Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Fear Free Future Posted: 19 Dec 2010 11:54 PM PST Fear is a complex emotion, it can protect us and limit us, it can make us timid and it can make us aggressive. Fear evolved for practical reasons. We assess external stimulation for risk, if a situation appears to represent a threat our whole body reacts. The limbic part of the brain (the oldest, most primitive part closest to the spine) takes control and shuts down access to the cerebral (thinking) part of the brain. Blood flows to the muscles and heart and away from the brain. Powerful stimulants and pain-suppressors, endorphins and adrenaline are pumped into our body. We are ready to fight or escape. In some ways our emotions struggle to evolve fast enough to cope with our rapidly developing lifestyles. We often appear to struggle to differentiate between situations which require fear as a response and those that require a different and more evolved response. This misapplication of fear is what limits us or makes us aggressive when we could respond more appropriately and effectively. Fear in work situations might make us cautious missing opportunities for creativity or innovation, it might make us insecure preventing us from speaking out, it might make us conform rather than challenge an error. Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi observed:  "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." Fear occurs when we lack the confidence to deal with a situation. This might be perfectly reasonable when we are confronted by a Tiger, but something more subtle and nuanced is required when we are confronted with a challenge that we need to think our way out of rather than fight or run. Indeed the fear response specifically inhibits our ability to think our way out of a problem. Intense physical activity mimics a lot of the physiological elements of fear - try doing mental arithmetic while exercising hard. We need to learn to manage our emotions to the extent that we can keep fear under control and maintain our capacity to think, even under stress. For much of our evolutionary past winter was a fearful time of year. The shortest day was celebrated as it meant the light was returning. The animals were slaughtered providing fresh meat for the celebrations and avoiding the need to feed them during the famine months from January to March. Many of us are experiencing a dark period in our society. We can choose to respond to that darkness with fear and the consequent aggression or timidity or we can choose not to. As we celebrate the passing of the darkness this year, let's make a conscious decision to move from fearful reaction to loving response as much as we can. We have the choice to move from darkness into the light or into further darkness. Lightness requires us to replace our fear with love. Further fear will lead to deeper darkness. If you are afraid of the dark, live with light and love, not fear. Best of TED this week: Shimon Shocken talks about the transformative effects of mountain biking on prisoners in Israel. Watch his TED talk, put it on your web site, link to it and talk about it to everyone you meet. I have put it on www.neilcrofts.com If you would like help in finding your authenticity, give me a call. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Transformers Posted: 12 Dec 2010 11:34 PM PST Last week I was facilitating a corporate leadership and teamwork event. As is usual in this kind of event there are, as one of my colleagues describes them, three types of participant - explorers, vacationers and prisoners. Explorers are those who come to find out whatever they can to learn, connect and develop. Vacationers see it as three days out of the office and an opportunity to kick back. Prisoners feel that they are not there through choice and will just endure. Our objective as facilitators is to engage all three groups to such an extent that the event becomes transformative, in terms of their leadership and team working capabilities, in this case. Part of the way we do this is to set ourselves a daily "brand" benchmark. For the first day our brand included "fun", for the second "inspiration", for the third 'transformation". Fun, because when people are having fun they are engaged and engagement is required for learning. We are inspired when some input has personally relevant value to our life. We are transformed when we can embed the learning to the extent that it becomes a permanent change in behaviour. Here is the key though, as facilitators, to make the first day fun, we need to be inspiring, to make the second day inspiring, we need to be transformational and to make the third day transformational, we need to be transcendent. This is the challenge, the test and the opportunity of transformational teaching and communication. With good materials and a good event design, inspiring should be reasonably easy. Transformational is altogether more challenging. Being transformational means that through the exercises, conversations, materials and experiences participants are able to re-wire their brains. They do this by opening up neural pathways that may have lain previously unused, to the extent that they become habits. Transformational teaching is interesting across multiple learning preferences (kinesthetic, intellectual, emotional, auditory, visual etc), repeated often enough to land without getting boring and has enough distraction free time around it to be processed into habit. Transcendence is another whole level. It requires a level of authentic immersion in and passion for the subject that enables the teacher, facilitator to maintain a state of transcendence. Perhaps like an artist, musician or athlete, getting into the zone and being at one with their medium and their audience. My own experience is that working at other levels is transactional, there is a contract that offers a certain value in exchange for attention. Transcendence is captivating, it draws people in, even the vacationers and prisoners. It is compelling, even those who are highly resistant to the messages find it hard to counter. I aspire to do my teaching from a transcendent space. To make that profound connection with myself and the audience that helps them to fully connect with their authenticity and apply it wholeheartedly to their work and their organisation. Best of TED this week: Shimon Shocken talks about the transformative effects of mountain biking on prisoners in Israel. Watch his TED talk, put it on your web site, link to it and talk about it to everyone you meet. I have put it on www.neilcrofts.com If you would like help in finding your authenticity, give me a call. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Transparency Posted: 06 Dec 2010 12:11 AM PST Back in the innocent, febrile days of the dotcom boom in 1998/9, we at Razorfish and others like us were touting transparency as an inevitable side effect of the internet. I am not sure our clients really knew what we meant, I am not sure we knew what we mean, but it seemed like a logical outcome of digital. Now we know. When you put recording devices into everyones hands and connect them to a global distribution network - secrets, of any significance,cease to exist. Whatever the nuances of the Wikileaks diplomatic download, this is transparency in action. Our advice to our clients in 1998 was to only do things that were fully aligned with their brand and brands had to be fully aligned with their market place. In a transparent world; Do NOTHING of which you are not proud. Politicians, diplomats and businesses have had plenty of warning to get used to the idea of transparency. It was inevitable as soon as Tim Berners Lee let the World Wide Web genie out of the bottle, and so it has happened. The reality is that we have become so completely used to the idea of saying one thing and doing another, to deceit, to lying that it is culturally hard to shift. To be fair to them, many businesses have already got their acts together - now it is the turn of governments. These are evolutionary lessons. Evolutionary lessons are hard. If you are at the leading edge they are hard because as Schopenhauer said: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. If you are behind the curve they are hard because the sensibility of the community has moved on and you are seen as vulgar, out of touch and embarrassing. Watching the writhing, self serving, finger pointing of the embarrassed you can see where they lie on the curve. Once again, the only answer is authenticity, to be true to our own brand. For every one of us, in business and politics. That way, even in a transparent world there are no embarrassing skeletons to be divulged over the internet. I was really hoping to be able to launch "Magic Monday" today, my anthology of six years worth of Monday messages, sadly the technology has delayed me and I have too much on this week, to be ready by next Monday. Many apologies to those who are waiting - I still hope to have it ready before Christmas. RA Mashelkar talks about the transformative effects of low cost design, why not apply these principles rather than implement austerity measures? Surely it is only fear and self serving to do otherwise?. Watch his TED talk, put it on your web site, link to it and talk about it to everyone you meet. I have put it on www.neilcrofts.com If you would like help in finding your authenticity, give me a call. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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