professional relationships

It All Comes Back to Fear & Love

It All Comes Back to Fear & Love

Yep. We’re going to say it again: we don’t stop being human beings when we become employees (as a gentle reminder).

As humans, we all have emotions, which can sometimes manifest in some questionable approaches to employee to employee, supervisor to employee, and employee to supervisor behaviors, interactions, and exchanges. Have you noticed? As we’re fond of saying, there’s a reason for everything: emotions can get in the way of effective, concise and direct communication, which can then lead to our work environment becoming a place where feelings guide the professional space as opposed to thoughtful, intellectual, rational and intentional goals aimed at a common purpose and directive. Feelings can be illogical, mercurial, random and often incomprehensible. It’s just part of being human. As employees, however, we really need to be mindful of how feelings are very different from rational thought. Feelings are not analytical, impartial or judicious, all characteristics of a well run business.

The thing is (and not going all “kumbaya let’s give one another a hug” here), every single human emotion can be boiled down to two fundamental emotional sources: love and fear.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross says: “There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.” (OK, a little kumbaya. To add a bit of gravitas, The Atlantic and The Harvard Business Review among others, have published articles discussing love and fear in business, but you take our meaning).

SO. How do these two disparate emotions manifest at work?

Not Responding and The Clear Message it Sends

Not Responding and The Clear Message it Sends

In our fast paced business world (which seems oddly even more busy tethered to our computers instead of traveling to meetings and commitments), it’s SO easy to become mired in the singularly focused worlds of what we do, how we plan our days, what we want/need to accomplish by what time and who we need when we need them. Makes sense. We need to get stuff done, and in our currently remote situation, which hopefully will end very soon, this is even more challenging: deadlines, Zoom calls, business development, responding to immediate needs of our colleagues, personal life challenges of homeschooling kiddos, designating work spaces, and maintaining home and hearth. It’s a lot, absolutely no question.

We’re humans working with humans, each with our own lens and view on any given situation and interaction. Do we take the time to think about how our actions or inactions affect others? They are certainly easy to forget, particularly in our “home bubbles.” without the personal, non-verbal cues that we receive by being present together in an office, that our actions, inactions, responses, and non responses, do in fact affect others, and that there’s a concept called “common courtesy” that we sometimes forget in our busy lives.

The Core of FIG: Relationships

The Core of FIG: Relationships

As we alluded to last week, the word “relationships” is another amorphous piece of language we throw around a lot, in both business and in our personal lives. But what exactly are they?

For the purposes of this piece, Dictionary.com defines the word as: “a connection, association, or involvement; an emotional or other connection between people.”

OK, a good start, but how do we initiate, develop, nurture and sustain them is what interests FIG. Why do they matter? Why are they important? What do they mean? And why should we care?

Inroducing Shifting the Diamond: How a Change in Professional Perspective Can Serve The Rest of Your Career

Inroducing Shifting the Diamond: How a Change in Professional Perspective Can Serve The Rest of Your Career

We know... you probably get invitations to webinars ALL THE TIME. Please, bear with us: this is not just another professional development course. Future Image Group is dedicated to empowering employees at each level of every organization to make a permanent change in the way they create meaningful relationships in the professional space.

Let’s Talk About Self-Love: Self-Care to Make Yourself a Better Professional

Let’s Talk About Self-Love: Self-Care to Make Yourself a Better Professional

Around Valentine’s Day every year, we like to take the time to think about love in a different frame. Love of others isn’t the only important thing. Love of self and an understanding of how to weave love into personal and professional relationships is a foundational part of having a healthy social life. This year, we want to talk about using self-care to make yourself a better professional.

Millennials: 5 Steps to Make Now to Advance Your Career Faster

Millennials: 5 Steps to Make Now to Advance Your Career Faster

Today’s professional world is rife with opportunities for entrepreneurs and self-starters to create the life they want if they work hard and leverage their connections. Between the gig economy and the large force of young professionals in the traditional workplace (a combination of Gen X, Gen Y [Millennials], and Gen Z), the way people perceive and achieve professional advancement is changing. However, with the millions of young people entering the workforce today, competition is fierce. Here are 5 steps young professionals can take to differentiate themselves from the competition and move toward quicker advancement, whether climbing a more traditional corporate ladder or pursuing the creation of their own business.

FIG Role Model: Sherry Turkle

FIG Role Model: Sherry Turkle

The “Margaret Mead of digital culture,” Professor Sherry Turkle is an incredibly accomplished person.  She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Because she has been studying people’s interaction with technology since the birth of the earliest personal computers, she is an incredible source of knowledge on the ways we use technology as a social tool and how it affects us as a part of our psychological lives.

Spring Cleaning: 5 Negative Social Habits to Throw Out Now

Spring Cleaning: 5 Negative Social Habits to Throw Out Now

We all have our bad habits. We’re human, after all! However, another great part about being human is the fact that we can decide to work on our bad habits and grow out of them. One of the areas in which people have the most bad habits is in social interaction. Here are five of them you can start working on today.

5 Ways to Overcome Social Anxiety

5 Ways to Overcome Social Anxiety

Do you become overwhelmed or anxious in social situations? You’re not alone. According to The National Institute of Mental Health, 12.1% of U.S. adults experience some kind of social anxiety at some point in their life. Of those who are affected, an estimated 29.9% had serious impairment, 38.8% had moderate impairment, and 31.3% had mild impairment.

FIG Book Club: February Recommended Reading

FIG Book Club: February Recommended Reading

Welcome to Future Image Group’s Book Club! Every month, we’ll recommend a book, abstract, or research paper related to personal and professional development in the workplace (which, in turn, is also related to the development of social skills and more meaningful personal relationships).  We hope you enjoy – and we’d love to hear your recommendations for books that have helped you or given you some insight on your own journey of professional or personal social development.