Shannon Cassidy - 23/28 - Bridge Between

4 Ways to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

August 14, 2014August 14, 2014 Shannon Cassidy 2 Comments

A recent blog post from the Harvard Business Review questioned whether people can really improve their Emotional Intelligence. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote our emotional intelligence is relatively stable, but not rigid. He notes change requires “a great deal of dedication and patience.”

What are we talking about here? Emotional intelligence describes a person’s ability to understand her own emotions and the emotions of others. Insights from emotional IQ are useful for improving all professional and personal relationships. Quite simply, you make better decisions when regularly considering this information.

Here are four tips to help you improve your emotional intelligence with the recognition that change takes time:

1. Become a better listener. A big mistake people often make in the business world is thinking about what they want to say next instead of listening to other participants in a conversation. If you tune in to others, you will catch important clues about their emotions and choose more appropriate responses.

2. Acknowledge your weaknesses. According to the Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence (Mayer and Salovey, 1997), emotional intelligence involves the abilities to accurately perceive your emotions and those of others, use emotions to guide thinking, understand emotional meanings, and manage your own emotions. You may be weaker in one or more of these four areas.

3. Set a goal. You are going to increase your emotional intelligence by setting a personal goal and taking incremental steps to reaching it. If you know you need to focus on understanding emotional meanings, you can work with a professional to recognize the signs people give you. Stopping to think about emotional meanings can help you avoid many difficult situations.

4. Improve by up to 25% by following a well-designed coaching program. Chamorro-Premuzic noted working with an executive and business coach can help you make improvements in your emotional intelligence. Ensure you are working with a coach who is giving you the right feedback.

Bridge the gap between intention and action. Get on the path to interacting more effectively with everyone you meet. Please contact us for personalized assistance today!

Three Ways To Develop Your Job Strengths

August 8, 2014August 8, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Literally billions of people all throughout this planet trudge away at jobs that they don’t care for just to try to make a living. They do not push themselves to be better, they just settle for treading water and not really making any impact on their own lives or the lives of others. It is sad to see this happen so often, but it does. If you want to break out of that mold, you need to think to yourself “how can I develop my job strengths?”.

Show Your Ability To Change

One of the attributes you’ll want to show in the office is the ability to change. This is good not only for your own enjoyment at work, but also for your prospects of being promoted. Companies look for people who are willing to put in the time and effort necessary to succeed. Take a look at what Forbes.com has to say about the ability to change:

You must be able to show the ability to evolve your thinking and the capacity to expand your skill sets. The old ways of being good at something and never expanding your abilities are over. You must work twice as hard to illustrate your capacity for growth – this will require you to invest in yourself and your know-how more than ever before.

Find Peace In Your Daily Work

How are you productive and contributing to the world even in your daily work? Strive to find peace in the work that you do on a daily basis. Discover how your efforts make the world a better place for someone else. A bumper sticker quote I like to keep in mind:

“Enthusiasm is contagious. Start an epidemic.”

Realize That Work Isn’t Everything

One of the best things that you can do to improve your mental health is to discover your interests. There are a lot of things that are far more vital than the amount of hours you put into work. Think about activities, discussion topics, areas of study, products, services and hobbies you find most interesting.

5 Productivity Tips for Procrastinators

July 11, 2014August 28, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Are you avoiding success in your life purely by procrastinating? The words “productivity” and “procrastination” go together like oil and water. Twenty percent of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. Good news: Procrastinators can change their behaviors!

Procrastinators must first understand the problem in order to become more effective. The reason why you wait until the last minute does matter, but how much time you waste ignoring it matters more. Gossiping and daydreaming distracts us from completing the task. Although distractions existed before the world wide web, the internet helps people waste more time. Distractions are easy because they are enjoyable. The task is boring, uncomfortable, difficult or stressful. How will you resist?

Notice patterns of where the time goes. Are you leaving in the middle of a project to check Facebook? Are you avoiding the task by reading news stories and checking emails? Time yourself about how long it takes you to start or go back to the task from the time you enter the workplace. You’ll see in detail how long it takes. Once you see the time pass you’ll start to focus. It isn’t going to take a day to solve. It is going to take constant notice about the time to understand how much of it is wasted.

You can be a productive procrastinator with these suggestions:

Reward yourself. Give yourself a five or ten minute break for every assignment you complete. Let the distraction be the motivation to complete the task.
Break up a big project into tiny ones. Large projects require extra concentration and energy. Doing it all at once is tiring; when we are tired, our mind wanders. This encourages us to distract ourselves from the project. If the project is in tiny steps, we can get parts of it done until competition. Add easy tasks in-between the large project as relief.
Offer self-deadlines. A deadline pushes us to do something. If we place self-deadlines on ourselves we can complete more. For example if you want to complete 10 tiny tasks or half of a large project today, this will motivate you to finish it on time.
Remove high expectations. Daydreaming about the best PowerPoint presentation that has your co-workers on their feet is a high expectation. These kind of unrealistic fantasies set people up to fail. Revert to number two and take it slow.
Swap out the workload. If you cannot handle the project, hand it over to someone who can. This is the last minute choice. Be sure to take on projects you can handle next time.

Two words that don’t go together work well with effort and patience. For more information on how to bring your best self to the job, contact us.

Four Ways to Increase Your Productivity

June 10, 2014June 10, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Increase your productivity at the office with these easy tips for getting things done at work.

The Labor Department announced that U.S.productivity fell 1.7 percent for the first quarter of 2014, making it a current hot topic in business. While company-wide productivity takes time to see results, here are few things that you can start doing today to improve your own:

Make Lists

Too many ideas and and tasks that need to be completed consumes your thoughts and therefore reduces productivity. Keeping a tool close at hand to write down ideas or to-do list items helps your brain associate that the item has been acknowledged and provides focus. Mobile note-taking or list apps, Google reminders, a personal notebook or even a tried and true paper To-Do list will suffice. Find the method that works for you and watch as your productivity increases.

Prioritize

When confronted with a long to-do list or tackling a project, prioritize the tasks by putting them in order of importance. Remember the old saying that things that are urgent are not always important. Productivity is not just about getting lots of things done quickly. The tasks that are completed need to be important enough to move the task, project, or company ahead on a regular basis.

Delegate

Identify employees’ strengths and use those to your advantage. Assign tasks that others can accomplish more efficiently, as well as tasks that prevent you from focusing on more important things at hand. Delegating ensures that projects are being worked on and moved ahead on schedule, and allows employees to feel a sense of ownership over the success of the company.

Focus

Resist the urge to multi-task. Set a timer for a certain amount of time to work before checking email or making a phone call. These potential time suckers will steal your attention and reduce productivity while working. Hop off the hamster wheel and laser in on the task at hand.

What’s YOUR go to method for tackling the to-do list? Please share in the comments!

Excitement About My Job: Are You Happy?

May 6, 2014June 6, 2014 Shannon Cassidy Leave a comment

Invest in Happy

Our identities are often tied up with our occupation because so much of our time is devoted to working. Did you know that the 72-work week is the new norm? According to a recent study of executives, managers and professionals 60% of them who carry smartphones are connected to their jobs 13.5 hours on weekdays and 5.5 hours on weekends. With so much time being devoted to work, wouldn’t it suit you to enjoy what you do?