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Paying attention and happiness (part 3) – other-awareness

February 8, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! Last month, we discussed how paying attention to yourself – self-awareness – can benefit you in terms of enhancing your emotional intelligence but also bolstering your resilience and adaptability. In addition to making emotional self-management smoother, I have noticed in folks gaining in and practicing self-awareness a quietening of the mind, a stronger sense of self, greater acceptance of life’s daily irritants and a lesser reactivity overall. A third benefit I have noticed from paying attention to oneself is that it also boosts motivation, increasing self-determination and therefore improving one’s goal achievement prospects.

Let me now invite you to look at the other side of the coin: other-awareness. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching Tips, Happiness at Work, Neuro stuff, Personal Effectiveness, Self-Confidence Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Paying attention and happiness (part 2) – self-awareness

January 12, 2018 by 1 Comment

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! And of course: best wishes for happy 2018!
 
In last month’s blog, we discussed the fact that voluntary attention – what we consciously focus on – is the instrument thanks to which we can shape our reality – rather than it being just the result of an interpretative process based on our unique life experiences. Really paying attention is the means through which we can expand our horizons: by consciously choosing what we attend to, we challenge our ‘newspaper syndrome’ (for a refresher, see http://coachingforinspiration.com/my-brain-the-newspaper/).

Paying better attention as well as more frequently, thereby refusing to accept the limited reality which is presented to us, is worth our while because otherwise "[w]e can’t study, listen, converse with others, work, play, or even sleep well" (see Allan Wallace’s book ‘The Attention Revolution’, 2006). Apart from the obvious discomfort which must ensue from such fundamental dysfunctions, what is really at stake is our happiness. Lacking the capacity to focus robs us of choice and leaves us vulnerable to the myriad stimuli in and out there, waiting to turn us into weathercocks.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching Tips, Happiness at Work, Motivation, Neuro stuff, Resilience Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Paying attention: the secret to happiness (part 1)

December 8, 2017 by Leave a Comment

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! Let’s see: where have we got to? Three articles in, we know about the three parts of the human brain (see: http://coachingforinspiration.com/three-brains/) and the dominance of the unconscious. We also know that one of the main purposes of the human brain is sense-making (see: http://coachingforinspiration.com/brain-is-for/).

In last month’s article, we discussed the fact that because ours is only an edited reality which is the result of an interpretative process based on our unique life experiences, it is as though we each read only our own individual newspaper and perceive reality through a filter we are mostly unaware of. Indeed, we don’t get to choose our newspaper, we cannot read any other one and everyone else reads a different one – from mine, yours and each other’s.

It is a wonder that we agree on anything!
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Coaching Tips, Happiness at Work, Neuro stuff, Resilience, Self-Confidence Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,