These simple steps will stop you jumping to the wrong conclusions about others – and make it less likely that others will do the same about you One of my Practical Appreciative Inquiry students recently shared this article from the…
Practical Appreciative Inquiry: Are Your Conversations Above Or Below The Line?
How to prepare yourself for any work conversation, even the difficult ones Here’s a very useful little nugget I picked up from a recent episode of the Rebel HR podcast, where the guests were Jackie Stavros and Cheri Torres, authors…
Are You A Leader? Here’s The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Combat Anxiety In Uncertain Times
Here’s the most effective way you can reduce speculation and combat anxiety in your team during the coronavirus pandemic.
Two Drivers of Communication: Are You An Advocate Or A Learner?
You will have come across the idea, which probably originated with NLP, that ‘every communication should have a desired outcome’. You might want to change someone’s mind, to get them to do something for you, to sell them something, or…
The 5 Biggest Email Mistakes Executives Make – And How To Avoid Them
Email as a way of communicating has certain ‘traps’ baked into it, which can obscure your message, mess up your working relationships, or if you’re really unlucky even end your career. These pitfalls are easy to avoid – and yet…
The ‘Golden Rule’ Is Not Enough
The ‘Golden Rule’ or ‘ethic of reciprocity’ – essentially, ‘treat others as you would like others to treat you’ – is one of the foundation stones of morality, not just in Western thought but in religions and cultures worldwide. It’s…
The CRAFT Model – How To Influence People
This is a simple 5-step process to for influencing people to change their minds. It’s not the only way to do it, but it does give a step-by-step process that I trust you will find useful. The process is derived…
The ‘S.T.I.R.S.’ Model for Emotionally Intelligent Feedback
Bearing the principles for delivering emotionally intelligent feedback from the previous article in mind, here are the steps for actually delivering the feedback. As a reminder that what you should be doing is stirring the recipient to change their behaviour,…
Emotional states affect the impact of messages
Some research from Dr Robert Cialdini’s excellent Inside Influence Report for May 09 suggests that the emotional state of an audience affects how receptive they are to particular kinds of messages. To save on processing effort and stave off information…
Obama evokes ‘new emotion’ – ‘Elevation’
TheStar.com | Mind & Mood | New emotion dubbed 'elevation'.
Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley last week successfully teased the uplifting emotion, stimulating the vagus nerve, from lab subjects after playing them Barack Obama's victory speech. The subjects reported "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." Past attempts to elicit the emotion failed. Vistas of the Grand Canyon didn't cut it. Neither did reading poetry to test subjects.
Powerful moments of elevation "push a mental reset button, wiping out feelings of cynicism" and replacing them with hope, optimism and moral inspiration, says Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who coined the term.
Later in the same article, Haidt says something else that caught my eye:
"Watching Obama," Haidt says, "people feel like they're being called to their higher, better selves."
At last…
(thanks to Sandy McMullen for bringing this to my attention)