Posts Tagged ‘Personality’

Want A Thriving Business? Focus On Emotional Intelligence

Written by Hebatullah Saeed on January 26, 2022. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

Image Source: oatawa | Canva

Emotional intelligence can improves business results often by order of magnitude. Today, the leader’s mood plays an important role in this dynamic. New research has shown that leaders should redefine what they do first and best. The human mind proves that leaders’ moods could affect the feelings of those around them. The reason for that lies in what scientists call the open-loop nature of the mind`s limbic gadget, which relies upon outside assets to control itself and serves as our emotional center. However, the closed-loop gadget is self-regulating, and our mood usually depends on our connections with different humans. The open-loop limbic gadget is a triumphing layout in evolution. It allows humans to come to one another’s emotional rescue; for example, permitting a mom to appease her crying infant.

Resonant Leaders Inspire People

Resonating means being in harmony or in sync with those around you. Mary Tuk engages with the people around her, those who report to her and others. She tells them not only what is important to them in their lives and work but also to their personal and professional vision. She listens to them because she cares. Employees sense this and respond accordingly. This creates an environment of open dialogue, mutual respect, and trust. Personal and shared visions have a long history in management and organizational practice but only recently have they begun to systematically build empirical knowledge about the role of individuals and shared visions, teams, or organizations when developing personal or shared visions. Positive Emotional Attractors (PEA) and Negative Emotional Attractors (NEA) are two major states that are strange attractors, each characterized by three dimensions. These are (1) positive emotional awakening and negative emotional awakening; (2) endocrine excitement of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, and (3) neurological activation of standard mode networks and task-positive networks. Building a compassionate relationship in a shared vision is difficult even in the simplest times. But in a highly competitive industry like banks, this is a big challenge. Imagine trying to excite people in the future by working on performance, energy updates, and sustainability when the world around you seems to be collapsing. Emotional and social intelligence skills show that in many countries around the world, they predict the effectiveness of leadership, management, and professional activities. They can be called emotional intelligence (EI) and social intelligence (SI) behavioral levels. To be an effective leader, manager, or expert, a person should properly understand and handle his or her emotions based on each person or situation and interact effectively with others. One needs to understand the emotional signals of others . These competencies occur in three clusters: (1) Cognitive intelligence (CI) competencies, such as systems thinking and pattern recognition; (2) Emotional intelligence index (EI) abilities, such as adaptability, emotional self-control, emotional self-awareness, positive attitude, and achievement orientation; and (3) Social intelligence (SI) abilities, such as empathy, organizational awareness, inspirational leadership, influence, coaching and mentoring, conflict management, and teamwork. Other competencies are like threshold competencies, and that means they have to be defensive.

Emotional intelligence at work

Emotions can also be a valuable tool in the workplace. Through learning to read and influence the emotions and reactions of others, emotional intelligence can be rewarded in your organization. Here’s how that can happen: Make sure leaders practice the right actions. If the leader does well, you can see it in the team. Allow colleagues to distinguish between emotions and personality. Try this exercise: The manager puts a huge calendar on the wall, and the team members mark the calendar with emojis that show their feelings. Encouraging employees to say “I feel frustrated” rather than “I’m frustrated” can increase their emotional awareness. Make employees feel valued. When employees have a say, they feel more connected. Talk frequently with your employees to find out what they think of changes and projects so they can talk and hear. If they tell you they are angry, frustrated, or worried, make it okay. Also, say thank you and show people that you are grateful. Make feedback routine and factual. Give and receive negative and positive feedback. It helps everyone become a better employee. It’s a good idea to start with a question, “How are you? What are you thinking?” If you give negative feedback, don’t do it personally. Also, please accept feedback from the team. “What would you change if you were in my position?” Remember to control your reaction to what you hear. If you don’t like it, think about why and pause before answering. Make assertion training accessible to all employees. Explosive anger, resentment, and frustration result from disgusting emotions. For many, it is difficult to express themselves properly. Teaching employees when and how to deal with difficult situations can help people avoid emotional relapses. Facilitate stress management. Be aware of your employees’ increasing workload, deadlines, and stresses. Provide support if possible. Implement stress-relieving strategies and training to reduce emotional ups and downs.

Control Core Beliefs and Worries to Balance Your Confidence

Written by Kathina Aninditya on November 1, 2021. Posted in Articles, Personal performance, Uncategorized

Image source: Chris Montgomery | Unsplash

Confidence is a belief in one’s ability to succeed. It is positioned in between a trait or an ability. Much research has been conducted on confidence over the years. The majority of this research accentuates the importance of confidence in life which leads to studying the techniques to build and improve confidence.

Additionally, Locke et al. have found that the stronger people’s self-confidence is, the higher the goals are and their committedness towards them. This shows that self-confidence could also indicate one’s willingness to act. In this sense, self-confidence is considered one of the most influential motivators and regulators of behavior in people’s everyday lives as it helps strengthen one’s resilience in facing adversity to succeed in life.

However, people often do not include developing confidence together with their competence. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis found an overlap of only 9% between how good people think they are and how good they actually are. This phenomenon could reduce one’s self-awareness and performance, which may result in the creation of a narcissistic culture. Therefore, the need to keep confidence in check must be highlighted and should be practiced with the following strategies.

Test your core beliefs

Core beliefs are the most basic assumptions about one’s identity. It determines the degree to which people see themselves as safe, competent, powerful, and autonomous. These beliefs become the foundation or rules of how one governs one’s behavior. Core beliefs and the associated rules are fundamental to one’s personality, hence to self-confidence, as a personality trait.

The role of core beliefs is also emphasized in the definition of self-confidence. While positive beliefs lead to becoming a confident person, too much positivity could become toxic which results in overconfidence. Meanwhile, negative beliefs could result in underconfidence. To change these two extremes, McKay, M., et al. mention a seven-step process in their workbook, Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life, to help test an individual’s core beliefs:

Identify your core beliefs by asking situational “What if” questions and exploring what that situation can mean for you.
Once the core belief is identified, assess its negative impact by thinking about how this can affect your work, mood, and relationships.
From there, identify rules based on your core belief by exploring its veracity through questions like “What do I actually do to cope with my belief? What do I avoid? How do I think I’m supposed to act? What are my perceived limits?”
Generate catastrophic predictions for each rule in case you break them. Think of scenarios that can possibly happen if you do not follow your rule.
After that, start with a rule that has the least consequence and test it based on the following five selection criteria: easy to set up the situation, allows a direct test of the underlying core belief, has a clear prediction of your behavior rather than suggestive feelings, has an immediate outcome, and has a relatively low amount of risk associated to it.
Test your rule in a real-life situation and keep a record of how you handle the situation based on the new behavior and the outcome it brings. Keep doing this until you are able to test out all the rules.
Once you’ve done all these, you should be able to develop a new core belief. With this new belief, go back to step three and repeat the process. Write the new rule as affirmations by using “I” language in the present tense rather than commands or restrictions.

The whole process can go on for as long as it needs to be until you are comfortable with the new core belief and its rules. The important thing to consider here is to continuously keep a log of everything as it may act as support for new rules in the future. This will also help guide you as you fortify and balance your self-confidence.

Control your worries

Confidence is closely related to a sense of worry. Worry represents a natural process of mental problem-solving on the uncertainty that invokes a feeling of anxiousness. It can motivate people to put extra effort into work or personal tasks, making them feel more confident as they face their problems. However, worry is more known for its negative impacts, such as cognitive bias, which may lead to either underconfidence or overconfidence.

Worry is also a cyclical pattern involving thoughts, body, and behavior. For example, the thought of being rejected during a job interview can chain into other negative thoughts, resulting in anxiety. Subsequently, physical symptoms associated with the fight-or-flight response begin to manifest such as heart palpitations and muscle tension. People may adopt a self-serving behavior to avoid this uncomfortable feeling by shifting the blame to others for making it harder to land a job.

Based on this pattern, it is recommended to control worry by approaching it in three levels. First, to deal with physical stress, you can practice relaxation exercises regularly. Relaxation provides breaks in the cycle of the fight-or-flight response. One of the techniques is progressive muscle relaxation which involves alternating tension and relaxation in a group of major muscles.

Second, practice risk assessment to know which risks to avoid and be prepared for instead of worrying to help your thinking process. There are two main aspects to risk assessment: probability estimation and outcomes prediction. You need to estimate the probability of a worst-case scenario from the feared event coming to pass, with 0% for no likelihood to 100% for absolute inevitability. Then, predict the outcome you most fear while trying to figure out the possible coping strategies that would help ease the worry.

Finally, these five steps can help in mitigating worry behaviors:

Record your worry behavior
Pick the easiest one to stop and predict the consequences of stopping it
Stop the chosen behavior or replace it with a new behavior
Assess your anxiety before and after
Repeat steps 2-4 with the next-easiest behavior

Being confident surely helps one overcome adversity. However, having too much or too little confidence without being accompanied with proper competence could have negative impacts. Therefore, verify your core beliefs and control your worries to have the right amount of confidence. As Charles Darwin said, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Which archetypes are better for business: Givers, Takers or Matchers?

Written by Maria Juncu on July 13, 2020. Posted in Multimedia

Motivators are the key to any long-lasting, successful, future-oriented organization.

The Importance of Good Etiquette in Business – Part I

Written by Anna Kucirkova on June 7, 2019. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

If you want to land a job, get into a good school, build a strong career, or maintain lasting personal relationships, it’s important to know how to have good etiquette.

Personality vs. Portfolios: The Best Performance Predictor

Written by Denisa Călin on April 7, 2014. Posted in Editorials, Individual Performance

Do thick CVs predict performance, or describe a precedent?

When looking to hire, Human Resources specialists and managers will look to the best fit between the candidate’s offer, his CV, background and achievements and the job’s requirements. It’s the natural string of events, taking into account urgency and the need for workforce.