You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?

There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!

Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!


Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!

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Showing posts with label Mindanao Daily News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mindanao Daily News. Show all posts

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Communication – The importance of listening




 By Klaus Döring

A good listener is someone who listens to the speaker to receive and interpret messages accurately. No one likes to communicate with a person who cares only about what they have to say. That’s why, to become a good communicator, you need to be a good listener too.

Active listening is an important part of your communication skill set because it encourages openness, honesty, and success. When you pay attention to your conversation partner, you show that person they are being heard, thus building trust and making that person feel like their words matter to you.

Listening allows us to look within ourselves and become aware of the barriers that inhibit our ability to listen effectively.” As we better understand ourselves, we are then in a better position to understand others and show authentic compassion and empathy.

Do you sometimes feel like this, my dear readers, that you want to discuss something, but the people opposite to you simply cannot listen to you? Sometimes, I would love to tell them, “first, learn to listen”!

Listening is indeed the key in effective communication. A person does not have to speak all the time to be the smartest person in the room. Lack of listening may result in frustration, disappointment, and resentment in our relationships. When we listen, we are able to create stronger emotional connections with people.

Listening is a vital element of communication and it is very much different from the human sense of human. A meaningful communication requires both a good listener and a speaker. However, the effect of a listening style may vary depending on the occasions and situations a listener is in.

However, every time you use active listening, it gets a little easier. It can help you to navigate through difficult conversations. More than that, it helps improve overall communication, builds a better understanding and ultimately leads to better relationships with family, friends and co-workers too.

Listening is an active process by which we make sense of, assess, and respond to what we hear. The listening process involves five stages: receiving, understanding, evaluating, remembering, and responding. Not only in school or at the workplace. But especially talking about the workplace: Listening helps managers to solicit feedback and proactively find out about problems before they escalate. It’s also the only way for management to get to know people as individuals and ensure that they feel genuinely valued.

Not only does listening enhance your ability to understand better and make you a better communicator, it also makes the experience of speaking to you more enjoyable to other people.

Listening and the supreme gift of wisdom belongs together. You can only become a wise person, if you know how to listen. Do you still remember the university lectures in your old student days once upon a time? Anybody can become wise, Proverbs says. Wisdom is not reserved for a brainy elite. Becoming wise requires self-discipline to study and humbly seek wisdom at every opportunity. And allow me to repeat: and, first, learn to listen.

Thursday, October 7, 2021

WHEN OUR LIFE BECOMES SENSELESS

My column in Mindanao Daily News and BusinessWeek Mindanao

OPINION
By KLAUS DÖRING


"In this world there are only two tragedies," said Oscar Wilde. "one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." This paradoxical proverb has often proved true.

Many people think that if they only had more money they would be happy. Howard Hughes was the world's richest man when he was only 45 years old. Twenty years later, at sixty five, he still had all his money but was probably the world's most miserable man. He had retreated from society, living in small dark rooms in different hotels and keeping all the sun out. He was dirty , his beard grew down to his waist, and his hair fell down his back. His fingernails were two inches long. His huge body had shrunk to nothing.

In today's pandemic times many people are also asking themselves about the meaning of life. I don't need to go into that any further here. Everyone knows. Everyone may experience it themselves or find it in their families and surroundings. Yes, the pandemic is far from over, even if there are the first openings and loosenings here and there.

"What is the point of life?" people are asking. You work hard, and many times someone else gets the credit. You struggle to be good, and evil people take advantage of you. You are in a great situation and accumulate money, and it just goes to spoiled fellow men and women. You seek pleasure, but it turns sour on you. And everyone - rich or poor, good or evil, meets the same end. We all die.

I found Ecclesiastes in my bible. A book for our time. Ecclesiastes strikes a responsive chord. No century has seen so much progress, and yet such despair. What is the purpose of life anyway? Is there any ultimate meaning? I even asked myself all these questions, since some people around me passed away during the last weeks.

A key phrase in this book, "under the sun", describes the world lived on one level, apart from God and without any belief in the afterlife. If you live on that level, you may well conclude that life is meaningless.

Ecclesiastes attracts extreme reactions. Novelist Thomas Wolfe said of it, "Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound."

It's really true. Please check it out and try to read it. And find out for yourself if life really seems so meaningless!
 

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Email: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter or visit my www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com .

Monday, June 25, 2018

Roused to anger?



My column in

Mindanao Daily

HAVE MY SAY
By KLAUS DORING
ANGER. A day rarely goes by without us feeling angry. It is not necessary to cite examples. Sometimes, it's just a minor reason like we hate the fly at the wall. Sometimes anger has important reasons.
Anger seems to become main part in our daily life. That's why it is really important to talk (again?) about this phenomenon. As I said, anger is one of the most basic emotions. Everyone can really get angry. If someone told you, he won't get angry, better don't believe him.
Anger is a terrible feeling of being against something or someone. It can be my neighbor, because he is still (!) burning poisonous plastic and rubber garbage. Many of us get angry observing some politicians during those days worldwide.
Anger is a hostile emotion that sets people against one and another, or even against themselves. By its nature, anger involves opposition, hostility, hatred and dislike. Anger, however, is simpler to define that to identify. Emotions of antagonism can take a wider variety of faces. Expressions of anger range from the overt, in-your-face brand of open hostility to the cold indifference of a silent individual.
Anger at the workplace is becoming very common nowadays.
One of my good friends works as stewardess. Imagine yourself 35,000 feet up, pushing a trolley down a narrow aisle surrounded by restless passengers. A toddler is blocking your path, his parents not immediately visible. A passenger is irritated that he can no longer pay cash for an in-flight meal, another is demanding to be allowed past to use the toilet. And your job is to meet all of their needs with the same show of friendly willingness. For a cabin crew member, this is when emotional labor kicks in at work.
A term first coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, it’s the work we do to regulate our emotions to create “a publicly visible facial and bodily display within the workplace”.
At times, anger can be felt like an inner fire. It hits you in the gut. You see red and feel hot and maybe sweaty. Your stomach gives you problems, our blood pressure rises, and breathing rate increases. Not only neighbors or politicians are the reason of anger. The silent withdrawal and lack of understanding and innumerable shortcomings of a partner or in the family are often an indication that one is angrily punishing the other for not doing things his or her way.
Back to the workplace: unhelpful attitudes such as ‘I’m not good enough’ may lead to thinking patterns in the workplace such as ‘No-one else is working as hard as I seem to be’ or ‘I must do a perfect job’, and can initiate and maintain high levels of workplace anxiety.
When research into emotional labor first began, it focused on the service industry with the underlying presumption that the more client or customer interaction you had, the more emotional labor was needed.
However, more recently psychologists have expanded their focus to other professions and found burnout can relate more closely to how employees manage their emotions during interactions, rather than the volume of interactions themselves. Perhaps just only today you turned to a colleague to convey interest in what they said, or had to work hard not to rise to criticism. It may have been that biting your lip rather than expressing feeling hurt was particularly demanding of your inner resource.
But in some cases maintaining the façade can become too much, and the toll is cumulative.
In another friend's last position, the “customer was king”. She was working in a shopping mall. Many times, she got a tirade of abuse from several customers. “When I explained what happened to my senior, I was told I must have said or done something to warrant this response… I was then told I should go and apologize.” Yes, that's how it is!
As I stated earlier: Minor things could become the start of anger. Over the years, handling the stress caused by suppressing one's emotions became much harder. Small things seemed huge, we easily dreaded going to work and anxiety escalated.
Across the globe, employees in many professions are expected to embrace a work culture that requires the outward display of particular emotions – these can including ambition, aggression and a hunger for success.
The way we handle emotional labor can be categorized in two ways – surface acting and deep acting.
A few years ago, the New York Times wrote a “lengthy piece about the “Amazon Way”, describing very specific and exacting behaviour the retail company required of its employees and the effects, both positive and negative, that this had on some of them. While some appeared to thrive in the environment, others struggled with constant pressure to show the correct corporate face.
“How we cope with high levels of emotional labour likely has its origins in childhood experience, which shapes the attitudes we develop about ourselves, others and the world,” says clinical and occupational psychologist Lucy Leonard.
“Unhelpful attitudes such as ‘I’m not good enough’ may lead to thinking patterns in the workplace such as ‘No-one else is working as hard as I seem to be’ or ‘I must do a perfect job”, and can initiate and maintain high levels of workplace anxiety,” says Leonard.
Workers are often expected to provide good service to people expressing anger or anxiety – and may have to do this while feeling frustrated, worried or offended themselves.
Take the example of a particularly tough phone call. If you are surface acting you respond to the caller by altering your outward expression, saying the appropriate things, listening while keeping your actual feelings entirely intact. With deep acting you make a deliberate effort to change your real feelings to tap in to what the person is saying – you may not agree with the manner of it but appreciate the aim.
Both could be thought of as just being polite but the latter approach – trying to emotionally connect with another person’s point of view – is associated with a lower risk of burnout. Good thing: many offices over the last decade have created recreational or rest spaces in a bid to mitigate employee stress.
When things get tough, you might be very lucky talking to colleagues to unload. “It’s the saying it out loud that allows me to test and validate my own reaction. I can then go back to the person concerned,” one of my former office mates in Germany explained many years ago.
Those who report regularly having to display emotions at work that conflict with their own feelings are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion
Remaining true to your feelings appears to be key – numerous studies show those who report regularly having to display emotions at work that conflict with their own feelings are more likely to experience emotional exhaustion.
Of course, everybody needs to be professional at work and handling difficult clients and colleagues is often just part of the job. But what’s clear is that putting yourself in their shoes and trying to understand their position is ultimately of greater benefit to your own well-being than voicing sentiments that, deep down, you don’t believe.
Where it is possible, workers should be truly empathetic, be aware of the impact the interaction is having on them and try to communicate in an authentic way. Easy to say, yes, I know. But let's give a try!

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Does our social media betrays our mood?

My column in MINDANAO DAILY -
the Mindanao-wide published newspaper.

Clues to the state of your mental health may be hiding in plain sight – in the tweets you send and the Facebook updates you post. There it is in your Facebook timeline or Instagram gallery – a digital footprint of your mental health.

I was shocked but - on the other way also very interested checking out more on BBC. This February, BBC Future is exploring social media’s impact on mental health and well-being – and seeking solutions for a happier, healthier experience on these platforms. 

One thing is really clear: it’s not hidden in the obvious parts: the emojis, hashtags and inspirational quotes. Instead, it lurks in subtler signs that, unbeknownst to you, may provide a diagnosis as accurate as a doctor’s blood pressure cuff or heart rate monitor.

For those who see social media mainly as a place to share the latest cat video or travel snap, this may come as a surprise. It also means the platform has important – and potentially life-saving – potential. Following the BBC:  in the US alone, there is one death by suicide every 13 minutes. Despite this, our ability to predict suicidal thoughts and behavior has not materially improved across 50 years of research. Forecasting an episode of psychosis or emerging depression can be equally challenging.

But data mining and machine learning are transforming this landscape by extracting signals from dizzying amounts of granular data on social media. These methods already have tracked and predicted flu outbreaks. Now, it’s the turn of mental health.

Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them.

Even then, these patterns are hardly robust enough in isolation to diagnose or predict depression. Still, they could be crucial in constructing models that can. This is where machine learning comes in.

While checking out all these details, I try to recall my last posts and reactions in social media. Maybe at this moment, you think about yours too.

Allow me to share more with you, my dear readers: researchers from Harvard University and the University of Vermont used these techniques in their recent analysis of almost 44,000 Instagram posts. Their resulting models correctly identified 70% of all users with depression. compared to a rate of 42% from general practitioners. They also had fewer false positives (although this figure drew from a separate population, so may be an unfair comparison). Depressive signals were evident in users’ feeds even before a formal diagnosis from psychiatrists – making Instagram an early warning system of sorts.

Meanwhile, psychiatrists have long linked language and mental health, listening for the disjointed and tangential speech of schizophrenia or the increased use of first-person singular pronouns of depression. For an updated take, type your Twitter handle into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles. From my 1017 most recent words on Twitter, I’m apparently average for being angry and worried but below average on being upbeat – I have been pretty pessimistic about the state of the world recently. Enter @realdonaldtrump into AnalzyeWords and you’ll see he scores highly on having an upbeat emotional style, and is less likely than average to be worried, angry, and depressed.

The behaviour we exhibit online can be used to inform diagnostic and screening tools – so the opinion of Chris Danforth, University of Vermont.

But far beyond this quick and sometimes amusing scan of emotional and social styles (AnalyzeWords tells you if you’re more “Spacy/ValleyGirl” than average), researchers are exploring profound questions about mental health.

Telling signals of depression include an increase in negative words (“no”, “never”, “prison”, “murder”) and a decrease in positive ones (“happy”, “beach”, and “photo”), but these are hardly definitive. Taking it a step further, researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Vermont extracted a wider range of features (mood, language and context) from almost 280,000 tweets. The resulting computational model scored highly on identifying users with depression; it also was correct in about nine of every 10 PTSD predictions.


The ratio of positive to negative words was a key predictor within the model, says Chris Danforth, one of the researchers and Flint professor of mathematical, natural and technical sciences at the University of Vermont. Other strong predictors included increased tweet word count.

What to do with all this information? Empowerment would be a good start. 

Reservations persist more broadly in this field, though, especially around privacy. What if digital traces of your mental health become visible to all? You might be targeted by pharmaceutical companies or face discrimination from employers and insurers. In addition, some of these types of projects aren’t subject to the rigorous ethical oversight of clinical trials. Users are frequently unaware their data has been mined. Yes, include me in. And -maybe- you too!

As privacy and internet ethics scholar Michael Zimmer once explained, “Just because personal information is made available in some fashion on a social network, does not mean it is fair game for capture and release to all”.

BBC news made me very thoughtful: Data mining and machine learning offer the potential for earlier identification of mental health conditions. Currently, the time from onset of depression to contact with a treatment provider is six to eight years; for anxiety, it’s nine to 23 years. In turn, hopefully we’ll see better outcomes. Two billion users engage with social media regularly – these are signals with scalability. As Mark Zuckerberg wrote recently while outlining Facebook’s AI plans, “there have been terribly tragic events – like suicides, some live streamed – that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner.”

Quoting BBC again - and here, I really strong agree: mental health exists between clinic appointments. It ebbs and flows in real time. It lives in posts and pictures and tweets. Perhaps prediction, diagnosis and healing should live there, too.

See you in Facebook and Twitter. Or email me: doringklaus@gmail.com. And you can also follow me in LinkedIn - or just visit my www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or -my relaxing place- www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com .

Monday, September 19, 2016

In Love with Life?

In love with life?

Mindanao Daily News

HAVE MY SAY
BY KLAUS DORING
SOMETIMES, we feel our life is turning miserably. Our negativism doesn’t allow us to keep our eyes, ears – and, most important! – our minds, hearts and souls opened. We’re reaching our breaking point.
This breaking point can be the prelude to our strongest moment. Can be! Must not! But if yes, then it is when we reach our breaking point, we discover our real strength. Allow me to ask you, my dear readers: “What happens to you or with you when you reach your breaking point?” Do you face it or do you run away? I’ll be giving you a very simple answer: If you face it – you break it. If you run away (and/or close your ears, eyes and mouth) – it breaks you!
Are you in love with life? No.
Everyday–a dull reality! Many of us will answer this question with a big YES! Actually, we do like to cover a newborn day already with grey veil. But, each day has a new face, but sometimes we don’t have the strength to watch its countenance. Of course, not every day has adventures and highlights. Would be really too easy!
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that, at the same time, seemed especially desolating and painful with a particular satisfaction. Indeed, everything I have learned, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness.
If it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from your earthly existence, the result would not make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable.
By observation, we can feel that many of us need help to manage the everyday life. We need something that would keep us going as we journey through life. Many times we can also learn from other people and their experiences.
And here is one more thing: Affection is the humblest love – it gives itself no airs. It lives with humble and private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, and the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor. The glory of affection, the disposition of mind, the good will and tender attachment, that can unite those who are not “made for one and another!”
For me life has been a thing of ups and downs in approximately equal measure. I don’t have something sensational to report every day about my progress. Often, I wonder if fulfillment in life is necessarily tied to change for the better. But one thing is for sure: I keep staying in love with life.
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You can email me: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook or Twitter or visit one of my websites www. germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com.