Category: Personal and Professional Development

Composure: Whether they make mistakes or simply must deal with intimidating people, everyone has stressful moments in meetings. How can you stay composed?

Composure creates poise under pressure. ~ www.jaywren.com

Composure: How to Overcome Meeting Anxiety

Anxiety in meetings can be a problem for anyone.  However, whether you have natural poise or suffer social anxiety, you can stay composed for success.

Breathe

You don’t have to stop for a 20-minute mindfulness meditation to use breathing to gather composure.  Anxiety can suppress our breathing.  A lack of oxygen creates even more anxiety.  However, replenishing oxygen with a breath can reduce anxiety.

Breath in slowly and quietly.  Mentally focus on your breath.  The process will give your body the oxygen to burn the adrenaline from anxiety.  Furthermore, focusing on your breathing redirects your thinking from your anxiety to a calming breath and allows you to become spontaneous.  You will appear poised and gain composure.

Listen with a Purpose

Focus on what people are saying.  Ask yourself why they are saying those things.  Think of how the contributions of other people is useful to you.  Seeing the benefits in another person’s message takes your focus off your insecurities and creates positive feelings about what you are learning.

Practice Intelligent Silence

Intelligent silence is powerful.

Attending meetings and never speaking decreases your value to the meeting.  However, people who listen and speak when they have something meaningful to say strengthen the power of their contributions.

Additionally, allowing yourself to be silent and think before you speak will increase your composure.

Bring an Agenda

Come to meetings with a list of things that you want to know and things you want to say.  This approach is especially helpful when you are attending a job interview.

Become the Facilitator

Giving your support to other meeting attendees takes your focus off your insecurities and makes you valuable to the success of the meeting.

Developing the skills of a facilitator helps you as a public speaker, helps you in building professional relationships, and helps you in becoming a better friend or family member.  Furthermore, becoming the facilitator gives you leadership power in a meeting.

Wisdom: Is this a hollow word? A meaningless concept? Or is wisdom a powerful force that is available to everyone who seeks it.

The voice of wisdom is always there, even when we can’t hear it. ~ www.jaywren.com

The Wisdom to See Through Bias

Wisdom is that quiet voice that makes us pause and question our thinking.  It is our inner voice.  Some people call it the instinct of our gut.

When bias is shouting in our ear, wisdom is calling to us to look beyond our feelings to find the truth.

Knowing when to beware of bias and when to embrace your inner voice is the direction to wisdom.

Case Study #1:  Company leaders love a group of products.  Bias leads them to believe that these products are critical to a company’s image.

However, this group of products is losing money.  Furthermore, these products distract from the great products that will create a successful company future.

In this case, wisdom can balance between the feelings for image and the logic of building a successful business.  The company leaders decide to sell these image products.

Case Study #2:  Proud Dad loves baseball.  He insists that his daughter play fast-pitch softball.  However, his daughter hates everything about fast-pitch softball.  The size of the ball, the fear of dangerous pitching and fielding fly balls, even wearing a glove and cleats, everything.

However, his daughter loves volleyball.  She even excels in volleyball.

Proud Dad has no interest in volleyball. The games bore him, in part because he has never been around the sport.  Volleyball is not a sport that triggers for his enthusiasm.

Fortunately, Proud Dad can listen to that quiet voice speaking under the noise of his own bias.  He sees that the sports his daughter chooses are about her interests and not his interests.

Proud Dad signs up his daughter for volleyball and comes to the games.  He develops a positive interest (a new bias) in his daughter’s volleyball.

The Powerful Freedom of Wisdom

Wisdom frees us from the anger and resentments we have for people who are different from us.  It enables us to recognize the truth in what other people say, even when they say things we don’t like.  In this sense, it lifts us above our emotions to see the truth.

In conclusion, wisdom frees us to see the faults in our thinking.

ias is the noise above reason and wisdom, but is it always bad?  What role does it play in decision making and in governing our actions?

It is always easy to believe the voice of my own bias. I have always heard it. ~ www.jaywren.com

Bias: How We Interpret the World with Our Feelings

Bias is the visceral, negative, or positive feelings that we have about a person, place, or thing.  These feeling simplifies our lives to interpret the world to our liking.  It bypasses our ability to reason.  Also, it is that noisy voice that drowns out wisdom.

Although perceived as bad, like any emotion, biases have positive and negative effects.  It is an emotional voice that tells us what to think and do.

This voice is an essential element of human nature.  Patriotism, faith, political ideology, and fandom sit atop our biases.  The powerful effect of bias can bring us together to form successful groups.  In the sports or business, the voice of our feelings motivates us to become more powerful competitors.

Additionally, these feelings can make life fun.  The excitement, love, and joy we feel for our sports team, political party, religion, or family members come from these feelings.

We hear the word “biased” often from the proud parent who brags about a child.  The parent closes with, “Of course, I am not biased.” Nod, nod, wink.

Furthermore, these feelings bring us internal peace.  They help us overcome doubt and fear.  Bias can create healthy, positive emotions that carry us through periods of uncertainty.

At other times, bias can create tension when our feelings conflict with the feelings of other people.  Discussing religion, sports, politics, and other personal feelings in any place where people don’t share those feelings can undermine the bonds of loyalty to a team or a company.

A Healthy Relationship with Our Biases

Since bias has beneficial effects and adverse effects on how we think, having a healthy relationship with these feelings is important.

The first step in building a healthy relationship with our biases is recognizing that we have them.

Unlike the emotions that float through our daily lives, biases become hard-wired to our beliefs.  These feelings respond to triggers. When we hear or see things that instantly and subconsciously stir our emotions, the noisy voice of bias can drown out the voice of reason.

We believe in the things that we like.  We get angry when we hear or sear things that we don’t like.  When we interpret the world as good or evil based on our emotions, it is difficult for us to know what is true or false in the world.  Likewise, it is easy for biases to deceive us into making bad decisions.

Facebook is not the place for political discussions.

I recently posted an article on how weary people are from reading about politics and political discussions.

“Pause Before Posting:  Sharing online stories on is as easy as clicking a share button. However, if the story is about politics, pause before posting. Your friends and connections are probably tired of hearing about it. They get more than a daily dose from major media.”

Politics: A Majority Are Sick of It.

Until you get the job you love, learn to love the job you have. ~ www.jaywren.com

Learn to love your job. If you have a job, any job, you can learn to love your job until you move on to the place you want to go.  If you are a manager, the more pleasure you can find in your job will affect how much enthusiasm, energy, and focus you are able to generate to your team of workers.

A few years ago, I worked out of a beautiful office on a local lake.  There were beautiful trees that blossomed in the spring and that kept beautiful purple leaves year-round.

Mallard ducks and Canada geese few in every year and swam on the lake. There was a strip mall next door with an espresso shop and grocery store.  There were five restaurants and a take-out-Chinese restaurant within walking distance.

I met all kinds of people in that office complex.  Some of them seemed to like to work in this building.  Other people were not so crazy about it.

• They did not care for the ducks and geese that could be messy.
• They exterior single-story exposure and the glass walls made them uncomfortable.
• Although locked for privacy to the tenants, the restrooms exited into an open breezeway.  To walk back from your office to the restroom you had to go outside and face the elements.
• Because of the open construction of the buildings, people who were not tenants would occasionally sit on the deck on the lake.
• Occasionally skate boarders would invade the parking lot and could be a little annoying with their noise, but they always came later in the day when everyone had gone home.  I left them alone, and I think that they would easily get bored with the parking lot that did not offer many ramp challenges left the parking lot vacant for skating boarding.

I could easily name a half a dozen reasons to be grateful to be in that office:

• It was convenient to my home. I could walk to work.
• I could walk out to a deck and sit quietly to clear my mind.
• The strip mall was a terrific place to take a break.
• There were so many great food options.
• The shop owners were friendly and became great neighbors.
• When people came to my office, I was very comfortable see where I worked.

Now, carry my situation forward to your workplace.  You can learn to love the work you do and the place where you work.  The way you choose to view your work will play a daily role in how you feel about your job.

The way to start to love your work is to make a list of the things that you find rewarding about your work.

Learn to Love Your Job

Here is a comparison table to show you what I have in mind.  Do you see your job for the things about which you or about which you can feel grateful?