Et si l’auto compassion était la marque distinctive des grands dirigeants ?

La compassion n’est pas un sentiment que l’on s’attendrait à trouver dans le monde parfois sans pitié de l’entreprise. Et pourtant, elle pourrait être la première vertu du dirigeant.

Les dirigeants qui font preuve de compassion envers leurs employés favorisent la résilience individuelle et collective dans les périodes de changement, selon le CompassionLab de l’université du Michigan. Et le développement de la dimension compassion-empathie du leader a un impact positif sur la perception de justice interpersonnelle et la reconnaissance chez ses salariés, selon une recherche de l’Institut français du leadership positif. La compassion (du latin «cum patior», signifiant « souffrir avec ») consiste en un processus en trois temps selon l’étude « Compassion in Organizational Life » (Kanov et alii, 2004) : 1- prendre conscience de la souffrance d’autrui, 2- se sentir concerné par cette souffrance, 3- agir pour réduire ou éradiquer cette souffrance. S’il est déjà difficile pour un dirigeant de passer par ces trois étapes, que dire alors de ce trait de personnalité appliqué à soi-même ?

Le courage d’accepter ses failles

Bâtir une relation empathique avec ses collaborateurs passe par le défi de prendre en compte ses propres failles et vulnérabilités. Difficile d’avouer ses zones de fragilité ou d’insécurité psychologique à son board, non ? La plupart du temps, nous cherchons à les masquer, y compris à nous-mêmes. Prendre conscience des vulnérabilités de l’autre passe par accepter les siennes avec courage. « Si vous ne vous incluez pas dans votre compassion, celle-ci est incomplète », affirme Jack Kornfield, l’un des principaux vulgarisateurs de la méditation de pleine conscience en Occident.

Parmi les croyances limitantes, les doutes, les failles et les zones d’insécurité d’un dirigeant, nous trouvons notamment : le besoin excessif de contrôler les choses ; la quête de perfection ; la peur de ne pas se sentir suffisamment à la hauteur et apprécié ; l’autocritique ; le besoin de reconnaissance, d’approbation, de réassurance ; la peur de l’échec et du jugement d’autrui ; des attentes de soi ou des autres exagérément élevées ; le besoin de connaître l’avenir, de maîtriser son destin ; l’anxiété sociale ; la peur de mourir et d’être oublié…

Le docteur Kristin Neff, de l’université du Texas, définit l’autocompassion comme « la capacité d’accueillir sa propre souffrance avec chaleur, ouverture et intérêt ». Alors que l’estime de soi se nourrit de circonstances extérieures (comparaison sociale, défense de son ego) et d’autoévaluation (valorisation, voire narcissisme), l’autocompassion est neutre et toujours disponible. Elle permet de développer une plus grande résilience émotionnelle, une attention plus grande au soin de soi et des autres. Développer la compassion envers soi-même repose sur trois leviers que l’on peut actionner :

– être bon et compréhensif envers soi-même dans les moments d’échec et de douleur, plutôt que de se juger et de se critiquer ;
– percevoir sa propre souffrance et son échec personnel comme faisant partie d’une expérience humaine plus large et partagée, plutôt que comme une expérience isolée ;
– rester ancré dans l’instant présent de l’expérience difficile, sans chercher à se projeter.

Un leadership plus compassionnel déclenche davantage d’engagement et de lien prosocial (je sais que je peux compter sur mon dirigeant en cas de besoin). Il inspire confiance en l’autre et génère, in fine, plus de performance. Etes-vous dur avec vous-même en tant que leader ? Portez-vous l’armure du héros insensible aux émotions des autres, dur au mal et dénué de compassion envers vous-même ? Ressentir de la compassion pour soi-même, au lieu de s’autocritiquer ou de se juger négativement, permet de modifier la nature et diminuer l’impact des émotions désagréables.

Les individus très résilients mobilisent leurs émotions positives plus facilement et plus régulièrement que les personnes moins résilientes. La compassion est l’une des clés précieuses pour cultiver notre résilience. Une recherche menée par G. T. Jinpa en 2013 a montré qu’un programme d’entraînement à la compassion pendant huit semaines (« compassion cultivation training ») pouvait augmenter notre capacité de compassion pour autrui, mais aussi notre disposition à recevoir celle des autres, ainsi que notre auto compassion.

La compassion envers soi
La compassion envers soi-même est donc un trait de leadership que l’on peut développer à condition d’entraîner son esprit régulièrement à l’aide de quatre exercices quotidiens.

1. Entrer en intimité avec ses émotions.Porter son attention aux sensations physiques et aux émotions associées à sa souffrance. Reconnaître, nommer et accepter ses émotions et ses sensations physiques, qu’elles soient agréables ou désagréables.
2. Identifier le souhait le plus profond ou un besoin non nourri derrière chaque émotion. Qu’est-ce qui vous est cher ? Ressentez-vous un danger ? Quelle est votre aspiration profonde dans la situation ? Qu’est-ce qui a beaucoup de valeur pour vous et que vous essayez de protéger dans l’épreuve subie ?
3. Changer la fréquence de sa radio interne. Remplacer ses monologues intérieurs d’autocritique et de jugements sévères par un dialogue réconfortant. Quand j’échoue dans un défi important pour moi, je remets les choses en perspective ; je deviens plus tolérant et patient avec certains aspects de ma personnalité que je n’aime pas.
4. Admettre l’universalité de la condition humaine.Reconnaître que la frustration, le découragement, les déceptions et la souffrance sont des expériences que tout être humain connaît.

Un article écrit par Yves Le Bihan

Partant du constat que le corps « traduit » les émotions (gorge nouée, frissons…), une équipe de chercheurs finlandais a mené une enquête auprès de 700 personnes pour établir une cartographie corporelle des émotions.

Ainsi, après avoir exposé les participants à des « stimuli émotionnels » (images, films, histoires….), les chercheurs ont demandé à ces derniers de colorier, suivant les sensations (le rouge pour les sensations accrues, le bleu pour les faibles sensations et le vide lorsque rien ne se produit), les zones du corps qui réagissent.

L’étude et les conclusions de cette recherche publiés dans la revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), montrent que les émotions de base telles que la colère, la peur, la tristesse, le dégoût, la joie ou la surprise sont la plupart du temps associées à une activité dans la poitrine.

D’autre part, les chercheurs ont conclu que cette étude pourrait les aider à mieux comprendre les troubles de l’humeur comme la dépression ou l’anxiété, qui sont accompagnés par des processus émotionnels altérés, une activité du système nerveux autonome et des sensations symptomatiques.

This is what Tibetan monks and Navy SEALs have in common—and how we can use it to our advantage

• Sélectionné dans : Editor’s Picks, Leadership & Management, The Weekend Essay
• Un article de Steven Kotler Author, journalist, cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project, cofounder at Rancho de Chihauhua.

Abraham Maslow once famously said, “When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways. The technical term for this is the Law of the Instrument. Give someone a hammer and, indeed, they’ll look for nails to pound. But present them with a problem where they need to repurpose that same hammer as a doorstop, or a pendulum weight, or a tomahawk, and you’ll typically get blank stares.

We may be facing a similar situation when it comes to our minds. At least as far back as the French Enlightenment and Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore, I am), we’ve relied on our rational selves—what psychologists call our “egos”—to run the whole show. It’s a Maslow’s hammer kind of reaction. Every issue we encounter, we try to solve by thinking.

And we know it’s not working. Even a quick glance at today’s dire mental health statistics—the one in four Americans now on psychiatric medicines; the escalating rate of suicide for everyone from ages ten to seventy-eight—shows how critically overtaxed our mental processing is these days. We may have come to the end of our psychological tether. It might be time to rethink all that thinking.

With the recent advancements in neurobiology, we now have options: Embodied cognition teaches us that how we move our bodies affects our brains and minds. AI therapy proves that our subconscious expressions can reflect our inner state more accurately than we do. Precognition demonstrates that we can anticipate how we’re going to feel and think in the future by tracking (and even altering) our biometrics in the present. Neurotheology integrates all of these findings and lets us reverse-engineer a whole host of nonordinary states, just by working backward from our neurophysiology.

Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.

Take, for example, one of the most common ailments of the modern world—mild to moderate depression. Instead of moping around, hoping for things to get better on their own, we can scan our UI and choose an alternate program to run. We could get on a treadmill (studies show exercise is effective for depression in all but severe cases), or get some natural sunshine (70 percent of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, which has a direct impact on mood), or practice meditation for fifteen minutes (a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found it as effective as SSRI’s and without the side effects). None of these approaches require thinking about our thinking, but each of them can significantly shift our mood.

Choices like these are available not just in our personal lives, but in our professional lives, too. Instead of nervously waiting for a job interview and obsessing about all the things that could go wrong, we can take a page out of Amy Cuddy’s book and stand up, breathe deeply, and power-pose our way to lower cortisol, higher testosterone, and more confidence. Instead of using trendy leadership books and a new mission statement to fire up employees, we can follow ESADE’s lead and use neurofeedback to heighten group coherence and prompt more productive strategy sessions.

But most of us, when challenged, will do none of these things. We’ll think more, talk more, and stress more. We’ll wait until after we feel better to go for that walk in the sun, rather than going for that walk in order to feel better. We’ll wait until after we get that job offer to pump our fists and stand tall, instead of the other way around.

That’s because, at first, reorienting from OS to UI can be downright disorienting. If I can change the “wallpaper of my mind” by deliberately shifting my neurophysiology—my breathing, my posture, my brainwaves, or any number of other interventions—what good are all those stories I’ve been telling myself?

If I am not my thoughts, then who am I, really?

This idea, that our ego isn’t the be-all and end-all, flourished in Asia for centuries before landing in California in the 1960’s. Thoughts were illusions, the swamis and lamas maintained, and nirvana lay on the other side of ego death. But, for modern Americans, all those earnest (and sometimes addled) attempts to transcend the self didn’t turn out to be that practical. To make sense of today’s fast-paced world, we need our egos to navigate our relationships and responsibilities. We just don’t need to use them like Maslow’s hammer, turning everything around us into a psychological problem to beat on.

Instead, we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology. And while this may seem far-fetched, top performers are already there. Tibetan monks can shut off their default mode network (or inner mind chatter) almost at will, SEAL snipers tune their brainwaves to the alpha frequency before locking on to targets, extreme athletes smooth out their heart rhythms right before dropping into a mountain or wave. They’re deliberately doing an end run around their conscious minds.
They’re accessing more efficient and effective ways of being, and they’re doing this exactly backward from how most of us have been taught.

Which brings us back to ecstasis. When we step beyond our conventional egos and experience the richness of altered states, it’s essential to upgrade our software. Those monkey-suit personas we thought were us (until we suddenly realize they aren’t) don’t need to confine us or define us.
“To diagnose . . . yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events,” Harvard Business School professor Ron Heifetz maintains. “‘Getting on the balcony’ . . . [provides] the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”

And this is what moving from OS to UI delivers: a better view from the balcony. When we consistently see more of “what is really happening,” we can liberate ourselves from the limitations of our psychology. We can put our egos to better use, using them to modulate our neurobiology and with it, our experience. We can train our brains to find our minds.

Edited by Kira M Newman on Monday February 13th, 2017 Search inside yourself

Navigating Life’s Struggles

A mentor of mine recently passed away, and I was heartbroken — so I tried my best to avoid thinking about it. I didn’t even mention it to my family because I didn’t want those sad feelings to resurface.

In other words, I took the very enlightened approach of pretend it didn’t happen — one that’s about as effective as other common responses, such as get angry, push people away, blame myself, or wallow in the pain.

Even for the relatively self-aware and emotionally adept, struggles can take us by surprise. But learning healthy ways to move through adversity — a collection of skills that researchers call resilience — can help us cope better and recover more quickly, or at least start us heading in that direction.

Here are 12 resilience practices (squeezed into five categories), which can help you confront emotional pain more skillfully.

Wallowing in our pain or bottling our emotions is easy, but it doesn’t help.

1. Change the Narrative

When something bad happens, we often relive the event over and over in our heads, rehashing the pain. This process is called rumination; it’s like a cognitive spinning of the wheels, and it doesn’t move us toward healing and growth.

The practice of expressive writing can move us forward by helping us gain new insights on the challenges in our lives. It involves writing continuously for 20 minutes about a particular issue; exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings around it. The goal is to get something down on paper, not to create a memoir-like masterpiece.

A 1988 study found that participants who did expressive writing for four days were healthier six weeks later, and happier up to three months later, compared to people who wrote about superficial topics. In writing, researchers suggest that we’re forced to confront ideas, one by one, and give them structure; which may lead to new perspectives. We’re actually crafting our own life narrative and gaining a sense of control.

Once we’ve explored the dark side of an experience, we might choose to contemplate some of its upsides. A technique called ‘finding silver linings’ invites you to call to mind an upsetting experience and try to list three positive things about it. For example, you might reflect on how fighting with a friend brought some important issues out into the open and allowed you to learn something about their point of view.

Writing about your pains and emotions helps heal them and transform them into wisdom.

In a 2014 study, doing this practice daily for three weeks helped participants afterward become more engaged with life, and it decreased their pessimistic beliefs over time. This wasn’t true for a group whose members just wrote about their daily activities. It was particularly beneficial for staunch pessimists, who also became less depressed. But the effects wore off after two months, suggesting that looking on the bright side is something we have to practice regularly.

2. Face Your Fears

The practices above are helpful for past struggles; ones that we’ve gained enough distance from to be able to get some perspective. But what about knee-shaking fears that we’re experiencing in the here and now?

The ‘overcoming a fear’ practice is designed to help with everyday fears that get in the way of life, such as the fear of public speaking, heights, or flying. We can’t talk ourselves out of such fears; instead, we have to tackle the emotions directly.

The first step is to slowly, and repeatedly, expose yourself to the thing that scares you — in small doses. For example, people with a fear of public speaking might try talking more in meetings, then perhaps giving a toast at a small wedding. Over time, you can incrementally increase the challenge until you’re ready to nail that big speech or TV interview.

Start off small when facing your fears, and gradually, your confidence will build.

In a 2010 study, researchers modeled this process in the lab. They gave participants a little electrical shock every time they saw a blue square, which soon became as scary as a tarantula to an arachnophobe. But then, they showed the blue square to participants without shocking them. Over time, the participants’ Pavlovian fear (measured by the sweat on their skin) gradually disappeared.

In effect, this kind of ‘exposure therapy’ helps us change the associations we have with a particular stimulus. If we’ve flown 100 times and the plane has never crashed, for example, our brain (and body) start to learn that it’s safe. Though the fear may never be fully extinguished, we’ll likely have more courage to confront it.

3. Practice Self-Compassion

I’ve never been a good flyer myself, and it was comforting when an acquaintance shared an article he wrote about having the same problem; as well as his favorite tips. Fears and adversity can make us feel alone; we wonder why we’re the only ones feeling this way, and what exactly is wrong with us. In these situations, learning to practice self-compassion — and recognizing that everyone suffers — is a much gentler, and more effective, way to heal.

Self-compassion involves offering compassion to ourselves: confronting our own suffering with an attitude of warmth and kindness; without judgment. In one study, participants in an eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion program reported more mindfulness and life satisfaction, with lower depression, anxiety, and stress afterward, compared to people who didn’t participate — and the benefits lasted up to a year.

Be kind to yourself. Be your own best friend.

One practice, the ‘self-compassion break’, is something you can do any time you start to feel overwhelmed by pain or stress. It has three steps, which correspond to the three aspects of self-compassion:

• Be mindful:Without judgment or analysis, notice what you’re feeling. Say, “This is a moment of suffering” or “This hurts” or “This is stress.”
• Remember that you’re not alone:Everyone experiences these deep and painful human emotions, although the causes might be different. Say to yourself, “Suffering is a part of life” or “We all feel this way” or “We all struggle at some point in our lives.”
• Be kind to yourself:Put your hands on your heart and say something like “May I give myself compassion” or “May I accept myself as I am” or “May I be patient.”

If being kind to yourself is a challenge, an exercise called ‘How Would You Treat a Friend?’ could help. Here, compare how you respond to your own struggles — and the tone you use — with the way you would respond to a friend’s. Often, this comparison unearths some surprising differences and valuable reflections: Why am I so harsh on myself, and what would happen if I weren’t?

 

Nous n’avons pas vraiment appris à accéder, de manière simple et authentique, à ce qui se passe en nous. Cette capacité s’avère pourtant déterminante.
Nombreuses sont les personnes à être persuadées que leur bonheur dépend entièrement des circonstances extérieures. Pourtant, les recherches en sciences cognitives  ont démontré que notre intériorité a un impact déterminant sur nos existences : nos pensées modèlent notre rapport au monde, nos émotions affectent notre santé, nos croyances écrivent les scénarios de nos vies.

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Une petite animation amusante et juste pour illustrer ce qu’est le coaching!Lire la suite

L’article ci dessous a été publié sur le blog PNL-INFO

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« If you don’t control your mind, someone else will ».

Une rubrique de : Sylvaine Pascual – Publié dans: Objectifs, décisions et solutions

Une prise de décision, ce n’est quand même pas souvent le choix de Sophie. Pourtant, de choix cornélien en dilemme inextricable, il arrive qu’elle ressemble davantage à une prise de tête qu’à un pique-nique au bord de l’eau. Souvent, ne sachant pas trop comment nous y prendre, nous avons vaille que vaille recours au bon vieux avantages/inconvénients, dont l’inutilité n’explique pas la longévité! Heureusement, il y a des alternatives et avant de les explorer, voyons comment nous prenons nos décisions.

Halte à l’obligation de “bonne décision”
Nous vivons une époque formidable dans laquelle les injonctions d’urgence, d’excellence, de performance, d’efficacité nous mettent sur la calebasse une telle pression de prendre les “bonnes décisions” que nous finissons devenir des obsessionnels de la décision et de ses conséquences.Lire la suite