3 Commonly Used Phrases Around Resilience That Actually Drain Resilience

Resilience is very popular as a topic currently. Everyone is talking about how to build resilience in order to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life and the odd exceptional circumstance.

It has become very fashionable for organisations to look at building resilience in people and they look to the CIPD, psychologists, coaches and trainers to help them with this erstwhile endeavour. YET, there are a number of commonly used phrases that are used when working with resilience that may exacerbate the issue. These phrases are used so often that you probably use them yourself every day without even thinking about them.

1) Resilience involves “bouncing-back”
Resilience is often defined as your ability to bounce back from the stresses of life.

The idea of resilience as an aspect of human behaviour originates from material science where it describes the property of a material to resume its original shape after distortion or stress – to bounce back.

The issue with the phrase “bouncing back” is that there is an expectation that people will return back to a state where nothing has changed.

You show good resilience by possessing:

• a firm, reliable acceptance of reality
• a deep belief, supported by strongly held values, that life is meaningful
• an ability to be creative, adaptable and to improvise.

This has nothing to do with bouncing (backward or forward) as you continually evolve and improve yourself by learning from your environment and your mistakes and in this way develop your resilience.

2) Resilient people are better at managing “positive and negative emotions”
Emotion is a complex state of feeling resulting in physical and psychological changes that influence thought and behaviour.  Emotions are controlled through interactions of your amygdala and hippocampal complex within the limbic system of your brain. This part of the brain has no language processing ability. It is your neo-cortex – the thinking part of the brain - that assigns a label to the emotion.

The issue with the phrase “positive and negative emotions” is that it assumes some emotions to be good and some to be bad.

Emotions are emotions. You experience them for a reason. They have developed over eons through evolutionary processes as a survival mechanism. It is not the emotion that is positive or negative; it is the thought process and the behaviour that accompanies it that requires the label.

Anger is often referred to as a negative emotion, yet it serves you well to right a wrong, to be more attentive and careful in your thinking and to motivate you at certain times.

Fear is often referred to as a negative emotion. If it is so negative, why can you get so much enjoyment from horror movies and scary films?

Happiness is often referred to as a positive emotion. It is suggestive of a state of blissful nirvana that you must aspire towards, yet it is not appropriate at solemn occasions. Also, happiness will limit you in your ability to communicate effectively, negotiate well and make critical decisions. It can encourage riskier behaviours, encourage you to take shortcuts and lead you to make more mistakes.

Resilience is developed through the intelligent application and expression of identified emotions, known as emotional intelligence.

3) Resilient people have a good “work / life balance”
Resilience is having a clear, realistic focus of what is important and being able to prioritise effectively.

The issue with the phrase “work /life balance” is that it compartmentalises everything into work activities (meetings, clients, trips, conferences) and life activities (family commitments, holidays, hobbies, keeping healthy).

Think about it. The phrase is actually meaningless. Life is not at one end of a fulcrum with work on the other end! Work is an integrated part of life.

You only have one life – you just happen to live some of it while working and some of it engaged in other activities. Like most people over the age of 20, work takes up a major proportion of your life and has to be realistically integrated into all of your activities to give you a rich, rewarding and meaningful focus.

Resilience is developed though realising what is necessary and important, keeping fit and healthy, and building rewarding, authentic relationships inside and outside of work. It is all about personal organisation and finding ways to relax.

Perspective on issues and your ability to look at problems creatively is lost under continued stress. The popularly of resilience tries to rectify this, however, your good intentions could be diminished by the inappropriate language that you use inadvertently.

Adapted from "The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience; Strategies to Manage Stress and Weather Storms in the Workplace" - published May 2016.  Available to order from Amazon - https://goo.gl/JdQKsX

Insights into Mindfulness Lightbulb Moments Cards

"Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment."  Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme  at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Ei4Change has available Lightbulb Moments cards giving insights into various aspects of emotional intelligence.  These have been well received as a valuable resource in education, training and coaching.  

A new set of 18 Lightbulb Moments cards - Insights into Mindfulness - has just been published.

Lightbulb Moments are free to download from the Ei4Change website.  You can  access to all the Lightbulb Moments series and other free resources by clicking on the button.

Emotional Intelligence Programmes for 2016

Ei4Change – Emotional Intelligence 4 Change - are pleased to announce that we have a number of emotional intelligence training initiatives starting in 2016. 

In April 2016, we are running an Introduction to Emotional Intelligence workshop and leading into our Advanced Emotional Intelligence Programme.  Both are endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management who provide a Certificate on satisfactory completion of the required assessments.

These programmes cover an in depth look at the role and function of emotions and how emotional competencies can be used and applied.  They provide a complete picture of emotional intelligence how these principles enable people and organisations to improve their performance.  The tools and techniques that participants will learn can be applied immediately.

Our programmes commence on April 4th at The Woodland Grange, Leamington Spa.

Ei4Change is also running the Introduction to Emotional Intelligence Programme via webinars over 8 weeks starting on 20th April 2016.  This programme is ideal for you if you live and work outside the UK or if you are unable to commit the time to attend workshops.

Graduates from the Ei4Change Advanced Emotional Intelligence Programme can cement their learning by enrolling on the Master Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence Programme.  Again, this programme is endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management who provide a Certificate on satisfactory completion of the required assessments.

We are running a Master Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence Programme commencing on the 20th June 2016 at The Woodland Grange, Leamington Spa.

There is a 20% Earlybird discount on all courses at Woodland Grange up until 31st January 2016.

For more information on our emotional intelligence training, see our website www.ei4change.com or contact Robin Hills at Ei4Change via email robin@ei4change.org.uk

Introduction to DISC Personality Assessments

Everyone should be treated with care and respect. Whilst people are different, everyone has a value with special strengths and qualities. People very rarely set out to cause upset - they just behave differently. That’s because they are different.

Personality assessments are useful tools that can give some interesting insights into these differences around motivation, management style, communication, relationship building, etc.

The theories that underpin personality assessments are surprisingly easy to understand at a basic level. There are many different personality and motivational models and theories, and each one offers a different perspective.

One of the most widely used, well respected and highly developed models is based on the theories of Dr William Moulton Marston, from his book Emotions of Normal People (1928). His ideas have been developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota into a robust, validated assessment tool known as DISC.

The DISC model presents a series of four main descriptions (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance).

Dominance = Results driven - strategic planning and action towards identified aims - tends to be outspoken.

Influence = Influence, persuasion, affability - communication and people skills - tends to be extraverted.

Steadiness = Steadiness and process - routine, dependability, reliability, credibility, trustworthy - tends to be team-orientated.

Compliance = Compliant with rules, proven principles, detail, accuracy - tends to be introverted.

Most people have a dominant or preferred main type, plus one or two supporting types in different degrees, which are dependent upon the individual and the situation.  The main characteristics of their dominant or preferred type are displayed allowing for recognition of a broad range of generalised behaviours.

DISC testing instruments assess people's strongest or preferred type and their supporting types from the four available.   The results are represented on a series of graphs and personality descriptions based upon the mixture of the types.

Once identified and recognised, each type can be seen to react differently in a given situation, to work with tasks in their own way and to engage with people in different ways.  There is no right or wrong type, the important point is that each type has differing strengths and liabilities.

The research and development over the years means that DISC can give valuable insights into predicting behaviour in the workplace and behaviour under pressure. In recruitment, DISC can provide very valuable compliment to the interview process.

This article can only give a very quick overview of the tool. To find out more you can enrol for free in my class Behavioural Styles and Teamwork on Skillshare using this link - http://skl.sh/1OVbIF2

The best way to get a clear understanding of your own profile is to take the assessment provided by a reputable, respected company. From this you can see what the assessment shows and how it can support you as part of a recruitment process or in your personal and management development. If this is of interest to you, please get in touch at robin@ei4change.org.uk

The importance of testing for clear thinking in recruitment

Neuroscience is rapidly changing our understanding of how human memory works.  For many years it was widely believed that the human brain recorded events like a video camera and that events that had been completely forgotten could be could be retrieved and played back given the right set of circumstances.

We now know that the memory does not work in that way at all.  In fact the human brain reassembles and reorders various parts of an event when retrieving a memory.  It, in effect, creates a completely new memory, often including details that seem very real but which turn out later not to have taken place.

The same process takes place when the brain remembers words and orders them together either to think analytically or attempt to express thoughts.  Rather than having a dictionary-like definition, words in the brain are stored as an ever-changing set of connections that constantly update their meanings.

When people are reading, writing, listening or speaking, their brains create new connections and hence new definitions for many of the words, statement or phrases that it is processing.  This phenomenon manifests itself in the tendency of business discussions to devolve into dialogues around semantics rather than address the actual issues in question.

The brain’s inherent plasticity when using words greatly increases the value of business communications that are clear and precise.  That clarity and precision (or lack of it) is simultaneously rewiring the word connections and definitions both in the brain of somebody who is writing and speaking as well as the person who is listening or reading.

Fuzzy wording creates fuzzy thinking

Unlike communications that are clear and precise, business communications that are fuzzy and imprecise generate connections between words that are similarly ambiguous and unclear.  In other words, a feedback loop is taking place: fuzzy thinking creates fuzzy wording which in turn creates fuzzier thinking. 

Many organisations tolerate, indeed encourage, the use of fuzzy and imprecise wording in the form of acronyms, buzzwords and jargon.  The culture created is one where fast communication can appear to occur so that anyone who uses the key words feels as if they are an integral part of the organisation. 

This has been compounded in recent years by the trend for people to express themselves using quotation marks or inverted commas in both writing and speech.  This is an expression of thought in its original form phrased by the communicator without clearly defining exactly what they mean.  Often the phrase is a metaphor and in most circumstances there is understanding.  Caution is advised as the rules around the use of quotation marks varies with language.   All too often, we know what we mean and think that we are communicating clearly but in reality this is often not the case.  As an illustration, we when we talk we think people “get it” but in reality they “switch off” when they hear something that isn’t meaningful “in their world” and so may appear to be somewhat “dumb”.

Clear thinking creates clear wording which in turn creates clearer thinking.

What this means when recruiting

From the perspective of recruitment, it is important to understand how your communication style reflects the fuzzy thinking and imprecise wording of the industry that you recruit for and the clients that you work with.  It is obviously necessary to assess your clients’ tolerance towards industry acronyms, buzzwords and jargon and imprecise wording and how ingrained it is in their culture.  How much are you contributing to this by your desire to be recognised as an experience professional?

For those organisations who recruit people who communicate in a similar way, this will contribute to the amount of ambiguous thinking, which is going to impact on the communication capabilities within the overall organisation. 

In the future, recruiters must put additional emphasis on a candidate’s ability to write and speak with precision and clarity.  As a result, the recruitment process will tend to make the overall organisation progressively better at communicating internally and externally and so appear to be “smarter”.

What can neuroscience tell recruiters?

There has been a lot of talk about neuroscience recently. It is the latest flavour of the month but what does it really mean in the field of recruitment?
Neuroscience is more than just an understanding of which parts of the brain become more active in certain situations. In fact, the more we find out about the workings of our most complex organ, the less we find that we truly understand. However, the research is uncovering new knowledge that can makes us better at recruiting to ensure that we place the right candidate in the right role at the right time.

The outputs from brain research, social science and psychology can help recruiters to attract and retain new candidates and clients by helping to understanding more about motivation, personalities and behaviour and what drives them. All this can play a part in improving performance.

A lot of the research is providing peer-reviewed evidence that supports many of the things that we have known or suspected for years. However, it is adding to our knowledge of what makes us tick as human beings. This means that we can now look at making changes in our behaviour that is proven to have more positive, sustainable outcomes in the long term.

Motivation

Motivation is vital in recruitment. However, it is not just about money. The motivation and reward systems in our brain drive us towards our goals with energy and enthusiasm.   Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in generating feelings of pleasure. In business, if a happy environment full of rewarding experiences is created, our brains produce dopamine in the right areas so that we become more motivated to push ourselves. So trying to find out what produces those dopamine responses for individuals will help to determine what motivates them.

Stress

Cortisol has been found to accumulate in parts of the brain when a person is feeling stressed. It has become widely known as the stress hormone. High levels of cortisol for extended periods lead to high blood pressure (with the associated health issues), memory loss and possible depression. All of these are costly to the individual and the organisation. Good businesses need a healthy workforce, which starts with performance management that is consistent and transparent to avoid stress in the workplace.

Recruiters may view a candidate’s history of working long hours as a positive indicator of commitment. In the future, however, recruiters may need to interpret a history of working long hours as a negative indicator suggesting a lack of balance and a consequent inability to think and perform effectively. This is, also, where consideration of a person’s motivational factors becomes critical. What is driving this behaviour?

Empathy and emotional involvement

Male and female brains are not only wired differently, they are infused with different combinations of neurotransmitters (such as oxytocin) and hormones (such as oestrogen, adrenaline, oxytocin). Oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter and a hormone.

Women have been shown through studies to be better at intuitive thinking involving people. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved and will listen more. Women are more naturally empathetic.

Women’s ability to listen more effectively and read emotional cues has enormous implications for how businesses are run, especially in the crucial area of teamwork. According to recent studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is a positive correlation between the ability of teams to accomplish group tasks and the number of women on the team. The correlation between team success and gender was not the diversity of the team, but the actual percentage of women on the team. The more women on the team, the more effective the team, even when they worked online without face-to-face meetings.

From this, recruiters may need to view the recruitment of more women as a workable strategy for creating stronger, more effective teams. Such a strategy is likely to become more important as social networking increases the amount of team activity in the workplace.

Learning

Good leaders and managers ensure their people will be given opportunities to develop and grow. Synapses in the brain grow and strengthen with new information, referred to as plasticity. However, neuroplasticity takes time and the system can be overloaded if too much information is delivered all at once. Research shows that we retain information better when we learn in in small regular doses interspersed with good, quality sleep. Training that combines a mixture of theory, reflection and practical activity and will allow the brain to assimilate and use the information well. In order to embed in the learning, the training needs to be relevant and built into working practice over a period of time.

When a company is harnessing their employees’ individual personalities, goals, needs and abilities, in an employee-focused manner and communicate with them properly, the employees feel valued and valid, which helps to build a successful and intuitive working environment. This in turn empowers them and alleviates stressful situations reducing the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, which can narrow their attention to any perceived threat, and opens them up to broader thinking, better problem solving and more creative thought.

All this is very interesting but what does it mean in practice? Certainly, from a recruitment perspective it means working with candidates in new ways to look at how they take in information, how they process information, how they work with emotions, what factors are motivators for them, how they interact with others, how they manage stress and their effective working practices.

Another way of looking at this conundrum is to start focusing on emotional intelligence. This is how a person combines their thinking with their feelings in order to build quality working relationships and to make more effective decisions. The evidence is mounting that emotional intelligence is a more effective measure of success in work and life that is bringing in the new understanding supported by the evidence from neuroscience.

Coaching with “Images of Resilience”

In conjunction with RSVP Design, Ei4Change has produced a toolbox to support training, personal development and coaching around resilience.

Images of Resilience contains multiple copies of 16 carefully designed images drawn in an attractive cartoon style.  The images are metaphors, representing a range of experiences and emotions linked with the theme of RESILIENCE.  They facilitate the exploration of different facets of resilience and its connections with stress, change, challenge and learning.

Images of Resilience is an extremely powerful tool for use in one-to-one coaching.  It can also be used in small group discussions (of up to three people).  

Here is a detailed example of how you can use Images of Resilience in coaching.

1. Explain that the images represent a range of aspects of resilience: some of the skills, behaviours and attitudes that are required to develop the personal resilience and deal with challenges, pressures and stress in both personal and professional environments.

2. Explain that this process is intended to help individuals to think about the responsibilities and pressures that they are currently facing and to consider their own strategies and approaches to managing themselves.

3. Begin by giving an example.  Select the image called ‘Drive and Motivation’– the picture of migrating animals and birds.  Describe how this image represents an internal drive that motivates the animals to undertake long, demanding and potentially dangerous journeys.

Ask the questions:

“What is it that motivates you?

“What is the internal drive that makes you want to commit to something that might be difficult and stressful?”

4. Listen to the answers, then show the card called ‘Risk’ – the person entering the radioactive environment.  Describe how a challenging management role has risks attached – for both the manager and the people being managed.

Ask, “What are those risks and what do you think you can do to prevent or over come them?”

5. When you have worked with these two examples, spread the remaining cards (with supporting notes) randomly on a table and ask the coachee to choose two or three further cards.  Each of these cards should represent an aspect of resilience that the coachee feels is important to demonstrate and strengthen.

(Allow enough time for the coachee to consider the cards and hink about what they might mean – a minimum of 5 minutes of reflection time).

When the cards have been selected, ask the coachee what the cards mean to him / her.

Explore two aspects:

• Why the coachee selected this card and why it is an important skill or quality.
• The extent to which the coachee feels that they have, and can rely upon, this quality.

Can they give examples of how and when they use it?

For example, if the coachee selected the image entitled ‘Bouncing Back’ – the wobbly toys, can he / she describe situations in which he / she has taken knocks or criticism and been able to bounce back in a positive way?

6. Finally, ask the coachee to select two cards (these may include a card or cards that have already been discussed).

• The first card should represent what they feel is their own most valuable ability in relation to resilience (ie, what they think they do best and find most useful).  For example, this might be endurance – a willingness to work with uncertainty and ambiguity or an ability to find creative ways of dealing with barriers to progress.
• The second card should represent what they believe they would find most difficult.  For example, keeping focus when there are many distractions and being flexible about a process when under pressure to deliver results or overcoming their fears.

7. Explore the coachee’s choice of cards and then ask them to summarise their thoughts and discussions through effective questioning.

This process will explore various dimensions of personal resilience within the working environment leading to a depth that may have taken many hours within an ordinary coaching session.

Images of Resilience can be used in education to help students explore specific skills  valued by employers and to manage work as a part of life to find their own personal coping strategies when under pressure.

For more details click here

A video giving more details about resilience and Images of Resilience is available on YouTube.

For more information, and to order Images of Resilience, visit www.rsvpdesign.co.uk

Facial expression is the most common tool by which we gather information about other people.  We not only use the face to identify others, we use it to determine their initial emotional state and any changes that might occur during the communication process.  This makes facial expression more emotionally revealing and more accurate than the spoken word.

In selling, facial expression is the primary feedback tool that guides the selling process.  It provides valuable feedback about how the sale is progressing.  Level of interest, desire, and indication of honesty or deception can be identified by changes in facial expression.   Sales professionals not only react to facial responses to reinforce points that are important to the prospect but also identify and deal with objections before they get in the way of making the sale.  This is the main reason why sales professionals drive millions of miles to have face-to-face meetings with prospective clients.  When facing the prospect or client, the subtle indications of heightened awareness suggestive of positive feedback can be witnessed as well as signs of tacit disapproval.  Both are critical for initial sales success and for maintaining long-term professional relationships.

There are as many as 38,000 different combinations of facial expressions that involve over 20 muscles.  Yet, despite this wide range of possibilities and the impact of cultural influences, facial expressions are not only readily identifiable; they are surprisingly reliable indicators of emotional responses.  These expressions are typically identified with very high levels of accuracy.  Researchers Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen have identified seven universal facial expressions displayed throughout the world: surprise, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness and contempt.

(Facial expressions courtesy of www.feelingfacescards.com)

Facial expressions are notoriously short in duration.  Although we tend to display a general emotional state to those around us, a genuine facial response is short-lived, usually less than half a second.  The expression of surprise has the longest duration, lasting over three seconds.

(Facial expressions courtesy of www.feelingfacescards.com)

To achieve an accurate assessment of facial expression in a sales situation, one must focus on the face as information is shared.  Otherwise the actual response is easy to miss, or it may be consciously manipulated either to conceal or mislead the sales professional to maintain some degree of negotiating power.

Micro-expressions, describe the facial expressions typically lasting a microsecond and are extremely accurate and revealing.  Micro-expressions are highly accurate emotional responses, which often indicate a socially unacceptable response or may reveal a highly charged emotional state that is best concealed, thus their short duration.  For example, in sales, a particularly high price might reveal a prospect’s naïveté, which she may immediately attempt to conceal behind a veneer of indifference.

With training, using videos to show the evolution and decay of micro-expressions, greater precision is possible in assessing facial expression.  Given the tendency to minimise facial expressions (much more common to males than females) in sales meetings or negotiation sessions, subtle cues indicating positive or negative responses become even more valuable.

Together with the Centre for Body Language, Ei4Change is undertaking research on the use of body language in selling.

To gather quality scientific evidence, we are searching for companies with sales teams of at least 10 people, who would like to participate in our online research at no cost.  In exchange, we will provide you with the test results and an analysis report of your company's sales team capabilities.

You can try a free, simplified version of the online test that we use with your sales team: http://www.microexpressionstest.com/micro-expressions-test/  The full test will take just 2 minutes to complete.  Also, further details can be found on the Ei4Change Body Language page