Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Few realize the powerful part tone plays in the mind and in communication that opens the workplace into extravagant possibilities. Tone is a smart skill, often learned in hard times, and practiced by brilliant communicators. We all face disappointments and these tend to cost us personally, in lost dollars, broken spirits, disappointments and emotional drain.

Research, in fact, shows that we each get hit with about 22 stressors each day.

But have you watched how great communicators recover faster, and exchange those harmful mental hormones that rush in with poor communication for healthier hormones that promote good communication.

Smart skills start with changes in thought and reinforce each time we act on them in ways that rewire our brains for more of the same. What you do or say today reboots your brain for or against effective communication, for instance, and brain imaging shows how so.

Cortisol shuts down your brain’s ability to learn or communicate, for instance, while increased serotonin gives you the smile and brilliant words that open new possibilities. But what about those trouble makers?

Rather than focus on inept communication that tends to show up in people who lack tone skills, why not become that person who’s fun to be around and the communication tool your brain uses for that is tone.

Here are smart skills to improve tone as a tool for communication in tough times:

1. Increase serotonin and decrease cortisol at work through what you do, say and track for progress.
2. Build goodwill – even with people who disagree, in concrete acts and words that will motivate others around you to ratchet up the levels of communication.
3. Create tone possibilities so that people encourage others, or offer suggestions for improvements, rather than criticize things they dislike. That way you will increase collective serotonin in measurable ways.
4. Take risks for communication’s sake - practice the opposite of people who ignore problems and who see silence as golden.
5. List for yourself the specifics in your circle that would show precisely what good tone looks like and how we know it’s operating.

When good tone inspirits communication, for instance people laugh lots, share ideas with respect, accept imperfections, support others and yet share ideas for improvement of just about everything. What else would show you that you are maintaining good tone to model what communication for possibilities looks like in your circle?