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Showing posts with label Emotional Intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emotional Intelligence. Show all posts

The Life Coach: Resilience

Executive Coaching


















By: Santi Chacon
Executive Coach

Alexandria, Alexandria, Alexandria

It started with my friends two year old, feeling a bit of fatigue. Soon Deanna came home a little frantic; Alex had a fever. We quickly ran the bathtub water, cooler than usual, to cool her down. This continued on throughout the evening; the little girl crying out to mommy, for help. Alex and I both hoping that her mom somehow had the secret to health and well being.

This went on for the entire week, jolting awake by Alex's sobs and running bath water to cool her. When Alex's fever subsided a bit, to something mom was happy with she would lay her back down to hopefully find rest.

In observing this drama unfold, I became aware that when Alex felt better in between the ups and downs of her fever, she was swept away by a cheerful state of alacrity. She asked (in only the way a two year could; mumbling) to go outside to play, she wanted to enjoy the freedom of being two; in that wonderful carefree way. She wanted to run around and to enjoy life once again; such a beautiful little soul. In my heart I knew her resilience was something we all could take note of.

Thoughts

How many of us choose to enjoy life? Or to re-awaken our freedom to live carefree right after we experience an unmet expectation a heart break, an emotional interruption or detour? How many of us stand up with great alacrity and get on with life with the enthusiasm to live the life we were meant to lead?

Would it be true to say that we fall into the temptation of wallowing in the mire of our situation? or allowing ourselves to be swept away by the mellow drama of our self-pity?

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

Viktor Frankle

When it comes down to it, it really is about how we respond to life, and our attitude along the way.

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The Executive Coach: The Relaxation Response

Executive Coaching and Emotional Intelligence
 























By: Santi Chacon
Executive Coach

Self-Control

Self-Control is the name of the game when you are leading a competitive organization, and feel the pull of emotions with remnants of distorted voices of broken expectations still ringing in your ears, when things heat up and stakeholders are coming down fast because last quarter's numbers weren’t what they should have been.

Whether you are leading a family, a ministry or business you are leading. And if you are leading objectivity is extremely important, to stay outside your emotions for the moment when your tendency is to be inside your emotions is key. Bottom line when you feel life’s pressures this is the time you need to show your constituents your unshakable character. The rule of thumb the more stressful the situation the more relaxed and objective you need to be.

You may ask: How am I supposed to do this?

Let's start by going over a few concepts first.

Psychosomatic

Psychosomatic denotes that our thinking affects our body for good or for worse. But, the challenge to stay “cool headed” may have its roots deeper than you have imagined. In your earlier years if you had exposure to an insecure or emotional authority figure, whether a boss, a church leader, or a parent where yelling and over reacting was the norm, than ingrained in your neuropathway could be the habit to over emotionalizing or over reacting in times of stress.

Along with loosing our temper is the danger of causing wear and tear internally. When we tend to loose our temper and our heart rate goes up, blood pressure rises. When this is done consistently it can cause micro tears in our arteries, there by giving way for plaque to build up, this may cause heart disease, never mind the ulcers or weakened immune system. These are just a couple of instances of the damaged that can be caused by over emotionalizing. There are more dangers to “loosing control” than a damaged relationship, its damaged health.

Stimulus and Response

Stimulus and response plays a factor in our tendency to react to life’s stressful situations. If I punch you in the nose there is a split moment before you decide to react. If I’m bigger than you, you may consider running, if I’m smaller than you, you might consider hitting me back. This reaction is called the fight or flight response which is highly embedded in our psychology and physiology. The ability to control our destiny lies between this space of stimulus and response. If you control this space you can lead incredible change.

In history those who learned to control this space between stimulus and response had facilitated national and world change i.e. Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Theresa.

The Answer

There is a way out of old patterns and into self-renewal. One of the latest discoveries in psychology was that relaxation has the propensity to heal the body and to restore the wear and tear. Along with relaxation, meditation has been recognized to develop the prefrontal cortex which is the control panel for things like self-control, motor skills, and speech.

When a person meditates they gain the freedom to use the space between stimulus and response constructively. This can be a powerful ally and tool for leadership development. Start by contributing 10-15 minutes a day within 8 weeks, you will notice a great transformation in emotional intelligence, and maturity.

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The Life Coach: Self-Efficacy

Executive Coaching and Emotional Intelligence



















By: Santi Chacon
Executive Coach

Learned Optimism

The greatest leaders believe in their followers, believe in their future, most important they believe in themselves; in their ability to empower constituents and get things done. Effective leaders teach themselves how to be optimistic, therefore they are learned optimist.

One person that exemplifies the 'optimist' is Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who up till the day he left us, preached "The Power of Positive Thinking", belief in yourself, in God, and in your fellow man.

If we are honest with ourselves, we know what baggage we carry around, or tendency toward projections and our propensity to be mean spirited to those we love most. We are certainly aware of the broken promises and commitments of others toward us, and unfortunately we remember the unmet expectations we've suffer through, from our creator.

The longer I live life, the more I'm left to wonder about the question of: how do we get to the point of confronting our latter years in life with a promising belief in the goodness of God, ourselves and mankind? Even through our trials, unmet expectations and broken hearts, to thrive with this refreshed belief. This is truly the goal of a great leader, in a world that is so easily given to disbelief, cynicism and bitterness.

The simplicity of the matter is we only can give to others and ourselves what overflows throughout our being. We only can give out of our abundance by what has been nurtured in our emotions and beliefs. Our beliefs are not just something that are latent in us, a perception that only provides value or effect to the beholder; no, belief is something we give to those around us it permeates the minds of those in our environment and touches people in a way that is unknown to the conscious mind. Beliefs start revolutions, beliefs are the cause of life, hope, and passion.

To love our neighbor as ourselves, truly means that from the depth of self-esteem I can esteem others, that through self-love I can love others. These are given out of our personal abundance when we choose to nurture the overflow of love, esteem, and respect so it continues to pour out all around us.

The beginning of Over Flow

Self-Efficacy

If we truly want to Lead a Great Life, and desire to be the empowering leader that we are called to be it's important that we not only consider the following but, act on the principles introduced below:

1.) Action

A key to raising our self-efficacy, self-esteem or base level of happiness is through hard work and coping.

Learning to Fail

Hard work is a way we learn to fail. This may seem like a paradox but, the truth of the matter is the more failures we experience the more we experience success. Truly the most successful people in life have had the most failures. Even small successes have a way of affirming our personal value and self-worth. This is only half of the equation to raising our levels of self-esteem; the harder we work at something the more we succeed. The more we succeed the greater we feel about ourselves.

Coping

The second half of the equation is coping. The definition of coping in this context was best said by Dr. Tal Ben-shahar a professor at Harvard: "...it means getting out of our comfort zone, taking risks, daring, having high expectations and going for them, it means trying out for a play, it means approaching a person even though I’m afraid, putting ourselves out there, it’s about courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but, regardless of fear moving forward anyway, people who work hard and improve their self-efficacy raises and they belief in themselves raises." - with this said, it's when we meet those disappointments, and find the strength or personal power to carry on, that our self-worth is affirmed.

The second principle we need to visit is:

2.) Imagination

This principle contributes to the building of our belief in ourselves and denotes the concept of a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's important that we keep the end in mind, or that we envision what the future holds for us. The more vivid our imagination is in seeing our future, the faster we will get there. Our minds don't know the difference between a actual experience or a imagined experience, the same synapses fire in both occasions. In both instances of experiencing success or the imagined experience of success, our self-image and self-concept is influenced.

In order to use your imagination effectively visualization requires:

Subjective Visualization:

This defines you seeing things through your own eyes. This is most impactful to programming your autonomic system and reprogramming your self-image, there by creating positive self-esteem.

Involve your Senses:

It's important when visualizing that you involve the rest of your senses: touch, taste, auditory and olfactory.

Emotion:

The more emotion you place in your visualizations the faster it will come about. Stir up the emotions you think you would feel, if you were actually doing what you are imagining. Emotions play a striking part in re-enforcing the desire end. The more intense the emotion the more the event is re-enforced.

The third principle in this trio is:

3.) Cognitive therapy

Cognitive Therapy is just a fancy way of asking you to pay attention to your explanatory style. It's important that what ever happens whether positive or negative that you provide an interpretation or explanation to yourself that would be the most empowering.

Re-framing:

Let's say your spouse leaves you - what do you tell yourself, or you loose a job, how do you explain or represent these types of disappointments. These are more extreme cases, every day we are left to dozens of small but, significant events. If you use a positive explanatory style it will contribute to your self-image, self-esteem ultimately self-efficacy in a powerful way.

In conclusion: our self-image (or how we see our-self) is based on our interpretations of past experiences, not the actual experience. We program who we are based on memories or the interpretations thereof. So one way we can grow this self-image or to avoid self-imposed limitations, is to insert new memories, successful, triumphant memories, it will in turn build a new you; a limitless you.

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The Life Coach: That Proverbial Bus

Bus Stop at Night
Executive Coaching and Emotional Intelligence


















By: Santi Chacon
Executive Coach

Damn it! where is the bus? it was supposed to have been here 48 minutes ago.  I am so freaking cold...I am gonna be so late.  If it doesn't come soon I will miss my...What am I suppose to do now!?  auhhhh!...Crap!

God help us if we don't come through victorious. 

We have done everything we could, prepared all we could, burned the midnight oil, planned our work and worked our plan to ensure we came home with the trophy, to make sure we came through victorious, to ensure we got there on time, to ensure we met the deadline, to ensure we had it finished with time to spare.

Freaking Crap! Oh! I forgot this is an interdependent world.

We are so focused on doing it right, that we no longer acknowledge all the connections that make our win possible i.e. the bus driver,  traffic, the internet connection, our business partners verbal agreement, our bank, our car etc.. After all we have done this a million times before. We take for granted the people and systems that make our goals possible, so when something for a moment becomes unpredictable or unreliable we feel the burn of frustration, resentment, anger, in other words stress. This emotion builds up in our chest begging for a release, a scream, a kick, or better yet a punch.  We grit our teeth and try to breathe in deeply but we find ourselves still waiting for that proverbial bus.  The worst thing is its' happening right here right now!

When It Comes Enjoy The Ride

It is out of your hands. It will happen or not happen independent of you. There is nothing that your worry can do. Decide not to be so attached to the outcome regardless of how painful. The pain will subside the more you focus on being the observer. Be tolerant; not in the way of grinning and bearing it, but become passive.  That moment of stress will come and for whatever reason it just will not work out this time.  It will happen or not independent of your will. Just take a deep breath understand you did everything you could have done and get on with your day.  You only live once and you will endure more stress, just release the situation and chant whatever will be, will be. Life is short, so have fun while you are here.

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The OCD ADHD CEO: Hey Michelangelo, CALM DOWN! (1)

statue of david
Business Coaching and Management



















By: Santi Chacon
Executive Coach

Don't Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of Progress

Do not sabotage your own success because things don't seem perfect. I know you created this wonderful company and have taken it from an idea to a cash cow. Being a perfectionist has its' charms and strengths but your restlessness is affecting those around you, so take it down a notch. Business might not seem perfect in your ideal world but it's going pretty good. The truth of the matter is that no one meets your expectations for perfection, not even you. It is a wonderful ideal to work toward your idea of 'the perfect,' as these demons of unrest drive you to be an achiever. But there are times that it will be anti productive especially when it comes to soft skills toward stakeholders, i.e. investors, partners, employees, and customers.

Let me take you through a number of categories, which include management, branding, market research, lead generation, lead conversion, and client fulfillment. Don't worry its' not that intense we will kick around a few concepts regarding each one and you can see if it is going worse then you think are better then you thought. Whatever advantages or disadvantages your business holds today the credit is yours. Just do me a favor learn to celebrate progress not perfection, you will be much happier.

1.) Are Your Managers Competent And Accountable?

Competent and accountable managers breed trust. Having anything less then accountability and competence on your team should be unacceptable. This means that it is important that you also stay accountable to your team and work on developing your strengths as a manager and leader, so that you can consistently deliver value both to your team and the market place.
  • Are you staying accountable? How do you know?
  • Can your people sit with you in your office and tell you what is wrong with your business?
  • Are you actively growing in capacity, through education and skill growth?
  • Is your team accountable to you and to each other?
  • Is your team actively working to grow in capacity, through education and skill development?
  • If your answers are in the emphatic affirmative area than I am certain you trust your managers. If you didn't find yourself so lucky you have your work cut out.
2.) Do Your Managers Have High EQ's?

If a stupid person complimented you on your intelligence would you be flattered?

The same type of sentiment goes for finding emotional intelligent managers, don't fall into the trap of thinking if someone is more emotionally intelligent then you that they fit this criteria. This infers that you understand the principles of emotional intelligence and that you grow in your acumen.

Knowing Your Emotions

Great managers are self-aware. Knowing how we feel and why we feel that way is important to communication and managing our own expectations. This also provides a reference point into the needs and emotions of others.

Managing Your Own Emotions

An invaluable manager knows how to detour frustrations and disappointments in trade of high productivity under the pressures of daunting expectations.

Motivating Yourself

Self-management and goals setting are emotional tools managers can't live without. Staying motivated during a crunch or a particular mundane day is vital to managerial progress and success.

Recognizing And Understanding Other People's Emotions

Interest and concern for others is a mark of empathy. Empathy serves as an emotional tool to assist productive managers in understanding the unique needs and motivations of those they serve.

Managing Relationships

Great managers understand how to motivate individuals to be at their best. The ability to direct and manage the emotions of others is an indispensable skill.
  • Do emotions catch you by surprise?
  • Do you encounter challenges when attempting to direct managers?
  • Do you communicate your emotional needs in productive ways?
  • During conversations do you interrupt others?
  • Do you work to understand others in moments of disagreement?
  • Do you procrastinate?
  • Do you keep your word?
  • Are people expecting too much from you?
  • If after answering these questions, you are not certain how you answers reflected on your EQ then its time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
3.) Are Your Managers Process Oriented?

Now, let's get down to business. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being highly important, how important are business processes to you and your business? Process management is what you ultimately want your manager to have an acumen for. You want well document and efficient procedural processes and effective human management systems in place. You want processes in place for making your employees happy to processes that make you number one in your industry.

When you lose key talent to a competitor, you do not want a gaping hole that makes the department or even worse the company wobble, because you are scrambling to get things in place. You want to pick up seamlessly where your manager left off.
  • Can you run all your departments?
  • If key talent leaves can you seamlessly step in?
  • Can your managers run your business successfully?
Still there? How did you do?
    If you did well, go buy yourself a beer you deserve it. CHEERS!

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    The Life Coach: The Fundamentals

    Executive Coaching and Emotional Intelligence




















    By: Santi Chacon
    Executive Coach

    3 Fundamentals

    1.) Child-Development: Our brain is still developing in our childhood. But, at about puberty, it loses a lot of it's elasticity, it locks in and stores, what has been recorded and this becomes the core of our permanent identity. We can only learn to manipulate it, but the raw elements of what becomes this identity are woven into the fabric of our unconscious mind.

    2.) The Formation of Our Identity: The self image is an internal mechanism. It records what we experience through our senses 24 hours a day. Through this unconscious recording, it dictates who we are, and what we should feel. So in reality we train it by exposing ourselves to thoughts (self-talk) relationships, by what we watch and listen to. From this it learns to recognize patters and then it demands from us what we have programmed it to demand.

    3.) The Definition of Projections: Projections are the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others: and/or the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.

    The challenge we face with this truth, is as a child we learn to accept what is given to us by authority figures. We as children are not in control of what we learn or understand as acceptable.
    Now, if we came from great parents, this will help to propel us forward in life. However, if it seemed that you had a dysfunctional upbringing it’s important for you to be self-aware, of what is going on inside your self-image. This will help you to take steps to amend the errors.

    Most of our adult life we are fighting against patterns rooted in our childhood. Maybe our parent’s fought all the time. Maybe, we were abused, or in foster care or maybe our parents were absent physically or emotionally.

    If we don’t learn to manipulate and reframe these patterns, we will spend our entire adult lives, fighting for what we felt we lacked as a child. We will interpret our present adult experiences through the emotions of our childhood.

    As a child if we are feeling abandoned or neglected by our care takers, some of the patterns we may see or experience depending on our personality and temperament could be things like: constantly seeking attention from our most intimate partner, becoming too needy, hypersensitive, never convinced our partner loves us, regardless of what he/she does in attempts to convince us otherwise, or we may become aloof and cold, to protect ourselves from feeling abandoned, or we may withdraw when feelings of intimacy arise.

    Under certain triggers we will interpret our present adult experience through the emotions of our childhood. The more emotionally charged the experiences the more stained our self-image will be. For example if you were in fact abused emotionally, mentally or physically. Depending on personality and temperaments, you may become abusive yourself, you may be prone to projecting and overreacting to those closest to you. You may fight depression. And this is because: this is who yourself image says you are. What you experienced as a child, when triggered will be a constant state, as though you were reliving those moments, over and over again.

    Now these are extreme cases, there are degrees of struggle; my goal was to expose you to the logic of the self image, so that you may recognize it in your own life, based on your upbringing.

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    The Executive Coach: Interpersonal Communication

    business men at meeting talking
    Executive Coaching and Emotional intelligence

    How do you communicate with your constituents?
    Are you communicating in a way that builds up their confidence?
    Do you communicate in a fashion that leads them in their development and moves them toward your objectives?
    Have you created a communication strategy?
    Have you considered the typology of your audience before communicating to him or her?

    Adapting Your Ideas to the Audience

    It is time that you measure your message against who your audience is. A good leader is a combination of psychologist, business coach, and mentor.
    • Don’t seek a major opinion change in a single conversation.
    • Be conscious of each constituents posture, atttitude, and beliefs on important issues.
    • Make your ideas relevant to your audience by linking what you have to say to their experiences and interests.
    • Showing consistently that the topic affects them directly is the most effective strategy.
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    Emotional Intelligence: Coach: Eye of The Beholder



    By: Santi Chacon
    (Executive Coach)

    In January 10, 2006 The NewYork Times reported:

    On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch. Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in planning and carrying out movements.

    Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound: brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.

    A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded - brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip - even though the monkey had not moved but had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his mouth.

    The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth.

    Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.

    "It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own.

    But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists, recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say reflects the evolution of humans' sophisticated social abilities.

    The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.

    "We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."

    He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking."

    My Thoughts:

    When all is said and done, each of us are driven subconsciously to follow the neuro footprints we are exposed to. What we take in visually triggers our mirroring neurons. This exposure has a profound effect when it's done consistently over time; in some instances it could change our lives drastically when exposed at a heightened state of emotion.

    When it comes to learning to run motor skills young children are self-taught, they learn to imitate the idiosyncrasies of those they are exposed to. As we grow older we either follow the neuro footprints of personal ideologies (what pictures we see in our mind) or what we constantly take in visually, through our environment.

    Dr. Maltz notes in his 1960 classic, "Psycho Cybernetics", (speaking on the mind, and it's tendency to follow the paths we give it).

    "You" are not a machine. But new discoveries in the science of Cybernetics all point to the conclusion that your physical brain and nervous system make up a servo-mechanism which "You" use, and which operates very much like an electronic computer and a mechanical goal-seeking device. Your brain and nervous system constitute a goal-striving mechanism which operates automatically to achieve a certain goal, very much as a self-aiming torpedo or missile seeks out its target and steers its way to it. Your built-in servo-mechanism functions both as a "guidance system" to automatically steer you in the right direction to achieve certain goals..." 

    "Many people find they get better results if they imagine themselves sitting before a large motion picture screen—and imagine that they are seeing a motion picture of themselves. The important thing is to make these pictures as vivid and as detailed as possible. You want your mental pictures to approximate actual experience as much as possible. The way to do this is pay attention to small details, sights, sounds, objects, in your imagined environment. One of my patients was using this exercise to overcome her fear of the dentist. She was unsuccessful, until she began to notice small details in her imagined picture—the smell of the antiseptic in the office, the feel of the leather on the chair arms, the sight of the dentist's well-manicured nails as his hands approached her mouth, etc. ... for all practical purposes, you are creating a practice experience. And if the imagination is vivid enough and detailed enough, your imagination practice is equivalent to an actual experience, insofar as your nervous system is concerned."

    There is the high road of our brain; this is the logical route (the left brain); and there is the low road; which is the emotional route, (the right brain). When we witness someone taking action, the action triggers a response in our brains. Neurologically, we touch on the same neuro-pathways as those performing the task i.e. public speaking, parenting, singing, or dancing etc... without the left brain interfering. We experience it emotionally, without having to take any actions. When we merge our emotion with repeated actions the combination not only triggers those neurons, but this emotion and action began to define our identity through the self image.

    In conclusion we should filter what and who we expose our minds to. We should consider our aspirations and goals, and find meaningful things to focus on. If we don't choose who we are, our impulses and environment will choose it for us.


















      

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