Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Author: signordal
Why Guilt Is A Horrible Motivator
You’re reading Why Guilt Is A Horrible Motivator, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
So you’ve eaten a piece of cake that you weren’t supposed to eat, or maybe you missed your child’s first ballet concert. If you’re like most people, and not a psychopath, chances are, you will feel guilty about what you did. Guilt is what we naturally feel when we believe we’ve done something wrong. But should we be looking to guilt to make us more productive? The answer is no. Guilt is not a good motivator. You’ll be better of counting on other things for that productivity boost.
Guilt Takes Up Too Much of Your Mental Space
If you’re trying to motivate yourself to finally start on that project you’ve been putting off, you might be thinking that you should remind yourself of how disappointed your boss would be if you don’t finish it in time. You might be trying to guilt yourself into working on it so you don’t let your boss down. A lot of times, this will get you working, but will you be surprised if I say you won’t be your most productive while you work?
Guilt makes you feel bad about yourself. When you go on a guilt trip, you’re essentially focusing on your flaws and imperfections. But as scientists will tell you, you’re most productive when you feel confident, competent, and happy, not when you feel like you’re being a horrible human being. Happiness is what increases productivity. If you have to spend part of your mental energy trying to deal with negative feelings like guilt, you won’t be free to focus all your mental faculties on the task at hand. So guilt, instead of helping you be more productive, ends up being just and extra burden on your brain.
It would be much better if you focus on doing the right thing instead of avoiding the wrong. Focus on being a good person instead of trying not to look like the bad guy. Rather than guilting yourself into finishing that project, motivate yourself by thinking of how happy you would make your boss feel when you complete it. Think of how grateful he would be that you did your part. Picture him celebrating the completion of the project and imagine yourself being partly responsible for his happiness. Thinking of the positive impact you can make will get you feeling happy and confident so you can be optimally productive.
It Makes You Do More of What You Feel Guilty Doing
What did you do when you felt guilty about breaking your diet and eating that cake? Did feeling guilty help you get back on track? Chances are, it did the opposite. You broke your diet, felt horrible about it, and decided, “What the heck I might as well have more cake.”
When you believe you’ve done something bad, you begin to think that you deserve to be punished for what you’ve done. If no one on the outside is going to punish you, you start looking for ways to punish yourself. Your self-punishment is your attempt to cleanse yourself of your guilty conscience. You end up punishing yourself by doing more of what made you feel horrible and guilty. You eat more of that cake, feel guiltier and it just becomes a cycle of guilt and self-punishment.
Next time you make a mistake, instead of beating yourself up for the wrong and pushing yourself into a vicious cycle, celebrate what you’ve done right so far. Focus on how you managed to stick to your diet two weeks, for instance, instead of letting that one time that you had a slice of cake overshadow everything. That’s more likely to get you back on track. You’ll end up wanting to feel like you’re succeeding again and getting back to your success strategy.
It’s an Extrinsic Motivator So It Doesn’t Last
You don’t want to be in a situation where the only reason you do what you do is because you want to avoid feeling guilty. So maybe the only reason you’re spending sleepless nights studying through med-school is because you don’t want to disappoint your parents. Maybe only thing that’s making you work hard to finish projects and meet deadlines is your desire to not feel bad about disappointing your boss. This means that you’re looking to the outside to find the motivation to do what you do, and there’s nothing intrinsic pushing you forward.
Your desire to avoid guilt is an extrinsic motivator. What would happen if this extrinsic motivator is removed? What would happen if, for instance, you find yourself working as an entrepreneur with no boss to disappoint? You lose your impetus. The new freedom confuses you and might even leave you paralyzed on how to act. That’s why you might see a person who is very hard-working in a structured office setting struggle to get anything done when they become self-employed entrepreneurs.
What you want to do instead is to find a way to build and nurture that intrinsic motivation. Regardless of the job you have, get yourself to a place where you wake up every morning ready to take on the day, not for your family or your boss, but simply because you enjoy what you do. Find a way to do your job simply because it makes you happy. That way you’ll keep being productive and doing your best, even when you have no boss to impress.
The next time you want to guilt yourself into doing something remember that you’ll be sabotaging yourself. It’s much better if you focus on doing the right thing instead of avoiding the bad, celebrating your successes, and enjoying yourself through every task.
Nelu Mbingu is a self-improvement blogger. She enjoys sharing her ideas about personal growth and social success on her blog, Lessons From Everyday Life. She loves telling her stories, hearing other people’s stories, and becoming wiser day by day. Visit her blog or follow her on Instagram: neluthecurious_
You’ve read Why Guilt Is A Horrible Motivator, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
5 Tips to Stop Wasting Money on Substandard Services When Outsourcing
Outsourcing jobs is a great way to solve problems at work. It can help you deal with heavy work overload, time sensitive deadlines, lack of work competence or having inadequate workforce at a given time.
However, it is still not as ideal as it sounds, especially with all its potential risks. This includes hiring incompetent freelancers or competent freelancers that overcharge their services.
It is in your best interest to avoid both of these scenarios and the following article will help you do so. Here we will provide four tips on how to avoid wasting money on substandard services when outsourcing jobs.
Plan for what is needed
The best way to avoid unnecessary expenses is to have a well-laid-out plan for your freelancers. The more specific you are, the better.
First of all, the people you collaborate with are not mind readers. Since you communicate via emails, it’s easy for a project to lose its track due to the lack of necessary information.
Moreover, if you fail to provide detailed information, you risk getting a project that meets your demands but lacks in quality. So, give them online samples of the level of quality you expect to see. Try to be specific about what you do not want to see.
This way, you will be fully covered when asking for a refund if the demands are not met. Moreover, freelancers who lack the competence to meet those demands will back off.
Ask for previous work samples
When you are hiring someone, it is imperative that you go over their portfolio.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell from someone’s portfolio if he can fill in your specific task. So, for that reason, it would be best to ask freelancers if they have a previous work sample of something that is similar to what you are going to ask for.
Maintain communication
Once you select your freelancers and award them the project, it is important that you maintain communication. As we said, you are not sharing the same working space.
If the project is delicate, it would be wise to organize a Skype call. You can also ask to receive screenshots of how your project is going. This way, you can correct any inconsistencies immediately. You’ll be able to see in advance if you have made the right call, too.
Get a referral or test potential candidates
Lastly, if you are not sure in the expertise of your potential candidates, you can test them out. You can also ask for referrals from other trusted users in the same niche as you. You can do the testing if you are down to two or three potential candidates so it won’t cost you a lot.
Focus on these traits
If you want a reliable outsourcing partner, then you need to have a clear list of their purpose. If they can meet these standards, you can count on them.
> Positive results – The Company can help you increase your customer satisfaction and decrease production costs within the desired time frame.
> Compatibility – The Company should share common goals and values as your company. They need to be performance centric, care about their clients and community and use same methods for managing the company.
> Innovative – You need a company that can greatly contribute to your business and that can perform on their own without the constant need for monitoring. They should help you modernize your business regarding technology, equipment, etc.
See Also: How Cloud Technology Can Help Your Business Grow
> Flexibility – You need a company that can adapt to your standards and provide you with a personalized service to meet your demands. They need to consider your needs as a priority and you need to adequately reward them for their devotion.
> Adaptable management – You need a company that can respond quickly and adapt to changes without sacrificing the quality of the end results. In other words, it needs to have a reliable management team as well as competent staff.
> Benchmarking – You are going to know the outsourcing solution is reliable if they can provide you with evidence explaining that you are receiving a high-quality service. They need to create new growth potential and offer measurable success in the field of employee and client satisfaction.
> Resourceful – They need to continuously deliver in-depth content that is innovative and that fits your needs and demands.
> Constant quality improvement – With continuous collaboration, the quality and the performance of your outsourcing solution should improve. Basically, you need a company that can keep up with you. They need to work on their own staff and provide new and comprehensive training courses for their employees in order to achieve these results.
Conclusion
We hope you will end up with an outsourcing agency or freelancer you can trust and collaborate on numerous other projects in the future. Once you find a competent outsourcing company, it will be far easier to handle projects in the future.
See Also: A Practical Guide to Hiring and Managing Freelancers
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Japanese Architectural Firm Atelier Boronski Designed a Sophisticated Riverside Villa Located in Kyoto
Atelier Boronski, a Japanese architectural firm headed by a New Zealand-born architect educated in both countries, designed this sophisticated riverside villa located in Kyoto, Japan. The home covers a total area of 230 square meters, and is situated in a quiet street that still enjoys the advantage of being close by to the city center. Surrounded by cafes, restaurants, and bakeries, and only a short walk away from the museum..
Lygia Pape’s Radical Banquet
By the time she made it, Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s career had evolved through two schools of geometric abstraction—Concretism and its less rigid Rio de Janeiro counterpart Neo-Concretism. She had made paintings, sculpture, artists’ books, films, installations, and performance art. A retrospective of Pape’s work currently at the Met Breuer—her first solo exhibit in the United States—is highly conceptual, drawing on semiotics, architectural theory, and anthropology, but never losing a deep connection with the visceral realities of daily life.
A Mystic Monumentality
In recent years Louis Kahn’s messy personal history has threatened to overshadow his immense professional accomplishments, yet his aura has grown steadily, not just for what he achieved but also because of what has taken place in the built environment since his death. After he almost single-handedly restored architecture’s age-old status as an art form, his legacy was quickly squandered by younger coprofessionals. From the mid-1970s onward they have careened from one extreme, short-lived stylistic fad to the next—Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, Blobitecture—and lost sight of the profound values Kahn wanted to convey: timelessness, solidity, nobility, and repose.
If not for the foresight of a few individuals including Theodore…
If not for the foresight of a few individuals including Theodore Roosevelt, the American bison could have become extinct. Hunted to the edge of annihilation, by the early 20th century only a few small herds remained. In 1956, 29 bison were brought from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska and released in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. Here they roam freely on 46,000 acres and number in the hundreds. Photo by National Park Service.
The Importance Of Emotional Intelligence For A Leader
Leadership is a people business.
If you weren’t working with other people, you wouldn’t be a leader. You’d just be some crazed shouty guy on his own in a badly-lit office.
And, without a personality yourself, you would just be an app. You would just be regulating the flow of work, like an algorithm unable to bend or adapt to the human values around you.
At the heart of what makes us human is our emotions. We can concede that as a human with a personality and a workforce, you are technically a leader. But, if you don’t understand or can’t work with your emotions and those of your colleagues, then you’re not going to be a very effective one.
There is a name for that crucial faculty for understanding emotions and that is emotional intelligence or EQ for short. Everybody has at least an ounce of it. Some just have a different type than others. For the greatest leaders, it is as vital as water or air.
So what are the constituents of EQ?
There are three factors that add up to create your emotional intelligence. They are:
• Perceiving and understanding emotions. This is the basic ability to tell one emotion from another and their intensity in yourself and in others.
• Managing emotions. This is about keeping your emotions under control and the ability to consciously affect the emotions of your colleagues.
• Utilizing emotions. This is next level stuff. It is your ability to harness emotions and drive them towards helping you or your employees towards accomplishing tasks.
If these seem like unattainable superpowers to you, it’s time to start taking some specific steps to develop your abilities and learn what makes emotional intelligence for leaders.
How to assess your EQ
Figuring out your strengths and weaknesses can help you to identify which elements of your emotional intelligence need some work.
Emotional intelligence is a matter of responsibility, mindfulness and empathy. Ask yourself how you score on these factors in various scenarios and find out more about your EQ.
Responsibility
For example, when you wake up in the morning and you know you have a ton of work to do, what is your instinct?
If your first idea is to make a plan and work through your tasks, you can consider yourself pretty responsible. If your immediate idea is to roll over and go back to sleep until the big bad work has gone away, well, that’s less responsible.
You might want to take some time by yourself to figure out why you’re in the line of work you are and what leading your team truly means to you.
Mindfulness
How about when you reach the end of a tough day and you’re full of stress and rejected? Do you push it down, like a supposedly good, strong leader?
Well, that’s not dealing with the problem. It’s a fast-track to burnout. Your humanity doesn’t stop at the seams of your suit. You have a soul to listen to, too.
Instead, when you’re feeling stressed, try using mindfulness techniques to reconnect with your core. You can go for a walk, listen to the sounds around you, name the colors you can see from where you’re standing or name the emotions that you’re feeling.
See Also: 7 Ways Mindfulness Can Unlock The Door To Your Authentic Life
Empathy
Suppose you have good reason to pass that heavy workload onto a colleague who’s just as busy as you. Regardless of whether that was the right or wrong decision, did you stop to think about how that would make him feel?
Dishing out heavy workloads without a thought for the emotional consequences puts you back in the ‘app’ territory. In other words, you have about as much empathy as a smartphone.
Slow down, try to only give out tough tasks face to face and make eye contact. Train yourself to remember there’s a human being behind every workplace accomplishment.
See Also: How To Develop Empathy By Understanding Subjective Hardship
How to boost your EQ
So, now you have a pretty good idea where your EQ levels are at. Unless you’re Oprah or Mr. Rogers, there’s probably room for improvement.
Most of it is stuff you can do as you work. Slow down, try to identify problems as they arise instead of steaming through them and apply some of these techniques to train your EQ:
Improving your perception of emotions
Take some ‘me’ time. Put fifteen minutes aside each day to think about what you’ve felt at various junctures. Reflect on how you felt in your mind and the way it made your body feel. Soon you will come to better recognize your emotions in real time.
And take some ‘you’ time. Observe how the individuals in your team respond to situations and to each other. When one of them has a problem, ask yourself what the reason behind their behavior might be.
Are they overworked? Insecure? Unfulfilled? How does it feel to be that person wearing those shoes?
It doesn’t mean you need to tolerate their behavior, but it might help you find ways to rectify it without negatively impacting the team.
Improving your management of emotions
So, you’ve slowed down and you’ve figured out you’re stressed, what next?
A change of context is always good and can help you get perspective. If you’re hot and bothered, splash water on your face. If you’re furious and full of self-loathing, spend five minutes watering the office plants. Seriously.
Likewise, if you sense negative emotions in others, don’t rise to them. Instead, take a minute to collect yourself, take a deep breath and suggest they do the same.
Improving your utilization of emotions
Emotions are a powerful force. We’ve already seen how they make us human. Now, imagine if you could harness that power like a solar panel.
You can do that by tracing those emotions to their roots, figuring out what the problem is and working on it. If you feel out of your depth, write a plan. If your colleagues feel bitter and unfulfilled, give them a challenge right when they’re hungriest for it.
Now, your EQ level just rose from ‘political tyrant’ to ‘leadership ninja’. Work is about to get much better for you and all your loyal team.
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Bar Orian Architects Have Designed this Elegant and Contemporary Home in Tel Aviv, Israel
Bar Orian Architects have designed this elegant contemporary home, which covers a total area of 250 square meters, in Tel Aviv, Israel. The project was completed in 2016. The exterior of the home is characterized by pale concrete walls and wooden shutters that cover all windows – both ingenious and stylish ways to counter the scorching heat and sun of Tel Aviv. The greenery around it serves the same purpose,..
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Apartment Beautifully Decorated by the Architectural Studio Lugerin Architects
This apartment, beautifully decorated by the architectural studio Lugerin Architects, covers a total area of 160 square meters and is located in a skyscraper in Klovsky Carnegie Center, Kiev, Ukraine. One of the advantages of this house is its views towards the central part of the city, which we can enjoy through its panoramic windows. The living room, dining room, and kitchen share the same completely open space that ends..
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Sig Nordal 