Who knew that rebalancing the negativity bias with enough positive could have so many great results? Here is a wonderful speaker talking about great research showing so many advantages to smiling often!
Browsing Tags Brain chemistry
Influencing Your Inner Movie – The Thinker & The Caveman
This is my favorite thing to teach. Being able to positively influence oneself is a critical skill for anyone increasing success, happiness, and even health.
There will be more videos teaching how to apply these concepts and tools in your life.
Stay tuned!
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Get your Caveman Passionate!
Get Your Caveman Passionate
I was honored to be interviewed for Peter Sterlacci‘s video blog last week. In his view, part of what I do is what he calls a “Personal Brand Mechanic”. I talk about the Caveman and the Thinker and how to get them both engaged both in living your personal brand, and in creating positive change in general.
Positive Intelligence
Shawn Achor is a dynamic speaker and writer on this topic.
His take, through the Harvard Business Review on positive intelligence is a fantastic example of putting the science of happiness ahead of outdated conventional wisdom.
Even though he is a “competitor” of sorts I can only speak highly of everything I’ve seen him put out there.
Rock on, Shawn! You are a major player in what I call the Positive Change Revolution!
Gratitude improves health, happiness, love-life, popularity and more
Scientific research brings us more proof of the power of gratitude!
A great blog post by Ocean Robbins…
The Neuroscience of Why Gratitude Makes Us Healthier
Positive change agents – principles for enjoyable success
We’ve used these principles to guide our positive change projects for years. 
These principles are keys to motivating busy people.
- Take the time to make goals clear and compelling.
- The easier it is to contribute the more people do it.
- Make starting steps doable and clear.
- Make sure people feel confident enough in their role.
- Frame goals, directions and other communication positively.
- Steady guidance at a strategic level keeps people on track and confident in success.
- Make questions specific, positive and generative.
- Keep focused on your top priority goal. Ensure that you’ve applied all the resources you need to to this goal.
Using classical music to inspire – video
This video shows Benjamin Zander in full glory presenting at TED.com. Being a world-class conductor, he speaks to influence and leadership using marvelous musical analogies. He has wonderful stories that are worth the video themselves as well. And his shoe salesmen joke is a classic example of looking for solutions.
Building resilience – not just managing stress
I have had the absolute pleasure to present a few Resilience workshops recently. They’re usually called “Stress Management training” for the client because that’s what people are used to. Yet, as the old saw goes, “prevention is the best cure”. It’s far easier to build resilience in yourself and your team, rather than try to manage tons of stress after it’s built up a lot.
One of the key factors in building and maintaining resilience is the way we influence ourselves. The influence skills we’ve been talking about in this blog are just as relevant for your inner world and personal life, as they are for professional success.
Some of the key elements that are so helpful for resilience are
- Identifying F Responses (fight, flight or freeze) in yourself and intentionally applying “R Responses” (relax, recharge and refocus)
- Giving yourself feedforward rather than scathing feedback when you can
- Focusing on clear, inspiring goals
- The “yes and” approach embedded in Improvisational Leadership
- Soothing images, like the ones I’ve posted
- And of course, “Influence your mood”
Build your resilience and thrive!
Feedforward – a positive alternative to feedback
Sometimes we have to do it, but feedback is tough… even when intentions are good (and we know that they’re not always).
Feedback often triggers “F Responses” (fight, flight or freeze) as we fear judgement, criticism and useless opinions. It can push people away.
Feedback also assumes that we are right about what we’re giving our opinion on. That can be incredibly presumptuous since we rarely know all that went into the decision-making and actions of the person we’re “educating”.
As Marshal Goldsmith talks about in his video, Feedforward is much easier to take, more motivating and helpful.
Ideas to help us succeed in the future are so much more empowering and useful.
Feedforward also tends to get to the point – the goal – much faster.
Next time you want to give feedback to someone, ask yourself, “Am I doing this to help the other person succeed, or for my own needs?”
If this is to help them succeed, then maybe feedforward ideas on how to be more succesful in the future might be a lot more helpful than feedback.
If it’s for your own needs – find another way that doesn’t push people away from you.
Do you want to be more popular?
What is everyone’s favorite topic – their own successes.
Help others feel good
Do you want to be more popular? Sincerely look for and acknowledging other’s real strengths, accomplishments and insights.
The best leaders (described as Level 5 Leaders in “Good to Great“) surround themselves with others who have superior skill sets, abilities and talents. Then they encourage them to do their work. These are the kind of leaders that people will go the extra 10 miles for.
Look for what is best about your spouse. Share that in a sincerely appreciative way.
Look for the talents in your children – let them know as well.
Appreciate out loud what you like about your friends – become more popular.
Just keep it real. Sincerity is key to lasting relationships.
And do it for yourself as well. Acknowledge your strengths, build on them, celebrate them. (for those that are modest — when we celebrate others strengths first most people are willing to give us credit for ours as well.
If enough people do this, the culture of your company/family/circle of friends becomes more fun, more effective and safer to try new things.