by Suzie Doscher,
​Executive and Life Coach, Zurich

According to the Business Dictionary personal power is “Influence over others, the source of which resides in the person instead of being vested by the position he or she holds.” In my opinion personal power in non-business language is the strength that lies within you. I feel I found my full personal power once I was aware and connected with my core values, had the life skills to handle difficult moments and situations, and had an influence on where my mind took me.  
 
Personal power is composed of:

• Knowing who you are
• Being comfortable with yourself
• Knowing what is right and wrong, a personal code of ethics 
• Being honest and trustworthy not only with others, but also with yourself
• Being dependable, again not only for others, but also for yourself
• Living your life from a place of integrity
• Handling your choices and their consequences, even the negative ones
• Knowing what you want, finding your way forward
• Knowing your weaknesses and your strengths
• Having an open-heartedand non-judgmental approach
• Taking responsibility for your actions and yourself

by Key Step Media  Time to read: 4 min.

​Whether you are a team leader or a member of a team, you will likely encounter situations in which you need to offer criticism or constructive feedback. While this can be difficult, giving feedback is a necessary part of leadership and being a member of a team. Teams that openly address counterproductive behavior create an environment that fosters continuous development, learning, and innovation. The ability to give effective, emotionally intelligent criticism is essential to high levels of team performance.

What Does It Mean to Offer Effective Criticism?

People who give effective criticism balance empathy and an understanding of the person they are giving feedback to with an objective and calm demeanor.

BY STEPHANIE VOZZA 4 MINUTE READ

​Ever have to psych yourself up to go to work? If that’s the case more often than not, your job might not align with your personal motives, says Carter Cast, author of The Right (and Wrong) Stuff: How Brilliant Careers are Made and Unmade.
Strengths are your natural skillsets, and motives are the place from which you draw energy, says Cast. They differ from values, which are what’s important to you. “If you ask someone what their values are, they can rattle them off quickly,” he says. “Motives are much harder to identify because we’re often not conscious of them. They’re the river that flows under us.”
A mismatch in job and motives will wear you down and eventually cause you to fail to live up to your potential, says Cast. “Currently, the assumption is that if you took this job, it’s the right job for you,” says Cast. “But people who are smart, don’t have a skill gap, and are good interpersonally will underperform if they don’t have energy for position.”

By Monica Torres 
​
No good employer is going to outright say that they kill you, but new research finds that too many modern workplaces are grim reapers inflicting a fatal amount of stress on our bodies and minds.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, is ringing the alarm that job stress and poor management is killing us — accounting for up to 8% of annual health costs and leading to 120,000 excess deaths every year in the United States.
In his new book, “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance — and What We Can Do About It,” he explains how long hours, a lack of job autonomy through micromanagement, and unstable health insurance are making us sick to death.
He talked with Ladders about his research and what leads otherwise reasonable people to stay in toxic jobs:

Published by The Local

​The number of sick days taken by Swiss people because of stress and other mental health issues has shot up by 35 percent in the last five years, new figures show.The data from health insurer Swica shows the number of days taken off by Swiss employees for health reasons has risen overall by 20 percent in the last half decade.

But a spokesperson for the company which provides pro-rata sickness indemnity to 30,000 Swiss firms said it was the skyrocketing number of sick days for mental health reasons that was particularly “alarming” given this is the health issue that companies can do most to combat.

“A lot of employees can no longer deal with rising work pressure,” Adrian Wüthrich of Swiss trade union TravailSuisse told the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper, adding that flexible working hours and unpaid overtime were making the situation worse.