Connecting the Dots Between Emotions and Behavior

How many times have you – at the end of an uncomfortable situation – walked away beating yourself up for how you reacted to it? “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry.” “I don’t know why she always makes me cry.” “I should have held my ground.”  For most of us, our lives are littered with shoulda woulda couldas – often the result of our emotions taking charge of our behaviors with little or no input from us. 

The key to putting yourself in charge is self-awareness. Understanding your emotions, not necessarily just where they come from, but how they manifest themselves in your behaviors, is essential. Once you have an awareness of how you typically respond to certain triggers and in certain situations, you can choose a different response. It’s not about avoiding certain emotions, or interpreting them as good or bad. After all, your emotions are your emotions. It’s about understanding them and learning to be emotionally agile so you can reframe your behavior into a more productive response.

Harvard Medical School professor and psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, says, “We will find ourselves in situations where we will feel anger, sadness, grief and so on. Unless we can process, navigate and be comfortable with the full range of our emotions, we won’t learn to be resilient. We must have some practice dealing with those emotions or we will be caught off guard. I believe the strong cultural focus on happiness and thinking positively is actually making us less resilient.”

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? Emotions are not good or bad, right or wrong. We have to reframe and understand where they are coming from, or act on them and make a change.  Our emotions come into play when our core values are compromised.  If our behaviors are not in line with our core values, it creates discontent within us.

So how do you begin the journey from recognizing emotions to managing behaviors? Lumina Emotion is the internal compass that helps us align our behaviors with our values and beliefs.  The Lumina Emotion Portrait uncovers the relationship between your inner feelings, emotions and behaviors. It examines unique patterns of behavior, including how you may tune up or tune down certain behaviors to suit the needs of your environment. It also focuses on how you can overplay your strengths and highlights potential blockers to interpersonal effectiveness - those emotions we feel when we are overly stressed or under pressure. Lumina Emotion helps you understand how you will react. It takes you on a journey to composure, which helps you find the behavior that will rescue you.

With self-awareness, you understand your core values, your core emotions and the triggers that result in reactive behaviors. You know with certain triggers you get angry, and you know what that looks and feels like. With this knowledge, you have the power of choice. Now when triggered, you can choose to take a step back, and leverage “the power of the pause.” You may still be angry, but instead of reacting in the behaviors that have not turned out well in the past, you use that power to choose to simply be quiet, listen and then, calmly ask questions. You’re not discounting the emotion, you’re simply reframing your response.

Most emotional intelligence tools on the market today focus on interpersonal relationships. They look at how interpersonally astute you are – how social, how engaging, how empathetic. Lumina Emotion is about the whole gamut of emotions and the associated behaviors. It’s not just about how well you get along with people, it’s also about what that quality might look like when you are over-extended/stressed.  “People-focused” under stress may become “people pleasing.”  “Modesty” under stress may become “self-critical.”  Lumina Emotion keys you in to your emotional reactors and gives you a model you can use to reframe your responses for more successful outcomes.

Interested in adding Lumina Emotion to your Learning & Development toolbox? Join us for our next Lumina Emotion qualification, Oct.31-Nov.2 in Dallas. For more information contact us at info-us@luminalearning.com. 

Lead on,

Rebecca

Lumina Spark Goes Digital with the Splash App

I am so excited to announce that Lumina Learning, who is at the forefront of psychometric assessment tools, has taken another leap forward by enabling users to view and compare personalities in the palm of their hand! 

The Lumina Splash App, launched earlier this month, allows you to explore, share and compare your personality right from your phone or other mobile device.  You can “speed read” your personality in just a couple of minutes by answering a set of 24 questions to create your own personal “Splash.” The Splash is a colorful representation of 8 aspects of your personality. It shows the degree to which you are 1) Discipline Driven; 2) Down-to-Earth; 3) Introverted; 4) People Focused; 5) Inspiration Driven; 6) Big Picture Thinking; 7) Extraverted; AND 8) Outcome Focused.  Note that it’s AND not OR.  Part of what makes Lumina unique is that we recognize that humans are complex beings. We can be Introverted AND Extraverted. People Focused AND Outcome Focused.  A big picture thinker AND down to earth. No boxes or labels here!

Using the Splash Navigator within the app, you can drill down to each of the 8 aspects to find out more about what they mean.  Getting ready to work with someone you haven’t worked with before? Share your Splash with them to see where you complement one another and where you differ to more quickly build rapport. 

The Splash created with the Splash App is a first step in building self-awareness, and just a small preview of the breadth of information available in the full Lumina Spark. In addition to the 8 aspects, the full Lumina Spark includes a personalized portrait of your strengths and development areas in 24 qualities represented in three personas: Underlying, Everyday, and Overextended.  Your Underlying persona is who you are most naturally. Your Everyday persona is how you “show up” based on what’s required of you at work, and your “Overextended” persona is how you behave under stress. Attaining self-awareness by understanding your strengths and development areas in each of these personas is powerful, and may help you discover things like why you’re not feeling fulfilled in your current role; or a quality you want to leverage going forward; or how to better communicate with that “difficult” colleague or family member. 

If you’ve attended a Lumina Spark workshop, you can see the digital version of your Splash any time during and after the course by simply scanning the QR code on the paper version of your Spark portrait. You can also share your QR code with others from the workshop to compare personas. The app also provides an easy means to get in touch with your practitioner. 

If you’d like to know more about how Lumina Learning can improve communication and increase effectiveness within your organization, please contact me at info-us@luminalearning.com or 888.827.8855. 

Lead on,

Rebecca

Claiming the Power of Choice

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lie our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl

Have you ever been in a situation where you immediately reacted to something – maybe a remark someone made or a question someone asked – and then later regretted that you didn’t count to 10 before responding? If so, you aren’t alone. We can probably all recount scenarios where a “pause” button could have been the catalyst for a better outcome.

Certainly there are times when we need to respond to a stimulus without pausing – imminent danger comes to mind as one, Jeopardy for another.  For the most part, however, it’s in our best interest to make use of “the space” to give us the power of choice. You get to choose how you will respond to a situation, a person, a thought, or an event and then, having made that choice, act.

The key to using that space wisely is self-awareness. Understanding your emotions, not necessarily just where they come from, but how they manifest themselves is essential. Once you have an awareness of how you typically respond to certain triggers and in certain situations, you can select a different response. A response that increases your effectiveness, helps you influence someone in a different way, and/or results in a more positive outcome.

There was a time when emotions were rarely discussed in the workplace. They existed, of course, but were either hidden or viewed in a negative light – a person might be described as “too emotional,” for example. Today, however, organizations are recognizing that emotions are a natural and necessary part of business life – in forming customer relationships, in making decisions, in creating a brand, in building employee loyalty. Now many organizations are adding Emotional Intelligence (EQ) assessments to their people development tools along with the personality and behavior assessments they are already using.  Often these are different models, that don’t necessarily connect emotions (internal) with the behaviors triggered by them (external).  And they may not provide guidance on how to be agile with our emotions so that our behaviors can be leveraged in the space.

At Lumina, our EQ assessment and our behavioral assessment are inherently connected. Through our research and statistics we are finding it very helpful in developing and transforming leaders and individuals to be able to show the connections between core emotions (Lumina Emotion) and how those are reflected in behaviors and personality (Lumina Spark). The Lumina Emotion Portrait uncovers the relationship between your inner feelings, emotions and behaviors. It examines unique patterns of behavior, including how you may tune up or tune down certain behaviors to suit the needs of your environment. It also focuses on how you can overplay your strengths and highlights potential blockers to interpersonal effectiveness.

Lumina Emotion offers users the “power of the space” by providing them with emotional and behavioral awareness to choose the appropriate response.  Next time, remember to stop, pause and claim the power of choice before making your response. Choose to be more powerful in your interactions with others.

Lead on, 

Rebecca

Improving Team Performance Through Effective Dialogues

In today’s workplace teams come in a variety of flavors: department teams, project teams, virtual teams, global teams, cross-functional teams, permanent teams, temporary teams, task force teams, self-directed teams and combinations thereof.  Each of these has its own inherent challenges.  Common among them, however, is the need for effective dialogues. Here’s how to achieve them.

Establish communication standards.  Whether it’s about sharing ideas or resolving conflict, it’s essential to develop and implement guidelines that encourage and support open communication. That includes communication media. Email may be acceptable for information exchange, but issues should be discussed in person or, if that’s not practical, by phone. Guidelines should cover:

·         Using a common language (especially important for global teams)

·         Identifying trigger words and phrases to avoid

·         Emphasizing effective listening strategies

·         Promoting an understanding and appreciation of varying communication styles

·         Scheduling regular meetings

Identify and address barriers to open communication. Barriers to communication generally fall into three categories: physical, emotional and environmental.  Support effective dialogues by removing any physical distractions (these could range from a noisy conference room to a bad telephone connection). Work to understand and appreciate the diverse styles of your team and create opportunities for the team to develop a mutual understanding of each other. As they learn to consider each other’s style and frame of reference, they’ll learn to minimize the emotional reactions that get in the way of effective dialogues.

Create guidelines for managing conflict. A certain amount disagreement on a team is natural and necessary for innovation and optimal performance. The key is how you channel and manage it.  Give your team tools for dealing productively with conflict by working together to create conflict management guidelines. Emphasize respect and active listening. Include feedback best practices. Encourage a dialogue that begins with points of agreement and develops from there. Ensure that the focus is on the issue at hand rather than personalities. State the team goals and expectations clearly and concisely and remind the team of their mutual commitment to those goals.

Evaluate and improve. Like any relationship, team relationships need to be nurtured. Make time for a periodic “check in” through an open dialogue specifically around how team communication is going. Encourage those who are typically less vocal to weigh in. Identify areas – from team feedback and your observations – where improvements could be made. Then make them.

Lead on,

Rebecca