During the Holidays, Take Time to Pause and Reflect

As the holidays and year end approach, it’s a great opportunity to carve out some time to reflect on our lives, our past year, and the year ahead of us. Here are some tips for doing so.

1.          Ask yourself these questions:

How many lives did you make a difference in this year?

What will you keep doing, stop doing and start doing?

Where is your passion, and how is it reflected in the work you do?

2.         To help you find your passion, reflect on:

What is it about your current role that excites you? 

Where in what you do are you able to feel ‘in the flow’?

Whom do you love working with and why?

How do you use your gifts to bring WHO you are to WHAT you do?

3.          Create daily reminders:

Put 2 sticky notes on your bathroom mirror so that you see them first thing each morning. On one note write: “Grow in one way each day” and on the other sticky note write: “Make a difference in one person’s life today.”

These notes will remind you to do these 2 simple things every day:  (1) Read something new or learn how to do something you didn’t know yesterday. This could be reading an online article, searching online for information about a topic of interest, or asking someone to show you how to do something rather than doing it for you. (2) Do something that will help make someone else’s world easier.  This could be as simple as holding a door for them, or helping them load groceries into their car.  I’m talking easy here.

4.          Repack your life

During this time invite yourself to “repack” your life.  This means unpacking and examining all the things you have been carrying around – material things, feelings, relationships, attitudes, experiences, habits, beliefs, etc. Decide what you want to LOSE, and what you want to TAKE with you. Start by creating your vision for your life.  In this vision do you have outer happiness and inner fulfillment?  If so, where are you? What do you have with you? What is making you happy and fulfilled? Let your vision guide you in what you need to take with you going forward and what to leave behind. Decide what you will leave behind and then repack those things that are meaningful and enrich you at the core level.

Decisions are Powerful.  Make the decision to be happy and fulfilled, and to make this world a better place by growing just a little each day, making a difference in at least one person’s life each day, and packing appropriately to live a life of happiness and joy in 2016.

Happy Holidays, and all the best for the New Year!

Rebecca

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

- Dr. Wayne Dyer, 1940-2015

Introducing Emotional Agility - Emotional Intelligence PLUS

There is much buzz in the marketplace right now around Emotional Intelligence, or EQ. Emotional Intelligence, as defined by Psychology Today, is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It has been shown to be one of the strongest predictors of performance.  Ninety percent of top performers are high in EQ (TalentSmart).

Emotional Intelligence, however, is only a part of the picture. There’s a more comprehensive way of looking at emotions and how you manage them – what we at Lumina Learning call Emotional Agility (EA) – that can be measured by a new Lumina product that will soon hit the marketplace.

Emotional Intelligence measures the degree of your interpersonal or ‘people’ skills.  It is a static view of how intelligent you are at managing your emotions, and is based on interpersonal skills rather than the full spectrum of your personality. It’s about “how you play with others” versus understanding how your emotions affect your behaviors. Emotional Agility, on the other hand, measures your emotions and how agile you are at managing those emotions in different situations. It links your emotions to you behaviors, giving you deeper insight and the opportunity to learn and develop.

Emotional Agility is built on the belief that we can learn to manage our emotions more effectively. The concept of EA is dynamic.  Consistent with our approach to all psychometrics, Lumina Learning measures the polarities independently, so when we measure how much Self-Confidence you have, we also measure your level of Self-Modesty.  This becomes really interesting when you look at how these scores show up relative to each of your three personas:  Underlying (how you are most naturally), Everyday (how you show up based on what’s required of you) and Overextended (how you behave under stress).  

Now let’s get even more pragmatic.  Our research links Lumina Spark (our personality assessment tool) to Emotional Agility.  Through this lens we see high correlations between our Emotional Qualities and Reactors, and our Lumina Spark behaviors.  So with the Emotional Agility instrument, we are linking our outward behaviors to our internal emotions.  This provides unprecedented insight, and lends itself to high levels of personal growth and development.  It is a key to developing leaders who are astute, and who can manage their effectiveness in both productive times and turbulent or high stress times. 

When we experience an emotion, we should recognize and act on it.  You know you are feeling something, what are you going to do with that? Are you acting in a way that aligns with your belief system, or are you reacting to old baggage? Emotional Agility is the internal compass that helps us align our behaviors with our values and beliefs. 

EA will be used for developing balanced leaders who are capable of aligning leadership values with organizational culture.  EA will also be available for personal development and self-awareness.  This state-of-the-art product will be launched globally in early April.  If you or someone you know is interested in becoming a qualified practitioner of EA, courses will be offered in the US in mid March.  Reach out to info-us@luminalearning.com for more information.  

Stay ahead of the curve and into the latest in the world of Emotional Intelligence/EQ.

Leading from within,

Rebecca

Evolving Beyond Labels with Lumina Spark

New Spark App coming soon – Individuals, teams and organizations using Lumina Spark
will have access to a brilliant new hi-tech app.

As a learning and development professional, I’m always thrilled when I share new information with someone and see the virtual light bulb go on.  That “aha” moment when knowledge and clarity intersect is where the door opens to personal, internal transformation.

This happened recently when I reviewed the results of BruceKasanoff’s Lumina Spark assessment with him. Like many people, he was a veteran of other behavioral assessments, and a doubter of sorts, since the labels those assessments provided didn’t quite fit.

At Lumina Learning we don’t believe in labels. Humans are far too complex to be categorized as EITHER/OR, or abridged into one of 16 personality types.  Reducing the complexity of the human personality into such a narrow scope can limit an individual in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. It is both limited and limiting.

Lumina Spark is a more innovative, comprehensive and realistic approach that focuses on traits, not types.  It recognizes the complex contradictions that make each one of us unique. For example, an individual may have both introvert AND extravert qualities; they can be tactical AND strategic; they can focus on results, AND also care about the people.

Based on the latest academic research in the “Big 5” personality traits, as well as certain elements of Jungian theory, the Lumina framework embraces the fact that each individual possesses opposing personality traits. It’s “AND” thinking versus “EITHER/OR” thinking. Lumina embraces the paradox. 

Everyone possesses all five of the “Big 5” personality traits – extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience – but we each possess them to varying degrees. We are unique individuals, not types.

Lumina Spark achieves this more comprehensive view by looking at 8 aspects and 24 qualities, and measuring these along a continuum to create a unique portrait for each individual. And it goes deeper.  Each quality is measured for three personas

1.       Your Underlying persona – who you are most naturally
2.       Your Everyday persona – how you “show up” based on what’s required of you at work
3.       Your Overextended persona – how you behave under stress

Attaining self-awareness by understanding your strengths and development areas in each of these personas is powerful.  For example, if your job current role doesn’t give you the opportunity to use one of your underlying strengths, that may be the root of your desire to move on.  Spark may help you discover “hidden gems” – underlying qualities that you can consider in career decisions or leverage to add more value in your current role. Also, when you understand the triggers that shape your behaviors and interactions when you are overextended, you are better able to control them.

Teams also benefit from the knowledge and understanding provided through Lumina Spark.

I recently worked with a newly-formed team made up of development professionals from different parts of the company. Their charter was to create and implement a leadership development initiative to be rolled out across the organization. The problem was, that while they collectively generated a lot of big ideas, the action and structure needed to put those ideas into play wasn’t happening. 

As I charted their individual Spark results into a team profile, it was clear that their collective Everyday personas leaned heavily toward conceptual, imaginative, big picture thinking, and other qualities you’d expect to be present in a development team.  This was especially true for the team leader. When I looked at the underlying qualities, however, I discovered in the Underlying personas that there were two individuals who had a strong natural inclination toward structure, reliability and other discipline-driven qualities that contribute to defining processes and procedures. Once the team recognized and leveraged these “hidden gems” they were able to get the job done. And the team members whose natural abilities had been dormant and were now being used were thrilled!

If you’d like to learn more about Lumina Spark, please contact me at info-us@luminalearning.com or 888.827.8855.

Leading from within,

Rebecca