Tuesday, January 24, 2012
QUOTES
"The future belongs to those
who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
Eleanor Roosevelt
American First Lady
"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile
the moment a single man contemplates it,
bearing within him the image of a cathedral."
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
Jack London
American Author
"Dream as if you'll live forever...
live as if you'll die today."
James Dean
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
How Emotional Equations Can Change Your Life - Forbes
How Emotional Equations Can Change Your Life - Forbes:
ENTREPRENEURS
How Emotional Equations Can Change Your Life
Subscribe to my updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel.
I recently spoke to Chip Conley, who has spoken at the prestigious TED Conference, is the author of Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success, and is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality. Joie de Vivre Hospitality grew into America’s second largest boutique hotel company. He speaks around the world on how to find meaning at the intersection of business and psychology. In this interview, Chip talks about what emotional equations are, why they are important and how they can change your life for the better.
What are emotional equations and what inspired you to write this book?
I was CEO of the company I founded, Joie de Vivre Hospitality (the country’s 2nd largest boutique hotelier), for nearly 24 years. During the last decade, we went through two once-in-a-lifetime downturns. During the dot-com bust ten years ago, I felt like a gladiator and our team did a phenomenal job tripling in size during a difficult time. But, during this Great Recession, I felt more like a prisoner and I could see that my depressed state was having its impact on my team and even the company culture.
I believe all leaders are CEO’s, Chief Emotions Officers, as leaders are the emotional thermostats for the groups they lead. When my emotional thermostat was low, I was reading Viktor Frankl’s landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and I turned that into an equation so that I could use it as a mantra: Despair = Suffering – Meaning. Ultimately, I shared this equation with my top 80 leaders in the company and we started teaching equations on Anxiety, Disappointment, Happiness, and Authenticity in our corporate university. I was inspired to write the book since so few of us have ever been taught about the mystery of our emotions and how to make sense of them.
What can math teach us about controlling our emotions?
This decade feels like a milder, but still painful, version of the 1930s. What’s interesting about the Depression is that people looked for internal logic as a means to remedy their external chaos. The 30s brought us Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Viktor Frankl, the Serenity Prayer – all dedicated to providing some level of internal logic during a time when the world felt dangerous and difficult. Emotional Equations are perfectly suited for this era (they’re even short enough to be textable and tweetable) as they help people to understand the ingredients or emotional building blocks that create our feelings. The more we are conscious about what creates Regret or Envy, the more we can influence those ingredients and have some emotional mastery in our lives.
Which equation helped you out the most when you were suffering?
That Despair = Suffering – Meaning equation saved my life (I write about this in the book). Think of Suffering as the constant and Meaning as the variable in this equation. Suffering is ever present (it’s the first Noble Truth of Buddhism), especially in a harsh recession, but Meaning is what you make of it. When I was having a particular difficult day, I would need to ask myself, “What’s the learning or lesson in this?” Or, better yet, what kind of emotional muscles am I training in this emotional boot camp I’m living through?
There’s a famous study of young women who grew up during the Depression. They compared these women later in life – who’d lost their husbands – with other women and they found that these women whose formative years had been the Depression were better able to handle the resiliency, independence, and courage necessary to become a widow. So, whether it’s compassion, humility, persistence, or curiosity – there’s some positive emotional power that may come out of this difficult time that can serve you for a lifetime.
How can emotional equations make people more successful in the workplace?
The truth is that most of us are very reactive with our emotions, but we aren’t always conscious of that. Yet, what we’re unconscious of often holds power over us. Daniel Goleman taught us 16 years ago that the most successful leaders have strong emotional intelligence and the foundation component of EQ is self-awareness. Emotional Equations helps people to understand their emotional patterns and reactivity such that they can exhibit more healthy and productive emotions in their work.
How do we know when we can’t use an equation to make a change in our lives?
These equations are meant to help people respond, not react to life, which can be helpful in the context of business when we want to use logic and reason in considering something. But, for some things in life – like the joy of seeing your baby born or falling in love – reacting is the most natural way to allow your emotions to gush just like they should. For me, I call this being emotionally fluent.
It’s nice to be emotionally intelligent, but it’s valuable to be emotionally fluent. In other words, you may go to Paris and know this history of the French language and all its dialects, but if you aren’t fluent in actually speaking the language that knowledge isn’t serving you in a practical way. Emotional Equations provide practical benefit, but my suggestion is that people don’t labor too much over the logic of the equations.
Dan Schawbel, recognized as a “personal branding guru” by The New York Times, is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. Dan is the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, the founder of the Personal Branding Blog, and publisher ofPersonal Branding Magazine
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/01/12/how-emotional-equations-can-change-your-life/2/
'via Blog this'
ENTREPRENEURS
How Emotional Equations Can Change Your Life
Subscribe to my updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel.
I recently spoke to Chip Conley, who has spoken at the prestigious TED Conference, is the author of Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success, and is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality. Joie de Vivre Hospitality grew into America’s second largest boutique hotel company. He speaks around the world on how to find meaning at the intersection of business and psychology. In this interview, Chip talks about what emotional equations are, why they are important and how they can change your life for the better.
What are emotional equations and what inspired you to write this book?
I was CEO of the company I founded, Joie de Vivre Hospitality (the country’s 2nd largest boutique hotelier), for nearly 24 years. During the last decade, we went through two once-in-a-lifetime downturns. During the dot-com bust ten years ago, I felt like a gladiator and our team did a phenomenal job tripling in size during a difficult time. But, during this Great Recession, I felt more like a prisoner and I could see that my depressed state was having its impact on my team and even the company culture.
I believe all leaders are CEO’s, Chief Emotions Officers, as leaders are the emotional thermostats for the groups they lead. When my emotional thermostat was low, I was reading Viktor Frankl’s landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and I turned that into an equation so that I could use it as a mantra: Despair = Suffering – Meaning. Ultimately, I shared this equation with my top 80 leaders in the company and we started teaching equations on Anxiety, Disappointment, Happiness, and Authenticity in our corporate university. I was inspired to write the book since so few of us have ever been taught about the mystery of our emotions and how to make sense of them.
What can math teach us about controlling our emotions?
This decade feels like a milder, but still painful, version of the 1930s. What’s interesting about the Depression is that people looked for internal logic as a means to remedy their external chaos. The 30s brought us Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), Viktor Frankl, the Serenity Prayer – all dedicated to providing some level of internal logic during a time when the world felt dangerous and difficult. Emotional Equations are perfectly suited for this era (they’re even short enough to be textable and tweetable) as they help people to understand the ingredients or emotional building blocks that create our feelings. The more we are conscious about what creates Regret or Envy, the more we can influence those ingredients and have some emotional mastery in our lives.
Which equation helped you out the most when you were suffering?
That Despair = Suffering – Meaning equation saved my life (I write about this in the book). Think of Suffering as the constant and Meaning as the variable in this equation. Suffering is ever present (it’s the first Noble Truth of Buddhism), especially in a harsh recession, but Meaning is what you make of it. When I was having a particular difficult day, I would need to ask myself, “What’s the learning or lesson in this?” Or, better yet, what kind of emotional muscles am I training in this emotional boot camp I’m living through?
There’s a famous study of young women who grew up during the Depression. They compared these women later in life – who’d lost their husbands – with other women and they found that these women whose formative years had been the Depression were better able to handle the resiliency, independence, and courage necessary to become a widow. So, whether it’s compassion, humility, persistence, or curiosity – there’s some positive emotional power that may come out of this difficult time that can serve you for a lifetime.
How can emotional equations make people more successful in the workplace?
The truth is that most of us are very reactive with our emotions, but we aren’t always conscious of that. Yet, what we’re unconscious of often holds power over us. Daniel Goleman taught us 16 years ago that the most successful leaders have strong emotional intelligence and the foundation component of EQ is self-awareness. Emotional Equations helps people to understand their emotional patterns and reactivity such that they can exhibit more healthy and productive emotions in their work.
How do we know when we can’t use an equation to make a change in our lives?
These equations are meant to help people respond, not react to life, which can be helpful in the context of business when we want to use logic and reason in considering something. But, for some things in life – like the joy of seeing your baby born or falling in love – reacting is the most natural way to allow your emotions to gush just like they should. For me, I call this being emotionally fluent.
It’s nice to be emotionally intelligent, but it’s valuable to be emotionally fluent. In other words, you may go to Paris and know this history of the French language and all its dialects, but if you aren’t fluent in actually speaking the language that knowledge isn’t serving you in a practical way. Emotional Equations provide practical benefit, but my suggestion is that people don’t labor too much over the logic of the equations.
Dan Schawbel, recognized as a “personal branding guru” by The New York Times, is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. Dan is the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, the founder of the Personal Branding Blog, and publisher ofPersonal Branding Magazine
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2012/01/12/how-emotional-equations-can-change-your-life/2/
'via Blog this'
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