If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Month: May 2020
There is very little that happens in our day that doesn’t require some sort of negotiation. Those who study or even actively think about negotiation have a distinct advantage over those who enter in ignorance.
Here you’ll find some tips to better negotiate in everyday situations:
1. Know when to shut up: The most powerful tool in negotiation is silence. The important thing is to know when to use it. Ironically, the more you stay silent, the more likely your adversaries will expose themselves and give you the advantage.
2. Think of the long term: Always think about how what you say and do can help establish a long-term business relationship. A long-term relationship not only makes negotiating easier the next time, it also makes your business world a better place.
3. Say no: Many of us want to be agreeable and positive and say yes whenever we can, but that’s not the way to get what you want in a negotiation. You first have to know what you want out of the negotiation, and then if you don’t get it, just say no until you do.
4. Look at what’s good for all concerned: During negotiations, remain emotionally detached from the outcome, and rather than focusing on exactly what you want, focus on a result that is in the best interest for all concerned. You’ll either walk away with a great deal in hand or walk toward something even greater.
5. Be ready to walk away: If you feel frustrated, threaten to walk away from the negotiations. Nine times out of 10 the other party then will make concessions. This confirms the long understood negotiation reality that the person willing to walk away is in control.
The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance.
The tricky thing about stress is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress.
If the stress isn’t prolonged, it’s harmless. However, as soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells. Besides increasing your risk of heart disease, depression, and obesity, prolonged stress also decreases your cognitive performance.
That is why top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under stressful circumstances. This lowers their stress levels regardless of what’s happening in their environment, ensuring that the stress they experience is intermittent and not prolonged.
Here are 10 of the best practice to cope with stress:
- Appreciate What You Have: Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%.
- Avoid Asking “What If?”: “What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control.
- Stay Positive: Positive thoughts help make stress intermittent by focusing your brain’s attention onto something that is completely stress-free. You have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can’t think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week.
- Disconnect: Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress under control. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even turning off your phone gives your body a break from a constant source of stress.
- Limit Your Caffeine Intake: Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior.
- Sleep: When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present.
- Squash Negative Self-Talk: The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just thoughts, not facts. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity.
- Reframe Your Perspective: Stress and worry are fueled by our own skewed perception of events. It’s easy to think that unrealistic deadlines, unforgiving bosses, and out-of-control traffic are the reasons we’re so stressed all the time. You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them.
- Breathe: The easiest way to make stress intermittent lies in something that you have to do everyday anyway: breathing. The practice of being in the moment with your breathing will begin to train your brain to focus solely on the task at hand and get the stress monkey off your back. When you’re feeling stressed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing.
- Use Your Support System: To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
In this TED Talk, Lorna Davis, explains the difference between traditional “heroic leaders” and “interdependent leaders”.
There are three big differences between the two ways of leading:
- A hero sets a goal that can be individually delivered and neatly measured. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, start with a goal that’s really important, but is actually impossible to achieve by one company or one person alone.
- The second big difference is the leader’s willingness to declare the goals before having a plan. The heroes only reveals their carefully crafted goal when the path to achieve it is clear. In fact, the role of the hero announcement is to set the stage for the big win. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, want other people to help them, so their announcements are often an invitation for co-creation, and sometimes, they’re a call for help.
- Heroes see everyone as a competitor or a follower. Heroes don’t want input, because they want to control everything because they want the credit. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, understand that they need other people.
According to Davis, we don’t need heroes. We need radical interdependence, which is just another way of saying we need each other. Even though other people can be really difficult, sometimes. There’s no recipe here, but time together has to be carefully curated and created so that people know that their time is valuable and important, and they can bring their best selves to the table.
Why does hero culture persist, and why don’t we work together more? Interdependence is a lot harder than being a hero. It requires us to be open and transparent and vulnerable, and that’s not what traditional leaders have been trained to do. However, the joy and success that comes from interdependence and vulnerability is worth the effort and the risk.
Our brain, in order to work at 100% of its possibility, needs to be exercised and trained. Brain fitness has basic principles: variety and curiosity. When anything you do becomes second nature, you need to make a change. Curiosity about the world around you, how it works and how you can understand it will keep your brain working fast and efficiently.
Here are some tips to help attain your quest for mental fitness:
- Play Games: Suduko, crosswords and electronic games can all improve your brain’s speed and memory. You’ll get benefit more by doing these games a little bit every day. Spend 15 minutes or so, not hours.
- Meditation : By creating a different mental state, you engage your brain in new and interesting ways while increasing your brain fitness.
- Eat for Your Brain: Focus on fish oils from wild salmon, nuts such as walnuts, seeds such as flax seed and olive oil.
- Tell Good Stories: Practice telling your stories, both new and old, so that they are interesting, compelling and fun.
- Turn Off Your Television: Turn off your TV and spend more time living and exercising your mind and body.
- Exercise Your Body: By moving your body, your brain has to learn new muscle skills, estimate distance and practice balance.
- Read Something Different: Not only will your brain get a workout by imagining different time periods, cultures and peoples, you will also have interesting stories to tell about your reading.
- Learn a New Skill: Your memory comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things differently.
- Make Simple Changes: To really help your brain stay young, challenge it. Change routes to the grocery store, use your opposite hand to open doors and eat dessert first.
- Train Your Brain: The basic principles are memory, visualization, and reasoning. Work on these three concepts every day and your brain will be ready for anything.
Image: Pixabay – Mohamed_Hassan
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
The Diplo calendar 2020 realized by Stefano Baldi presents a selection of quotes for better living and better working.
The selected quotes are by well-known as well as lesser known Italian men and women that can inspire us in our daily life.
Here is the selected quotation for the month of May
A great flame follows a little spark
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