I'd love to get your thoughts and advice on how do you manage challenges and issues at work when you're confrontational rather than collaborative? I would say it's all about empathy. Conflict is magnetic. It draws attention. And whenever we encounter conflict, our attention tends to go to this narrow focus point that is the conflict alone. So my advice is build your emotional piggy bank by depositing those five good interactions in before you have the conflict. Build that and then even in the conflict, continue depositing those positive interactions in as a way of making sure that your conflicts go well because you're demonstrating good intent.
How are you feeling right now? According to Celine Teoh, we all need to ask ourselves that question more often — and be more precise in how we answer it.
Teoh is a facilitator of the course Interpersonal Dynamics, or “Touchy Feely,” as it’s affectionately known on campus. In her work with students and as a CEO coach, she encourages people to get better acquainted with their feelings. “Feelings are data,” she says. “In the rest of our logical lives, we would never make decisions on bad or highly abstract data. But we'll do that with feelings.”
In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Teoh and host Matt Abrahams discuss how developing greater emotional awareness can help us achieve more agency and empathy in our personal and professional lives.
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