Yes! outlines 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive.

If you want to influence others to higher levels of employee engagement strive to enhance your request with the personal touch.

An ounce of personalized extra effort is worth a pound of persuasion. the more personalized you make a request, the more likely you’ll be to get someone to agree that request. More specifically, this research shows that in the office or in the community, a personalized sticky not could highlight the importance of your reports and communications and prevent them from becoming the proverbial needle in a haystack of other reports, letters, and mailings that are also vying for attention. What’s more, the timeliness and quality of compliance with your request are likely to be enhance as well.

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Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

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Here is a ZENgagement quotation relating to employee engagement from Howard Gardner edited book, Responsibility at Work:

We crave work that is of excellent technical quality, work that is ethically pursued and socially responsible, and work that is engaging, enjoyable, and feels good. Of course such work is more easily described than achieved. Not all work is executed at a level of excellence, not all work is carried out in an ethical manner, and alas, not all work engages the passions of the worker. Still, to the extent that our work is under our control, we like to do what we can to become good workers ourselves and to encourage good work on the part of those with whom we come into contact and those over whom we exercise some control (p. 5)

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Speaking about the daily activities in which humans engage, everything is work — being alive and in a body is already work. Every day there is eating and sh..ting and cleaning up. There is brushing and bathing and flossing. Every day there is thinking and caring and creating. So there is no escape from work — it’s everywhere.  for Zen students there’s no work time and leisure time; there’s just lifetime, daytime and nighttime. Work is something deep and dignified — it’s what we are born to do and what we feel most fulfilled in doing. ~ Norman Fischer, Zen monk abbot, (From Howard Gardner’s Responsibility at Work).

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From Wikipedia:

The theremin is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. It is unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The controlling section generally consists of two metal antennas to sense the relative position of the player’s hands. These sensors control audio for frequency from one hand, and volume from the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. To play the theremin, the player moves his hands around the two metal antennas, which control the instrument’s frequency and amplitude volume.

Virtuoso Pamelia Kurstinplays and discusses her theremin,  She excavates a dusty artifact from the prehistoric strata of electronic music — and demonstrates how to squeeze soul from an instrument you can’t even touch.

Watch the video by clicking below or go to the TedTalks site by clicking here.

truffle drawing by Elizabeth Perry.

http://www.elizabethperry.com/woolgathering/archives/002335.html

When we are divided or disconnected how can we expect anything different than disengagement.

To be humble is not to make comparsions. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. ~Dag Hammarskjöld

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David Zinger

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism,

and what we’re lead to is a life not fully lived.

Cynicism is fear,

and it’s worse than fear -

it’s active disengagement.

~ Ken Burns

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Is employee engagement something playful or a snow job?

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.  ~ Carl Reiner

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.  ~ Doug Larson

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David Zinger

They are my favorite articles out of a possible 84 articles I wrote since July. I chose them based on how helpful they can be to the reader and how they also express my specific perspectives on employee engagement.

As an extra, I included a bonus article on engagement and retirement.

9. The Employee Engagement Six Pack. This article uses the six pack of aircraft instruments to look at six ways to assess employee engagement.

10.  Zengagement. This was a series of over 35 very short posts/articles with an image and a quotation to foster your thinking or inspiration on employee engagement.

***

Bonus Article: Blogging break…Retire Now. This article examines retirement less of a state and more as a way of approaching our work and our lives.

Photo Credit: Number 10 by http://flickr.com/photos/spilt-milk/164145237/

David Zinger is devoted to working with employee engagement

to foster results that matter for all.

The line quoted below from page 4 of the book made me think about authentic employee engagement versus programs and policies that look like they foster employee engagement:

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.

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What might it be like to awaken each day into an increasing sense that being loving is even more important than being loved? ~ Stephen Levine

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 Here is a wonderful snippet of poetry from Ralph Waldo Emerson written in 1841, 166 years ago, on self-reliance:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, 1841.

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Elizabeth Hamilton has written an intriguing short book, Untrain Your Parrot.

I have read the question she asked in Chapter 1 before about what’s most important. Yet, I appreciated her phrasing and broader perspective:

If you died today, would your obituary reflect your professed values? Or entropy: “She let the important things slide, and then she died.” The obituary question invites us to reflect on whether the things we consider most important are echoed in our use of time, money, and energy.

The question isn’t just “What’s important to me?” — which is likely to veer toward self-centered responses; it’s “What’s most important, from an all-encompassing, life-centered, or reality-centered perspective?” After all, life is life-centered rather than self-centered, unlike people.

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NOW

It’s a good day when we don’t need to be doing anything else than what we’re doing, when we don’t need to be anywhere else than where we are. On this day, our life is fine as it is and we are free from having to improve and instead, just engage it as it is.  ~ Jack Ricchiuto: A good day.

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Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. ~ John Carmack

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He wrote the book, The Secret Power Within: Zen solutions to Real Problems. Here is a short paragraph from the book on gumption and trusting your gut instinct.

The self-confidence to do these things comes from discipline and learning. As you apply these to difficult challenges, you will acquire the personal strength to go on to other successes. There will be times when you don’t know what to do, when your head dictates one course of actions, your gut another. Which to follow? Always go with your gut. If this results in a setback, so what? You can be thwarted, but not defeated. You can be delayed, but not devastated.

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Our emotions can derail us and cause us to disengage from others, our work, and even ourselves.

Teachings from Tibetan monks may help us overcome our discombobulated monkey minds. Here were 10 great lessons that MabelandHarry listed derived from Tibetan monks:

1. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson
2. Follow the 3 R’s: Respect for self, respect for others, responsibility for all your actions.
3. Spend some time alone each day.
4. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
5. Love as if you’ve never been hurt.
6. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
7. Once a year, go somewhere that you’ve never been before.
8. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
9. Don’t let a little dispute ruin a great friendship.
10. Open your arms to change but don’t let go of your values.

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Without mindfulness we cannot experience high levels of employee engagement:

It takes training to master the art of living mindfully in the present moment. Everything has its own time — this is universal wisdom, not just Buddhist wisdom. You invest yourself one hundred percent in whatever you are doing in the moment. There are times when you have to discuss your work and business strategies. At that time, you invest one hundred percent of yourself into the practice of looking into the nature and difficulties of your business. If you are able to eat mindfully with concentration and spend time with your child mindfully with concentration, then, when the time for doing business comes, you will be able to look deeply into matters at hand and that time will be productive (p. 154).

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Pema Chodron has the following commentary in the book Always Maintain a Joyful Mind on awakening compassion and fearlessness:

In the morning when you wake up, you reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, you think over what you have done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion in the days that follow.

Can you dissolve the barriers between organizations, leadership, and employees to create employee engagement for all by opening your heart?

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