When there’s a change in your team or your organization, you face two choices:

• You can fight with the person responsible for implementing the change, resist it and defend the status quo.
• Or you can fight for your team or organization and refocus your efforts on making things work even better than they did before the change.

They’re similar emotions and efforts, but they lead to very different outcomes.

The quality of our social interactions, be they professional or personal, greatly determine the quality and efficiency of a team, a network, an organization or a family.

Customer service implies accepting others as they are and not how you would like them to be.

Say yes to every request and you will soon be buried in work. Don’t try to please everyone. Set priorities and plan. Estimate how long each task will take based on your workload.

When you run into a problem, try to think of at least two possible solutions before you take that to your boss. Don’t cultivate a reputation for being a problem-sharer - be a problem-solver!

Learning to say “no” is one of the Golden Rules of time management. In 80% of all cases, you won’t need to say “no.” Offer a “conditional yes” instead – “I’d be happy to help you” – and then refuse politely and explain why – “but I really must finish this.” Don’t let the person leave empty-handed: “I have a suggestion… Have you thought about… Next time…”

Suggest two realistic options and let the person choose which one suits them best.

E-Mail is a great tool, however, when you have sensitive or important matters to discuss, communicate orally instead of electronically. Hiding behind e-mail, you may create the risk that your message will be ignored or misinterpreted.

Who are your customers? Your customers are people who buy, but they can also be those who simply benefit from your efforts. These customers may be paying customers or internal co-workers. Everyone who works has customers. 

Without external customers there would be no sales, no business and no works.

Without internal customers there would be no product or service to sell. Internal customers require the same attention that external customers demand. It is easy for internal individuals or groups who are totally isolated from the external customers to forget how their work affects the external customer. However, all interactions eventually influence the external customer.

It’s the end of the year, good or bad, satisfying or disappointing, it’s time to take a look back over the past year.

Being resilient means being able to see failures as lessons and opportunities for improvement.

Being able to accept your failures as easily as your victories is a sign of strong self-confidence - the kind of confidence that will not be eroded by setbacks, and that will encourage you to persevere in adversity.

Your failures are whispers telling you to try again, they serve as benchmarks for the rest of your journey.

They help you know which paths to avoid in the future, and they are the ones that allow you to turn back and go in the right direction.

Reframe these failures in a way that allows you to make changes and emerge stronger than before.

When you look at a situation from a different perspective, you can see many opportunities for success, growth, and development.

What a great opportunity to reset the dial in order to start the new year with strength, character, brio and conviction.

You are in a situation where exchanging with your interlocutor is an INTERCULTURAL CHALLENGE? Do this …

• Define the facts, not your perception of the facts.

• Analyze your own reactions and emotions. Where do they come from? From your values, beliefs, how YOU see the world?

• Analyze your interlocutor’s reactions and emotions. Where do they come from? From their values, beliefs, how THEY see the world.

• Together, look for a way to engage in a conversation that will help you validate/understand, finding solutions together.

Values are formulated in principles to frame and encourage ideal behaviour. Principles are rules derived from values. For example, honesty is a value that governs behaviour through principles such as: tell the truth, don’t lie, be honest, don’t cheat. Thus, values give rise to principles expressed in the form of do’s and don'ts.

A principle is, in general, a guideline applied within an organization or in our personal lives. The principles, based on logical reflection, justify our “actions” in our eyes and in the eyes of others.

Research links poor stress prediction and the inability to gauge your own potential coping resources to the tendency to complain.

University of Alabama's Yi-Ren Wang and colleagues (2021) note that people that have tendencies to over-estimate stress and underestimate their coping resources are constantly on edge and are primed to focus on the negative as each new day unfolds.

So, how to be less of a complainer? The study suggests that you first try to build your own resilience and sense of control over the events in your life by:

• Learning to adequately estimate the challenges of the day

• Preparing for daily challenges and having a plan to overcome them.

Otherwise, your mood will eventually become worn down and with it, your patience… and everything will seem like a problem!

Positive language is a great way to avoid accidental conflicts sprung from miscommunication. While the change is subtle, the effects are drastic.

Say one of your products is backordered for a month and you need to relay this information to a customer immediately. Consider the following responses:

Negative language: "I can't get you that product until next month. It is back-ordered and unavailable at this time."

Positive language: "That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse!"

Redirecting the conversation from negative to positive places focus on the proposed solution. When the outcome takes center stage, it reduces the odds that customers will be upset.

Have you noticed how easily children can become absorbed in what they’re doing? For most of us, however, it can be something of a challenge. But some people can focus intently on what they're doing and perform exceptionally well as a result.

Psychologists refer to this state of absolute absorption and engagement as being "in flow ."

When we're "in flow," we dedicate all our thoughts to one task. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

But, with all the distractions of modern workplaces, it can seem almost impossible to focus properly.

Try these four tips for finding your flow…

1. Get comfortable and cut out distractions. Wear headphones to drown out excess noise or tidy up a messy desk to get "in the zone."

2. Keep interruptions at bay. Switch off your phone, close your emails, and let your co-workers know you'll be unavailable for an hour or two.

3. Manage your stress. When work is piling up, it can be easy to become flustered. Use time management tools to help take control of your day.

4. Organize your thoughts. Clear your mind of worries and distractions by writing out a To-Do List. Avoid multitasking. Just focus on doing one task and do it really well.

C.Porath, Associate Professor of Management at the University of Georgetown suggests:

If you need to confront a colleague who has been incorrect, ask yourself three questions:

1. Do I feel safe talking to this person?

2. Was the behaviour intentional?

3. Was this the only example of such behaviour on their part?

If you answered NO to any of these questions, do not discuss the incident with the culprit. Focus on your own effectiveness and, in future meetings, follow the acronym BIAF: Be brief, informative, amiable and firm.

But if you answered YES to all three questions, consider telling your co-worker how their behaviour made you feel.

It’s the cognitive and descriptive part of yourself. It’s developing a self-image. Do you really know yourself? Have you ever taken the time to listen to what your life tells you about your true nature? It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t. Few of us take the time to discover ourselves intentionally. We are bombarded with messages from other people - what they think of us, how they perceive us, what they want for us - that we forget to include the only voice that matters. Our own voice!

Feedback is more likely to affect learning, growth and change in areas that pose less of a threat to the recipient’s self-esteem.

Learning new skills is usually the easiest kind of change a person can make.

Changing someone’s attitudes and habits is possible but takes longer than the typical feedback process. Feedback directed to this type of change will need to be sustained over time and focused on long-term learning, not just immediate outcomes.

Changing the inherent personality traits is the most difficult and requires an intrinsic will of the person.

If you were to give an outright "No" to a customer's question, that would diminish the value of your service. Of course, you won't always know the answers, but it's about how you manage the "No."

Don’t offer a bland "I'm sorry, I don't know."

Imagine saying this, and you have the customer give you a blank stare. If you don't offer to be helpful to a customer in need, that only frustrates them more. Thus, making your job harder.

Instead, focus on alternatives:

• •“That’s a great question. I want to be sure I give you the right answer, so I need to double-check with someone. Can I call you back?”

• “Before I answer your question, I need to check a few things on my side. Can I follow-up with you later today?”

•  “My colleague is an expert in that area. Could you hold just a moment while I check with him?”

When forming ideas, many of us fall back on physical habits – some of us pace, for example, while others sit still. But is one bodily state more conducive to creative thinking than another?

A set of experiments reported in the Journal Frontiers in Psychology tested how college students fared on a range of creative-thinking tasks while in different states.

The participants came up with higher-rated responses while walking in a loop than while standing still, and even better ones while roaming freely. But the experimenters also found that students earned stronger ratings while standing than while sitting or lying down.

The researchers propose that more physically active conditions likely consume more mental bandwidth than less active ones, and so could reduce the amount of control people exert on their thoughts.

When you want your creative juices flowing – get up and roam freely!

An ally is any person who supports, advocates, or defends another person or group of persons from under-represented or marginalized groups to remove external barriers that prevent them from bringing their skills and talents to the workplace or community.

An ally is a member of a group with privileges that takes steps to support people outside their own group and/or facilitate access to opportunities for less privileged people.

Being an ally is an active verb and an ongoing process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and responsibility with individuals and/or groups of under-represented or marginalized people.

Emotional awareness is an ability to recognize your own emotions and their effects. People who have this ability:

•  Know what emotions they are feeling at a given time and why

• Understand the connections between their emotions and their thoughts and actions

• Understand how their feelings will affect their performance; and

•  Are guided by how they feel and their personal values.

Being aware of your own emotions and how they affect your behavior is essential to interacting effectively with others.

Some people dread small talk. They worry that it will be boring, awkward, or that they’ll run out of things to say…But it doesn’t have to be painful.

Here are two tips to begin mastering the art of small talk:

Be interesting - Instead of responding to a simple question like, "How are you doing?" with "Good, you?" embellish your response with tidbits of information. For instance, you might say, "Good, I biked to work today and I'm feeling great!" or ‘’Great, I’m going to Paris next week and I just can’t wait!"

Be interested – Be curious, ask open-ended questions and carefully listen to the other person answer. For instance, "What do you do?", followed by "What brought you to that type of work?"

By being interesting and genuinely interested in the other person, you may turn a small talk into an authentic conversation.

When problems arise – because they will - Don’t cover up service issues. When there are problems don’t choose to be discreet and hide it under the rug.

Instead, take control of all your customer service issues. Take the initiative to clarify what's going on, when you'll resolve it, and tell them that you're working on it.

Organisations that offer great customer service show you how to identify issues and anticipate them!

Is your desk filled with piles of papers?

Is your desktop jammed with endless folders? Is your email inbox overflowing?

All that clutter and chaos can cause you to work less optimally and decrease your creativity.

Research suggests that you’d be better keeping things tidy as you go or cleaning up after you finish. Streamlining is an essential process for maintaining satisfaction at work, while also benefitting your physical health and cognitive abilities.

So, file that paper after you’re done with it, organize your desktop, and go through (answer or set a flag and file) your inbox until it’s emptied …

If you can’t stop …ask yourself why you feel the need to keep everything out.

Whether it's via emails or chats, you must pay attention to your tone and how you respond.

A good rule of thumb is to craft a written message and reread it at least twice because you can only hit SEND once!

Here’s an old customer service trick that will help you with your tone. And this goes for phone calls, emails, chats or any customer interaction.

Before you speak (or write) in a snippy way, ask yourself, “Would I talk to my grandma like this?”

The emotional tax is the accumulation of emotions from being on guard to protect oneself from prejudice, from feeling different at work, and the associated effects on health, well-being, and the ability to thrive at work.

Feeling different from the rest of the group and having to be wary of potential prejudices, involve risks to your well-being that accompany this state.

People at the intersections of "race", ethnicity, sex and other aspects of identity are vulnerable to these risks. And when their unique identities and challenges or differences are not addressed, they may feel at risk in the workplace.

We should feel psychologically safe in the workplace. It is this feeling that someone can share what they really think and feel without fear of negative consequences.

The me-first ethic that has become so dominant in economics and society today will likely make these disasters worse. For the human species to survive, we will need an ethic of compassion, and emotional intelligence skills like resilience, empathy, teamwork, and collaboration, more than ever.

Daniel Goleman (Emotional and Social Intelligence)

Offer rewards, not threats - We often go negative to incite others to act, warning to take something away or raising the specter of future problems if they don’t take action. Rewards have the potential to be more effective.

Give them a choice - A sense of control is super important for motivating people to act. Example, team members can be given the opportunity to suggest guidelines for the rule-making process.

Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot suggests that incentives and choices can motivate people more effectively because our brain is set up to be more reactive to rewards and have a sense of action, and that has a huge effect on our beliefs and behaviour.

Your customer has a busy life, just like you do. Keep that in mind, especially when you’re initiating contact with unhappy customers.

Here’s an example. Instead of saying “I’ll have this issue fixed soon. You’ll receive an email update in 1-2 business days.”

Try saying “I’ll have this issue fixed for you soon. I can give you a call around noon tomorrow with an update. Or would you prefer an email?”

In the bad example, you’re not allowing the customer any control over when or how they receive an update. Worse yet, you’re telling them they might have to wait two days.

In the good example, you're inviting the customer to either suggest a different time or opt for an email. This personal touch allows the customer some control over when you intrude on their day.

Toxic behaviours are acts that poison the work atmosphere. They grow from selfishness and insensitivity and go from mockery to manipulation.

Toxic behaviour is destabilizing, generates stress and frustration and has a negative emotional impact. It steals your energy.

If you can’t limit or cut-off contact, Robin Stern, associate director of Yale Center for Emotional intelligence suggests shielding yourself by setting firm boundaries. Assertively say no to demands that feel unreasonable - without justifying yourself.