The art of managing emotions | Daniel Goleman | WOBI

if you ask people honestly about how they feel about their job a very large proportion are disengaged it's just a job I just do enough to keep it that's that statement is a rough index of a person having too little cortisol they're in the wrong brain state at work as you get such people more motivated more interested more engaged they rise up this arc toward the optimal zone however if you give them too much pressure too little support too little time too little staff too much to do they start to feel overwhelmed and they keep going to the right and performance suffers so the art of leadership is to help people get and stay in the optimal state for performance that is how you get your best return on investment from a salary and from a neurological point of view this means helping people get and stay in the best internal state the best state of their brain this optimal state is called flow flow was discovered by researchers who asked one simple question of a huge variety of people the question was tell me about a time when you outdid yourself even you were surprised too how well you did and they asked ballerinas and basketball players and chess champions and Surgeons business people all kinds of people and what they discovered was that it didn't matter what domain of skill they were involved in everyone who was outstanding at that moment was in the eye internal state and that state is characterized by several things one is unperturbed well attention their focus is 200 percent another element is that you're completely flexible and adaptable whatever comes up you can handle it another is that your skills are challenged to their highest level sometimes a little beyond another a very important element is it feels great you get a kind of a rapture or bliss there's a joy in being in a flow state so the state where people are performing at their best is also a state where they feel at their best and a smart leader an effective leader an emotionally intelligent leader can help people get and stay in that state here's some tips how to create flow one is clear goals clarity about what to do what the goal is but flexibility and how to do it the second is immediate feedback it helps to know how you're doing helps to know if you're getting closer to the goal the third is to challenge and grow that person's skill set give them an assignment that stretches them and more fundamentally to match people's abilities with the tasks you give them you don't want someone highly talented to be doing something that's boring for them then they're disengaged you don't want someone to be in the wrong domain of skill so the leaders task from this point of view is to help people get and stay in flow and how are you going to do that well those were some ways but you also have kind of a secret weapon and that has to do with a new discovery it's called the social brain this discovery came in last five or ten years when brain scientists stopped studying one brain in one body and one person and started studying two brains in two bodies and two people while they interacted and it turned out that there were entire circuits of the brain that hadn't been discovered before because they'd never looked this way and these circuits are designed to like a neural radar to sense what's going on in the other person's brain and to lock in to that and to have a silent brain to brain conversation no matter what else is going on these were discovered in a very intriguing way the big discovery is called mirror neurons now that's what that's the radar mirror neurons were discovered when some scientists in Italy were studying the brain of a monkey and they were looking at the part of the brain that moves the body and they're studying just one cell at a time one day or they were looking at a brain cell but only fired it was only active when the monkey raised its arm it's the only time then one day the cells started firing and the monkey wasn't moving they're completely puzzled what's going on then they realized it was a hot day a lab assistant had gone out for a gelato he was standing in front of the monkey and every time the lab assistant raised the gelato the monkey's brain cell for the same activity fired that was the discovery of something that happens in us all the time whenever were with another person it turns out we have cells in our brain that are matching precisely what's going on in the other person this is essential it gives us an immediate unconscious sense of what's going on what are we doing it keeps the interaction running smoothly so the mirror neuron creates a brain to brain bridge that senses movement emotion intention it's why emotions are contagious it had been known for several years in psychology decades actually that if you take two strangers have them come into a lab fill out a little checklist how are you feeling right now and then sit looking at each other in silence for two minutes and then fill out that same checklist the person in that pair whose most expressive transfers their emotional state to the other person in two silent minutes we never knew how we never knew why but now we understand the emotions are contagious we're constantly sending and receiving them but there's a special condition a special caveat for leaders because it's human nature that people pay most attention to and put most importance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does the leader is the sender for better or for worse so when I say you have a secret weapon to help people get into that better state for performance I'm talking about using the social brain skillfully what does that look like the key point for any company is that whoever in your company is at the interface of your customers or clients makes them feel better or worse and how they feel at that moment is not how they feel about that guy or that woman it's how they feel about your company so managing the emotional state of people is extremely important from the highest level to the outer fringe where your company contacts your customers

Channel: WOBI - World of Business Ideas

Views: 219,224

Rating: 4.8921108 out of 5

Keywords: WOBI, World of Business Ideas, video, wobi.com, management videos, management, business, leadership, people, emotional intelligence, Emotion (Quotation Subject), inteligencia emocional, emociones, personas, liderazgo, Daniel Goleman, meaningful work

Id: FKjj1tNcbtM

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2012