Image courtesy of fbobolas via Flickr

At the end of year we tend to get bombarded with all kinds of writings regarding New Year’s Resolutions. Yet, I agree with Mike Brown in Brainzooming and with the study reported recently in The Guardian that most New year's resolutions are doomed to failure, because of the way they are made. They tend to be too vague, general, and with no thought for how to achieve the goal.

By the beginning of February, most people and organizations don’t even remember anymore what their New Year’s resolutions were. Many have given up on even trying to anything about them. That is why I want to make a case for finding a way of keeping New Year’s resolutions. It only requires a few tweaks. . . It’s relatively easy if you decide to REWIRE your brain to create your future

Have been there. . . Photo by littletriggers via Flickr

The end of the year tends to be conducive to thinking about past and future. Today I was reading in the New York Times The Big Zero by op-ed columnist Paul Krugman. He names this decade "The Big Zero" because he contends this “was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.”

Worst yet, besides zero job creation, zero economic gains for the typical family, zero gains for homeowners, zero gains for stocks, “what was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.” He concludes that this was “the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing.” If true, what a bleak, sad, and unfortunate statement!

In the fast paced world we live we tend to think we do not have time to pause, be silent, think, and reflect. The faster you run, the more you need to draw air in. Saying you don’t have time to pause and be silent would be like saying you do not have time to breathe, because you are running. I will like to propose that we don't have time NOT to pause! You see, silent reflection helps us hold the door of our mind open long enough for new perceptions, ideas, and solutions to emerge.

Conversations that matter need breathing space. You need to slow down the conversation enough to let insight happen in the space between words. That is the only way you can discover what the conversation really wants and needs to be about. Leaders need to talk with people, not at them.

To most people, the holidays mean long, hard, unpleasant, stressful work. For leaders it can be even worse. How much of it has to do with outside and family expectations and how much we bring upon ourselves is not the issue I want to discuss – although it might be something worth thinking about. What I want to share with you are ways in which you can be less frazzled and more joyful in the midst of it all.

If you can keep your positive spirit, it will be contagious in the workplace and at home. After all, the end of the year should be a time of rejoicing and goodwill. The specific ways to less stress and more fun have to be individualized. Therefore, I’m going to give you some simple and short suggestions, giving you only some general principles and letting you fill in the blanks.

As a leader, your conversations become relationships. Taking responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, and for the message you need to deliver will allow you to speak with clarity, conviction, and compassion. How people feel after a conversation with you will determine how they would feel about developing a relationship with you or not. It also affects the trust that develops. When relationships are on the line, there are no trivial comments.

Listen to our Intuition to Make the Best Decisions. Last 10 years research in neurobiology seems to say that harnessing one's instincts and intuition helps leaders make better decisions.

Have there been times where you made decisions without thinking, decisions that might have seemed illogical, or even irrational at the time but that turned out to be not only the right ones, but life-altering? Have you ever hired someone with impeccable credentials, knowing deep down that the candidate wasn't right for the position or the organization, only to find out the hard way that by ignoring your instincts and hiring the individual you wasted time and money?

Tapping into that visceral reservoir known as intuition can be particularly difficult for leaders, whose analytical, logical minds are wired to rely on “hard” data to make decisions. But learning to harness one's instincts and intuition helps individuals make better decisions in all areas of their lives, personal and professional, says Karol Ward, a psychotherapist and author of Find Your Inner Voice: Using Instinct and Intuition Through the Body-Mind Connection.

A few weeks back we talked about the importance for leaders to deal with reality. Dealing with reality includes not only acknowledging what is real, but confronting your challenges. Together with the courage to interrogate reality comes the courage to confront your most difficult and often recurring personal and professional issues. That is what we are going to talk about today.

One of the complaints I often hear from the leaders I work with is that they are dealing with some challenge that is taking more and more of their time without being resolved. When I start inquiring, most of the time the reason it has not been solved is because the leader is afraid to confront the problem head on for all kinds of “reasons:” “I’m too busy,” “I don’t want to loose her,” “He can be cruel,” “I don’t want to bring unnecessary panic,” “I don’t know what to do,” “I have tried before and nothing works,” etc. etc. etc.

I spent last week at the Outer Banks with a group of friends. We went to celebrate the wedding of the son of one of them. I enjoyed the experience of letting go of everything and just be in the moment. Especially seeing the bride and groom so intensely aware of each other in the moment of their ceremony by the beach made me think anew of the importance of living the moment and be present in our interactions with others.

Continuing the series on how to elicit the thoughts and ideas of others and share yours in a way that real understanding and collaboration can happen we are going to explore today how to Be Present.

When talking to others, speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have in your life. It could be! When we are totally present and highly aware, our brains record and compute all kinds of subtle messages that can help us “read” the other and which many times result in the proverbial good or bad “gut feeling” we get about something. You might not be able to explain it fully, but you better “listen” to it.

Be Authentic!

We are continuing the series on how to elicit the thoughts and ideas of others and share yours in a way that real understanding and collaboration can happen. Today we are going to explore the importance of choosing to be authentic. Authenticity, being true to self, your values, and convictions, will help others recognize your leadership.

Some of the failures and blatant unethical practices we have lately seen in business can be tracked back to a lack of authenticity. You need to know and understand who you are before you can address others. You need to clarify what you want and how you want to get there. Then you can have conversations that spring from your authentic self. People will recognize and resonate with this.

Authenticity has to do not only with speaking the truth, but most broadly presenting yourself in a genuine way; being without pretense; taking responsibility for your feelings and actions. To be able to be authentic, you need first to learn to read your own mind!

The concept of authenticity has received a significant amount of attention recently as people search for meaning and happiness, in their personal and work lives. How one chooses to try to live more authentically depends on their own perspective on authenticity. Like many other popular concepts, different people have different views about authenticity.

Don't stick your head in the sand!
Photo by Spartacus007 via Flickr

As promised, I’m going into more detail on how to elicit the thoughts and ideas of others and share yours in a way that real understanding and collaboration can happen. Today let’s look at how to deal with reality.

Reality shifts and changes. Markets, economies, colleagues, customers, yourself. . . you name it. Things and the world change. Stuff happens. Many times we prefer to ignore reality, because it seems simpler that way. In reality, ignorance will only make things worst. Things that are ignored become the “white elephant” in the room that everybody sees and nobody talks about. Once you start the conversations that you have been unable to have, the energy changes and tough issues can be confronted and resolved.