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Category: Training (Page 3 of 40)

5 Tips Become a More Empathetic Person

Empathy is the ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Highly empathetic persons sense the emotions of those around them, and have the ability to tap into those same emotions within themselves.

Empathy is something we tend to reserve for our personal lives, however, empathy should also be practiced in our professional relationships.

Indeed, business relationships form because of a fundamental trust between you and your network. When you express empathy, you are delivering an experience to people that they’re not just listened to; they’re heard. And because they’re heard, they’re understood. This gives your network a sense of connection and safety directly associated with you, ultimately laying the foundation for them to trust you with their business.

Empathy is a skill, and skills can be learned. In this article are presented 5 tips to develop empathy:

1. (Actively) Listen More Than You Speak

Empathetic persons listen first and only speak after they’ve carefully heard.

2. Express Your Perspective

Put yourself in their shoes, experience the moment as if it were happening to you, and let your emotions guide you.

3. Be Vulnerable

Asking for help shows vulnerability, and vulnerability often leads to that greater sense of connection and relation.

4. Don’t Make Assumptions

When you make an assumption, the understanding you draw is rarely a good match to the problem this person is facing. As a result, the connection you try to make feels forced and unnatural. So don’t rush empathy, and don’t try and empathize before you truly understand the situation.

5. Use Your Imagination

The ability to imagine what someone else is feeling—even if we haven’t experienced it ourselves—is critical to empathy. And one way to develop this skill is to develop your imagination.

Empathy

Image: FlickrKaiwan Teanngam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) 

The Bus Metaphor

The right people in the right seats on the bus: this is the metaphor from the first Jim Collins best-seller ‘Good to Great’. In that book – published in 2001 – the author identifies what leaders need to do, in order to see their teams and organizations excel. And he uses the power of an image to communicate the following concept.

According to Collins, leaders who are able to transform their organizations begin not by setting a direction, but by getting the right people on the bus – and the wrong people off the bus.

Actually great leaders understand the following three simple truths:

1. If you begin with “who,” rather than “what”, you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

2. If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away, because they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.

3. If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company.

Assembling the team is the first crucial point. Then a leader has to develop a vision (the direction of the bus), to remove obstacles to high performance (that is, maybe people are not exactly in the right seats and need to be assigned to the right role) and to help people with diverse talents and interests building trust in each other.

It is an hard work, but leaders need it to accomplish objectives with the right people.

Image source: http://bit.ly/16TU0QU

 

3 Tips for getting back to work

The vision of returning to the office after vacation and the reality usually have very little in common. In this article you will find some tips to avoid the post-vacation crush:

  1. Actively plan for your return.

When planning time away from work, most people focus on getting organized for departure. Avoid undoing all that restoration by treating your return as something that needs to be managed in advance as well.

While many of us try to maximize vacation time by coming home Sunday night experts suggest considering an earlier-than-last-minute return.

2. Factor in some triage.

Don’t just walk back into the office after a vacation without a plan of attack, unless you want to be steamrolled. Experts suggest you protect the time you’ve set aside to get caught up the way you would a meeting or a presentation.

3. Your out-of-office response is your first line of defense: wield it to your advantage.

Your out-of -office autoreply needs to be straightforward, helpful, and honest, but not that honest.

 

Learn to plan ahead, rely on your coworkers, and understand that sometimes, it’s inevitable that you’ll miss out on that last-minute request, and you’ll be that much more productive when you return.

 

Image: Holidayyourdoku .com  (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

Master the Instant Speech in 3 easy steps

So many times we are required to come up with sensible and insightful observations to make during a conversation. And many times we find ourselves struggling with organizing our ideas properly and more importantly conveying them effectively to our audience (whether small or large).

The Instant Speech is a powerful yet really simple technique to help us in those situations where we want to tell a story or get across a message in a few words.

There are 3 steps to creating the general framework of an Instant Speech:

  1. Decide your Key Message
  2. Choose 3 points or topics to support it
  3. Deliver your Instant Speech with confidence

To read more about this and to get more tips on Public Speaking you can visit Jezra Kaye’s website Speak up for success 

 

 

Image source: Pixabay (CC0)

How To Make Positive Thinking Easy

1. Spend Time with Positive People

2. Take Responsibility for Your Behavior

3. Contribute to the Community

4. Read Positive and Inspirational Material

5. Recognize and Replace Negative Thoughts

6. Establish and Work Toward Goals

7. Consider the Consequences of Negativity

8. Offer Compliments to Others

9. Create a Daily Gratitude List

10. Practice Self-Care

Image source: FlickrBoohoomian (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Pomodoro Technique

What do tomatoes have to do with management? Everything according to Francesco Cirillo, the man who invented this time management technique in the late 1980s.

The method is named after the kitchen timer shaped like a tomato some of you might have already seen.

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Image Source: Flickr – Marco Verch – (CC BY-NC 2.0)

This method consists in maximising your attention for short periods of time by taking frequent breaks to refresh your mind. By splitting a large task into many smaller tasks, you are able to keep up your motivation and enhance creativity.

The method is extremely easy to implement by following a few simple steps:

  1. Choose a task to be accomplished
  2. Set the timer to 25 minutes
  3. Work on the task, without any distractions, until the timer rings, then put a checkmark on a piece of paper
  4. Take a 5 minute break, then return to the task
  5. After four pomodoros (that is, four 25-5 minute splits) take a longer break (15-30 minutes), then get back to the task

The actions of recording pomodoros adds a sense of accomplishment to our work and helps us give our undivided attention to the task during the 25 minutes of work.

The times indicated are those suggested by the pomodoro technique, but we can adjust them to our needs, keeping in mind always to keep a short break and a long break every 4 short breaks.

Though the method was traditionally conceived using a mechanical timer, today there are many apps that can help us in using this technique.
I recommend the app “Clear Focus” – simple and effective!

If you want to read more about the pomodoro technique and its history, you can head over to the official website:

 https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique

 

 

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature. Voltaire

Image Source: Pixabay – Gellinger (CC0)

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