Since everyone is under enormous pressure at this time of year - we kick off with EQ and mental health content. It is particularly important at this time of intensity and high stake events like exams, that you should guard against being pulled into the direction of other people's goals or agendas when you really should be removing yourself from the situation and focusing on your own goals.  Travis Bradberry offers some insight into how you can extricate yourself from situations with 'toxic' people. These people are no good for us, but we first need to recognise who they are and how to remove ourselves from their 'orbit' .  Have a read of the 

10 Toxic People You Should Avoid Like The Plague

Travis Bradberry reminds us …

Toxic people create unnecessary complexity, strife, and, worst of all, stress.

“People inspire you, or they drain you—pick them wisely.” – Hans F. Hansen

As usual Dr Bradberry has all his assertions backed up by research. Read the article here and be wiser to those who are draining you. (5 minutes max)

Personal Competence and Social Competence form the backbone of Emotional Intelligence or EQ. This is according to Dr Travis Bradberry who claims that...

'Despite the significance of emotional intelligence, its intangible nature makes it very difficult to know which behaviors you should emulate. So I’ve analyzed the data from the million-plus people TalentSmart has tested in order to identify the habits that set high-EQ people apart.'  

With such an enormous amount of data and so much testing - there has got to be some truth in Bradberry's article below. Give it a read. 

Eight Habits of Highly Emotionally Intelligent People

Seven Challenges Smart People Overcome

This is an article by Dr Travis Bradberry and it highlights the challenges that we all face in making our lives more liveable, productive and 'successful' and shows how some of us manage these challenges and don't let them manage us!

The seven challenges named are: age, negativity, toxic people, what other people think, fear, the past or the future and the state of the world.  See for yourself how Travis Bradberry explains the hold that these challenges can have over us and the logic we use to change that around. My favourite section is about the past and the future. I have always held that our power lies in the present so don't fixate on past actions or the future, but I couldn't have encapsulated the uselessness of worry better than Mark Twain:

Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe. 

Do yourself a favour and read the article, it's very practical and direct and that's just what we need to change our habits. It is a five minute read here. 

As Travis Bradberry suggests, ‘Difficult people defy logic’, but then again who do we label as difficult? In this article Travis Bradberry defines the ‘difficult person’ obliquely through the negative effect that the person has on us. BUT, he also gives us the tools to neutralise the effects. That is empowering because it leaves the ‘difficult person’ shouting in a vacuum and you are free to get on with your life. Stress comes from all quarters and when you are studying you don’t want to impede your learning with stress clutter!

Read this article and be liberated from the stress that others try and pour onto you.

How Smart People Handle Difficult People