In the national bestseller Flow, University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests two key factors determine our overall happiness:

• Our relations with other people
• How we experience our work

You can improve both areas by bringing humor to work each day.

Harvard Business Review (September 2003) reports that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and earn more money than their counterparts.

A good laugh reduces blood pressure, increases heart rate, massages internal organs and reduces the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood. It boosts blood flow to your brain, which means you learn more, forget less and feed your curiosity.

While the advantages of a good sense of humor at work are many, there is a dark side that can backfire. How can you be funny without being a jerk?

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The complete 1,000 word article includes these important concepts:

• Humor and Creativity
• Humor and Managing Change
• Motivation and Morale
• Humor Strengthens Teams
• The Dark Side of Humor
• How to Add Humor at Work

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As knowledge workers in the 21st century, our success depends on having a healthy, functioning brain. What can leading neuroscientists teach us about stress, effective coping skills and peak performance in the workplace?

While you cannot completely eliminate stress, you can make it work for you to improve your brain’s ability to function. Your choices — and how you respond to stress — can make you smarter, stronger and wiser.

The Mind-Body Connection

Most people know that when they exercise, they feel better — but they cannot explain the connection. They assume they’re burning off stress, reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, all of which are true.

There’s more to it than that. The real reason you feel better lies in basic physiology: When you get your blood pumping, your brain functions at its best.

Today’s technology-driven tasks put us in front of a computer screen most of the day. It’s hard to remember that our bodies and brains were built to move. Our brains need physical activity and stimulation. We need to exert more energy than “keyboard calisthenics” allows.

Stress – It’s Everywhere

In a recession, with increased job stress, there’s no getting away from a nerve-wracking environment. Either you’re unemployed and struggling to cope, or you’re employed and doing the job of more than one person.

How can we harness the power of stress to our advantage?

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This is a brief synopsis of a 1000-word article suitable for coach’ newsletters. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete 1,000 word article includes these important concepts:

•    The Mind-Body Connection
•    Stress – It’s Everywhere
•    Word Stress
•    Stress Inoculation
•    How Stress Affects the Brain
•    The Wisdom of Stress

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Healthy Brain Stress- Dec09-34b- 1000 word Article –

How to Keep a Healthy Brain
Part 1: Exercise

Experts worldwide are jumping on the brain bandwagon, eager to teach you about the neuroscience of happiness, effective coping and peak performance.

It’s an exciting time. As knowledge workers in the 21st century, our success depends on having a healthy, functioning brain.

But if you’ve read a few of the latest articles on brain science, you may find yourself scratching your head, wondering what you should be doing differently.

Science can now answer this question, having made incredible strides over the last 5 years. While many previously thought our brains steadily deteriorated after age 25, this turns out to be false.

While you cannot stop aging, you can prolong your brain’s healthy function. The No. 1 method is to create a healthy environment for the brain to thrive.  It turns out that the same things that keep yourheart healthy, keep your brain in good shape.

This article will discuss how physical activity influences the health of your brain, followed by future articles on the other three domains.

Your Body, Your Brain

Brain health depends on a regular schedule of aerobic exercise. Researchers have not yet established a definitive guideline, but most agree on 30 to 45 minutes, at least three to four times a week, to elevate heart rate.

If you’re exercise-phobic, disabled or just plain stubborn, it will be more difficult to maintain a healthy brain in the long run.

Regardless of your current exercise habits, you’ll need to accept this irrefutable fact: Your brain will deteriorate with age unless you engage in some form of regular exercise or sport.

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•    Your Body, Your Brain
•    Why Physical Activity?
•    The Body-Mind Connection
•    The Research

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Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.

Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.

Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do, “ according to Fortune Senior Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it.

The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

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Crisis or Opportunity?
Is Talent Irrelevant?
Talent or Hard Work?
10,000 Hours or 10 Years
What Is Deliberate Practice?
Why We Avoid Hard Work
What About Passion?
Talent Is Never Enough

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Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 2000 word Article

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Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 1000 word Article

Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D.

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“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” —Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric

Most business books focus on how leaders can achieve more. How can you do more, better…and faster?

This full-length article takes the opposite tack: how and why, as leaders, you should sit and be still. How do your leadership skills benefit when you take time to quiet your mind and simply sit and be still?

Psychologist Daniel Goleman, an authority on emotional intelligence in organizations, calls this the leadership paradox in Primal Leadership: “For leaders, the first task in management has nothing to do with leading others; step one poses the challenge of knowing and managing oneself.”

This includes:

• Connecting with deep values that guide
• Imbuing actions with meaning
• Aligning emotions with goals
• Keeping motivated
• Keeping focused and on task

When we act in accord with these inner measures, we feel good about what we do. Our emotions become contagious. When we, as leaders, feel positive, energized and enthusiastic about our work, so do those we influence.

Honing the skills of awareness leads to mindfulness—becoming aware of what’s going on inside and around us on several levels. Mindfulness is living in a state of full, conscious awareness of one’s whole self, other people and the context in which we live and work.

Before you dismiss mindfulness as New Age rhetoric, pay attention to the research. Recent studies in management science, psychology and neuroscience point to the importance of developing mindfulness and experiencing meditation.

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The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

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• What Is Meditation?
• The Restlessness Experience
• Self-Awareness and Emotional Intelligence
• Mindfulness Meditation Benefits
• Being You
• The Art of Non-achievement

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What would your life be like if you were able to focus your attention on
three priorities for a week? What if you were able to concentrate and focus on
those activities, in spite of distractions?

“In the final analysis, the quality of our life depends on our ability to
consciously choose who and what we give our thoughts, interests, moments and
emotions to.” — Author Sam Horn, in Conzentrate: Get Focused and Pay
Attention – When Life Is Filled With Pressures, Distractions, and Multiple
Priorities (2000).

Few people understand what concentration means, or how important a role it plays
in our lives. Life consists of what we pay attention to. If we focus on
meaningful, positive things, we’ll have a meaningful, positive life. If we focus
on meaningless, negative things, we’ll have a meaningless, negative life. This
is simplistic and also enduringly profound: one of life’s great truths.

“Our experience is what we attend to.” —William James

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.”— Buddha

The full article consists of the following important concepts:

Why Concentration Is so Important
The Pareto Principle
Five Keys to Concentration
TIME: Thoughts, Interests, Moments & Emotions
The Power of Priority
Working with Your Coach

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Article Full Reprint Rights $57 click HERE

According to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, each day we
experience approximately 20,000 moments. A moment is defined as a few seconds in
which our brain records an experience. The quality of our days is determined by
how our brains recognize and categorize our moments—either as positive,
negative, or just neutral. Rarely do we remember neutral moments.

There is no question that the memories of our lives are recorded in terms of
positive and negative experiences. Now scientists propose that each day our
brains—i.e., our thoughts and emotions—keep track of our positive and negative
moments, and the resulting score contributes to our overall mood.

Our emotional tone or mood is defined by the number of positive versus negative
moments experienced during the course of a day. This is not really news to those
people who study emotional intelligence and how the brain works. Yet it has
major implications for how we can improve the quality of our lives.

The Magic Ratio

Over the past decade, scientists have explored the impact of
positive-to-negative interaction ratios in our work and personal life. They have found that this ratio can be used to predict—with remarkable accuracy—everything from workplace performance to divorce.

This work began with noted psychologist John Gottman’s exploration of
positive-to-negative ratios in marriages. Using a 5:1 ratio, which Gottman
dubbed “the magic ratio,” he and his colleagues predicted whether 700 newlywed couples would stay together or divorce by scoring their positive and negative interactions in one 15-minute conversation between each husband and wife. Ten years later, the follow-up revealed that they had predicted divorce with 94 percent accuracy.

This is a synopsis of a 1,000 word article available for purchase and use in
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The full article contains the following concepts:

Defining moments during life
Defining moments during the day
The Magic Ratio
The Bucket and the Dipper
5 Strategies for improving your positive to negative ratio
Resources: How Full is Your Bucket by Tom Rath & Donald O. Clifton

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