Here’s the catch: it’s about timing. We all want to get through the bad part of the crisis as soon as possible to get to the good opportunity part. Or better yet, just skip the negativity all together and sail happily and prosperously into the dazzling opportunity everybody promises there is on the othe side.

And timing depends on you. Because the longer you run away from the doom, the more you strive to skip the puddles of darkness, the harder you make it for the opportunity to come along. It only really comes along when you’ve learned the lessons that dwell under the surface of the ugly waters. The fastest way to finding new opportunities just happens to be hidden at the bottom of the puddles of doom.

In our globalized happy-go-lucky culture of the XXIst century it is loser-like to be sad, depressed and hopeless (See the 10 minute youtube RSA Animation “Smile or Die” for a critical look at our positive thinking obsession). Maybe that’s why this economic downturn seems to be getting worse instead of better: BRIC’s will stop growing and PIGS aren’t ready to fly just yet.

I have come to believe that systemic crisis is nothing more than the driver to each individual person’s own crisis. Some people aren’t affected at all, while others lose everything they have. And then there are so many other ways to be driven into crisis: sickness, divorce, severe disappointments, death of loved ones, empty nest, retirement, family wars, etc, etc, etc. To each sufferer his or her crisis is bigger and more painful than anybody else can ever imagine. And everybody goes through several crisis in their lives, some mild and some severe.

New beginnings can only come after the end of things as they are. So instead of wishing everybody ‘Happy New Year’, I’ll just hope that we keep walking forward through our real clouds of adversity instead of trying to avoid them by plugging into internet-enabled entertainment and society-enabled dreams of success.

More and more people dress to work as they would to spend the day at home in front of the t.v. Flexible schedules and long traffic jams are pushing us to work from home and set up domestic affairs close to the office. You may find yourself phoning from work to solve a nanny crisis, or emailing late at night from home to make a work related deadline. And in this world of dissolving limits, where your boss might become your husband, or your ex-wife may turn into a client, growing as a person and developing as an executive are more intertwined than ever.

It used to be bad manners to talk about clients’ personal lives when discussing their conflict management skills. Not anymore. Students may readily discuss a problem with a girl friend when you teach them about trust issues in the work place. And it’s just right for them. Because through that immediate, heart renching problem, they learned exactly what I was talking about.

As the rest of our historic barriers in geography, culture, language and social class, dissolve, so too do the limits between the different compartments of our lives. Let’s look forward to how much more we can learn about ourselves, about business and about life. And let the new business opportunities and models commence. The world economy sure needs innovative ideas!

And yet this paradox has become typical in our occidental web-connected society. The more we connect to internet and its fuzzy layers of intellectual (and intellect-less) chit-chat, the less we connect to real life reality, thus putting ourselves in potentially life-threatening situations.

I wonder what Eckhart Tolle, author of “The power of now” would say abou this incident. His best-selling book, appeared a good number of years ago, insisted on the importance of connecting to the PRESENT reality around us instead of constantly remembering our past or planning our future. And he was only the last of a long line of thinkers around the world who have tried to convince us of this principle for the last five to seven thousand years.

We are told today that “being connected” means tweeting and facebooking and youtubing all day long, to the extent that american families have started texting each other from room to room of the same household instead of reaching out to see each other’s face or hear a human voice. The rest of the world is fast catching up on this latest trend, I’m sure.

But that kind of connecting can get you killed if you’re driving, or crossing the street, or in any situation that involves risks to your safety. How on earth could we have strayed so far away from the evolutionary principle of adapting to our immediate environment in order to survive and thrive?

True connectivity is precisely this age old ability to stay in the present tense. To notice the hidden details and catch on to the undertones in a boss’s reprimand, the subtle movements of his body that indicate something else might happen any second.

True connectivity has to do with increased awareness of what is happening now. Around you, but also inside you. What are you feeling towards this person or that one, what does your gut tell you about taking the right avenue of conversation instead of the left one?

Emotions are our mammalian inheritance, acting as the life or death interface to reality that will keep us closer to life than to its opposite. They were developed with the limbic brain to enrich the basic reptilian response of fight or flight, giving us a wider and better range of responses, bringing us closer to  socially intelligent forms of life, where most of the menaces to survival no longer came from nature, but from our very equals. Equal based threats are more probable and far more complex in humans than in any other living species.

True connectivity is fast becomming a long lost art that we once excelled at as a species, but that we have abandoned in this intellect-obsessed XXIst century. All in the sake of what…tweeting with a pet?

What makes humans so complex in relation to other mammals is the great capacity of our neocortex, developed as a defense mechanism against the threats to survival presented by other humans. The depth and variability of the feelings we express towards other human beings are as complicated as our amazing neocortex could make them. Where dogs may feel a very flat sense of belonging to their pack, for example, humans will combine this belonging to their family with touches of guilt, spasms of happiness and days of utter depression. There is simply no end to the amount of adjectives we can use on any given day to describe our emotional state.

Our ability to express and read more complicated feelings is also something we develop as we get older. A three year old baby starts making faces to express the very basic emotions it has just learned. Rage, happiness and fear look funny on a baby’s face because they look like a picture we would draw..they are missing important details that will only appear years later.

So, if you think of it, the way we develop wrinkles on our faces corresponds to our growing ability to express more subtle feelings, like happiness after a long difficult year of weeping, for example, which looks completely different from regular, innocent and aloof joy. As life provides us with all kinds of experiences, the increasingly mixed emotions we experiment reflect in the wrinkles that come out around our eyes or our mouth.

Those who live less tend to have fewer signs of character and empty looks, whereas those who live rollercoaster rides of risk or love tend to develop all kinds of expressive gestures that combine the smallest muscle moves here and there. It’s like the difference between a colour-by-numbers picture and a Van Gogh painting.

If feeling alive is associated to actually feeling emotions when we interact with the world, then, wrinkling our faces as we explore the shades of grey in each corner of our soul is the only way to continue growing and living life at its fullest.

So weird that publicity seems to depict operated and inflated flat faces as the ideal of happiness and full lives.  Surrounded by luxury and fashionable items, these altered faces of rich individuals depict nothing but emptiness….more like the dog’s flat belonging than like a real person’s connection to the world.

Look in the mirror and talk to yourself. Just remark on all the different gestures you can make in a couple of sentences…the more wrinkles you have, the better you can punctuate or underline the meaning of your words. And so, the more intensely can you connect to other people around you…actually living each human connection to its fullest potential!

The volcano that has completely stopped European air traffic is just a very small reminder of how powerful and violent nature can be. The quiet, slow moving cloud of grey and black ashes whispers in our ears the strories of so many volcanic eruptions in the past, and how they created death and destruction around them. But we must remember, they also generate new life.

Here’s my point for today. Leadership requires certain doses of violence from time to time, and we can’t really shy away from it, unless we want to fool ourselves.  And any video of natural life will show that other animals engage in violence quite freely in order to fight for food, for access to the best females and for the respect of others.

We may think we’re different ’cause we’re smarter and all that. But our thinking abilities fool us more often than not, making us think we rule the world until one crummy little volcano stops our lives and our businesses. The fact is we come from the same place that all other animals come from and we also compete for what we truly want. Whether it be intellectual violence, psychological violence or large scale strategic war violence. We keep doing it over and over because through all these combats is how we discover who has the right to survive and the right to lead the rest of us.

If you are smirking and wrinkling you nose at this post, then maybe you should quit crying about wanting to become a leader and start following the people who are willing to pay many kinds of prices, including getting really angry if necessary, in order to earn their colleagues’ trust.

Don’t simplify your way out of this thought provocation either. I’m not saying you have to kill someone to lead. I’m saying you have to know when to show your rage, your anger and your capacity for the necessary violence if you want to be respected by the violent ones.

As a society, we really need to stop judging other people’s violence and putting ourselves above them, in our ‘civilized’ and very evolved manner. It’s a huge lesson in life to come into contact with one’s own rage and to show it to others. Only by dancing with your demons can you really aspire to know them or conquer them.

Maybe the reason why a lot of these efforts fail can be found in the approach that marketers use when trying to build trust in their brands and their organizations. The science of marketing is amazing in its depth and rational complexity, sometimes, but trust is anything but rational.

Her’es the thing: If you realize that trust is a fundamental design principle common to all mammals, you can begin to understand that logic, numbers and mental concepts only make up a very small portion of why people trust some brands and distrust others. Trust is something that begins in people’s gut, it has to do with instinct, with feeling and with a lot of unconscious processing.

So the biggest driver to marketing trust in any form is other people’s behaviours. Coloured logos and slogans are only meaningful when they become associated to the behaviour and ‘vibes’ perceived in somebody that represents that brand.

In the olden days of smaller businesses, the brand acquired the values and qualities of the people who worked behind it. Nowadays, the people behind brands are anonimous, and don’t seem to care much what you think of their brand, if you guide yourself by the way you are treated at standardized-foreign-call centers. Celebrities are paid lots of money to pose for pretty pictures to ‘manipulate’ this unconscious perception process through which consumers will trust a brand because they trust and admire the celebrity that wears it.

Now, if we all know that these celebrities are posing for money, and that today they represent one brand and tomorrow they smile for another one, how credible or trustworthy are they to the public? To a mass of consumers who feels betrayed by politicians, financial institutions and everyone who told them to keep consuming in order to reach happiness?

Here’s the question I leave you with today. How do you generate trust around you? How do you do it at close range, with those that spend a lot of time with you, and how do you go about it in the larger, internet enabled social environment you move in? And how does this impact the trustworthiness of the brand you represent?

I have to say I was very positively surprised with the outcome, and especially with the potential of growth and learning that I suddenly found open before me: I can see months of practice, learning and further personal development ahead of me, without looking outside, but rather, inside.

This is the whole point of focusing. It is a technique to help us take our attention focus to the sensations and images that the unconscious part of our brains and bodys are continually using to try to get through to us. This doesn’t force us to do anything, but in fact gives us the liberty to decide whether to go with this new point of view or to go against it because it may be wrong, subjective, or simply based on cave-man-era logic.

Whether you use focusing or other techniques, you can’t expect to lead people if you can’t tap into the bodily information and processing that made us who we are as a species, before we got all intellectual about everything. Not only because your body runs you, leaving you to be its follower instead of its leader, but also because as leader you need to interpret and manage the emotinal aspects of your team’s behaviour as well.

I can’t name a single performing leader that hasn’t relied instinctively on their ’gut feeling’ at key moments. They all know that their gut has important things to say about the choices they make, so learning to listen to your gut couldn’t be stupid, could it?

The more pervasive knowledge and informtion are in the business world of today, the more important it becomes to add value in other ways in order to lead the rest.

We really must dive deeper into the wisdom of emotions, developed along millions of years of very successful evolution!

For a few months now I have been debating how to distribute my resources between Spanish focussed visibility and international efforts, and after events like last week’s in Moscow, and other great opportunities in Paris and London, I am leaning towards spending a lot more time in english, focussing internationally on the thousands of global minded professionals who are looking for global minded ideas.

So my blog is going english from today on, and my third book is also going to be originally written in english.

This big strategic decision has come along the way most strategic decisions should. With a lot of experimenting different things (and my blog can testify to several different approaches in Spanish since I started it in September 09), a lot of networking different environments and people, and some analyzing of the trends that carry energy and provide strong ‘gut feeling’.

We live in a society that has forgotten the importance and overpowering importance of emotions, and thus a lot of our strategic thinking is entirely focussed on numbers and data…but truely succesful strategy always has a clear gut feeling behind it.

If you think of it, emotions were built into our system to help us survive by making us feel attracted to things that were good for our survival (food, sex, etc) and beware of things not good for us (wild animals, landslides, you name it!). Our emotions should then play a very important role in telling us how to chose the best paths to achieve success in our lives.

And by the way, can you really label your own emotions and tell the difference between real emotions and fake-feel-alikes generated by your ‘mental’ mind? More on this in my next post!

have a great day….

Los empresarios y expertos convocados a discutir las dificultades de emprender se entremezclarán con una rica oferta de expositores y dinámicas de networking para ofrecer todo lo necesario a los visitantes que estén pensando en montarse por su cuenta o emprender un negocio.

Como firme defensora de las bondades de ‘tomar las riendas’ en esta situación económica, estoy encantada de participar como presentadora de los ponentes del auditorio principal del salón, y poner así mi grano de arena para construir una nueva forma de ver la vida entre los españoles.

La crisis económica se agudiza frente a la lentitud de nuestros políticos para poner medidas (ahora EMPIEZAN  a proponer medidas como si lo difícil fuese pensar en qué hay que hacer…como se nota que tienen poca experiencia implantando medidas que nunca funcionan como uno esperaba! ).

Y así, el único modo de mantener una mente positiva y constructiva es definir un perímetro de actuación que sí dependa de uno. Esperar a que vuelvan los clietnes que se fueron es deprimente, esperar a que alguien te vuelva a dar empleo es desesperante. Para darle la vuelta a la situación uno tiene que TOMAR LAS RIENDAS, superar sus miedos y poner su talento en el mercado.

El camino más corto para “arreglar esto entre todos” es emprendiendo, montando empresas, creando empleo autónomo. Los grandes cambios nacionales ocurren de una cabeza en una.

Espero veros a todos en el Salón Miempresa (www.salonmiempresa.com)!!

¿Pero en qué se nota? Claro que no han dejado de fabricar coches ni se han parado las cadenas de montaje. Lo que se detiene es mucho más vital para la economía y su capacidad de producir riqueza: son las reuniones, las visitas comerciales y las discusiones en equipo que requieren la presencia de todos sus intervinientes.

En un país con más del 90% del tejido económico compuesto por pymes, las reuniones y visitas son uno de los principales motores de la creación de bonanza, y sin embargo, las detenemos alegremente durante todo un mes en diciembre.

Y es que, el problema de la productividad española no son el número de días festivos, que al fin y al cabo, tampoco superan tanto a los festivos europeos, el problema es la desaceleración de reuniones y movimiento que se produce en los días previos a las fiestas y en los días posteriores.

Así, el mes de diciembre lo perdemos a partir del primer puente, y la mitad de Enero también. Luego vienen los líos alrededor de Semana Santa, y pocas semanas más tarde empezamos con las fiestas y puentes de Mayo y luego llegamos al verano, el calor, los horarios de verano y la vagancia generalizada.

Es un año difícil, este 2010 que apenas ahora empezamos. Pero es la oportunidad de cuestionarnos todos cuánto estamos dispuestos a trabajar para salir de la crisis. Posiblemente salgamos de esto más fuertes, más trabajadores, y aunque pueda sorprendernos, más felices.