Emotional Wellbeing In Business

Palma provides a definition of emotions and invites you to take a closer look at your own emotional landscape. She explains how all emotions have their role to play in your 'psychological immune system' and offers an overview of the basic core emotions (such as enjoyment, sadness, anger, disgust and fear). She shares the story of a founder she worked with who had a very limited emotional landscape and provides a short reflection/writing exercise to help you reflect on your own emotions.

Palma speaks about the importance of self-awareness as the first step to self-mastery, noting that "we can only manage what we monitor". Referencing Harvard Professor Ellen Langer, who said that "most of us are on autopilot virtually almost all of the time", Palma explains how the first step to changing your experience is to become aware of your experience. You will also learn a simple exercise to start raising your self-awareness, which is called 'STOP'.

Palma speaks about the constantly changing nature of emotions, as well as the quiet backdrop to all of your experience, which is also called the 'inner witness'. She speaks about the interplay of thoughts, bodily sensations and emotions and how bringing curiosity to your experience in the present moment will help you to downregulate your emotions.

Palma shares a guided reflection designed to help you create more awareness around your emotions in the present moment, safely experience your emotions and downregulate your nervous system. This involves naming emotions present in your body, feeling the emotion in the body, describing the sensations and observing them with curiosity.

Palma shares an exercise that is designed to help you calm down your nervous system and shift your emotional state by actively cultivating positive emotions and regulating your heart rate. This exercise works with your breath and cultivating appreciation, to increase heart coherence and allow you to return to a calm state.

Palma guides a short loving-kindness meditation. According to contemplative neuroscience, loving-kindness meditation is the most effective meditation for rewiring our brains for the better. It strengthens our compassion muscle and helps us to be kinder to ourselves and help others from a place of strengths.

In this lecture, Palma offers two short writing exercises for working with difficult emotions such as fear, anger and sadness. You will also find these questions in your Workbook under Question 6.

Palma introduces the practice of five random acts of kindness and its evidence-based benefits for your emotional wellbeing. There is a growing body of research that suggests that doing something kind for someone else significantly raises our wellbeing, compared to doing something nice for ourselves.

Palma invites you to reflect on your main takeaways from this course and how you now feel about playing an active role in positively shaping your life. She encourages you to continue to use these exercises on a regular basis to help "rewire your brain" and experience increased wellbeing, joy and contentment in your life.