About toxic relationships at work

“Don’t confuse “familiar” with “acceptable”. Toxic relationships can fool you like that.” – Steve Maraboli, Speaker, Author, Athlete, Veteran Wisdom and Courage: to know when to act differently, and then to do so. This may sound obvious, but is this how you actually respond when the situation demands it? Do you instead remain trapped in […]

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Managing Conflict

“I’d like to punch him in the face”, Donald Trump, 22 February 2016 about a protester at one of his rallies Conflict surrounds us: armed struggles abroad, political attacks at home. We also know conflict in our personal lives – at home, in the schoolyard and at work. Here is a video about coping with […]

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Why AI Can’t Coach

“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.” —Jean Baudrillard Mark’s comment on last week’s post led me to reflect on the potential impact of AI on coaching. Can AI coach? AI can certainly be supportive in a number of ways. In particular, generative AI will be able to […]

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How Coaching Transforms Your Life

HR is once again reminding me about the leadership course I “absolutely must attend.” I have always had a lot of respect for these dedicated HR folks who consistently try to engage employees in development programs, training sessions, and team-building events. For many years, I was one of those employees, and I remember how conflicted […]

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Paying attention: the secret to happiness (part 1)

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 (read about the triune brain) and the dominance of the unconscious. We also know that one of the main purposes of the human brain is sense-making (read again about what the brain is for). […]

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How we really make decisions

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! Are you enjoying the summer? I’m writing from the South of France and it’s just blissful! Today, I’d like to address decision-making. Remember that I posited in an early post that “there is no thinking which is not emotional which in turn implies that our decisions and behaviours are […]

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Really learning (part 3): meaning and chunking

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! In this third – and final – blog on the topic of facilitating learning, let me build on the positive implications of harnessing emotion and of maximising attention and engage you on the themes of meaning generation and chunking. At this stage of the game, I have […]

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Really learning (part 2): back to attention

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! For those of you who teach, did you think that leveraging emotions was a good idea? If so, how did you practically do so? For those among you keen learners, did you agree that emotions facilitate both the processing and later the recall of new knowledge, as I proposed in my […]

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Really learning: the role of emotions

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! What did you think of my suggestion back in April to leverage language to influence how you feel? Did you tell yourself you ‘only’ felt your negative emotions – to hasten their passing? – and that you were your positive emotions – to encourage them to linger a bit? This month, […]

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Emotions, language and who we choose to be

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! And I promise, no more about paying attention! I appreciate that four articles – fascinating though they were, weren’t they? – on that topic is enough. But before we move on, wasn’t it interesting to see how neuroscience – and notably understanding how our brains process stimuli, including social cues […]

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Paying attention and happiness (part 4) – active listening

Hello and welcome to this month’s neuro blog! Last month, we discussed other-awareness and landed on the notion that disagreement – about beliefs, values and behaviours – is more likely to be the norm. I advocated tolerance but also proposed that you put on a metaphorical Detective Columbo’s raincoat (no need for the cigar nor the dishevelled look) and go look for the […]

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

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 […]

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