Start today the right way. Listen to You Are Loved by Stars GoDim

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thSOeSduSDQ?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]

Pay kindness, pay compassion, pay love forward and watch it illuminate your life and your day.

Love  is the source of your internal energy and of the best and brightest within you. It is the greatest antidote to pain and suffering. 

Start today by living and appreciating yourself. Let this day inspire you to share love, compassion and understanding with someone you know or meet. 

Pay love forward because it will make you feel good, do good and share good with another human being.  Even a smile or an act of encouragement can change and often save the life of another human being. 

Stop the needless pain. Everyday, people suffer in silence from stress, anxiety, loss and traumas that undermine their best selves and lives.  

Pay kindness, pay compassion, pay love forward and watch it illuminate your life and your day.

Are you facing a crucible, a difficult life, leadership or career trauma? Reach out and I will reach back. irene@justcoachit.com

4 - Team

Irene Becker, Founder, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ | Reach-Resonance Results
Life, leadership, communication and career coaching for results in disruptive times 

Executive Coaching, Consulting, Training & Keynotes with a 3Q Edge™ (IQ-EQ-SQ)
Call: 1 (416) 671-4726   Email:  irene@justcoachit.com
Twitter:  @justcoachit




Skills to Improve Upon As a Leader

Image Source: Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/illustrations/achievement-success-mountain-clouds-5597527/)

Leadership isn’t a noun. It’s a verb. It’s a skill set you practice, not merely possess. What that means is that your status as a leader must not signal stasis. In fact, when you’re a leader, your own success, as well as that of your team, often depends upon your continued evolution as a leader.

That’s a tall order, of course, especially when you’re also tasked with supporting the same pursuit of excellence in your employees. The good news is that focusing on improving a small set of core leadership skills will help you to model the continuous development you seek to instill in your team. At the same time, you’ll also be optimizing your leadership effectiveness, building the performance of your team one improvement at a time.

This article explores the essential skills you should improve on today to increase your efficacy as a leader and role model not just for tomorrow.

Digital Literacy

As a leader in today’s technology-driven world, one of the most important skills you can cultivate is digital literacy. No matter what your particular industry, your company, and career almost inevitably are rooted in information technology.

Unfortunately, however, not all digital information is created equal, and this can pose a serious risk to your career, your team, and your organization. Digital literacy skills, though, enable you to become a savvier consumer of digital content.

Here are five digital literacy skills that many employers look for when hiring candidates:

  1. Independent research
  2. Knowledge of terms and platforms
  3. Collaboration
  4. Adaptation
  5. Ability to teach

Communication

The best leaders are also often the best communicators. If you want to inspire, unite, and lead your team, then you have to know how to communicate with them effectively. This is about more than the ability to make a speech, conduct a meeting, or carry on a face-to-face conversation, however.

In the modern workplace, teams are more diverse than ever before. Additionally, with the rise of the virtual office, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, work is being conducted in more diverse settings than ever before.

This means that you will be required to communicate effectively across a range of media, from text-based communications to live public speaking to the hosting of video-based conferences. Each of these contexts requires a unique approach to communication:

  • Email, chat, tasks, and other written forms: language must be softened to prevent miscommunication
  • Video and live presentations: presenters must learn to read facial expressions and body language to gauge audience interest

Learning how to adapt your communication strategies to a wide array of situations, contexts, and content is essential for today’s business leaders.

Memory and Learning

When you’re a leader, you have a lot on your plate. You have to have strong insight into your team, both as a collective and as individuals. You also have to possess expertise on your organization, including the short-term and long-term needs and goals that shape the company and your role in it. Additionally, you’re also expected to be an authority in your field, to have the answers your team and your clients need to ensure success.

That’s a pretty significant demand on your mind and memory. This is why improving your memory is one of the best skills you can cultivate. Others include:

  • Mindfulness
  • Meditation
  • Gamification
  • Active listening
  • Mixing up routines
  • Using music

These can significantly improve both your short-term and long-term memory, which can dramatically enhance your effectiveness as a leader.

The Takeaway

Being a good leader doesn’t just happen. It’s not simply about winning the promotion and being assigned a team. You have to work at it with both diligence and commitment. A good leader, after all, is one who consistently strives to improve and who models this ethos for their team. There are, however, specific essential skills that can be particularly beneficial for leaders, no matter their particular industry. For example, an effective leader in today’s workforce possesses robust digital literacy skills, is one who is an excellent communicator regardless of the particular contexts in which they are engaged, and is also one who possesses a keen and reliable memory, no matter how taxed their time, attention, and focus may be.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is adrian-johansen.jpg

Author Bio:
Adrian Johansen is a writer and consultant in the Pacific Northwest. She loves sharing knowledge with others and learning along the way! You can find more of her writing at Medium




4 Ways to Kickstart Happiness

Too busy to get happy?  Think Again. 4 Ways to Kickstart Happiness


Helping smart people and organizations communicate and lead forward smarter, faster and happier is what I do best    


© Irene Becker | www.justcoachit.com | 3Q Leadership™ Blog

Here are the facts you need to know:
Stress and anxiety are now the major cause of disability in the world.
Science confirms that optimization of our intellectual potential, health and wellness start with priming our brain to be happy.

Learning to get happier, taking time to have happy moments during the day, is critical to your health, your wellness, your potential, your work…your life 


Four Ways to Kickstart Happiness

1. Suspend disbelief:
Science tells us that there is no logical reason to explain how a bumblebee can fly. No way to understand the bumblebee’s aerodynamic capability.  And yet this small, winged insect has made flight a priority and defies logic every minute, every day flying from flower to flower. What does the unexplained flight of a bumblebee have to do with happiness?  Absolutely everything.  Happiness is very much like the bumblebee’s incredible ability to fly. It is not the product of our intellect.  It is something that we have to feel. It occurs when we suspend disbelief, disengage from intellect and feel with our heart.


2. Take time to be happy every day-even if that time is a 5 minute stress break where you close your eyes and visualize your happy place and nothing else.
In the very busyness of the lives we have created, it is easy to reach a place and a personal space there is no joy.  When joy cannot enter our heart, when we have reached a dark place where we have lost touch with that which replenishes and restores our full passion, power and creativity, we have come to an apocalypse of self.  An apocalypse of self where we are so focused on doing, that we have forgotten how to be one with the seedbed of our possibility and personal power, we have lost touch with our ability to be happy.

3. Understand how your brain works:
 Your brain will retain what is important to you or what has an emotional trigger. Scientific research notes that 2 billion pieces of data come through our senses every second.  Our reticular activating system (RAS) then filters this data and tells our brain what information to pay attention to, what stimuli to focus on.  The RAS filters what we will load into our conscious mind according to three criteria:  1. Is the information important for our survival?  2. Is the information new or different?  3. Does the information have high emotional content for us?

4. Make happiness a  priority.   Just as the bumblebee wants to fly, each human being has a basic desire, an innate need to be happy.  True happiness cannot be purchased, bartered or bargained for.  Happiness comes from our heart; it starts by training our brain to recognize and emphasize what the heart already knows

1.  Happiness important for our survival, as it is the seedbed of inspiration and innovation.
2.  Happiness comes in new and different ways that can enlighten and engage us.
3.  Happiness is the emotion that holds the key to our true power.


No matter where you are, what you are doing, how you are feeling, you can retrain your brain to be happier. 
Yes, we can be like a bumble bee and create what we truly want.  Seize the day. Seize your personal power to reclaim an attitude of gratitude, an emotional pause that shouts loudly to the realm of possibility. Take time each day for a happiness moment.

 

Helping smart people and organizations lead and communicate forward smarter, faster and happier is what my work is all about. Discover Executive Coaching, Consulting, Keynotes and Workshops with as 3Q Edge™

Irene Becker, Chief Success Officer, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ Toronto and Virtually Everywhere
Face to Face  by Video Conferencing
 www.justcoachit.com Twitter @justcoachit   Tel: 1-416-671-4726 Email:  irene@justcoachitcom