Emotional Intelligence Archives - Page 16 of 26

Gratitude Calendar: Month of February

Emotional Intelligence, Engagement / My Holland

February is the second month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian Calendar, and is the only month that has less than 30 days. It was named after the Latin word februum, which means purification because the month was a time for purification. The old Roman calendar considered the winter season a month less period, and the year consisted of only 10 months. The month of February was added, along with January, around 700 BCE, so that the calendar would reflect a standard lunar year of 355 days. February became the second month of the year around 450 BCE, although it was originally the last month of the year. February was shortened to either 23 or 24 days at certain intervals in the Roman calendar, and a 27-day intercalary month was inserted after February to realign the year with the seasons. As part of the Julian calendar reform, the intercalary month was abolished and every fourth year was declared a leap year where a 29th day was added to February. It is the only month that can pass without a single full moon. February’s birth flower is the violet and the common primrose. The birthstone for February is the amethyst which symbolizes piety, humility, spiritual wisdom and sincerity. Get your FREE Gratitude 2019 Calendar. Click HERE. Exclusive calendar only from EQuest Asia Pty Ltd.

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Positive Leadership: Its the best kind of leadership

Emotional Intelligence, Happiness, Happiness at Work, Leadership, Positive Psychology, Positivity, Productivity, Workplace Culture / My Holland

A lot has been talked about and written about leadership. It’s not surprising. It’s such an important factor for success, depending on the kind of leadership existing in a place, it can make or break big business corporations, civic organizations, sports associations, small or medium size enterprises and even fund-raising charitable institutions and foundations … and for that matter, in a more expansive perspective, even governments. What exactly is positive leadership? In the context of running a business or a typical organization, profit or non-profit, Positive Leadership is about putting the emphasis on what elevates individuals, teams, and organizations. It’s about developing and gearing them up to achieve their full potential in addition to supporting and guiding them as they face everyday challenges they meet in the course of their personal and professional lives. Positive Leadership is about creating affirmative bias – in other words, a positive leader focuses on the strength and capabilities of his people and affirming their human potential. Rather than harping on weaknesses and inadequacies … rather than seeing a glass of water as being half empty, but seeing it half full, a positive leader centers his or her efforts on his team’s inherent goodness. He focuses on the positive, putting his/her heart and soul on what is going right in addition to what’s going wrong. Practicing all these, a good positive leader becomes effective and prone to achieving extraordinary positive performance on the job, resulting in outcomes that exceed expectations. How does one go about becoming a positive leader? If you’re running a small or a medium size business or some form of an organized outfit, here are three key strategies you can apply to achieve positive leadership in your workplace: Create a positive climate –While it’s not something you should ignore, try not to dwell too much on the hard, no-nonsense, profit-or-bust stuff. Instead, foster compassion. Thank your people for well-done jobs. Where they may have some shortcomings, learn to forgive while teaching them how to do things the right way. Create a two-way positive communication – This involves that popular adage about building bridges rather than walls. Make sure your feedback system is one that is constructive in nature identifying flaws and weaknesses without demoralization and advocating training and development for professional advancement. It won’t hurt too for you to do an objective and honest self-critique. It’ll keep you on track about achieving positive leadership. Practice a positive relationship with your people – Build a community-like workplace where you connect to your guys’ personal values. Work towards their physical and emotional well-being, they are after all, not cold robots. Reinforce their strengths, constantly looking for ways to build their energy and enthusiasm. These then are the three important strategies in achieving positive leadership. As you imbibe and adopt these, a positive performance, the extraordinary kind that goes beyond expectations, becomes almost inevitable.

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Did You Know You Could Communicate Your Emotions In 3 Surprising Ways?

Emotional Intelligence, Happiness, Mindfulness, Positive Psychology / My Holland

A respected researcher, Sigal Barsade who’s been looking into and studying emotional contagion for many years says emotions spread among people like a virus that thrives in the air. From her findings and observations from other research studies on the subject, here are three ways through which your emotions are actually spread : The inflection of your voice – It’s one of the principal ways we transmit how we feel to other people and generally, they’re able to grasp the feelings they deduce from the tone of our voice. In other words, it’s not so much what you say, but how you say it. In an interesting study conducted by Roland Neumann and Franz Strack, they had participants listened to several actors reading an impartial spiel using happy, sad, and neutral inflections. The findings? The group who listened to the actor with a positive inflection reported feeling optimistic. Those who stayed with the actor with sad inflection didn’t like it at all. Our tiny facial muscles – Experts say that when we talk with other people, we are unaware that we’re mimicking the micro-movements of the other person’s facial muscles. This happens automatically in milliseconds, without us being conscious of it. Be it their lips, eyebrows or eyes, we’re actually attuned to the subtle movements of other peoples’ tiny facial muscles. For instance, when you see a guy who just spotted a tiger nearby, your brain cells, called mirror neurons decode the other person’s facial expression as an expression of his fear. This involuntary mimicking activates a mental and emotional state that jives with the other person so that you yourself also feel his fear and could have spelled the difference between life and death. Facebook posts- While the previous two surprising ways emotions are spread mostly have to do with subconscious movements and mimicry, verbal and non-verbal cues, a A study done by Facebook and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States says emotional contagion can also happen based only on words. In this study Facebook steered users news feeds towards mostly positive or mostly negative content. The users’ subsequent posts turned out to be either more positive or more negative depending on which group they were in. These observations indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook also influence our emotions, constituting evidence (though experimental) that this expansive emotional contagion could also occur and in fact, be happening in social media. So, what’s the point of all this? This whole exercise says we’re spreading our emotions without knowing it or simply being unaware of it. So, if you want to make sure you’re spreading what you’d like to transmit, then take care of yourself, emotionally.

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Emotional Intelligence

Gratitude Calendar: Month of February

Positive Leadership: Its the best kind of leadership

Did You Know You Could Communicate Your Emotions In 3 Surprising Ways?

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