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Practice Mindfulness And Boost Your Self-Esteem

Awareness, Mindfulness, Positivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

It happens to the best of us. We initiate or get involved in a project or some undertaking, put in tons of effort, time and energy and it goes haywire resulting in a lot less success than what we had anticipated. Short of committing Harakiri or going out of our minds and cutting out paper dolls, we go down into a spiral of self-recrimination, despair and absolute dread of trying again. Our self-esteem sinks so low, we’re scared sh-t we’d do worse or even completely fail compared to others who would have done better. Look at what the research studies say: Take consolation in the news that the recent surveys show mindfulness could help us build and secure our self-esteem, the kind of self-esteem that stays with us regardless of how big or small our successes are in comparison to other people around us. Thanks to Christopher Pepping and his associates at Griffith University in Australia, who after conducting a study among undergraduate students, have found that these following four aspects of mindfulness have a powerful influence to raise our level of self-esteem: Having an attitude that is not judgmental toward our thoughts and emotions. This helps us to have a neutral and more receptive attitude about ourselves. Putting a label on our personal experiences with memorable words. This would tend to prevent us, or at the very least divert us from getting obsessed by critical thoughts and emotions. Living in the present moment. Even our wise old folks used to say … “Be happy. Live in the moment.” Doing this helps us to avoid getting trapped in self-critical thoughts and feelings related to what we had done in the past or intend to do in the future. Allowing thoughts, emotions and feelings to enter our hearts and minds, being conscious of them but without reacting, one way or another to them. When these thoughts and feelings pop up, be aware of them, just don’t let anything prod you into reacting or responding to them.. This will eventually help you in managing them better. These results published in The Journal of Positive Psychology did support the researchers’ hypothesis that those with the foregoing mindfulness skills had higher self-esteem. And to further validate this, a subsequent study was conducted which had one group of students participating in a fifteen (15) minute mindfulness meditation while the other half of the respondents were asked similarly for fifteen (15) minutes to read the story of a certain fly-trap plant. When all participants had completed the questionnaires that rated their degree of self-esteem and mindfulness before and after the process, it was found that those who were into mindfulness meditation had a higher level of self-esteem versus those students who read the plant story. So, are you feeling low? Are those “I’m so stupid!” and “Those 5th graders are smarter than I am!” thoughts creeping up on you? Start helping yourself today. Try practicing these four dimensions of mindfulness and help get your self-esteem up there.

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Biaises and mindfulness. How’s Your Social IQ?

Awareness, Mindfulness, Wellbeing / My Holland

There was a time during the pre-historic age when life was plain and simple. You wake up. Hunt for food. Cook (sometimes not), eat, sleep and go through the whole routine all over again the next day. When your spouse and the kids complain about the food. No fuss. You just stop them with your stone club. End of discussion. Today, it’s a bit complicated. You wake up, you worry. You buy and cook food, you worry. You eat, you worry. You sleep, you worry. And then you try to go through the whole routine the next day but you can’t. You’ve gone bonkers! Between striving to lead a reasonably comfortable life, pursuing a successful professional career and chasing that proverbial rainbow of happiness stands an ugly pitcher throwing curve balls at you morning, noon and night. How do you go about squarely facing something like that? Social Intelligence. How To Heighten It. Roughly, social intelligence is about our ability to manage our emotions, listen to others with an open mind, inspire our fellow humans and colleagues, express ourselves with confidence and a whole lot more that helps us to become a better person rather than a psychopath. So, it’s essential to get this social IQ to a high level. It’ll improve our sense of well being and strengthen our attention span. In short it’ll help us to improve our lives significantly. So … Learn About Mindfulness To Bring Our Social IQ Up There. As research about mindfulness is widespread, it has been shown to work wonders on that part of our brain which regulates and controls our emotions. How that works in real life is that it enables us to tone down our biases. Usually, we face life and our world through bias of a mindset. If we’re a finance guy, for instance, we’re into dollars and cents. If we’re in love, we look for a rewarding reciprocation. A sales person? It’s that hunt for a deal or signing of a sales contract. Nothing wrong with relying on these “biases” in order to analyze and solve problems but not being aware of doing so can sometimes blind us to a wider and richer range of social goings-on that may be unfolding in our midst. Mindfulness helps us to notice and appreciate the bigger picture that crops up when we look beyond our biases. Practice Meditating. Sit Still For 15 Minutes And Meditate. Learn to become aware of our “biases”. You can do this by meditating and letting go of your thoughts. Try achieving a state of thoughtlessness. It’s fundamental to developing a mindfulness discipline. Over time, with practice, this technique can expand powerfully into our everyday life, enhancing our ability to “de-bias” and in turn, focus our “unbiased attention to what’s going on around us, manage our emotions better and help us see the world as something good and wonderful. So, raise your social IQ! It can’t hurt you any.

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How Personal Bias Impact On Your hiring and Management Of People.

Awareness, Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness / My Holland

It’s a fact. We all have unconscious biases and without being aware of it, they get to play an integral role in both our personal and professional lives. We see a middle-eastern looking man, sporting a long, dirty beard and wearing a turban and immediately we associate his looks to some terroristic suicide bomber from some place like Syria, and we stay away from him. He may, after all have a ton of explosives strapped to his body. In the same vein we bump into some young man looking like a trendy ivy leaguer, clean-shaven and wearing the latest fashionable suit, and we say. “There’s a decent, educated guy who must be a top manager in a hot-shot company. Wouldn’t it be nice for our daughter Sarah to meet him?” Sure, if a chance came up, Sarah would be glad to meet him – her parents (going by their bias) not having any minor qualms at all, that this person, for all his good appearance could well be a serial killer. How Our Biases Work. That’s how it goes with our biases. Our many years of experience, personal attitudes and outlook about certain things, our culture and beliefs – over time, they build a set of instinctive prejudices and preferences which we generally take for granted since we are, for the most part unaware of them. These things can range from the trivial like “It’s silly to have your kids believing in Santa Claus” to prejudices that are damaging as in believing Caucasians and Westerners are smarter, sharper and more superior to Asians. When we jump into these initial impressions and snap judgments of people without any clear or concrete basis, they’re most likely the result of our biases. As they come up during casual conversations or as you see people on your way to work and perceive them with your bias, they would generally be harmless. But, when it comes to recruitment and selection of people for your management teams or for simply, decision-making when hiring employees, they could cause some real big problems. How Biases Can Affect Your Hiring Decisions While it makes sense to consider a job candidate’s actual experience, skills and potential value to your company, you might decide on somebody because he/she has basically an outlook that runs parallel to yours like putting a premium on teamwork and sense of cooperativeness when the need is for somebody who’s strong-willed and is able to make fast decisions. Of course, this can work the other way around – hiring a strong, take-charge person like you when what the company needs is a team player. These biases by affinity (same outlook, same beliefs, etc.) can, in the long run lead to an organisation of clones. As a management guru once said …”If everybody is thinking the same way, a lot of you are not needed here” So, What Can You Do To Overcome These Biases? Just about the best thing you could do is to consciously and deliberately build up self-insights. Look deep into yourself and uncover, and then accept your unconscious biases about people looking for a job. And then, more importantly, you should understand how your biases are most likely to impact in your hiring and selection process.

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Practice Mindfulness And Boost Your Self-Esteem

Biaises and mindfulness. How’s Your Social IQ?

How Personal Bias Impact On Your hiring and Management Of People.

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