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Compassionate Leadership
Compassionate Leadership seems to be an emerging leadership paradigm. Whether this in terms of leading ourselves more effectively with self awareness practises like mindfulness increasingly entering the corporate world, or leading others more empathically or even expressing itself as having a more ethical business objectives. For instance if we take the later point first. Ray C. Anderson, CEO of the carpeting giant Interface, Inc. became known as 'the greenest CEO in America.' But this awakening happened after his 60th...
read moreThe companionship of long-distance runners: kindness in unexpected places
Recently I was walking along the beach near where I live in Edinburgh when several unexpected things happened. It was a unique summer day for Scotland: the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky! It also happened to be the day of the Edinburgh marathon, and the promenade was packed with people waiting to cheer the runners on. I arrived just as the first runners appeared, and immediately spectators began applauding the athletes and shouting out words of encouragement. Some people in the watching crowd were obviously waiting for...
read moreThe Power of Gratitude
In this short, readable book the author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing. In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift—a middle-aged, overweight divorcé, estranged from his older children, on the point of loosing his current girlfriend and possibly his business too, he felt things had come to such a point that he needed to make major changes in his life. Inspired by a thank-you note that he received himself he decided...
read moreBeing and getting the job done
So how do we bring awareness into action and learn to ‘be’ at work—while still getting the job done? One of the biggest misunderstandings in our line of work is when people think that practicing techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can only happen in one’s personal time and if anyone tries it out at work they’ll either get laughed at, or fired for time-wasting! Nothing could be further from the truth. These techniques can be integrated into a working day without taking out time from essential tasks and will actually add to our focus,...
read moreBook Review (Part 2) – The Emotional Life of Your Brain
(This is Part II for Part I please click here, book available from Amazon here) The core of Davidson’s book crystallises research as to how we uniquely react and respond to ‘life’s slings and arrows’. Individual response is unique mix across six dimensions — Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Sensitivity to Context, and Attention. We have a mix of these styles which means we could easily bounce back from a setback (resilience domain) but not very good at reading the body language of others (social intuition domain)....
read moreBook Review (Part 1) – The Emotional Life of Your Brain
(This is Part I for Part II please click here) Some texts are perfect for particular needs of our time. For me The Emotional Life of Your Brain is one such book. It’s written by a pioneer in neuroscience Professor Richard Davidson and an award winning health & science correspondent Sharon Begley – who has a deft skill at making such books light on the eye and easy to digest. I must admit to Davidson being a bit of a hero of mine, both because of this pioneering work (in 2006, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the...
read moreThe Kindness Formula
In the last blog we took a brief look at how it could change our working environment if we included ‘random acts of kindness’ as part of our daily routine. This time we will take this idea a bit further and introduce the idea of the Kindness Formula. The Kindness Formula goes like this: Make it a habit to do at least three kinds things every day: one for yourself one for someone you know one for a stranger Having a formula helps us to make kindness a habit and to think more deeply about how we wish to express it. If you find doing three every...
read moreRandom acts of kindness
There is a very efficient tram system in Amsterdam where I live. The trams are clean, speedy and run on time. The other day I was slow to get up and ended up as the last one to get off the tram. There is a chip card system to get on and off the tram and I fumbled my card, so that the doors shut before I could get off. Just I was envisioning myself being carried way off down the road past my stop, the doors slid open and I could disembark. As I was getting down I realized that a man sitting in the seat by the door had noticed my predicament...
read moreGoldilocks and a well balanced, resilient brain
Just as the heart is part of a system that moves blood around the body, in a similar way the nervous system which includes the brain, is part of a structure that moves and responds to information as it flows and moves around the body. The brain itself takes a lot of energy to function well. That’s why as we get tired and run out of energy it gets harder to think clearly. It’s only 2 to 3 lbs in weight but uses a staggering 20% of all the glucose and oxygen that the body as a whole needs. As mentioned in, "hard wired to connect” , the brain...
read moreFrom tigers to contented cats
At the beginning of this month there was a brief and moderate amount of publicity in the UK for two books about a subject many of us, myself included, find difficult to contemplate - death. One was by an Australian palliative care nurse called Bonnie Ware, who wrote ‘The Top Five Regrets About Dying’. Ware observed many people nearing death who saw with complete clarity that, for example, they wished they had the courage to live a life that was true to themselves and not the one that others’ expected of them. The next bigge st regret was that...
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