Tag: Personal Development

On the path of self-transformation

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Currently reading an excellent book in order to prepare for a ‘mindfulness in the workplace’ training I am going to attend, it struck me how easy it can be to bring calm and quietness into our daily lives. If you ever had anything to do with psychology, yoga, coaching, stress-reduction techniques or mediation you will certainly know this but bringing it all together to the point is what really makes a difference.

Did you for example know that:

  • What happens in your mind changes your brain and vice versa? You can actually train your mind to change your brain in lasting ways.
  • Small positive actions every day will add up to large changes over time? You will gradually build up new neural structures.
  • Human beings evolved to pay great attention to unpleasant experiences? This negativity bias highlights bad news and creates anxiety and pessimism. It takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one.
  • Psychological pain draws on many of the same networks as physical pain and can thus trigger the same negative experience and suffering?

Little steps you can do on your path to change:

  • Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Bring your mindful attention to these facts, be open and allow them in. Let them affect you!
  • Hold these moments/experiences in awareness, being fully with them, savoring every moment. Focusing on your body sensations and emotions, let the experience fill your body and be as intense as possible so that both your body and mind can absorb it. Every time you do this, you build a little bit of neural structure. This will gradually and over time change how you feel and act.
  • Relax your body whenever you can by taking a deep breath for example or by focusing systematically on different parts of your body. There are many ways to train this from simple methods to yoga, meditation etc. Practicing ‘offline’ will allow you to foster and build strategies for your body which will then also be available to you when a stressful situation arises.

Let me finish for today with a quote:

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” – Buddha Quotes (Sources of Insight)

Have an excellent day/evening/morning! Jenny

How to effectively survive global ‘calls’

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Global callI guess at least some of you have already spent parts or even most of their day glued to a telephone or other device trying to participate in ‘global’ calls, brainstormings or discussions with various others. Being a virtual team member is far from being easy, even if you don’t have to lead a session in a particular moment, that is for sure.

The hardest thing to follow is actually when you have a group of people sitting together in a room and others participating on the phone in different locations. The team sharing a physical location has definitely an advantage over the other participants as its members can visually interact and see each others faces and gestures. It gets especially difficult, when not everybody can be clearly understood through the phone. Another tricky thing is that you might not even know who is speaking as you don’t know all the people on the line and hence cannot recognize the voices. Very few people actually state their name when they speak as they tend to forget that not all the participants can see them.

How do you make the most out of such sessions without giving in to the temptation of doing other things while your phone continues to speak, on mute?

As a participant you should look at the agenda right from the start, before the call has even started and identify the areas of interest to you. Write down a couple of points that you want to touch upon, or simply note some thoughts. This will help you to stay focused during the call especially for the parts that are important for you.

Remember: nobody can listen for hours in a row! If an agenda is set up in a right way, it will leave enough breaks to allow for the participants to re-focus. It will also take into account the different periods of the day the participants are in and hence move the parts where solid input is expected to reasonable times so that the people are still awake.

As an organizer, this website provides a helpful oversight over time zones and lets you easily schedule global meetings.

If you need participants from all over the world, I would also highly recommend scheduling various meetings having the same topic, even if it means that you have to repeat yourself. You will ensure that nobody will be expected to attend at an unusual hour, which makes people happier and hopefully they will contribute more actively. You could for example structure your meeting like a World Café, where every contribution actually builds up on the contributions of the previous sessions. By doing so, you ensure that even for you, it doesn’t get boring and the outcome will definitely be there.

Apart from that, if you can, try to make the sessions as short as possible. The shorter you time your meeting, the more attention you will get and the more focused your participants will be. Oh, and avoid lengthy power point shows, you will loose your audience in minutes. Write down bullet points of what is being said or accompany the discussion in a way that makes it more interesting to the participants, even those not being physically there!

If you have any more insights to share or tipps and tricks on how to ‘survive’ long calls, let me know!

Have an excellent morning, afternoon, evening, night! Jenny

Further reading:

Related articles

The fight for attention in communication

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Lately, I had again the ‘pleasure’ of sitting in front of people who were checking their various devices and answering e-mails whilst talking to me. I don’t know how you react and feel in such a situation but I can say that it leaves me:

  • Angry
  • Disappointed
  • With a sentiment of ‘emptiness’

Whereas with people you know and you usually interact with, you can easily voice your discontent in a nice and polite way, with people you don’t know, this is quite more delicate. Especially in a situation where your counterparts are in fact assessing or testing you, you don’t want to risk getting bad marks or being excluded from further processes. And still, the fact of not being attentively listened to actually has a very ‘sour aftertaste’, where you find yourself actually wondering whether what you had to tell was

  • Interesting
  • Worth being told

You might even think that maybe your performance or appearance was not as it should have been.

Let me tell you something: this is completely untrue! Every human being deserves being listened to, no matter what he or she has to tell. When setting up an appointment, even a telephone one, you ought to show respect and attention. It cannot be stressed enough how the course of interaction can be altered and positively affected if basic rules are understood and put into practice.

So, if you ever find yourself in a similar situation as described above, whatever the context and the circumstances, you might want to pause for a moment until you get the attention of your counterpart and politely ask for quality time. It will give you satisfaction and a sense of value even though you might not be able to change other people’s future behaviour.

“Mantras” for the New Year

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Dear friends and readers, 2013 is here and the world has obviously not stopped to exist… As I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions I did not make any; but I think that it is worthwhile to remember a couple of things as most of us already started or are about to start with our busy lives again:
– Happiness lies within yourself
Running behind dreams and believing that something more interesting and better waits for you around the corner makes you miss the most important things that are given to you, namely the present moment. Live all of your present moments to the fullest extent! You are the key to your own happiness!
– Solutions are never far away
Even if you have major issues and problems, there is always a way out. It might not be easy and it might not be solved fast but there is always a solution. Very often we are so deeply entangled in our own schemes and routines that we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Try to shed light from a different angle on what you are going through, reach out to other people, don’t be shy to speak up. Solutions are never that far away!
– Stop running
Easily said and not easily done, I know! Setting objectives and goals even in your personal life in order to find more time for yourself and the things you want to do really helps! If you don’t know how to do this, ask me. I am more than happy to share tools and insights with you! Even small chunks of time for yourself are already a great start. And: it is possible! You can do it…
– Don’t fall into the same pitfalls
Learn from your mistakes, analyse what went wrong and why. You could even write this down if it helps you. It will make you grow and ultimately make you stronger!

With this in mind, I wish you an excellent start in the New Year! Looking forward to reading/hearing from you!
Jenny

Addendum – About cultural types, European culture and intercultural competence

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As an addendum to my last post on cultural types, European culture and intercultural competence I have at least to say a word about languages. With a smile I have to admit that thankfully nobody ever made me learn Esperanto[1]… what a funny thought that is: having one European common language. But: could a language really exist without having a cultural background? Interesting question indeed as in the common theories[2], language is determined by culture but culture also by language. It is true though that the more languages you speak the easier it gets when we speak about my particular domains of expertise at least which are communications, leadership and coaching. When being able to talk to your international team members in their language or to coach people in their language of origin, it truly makes a difference. Not only will you find that people open up easier but you are also not confronted to the barriers of communicating in a foreign language, as non-natives very often have difficulties to formulate their inner thoughts, worries or motivations in another language.

So, not only does a multicultural and multi-facet background give me access to intercultural skills but also the ability of speaking and thus being able to communicate in a variety of languages. This becomes very relevant when looking into emphatic listening[3] or mindful conversation[4] for example. If the ‘receiver’ of your message doesn’t understand what you actually mean and doesn’t ask (depending on the culture your interlocutor actually comes from, it might even be considered as rude to ask questions), the communication process will not function adequately resulting in misunderstandings and more.

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If you now apply this to digital means of communication like e-mail and such where it is even harder to communicate what you want to say – as you only have words and the tone of these to express yourself – plus you communicate in a language which is not your main one, you can imagine how difficult transmitting any message gets. From my experience, I honestly have to say that most of the problems arising in multicultural leadership/working teams stem from misunderstandings or misinterpretations from what has been originally said or demanded. In such an environment it is thus of crucial importance to pay particular attention to the original culture, language and behaviors of people so that a common ground for discussion and exchange can be found! And: I don’t think that Esperanto would have solved these problems J

[1] Please see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto for reading more about what Esperanto is!

[2] See for example this excellent article in the Wall Street Journal “Lost in translation”: http://tinyurl.com/2bmmtfd or this link on language and culture: http://tinyurl.com/9pt2ldz

[3] As explained in my blog entry on ‘the power of listening’ for example.

[4] According to Chade-Meng Tan, mindful conversation consits of three components : listening, looping and dipping. See his book “Search Inside Yourself” p. 60-62.

Mindful leadership in a multicultural environment – Part I

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Leadership|Jenny Ebermann|Services|Everybody knows that our world seems to spin faster every day; distances become ‘smaller’ and suddenly a student in Norway can interact directly with peers in New Zealand through Social and other Digital Media. Space and time are not important anymore. Information and images can be transferred instantly. You want to know what a hotel is like in one part of the world: no problem, you will find all you need on the internet where many people already left their feedback on what you are looking for. The same applies for goods, products and other services which can rapidly be ordered, delivered, exchanged from one country to another. For the humans living in this world, remote spots on the planet suddenly moved directly into their living rooms through TV, PC or other supports. Nothing seems to have a secret anymore. Even travel has become affordable, meaning that everybody nowadays can visit any location for a correct price and in nearly no time.

The same principle applies to today’s workforce: nobody is bound to employment in their country of origin; applications and CVs can be posted everywhere on the net and connections made to recruiters worldwide. As a direct consequence, people from very different nationalities and backgrounds find themselves coexisting in one and the same office or workplace, not only in multinationals but also in SMEs and elsewhere. In the sports world for example, successful teams around the globe host players from various countries. Only one criteria counts: to be the best in the relevant discipline, no matter where the candidate comes from.

But: what at first glance seems to be exciting and simple, can become rather difficult in the day-to-day practice. Even though continents, languages and people have become ‘closer’ to one another, every single human being has its own culture, behaviour, pace and habits. As a result, business relationships have to take the cultural background of the different partners into account in order to ensure a fruitful collaboration. In short, nowadays a successful and mindful leader has to have much more competencies than social and technical skills. Intercultural competences are equally important and represent a huge challenge in multinational teams. Results are often affected and even hindered by irritation, embarrassment, resentment and conflicts within a team, problems emanating directly from cultural misunderstandings. How can such “disturbances” be overcome in order to establish a  friendly and effective work environment? How can international business be smoothly
conducted, even though people from different cultures are involved?

Leaders and HR often call upon specialised coaches to help them navigate the uncertain waters of intercultural management. How intercultural coaching and coaching in an intercultural management environment can be differentiated and how teams can be trained and coached to efficiently work together will be discussed in the next articles. Stay tuned!