Watch: Strategies for Renewal and Building Resonant Relationships

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From the course by Case Western Reserve University

Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence

427 ratings

Case Western Reserve University

Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence

427 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Inspired Leadership

Emotional intelligence, hope, mindfulness, and compassion help a person reverse the damage of chronic stress and build great leadership relationships. The Positive and Negative Emotional Attractors inspire sustained, desired change and learning at many levels.

From the lesson

Week 2: Renewal As an Antidote to Chronic Stress

We examine the effects of emotional contagion, both positive and negative on relationship. We examine the psychological and physiological process with which our bodies and minds experience stress and how it hinders openness to new ideas, people and emotions. Chronic annoying stress causes cognitive, emotional and perceptual impairment. We examine the Parasympathetic Nervous System, the bodies only way to ameliorate the effects of stress and renew. We examine how hope/vision, compassion, mindfulness and playfulness both build resonant relationships and enable us to renew.

Watch: Strategies for Renewal and Building Resonant Relationships8:40

Meet the Instructors

Richard Boyatzis
Distinguished University Professor, and a Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science

♪ [MUSIC] ♪. But therein lies the critical

observation. And I'd like to illustrate that by

pointing out that even if we have resonant relationships in, in our

leadership or managerial positions that one of the things that happen is over

time the build up of the stress gets to us and we start to experience what we

call the sacrifice syndrome. You know what that's like.

You get to the end of Friday evening and you're starting to go home and you feel

like someone's sucked the blood out of you and you can barely make it to your

bar at home and pour yourself a drink, or if you don't use alcohol, make some

strong tea. The problem is, the sacrifice syn-,

syndrome as I was saying, leads to cognitive perceptual and emotional

impairment, and you are not sustainable in your leadership.

So, no matter how effective you have been, you are less.

Well, the only antidote discovered to date in medical research is the

activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

If you will, we're calling the renewal cycle.

So, it is the daily dosage of renewal in balance with the sacrifice syndrome of

the chronic stress that allows us to build up our capabilities to rebuild.

Medical research and psychological research has helped us to understand that

there are a number of experiences that invoke the parasympathetic nervous

system, the renewal process. For example, under mindfulness, we know

that meditating helps produce this. There have been many research studies

over 30 years showing this. For example, although people say

meditating 15-20 minutes, three times a week, once a day helps, most people, when

they learn to meditate, are taught that you should be meditating twice a day.

two studies have shown the power of yoga to produce this.

Two studies have shown the power of Tai Chi.

My guess is other forms of martial arts do it, if it's the centering parts of the

martial art, not the kick-ass parts, I think that they probably activate the

sympathetic nervous system. Prayer, two studies have shown that when

we pray, if we're praying to a loving God.

That was the interesting twist. If you pray to a loving God, it activates

the renewal system. If you pray to a vengeful God, it

actually activates the stress response. And I think I do a lot of work in

Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, in Instanbul and sometimes in Bahrain.

My Islamic friends have it all over the rest of us in the Judeo-Christian

tradition because if you pause three, most executives and professionals make it

to three prayers a day, not the full five, that's three times a day you're

pausing, centering yourself and engaging with a loving God.

And by the way, most of the Judeo-Christian sects do ask you to pray

twice a day, but we forget that very often.

So, mindfulness practices do seem to have a profound effect both in terms of the

research, and in terms of popular thought.

Another thing that has a huge impact is compassion.

Being in a loving relationship is very powerful, as it stimulates renewal.

Having pets, especially pets that you can stroke.

Dogs, cats, horses, monkeys. Doesn't work with fish.

Sorry folks. Because it looks like it, it is in the

stroking of the pet that you are building this sympathetic emotional bond that

engages in renewal. Volunteering and doing things for people

who are less fortunate than you helps. Care-giving helps.

One caveat here, there is something that has been identified in elderly

caregivers, social workers and nurses in particular, where those occupations where

compassion is drawn upon so much that they actually go into compassion fatigue

which is a syndrome that leads to stress. My wife who is an elementary school

kindergarten school teacher for for over twenty years.

I mean, she made the observation to me very often that when I, we would have

dinner or, or get-togethers with a lot of her elementary school friends it was

interesting that they didn't have that many children, if any, and, and some of

it might have been the compassion fatigue of what happens when you're around little

children and giving your all to them all day.

I just wanted to mention that as a caveat, because compassion usually helps,

but you can overload. Feeling hopeful about the future

activates the parasympathetic nervous system renewal process.

And although in out 2005 book, Resonant Leadership, I didn't go, we didn't go

into it and we can I, just focused on mindfulness, hope and compassion.

In the last three years the research has come out that I think is pretty con-,

convincing, that laughter, joy and playfulness also stimulates the renewal

process in the human body. So, one of the things that this says to

us is, it is hopeful, it is a hopeful message.

That yes, despite the amount of stress that we're under, unintentional or

intentional, we can ameliorate it, or the ravages of it, by practicing certain

things each day. Now, the dosage ends up being critical,

because you can't wait 'til the weekend and kind of try to binge rest.

For a couple of reasons, one, rest isn't the same as renewal.

Your body needs rest but that's not the same as renewal.

Secondly, if you worked two or three 60, 80 hours week or you're working multiple

jobs and all the sudden you get two days off, that is not going to make up for

three weeks of what you've done to your body and mind.

So, one of the hopeful things, though, is that we do know what you can do on a

daily basis. I've listed some of the things you can do

at home. In a, in another module we'll be talking

about a number of the things you can be doing at work to make this invay-,

invoked and more effective. Second, interesting if not very hopeful

observation, is that the same experiences that helped us, as we talked about in the

earlier module, build our resonant, our more effective relationships, are the

experiences that help us to build renewal into our bodies and minds.

So, yes chronic stress is the devil. In this case, it is the thing that causes

us to slide into dissident relationships to disengage with people we care about.

With our friends. With our colleagues.

With our natural environment. With our faith.

Chronic stress is something that ends up making us less than who we are and who we

could be. I would like to ask you to consider, as a

personal learning assignment coming out of this module, to keep a diary, and you

really should do this each day. Don't wait till several days later and do

it. But at the end of each day, go back write

down the hour that you woke up, and go all the way through to the hour you are

about to go to bed. And write down things that happened

during each hour that were stressful, annoying stressful or things that

happened each hour that were renewing. In other words, were you interacting with

people who are a pain? Were you dealing with something really

annoying, were you dealing with something positive and, I mean really problematic?

Versus, were you dealing with something that was fun, engaging, positive,

hopeful, compassionate? Keep track each day in kind of a log or

journal, and at the end of a week look at it.

And then at the end of two weeks, sit back and take a longer look and ask

yourself, what could you do differently each day to reverse that balance, because

you're the one who makes the decision each day.

In the next module we'll be going into a number of the things you could be doing

at work to invoke this renewal process. Thank you.

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