Thank you so much for your interest in The Insight, by Sheba. I hope you enjoyed this week’s blogs about “Emotional Capital.”

Next week’s topic will be “The World of Positive Psychology.”

Friday Review: Happy Reading!

1. Spend Encouragements.

• Healthy successful relationships will not begin, develop or last without encouragement. The more we are involved in our environments the more we feel a sense of belonging. Build your relationships on genuine encouragement and foster a sense of belonging for each of them. They will flourish!

2. Reserve Funds.

• Think of resilience as your emotional savings account. You’ve been building emotional strength all you life and storing it away for the moment you meet adversity. When that moment comes, you’ll be able to think clearly and handle the challenge in a healthy manner. You can manage your emotions and use them to work for you.

3. A Most Precious Commodity.

• Be cautious in placing your trust so that you can keep it from breaking. A broken window can be put back together, but it takes patience, and great effort. Even, when you’ve finally glued the pieces back together, the cracks are still visible. Trust is far more fragile and more valuable than glass. Once broken, the hardest decision to make is whether or not to piece trust back together.

4. Like Balancing Your Checkbook.

• Balance cannot be achieved if we do not include ourselves and personal best interests in the process. We can easily drain ourselves if we continue to spend our emotions on others without adding downtime into our schedules to recover. Start small and make the necessary changes you see fit to create balance and to serve yourself. If you don’t, who will?

The Insight— How much more would we value our emotions and the emotions of others if we considered them the currency of our relationships? Maybe it’s time to change the way we think! Think of your emotions as an investment into the lives of others. But also recognize that, much like money, we do have a spending limit with our emotions, meaning we need to replenish them every now and again. Continue to invest in others, but recognize your own needs as well! Happy spending!

Have a wonderful weekend!

By Sheba

www.bySheba.com

Creating Positive Perspectives for Life

The Scenario – Just like balancing a checkbook, we need to keep tabs on the emotions we spend, how frequently we spend them, and who we invest them in. This will better enable us to recognize when we’re nearing our limits, so that we can schedule time to recover. You’re responsible for so many others, but who is responsible for you?

Where do “I” belong in a balanced life?

It’s okay and sometimes necessary to be selfish in order to reach balance and nurture your own needs. Jen Uscher, M.F.A., and Laura J. Martin, M.D., of WebMD, offer five tips to ensure personal time while pursuing balance:

1.       Schedule Downtime

• Schedule personal time and respect that time the same as you would any other activity in your schedule

2.       Disengage

• Cancel any engagements or activities that only occupy your time and drain your energy

3.       Delegate

• Review your to-do list and delegate the tasks that don’t specifically require your involvement

4.       Engage in physical activity

• Take every opportunity for physical activity throughout the day, whether that means walking or riding your bike to work, or parking all the way in the back of the grocery store parking lot

5.       Don’t Make Balance a Chore

• Avoid making drastic changes or unrealistic challenges to achieve greater balance, but welcome and take opportunities to relax

(Read More)

The Insight –  Balance cannot be achieved if we do not include ourselves and personal best interests in the process. We can easily drain ourselves if we continue to spend our emotions on others without adding downtime into our schedules to recover. Start small and make the necessary changes you see fit to create balance and to serve yourself. If you don’t, who will?

Does your life balance include personal time?

By Sheba

www.bySheba.com

Creating Positive Perspectives for Life

The Scenario: Trust is a precious commodity within our relationships. It’s much easier to spend trust than it is to repair it. When the opportunity presents itself to us to mend broken trust, we often are afraid or opposed to making that effort.

How do we decide whom to trust again?

According to a report entitled “How Implicit Beliefs Influence Trust Recovery,” by Michael P. Haselhuhn,Maurice E. Schweitzer, and Alison M. Wood, there are two beliefs systems we use when determining trustworthiness. Read More

1. Entity Belief

• The belief that trust is a personal characteristic that an individual exhibits. Should that individual break trust, he or she is no longer trustworthy.

2. Incremental Belief

• The belief that an individual can become trustworthy based on his or her desire to change and the circumstances under which they were untrustworthy.

The Insight: Be cautious in placing your trust so that you can keep it from breaking. A broken window can be put back together, but it takes patience, and great effort. Even, when you’ve finally glued the pieces back together, the cracks are still visible. Trust is far more fragile and more valuable than glass. Once broken, the hardest decision to make is whether or not to piece trust back together.

Can you forgive once trust is broken?

By Sheba

www.bySheba.com

Creating Positive Perspectives for Life

The Scenario: Hopefully, you’ve never had to look at your bank account and realize that your readily available funds have gone missing or been significantly depleted. If you have, you certainly remember how thankful you  were that you’d been diligently storing extra funds in a savings account for years in case of an emergency such as this. We can think of emotions in the same way.

Are you emotionally intelligent?

Emotional intelligence, according to psychologists Peter Saloveyand John D. Mayer, is the ability to understand your emotions, their meanings, and the relationships between them to manage, reason, and problem-solve on the basis of your conclusions. What does this have to do with resilience? Having emotional intelligence infers you are emotionally resilient.

Here are a few tips to help you increase your emotional intelligence.

Step 1: Increase Self-Awareness:

• Identify and label your emotions and those of others.
• Look for non-verbal cues and behaviors like body language and facial expressions.
• e.g. Know when you are angry but not in pain, or lonely and not just sad.

Step 2: Increase Emotion Management

• Use your emotions to serve a purpose.
• Emotion grabs our attention. Use it to act for you, not against you.
• e.g. When making a speech, use an emotional story to grab the audience’s attention.

Step 3: Increase Emotion Understanding and Meaning

• Distinguish between thoughts and feelings to better understand the direction that emotions take.
• e.g. When you become angry are you vengeful, passive aggressive, depressed or aloof?
• e.g. When you are happy do you sing, laugh, want to be around other people, paint or write?

Step 4: Increase Self-Regulation and Control:

• Increase the number of positive events in your life and make changes so they happen often.
• Avoid situations where you feel invalidated and pushed aside.
• e.g. If Ellen DeGeneres makes you laugh, record it and watch it every day.

(Read More)

The Insight: Think of resilience as your emotional savings account. You’ve been building emotional strength all you life and storing it away for the moment you meet adversity. When that moment comes, you’ll be able to think clearly and handle the challenge in a healthy manner. You can manage your emotions and use them to work for you.

Do you want to improve your emotional intelligence? Start saving!

By Sheba

www.bySheba.com

Creating Positive Perspectives for Life.