Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

Every summer, many people put aside their work, daily stresses and responsibilities and escape on a vacation, somewhere far away from reality. It may be a secluded retreat in the mountains, a camping trip with the kids, an arranged tour in another country, an Alaskan cruise, or days relaxing at an exotic beach or resort.
​
However, with the current pandemic including social distancing and travel restrictions, along with financial constraints for many, those plans may have to be temporarily shelved. But the desire to escape reality – for just a bit – is very much alive. So, with many people remaining in their homes, how can that off-work journey happen? We have some tips for making the best of the situation and creating cherished vacation memories without ever leaving home. It’s called a staycation.

What’s a staycation?

By Rebecca Muller, Community Editor at Thrive Global
Photo by visuals on Unsplash

​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
....

By Nicole Loher at Her Agenda
Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

​Between the upcoming election, a second possible COVID-19 lockdown in the US, a shifting job market, and much more, there’s a lot to distract us from our goals.

In a recent survey, 61.1% of participants that worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic cited social media as the greatest source of distraction from work. On the other hand, 53.7% admitted that their smartphone has affected their productivity during the lockdown.

According to Daniel Goleman, author of Focus: The Hidden Power of Excellence, distractions come in two forms: sensory and emotional distractions. Sensory distractions are external, or the things happening around you, and emotional distractions are internal and often a symptom of mental distraction or your inner dialogue. 

Try these five science-backed ways to help maintain focus:

By Marina Khidekel, Head of Content Development at Thrive Global
Photo by EIELEI on Unsplash

​A recent study found that people who laugh (or even smile) frequently are less stressed in the face of anxiety-inducing events, and even show fewer physical and emotional stress symptoms than those who laugh less often.

Researchers are finding that laughter can act as a buffer for feelings of stress and overwhelm — and in particularly challenging times, leaning into moments of levity, joy, and silliness can boost our mental health and help us deal with feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.We asked our Thrive community to share one thing that’s making them laugh during this challenging time. Which of these is bringing a smile to your face right now?

By Karen Bridbord, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist and Organizational Consultant
When I wrote about the inflection of workplace culture back in May, I was expecting the pandemic to be a distant memory by now. Remember when we all thought it was going to last three weeks? Yet today, six months into the most significant global health crisis of our lifetime, we find ourselves still grappling with uncertainty.

Instead of creating new rituals to uplift and ground us as we find ourselves, as I recommended in the beginning of the pandemic, we now must find a way to sustain ourselves. We’re collectively exhausted. This pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint, and we need to act accordingly. This includes adjusting our company values and how they’re operationalized in our organizational cultures.

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 Rebecca Muller, Community Editor at Thrive Global
What should you do when you know you’re feeling stuck at work, and you know you’re ready for something new — but you don’t know what that something will be? Researchers now call this often stressful stage the “exploratory phase.” And the process of contemplating your next career move — while living with a deep-seated feeling of uncertainty — can be scary.

“Success is pretty much never something that happens immediately or seamlessly,” Traci Stein, Ph.D., M.P.H., a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor at Columbia University, tells Thrive. Stein says it’s important to remind yourself that almost everyone struggles with an exploratory phase in their career at one point or another, and the process isn’t one that should scare you away from trying something new. After all, exploring any new opportunity takes you out of your comfort zone.

By Sweta Bothra, Lead Therapist at InnerHour, a Mental Health Platform​
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What kind of mindset do you have? Is it one that drives you to become the best version of yourself, even when times get tough?

A mindset can be defined as the way in which a person perceives themselves and the world around them. Your mindset can hugely impact your behaviours, ideas and choices you make when it comes to your goals. It can even affect your work, relationship with others and daily routine. Ultimately, the kind of mindset you have defines you who are and who you can become. 

There are two types of mindsets – fixed and growth. Let’s look at each in a little more detail. 

By Sweta Bothra, Lead Therapist at InnerHour, a Mental Health Platform
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Our daily habits influence our lives in a large way. They determine how we think, behave and interact with others. In fact, according to researchers, our habits account for almost 40% of our behaviour every day.

Building healthy habits can help us achieve our goals, improve our relationships, and live a happier and healthier life. Before we talk about how to build healthy habits, let’s understand how habits are formed in the first place.

The 3 R’s of Habit Formation
Every habit starts off with a three-part psychological pattern referred to as the habit loop.

by Jeff Kavanaugh 
Photo by Christopher Paul High on Unsplash

​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
Photo by Cherrydeck on Unsplash
​
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 Jessica Mudditt
Giving advice is often counterproductive, say experts, even when someone asks you for it. Here are some pointers on how to get it right.

Think back to the last time you were discussing a challenge at work and someone chimed in to offer their opinion. Did you welcome their advice? Probably not. It’s more likely you dismissed it and thought to yourself: ‘You have no idea know what's going on.’ Or possibly the more defensive: ‘You don’t even know me.’

Coaching expert and author Michael Bungay Stanier believes that many of us are too quick to jump in with proffered solutions. He discovered that advice-giving has become endemic in the workplace, which prompted him to write The Advice Trap. In it, he argues that our tendency to dispense advice stems from society teaching us that success means having all the answers, and that leaders in particular must prove their value by liberally dispensing it.

Opinion editorial by The American Genius 
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

Anthony J. Algmin is the Founder and CEO of Algmin Data Leadership, a company helping business and technology leaders transform their future with data, and author of a new book on data leadership. We asked for his insights on how strong leaders can see their teams, their companies and their people through this global pandemic (and other crises in the future). The following are his own words:
​
Managers sometimes forget that the people we lead have lives outside of the office. This is true always, but is amplified when a crisis like COVID-19 occurs. We need to remember that our job is to serve our teams, to help them be as aligned and productive as possible in the short and long terms.

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:

By Brett Fox
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

​We all want to know the secrets to being a great CEO. So wouldn’t it be great if we actually were able to compare two CEOs in the exact same industry to see why one was better than the other?

I was really fortunate to work with two CEOs in the same industry, so I got to see the differences up close. One of the CEOs was a great leader, and the other CEO was not a great leader.

The two CEOs were very similar in many ways. They were of the same generation. They both grew up poor/lower middle class.

They both had sizable egos. And they both enjoyed some of level of success.

However, one of the CEOs, the late Jack Gifford, built his company (Maxim Integrated Products) to over $2B/year in revenue. The other CEO (we will call him “Bob”) wanted to build a $1B/year company, but his company was stuck for years with revenue of around $200M/year.

By Martha Bird, Business Anthropologist at ADP
This year has witnessed a dramatic and rapid shift in the way Americans work. In a matter of months, many businesses have transitioned to a fully remote workforce where possible, becoming “often on” workplaces with employees’ work schedules intermixing with their life at home. Such a change might once have been unimaginable but is quickly emerging as a new reality as people continue to socially distance and navigate uncertainty surrounding school and business closures. This blurring of work and home lives is very likely to shape the evolving world of work.

Many employers are taking this moment to consider the advantages of a partly remote workforce, redefining productivity outside of the traditional 9 to 5 hours, and focusing on communication and engagement to support their workforce and sustain business operations. It is equally as critical to remain aware that stay-at-home orders have impacted people differently, with up to 60 percent of workers unable to work from home1. As pillars of the broader human community, employers who reflect on all circumstances equally and act with holistic awareness will lead in more ways than one.

The WFH Advantage ...

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.”
​
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 Kate Morgan
Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

​Last week, two close friends officially postponed weddings planned for later in the year. “I know this is overdue,” wrote one in a text to me and the other bridesmaids, “but it’s given me a pit in my stomach every time I go to hit send.” Then she sent a digital version of her “Change the Date”, a replacement for the Save the Date notecard stuck to my refrigerator. 

For the first half of the year, the uncertainty of the pandemic’s spread has made it nearly impossible to predict whether anything will happen as we imagined it would. “I think we’re all being made keenly aware that the control we thought we had is maybe more fragile than we believed,” says Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. 
​
But putting the future into a perpetual holding pattern is tough on mental health. Studies have shown strong ties between an unclear future and anxiety, and intolerance of uncertainty has been shown to correlate strongly with depression.

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?

An article by Tony Schwartz

The last several months have been, in many ways, the richest, most exciting and most creative period of my life. Still, as I prepare to take off most of the month of August, I’m feeling edgy, worn out and a bit overwhelmed.

I’m sputtering to the finish line, running near empty.

“How often should you vacation?” I was asked after a talk I gave this week. It dawned on me that I’d let my own balance tip. My to do list had runneth over. I have not taken off more than two full days in a row for six months.

The consequence is that I feel not just tired, but less able to think clearly and creatively, more at the mercy of my emotions.