Reconnecting After COVID

Daniel Goleman: I think that people are so distracted, so preoccupied, that listening, or simply being present to the other person – which is a basic skill of management, of teamwork, of leadership – is diminishing. And I feel that that's one place that emotional intelligence, particularly coaching, can help enormously.

Rachel Salaman: Daniel Goleman is one of the biggest names in emotional intelligence. I spoke to him about his book on meditation and mindfulness, called "Altered Traits," where he explains the power of being "present" – and how to achieve it.

Daniel Goleman: Look at your priorities in the day. Do you make time for yourself? Do you make time to reflect? Do you have a time when you don't need to be answering the phone, answering texts, doing anything other than thinking about what's going on in your life or being with yourself? That's, by the way, one of the benefits of a regular mindfulness practice: it gives you that time.

The second thing is when you're with another person, when you're interacting, when you're on the phone or in person, ask yourself, "How present am I?" The question itself can bring you back to the present, and it also can lead you to reflecting on what you can do to be more present, more often.

Rachel Salaman: Daniel Goleman. So, being "present" connects us to others in a range of useful ways. But it also brings us back in touch with ourselves. And for Robert Kaplan from Harvard Business School, that's vital for being happy and successful, because it reconnects us with our real interests and true passions – so that we can start to follow them.

Robert Kaplan: Let your imagination run back to when you were really outstanding at something, and you loved it. And then look at, what were you doing? What tasks were you working on? What was the nature of what you were doing, and why did you love it so much? And what could you learn from that about what your passions are? What do you do in your free time and why?

All those questions are intended to get at you better understanding your passions. And I think it's critical that you do that, because passion is the fuel that propels you to work, go through bad days, bad months. And in particular it's the fuel that motivates you to work on your weaknesses, if you decide to do that, and really assess your strengths and weaknesses. It provides all sorts of motivation to get better at what you're doing.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan, author of, "What You're Really Meant to Do," on discovering what drives you.

And when I spoke to Professor Gabriele Oettingen, from New York University and the University of Hamburg, I wanted to know how you create some momentum – to start moving from where you are now, to where you want to be. For Gabriele, it's all about identifying the obstacles in your way.

Gabriele Oettingen: When you juxtapose your dreams and fantasies about the future with what holds you back – what is the main obstacle that stands in the way of achieving that future – you will understand where to go: whether you should actually put in effort and complex thinking into reaching the future, or whether you should better delegate it or give it up.

So, it is a strategy that helps you to select which projects are important; which goals are important for you at the moment to pursue; and which ones you should better let go. So it liberates you from this kind of state of being just overburdened with too many projects [that] you neither can fully go for, nor you can actually disengage from or let go.

Annie McKee: She was, you know, honestly, really, truly stressed out and burned up, and she didn't find her work to be meaningful anymore.

Rachel Salaman: For leadership coach Annie McKee, it's not just about goals and strengths, or even passions. She says we need to be fully connected with our purpose. Annie told me about a woman who had to completely rediscover her sense of purpose at work.

Annie McKee: She was able to recharge herself by really taking a good, hard look around at what she did every single day, and try to find those activities that did sort of give her a boost, that did make her feel that she was living her values.

And, for her, that was the encouragement she was able to give to others. She was a manager, she was leading a team, and it really did make her feel that she was doing something good and useful when she supported her people in developing themselves.

And she was able to craft a life at work that involved more of that, rather than just sort of nose to the grindstone, you know, nose to the computer screen. And over time, over a couple of months, she found herself getting out of that rut.

Rachel Salaman: Dr Srikumar Rao had a very memorable way of explaining his take on this. He's the author of, "Happiness at Work," and he told me that to reconnect with our purpose, we need to stop thinking that everything is about us.

Srikumar Rao: Most of us tend to live in what I call the "me-centered universe." And in a me-centered universe, we believe that Galileo got it wrong – the earth doesn't revolve around the sun, it revolves around us personally. And we have a habit of, no matter what happens, to immediately break it down to, "How is it going to impact me?"

If you live in a me-centered universe, you are going to experience more than your share of frustration, angst, depression – all the things that make life terrible comes with the territory.

So part of what I share is, if you want to reach a life where you're radiantly alive, then you have to be part of a cause which is considerably bigger than you are.

Rachel Salaman: Srikumar's words echo what many other guests told me about the value of strong relationships at work. Here's Emma Seppala from Stanford University.

Emma Seppala: When you're present with other people, that human connection, which is so essential, whether it's with colleagues, employees, clients, or your family, that's when you really are able to connect. And, in fact, I would even say that's when you will become a charismatic person.

Rachel Salaman: I talked to Emma about her book, "The Happiness Track," where she explains how to make connections through compassion.

Emma Seppala: Research shows that if you're more compassionate – whether it's in the workplace, an organization, or in whatever context – actually, you're going to build better relationships and your employees and colleagues will have greater loyalty to you, and overall you're going to do better, assuming that you don't let people take advantage of you. So being compassionate but also being skillful about it and being intelligent about it, of course.

And really understanding and being there for people and giving them a break when things are difficult and applying compassion around you is going to lead to tremendous results, not only for your well-being, your health, your happiness – and even your longevity, research shows – but also, you're creating a better world for everyone around you. And, ironically, the results are that you will be more successful. That's what research shows.

Rachel Salaman: As we get used to working face-to-face with people again, compassion may be more valuable than ever.

The pandemic has been an emotional rollercoaster for many of us, and feelings will likely be changeable – and moods unpredictable – for some time to come. So good emotional intelligence is going to be essential, especially if we find ourselves stepping back into shared workspaces where everyone is still feeling "raw."

Mark Goulston: When someone is venting at you or complaining or saying something that normally will get you very upset, when they pause, say, "Is there anything else you'd like to add to that?" Just being that respectful will start to slightly calm them down.

Rachel Salaman: That's psychiatrist and business coach Mark Goulston, author of "Just Listen."

Mark Goulston: After that, what you want to say is, "You know, it's really important that I heard exactly what you said, so let me run it by you to make sure that I heard it correctly." When you then play back to someone what they've said at you, in a calm way, it slows them down because you're forcing them to listen, instead of venting.

Now what you want to do is calm them down emotionally. Someone I know at UCLA named Matt Lieberman, one of the things he discovered is that when people put an accurate word to a feeling, it calms down their emotionality. So that if you were to say to your colleague, your subordinate, your spouse, your kid, "And the way all of that makes you feel right now is..." – and then you might add a few words that they could try on – "frustrated, or is it angry?" And they might say, "Fed up." And then if you were to say to that person, "Well, how fed up are you?" Again, what you're doing is you're inviting them to get all this stuff off their chest.

And so what you've done is you've gone from their lower brain, which was the fight-or-flight, reptile brain, and now you've calmed them down emotionally, which is our middle brain, our mammalian brain, so that the next place you switch it to is, "And the reason it's so important that we solve this now is?" And they'll give you a reason. "Well, because if we don't get this solved, then we're going to miss some deadlines, and we're going to make some clients really angry, and then, you know, we're going to have another crisis here."

And then you can finally go into, "And so let's talk about how we might solve it." And then you're engaged in a collaborative conversation. But in your mind's eye can you see how doing something like that could take someone who's really hot-headed, and turn them into someone who could collaborate with you?

Rachel Salaman: Mark Goulston, on using empathy, compassion – and neuroscience – to calm situations and keep building our connections with others.

But what about self-compassion? Tal Ben-Shahar from Harvard University thinks that too many of us are too hard on ourselves, even when we know we're tackling tough challenges. He told me that we need to reconnect with reality when we're judging our own behavior and achievements.

Tal Ben-Shahar: What I would recommend is treating ourselves as we would treat others. So a perfectionist usually does not treat others as harshly as he or she would treat him or herself.

In other words, would we be very harsh on a person if they stumbled in a speech? Would we be extremely hard on a person if they didn't get it right the first time? Of course not. So why treat ourselves using different standards?

People talk about the golden rule: "do not do unto others as you would not have done unto yourself." I would add the platinum rule: "do not do unto yourself as you would not have done unto others."

Rachel Salaman: Tal Ben-Shahar, author of "The Pursuit of Perfect." So we have to be real with ourselves, as well as communicating clearly and building honest, empathetic connections with others.

According to our experts, that's how we'll find our place again at work – whatever shape our working life takes now – and help others to find theirs. And by focusing on the things that drive us, we'll gain a renewed sense of purpose, and stay connected to our goals and dreams.

Mark Goulston: I see communication on a continuum. At the worst end is feeling rejected. As we move more positive, slightly better than that is feeling misunderstood. Then the next stage is feeling figured out. And then the next stage is feeling understood. And then the highest stage is feeling felt.

I think when people feel felt, that's when they feel cared about. And if in their life they don't feel much caring going on, people are incredibly grateful to that.

Annie McKee: Purpose and meaningful work are important to everyone, in my estimation, and certainly my research supports that, but what does that actually mean?

What I've discovered is that what we want is to be able to live our values in the workplace, we want to feel that some of our core values can come to work with us. And we need to look for opportunities to make a difference, to do things that will improve the conditions around us, that will help ourselves and others reach those goals, reach those targets – to really move the cause forward, so to speak, in the workplace.

And we can do this in very, very concrete ways. We just need to lift our head up away from that computer and look around and see what we can do.

Srikumar Rao: It's a little bit like the training wheels on a bicycle. You have the training wheels because you're learning to ride a bicycle, and once you have, you take the training wheels off. So you begin in that manner: you want to be other-centered because you want to feel good about yourself. But, after you've been doing it for any length of time, you're no longer doing it because you want to achieve something – you're doing it because that's who you have become.

Rachel Salaman: Mark Goulston, Annie McKee, and Dr Srikumar Rao, bringing us to the end of this episode of Mind Tools Expert Voices: "Reconnecting After COVID."

Remember, there are in-depth interviews with all the people you've heard here, along with hundreds more conversations with leading writers and thinkers, in our Expert Interviews collection in the Mind Tools Club.

Join me again soon for another episode of Expert Voices. For now, I'm Rachel Salaman: thanks for listening.