"Active listening" is a critical skill for professional counselors. It's used to help clients feel they are being truly heard. The term "active listening" actually originated in business literature to help managers communicate more effectively. You can benefit from these skills too. Here's how: 1) When listening to another person, show your interest by changing your emotions appropriately to react to the speaker's point, concern, or idea. Emotionally participate in the story. 2) React to any…

Creative people may have natural abilities, but they have something even more important -- habits and beliefs that support creative thought. If you adopt a few of these habits, you will boost your creativity too. Creative people usually do or believe the following: 1) Challenge accepted ways of doing things. 2) Have self-awareness for their preconceptions (biases and ways of viewing problems) and challenge them. 3) When faced with a problem, see it as a challenge, not a roadblock. 4) Are not…

Fun at work improves employee engagement, morale, and productivity, according to numerous research investigations. Fun is not games and jokes, as you might imagine. According to researchers, fun at work means fun activities, coworker socializing, and manager support for fun. All three are interdependent. There is a direct link between an improved bottom line and fun at work. That link includes increased energy, motivation, and employee willingness to naturally go beyond their regular…

Your performance review is your time to shine. To increase the odds of a positive review with fewer unpleasant surprises, meet with your supervisor to discuss specific goals you would like to accomplish over the next year. Write them down. Find time every three months to meet your boss for 15 minutes to discuss performance, the goals you're working toward, and three key performance measures--quality of work, quantity of work, and initiative. Ask for feedback, and note concerns. At each meeting,…

Dealing with difficult people is one of the most queried topics in workplace wellness. There are 92 titles on Amazon.com that contain this phrase. Virtually all guidance focuses on changing yourself, not on changing others. Coping falls into three broad personal intervention categories: actions to take, attitude adjustments to make, and interactions that you make with those who rub you the wrong way. These three prongs of coping include options ranging from accepting the quirkiness of a certain…

Are you a critical thinker? Critical thinking is your ability to make decisions or judgments based on thoughtful steps taken to produce more answers that accurate and reliable. Critical thinking isn't just an expression suggesting one think through a decision. Critical thinking is also a learned skill and a large field of study that includes examining techniques for describing and analyzing a problem and knowing how to evaluate potential solutions, reasons through the data, and use sound…

Work teams can be powerful tools for productivity, but they lose impact when dysfunction affects five critical areas. Diagnose your team's health by examining how well your team performs on each of the following:

1. Trust and ability to be vulnerable with one another.
2. Ability to share and offer ideas freely, without inhibitions, and with acceptance.
3. Forming a consensus, identifying a project, and pursuing it to completion, with each member feeling important to its successful outcome.
4. Silence…

Knowing how to break down cultural communication barriers in the workplace is essential to maintaining productivity. Fail to tackle this important goal and productivity losses will be almost certain. Thankfully, there are thousands of resources that discuss cross-cultural workplace communication, but just a few tips will make you a pro. Be aware and accept that biases and stereotypes about other cultures affect you - and everyone else. With this awareness, think before you speak, learn about…

Why volunteer in your community? The obvious answer is to help an altruistic, nonprofit organization meet its goals without it incurring extra labor costs. Beyond a loving act of giving, volunteering has powerful personal benefits. Volunteerism can fight depression and anxiety because it offers a positive distraction away from negative "self-talk" scripts that often accompany these conditions. The act of giving back serves as a strong counterbalance. The result is you are happier helping…