded up into New England and down along the coast to the Carolinas using the affiliative style. You traveled frequently between the states, met with restaurant owners and eased their concerns, and made sure the customers felt like your company had a personal touch.
However, you know your tech knowledge is lacking, and technology is needed to distribute the food as quickly as possible. Efficiency is the most important appeal to your customers. Therefore, you informed a trusted colleague about the performance standards and let them delegate the strategy using their authoritative approach. You also told this person to appoint a second-in-command to bring along on visits to make sure you don’t spend too much time at each restaurant.
Long-Term Solution
While surrounding yourself with people who possess the skills you lack, it’s also a good idea to work on your limitations. The first step is to acknowledge your gaps in emotional intelligence so that you can work with yourself or a coach to develop them. Take an authoritative leader, for example, who may want to add some democracy to their workplace. They need to work on collaborative and effective communication skills.
They’ll want to master the affiliative leader’s strengths:
Empathy: Sensing how people are feeling in the moment allows the affiliative leader to respond to people’s emotions immediately, which helps build trust.
Gain practical insights from the following resources:
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters presents Daniel Goleman’s ground-breaking, highly sought articles from the Harvard Business Review and other business journals in one volume. This often-cited, proven-effective material has become essential reading for leaders, coaches and educators committed to fostering stellar management, increasing performance, and driving innovation. This collection reflects the evolution of Dr. Goleman’s thinking about emotional intelligence, tracking the latest neuroscientific research on the dynamics of relationships, and the latest data on the impact emotional intelligence has on an organization’s bottom-line.
The Coaching Program is an online streaming learning series for executives, highlighting methods for enhancing any leader or manager’s effectiveness, creativity, and ability to connect with their teams.
Leadership: A Master Class Training Guide offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation and senior hiring. Included is an extensive, detailed training guide around the video content for human resources professionals, senior managers and executive coaches. Each module offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. The materials allow for instructor-led or self-study opportunities.
Happy employees tend to go the extra mile with their customer service when they feel encouraged and supported. The relationship between workers, their environment, and customer service has actually been proved by a logarithm; customer service climate and revenue are directly proportional. In fact, a positive atmosphere doubles revenue.Throughout his studies at the University of Maryland and his observations in a multitude of industries, Professor Benjamin Schneider has found that when employees responded more positively to their work environment, customer satisfaction and business results increased. Inversely, a negative work environment led to unhappy workers, poor customer service, and declining revenues.
The service industry is among the most stressful of all occupations. Workers have to deal with everything from insufferable customers, disagreeable managers, challenging working conditions, long hours and, more often than not, low pay. Not much to smile about.
Emotional Contagion
Bad moods spread faster than wildfire. Rudeness can transfer from the employee to the customer, in turn making them angry or dissatisfied, regardless of how well the actual service was executed. Furthermore, disgruntled workers who aren’t thorough can create a wake of trauma in their path. Cardiac care units, for example, where nurses’ described their outlook as “depressed” had a patient death rate four times higher than comparable units.
Great service, in contrast, can make a world of difference for both the consumer and the employee. If consumers enjoyed their experience, they are likely to return, and share good reviews to their friends and colleagues, or online. If the employees feel upbeat and cared for, they are also more likely to work harder to appease the customer. Jennifer George and Kenneth Bettenhausen concluded in their study, Understanding Prosocial Behavior, that stores with positive salespeople had the best sales results.
A Good Leader Can Make a Difference
The manager is often the person who sets the mood. If a leader is confident, optimistic, and shows genuine compassion toward their workers, both the overall atmosphere and the sales will be lifted in the right direction. There are three factors that make or break a job: working conditions, salary, and leadership. Resonant leaders are perhaps the most important of the three.
How leaders carry themselves and their relationships with their employees directly impact their emotions and performances. Between 20-30% of an organization’s profit can be traced back to how employees feel about their place of employment, and 50-70% of this view traces back to one factor: their leader. A leader’s ability to understand their emotional intelligence and act rationally – not impulsively – becomes a major factor in the overall performance of the business.
A high-level executive can become isolated. They surround themselves with people who won’t report negative information. They’re afraid to deliver bad news for fear of repercussions. Not knowing the reality of a situation means you can get into a distorted bubble. A lack of information can lead to poor decisions. You go down a path that’s a mistake from the get-go, but nobody tells you.
When Daniel Goleman spoke with Bill George for Leadership: A Master Class, they discussed what Bill learned from a first-hand experience with the dangers of groupthink.
“Early in my life, I worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a civilian in the year of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve met in my life were at the high levels of the Pentagon. But toward the end they were walking off the cliff together. They suffered from groupthink. McNamara was so powerful. His team simply reinforced what he was saying. They didn’t take different perspectives.
Any good leader needs to have a reliable team who will ask tough questions, or poke holes in logic.
Another time one of my co-workers asked, “Do you think everyone agreed with that decision in the meeting?” I said, “Yeah, they all said yes, and at the end. We even voted.”
His response was an eye-opener. “Well, there were three people backing their managers that were so angry, they could hardly speak to you because you blew over them, and forced them to say yes.”
After some thought I knew he was right. I had to go back, tail between my legs, and say, “I’m really sorry. I guess I didn’t hear what you were really saying.” That allowed me to be open to honest conversation.
I also learned that it’s not just looking for and appreciating feedback from that special trusted group, but bringing the attitude with you to the office. I now try to surround myself with people who have diverse viewpoints.”
Fine tune your executive management skills with Daniel Goleman’s video series, Leadership: A Master Class.
Additional resources
The Coaching Programis an online streaming learning series for executives, highlighting methods for enhancing any leader or manager’s effectiveness, creativity, and ability to connect with their teams.
The C-Suite Toolkitis designed for senior management (or those new to senior management positions) seeking a comprehensive reference library from the most respected business and leadership experts of our time.
The Competency Builder program was created to assist workers at all levels learn how to work more mindfully, improve focus, handle daily stresses better, and use these skills to increase their effectiveness. A great resource for any HR library.
The EI Overview provides easy-to-understand insights into proven-effective ways managers can best employ leadership styles, as well as develop the areas where they lack.
Annie came to America while she was pregnant to assure her abusive husband would never be able to reach their children, as being born on American soil would make them citizens. She has been waiting for her green card for seven years, terrified she’ll be deported and separated from her twin boys. They live in a small, two-bedroom apartment and her boys walk five miles to school through a questionable neighborhood to get to school every day while she works three jobs. She leaves before sunrise and gets home well after dark every day, and hasn’t had a day off in three years. Her only solace is their elderly neighbor, Rosa. She loves cooking dinner for the boys and helping them with their homework, as her own children are grown and gone.
Susan is a CEO at a major corporation, and can not only afford childcare, but to have live-in assistance around the house. She can stock her fridge with the best, organic food, and her children are able to take weekly horseback riding and water polo lessons. She lives in a gated community, drives an eco-friendly car, and is able to take time off at her leisure to spend with her children. She went to college for business so she could take over her father’s corporation when he retired, and her children will never have to worry about affording a higher education.
Annie and Susan are similar women who live in the same city. They’re both single working mothers. They love their two children, and work hard to provide them with the best lives possible. They are the same age, like the same music, and are both reading a Milan Kundera novel in their free time. Annie tries to order a coffee (the sole luxury she allows herself to splurge on) and is fumbling around for change at the bottom of her purse. She’s desperate to avoid the public embarrassment that comes with not being able to afford $3.92 for a drink. She apologizes profusely for holding up the line, and manages to leave a crumpled, well-intentioned dollar bill in the tip jar. Susan, behind her in line, taps her foot impatiently and audibly sighs, even though she could easily buy Annie twenty coffees without ever noticing a lack in funds. When it’s finally Susan’s turn, she doesn’t look up from her phone as she orders, and puts an X over the tip space on her credit card receipt.
Why wouldn’t Susan just help Annie, or the hard-working people at the coffee shop?
In Daniel Goleman‘s recent book, A Force for Good, he interviewed Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Throughout his studies and a series of experiments, Dr. Keltner has concluded that in direct encounters, a person of higher status – or privilege – is significantly more prone to disregarding a person of lower status. On the contrary, a person of lower status is much more likely to pay attention and show compassion to other people, regardless of their status.
“Those with few resources and fragile circumstances – like a single mother working two jobs to pay her bills who needs a neighbor to look after her three-year-old – depend on having good relationships with those may one day turn to for help,” Goleman writes.
Wealthier individuals, in contrast, are able to afford help as needed – they don’t rely on the goodwill of the people surrounding them. Keltner suggests that because the rich can afford to tune out other people, they also learn to tune out the needs and suffering of others. In organizations and corporations, he observed that when high- and low- ranking people interact, the higher person avoids eye contact, interrupts, and steam rolls over the conversation.
John Ogbu, the late Nigerian anthropologist from UC Berkeley, noted that Berkely had a de facto caste system, much to Goleman’s surprise. Ethnic minorities and the while middle class were centralized in different, but defined, parts of town. The schools were in between them, separating the caste lines.
“The moment he pointed [the caste lines] out, I saw he was right. But until then that glaring fact had been under the social radar for me – while I was going to those very schools, I hadn’t given it a second thought,” Goleman reflects.
The Dalai Lama has a lot to say on this topic of socioeconomic divides, and added the aspect of faith to the conversation. Followers of certain religions believe social order determines their destiny. If someone is in a lower class, it is because they deserve to be there. If someone is in a higher class, it is because they have a greater destiny.
The wealthy and elite have many reasons for justifying their choice to ignore the needs and suffering of those around them. They displace the blame to the elect, saying change is out of their control or this is the way it’s always been (a feeble guise for their willful ignorance). They may profess “God made them [the worse off] that way,” or believe a divine being decided these people should be below them. The Dalai Lama dismisses this as totally wrong, and nothing but flimsy excuses for callousness. He calls upon people with the privilege and ability to make change to do so.
“You can repeat ”˜equality, equality’ a thousand times,” the Dalai Lama says, asking his followers to act, not just sympathize. “But in reality, other forces take over.” Awareness without action following means nothing.
There is little empathy in the business and political leaders of today, and little thought is given to how it will affect those without access to power when they make decisions. This callousness makes the gap between the classes, between the tops and bottom of organizations, between the castes invisible. This lack of compassion becomes the norm when it isn’t acknowledged, and isn’t just a problem in Berkeley, California. It’s prevalent everywhere, and can only be changed by action.
Like Gandhi once said, “Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use.”
Exciting, compelling, and grounded in new research on meditation, this is a rare audiobook with powerful insights that can change us at the deepest level.
