Category: K.E.E.N. skills

What Mindful Courage Actually Is

Getting outside of our comfort zone and getting scared requires courage. In that context I very much like Nelson Mandela’s quote: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

This idea is far reaching, because it puts courage in a new light. Courage is not irresponsibility. Real courage requires to understand the risks and taking them by overcoming our fear.

Not so many people are really courageous in this mindful sense. Most people are at best unconscious of risk.

When we are mindfully courageous we do push our boundaries while being mindful of what we are doing, why people around us might be reacting like they do and how we need to respond when unexpected things happen.

Learn to be mindfully courageous!

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How To Make Bold Moves More Frequently

Pamela Slim in her post ‘One bold move‘ advocates making bold moves more often, because while they may fail, they may also release unexpected power and advance our projects.

Her post contains several examples including personal examples of the possibilities offered by bold moves.

It is true that shyness and social conventions prevents us from considering the bold moves that would be so easy to take. The fear of rejection also participates to this avoidance.

Still, not only as Richard Branson says, “if you don’t do bold moves, the world doesn’t move forward“. If you don’t make bold moves, you won’t move forward. It’s all about courage and making them. And we’ll survive anyway, so why not make those bold moves?

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How to Improve Personal Attraction Through our Imperfections and Frailties

Following up from our previous post ‘How to Direct Your Self-Development: Become a Center of Attraction‘, it is useful to reflect a bit more on what makes us an attractive resource for others.

I like particularly this quote by Hugh MacKay, an Australian social researcher: “I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties“. It gives an interesting orientation to the aspects we can consider when we want to develop our personal attraction. In addition to our capabilities and resources, being able to build on our imperfection and flaws is an interesting approach that could be used more consciously.

How can we build on our imperfections, flaws and frailties to improve our attraction? It goes through proper communication and unveiling, which comes to exposing ourselves and taking risks. An interesting way of looking at how we behave socially.

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How To Account for Impermanence in Our Decision-Making

I quite like this LinkedIn post that had some success and widespread readership: “What I Wish I Knew At 22“. It is full of interesting recommendations. One of the main recommendations is about the impermanence surrounding us and the fact that success or failure one day means nothing at the scale of a life.

“There are very few decisions in life that are permanent. Very little in your life will be definitional unless you choose to make it that way. You aren’t defined by your last success any longer than you are defined by your last failure. The only one super-focused on your story is you, so move on and keep going.”

This has an interesting direct consequence in our personal decision-making: as long as it does not kill us (or bankrupts us, which is the equivalent in financial life), decisions can be reversed – and a bad decision is not the end. Therefore, there is no need to agonise over it too long.

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How To Negotiate the Diplomatic Way

I like the famous proverb that states “Diplomacy is the Art of letting someone else have your way“. It is quite an essential quote, that is of course valid in the context of any negotiation.

I like it particularly because of the emphasis it puts on getting the other party finally move in the direction we desire. Of course this might border on manipulation, but still it is an interesting viewpoint to consider any negotiation.

The ultimate point of any successful negotiation should be to seek a win-win outcome, and in that sense, finding a way for the other party to move in the same direction is a given.

The quote leaves open the possibility that a third party might also move in our direction and not directly the opposite party. It is also an interesting strategy to consider in any negotiation.

Quite a wonderful quote that leads to interesting considerations!

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How Experience Allows Us to Tackle More and More Complicated Challenges

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”

The first part of the quote is well known (and attributed on internet to various other people). What I find interesting is how the second part of the quote complements the first.

What he says is basically that experience comes from living through a number of lessons, and that can’t be fully understood theoretically by for example reading other people’s experience. The interesting part is how he describes that the key to life challenges is to be derived from one’s experiences, and that with experience we can overcome more and more complicated challenges and riddles.

As I become more experienced with things in life, I find more and more challenges and situations that need to be understood. I did not see them before. On one side I see how foolish I could be when I was younger, and and the other side I see how many the secrets of life remain before me, but that I have progressively the resources I need to tackle them. And that’s what makes life so interesting.

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How Procrastination Can Be an Escape Mechanism

Robin Sharma writes “Procrastination is an escape mechanism for people scared to do their best work“. The concept is quite similar to the concept of ‘Resistance’ developed by Steven Pressfield in the ‘War of Art’.

Still it is an excellent reminder that we should note procrastination as a symptom that Resistance is trying to make us escape from doing our Work, that is to say, our best creative work, the work that takes all our resources to be achieved, the work that can change the world.

Procrastination is not good or bad. It is sometimes quite good to postpone something or to relax. But when it comes while we should be doing our best work, it is a sign that we try to escape from our responsibility and from our capability.

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How We Are Not Supposed to Understand Everything

Robin Sharma writes: “It’s human nature to wish for an explanation to everything. We create a mental architecture from the time we’re children and then try to fit the events of our lives into these neat intellectual models. Why? So we feel safe and secure and in control.”. But it does not work that way. We need to understand “we’re not supposed to understand everything“.

This statement is powerful, because we hate positively being in situations where we don’t understand what happens around us. But it happens much more often than we care to admit or even realize.

We need to raise our ability to live with uncertainty and not understanding everything that happens around us. Ancient people invoked gods and demons, we invoke complexity or lack of information, but it is irreducible. It will always be the case. Instead of spending too much time trying to understand what can”t be understood, let’s spend our energy learning to adapt to the unexpected.

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How Competency Also Requires Emotional Intelligence

In a short and powerful blog ‘The confusion about competence‘, Seth Godin reminds us how competency is not just about grades, certificates but also about the ability to perform emotional labor.

In some countries such as for example France, India or China, the university one graduates from defines one’s career capability – even many years later. But the selection criteria used on young people do not involve any assessment of the ability to perform emotional labor, to be emotionally intelligent. And this makes so many super-graduated people incompetent in real life. They can only thrive in protected social settings.

“It doesn’t take a genius to see that competence is no longer about our ability to press certain buttons in a certain sequence. Far more often, competence involves the humanity required to connect with other people, in real time. It requires emotional labor, not merely compliance.”

Well said!

 

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How Not To Confuse Pleasure and Happiness

In this great post ‘The pleasure/happiness gap‘ Seth Godin reminds us that those are very different. And they are also distinct from the physiological point of view: “Pleasure is short-term, addictive and selfish. It’s taken, not given. It works on dopamine. Happiness is long-term, additive and generous. It’s giving, not taking. It works on serotonin.”

“Pleasure and happiness feel like they are substitutes for each other, different ways of getting the same thing. But they’re not.” Actually they are quite the opposite of one-another.

What people sell to us, what society tries to impose on us  is pleasure.

Happiness develops internally and is a voluntary construct. It takes time and personal effort, and it is so much worth it.

It is good to be reminded from time to time how those two can be so opposite.

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How to Best Engage and Transform People

Seth Godin, in his piece about how to transform higher education, writes a quote that is deeply at the core of change management in general: “If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience?—?you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them“.

This is a fundamental recipe of change management: get people to find their own way within a general direction. It is clearly the only way to get people to get passionate. This means that they will go through a learning experience, and thus commit mistakes and explore dead-ends. This will be more messy and might take slightly more time. We need to be patient and benevolent during the process. Still that is absolutely the best solution for a sustainable and true change.

Never underestimate the power of passion and willingness. It just needs the space to grow and the time to flourish. Let that space and that time be.

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