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Research Findings About Sticking To New Year’s Resolutions

Goals, Mindfulness, Motivation, Positive Psychology / My Holland

“I’ll stop smoking from here on in.” “I resolve to pay my debts and I.O.U’s on a more regular basis.” “I’ll do some jogging every morning or do some brisk walking at night when I’m unable to get up from bed at sunrise.” With the onset of 2019, these are some of the most common New Year’s resolutions (not too many resolved to be less sexually active) you’ll hear from family and friends, colleagues and associates at work and school mates. Funny thing is … like promises, as some cynics might say, they’re meant to be broken. Let’s see what research has to say about these. Conducted by researchers at the University of Scranton, a 2014 survey found that seventy-seven percent (77%) of people stuck to their New Year’s resolutions during the first week. Six months after, this figure goes spiraling down to forty-six percent (46%). Given that fifty-five percent (55%) of resolutions are related to health and fitness and twenty percent (20%) has to do with paying off financial obligations, human behavior experts and psychologists felt this was quite disconcerting and dug deeper to get a better understanding as to why this happens. An analysis on the subject led by Ayelet Fishbach from the University of Chicago and Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University found that, in a nutshell, people were less likely to stick to a resolution or a goal that did not offer an immediate payoff, or at least a reward that is obvious and can easily be seen. So what does one have to do to stick and follow through on a New Year’s resolution? Michelle Segar, director of Sport, Health and Activity Research and Policy Center at the University of Michigan says the trick is … to “feel like every little bit of self-improvement counts.” In other words, if you’re planning to join a ten kilometer (10K) marathon, you don’t train for just one day. Neither can you pay off a business or student loan with a single check? As the popular saying goes … there aren’t any elevators to reaching a goal. You gotta take the stairs. Some of the other hard-working tips that will help you stick to your guns re New Year’s resolutions are : Stay away from temptations. If you resolve to stop smoking, stay away from people who smoke and pubs and bars that have that hard-to-ignore cigarette fragrance permeating the air. Plan a course of action. Resolving to pay off debts regularly? Calendarize it or have your payroll guy at the office deduct a portion of your paycheck each payday. And, most importantly, should you backslide into something you resolved to stop doing, it’s not the end of the world. Don’t give up on the goal or the resolution altogether. Stick to it like glue.

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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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Positive Psychology

Research Findings About Sticking To New Year’s Resolutions

Positive Leadership: Its the best kind of leadership

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

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