What Is The Secret Of Success?

What is the secret of success? According to a new study by Talent Smart and published in Psychology Today, the secret of success in the workplace may be having a high emotional quotient (EQ). Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence “is the ability to understand, manage, and effectively express one’s own feelings, as well as engage and navigate successfully with those of others.”

Their research showed that 90% of high performers in the workplace possess a high emotional quotient, while 80% of low performers have a low EQ.

There are many different tests (and whole books written) on the topic of emotional intelligence and how to determine your emotional quotient. Here’s a short one from the University of Washington. Of course, most of these tests are self-graded so there may be a bias if a person is unrealistic in their self-assessment.

According to the Psychology Today article, here are five ways to boost your emotional intelligence:

1. Improve the ability to deal with so-called “negative“ emotions. While the author of the article defines some emotions as negative, the reality is that most emotions can be constructive if we learn to express them in a helpful way. Learning to deal with anger, frustration, and other difficult emotions in a way that doesn’t overwhelm us or affect our judgement is critical to success. There are many ways to deal with difficult emotions, which include: writing them out, going for a brisk walk, waiting a while before sending out that angry e-mail, or spending time in nature. Of course, these are just a few. I’d love to hear from you about the ways you deal with difficult emotions.

2. Stay cool under pressure. Boosting the ability to remain calm under pressure is one way to handle stressful situations in an assertive, rather than a reactive, way. Simply breathing deeply and counting to ten prior to expressing anger can be helpful. Similar to number one, vigorous activity or spending some time in nature can also help us keep our cool.

3. Pay attention to social cues. People with a high EQ are generally more accurate in their interpretation of others’ emotional, verbal, and physical expressions. They also tend to be effective at communicating their intentions. The author suggests coming up with multiple interpretations of someone’s expressions or actions instead of jumping to conclusions about his or her behavior. And, avoid personalizing someone else’s behavior. Seek clarification about someone else’s intentions or feelings if you are uncertain.

4. Be assertive and express difficult emotions when necessary. Set boundaries. Say “no” if you really need to and don’t feel guilty about it. Avoid trying to be superwoman or superman, taking on every responsibility that someone throws at you. I’ve been asked on occasion why I seem to have a positive outlook on aging while so many people desperately try to look and act younger. My response is simple: I would never want to go back to being younger now that I’ve gained more confidence and a stronger sense of myself, along with the ability to say “no” and set clear boundaries, without feeling guilty.

5. Express intimate emotions in close relationships. Another key to success is building and maintaining strong intimate relationships and one of the best ways to do that is to learn to share emotions in a constructive way and respond positively when another person does so. Of course, knowing with whom to share these emotions is also imperative. Some emotions are best reserved for strong personal relationships, not just acquaintances. But finding ways to let someone know they are important, cared for, or loved is important to relationships but also our self-worth and our emotional quotient. As John Donne aptly wrote, “no man is an island.” Strong relationships give us a solid foundation from which to experience life.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/the-secret-of-success.html

5 Easy Ways to Overcome Negative Thinking

Negative thoughts often sneak up when people are stressed, anxious, or depressed. And once they take root, they can impede more helpful, critical, and logical thinking.

Here are 5 simple and easy ways to manage negative thoughts when they appear.

1. Help your body relax: breathe deeply 5 times; take a drink of water; loosen up your arms and legs, roll your shoulders. If you have the time, you can even do progressive relaxation. Having a body that is relaxed will make your mind less stressed and encourage new problem solving.
2. Think of the ultimate worst case scenario. I do mean worst case. In my example it would be that the car would run out of gas, my phone wouldn’t work to call for help and no one would stop for us, and we’d spend the night in the car. Extremely unlikely. Coming up with the worst case scenario forces your mind to think outside the box.
3. Ask for help from someone you trust. If you lost a job, ask a close friend for help understanding why. If you struggle with your weight, talk with your doctor. Don’t let shame or embarrassment keep you stuck. The more minds that work at solving a problem, the better.
4. Make a plan. It doesn’t have to be super long or incredibly detailed. The purpose is to give you an outline or a map of what to do next. My plan was to find all the cash I could, to estimate how far my car would go on the gas I had, talk to my husband for his thoughts on the situation, drive slowly to conserve fuel, and to look for a store that would take checks and allow me to get cash back.
5. Replace the negative thoughts with positive ones. Don’t just think them, though. Write them out and put them where you will see them: on your bathroom mirror, your steering wheel, as a screensaver on your computer.

Negative thoughts can bog people down and prevent them from problem solving. The more you can rid yourself of them, the freer your mind will be to problem solve rather than perseverate.

In the end, I was able to clearly think through a plan to deal with the problem. I made it home with the empty gas light on, but I made it home. And I wasn’t bitter or angry or stressed. Well, maybe a touch stressed…

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/your-life/2013/09/5-easy-ways-to-overcome-negative-thinking/

Start Building A Healthy Self-Esteem Today

Building a healthy self esteem can do wonders for your life. The way you deal with people on a personal and professional level are all affected by how you perceive yourself. Having a low level of self confidence may greatly affect your life; you end up having a harder time performing at work, maintaining healthy relationships, and enjoying life.

Your perception of yourself will dictate how you live life as a whole. You may feel unable to confidently face problems and make sound decisions. You may also begin to notice that the people around you are also losing confidence in you and your skills; the way you perceive yourself will dictate how people will see you and interact with you. Yes, your self esteem means so much more than you realise.

Having a healthy concept of yourself must come from within you and not from what others say about you or your physical appearance. Self-confidence is learning how to appreciate and accept yourself as you are. If your self esteem is only dependent on how people see you and what they think about you, then your confidence will be short-lived. You will have self doubts the moment people start saying negative things about you. You need to learn how to be happy and proud of yourself, your achievements, and experiences even if others are not there to cheer you on. Once you learn to do this, then you will have a healthy self esteem no matter what the situation is.

You never know what life will throw at you, but you need to start building your self-confidence to face life's toughest challenges. You need the self-assurance to make sound decisions and navigate through life on your way to success.

Here are a few simple tips to help build your self-esteem:

• Recognise your strengths, talents, and abilities and empower yourself with them. Learn to accept your weaknesses without allowing them to pull you down into a spiral of depression. Instead, work on developing and improving yourself.
• Conquer self-defeating thoughts. Stay positive and fill your mind with good things about yourself, people, and the situation you are in. Even if things seem really bad right now, focus on how things could be better and the small steps you need to take to make that happen.
• Be honest to yourself and others. Don't try to put up an image of yourself that's not real; don't project someone you're not. Allow people to accept you for who you are and not someone you just created to please others. No one is perfect, even if sometimes they appear to be. Perceptions of people can be deceiving as you only ever see a fragment of the whole person.
• Take responsibility for your actions and decisions. Empower yourself to make important decisions about life and your future. Stop allowing others to dictate the course of your life. Think about what it is that you really want to achieve. Even if that means you need to do something that would normally make you feel a little selfish. Remember that it's your life, not theirs. Who will suffer if things go wrong because you let others run your life? In all likelihood, you will suffer the most. The people who keep trying to control your life won't be directly affected by what happens to you.

Building self confidence isn't something that can be done over night. You need to work on it every day and the best way to do that is one step at a time, the smaller steps the better.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/paul-bailey/self-esteem-building_b_2971836.html

4 Methods to Make Personal Development A Lot More Fun

Personal development can be fun. But often times, it can also feel like a chore. You have to do this, and practice that, and you don’t really feel like it, and you’re not seeing fast enough improvements, and you’re frustrated and disheartened.

In the long term, if you wanna keep developing yourself and see meaningful changes in your life, it’s important for personal development to be fun; to be able to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

Over the years, being a big self-improvement fan, I’ve tested various methods to make it more fun. I’ve identified 4 that create mind-blowing effects, and I’m gonna share them with you in the following paragraphs.

1. Stop Thinking You Need Personal Development
Most people tend to go into personal development with the perception that they are broken and they need fixing. They see themselves as damaged goods at some level, and they see self-improvement as the necessary solution.

However, this is rarely, if ever the case. You’re not broken and you don’t need fixing. Sure, you may have your flaws and imperfections, but doesn’t everybody? And that doesn’t make them defective.

When you realize this and you accept it, you stop seeing self-improvement as something you need, and you start to see it as something you want. You want it because you know bettering yourself will result in a better life, but you don’t truly need it. It’s a personal choice.

Coming from this angle makes self-improvement a lot more fun. It takes the pressure off and it permits you to take pleasure in the process. It’s like: “If it goes well, great, if not, oh well, at least I enjoyed it”. And this is an amazing mindset to have.

2. Always Reward Progress
Personal development can be slow. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and the desired results frequently refuse to show up with the intensity you want them to have. And this creates frustration.

There is a workaround this frustration, which is to reward yourself for every small progress you make. It can take you years to reach your desired destination. But you’ll make progress every single day. Why not take pleasure in it?

Well, you can do this. Firstly by acknowledging all progress and being grateful for it, and secondly by rewarding yourself for it.

What gives you instant gratification? Movies, games, relaxation, going out? Use these elements as rewards for sticking to the process, and for every step forward. Just one disclaimer: try to use rewards that don’t damage your life in the long-run. Avoid rewards like drinking, smoking, etc.

3. Do It Together With Others
Most activities are more fun when done along with other people than when done alone. Personal development is definitely one of them.

When one or more other people accompany you on the same journey, you share stories, you learn from one another, you support each other, and the journey is visibly more delightful.

That’s why it’s good to have company in self-growth. This company can be a friend you have in real life, which you get to join you on your journey. If you want, for instance, to work on building your public speaking skills over the next year, tell some friends about this and see if you can get them to join you.

It can also be people on a blog or personal development forum. These environments often create a good opportunity for people with similar goals to communicate, help each other and make the process fun. So if your real friends are not helpful regarding your self-improvement, try some virtual ones.

4. Choose Fun Personal Development Activities
Most personal development goals can be reached through a range of personal development exercises or activities. And some are a lot more fun than others.

You can increase your communication skills by going to formal social events and carefully studying every word you say, or by going to chill parties, talking with lots of people, being genuine and seeing what happens. The second choice will likely be a lot more fun.

Whatever self-improvement goals you have, take some time to consider how to go about reaching them. Try to see the full array of possibilities and out of them choose the ones that seem most enjoyable.

Don’t jump on the first road you see. If you just look around a bit, you might find a much better one slightly to the side of the first one.

I can vouch from experience that personal development can be a lot of fun. In fact it can be so much fun that the destination becomes secondary, and you just wanna be on the journey. Because it’s a fulfilling, integral part if your lifestyle, and your life simply wouldn’t be the same without it. That’s a great place to be in.

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/4-methods-to-make-personal-development-a-lot-more-fun/

You Need A Better Story

Everybody gets stuck. Life can be difficult, painful, and confusing. It's in those confusing seasons of life that we often find ourselves the most stuck, unable to change and move forward with our lives. I hate being stuck.

Solving Stuck
Like you, I've been stuck a lot. What immediately comes to mind is graduating college with no plan, the first and the second time my mom was diagnosed with cancer, that time my girlfriend broke up with me when I was just weeks away from proposing marriage, discovering a dead body in a lake, waking up one day and realizing I'd somehow become thirty pounds overweight during my twenty something years, and that terrible day when I was left unemployed for the first time in my life with two young sons, a pregnant wife, a mortgage, and a chest full of fear.

I've noticed that my tendency (and the tendency of everyone on the planet) is to solve stuck by doing something. We set new goals, write a to-do list, read a self-help book, and try to get un-stuck. Now, there's some merit to this. We certainly need to take action. But, at least for me, I've found that the problem of stuck runs much deeper than what can be fixed by a new exercise program, a change of scenery, or the latest method for improving my self-esteem. I need something bigger.

Finding A Story
A few years ago I read a quote that changed my life. Here it is:

The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is not satisfied with a merely psychological explanation of our lives. It doesn't do justice to our conviction that we are on some kind of journey or quest, that there must be some deeper meaning to our lives than whether we feel good about ourselves. Only people who have lost the sense of adventure, mystery, and romance worry about their self-esteem. And at that point what they need is not a good therapist, but a good story. Or more precisely, the central question for us should not be, 'What personality dynamics explain my behavior?' but rather, 'What sort of story am I in?' - William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993

I realized I'd been asking the wrong questions. I'd been asking questions that were too small. When life got hard and I got stuck I tended to ask questions like, "How do I fix this?," "What's wrong with me?", "What do I do now?" Instead I started asking myself, "What sort of story am I in?"

Stories are powerful. Whether we're conscious of it or not, every single one of us believes some kind of a story in order to make sense out of our lives. Human beings are meaning makers. No matter our culture, background, or beliefs, we need to make meaning of our lives and the story of our life only begins to make sense when it's understood under the banner of a bigger story. We need a story that is big enough to make sense out of both the beauty and the brokenness in our lives and in our world. Or, in other words, we need a story that's big enough to get us un-stuck from whatever life throws at us and to keep us moving forward in the plot.

You Need A Better Story
Change and forward movement in our lives isn't merely a matter of trying harder. It's a matter of believing and living more deeply into a big story in which we each have an important role to play.

Your life would actually be a lot better if your life could become less about your life. If you could see that your life is part of a larger plot than simply "the story of me," then adventure, mystery, and joy would reenter the picture. Most of the stuck-ness in our lives is a product of an over focus on our lives. We spend so much time looking in, when we ought to be looking out and up. The late Austrian philosopher, Ivan Illich, was once asked about the most revolutionary way to change society. He answered the question this way:
Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step... If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.-- Ivan Illich, "Storytelling or Myth-Making? Frank Viola and Ivan Illich," Proclamation, Invitation, & Warning, July, 2007

What our larger society needs is the same thing you need: an alternative story. A bigger story. Ditch the small goals, anxious to-do list, and the self-help craze of the month. Instead, get your heart wrapped into a better story and watch what happens.

What sort of story are you in?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-buzzard/you-need-a-better-story_b_3397077.html.