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Blog

6 Habits of Emotionally Sophisticated People

25/1/2021

 
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They keep their expectations in check


by Nick Wignall

Many people grow up pretty confused about their emotions and how they work. So, understandably, they tend to simply avoid what feels bad and hold onto what feels good.
The problem is…
Making decisions based on how you feel is a recipe for both failure and unhappiness.

On the other hand, emotionally sophisticated people have a more nuanced understanding of how emotions work. And the better you understand your emotions, the easier it is to work with them in a healthy way.
Emotional sophistication means having a deep understanding of how your emotions actually work.

If you want to cultivate a healthier understanding of your emotions, these 6 habits are a good place to start.

1. They’re Curious About Their Own Mind


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Six Simple Mind Tricks for Dealing with Uncertainty

28/11/2020

 
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by the BBC - (great tips for all uncertainties not just pandemic related)

"It may feel like we are living in extremely uncertain times, and that we now lack control over many important things in our lives, but is it still possible to be happy?
Here are six tips from experts in psychology and neuroscience on how to better manage the uncertainty in your life during these unprecedented times".
Video by Eleonore Voisard                  Click to see the video 

"CHANGE IS INEVITABLE, PROGRESS OPTIONAL"

7/2/2020

 
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“Whether you believe you can, or cannot – you are right” - wise words from Henry Ford
by Suzie Doscher

Change is not easy or simple.  If you have been told you should change but are not really convinced that this is true, you are more likely to fail at completing the process. You stand a better chance if want, and are motivated, to change something. This could be a behaviour pattern, how you react, a communication style or how you view the world to name a few examples.

Change can only really take place if you are ready to take action. 
Research shows 90% of the strategies designed for change assume people are ready to take action. In reality only 20% of the people already involved in some process of change are actually ready to take action. This helps explain why so many attempts to keep New Year's resolutions, lose weight, change behaviour, etc. are doomed to failure. 

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The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You

5/2/2020

 
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The Art of Solitude

by Zat Rana
Before dying at the age of 39, Blaise Pascal made huge contributions to both physics and mathematics, notably in fluids, geometry, and probability.
This work, however, would influence more than just the realm of the natural sciences. Many fields that we now classify under the heading of social science did, in fact, also grow out of the foundation he helped lay.

Interestingly enough, much of this was done in his teen years, with some of it coming in his twenties. As an adult, inspired by a religious experience, he actually started to move towards philosophy and theology.
Right before his death, he was hashing out fragments of private thoughts that would later be released as a collection by the name of Pensées.

While the book is mostly a mathematician’s case for choosing a life of faith and belief, the more curious thing about it is its clear and lucid ruminations on what it means to be human. It’s a blueprint of our psychology long before psychology was deemed a formal discipline.
There is enough thought-provoking material in it to quote, and it attacks human nature from a variety of different angles, but one of its most famous thoughts aptly sums up the core of his argument:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

According to Pascal, we fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction, and we can’t help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false comforts of the mind.

The issue at the root, essentially, is that we never learn the art of solitude.

The perils of being connectedToday, more than ever, Pascal’s message rings true. If there is one word to describe the progress made in the last 100 years, it’s connectedness.
Information technologies have dominated our cultural direction. From the telephone to the radio to the TV to the internet, we have found ways to bring us all closer together, enabling constant worldly access.

I can sit in my office in Canada and transport myself to practically anywhere I want through Skype. I can be on the other side of the world and still know what is going on at home with a quick browse.
I don’t think I need to highlight the benefits of all this. But the downsides are also beginning to show. Beyond the current talk about privacy and data collection, there is perhaps an even more detrimental side-effect here.

We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.
If Pascal’s observation about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of the human condition in general, then the issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude due to the options available today.
The logic is, of course, seductive. Why be alone when you never have to?
Well, the answer is that never being alone is not the same thing as never feeling alone. Worse yet, the less comfortable you are with solitude, the more likely it is that you won’t know yourself. And then, you’ll spend even more time avoiding it to focus elsewhere. In the process, you’ll become addicted to the same technologies that were meant to set you free.

Just because we can use the noise of the world to block out the discomfort of dealing with ourselves doesn’t mean that this discomfort goes away.
Almost everybody thinks of themselves as self-aware. They think they know how they feel and what they want and what their problems are. But the truth is that very few people really do. And those that do will be the first to tell how fickle self-awareness is and how much alone time it takes to get there.

In today’s world, people can go their whole lives without truly digging beyond the surface-level masks they wear; in fact, many do.

We are increasingly out of touch with who we are, and that’s a problem.

Boredom as a mode of stimulationIf we take it back to the fundamentals—and this is something Pascal touches on, too—our aversion to solitude is really an aversion to boredom.
At its core, it’s not necessarily that we are addicted to a TV set because there is something uniquely satisfying about it, just like we are not addicted to most stimulants because the benefits outweigh the downsides. Rather, what we are really addicted to is a state of not-being-bored.

Almost anything else that controls our life in an unhealthy way finds its root in our realization that we dread the nothingness of nothing. We can’t imagine just being rather than doing. And therefore, we look for entertainment, we seek company, and if those fail, we chase even higher highs.
We ignore the fact that never facing this nothingness is the same as never facing ourselves. And never facing ourselves is why we feel lonely and anxious in spite of being so intimately connected to everything else around us.

Fortunately, there is a solution. The only way to avoid being ruined by this fear—like any fear—is to face it. It’s to let the boredom take you where it wants so you can deal with whatever it is that is really going on with your sense of self. That’s when you’ll hear yourself think, and that’s when you’ll learn to engage the parts of you that are masked by distraction.

The beauty of this is that, once you cross that initial barrier, you realize that being alone isn’t so bad. Boredom can provide its own stimulation.
When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow. The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity.
You learn that there are other things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface. Just because a quiet room doesn’t scream with excitement like the idea of immersing yourself in a movie or a TV show doesn’t mean that there isn’t depth to explore there.

Sometimes, the direction that this solitude leads you in can be unpleasant, especially when it comes to introspection—your thoughts and your feelings, your doubts and your hopes—but in the long-term, it’s far more pleasant than running away from it all without even realizing that you are.

Embracing boredom allows you to discover novelty in things you didn’t know were novel; it’s like being an unconditioned child seeing the world for the first time. It also resolves the majority of internal conflicts.

The takeaway:
The more the world advances, the more stimulation it will provide as an incentive for us to get outside of our own mind to engage with it.
While Pascal’s generalization that a lack of comfort with solitude is the root of all our problems may be an exaggeration, it’s isn’t an entirely unmerited one.
Everything that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us. We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more alone.

Interestingly, the main culprit isn’t our obsession with any particular worldly stimulation. It’s the fear of nothingness—our addiction to a state of not-being-bored. We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.
Without realizing the value of solitude, we are overlooking the fact that, once the fear of boredom is faced, it can actually provide its own stimulation. And the only way to face it is to make time, whether every day or every week, to just sit—with our thoughts, our feelings, with a moment of stillness.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us: know yourself. And there is a good reason why that is.

Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest of our lives on.

Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do.
Solitude may not be the solution to everything, but it certainly is a start.

Resilience

24/6/2019

 
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Resilience is not a characteristic gifted to some individuals and not others. It is not a passive quality, but an active process.
  by Suzie Doscher, Executive Coach, Life Coaching and Self-help Author

Knowing you have the skills to bounce back, not only on an intellectual and but also feeling this on an emotional level is true strength. Resilience in my opinion is knowing that no matter what comes your way - you can handle it. You know you have the strength and confidence to get up, dust yourself off and move forward. Your self-esteem is strengthened by this ability.  You have the confidence to figure out and fix, or change whatever has set you back. 

This might sound easy so it is important to remember that when emotions are present (have been triggered) I can handle this is not necessarily the first thought or feeling that might occur. 
Neuroscience has proven when emotions are present the brain’s cognitive resources are the first to be disrupted. In other words emotions overpower thinking in that moment. 

When a situation results with you feeling stressed, kicked down, frustrated, angry, unsupported, alone, confused, overwhelmed etc. - these feelings are the emotions triggered by whatever happened in that moment.

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9 Ways Multitasking is Killing Your Brain and Productivity  According to Neuroscientists

1/2/2019

 
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According to Neuroscience Multi-tasking is Bad for You
by Mayo Oshin, Juggling ideas at the intersection of science, art and philosophy. 

We’d like to think that we can multitask — respond to emails, text messages, toggle between multiple tabs on a browser and scroll through social media feeds, whilst working on important tasks — but, our brains would say otherwise.
According to neuroscientists, our brains aren’t built to do more than one thing at a time. And when we try to multitask, we damage our brains in ways that negatively affect our well-being, mental performance and productivity.
Here are nine ways multitasking is killing your brain and productivity.

1. Multitasking can lead to permanent brain damage
A study from the University of Sussex (UK) compared the brain structure of participants with the amount of time they spent on media devices i.e. texting or watching TV. 
The MRI scans of the participants, showed that the high multitaskers had less brain density in 


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30 Simple Habits That Will Make You Unstoppable in 2019

7/1/2019

 
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A few small tweaks can completely change your year.
FYI: this is a very long article.

by 
Benjamin P. Hardy, Author, husband, father
​

According to the British philosopher, Alain de Botton, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” How different is your life, right now, from where you were 12 months ago? If it’s quite similar, then you haven’t been learning very much. 
To learn, by nature, is to change and evolve. In order to change and evolve, you need to regularly create peak experiences — those moments which create deep awe, gratitude, and a shift in how you see yourself and the world. When was your last peak experience? What was the last time you flexed your courage muscles? When was the last time you tried something that might not work? 
If you’re ready to make wild progress during 2019, you need to make some tweaks. This isn’t anything to be upset, distraught, or frustrated about. Life is, inherently, a learning experience. Life is beautiful. You get to have fun with it. One thing that is really beautiful about moving forward intensely in your future is that, simultaneously, you change your memory about the past. The past, regardless of what it has been — great or disappointing — will change in meaning as you make new decisions in your future. Your future is flexible. Your past is also flexible. What you have is now. You get to decide what you’re going to do. You get to decide how you’re going to live. Look around… No one is stopping you. Want to make a shift? Here are 30 behaviors to get you started: 

1. Wake Up Earlier 
“You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling, than feeling yourself into action.” — 

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What Is the Mindset That Defines the Most Successful People?

30/11/2018

 
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by Marcel Schwantes

Nobody likes to fail. Yet failure is the secret to success. If you haven't been rejected a number of times, the current mantra goes, you just haven't experienced success.
Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, swears by this premise. At Virgin, they encourage and even celebrate failure. There's an underlying theme there that, without trying something new and failing, it's virtually impossible to innovate and grow.

Branson says, "Do not be embarrassed by your failures. Learn from them and start again. Making mistakes and experiencing setbacks is part of the DNA of every successful entrepreneur, and I am no exception."
Wherever you are on your career path, it's time to acknowledge that failing is common, no matter how hard you try to avoid it.
​
But here's the thing. There's one superhuman quality -- a mindset -- every person needs to master on their journey of failing forward. Without it, you may as well toss in the towel now and never try again.
I speak of resilience.

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    Raise your self-awareness with this:
    Self-Help Book
    Self-Coaching Exercises

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    Available now
    ​AT Amazon stores worldwide
    in Paperback or on Kindle
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     "A truly inspiring book" I have read this book at a point in my life where I wanted something to change and I didn't know if it ever could. Through these pages I have understood how our experience in life depends 90% on us and not on external events, and that is a life changing lesson indeed." Absolutely recommended.
    Suzie Doscher is a Professional Executive Coach and Life Coach focusing on Personal Development. Located in Zurich, Switzerland. Her approach to personal development is practical and successful.  
    Suzie is happiest when helping people. 
    Her vision is everyone should have access to techniques for personal growth and development. This was the motivation behind her book. 


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YOU ARE THE CEO OF YOUR LIFE -
​
Let's start making some changes


​Executive Coach & Life Coach for Personal Development
Accredited Professional Master Coach (IAPC&M)

​ Zurich - Thalwil, Switzerland
Phone: + 41 43 443 59 54​
​

Email​ link
 suzie@suziedoscher.com

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