Read articles on how the latest insights from the world of neuroscience and behavioural science can make a difference to your organisation.
Emotional regulation is often defined as your ability to modulate your experience and expression of positive and negative emotions in accordance with the ongoing situation. It’s key to healthy psychological functioning, as well as your ability to adapt to your...
Do you look on the brighter side of life? Are you a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person? Are your spectacles tinted with rose? There are many phrases that people use to indicate where someone falls in terms of their outlook on life. Short-hand ways of...
Do you know when you’re stressed out? Stress is your body’s way of dealing with challenges. It is built upon an evolutionary system which is tasked with sending biological messages between your body and brain. In the case of stress, these are both electrical and...
The human psyche can experience a multitude of emotions. Some of these are those considered to be more basic, but others are more complex. Your basic emotions, such as fear or anger, carry messages, either for yourself or for other people. For example, fear tells you,...
Humility, or being humble, is a characteristic which is sometimes perceived to be a barrier to success, a weakness even. It can suggest that you sell yourself short. That you put yourself down when comparing against others. That you don’t think as highly of yourself...
“ Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear, ” wrote Mark Twain in this novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. In other words, having courage isn’t about being fearless. It is about being able to overcome, control and manage your fear. What is fear? Fear...
Emotion-driven habits Human beings are creatures of habit. Often working on an automatic pilot in response to various triggers that we come across throughout the day. And whilst these triggers could include walking past a cafe selling tasty treats, or the sound alert...
Being an optimist or a pessimist - are the labels really relevant? When talking about optimism, the stereotypical question someone might ask you is: “Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person?” And although some people may be able to categorize...
Whether or not you like surprises, they are useful to your brain. Do you like surprises? Some people do. Others most definitely do not. But despite these differences at an individual level, there are some constants with surprise - like the fact they are usually very...
There you are, standing in front of the audience and you suddenly feel a wave of stress rise up inside you. An array of physiological sensations like a racing heart, sweaty palms and a churning in your stomach start to uncontrollably manifest themselves. And all...
Regret. A strategy for change? If you look back over your life, do you have any regrets? Although many people try to leave their regrets behind, they often have a tendency to linger on. Maybe a decision you made which caused your life to temporarily take a turn for...
I’m always being asked ‘what’s new in neuroscience’ and it isn’t often that big paradigm shifts happen. However, a great researcher and writer have just released a paper that everyone should know about. The scientific paper itself is a little heavy to plod through –...
Last year I wrote a post on the neuroscience of Christmas overwhelm for Huffington Post. On the 29th November this year, I'd started to feel it. That’s too early in my book. In early December I was giving a talk on the neuroscience of laughter. A Coach who uses...
Last time, I reported research into resilience – what it is and what resilient people do in order to bounce back from adversity. On the one hand, it is about being able to accept failures, learn from them and try again. On the other it is about having a particular attitude that will allow perseverance even in the face of daunting challenges. Two specific examples from last time were that resilient individuals dealt with feedback in a certain way, and also that they interpret situations differently. Put together, resilience is a mind-set that shapes the way you see the world – it is full of achievable challenges that may take several attempts to overcome. (But they *will* be overcome…)
Resilience is a term that is used more and more these days. In these times of recession, stress and adversity we are told that we must develop resilience and that we must ‘future-proof’ our businesses to weather the storm.
Today and next time, I talk about future-proofing ourselves. But am I just peddling more snake-oil or is there truth (or *evidence*) that we can indeed develop resilience and be better able to deal with the slings and arrows that the world throws at us?
Many years ago Epictetus said “We are disturbed not by events, but by the views which we take of them.” What he didn’t say, but is implied in the statement, is that we all differ in how we view events. It seems that our early experiences play a major role in shaping...
This month we are looking at attributional style, sometimes called explanatory style, and started life as something called locus of control. Essentially, they are all the same thing and relate to our outlook on life – whether we...
Popularised by Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence is continuing to take centre stage in many organisations. Goleman believes, based on much research, that EI is often the difference between a good leader and a great leader. Many organisations have, over the years,...
Stress often gets a bad press and we’re going to look at an example that shows why it really deserves that bad press in this particular set of circumstances. Stress can occur in many different ways and each individual is different in how they create a stress response...
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