10. Practice your 2% Solution. As I described in Life’s 2% Solution, the 2% Solution requires just half an hour a day (3 1/2 hours a week if it works better to cluster your time). Spend that time doing something that’s deeply nurturing, meaningful, fulfilling to you.  It may be what you’ve vowed to do later when you are free to explore long-delayed purposeful pursuits.  This seemingly small expenditure of time is even more critical in today’s harried world, where work deadlines loom, the carpool to soccer awaits, the dry cleaning is piling up, and a dinner party fills up whatever free time is left. We get it all done, yet feel incomplete.  This stress-filled existence leaches away our creativity, passion and a sense of fulfillment. We sacrifice the long-view of our lives for short-term results, to check something off a list. No doubt, that scenario leads to burnout.

Action: Integrate your enhanced awareness from taking some of the above steps with your own 2% project.  Investing 2% of your time in an unusual way on yourself will make a world of difference.  It’s an achievable way of creating more work/life balance without having to turn your life upside down by radical change.  You can learn more and follow the 10 step process found in my book Life’s 2% Solution.

Smile.   It’s impossible to be grumpy and smile at the same time. 

Action:  If you are willing to change your emotional state, you will.  Breathe, notice what is going on, notice any tension you are holding in your body, be willing to let it go.  Be quiet and smile for a full minute. 

Be you.  Embrace yourself.  Know your good points and that which you don’t consider so favorably.  Know your styles and preferences and trust you are a good and resilient person.  We received the following quote awhile ago and we give profound credit to whomever first said it though we don’t know the original source.  “There is nothing wrong with you that what is right with you can’t fix!”

This month we are discussing 10 actions to make your 2010 a year of authentic success.

Create.  It feels good!  Humans are amazingly creative beings.  You probably create much more than you realize and miss giving yourself credit for your gifts. 

Action:  Intentionally make a soup, draw a picture, write a letter.  Whatever feels simply good to you and then stop and acknowledge the act of creating and give yourself time to enjoy.

Express gratitude.  This is a big one.  Anytime you want to build happiness, go find a way to give.  So much of authentic happiness is based in giving your gifts and in being a good and compassionate human being.  Don’t make it hard; find easy and natural ways to give with no strings attached.  Pay it forward is a great strategy.

Action:  Take time to stop and say thank you.  Notice how you feel and how the recipient feels.  Keep a gratitude journal.  Notice five to ten events that occur each day for which you are grateful.  Be specific.  Feel the gratitude in your heart as you write your list and as you read it over.

This month we are discussing 10 actions to make your 2010 a year of authentic success. We continue this week with four deeds that may seem simple at first, however when done with intention can bring you the authentic success.

Practice mindfulness. While defined in a variety of ways, mindfulness simply means paying attention. Notice how you are feeling and why and then make a choice to stick with that path and or take a breath and intentionally shift. Action: Set a time each day when you will review your day with intention to notice and expand your mindfulness. Even a short review will make a difference.

Relationships matter. Take time for friends and choose friends who support the values you wish to live with. Action: Notice who your friends are. Ask yourself if you are giving the time it takes to cultivate valuable relationships. If not make a change. Keep your expectations of time with friends manageable. Carpe diem! Seize the day: Action: Today is the only version of this day you’ll ever have. Take advantage of it!

Know your values. It’s easy to get caught up in the multitude of options that expand daily from numbers of cereals to forms of entertainment to interesting books. We all have twenty-four hours in a day. Take advantage of your day by knowing what is truly important so you don’t get distracted with the job of making too many unimportant choices. Action: Make a list of your top values – somewhere between five and ten items at the most. Then practice connecting your values with your choices.

Have you ever had a conversation between your ideal self (how you would most like to live) and your real self (how you really live)?  Authentic success integrates these two parts into a happier and more successful you. 

 Authentic success begets peace of mind because you are living and working in accordance with your values, strengths, and your sense of purpose instead of living in conflict.  Reaching this highly desired state requires personal awareness.  Without it you will be missing the joy from your current wealth by only focusing on what hasn’t happened.  Happiness and optimism, both components of emotional intelligence, are vital to experiencing authentic success.  The following 10 Actions are based on years of research in the fields of emotional intelligence and positive psychology and set forth choices you can make to change the quality of your life in 2010.

10 Actions to Make Your 2010 a Year of Authentic Success

 1. Define happiness.  Know what you are looking for when you are seeking happiness.  True happiness isn’t the quick food fix, even Belgian chocolates bring a temporary response.  As an article by Carlin Flora, “The Pursuit of Happiness” in Psychology Today (March, 2009. p. 65) states, “The most useful definition – and it’s one agreed upon by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, behavioral economists, positive psychologists, and Buddhist monks – is more like satisfied or content than ‘happy’ in its strict bursting-with-glee sense.  It has depth and deliberation to it.  It encompasses living a meaningful life, utilizing your gifts and your time, living with thought and purpose.  It’s maximized when you also feel part of a community. And when you confront annoyances and crises with grace.  It involves a willingness to learn and stretch and grow, which sometimes involves discomfort.  It requires acting on life, not merely taking it in.  It’s not joy, a temporary exhilaration, or even pleasure, that sensual rush – though a steady supply of those feelings course through those who seize each day.”

Action:  Happiness is closely tied to being aware of what success truly means for you.  Write your own definition of what Authentic Success means to you.

Multitasking Brings High Costs
- Marcia Hughes

Remember the days when you could drive your car without talking on the cell phone? Those where simpler times. In today’s world many think multitasking is an unavoidable process, but how has attempting to perform all of these tasks simultaneously affected performance? The American Psychological Association has recently published an article examining this very topic, http://www.apa.org/releases/multitasking.html. They found that ultimately it takes longer to switch from topic to topic rather than focusing on one thing at a time.

If you are as busy as we are these days your to-do list can become overwhelming. To tackle the multitude of deeds that need to get done it becomes reasonable to combine tasks. Why not peruse that new article while on a conference call? There also is a point of pride in these moments as we’re too likely to think “My brain can handle multiple tasks at once. I’m smart!” or “I’m efficient”. In the end we need to ask ourselves an important question. “Is it more important that I just get this done or that I get this done to the best of my ability?” Given that what we produce becomes a reflection of ourselves this question is easy to answer – or at least it should be. Read More.

In this final week of October we will wrap up our discussion on Collaborative Intelligence (CQ, CI). In the previous two blogs we evaluated motivation, team identity, emotional awareness, and communication. These are skills and behaviors that successful teams seek out when improving CQ. The circle isn’t complete without these final three. In this blog stress tolerance, conflict resolution, a positive mood are examined.

Stress tolerance is the skill of holding the world’s parade of unpleasant surprises at bay. Using other skills such as emotional awareness, conflict resolution, and communication will allow a group to deal with stress earlier in the development and thus make it more manageable. Dealing with adversity and turning challenges into opportunities is the best outcome of stress tolerance.

Conflict resolution is the process employed by individuals and teams facing confrontation. What team do in the face of adversity can define the group. when you’re willing to entertain change and conflict, giving up much of the illusion that you’re in control, you and your team can actually find powerful new levels of success.

One attribute that can effect conflict resolution and stress tolerance is a Positive Mood. Optimism and simple happiness have a lot to do with this type of attitude. As a leader, when people look to you during adversity and you can reflect a positive mood the results are exponential.

These skills and behaviors are the first steps needed to raise the collaborative intelligence of a group. When analyzing a group be sure to recognize your own deeds first. Leading by example has always been the most effective way to create a positive a environment.

On the last post we began discussing what it takes to enhance a team’s collaborative intelligence (CQ, CI). On that post we discussed motivation and team identity. On this post we will highlight emotional awareness and communication as fundamental skills in developing with a team’s collaboration.

Emotional awareness is one of the most underutilized of the qualities. Emotions are a rich resource of data and good data leads to good decisions. Understanding emotions improves performance, which drives results.

What makes communication effective is a vast topic; it is the everyday infrastructure that defines our career paths and our most cherished relationships. For a collaboration to be brought to its fullest potential all the participants have to have the ability to relate and respond to their ideas and observations.

Build CQ with Team Identity and Motivation

Does your team or group struggle with productivity?  Come at it with a new twist.  Instead of deciding to fix a little part go for the gold and build Collaborative Intelligence (CI or CQ). Developing Collaborative Intelligence (CI or CQ) within a group or team takes effort and recognition of the value CQ brings to the table. Some degree of collaborative intelligence may already exist in a group, however without acknowledging its effect and attempting to utilize that intelligence, inefficiencies and redundancies will plague the team. Honing key skills and behaviors with the direct intention of improving your team’s CQ will improve their partnerships and productivity.  The 7 key skills measured by the TESI http://theemotionallyintelligentteam.com are the indicators of a team’s capacity to build CQ.  Those 7 begin with:

Team Identity through which team members find a purpose for their work. This might seem a bit elementary, but it remains critical that everybody within the group finds a personal reason to engage and a reason for the whole team to exist.  How else do they measure success or feel proud?

Next comes team motivation, which measures the commitment to mobilize their three basic resources: time, energy and intelligence. When every member understands and stands behind the goals of the group the more likely they are to be motivated. Building this feeling in people is what makes great leaders.

Collaboration – a word increasingly used, a goal set by organizations of all types – governments, for profit, and non-profit – yet what is it?

You know collaboration is a popular concept, but do you know when you’re being collaborative?  Do you do it well?  Does your team?  How about your organization?  Signs of the desire to collaborate increase daily and the challenges on our planet that call for high level collective actions are indisputable.  So let’s help one another know how to collaborate and how to do so intelligently!  This is an invitation and a challenge we hope you’ll join!

We’re launching the discussion; and you know the only way for it to be truly collaborative and intelligent is by bringing our collective wisdom to the front.  Your voice is needed! So join the blog discussion!

The Collaborative Growth Team Model demonstrates the process to building collaborative intelligence through effective team work.  Team’s can measure their functioning and strategically improve through using the TESI® and you can learn more through The Emotionally Intelligent Team.

Let’s explore root concepts that lead to Collaborative Intelligence.

What is Collaborative Intelligence?

Collaboration involves working with one or more people in order to achieve a resilient result.  Intelligence is the ability to learn and apply facts and skills; we especially consider a person or an action intelligent when the ability is highly developed.  Collaboration is a composite skill that emerges from the masterful use of your ESE skills. The members of a football team collaborate when they huddle and agree that they will each do their part to execute a particular play. In the middle of the play, except in the face of an unexpected opportunity, the fullback won’t decide to change the play because he’d prefer to run the ball rather than block! Team loyalty is unquestioned.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence is the name of a discipline which studies the physiological and behavioral aspects of effective emotional communication. It could be called the art of influence, because any time we need to persuade someone to follow a specific course of action we need to influence their thinking and decision-making processes. This, it turns out, is accomplished through how effectively we interpret their emotional signals and respond with our own.

Over the past 20 years psychological researchers have developed scientifically validated and reliable assessments for measuring the accuracy of our emotional perceptiveness and how skillfully we send and receive emotional energy patterns. Extensive research has now proven how critical the so-called “soft skills” of managing human relationships are to the bottom line, and inaugurated a new era of emotionally-based personal and professional development.

We refer to emotional and social effectiveness (ESE) and refer to it as the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and to recognize and respond effectively to those of others.  It includes understanding your social community from the “big picture” point of view and the ability to direct change as well as adapt to change.