Your attitude towards these two words will save or destroy your relationships

You've probably said "I'm sorry" a lot in your personal and professional lifetime, but were you saying it for your own benefit or because you felt it was owed? The former attitude comes in two types.  In the first "I'm sorry" type, it has become a way of avoiding confrontation.  It's a knee jerk reaction formed from a habitual need to control every situation and diffuse perceived threats to your dominance.  You tell yourself that it's just the kind of self-effacing trait that makes you a great leader.  It doesn't.

The second "I'm sorry" type is the most detrimental to your relationships because it is actually an anti-apology.  Have you ever told someone that you are sorry they feel that way?  Is that an apology?  No, it is instead a way of placing blame.  While you may consciously perceive this as an apology and pat yourself on the back for recognizing someone's feelings, the reality is that you just caused more damage to that relationship than through the initial offense.  To you it feels like an effective way to maintain your own dominance in the conversation, but to the recipient it's a clear indicator that you have not been an empathic listener.

Understanding when to apologize is a skill to be learned.  The art of the apology will create trust and grow deeper and more meaningful relationships at home and at work.  Learning how not to apologize is easy if you just remember the power in those two little words.

Meetings Are Killing You and Your Creativity

We know that a sedentary lifestyle and sitting all day at work leads to major health risks, even to an extent that Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has said that "excessive sitting is a lethal activity" (Vlahos, 2011).  What you didn't know was that sitting in meetings is not only hazardous to your health, but is negatively impacting your cognitive and group performance, too.

Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, studied 54 groups to simulate a typical meeting environment where meeting attendees work together on a group-based creativity task.  While their control group worked in a typical meeting room with a conference table and chairs (sedentary workspace), the test group environment had the chairs removed from the room.  Knight and Baer found that "physical space shapes performance indirectly by affecting group members' arousal and territorial behavior, which together influence information elaboration" (Knight & Baer, 2014).  In other words, the chairs in the room affected group members physiologically (increased activity, moving around more) and behaviorally (using a physical object like a chair to create boundaries or "territories" of ownership to protect their individual ideas), ultimately altering group dynamics by changing the way they exchanged information and perspectives with each other.

Removing chairs from the conference room isn't going to automatically make you and your teams more creative, but could create an environment where teams collaborate and share perspectives in a way that leads them to better and more innovative solutions.

Check out these links to learn more about non-sedentary work habits:

"Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?" by James Vlahos
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html

"Get Up, Stand Up: The Effects of a Non-sedentary Workspace on Information Elaboration and Group Performance" by Andrew P. Knight and Markus Baer

http://spp.sagepub.com/content/5/8/910