Ciri's Life Coach

Here’s a dilemma: You’re a program officer of an NGO station in Somalia, and you get a wire from the head office telling you to show a film featuring an American politician greatly reviled in that country. If you show it, the locals will find it offensive. If you don’t, the head office back at home will be upset. What to do? This is not a hypothetical situation; rather a predicament faced by one of the foreign service officers. The officer recalled that if he showed the film, the NGO buldings would be burned down the next day by about 300 angry students. Yet the head office felt the film was great. What he had to do is figure out how to show the film so that the C.E.O could tell HQ that they had done as they wished, and yet not offend people in the country. His solution? He screened the movie on a holy day (Idd-Ul-Fitr), when he knew no one could come. That brilliant bit of common sense exemplifies practical intelligence, a combination of technical expertise and experience. A...

It seems no one is guaranteed a job anywhere anymore. These are troubled times for us. The creeping sense that no one’s job is safe, even as companies we work for are thriving. It means the spread of fear, anxiety, and confusion. One sign of this growing unease: more than half of callers making inquiries about new jobs are still employed. They are so fearful of losing those jobs that they had already started to look for another one. It seems we work in what amounts to a quiet war zone. “There is no way to give your loyalty to a company and expect it to be returned anymore. So each person is becoming their own little shop within a company. That means, you have to be able to be part of a team, but also ready to move on and be self –sufficient. We need to start realizing that success takes more than intelligent excellence or technical prowess. We need another sort of skill just to survive and certainly to thrive especially in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Such...

Once in school I encountered certain widespread misunderstandings about emotional intelligence. Let me clear up some of these common fallacies. First, emotional intelligence does not mean merely being nice . At certain instances, especially strategic moments it may demand not being nice , but rather, case in point, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but significant truth they’ve been avoiding. Second, emotional intelligence does not mean giving free lead to feelings that is, letting it all hang out . Rather, it means managing feelings so that they are expressed appropriately and effectively, enabling people to work together smoothly toward their common goals. Also, women are not smarter than men when it comes to emotional intelligence, nor men are superior to women. Each of us has a personal profile of strengths and weaknesses in these capacities. Some of us may be highly emphatic but lack some abilities to handle our own distresses; others may be of the subtlest shi...

The rules for work are changing. The new rules predict who is most likely to become a star performer and who is most prone to derailing. No matter what field we work in currently, they measure the traits that are crucial to our marketability for future jobs. Remember the old school days, when academic abilities were the most important standards to success. These rules are largely irrelevant to this standards. The new measure takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as empathy, adaptability, initiative and persuasiveness. If you work for a large, small organization or for yourself, your ability to perform at peak depends to a large extend on your having these abilities-though almost certainly you were not taught in school.Even so, your career will depend to greater or lesser extend, on how well you have mastered these capabilities. In a time with no guarantees of job security, when th...