Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

It’s holiday season and time again for office dinners.  Some people to your right or left may have a habit of unraveling your table in past, but it's usually possible to ensure huge success at the holiday dinner.

Here are 5 brain based tactics that could prevent poor behavior that sacks the supper, and bring people together in ways that may surprise you.

1. Offer small gifts to each guest. It could be a name tag with one thing you feel thankful for in that person. Your personal touch will add serotonin, the hormone that  rises when people feel genuinely valued.

2. If you host the dinner, surprise guests with a change by sitting in a different room, playing a favorite CD in background during dinner, or ask a different person to say a blessing to thank people who came. Changes create distance from old patterns and create opportunities for the brain to create new synapses to act in new ways.

3. Come to the table rested and relaxed, and you will model a tone that finds solutions to turnaround that first infraction before Fred’s foray. Be prepared for it, and have a positive word ready to fire back before bad behavior takes root.

4. Serve lots of water – with lemon slices if you like, but water irrigates the brain and prevents irritability at gatherings, in ways that may surprise you. Most people drink far too little water for a healthy brain, and negative affects will pop out because without water, people feel stressed or offended faster.

5. Start your dinner by inviting people to share one thing that went especially well for them at work in the last term. Such a two-footed questions keeps the tone fresh, and people will piggy back off one other’s insights about what’s working well, so cortisol, the hormone for stress and negativity, will diminish.

By now laughter will be far easier, because you built a climate for fun and relaxation, in a setting where people will make the most of mental resources at your holiday table. Happy Holidays!