Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

By Rebecca Muller, Community Editor at Thrive Global
Part of starting a new job is the excitement of meeting your co-workers and making new connections. But with so much of the workforce continuing to work from home, joining a new team remotely can have its own set of challenges. Without the face-to-face interactions you’d normally have in company meetings or at team lunches, bonding with your new team members through a computer screen can be difficult.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to create real connections with your new colleagues even if you’re working remotely, says Risa Mish, J.D., a professor of management at Cornell University. “The virtual context may lengthen the amount of time it would normally take to form relationships” she explains, “But if you put the effort in, those relationships will happen.” 
Here are five tips Mish recommends to help you break the ice:

by Leah Njoki

Ever been asked to say a few things about yourself? Perhaps you said you’re a good communicator, attentive to details, or a team player. The point being, we all define ourselves in a certain way.

Here’s the paradox, though; It’s not what you say that is an accurate representation of who you are, but rather what you show yourself to be. That’s how people judge you. They respond to the image you project. As such, it’s critical to focus on what you do rather than what you say.

If you want to sell yourself to the world in an authentic way, focus on these four really small things because they say a lot about you. This way, you’re guaranteed to make a lasting impression and command respect from people.

1. How you keep time
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By Suzie Doscher, Executive & Life Coach and Self-help Author 
When a company focuses solely on reaching targets and continually pushes employees to reach these goals, the side effects often result in a high turnover and burnout rate. Ironically, this can cause the company NOT to achieve its targets in the desired timeframe. Pushing too hard in one direction results in an inevitable push back from the opposite direction. This is a law of nature that applies to the business world as well. 
 
Stressed employees trying to reach sometimes unrealistic or unnecessary targets tend to operate at half of their capacity. They start to make mistakes and lose track of the details amid their overwhelming work schedules. They tend to suffer physically exhaustion as well. All of this hurts productivity, the very thing the company is trying to increase. ​

by Jeff Kavanaugh 
As a partner at a consulting firm as well as a professor in the University of Texas’s MBA program, I not only team up with some of the brightest young business minds in the country, but hire them, too. And in the process, I’ve come to suspect that their expectations don’t always match recruiters’ needs.
So to test my suspicion, I recently conducted a survey of over 3,000 students and recruiters to uncover their assumptions about the skills that lead to success in the job market. And the most startling gap that I found had to do with mismatched perceptions about leadership skills.

​WHY (AND WHEN) LEADERSHIP IS OVERRATED

​By Tim Davis
March 11, 2020 is a day destined for the history books: “WHO Declares Coronavirus Outbreak a Pandemic.” It was that day that, all around the world, leaders began scrambling, ripping through the pages of their crisis playbooks (or quickly creating them), searching for their pandemic play-by-play. Shortly after came the day the markets crashed on March 16, turning the crisis to both a health and economic calamity.

Though etched in our minds with great infamy, it’s days like these that I believe make true leaders. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn’t be the leaders we remember if it weren’t for the fiery trials that forged their legacies. This is true not only for politicians and activists, but also for business leaders. As president of The UPS Store, a business deemed essential throughout the pandemic, I’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t) when leading through a crisis, and how leaders can turn even a global pandemic into an opportunity.

By Susan Begeman Steiner
​Honoring emotions is an important element in achieving Emotional Intelligence. And your moods – both “good” and “bad” -- are an important part of your emotional being. Learning to flow with your moods and be honest about them gives you more individual self-expression and even self-confidence. 

Have you noticed that things go more smoothly when you are in the mood to do them? Traffic lights change to green and you find a great parking place when you’re in a good mood. And when you’re in a bad mood, seems like almost everything goes wrong?

Moods, good and bad, come in their own timing, so practically speaking, how can you capitalize on the good moods and mitigate the bad moods? Good moods are easy. Whenever possible, do things when you're in the mood to do them. Then you hit the green lights or, if you don't, you're not as likely to get upset about it. But what about the bad moods, when you just aren't in the mood to do something you have to do?

​How can you get yourself in the mood to enjoy what you’re going to do? Here are 3 keys that can help:

Deep Patel - ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK VIP, Serial Entrepreneur
Self-sabotage occurs when your logical, conscious mind (the side of you that says you need to eat healthily and save money) is at odds with your subconscious mind (the side of you that stress-eats chocolate and goes on online shopping binges). The latter is your anti-self -- that critical inner voice that seems to hold you back and sabotage your efforts.

Self-sabotage involves behaviors or thoughts that keep you away from what you desire most in life. It’s that internal sentiment gnawing at us, saying “you can’t do this.”
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This is really your subconscious trying to protect you, prevent pain and deal with deep-seated fear. But the result of self-sabotage is that we hesitate instead of seizing new challenges. We forgo our dreams and goals. In the end, we know we missed out, but we don’t understand why.

So what can we do to stop the self-limiting behaviors? Here are eight steps you can start taking immediately to stop self-sabotaging your success.

By Marina Khidekel, Head of Content Development at Thrive Global

There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic disrupted our routines — but in doing so, it’s also forced us to rethink our relationship with time in meaningful ways. As Dean Kissick writes in a recent New York Times op-ed, the opportunity lies in being able to “see time afresh — as something we really don’t have enough of, as something precious precisely because it’s ephemeral.”
We asked our Thrive community to share the unexpected lessons they’ve learned about time during the pandemic, and about the strategies they’re using to manage their time better. Which of these will you implement as we move forward?

By Evy Poumpouras
Think about the differences in these two sentences:
Look what I became. 
Look what became of me.

Despite the small word difference, what do these sentences say about the speaker’s mental attitude? Although they’re nearly identical statements, one is active and the other is passive. In the first sentence, the speaker has taken ownership over their life and became something by doing something. She owns the results, regardless of what those results are. Her approach and self-commitment have made her powerful, and that power came from within—hence a powerful mental attitude.