Relationship

“Empathy is a distributed brain process” says the research team from the University of Colorado Boulder.

What does this mean? Empathy as an experience is not located in a specific region of the brain, rather it “utilises” the whole brain.

The researchers differentiate between empathic care – where empathy generates care and assistance and occurring in the part of our brain associated with value and reward; and empathic distress – where it triggers avoidance, fear and anger, and occurring in that part of our brain dealing with mirroring.

While there is little difference person to person as to the patterns for empathic care and empathic distress, what promotes the care element?

Check this out on Medical News Today.

“The features of digitized legal providers are becoming well- defined– they are customer centric, tech and process enabled, agile, diverse, accessible to clients in real-time, intelligent, globally branded, scalable, multi-disciplinary, and enterprise focused.”

What does the impact of technology on legal services mean for the humans in that space?

Customer-entric, agile, diverse, accessible, intelligent and enterprise-focused apply to lawyers (and other professionals). What skills are required to respond to a changing workplace?

They include the ability to grow and manage relationships, an ability to process and consolidate large amount of information, and the psychological agility to remain calm and focused in times of transition and change.

For article in Forbes magazine, see here.

Recent research from Indiana University Bloomington shows traditional stereotypes of masculinity are linked to mental health challenges. The greater the conformity to these masculine “traits” of “a desire to win, need for emotional control, and risk-taking” and “playboy behaviour or sexual promiscuity”, the higher the risk of mental health issues.

In 2015, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, film-maker, was inspired to direct “The Mask You Live In” to bring to light the narrow definition of masculinity in US society, and and its negative impact on men’s mental health and social dysfunction.

We can choose re-write the story of who we are and who we want to be, to be rid of the bonds of these unhelpful “traits” and “stereotypes”.

To read about men’s experiences of this, go to this article from the Guardian.

Your personality traits impact on your success at work and thus your income. What are the traits which are found to positively influence income?

As Adrian Furnham stated, ‘[S]table, conscientious, bright people do better, particularly in more complex jobs. Personality is related to an ability to establish and maintain happy, healthy relationships which is at the heart of business leadership.”

Why and how? Read Furnham’s article “Personality and Income“.

To build better relationships, we need respect and compassion. Whatever the disagreement, respect and compassion for the person or party you are disagreeing with, is a solid foundation to begin reparation and resolution.

For an exploration of this, see Thomas G Plante’s article, ‘Two Words to Remember for Better Relationships‘.