How We Ask Questions

What we say affects how people respond and behave. For example, the way we ask questions affects how people respond to our inquiry and whether we obtain the best or optimal response possible or not. 

What Affects our Decisions

Our beliefs and emotions cause judgements often biased in nature and often not entirely correct. The executive part of the brain (System 2 in Kahneman's terms) could make false deduction based on limited knowledge and biased perspective and beliefs.

Positive vs Negative Stories

We create stories about everything we come across. Sometimes they may be right but often they are wrong. When we create negative stories we act negatively and when they are wrong the negative effect is far greater than if we had created a positive story and the positive story was wrong. So it does help to always give people the benefit of the doubt or create a potentially positive interpretation of things so that at least we give the other side a chance before we are certain of the truth. 

The Difficult Can Be A Blessing

Even difficult people can be a blessing - a difficult person can provide you with the opportunity to develop self management and self leadership capability, strength, resilience, inner wisdom and tolerance. If there are no difficult people in life how can one develop strength and resilience and the ability to regulate one's own mind and emotions?

Curious-Why vs Critical-Why

The difference between the curious why and the critical why is that the curious why elicits a sense of discovering solutions and the critical why gets stuck in the problem. The emotional response of the the former is exhilaration and later, anxiety.

Why People DON'T do what YOU want them to do

There are a myriad of reasons why people DON'T do what YOU want them to do, but we may be able to break it down to two main factors :
1. Motivation and drive
2. Values and priorities

The first one is simply based on a more emotional and psychological level - perhaps the person does not feel like doing what you want them to do. This could be because of their state of mind or the nature of the motivator. It could be your own behaviour affecting their state and emotion as well as others and the environment/situation/mood/circumstances. This also ties to the second factor (they are not completely independent): the values and priorities someone has may not be in line with yours, usually falling onto the the individual's logical or rational side. Everyone has a different take on what is important to them at any time or period of time. These may change but they are not always in line with what your values and priorities are.

Replace Your Anger with Curiosity

Always aim to replace your anger with curiosity - curiosity about what you are angry about and why you are angry about it. This helps you understand the world and yourself much more effectively that when in an angry state.

Leadership Is...

Leadership is having the confidence to stand up with what you believe, the humility to receive and embrace feedback, the ability to empathize from multiple perspectives, the courage to change and evolve for the better and strength to get back up when you fall, all with a mindset of compassion and trust. 

Empowering the Caring

We want a new world that empowers the caring and disempowers the uncaring. For many decades the wise and the caring few have remained powerless, voiceless, in the face of the cruel and the selfish.  Today we need to change all that. Today we need to create a powerfully caring world for a better tomorrow.

Expressiveness vs Intensity of Emotion

Does how much angry a person looks reflect their actual intensity of their emotion or their emotional state? Perhaps some feel more angry than another yet express this angry less subtly due to culture and nature etc. The intensity of an emotion may not directly correspond to expressiveness of the emotion.

State of Being and Transitions

Being in a state does not guarantee staying in that state, control of state transition can be achieved through awareness and meta-cognitive practice.
For example you could be completely relaxed, but suddenly snap when your hot buttons are pressed. What can control you suddenly snapping is immediate awareness of what is happening and appropriate intervention before "amygdala hijack"