comunication intresting article

The Top Ten Questions to Ask Yourself about Your Communication
It's fascinating that the activity which occupies approximately 70% of our waking hours is what we have difficulty with most. The fact is, most of us were never taught how to communicate in a way that produces desired results, so we continue to experience frustration, resistance, conflicts, or breakdowns. Take a look at some of the obstacles that may prevent you from reaching certain objectives during the communication process.

· We want to be heard and listened to but don't always concentrate on the quality of our message or give the gift of our own listening.
· We want to be understood, yet often fail to check if our communication was successful.
· We want acceptance and agreement from others, so much that we often become consumed with having to be right or to prove our point, instead of co-creating a greater outcome together.
· We want some kind of action or response from another person, without letting them know what we really want, or how to achieve it.
· We want to understand the message the other person is communicating to us, yet our ability to listen is tainted by our perceptions of the person speaking or the outcome we are looking to achieve. So, we often pass judgment on the speaker, evaluating the messenger rather than fully accepting the entire message.

Evolving your communication requires taking full responsibility for the outcome of each conversation; not only for what you are saying but also for the message the other person is hearing.

Since we all listen and process information differently, it is crucial to uncover and become sensitized to the other person's style of communication in order to align it with your own.

To strengthen your communication, here are ten questions to ask yourself to determine how effectively you communicate.

1. Am I taking full responsibility for the message being heard by the other person? (Remember, it doesn't matter what you say, it only matters what the other person hears.)
2. Did I respect the other person's point of view? Did I have a reaction to what they were saying that prevented me from listening to their full message?
3. Did the other person feel heard and understood? (Did I acknowledge them?)
4. If I was asking someone to take a specific action, did I make my request clear?
5. Am I speaking in a way the other person can understand? (Am I communicating in a way the other person will listen? (I.e., Speaking in their "language"/communication style.)
6. Am I checking to see if the conversation worked/was successful?
7. Was I communicating openly, without prejudices, expectations and judgment? (Was I focused on having to be right, or have my point of view be accepted?)
8. Did I leave the conversation with some value? (Did I allow the other person to contribute to me?)
9. Did I give the person the gift of my listening?
10. If the outcome of the conversation did not meet my expectations, did I learn what I could improve upon to better communicate with that particular person? (Did I open up a new and greater possibility that I didn't notice before?)

fitness and health

7 Steps to Exceptional Teamwork
have two members or 82. Regardless, it’s important to mentor your team every day. The power of a great team isn’t created at an annual holiday party or a quarterly meeting. It is developed through daily habits. Are you up for the job of leader? For a business owner, it’s the biggest job of all. Yet with just a few simple steps, you can grow as a leader and watch your team soar. Use the following strategies to nurture and lead a world-class team.

Step 1: Understand

What different personalities are you working with? Personality Plus: How to Understand Others by Understanding Yourself by Florence Littauer offers a revealing “personality profile” self-test and insightful advice to help people better understand themselves and others. Ask your team members to take the test and then share their personality profiles. Take it one step further by having each of them share their greatest strength and greatest weakness.

Step 2: Learn

My leadership team participates in a book club. We switch between reading a best-selling book on leadership and one on personal development, and we share a report on how the book relates to our business. We discuss the topic at our weekly team meetings.

Step 3: Dream

There is something very powerful about getting away from the business to work on the business. As leaders, we often do this on our own, and we encourage our team members to do the same. But taking your whole team on a planning retreat can yield huge results. My team escapes to a lake cottage for the day a few times each year. Everyone feels invested and heard. We leave the retreat with a clear direction for one specific area of the business as well as our defined role in that area.

Step 4: Connect

Every Sunday night, I email a personal message to my team. I share the highlights of my weekend, including activities I did with my kids or just for myself. (People often perceive leaders as workaholics. It’s good to share some of the nonwork parts of your life.) I also use the e-mail to acknowledge something that each team member did to overdeliver in the previous week. Further, I provide a lesson to focus on for the week to come: I often address difficult topics such as dealing with disappointment, being willing to forgive and stepping outside your comfort zone.

Step 5: Volunteer

Sharing common experiences unites teams. What better experience than to contribute to a local organization? Our team rotates teaching chair fitness at an assisted-living center each week. Giving back makes us feel good, plus it gives us something to talk about besides clients, payments and schedules. I have seen this simple commitment to team-volunteering work wonders.

Step 6: Play

In the business of fitness, every day gives us an opportunity to enjoy ourselves. However, we can also plan special outings with the sole purpose of having fun together entirely outside of business. These outings are worth the investment because the memories last. My team enjoys an annual ski trip at a resort just a few hours away. Fair warning: If you haven’t kept up on daily team-building steps, this one won’t work. It’s hard to relax and play with people you don’t feel connected to.

Step 7: Listen

People want to know that their voice matters. You can do much for your team simply by listening. If you have time only to give high-fives on the fitness floor between clients, you must carve out more time to listen. When the club first opened I started holding weekly meetings with my managers, and I have kept it up for 6 years. We have moved the meeting off-site to a local deli where we gather for 3 hours. We don’t plow through the agenda; we listen, share, brainstorm and delegate. When I queried my leaders about their favorite aspect of being a member of this particular team, the weekly meeting topped the list.

psychology part two

I was 14 years old and at summer camp when I had my first experience with alcohol. I'd never seen people my age drinking before, but I wanted to fit in. I got completely blitzed, felt amazing, and learned that I could erase my social anxiety with alcohol. Masking my negative feelings with a temporary solution that would lead down a dark path? Hello self-sabotage, my name is Adi.

From age 16 to about 20, I was a daily drinker and marijuana smoker. While they did an adequate job of keeping my social anxiety under control, I didn't realize how I had inadvertently narrowed my social circle to the other "druggie" people who wanted to pursue constant intoxication as much as I did. I continued to quick-fix my life away, compensating for the guilt of being too wasted to study or attend school by getting wasted or stoned yet again. By the time I landed on academic probation, self-sabotage was an old friend.

It's all about doing things that are bad for you and telling yourself you're actually improving things—even as the evidence piles up around you. It isn't about making a single mistake but rather a world-perception so inherently skewed that you can't see the destruction of your own choices. For me, that meant clinging to the idea that I needed drugs and alcohol to fit in and feel cool, even as many of the people I started out trying to impress were driven away by my behavior. Ultimately, my perception of my own choices was so warped that it would take me from the relative mundanity of being a stoner burnout to something far darker.

At 18, I was arrested for shoplifting in the upstate New York town where I was attending college. A normal kid without a pattern of self-sabotage might have been forced to admit the incident to his parents. I was unwilling to deal with the castigation I was sure to receive. The thought occurred that as a legal adult, I could hire my own lawyer and hide the incident from my parents. Of course, I didn't have the $500 for a lawyer—so I started selling marijuana to pay the fee. Yet again, a mistake bigger than the problem it was supposed to solve.

Over the next five years, alcohol and marijuana gave way to ecstasy and meth. Selling dime-bags of marijuana morphed into five- and six-figure drug deals involving shady cartel characters. I moved to Los Angeles, telling myself that I was going to become a musician, but I focused almost exclusively on using and selling drugs. The lifestyle was inherently dangerous, but all I could think about was the money, the parties, the luxuries. I was barely making music, but I was selling drugs throughout the music world, and I was able to tell myself that this was a step in the right direction. Even when an armed SWAT team kicked down my door and dragged me to jail to face 13 felony counts and the possibility of decades in prison, my self-sabotage was such that I wasn't sure exactly what I had done wrong.

What I couldn't have known until spending the better part of a decade studying psychology and neuroscience is just how perfectly I fit the classic profile of a kid with poor impulse control. Most people are naturally equipped to filter the constant electrochemical firing going on throughout their brains. When "normal" people feel the compulsion to do something they're not supposed to do—say, run a red light—their control mechanisms go to work. Actions, comments, and momentary impulses that aren't meant to see the light of day stay secretly locked inside forever. This happens largely on a subconscious level, without the person realizing that their brain has automatically filtered out a dangerous or stupid impulse.

For me, that type of control requires conscious deliberation, exactly the kind of effort lacking in my past because I did not realize, and had not been taught, that I would have to think so hard about those things. In other words, my self-sabotage came not because I didn't do the things I was supposed to do but because I never learned to stop myself from doing the things I wasn't supposed to do.

It took a failed stint in rehab and near-homelessness to get me to realize that what I had been doing wasn't working for me. As I sat on the phone with my father, prepared to lie yet again about why I needed to transfer to another rehab facility, he asked me the ultimate question point-blank: "You keep messing this up; what do you want us to do?"

psychology of the addiction

Self-sabotage is not an act, it's a process, a complex, tragic process that pits people against their own thoughts and impulses. Though we all make mistakes, a true self-saboteur continues to try to fix those mistakes by top-loading them with increasingly bad decisions.

Addicts, for example, present a parade of excuses and delusional thinking while avoiding the painful, decisive action necessary to set their lives right. All too often we hear stories of talented individuals who, despite much potential, allowed drugs and alcohol to drag them down. For some, this is fodder for celebrity gossip and tabloid junk. For me, it's the story of my life.

I have spent the last 10 years studying the effects of drug addiction on the brain. But I was a self-saboteur who spent much of his life before this battling drug addiction. My upper-middle-class childhood was hardly rough. I was a well-liked kid who smiled a lot, but inside I had the feeling that I didn't quite fit in. This feeling, along with my innate impulsivity and hyperactivity (which would most likely have been diagnosed today as ADHD), began to manifest itself through class clowning, borderline-dangerous roughhousing, and playing around with knives. I was hoping that by making a lot of noise and getting noticed, I'd end up better-liked.

lifestyles and living

A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview. Therefore, a lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity. Not all aspects of a lifestyle are entirely voluntaristic. Surrounding social and technical systems can constrain the lifestyle choices available to the individual and the symbols she/he is able to project to others and the self.
The lines between personal identity and the everyday doings that signal a particular lifestyle become blurred in modern society. For example, "green lifestyle" means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller carbon footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs and engaging in these activities. Some commentators argue that, in modernity, the cornerstone of lifestyle construction is consumption behavior, which offers the possibility to create and further individualize the self with different products or services that signal different ways of life.