Author: Jenny Ebermann (bxljenny)

Multilingual Communication Professional, Mindful Leader and Coach/Consultant. Specialties: - Mindfulness, - Intercultural Communications, - Personal Development - Diversity and Inclusion - Mindful Leadership

How much disconnection do you need?

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DisconnectingAre you already back at work or are you still enjoying some time off, relaxing and energizing yourself?

For many people, holidays always start with a lot of stress, either because they need to pack the appropriate things and then spend hours at the airport tackling over bookings, delays or other unforeseen events. Or, as many of us here in Europe, you decide to take your car because of practicality or budgetary reasons just to find yourself in endless queues, traffic jams and accidents. It surely takes some patience to arrive where you want to be and at least a couple of days more to be able to get out of your ever turning  thoughts. For some people it takes as long as a full week, to come down again and feel some relief, even more so if you stay connected to your day-job.

Were you able to switch off your devices and really disconnect during your holidays? And how long did it take?

Many of us are not used anymore to leave our smart phones out during the day without regularly checking something; not only mails and other messages, but the weather forecast, simply the time, news, the best hiking route, the nearest restaurant etc. How many of us still remember how it felt like and – more and foremost – how we managed to “survive” without all the apps, devices, guides and information so readily available nowadays? And how many of us feel comfortable not to use our digital friends regularly and instead simply be for a while?

I agree, Stillnessit is very tempting to read mails and stay connected on social media with many “friends” even during the holiday period. How many pictures and posts can be found of “happy people” smiling into their camera wherever they are in the world…. It takes courage. And also patience as your mind will play tricks with you and lure you back to the device just for checking the weather (it would be safer) or the latest news (I have to know what is going on); of course, once you hold your smart phone in your hands, you don’t usually end up looking solely at the weather or news….

But it is worth it: disconnecting regularly has huge benefits on your overall health and well-being as well as your behavior with others in real life.

As with all things in life: finding the right balance is crucial and necessary in order not to be overwhelmed in a world spinning faster every day…

Enjoy the rest of the summer and take a deep breath!

Jenny

How Our Thoughts Affect Our Performance: 3 Activities

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Many of us wish we could perform with the focus, strength and skill of a professional athlete. To do so requires a strong connection between our minds and our bodies—some research shows only a 5% d…

Sourced through Scoop.it from: blog.culturaldetective.com

Thanks Dianne for this great post summarizing our workshop in Valencia! #SiETAR #mindfulness #diversity

See on Scoop.it – Mindful Leadership & Intercultural Communication

Why Employee Engagement and Enablement?

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Mindful Leadership versus Engagement and Enablement2Competitive companies nowadays face an enormous pressure and so do their employees. Today’s best leaders have the resilience to cope with the many challenges and uncertainties coming their way and the resolve to sustain long-term success. Where does this resilience come from?

Well, from focus and clarity on one hand while making important decisions, then from creativity while transforming their enterprises, compassion for their employees and customers and lastly of course from courage to go their own way.

Studies conducted by companies evaluating their own executives have proven that the top 10% of performers displayed superior competencies in what is called, emotional intelligence, rather than in purely cognitive thinking. Capabilities like self-confidence and initiative; bouncing back from setbacks and staying cool under stress; empathy and powerful communication, collaboration; and teamwork all make for better business results.

Of course, when people feel motivated they perform better. High levels of employee engagement can for example boost revenue growth by up to 2.5 times!

But employee engagement is only half of the story. It’s not enough feeling great about your job if you cannot get things done. That’s why it is important for employees to be “enabled” too.

And exactly for that reason, the focus lies on you, your capacity to motivate your teams, engage and enable them. You become actors as well as owners of a sustainable future within your organisation or company by embodying change and people focus. Walk the talk and your employees will follow!

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” John Quincy Adams

Feeling stressed while communicating?

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Mindful, effective communicationsSure, sending an email is easy. How many of us have not written one while on hold with another call or in those few moments between one meeting and the next? Or how many are not sending text messages or smart phone messages while driving even?

Information can be sent from virtually anywhere nowadays.

Did you know?

Psychological social and emotional conditions (like receiving an unwanted e-mail for example) can have the same impact on you (physiologically speaking) as physical aggressions as they draw on many of the same neural networks.

What does this mean?

Even just anticipating a challenging conversation or event can have as much impact as living through it for real!

Within your brain, the amygdala (associated with emotions, memory, etc.) sounds the alarm, which releases stimulating substances in your body, readying it for the “fight or flee” response. Stress hormones are also released.

This means that simply the act of receiving an email can put you physiologically in a situation where you feel stressed and so emotional that you are not even able to respond adequately to the message sent to you.

Intercultural CommunicationsIn terms of communication, this has a direct impact on the quality and the effectiveness with which we work and interact. Being mindful in interpersonal communication can be learned; you can do so too!

Jenny

The Secret of Interpersonal Communication

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Becoming an effective communicatorEffective Communication

I am sure that you have already attended a communications training of some sort in your life; be it to improve your communication skills, your team collaboration or to learn particular tools and methods that were supposed to enable you to become a better, more effective communicator.

As I wrote in an earlier post, communications is much more than its mere verbal aspect let alone a set of tools and measures:

Following a study of Albert Mehrabian, an American Psychologist, who looked into which aspects of communications are relevant to the actual understanding of information thus to effectively communicating:

  • The verbal aspect only accounts for 7 % (hence the content of what you are saying)
  • 38 % come from the paraverbal aspect of communication (intonation, cadence, volume or pace ) and surely not surprising:
  • 55 % from the non-verbal aspects.

BeatenbergOver the last weekend, I have been exploring a technique called “Insight Dialogue” which was recommended to me and really is mindfulness and awareness applied to interpersonal communications. While you pause and relax, you provide yourself with the opportunity to tune into your own feelings and emotions, stepping out of the habitual trigger-response mechanism and opening up, allowing (mutual) space for response rather than reactivity. While you trust what emerges and listen deeply, you finally propose an answer or input, which is truly beneficial to your counterpart or dialogue partners. You remain integer and compassionate not being entangled in emotions or feelings and clinging to words wanting to steer the conversation your way.

What a great way of connecting with each other and having a meaningful conversation. I am now even more passionate about including these techniques into my training, coaching and consulting work. Insight Dialogue certainly offers a wonderful way towards working on Self-Awareness and Management, Social Awareness and Relationship-Management all at the Center of Emotional Intelligence thus at the heart of Mindful Leadership.

Linking Mindfulness to Sports and Intercultural Training

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Leadership, Diversity and Mindfulness applied to sports

Last Saturday at the SIETAR Europa conference, I had the chance to animate a wonderful workshop with a fellow interculturalist and friend Susan Salzbrenner from Fit Across Cultures. Jenny Ebermann | Susan Salzbrenner As we both have a strong background in sports and did not want to engage in more theories and “brain” focused presentations and activities, we decided to animate a session connecting our two brains[1]: the cranial one which we know and the so-called “enteric brain” located in our bellies (in the gut).

 

How did we do that?

Well, by linking intercultural training and the importance of “embodiment[2]” and mindfulness (moment to moment awareness) to athlete’s realities and movement. After a moment of mindful walking and grounding and by means of a very practical “experiment” we had the participants tune into themselves and connect with their feelings and body experience in different challenging intercultural and interpersonal situations.Cloud SIETAREUROPA 2015 mindfulness

Although this is far from being easy, the participants were wonderful and shared what was going on for them. Being able to relate to your bodily experience can actually inform you even before your thoughts come in, when it comes to decisions, dealing with particular emotional situations or simply in our daily lives. In the context of sports, athletes also have to train mentally in order to be able to resist pressure in competitions and perform at their best. Being in sync with their bodies helps them to overcome differences and difficult situations and enables diverse teams – when managed well – to outperform competitors.

What a great learning and what a powerful group! Thanks to all of you who have participated and thanks Raquel Benmergui for the wonderful graphic representations!

Jenny

 

[1] Compare to : Amnon Buchbinder on Philip Shepherd’s “Out of our heads”

[2] In the sense that: “We make the experience of culture through our bodies”, see Ida Castiglioni: “Embodiment of Culture”

Do you still read books?

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BooksHow many people among you still read books? Or do you prefer reading your favourite magazines and authors on mobile devices? I must say that I still love holding a hard copy in my hands that I can feel, smell, touch…. Especially when entering an old library and imagining all the work that went into writing, drawing, updating the manuscripts and books, I feel very humble and at the same time interested and eager to sit down and sink into this atmosphere of knowledge, fantasy, thoughts….

Today, we are living in a digital world, where everybody can share everything, become a journalist, producer, filmmaker right out of their living room and live wherever they might be. Children already start having touch pads and smart phones from a very young age onwards and not many of them have actually seen a library from the inside.

LibraryDo they have to? No, I guess… it all depends on how you consume digital media, how much space you leave for just being and opening up for creativity and innovation.

As I travel through Europe and work with people from many different backgrounds and industries, I notice the same pattern: people feel overwhelmed, not “human” anymore, constantly reminded that they should be responding, checking, scrolling, informing, texting… you find people sitting in restaurants, tubes, buses, bars that don’t speak to each other but prefer sending out messages to their online “friends”. News, pictures, videos are volatile, replaced by a stream of newer, nicer, cooler images and texts every second. Social media spread information mostly without checking if the source of the information is actually credible.

Are you also constantly connected, on the run, hasting through your different activities?

Do you jump up, every time you hear the familiar ‘ping’ sound of your mobile device, indicating that something new came in even when it’s your neighbours phone or device?

Try this: switch off your ring tones, alarms and notices so that you don’t hear anymore when new messages come in! You will already feel somewhat more at ease.

Maybe you are even able to switch off your complete phone or tablet from time to time to allow yourself a brain break.

What do you think and how do you cope?

Jenny

Training the Leaders of Tomorrow

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Having children on my own and seeing what they are taught in school and how, I began to wonder what I could possibly do to help them prepare for an adult life were uncertainty, ambiguity, volatility and complexity would simply be “normal”. Already working with leaders and organisations in terms of emotional intelligence, mindful leadership and communications, stress reduction and diversity, I began to think seriously about  training the leaders of tomorrow, hence the children of today.

At first, I followed the online courses of Mindful Schools in the US but then wanted to invest more time in teaching mindfulness to children here in Europe. I thus enrolled in a method called “Mindfulness Matters” (also known as the “frog method“) from Eline Snel and her Academy for Mindful Teaching. After 6 months of pilot teaching, training and learning, I am now certified child teacher for mindfulness; what a rewarding experiment to be able to teach competences to children that will last a lifetime! Let me know if you need more information about what this method consists of and what skills are taught to children! Have a great week ahead, Jenny

Jenny Ebermann Mindfulness Matters