A French writer once said that one China will wake up, the world will tremble…. Today, the tables have turned. We have trembled… But we are now facing a new global movement, which is characterized by yet another saying: when the US sneeze, all the global economies shiver… Unfortunately. Nobody heard the US sneeze, and now they are in bed with a very bad cold! So where does that put us???

Well in an very positive way, I would say it puts us in a place where we have never been before. We are today at the cross roads of most of our life’s. We reached a tipping Point, and someone else punched us over…. So now we need to swim, Problem: some of us can swim, but the old way, with the current, and some of us can’t swim, so we need to learn. And I think this is where our survival stands, in our will and ability to move forward.

I usually don’t read the news paper in the morning as I am a firm believer in the Golden Hour…. That one hour after you wake up that will determine the mood of your day, or in other words, your psychological barometer…. So starting your day reading the newspaper might not be the best thing….. Did you ever see on the Front page any kind of good news? Never! It would not sell. It’s actually interesting that people pay money to buy newspaper and magazines that tell them how critical their condition is and how horrible it’s going to get, and then pay more money they go lie down on the couches of Psychologists, who listen to what is going wrong in their lives and then go spend more money to buy Xanax and Prozak or Valium to forget all the bad news and live on some kind of medical induced cloud….

And then I noticed this afternoon – as I was sitting in a waiting room – an article from a local Newspaper, staging a  few steps to success. Of course the usual: “in the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity” What actually attracted my attention was the rest of the article. As what we all need in our life today are not measure  shift in paradigms, which are very scary…. We need little tips, easy to implement and that can have almost immediate results.

In all my work in Emotional Intelligence, whether it be in training, coaching or mentoring, I have always asked the people I worked with to go for incremental changes…. Do not go for 180 degree changes, they are to hard to manage, unless you really need a massive break in your life. In most of the cases… mark my words, chew the elephant one bite at a time!

In this morning’s article, I read 4 pointers to follow: Re-invent yourself, Upgrade Yourself, Break your Routine, Grow your knowledge.

This is totally in the line of my guidance. And I will give you a few more ideas that you will find elaborated in my next book:

Start your day in a positive way, plan Black Out Times, Work out regularly (don’t aim at looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger), get up earlier then you use to, but insure at least 6 or 7 hours of sleep, write handwritten letters, look at situation from other’s perspective, look at situations proactively rather then reactively, challenge the conventional…..

I don’t want to tell you more as I am a firm believer in changing our life, step by step, and in today’s environment, the learning to take from the global turmoil is that we all need to do things differently. There is no more place for the routine of life as it was, we definitely need to re-invent ourselves.

This is in perfect alignment with the concepts of Emotional Intelligence I have been advocating for so long.

Start to take charge of your life and influence others.

Dr. JP Bonnifay
CEO & Lead Consultant
HPI Sdn. Bhd.