#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

We can't be the alpha dog all of the time. Whatever our personality, most of us experience varying degrees of feeling in charge. Some situations take us down a notch while others build us up.

New research shows that it's possible to control those feelings a bit more, to be able to summon an extra surge of power and sense of well-being when it's needed: for example, during a job interview or for a key presentation to a group of skeptical customers.

"Our research has broad implications for people who suffer from feelings of powerlessness and low self-esteem due to their hierarchical rank or lack of resources," says HBS assistant professor Amy J.C. Cuddy, one of the researchers on the study.

In "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance", Cuddy shows that simply holding one's body in expansive, "high-power" poses for as little as two minutes stimulates higher levels of testosterone (the hormone linked to power and dominance in the animal and human worlds) and lower levels of cortisol (the "stress" hormone that can, over time, cause impaired immune functioning, hypertension, and memory loss).

The result? In addition to causing the desired hormonal shift, the power poses led to increased feelings of power and a greater tolerance for risk.

"We used to think that emotion ended on the face," Cuddy says. "Now there is established research showing that while it's true that facial expressions reflect how you feel, you can also 'fake it until you make it.' In other words, you can smile long enough that it makes you feel happy. This work extends that finding on facial feedback, which is decades old, by focusing on postures and measuring neuroendocrine levels."

The habits of the best leaders are well documented. They’re self-aware. They admit mistakes. They take care of, recognize, and communicate well with their teams.

But what do these inspirational people do on their own time? What goes on behind the scenes that helps them be so effective on a day-to-day basis?

"I’ve definitely noticed some things that great leaders tend to do," says Danielle Harlan, founder and CEO of The Center for Advancing Leadership and Human Potential, an organization that helps individuals and organizations maximize their impact. And the things they do behind the scenes make all the difference when it comes to their professional leadership ability, she says. Here are five such common habits.

How do we improve who we are? The most effective--and often most difficult--way by far is to self-analyze. When we deconstruct our notions of ourselves and who we think we are, we are able to overcome potential obstacles standing in our way to becoming a better person.

By answering these 5 questions you can begin the journey of becoming your best self.

1. If you had one day left to live, would you be ready to go?

Although it's very easy for us to reach temporary states of complacency, reaching a level of complete fulfillment at life's end is a totally different story. So many of us end up going through the motions instead of actively enjoying what we do on a daily basis. Making sure we are content, right this moment, is a great way to keep this tendency in check.

You're blurry-eyed and slack-jawed at your desk, staring at a to-do list so long you feel like you could wrap it around the entire earth -- twice. Yes, we've all found ourselves in this stressful situation every now and then.

Facing a to-do list that feels completely unmanageable isn't fun. In fact, it's usually enough to make me want to curl up under my desk in the fetal position and hide until all of those pesky tasks dissolve away.

But, unfortunately, that tactic has yet to work out for me. So, I've had to find another method to deal with my mile-long list of assignments.

I've tried my fair share of productivity tips, tricks, and hacks that promise to help me grab the bull by the horns and conquer my to-do list with confidence and a healthy dose of strategy. However, I've found that most of those (although, not all!) really only manage to serve as a distraction and slow me down.

Instead, I prefer to keep things basic, simple, and intuitive. So, when looking at my overwhelming to-do list, I always ask myself this one quick and easy question to pare down my tasks and channel my focus:

Does this absolutely need to be done today?

I know, it's so straightforward and obvious, you're likely groaning and rolling your eyes at me right now. But, it's actually an important inquiry that most people skip when creating their own lists. Humor me and allow me to dive in and explain why this question is so effective.

We live in an age of increased complexity, velocity and demand for multidisciplinary thinking. So much of what we do today requires the careful balance of both generalists and specialists to make great work happen.

It excites me to see more and more organizations embrace this approach by bringing together people from multitudes of fields and perspectives, enabling a new depth and diversity of visioning and problem solving. Optimally, these multidisciplinary teams are further supported through evolved organizational and management-thinking that favors meritocracy over rigidity. Organizationally, this can be achieved by constructing horizontal networks where there were once more stacked seniority-based hierarchies.

In practice, managing people and teams of this sort requires every bit as much care and rigor as more traditional structures, but the energies are directed differently — there's more attention directed toward supporting relevant possibilities and valuable outcomes than reinforcing structure. The investment is worthwhile, because when it works, the results and cultural implications are magnificent.

They said computers would make us all a lot more productive, and free up our personal lives.

Is it just me, or was that all a big, fat porkie?

The technology that was supposed to bring us this gift of freedom has entrapped us, eroding valuable time, energy and attention. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology. But let's take a reality check and go back to using it to help us do our jobs, not to dictate and distract every waking moment.

Here are seven key productivity traps to be mindful of: