How do you respond to a positive accomplishment shared by your colleagues, family, and friends?

Relationships are the golden ticket to thriving leading a team. It holds a team together and makes it more resilient, engaged, and happier.

It turns out that how we react to positive events is a better predictor of our relationships' quality and long-term success.

According to psychologist Dr. Shelly Gable, we could classify our reactions as per the below dimensions. (See picture)

Using Active Constructive Responding, showing genuine interest and authentic enthusiasm, is more likely to help you develop meaningful and resilient relationships.

We have developed our vocabulary to analyze information, make excuses, and insult, more than our vocabulary to express our feelings and needs clearly. Our blind spots usually make assumptions that we are communicating our needs effectively. We assumed that our metaphors and body language should be enough. However, the receiver has magical powers, reads our minds, guesses the intentions, perhaps has a crystal ball at their homes to decode later our actual needs, right?

In our home, schools, or work environments, the authority figures have often educated and awarded us for following orders, suppressing our feelings and needs, perhaps looking to be accepted or just not be reprimanded.

Let's face it! Some of us are not used to STOP, feel and identify our emotions and needs. Probably, just reading about it makes us feel anxious or skeptical about going there. When strong emotions are arising causing pain, the easier path is to ignore them and keep operating on autopilot, a route that we already know.

Emotions are a crucial leadership subject. Labeling our emotions sometimes is tricky, but it is the first step to get to know ourselves a little more, understand others' perspectives and, express our needs effectively.

How do we believe what we believe, and why do we convincingly believe it?

Beliefs are value judgments that we are fully convinced and take as absolute truth. Therefore, we do not question them and have adopted most of those beliefs as part of our identity. They are deeply rooted in our subconscious, codify the way we see the world, and lead us to act in a particular direction.

Our beliefs arise as a byproduct of our environment, culture, family, relationships, internet, and experiences. Since our childhood, we have been baptized with many of them, especially through the type of educational model introduced in the first years of life. We integrate them as a filter for our own decisions.

“Life is hard” “I am too old” “I am too young” “You have to study hard to have success in life” “Being selfish is bad” “You have to think of others first” “I treat others the way I would like to be treated” “If I’m a good person, good things will happen to me” “You have to set limits, or they disrespect you” “Things have to be perfect” “You have to be disciplined to get things” “Men are like that” “I need to know everything first, so I can do it” “The universe works for me” “Everything I set my mind to, I achieve.”

“What you believe is what you create”

Our beliefs condition us to act in a certain way, influencing our perception and interpretation of life, how we think or process external events and behaviors, how we feel and relate to each other.

They have so much power in our ability to act that they come to reinforce themselves in our lives as fulfilled prophecies. Therefore, it is essential to understand and question them from time to time to corroborate whether these beliefs are still valid or false, whether they help us grow and be happy, or whether they limit us and condemn us.

What are the beliefs’ roles in our life?

If we look into what has been studied by neuroscience, our brain’s job is to seek efficiency and manage our energy. Beliefs provide us with a path of automated actions and as a decision filter.

Beliefs have been linked to the limbic system and the midbrain hypothalamus. The limbic system, connected to other parts of our brain, not only emotional, is in charge of processing information coming from the prefrontal cortex and regulates the autonomic nervous system that controls basic bodily functions. Because they are produced by the most profound structure of the brain, as Robert Dilts, pioneer of Neurolinguistic Programming, tells us, beliefs provoke changes in the fundamental physiological functions of the body, being responsible for many of our unconscious responses. In fact, we know that we really believe something because it triggers a physiological reaction in us.

As demonstrated in […]