Inventive high flights and communicative crashes
It’s genuinely fascinating: We have built airplanes, decoded the human genome and invented artificial intelligence. But when it comes to our communication skills, which involves clearly naming and consciously controlling our thoughts and feelings, we are totally underdeveloped. Even in our pretendedly rational business culture.
Communication loops vs. emotional agility
You disagree? Then let’s look at a mundane situation: There is the weekly team meeting and the atmosphere is poisoned. Theres the one that always feels misunderstood, the one that feels he is not even getting a word in edgewise and the one that is only physically present while hoping it will all be over, soon. In the end there is no clear result and everyone is frustrated. Sounds familiar?
We all know those kind of cursed talking situations. With colleagues as well as with friends and family. But why are we trapped in such bad communication loops to nowhere? In a nutshell: Because we lack emotional agility.
Own you story and avoid dead people’s goals
Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David is a mastermind in the field of emotional agility. In her eponymous #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling book she dives with us into the topic and presents strategies how to improve our work life, team life and life in general. She explains the difference between a „bottler and a brooder“, shows how to tweek our habits or how to get unhooked of misguided ideas. She points out why it is so important to own our story and to know our why in order to be successful. And, a finding which I personally found particularly amusing: She unmasks some of the ideas we all carry in our minds as nothing but „dead people’s goals“.