Dimos Kyritsis

  Communication is the most common activity amongst people. It can definitely add to people’s welfare and it can detract from it. We often misunderstand the messages we receive as we do not tend to acknowledge where the speaker is coming from. We often fail to communicate our message clearly as we are not aware of our own mental state while speaking.

Steward & Joines introduce Transactional Analysis (TA), a theory of personality which provides a theory of communication and a method of analysing systems and relationships both in personal life and in work situations. It can help people to stay in clear communication and avoid setting up unproductive confrontations. It can be suitable for use in leadership and coaching and it makes a powerful tool in management, communications training and in organisational analysis.

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Ακολουθούν Ελληνικά – Greek to follow

Don’t take it personally

My up to date working experience in many settings through various professional roles has shown me that most of the rifts  occurred are more attributed to luck of communication than to lack of expertise, lack of technical skills and lack of commitment. The good news are that we always have a role to play in a situation where communication skills are required. We can therefore take responsibility for the language and the messages we send out.

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Having spent loads of time on what is missing in many areas of my life and realised how much time I have spent feeling inadequate because of this, I decided to focus upon what it is instead. The abundance I have experienced and celebrated ever since has been transformational. I was raised in a culture and in an environment where feeling proud of your achievements was a synonym of being arrogant or superior to others

Kristin Neff  and Christopher Germer, in their book ‘the mindful self compassion workbook’ point out that our tendency to focus much more on what is wrong rather than on what is right in our lives is called negativity bias. The negativity bias is usually strong towards ourselves, as we tend to focus on our inadequacies  rather than appreciate our strengths, we often have a skewed perspective of who we are. This attitude may stem from:

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 Ever since I started practicing Yoga, I believed that Yoga & Life Coaching seem to  overlap that is why I wanted to combine both in my workshops and retreats. Since, the beginning of February I’ve been studying yoga on a teacher training course in Mysore, South India and the more I study, the greater correlations I see.
According to the Yogic philosophy there are five stages of mind: Mooda, which means attachment, Kshipta, which means confusion, Nikshipta, which means clarity that is not sustainable, Ekagra, which means focus, resolve, and Niruddha which means clarity and sustainable focus. Yoga is working towards helping someone to achieve the last two stages of mind: focus and sustainable clarity.
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All of my life I’ve been working towards success being driven most of the times by my fear of failure, which was actually fear of being exposed, fear of being viewed as a looser, fear to admit that sometimes the result of any kind of an attempt can be out of control or unpredictable. My engagement with life coaching has helped me a lot to reframe the idea of failure and convert it into an opportunity for learning and growth.

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Mike Brent and Fiona Dent, in their book ‘The leadership pf teams’, point out that  three things seem to be paramount when it comes to engaging a team: Purpose, Involvement and Appreciation. How do these 3 factors work?
Purpose: the team members should be clear about what is the purpose of the project they work on as well as how they can contribute towards that purpose both as individuals an as a team. The purpose always signified the direction
Involvement: all the members of the team should be involved at the process in order to own the purpose. What is the best way for you to involve your  team?
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One, and maybe the most important, indicator of a successful coaching relationship is trust. A mutual trust between the coach and the coachee. What do both need to trust in? Dennis and Michelle Reina, in their book ‘Trust and Betrayal in the workplace point out three types of transactional trust:

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Today it was the first time I heard about the Information fatigue syndrome defined as the stress that results from having to deal with excessive amounts of information.

In a report done by Reuters News Agency called ‘Dying for information?’ over 1000 managers and CEOs were were serveyed globally and it was found that information anxiety is now a part of most executives and a significant percentage of them, 43% find hard to make important decisions because of data overload, while they may be suffering from stress related health problems brought on by too much information.

What does this mean for executives and managers?
How could we act proactively to prevent information fatigue syndrome?

Feel free to share your answers 😉

Source. Lee, A (2007) Multiple streams of coaching income. Missouri, MP Press.

Last week my friend Michael Robinson talked about success despite adversity on his Saturday’s radio show on microbin radio. Being intrigued by these words, I checked the online Cambridge Dictionary to find out the exact definition of both. So, according to it, success is the achievement of the results of something wanted or hoped for, or something that achieves positive results. Adversity is defined as a difficulty or an unlucky situation or event.

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Every new situation involves a challenge. Much as appealing as might seem to be, it requires us to step out of our comfort zone and let go of an old way of doing things. Now, in the era of uncertaintly, the era of destressed economy, many of us have envisioned a greater career, a more profitable job with the prospect of career development, yet we are afraid of leaving what we have and make the change. This fear prevents us from making decisions. This fear makes us create comfort zones.   It cannot be denied that nowadays there are not many options for carreer opportunities, especially in my country, Greece, yet facing any kind of fear always entails a gift.

Except with a challenge, every new situation involves an opportunity. I invite you, therefore, to see what opportunities you are loosing because of your fear. What is the worst thing that can happen and how are you going to handle this, if it happens? What can you do to prevent the worst case scenario? What skills and strengths of yours will help you to muddle through and get what you aspire?

What change needs to happen so that you will not leave in the fear of moving forward?

I am more than sure that you’ve got all the answers within you. This fear has happened in my life and I always remember what Tom Robbins used to say: ‘We make a change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change’

Good luck!