Wellbeing Archives - Trang 3 trên 4

Loving what you do… small steps

Compassion, Mindfulness, Productivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

Can you picture Tiger Woods driving a heavy truck hauling cargo from the piers to their destination in the city’s warehouses? How about Meryl Streep? Do you see her counting dollar bills as a bank teller? Neither, I’ll bet, can you visualise Steven Spielberg as a used-car salesman convincing a prospect to buy that Toyota Camry. Along with a lot of other people, these three personalities : an excellent young , meticulous golfer, an accomplished, multi-awarded actress and a highly successful film director with the wild imagination of a 12 year old, all love what they do. They enjoy every aspect of the careers they’ve chosen to pursue and excel in, and presumably wouldn’t trade it for anything else. Fate has been good and generous to them – loving what they do and getting paid handsomely for it. The celebrity status, the fame and glamour that come with it are gravy for a remarkably delicious steak! Wouldn’t it be grand if we can all just do what we enjoy doing and get a hefty paycheck at the end of each month? Is there actual truth to what most commencement speakers tell a graduating class, “Do what you love. The money will follow,” ? Surely, it’s inspirational, but there aren’t any guarantees. You could pretty well go broke doing what you truly care about. The experts say desire is all important when you’re treading into the unknown. When you simply want to follow your passion and do what you enjoy doing, or at least pursue something that’ll lead you to what you love in order to do your best work, a certain degree of uncertainty revolves around it. Success isn’t a sure thing. It’s a make or break thing. Your strong desire though will push you to be more creative, more resourceful and help you go for the whole nine yards. So, what if I have the desire but am sure it won’t lead to anywhere that’ll bring in the money, should I still go for it? In a research study, “The Power of Small Wins” which ran in Harvard Business Review a few years back, it showed that people who progress everyday toward something they love, feel tremendously satisfied and fulfilled. And so to answer the question … Yes, go for it! But let’s qualify that. If chasing this thing you’re crazy about won’t enable you to bring food on the table or, it would keep you away from a college degree, then hold back. Don’t make any big bets on your desire. This does not mean though that you cannot work on your passion a little at a time, or start building blocks. Spending 15 minutes or half an hour a day on it will keep the embers burning. And you really should. Why? Because you could be wrong! Assuming doing what you love won’t bring in the greenbacks could ruin your whole life. So, take those small steps towards what you love doing. Who knows? You just might discover that this passion of yours is a treasure chest waiting to be opened.

Loving what you do… small steps Đọc thêm »

Happy people work harder!

Compassion, Sự gắn kết, Wellbeing / My Holland

Happier People Work Harder, Better Most of us, working adults spend a large part of our waking hours at work than any other place. Ideally therefore, business companies should make it a point to ennoble the human spirit and not degrade it and even in some extreme cases, kill it. For these businesses, it should not only be a moral obligation to foster and promote the well-being of its workers. Doing so also makes a lot of economic sense. A Previous Study Over the past decade close to twelve thousand (12,000) electronic diary entries from nearly three hundred (300) professionals in seen (7) different corporations were gathered to study a person’s state of mind everyday at the workplace. They were asked to describe one event that dominated their average working day. These responses then provided a basis for analyzing the latent perceptions, emotions, feelings and motivations that they experienced in response to what went on during their everyday work routine. These also gave an indication of what made sense to them. What The Study Says Two of the vital findings were: In thirty three percent (33%) of the twelve thousand entries, the respondents were unhappy and unmotivated, or both. Some had even claimed they were disgusted and frustrated. Their inner work life had a great impact on workers’ creativity, productivity, commitment and a general predisposition to work with the rest of the company’s employees. When they feel happy, theses guys are more likely to have new ideas and tend to be more engaged in their work. The finding was clear enough to show that workers perform a lot better when they are happily engaged in what they do everyday. What Can Managers Do? It makes practical sense for managers to help ensure that their people are happy and engaged in their jobs. It’s not expensive, since employees’ well-being depends largely on how they are able, and how willing they are to facilitate the accomplishments of their workers. This is generally done by providing his people with help, removing hindrances that tend to obstruct the smooth flow of work and by acknowledging specially strong efforts of his people. In the end, going by all the assessments and evaluation from the recent study, the one clear pattern that emerged was: of all events that engage people in their workplace, the most vital was simply making progress in meaningful work. In other words, as long as workers continue to experience their jobs as meaningful, there is progress, and this is usually followed by joy and excitement about the work. You as a responsible manager should recognize this to be the prime mover in building and establishing employee engagement in their jobs. What will make this happen are workers’ autonomy, ample resources and learning from problems. These are the essentials to a happier working group and a better business potential. The sooner you believe and accept this as part of your mission, the sooner you’ll build a happier employee base leading to higher productivity.

Happy people work harder! Đọc thêm »

Creative leadership… why?

Emotional Intelligence, Sự gắn kết, Khả năng lãnh đạo, Productivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

The 7 Key Principles Of Creative Leadership Whether you’re the CEO of a huge business organization, a team leader or a division manager of such a company, or owner of a small business outfit, creative leadership is important. It’s what leads to innovation. Furthermore, from concept to idea execution, a great deal of creativity is required. Here are 7 of its key principles: “It ain’t your creativity, baby! It’s about your group’s creativity.” : It’s true. Creative leadership has little to do with your own personal creativity and a whole lot to do with your team’s creativity. It’s a case of simple math. If it was only about your creativity, why should you need a whole team? You’ve got to tap the cumulative creativity of your group. This could be 6 to 60 and the numbers will surely give you better results. You don’t need to be a creative genius, but, you’ve got to have an understanding of creativity : If you’re exceptionally creative, great! It’ll set a terrific example to your team members. But to be a good creative leader, it’s not necessary to be a creative person. Don’t feel the need to pretend that you are. What is critical though is that you understand the creative process so you can facilitate it for your people. If you want to, you can talk loudly about your skills as a facilitator of creativity. This is, in the end, a lot more important in a creative leader. Get to know the strengths and weaknesses of your team: You’ll need to do this to maximize your effectiveness. Some of your guys may be incredible with ideas but lousy on execution. Others may exactly be the opposite. Some may do wonders solving problems on their own. Others have got to have teammates to add 2+2! Diversity: If teams have not been thrust upon you by circumstance and you are still in the stage of forming one, go for diversity. Choose diversity of experience, educational background, sex, culture, age, knowledge. If there are people you don’t like but are reputed to bring in results, get them too. Think that creativity is built on diversity. A more extensive range of backgrounds, culture and knowledge leads to a wider array of thinking and therefore greater creativity. It’s ok to make mistakes: If people don’t fail, they’ll never achieve great success. In the creativity and innovation fields it’s ok to make mistakes. As a creative leader, you know better. Encourage your guys to try, fail early in the game and try again. Share the failures with the rest of the team so everybody learns from them. You’ve got to trust your guys: Set clear goals. Give them a budget and tools and let go. Let them work out their own approaches towards achieving their goals. They’ll never learn by doing what they’re told. They learn by researching, trying, making mistakes and trying once more. You’ve got to be the champion of your team’s ideas. Surely, your creative team will come up with many ideas. As the leader of the band, you need to champion those ideas. especially, when they offer values to your company or your customers. When you do this, you make it more likely that the ideas could be realized and it’ll demonstrate to your team that you believe in their ideas and that you’re a creativity champion. A creative leader has an open mind. Start off by giving these principles some thought and apply them as quickly as you can.

Creative leadership… why? Đọc thêm »

Flow and sustainable happiness…

Sự gắn kết, Tâm Lý Tích Cực, Productivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

Flow – the secret of happiness Have you ever done an activity – a sport or something creative – where you have been totally absorbed in that exact moment, without a care about what is going on around you? Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the pioneers of the scientific study of happiness, called this feeling ‘flow’ and says it is the key to happiness. He said: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” At that moment when you forget yourself and only the thing you are doing at that moment matters, you have effortless control and Csikszentmihalyi says this is an optimum state of happiness. Lots of psychologists and theorists argue that happiness must be worked at to achieve, it doesn’t simply happen. It can be achieved by setting ourselves challenges (nothing too hard or too simple) and making them unique to our passions. We need to cultivate our own happiness and one way to do that is to work out when and how we can achieve flow. Flow happens on our journey towards completing – so for example, it is the creative process of writing a story or painting a picture, or it is what athletes refer to as ‘being in the zone’ when they are preparing or running a race. When we are totally immersed in something we give it our full attention and can forget all of our external issues and problems. Cziksentmihalyi stated that happiness comes from within us and is unique to US –our passions, our likes, what makes us tick. In 1990, he explained flow as: “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” This is why it is so worthwhile to have hobbies in our lives and make the time to do the things we love to do. To achieve flow, Czikszentmihalyi said there are certain things to do and feel, such as having clear goals, allow awareness and action to meet, disregard time and allow self-consciousness to disappear. During ‘flow’ there is no worry about failing; instead we receive immediate feedback in the shape of gratification. So how do can we achieve flow on our lives? Csikszentmihalyi says that we need to immerse ourselves in an activity we can lose ourselves in. This will be different from one person to the next. It also requires us to practise mindfulness – being aware of the here and now. When we learn to enjoy the immediate experiences we face, we can experience flow and its benefits for our happiness.

Flow and sustainable happiness… Đọc thêm »

Stress and productivity. What is the link?

Sự gắn kết, Wellbeing / My Holland

Stress In The Workplace Can Affect Productivity Experts have long acknowledged that job stress plays an important role in employee performance. What happens when there is stress is that it reduces a worker’s ability to concentrate on multi-tasks, and all his energy is directed at the completion of those tasks. It has been established that there exists a level of stress, below which employees become unmotivated and above which, they tend to be overwhelmed. We all deal with stress. It’s is part of what we are and even, who we are. You might say it is a part of how we are wired. And yet, while stress gets us moving, it also directly affects our ability to be creative and productive. Interestingly, we sometimes cause self-inflicted stress by our own lack of organization and very poor management of our time. The $64 Million Dollar Question So, the big question you will need to ask yourself is … “Is stress helping me or hindering me in my job performance?” To help you understand stress and get to the right answer, here are five ways that show how stress impacts your productivity: Stress drains your energy. It is funny. Stress can give you that adrenaline burst to get you going however a project, but after that initial rush, it quickly drains you. Physically and emotionally, you find yourself exhausted. And when you do not get enough sleep because of your stress, your best job performance suffers. Stress clouds your focus. For the most part, stress makes it hard to focus on what is important. It runs you down until you end up doing just the urgent instead of your priorities. Stress wastes time. It is simple. With stress, you worry. Sometimes just worrying all day long when you could have done other productive things. Stress reduces creativity. When you are under stress, you would most likely “lock on” to the first solution that comes to mind, and that is it. End of discussion. End of thinking. In other words, your mind doesn’t open up and limit your ability to come up with new ideas. Stress affects your personality. It would not make you a Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but have you ever heard the expression … you do not seem to be yourself today? Sure, you have. It is when, because of your stress, you would be irritable and snap at everybody within your circle and may even start yelling like a banshee without thinking. So, there you go. Stress can get you jumping out of your seat right now. It will give you that light jerk your body needs to work on something. but consider the big picture. Down the road, stress can affect your productivity in such a negative way, it will put your job on the line

Stress and productivity. What is the link? Đọc thêm »

Wellbeing

Loving what you do… small steps

Happy people work harder!

Creative leadership… why?

Flow and sustainable happiness…

Stress and productivity. What is the link?

Liên Hệ