Why listening beats giving advice, and what coaches and managers can learn from Motivational Interviewing Recently I came across an engaging short video by Roksana Anning on the ‘Righting Reflex’. The term was new to me, but the idea resonated…
How To Stop Your Boss From Inadvertently Screwing Up Your Meeting
I wonder if you’ve found yourself in a situation like this? Recently one of my former Appreciative Inquiry students called me to get some advice. She was running an ideas generation meeting, using Appreciative Inquiry as a broad framework. Her…
Leadership And Expressing Emotion
Authenticity In Leaders Is Not Enough For Their Followers Some thoughts inspired by the discussion about ‘Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?’ between Gautam Mukunda of Harvard Business School and Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD on the always excellent HBR IdeaCast. There is a…
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…
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)