How to Handle an Office Romance

How to Handle an Office Romance Rusty Rueff, On Tuesday 4 January 2011, 23:22 SGT

This year's annual holiday company party was the best ever--because you met the person of your dreams. You never imagined that he or she would work for the same company as you. So now what do you do?

We all know office relationships are complicated. And somewhere in your company's employee handbook is a list of policies that probably says employees shouldn't get romantically involved.

But office relationships still happen. Even good employees find themselves wanting to make the most out of an office romance, while continuing to make the most out of their job.

Here's what to do if you and a co-worker fall for each other (assuming you're both unmarried):
-- Don't feel guilty for falling in love at work.
Your employer worked hard to fill the company with people who share the same values, principles, work ethic, skills, and education. Plus, you're together for 8 to 12 hours a day. So it's not that surprising that romances tend to spark between employees. No matter what happens, don't feel guilty.

[For another perspective, see Be Wary About Chancing a Workplace Romance.]

-- Don't go public until you're sure the relationship will last. Since not all companies will be happy about your good news, it's in your interest--and the interest of your partner--to be sure the the relationship is real and worth investing in before having that conversation with the boss.

-- Decide who's willing to leave their job if it gets too tough to handle. While you might not be officially told you can't have a relationship in the workplace, you may get that subtle vibe from your boss or your boss's boss. Before you disclose the relationship to your colleagues, determine whether you or your lover would be willing to leave the job if the news isn't accepted as you'd like.

-- Disclose the relationship to your boss at the same time your partner discloses it to his or hers. If you have the same boss, you won't have this problem. But if you have different bosses, make sure one doesn't hear about the relationship from the other. It's better to break the news yourself. Tell your boss that you'd both like to continue working for the company, that you're just as committed--if not more so--than you were before.

[See 10 Ways to Make Any Job Healthier.]

-- Go out of your way to keep it low key at work. Once the relationship is public, put extra effort into making sure everything comes across as "normal," and that you remain professional. Keep your work time for work and your time outside of work for the relationship. That means having lunch with your co-workers and not your partner.

-- Stay mum while at work. You may be privy to confidential information because of your relationship, but don't disclose it at work. Keep your relationship and work separate as much as possible.

-- Maintain good relations at all times. For your own sanity, never talk about work when either of you are horizontal. It's just good relationship management. 'Nuff said.
[For more career advice, visit U.S. News Careers, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.]

So if you find yourself tangled in an office romance, don't feel like you have to give up your work or your love interest. I'm speaking from experience; my wife and I met at work. We dated clandestinely for a year, agreed that one of us would be willing to walk away from the job if there was a problem, and ended up tying the knot while still working for the same company. And yes, both of our bosses attended the wedding!

Rusty Rueff, director and career expert for jobs and career website Glassdoor.com has been a CEO, led HR in global companies and is co-author of Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business.

http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/How-to-Handle-an-Office-usnews-2430770618.html?x=0

A slow ride back home

Today is a slow ride back home. SMRT as usual, is encountering some track fault issue after a extended downpour in the north. Not usual, I was out quite late after taking a extended break from trying to get some visual effects done on the computer. Bubble effect..that is what I am trying to do. It is not as easy as it is.....taught in illustrator and trying to do it in Photoshop CS5.

Got to try and still trying.

As I am on the way back, with the try moving and stopping. Slowly as I continued to read the book of Job. I was brought to how Job life was after the test has started. I could sense the discomfort that Job is experiencing. Bearing with it daily, after having to lost all comfortable comforts. Now he is suffering alone, lonely inside with people just being around him. Just presence yet not able to alleviate his pain and agony.

Cry of sorrow. Godly sorrow.

Life seems like the train moving slowly and stopping. The passenger do not really can feel except when things come to a halt. The jag. The accerlerationg effect is quite mininal. Only the frequent annoucements of the train being delayed that caused some to complain and gonder about being late for appointments and hungry souls.

How to be aware of the surround and yet not carried by the motions of life. It is to be still with God and be focused on Him. As I read God's word, there is that inner peace though. Figuring what is God asking me and sensing His presence. The peace and tranquil, felt even though I am still aware of the surrounding. How much more so that I can really be fully focused on God and nothing surrounding matters. Nothing of the world matters but only what God matters. A quiet Quality Time spent.

As I place my thoughts there, my mind still wonders. Of how just looking into the eyes and being in the presence is just so sufficient. Being content? Or not asking for more? Perhaps this may not be the time for me consider though I know I did made preparation for the crossing of the uncharted waters. 10years is fast to come by...and the 10th year marks soon comes. What have the Lord has to say? Only the Lord says and for me to spend time to hear.

Meanwhile, yup..prayer...prayer.. Organiser is up. Now prayer is another territory to claim back. It is just a pleasure to get back to what it was before. I pray that it will just get better and better. God please help me. I am weak but you are strong. All things are possible through Christ.

Wisdom: Part 1

Those who have the gift of wisdom, according to Mark Driscoll, have "the ability to have insight into people and situations that is not obvious to the average person, combined with an understanding of what to do and how to do it. It is the ability to not only see but also to apply the principles of God's Word to the practical matters of life by the 'Spirit of wisdom' (Eph. 1:17)." Some people who have this gift can have occupations such as coaches or counselors and are in areas where they can help people make good choices according to biblical trughts. Do you know anyone who has this gift or do you feel like you may possess it? Mark Driscoll has some practical questions that you can ask yourself to determine you do:

1.When studying God's Word, do you find that you discvoer the meaning and its implications before others do?

2. Are you able to apply biblical truth in a practical way to help counsel others to make good life choices?

3. Do you find that when people have important decisions to make, they come to you for prayer and biblical counsel?

4.Do you find that when you counsel people, God the Spirit gives you wisdom to share with them from Scripture, which they accept as God's truth to them through you?

"To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:8).

Living Life

Wary Investors Turn to Lie Pros

Wary Investors Turn to Lie Pros by Kyle StockTuesday, January 4, 2011

provided by Wall Street Journal

Deception detectors find a new niche.

When screening a fund manager, investors like to see experience and a consistent record or returns. Elizabeth Prial, however, looks for dilated pupils and uneven breathing.

Ms. Prial, a psychologist and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, has spent most of her career looking for lies in the statements of mafia hitmen and terrorists. Now, she is on the hunt for the next Bernard Madoff, selling her deception-detection skills to institutional investors and others with large pools of money who want to know if prospective fund managers are telling the truth.

"It's usually very clear," she said. "I'm 90% confident in most of the things that I can see."
Amid the rush to fortify the nation's still-rickety regulations in the wake of the financial crisis, affluent investors are turning to behavioral specialists, looking to find things in faces and phrases that may not be revealed in financial statements.
J.J. Newberry, a lauded California-based human lie detector, has trained almost a dozen investment professionals in workshops typically reserved for police officers and government agents.
Mark Frank, another deception detection consultant who teaches at the University of Buffalo, said in recent months he has repeatedly turned down requests to analyze subjects for Wall Street firms.
Eccentric screening techniques are nothing new to Wall Street. Seigmund Warburg, founder of the giant London-based investment bank S. G. Warburg & Co., was notorious for subjecting customers and employees to psychological tests. He was particularly diligent about evaluating hand-writing samples of would-be workers, in attempt to uncover character flaws.


Detecting Deception
There is no universal movement or "Pinocchio's nose" that denotes a lie. But here are several things that people known as "deception detection" professionals look for when examining a money manager's truthfulness.
• Pupils changing size: Often corresponds to extreme emotion, including fear.• Irregular breathing:Can flag nervousness and agitation.
• Microexpressions:Split-second facial expressions that portray various emotions (despair, fear or anger).
• Crossing legs:Liars typically try to distance themselves from an untruth; crossed legs can be a manifestation of that.
• Motionlessness:Often caused by the extreme focus associated with telling and maintaining a lie.
• Quick verbal responses:Often indicates a premeditated, scripted statement.

Ms. Prial, 43 years old, has assessed almost 50 fund managers on behalf of prospective investors. Though she still consults for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, her private sector employer is Insite Security, a New York-based firm that also sells standard due diligence and workplace disaster-preparedness plans. Insite's clients -- pension funds, affluent families and private-equity companies -- pay about $10,000 a meeting for the service.
Ms. Prial, slim, dark-haired and unassuming, is introduced as an associate and sits quietly while the would-be fund manager is interviewed by Insite's client. She watches and listens for the myriad subtle signs that researchers have linked to lying: facial twitches, changes in breathing tempo, and shifts in language patterns.

Professional human lie detectors said that people are uncomfortable with untruths and will show that in certain ways, such as microexpressions -- brief flashes of fear or other emotions in a face -- or concealing motions like crossing one's legs or touching one's face. Lies in speech are often flagged by a switch from the first person to the third person, as when a subject suddenly begins speaking on behalf of "the firm" or "the team."
"The most accurate indicator is the pupil size changing," Ms. Prial said. "If you can be close enough to see that, then you're golden."

But deceptive "tells" are not universal, which is where the psychology comes into play. Human lie detectors said the practice is most effective when the analyst can establish a pattern of behavior and then flag transgressions from that pattern.

"I can't say 'Oh, when they scratch their nose, they're lying,' " Ms. Prial said. "It's more like: 'What does this person look like when they're telling the truth, and when do those characteristics disappear?'"

Traditional polygraphers and investigators employ many of the same interviewing techniques as Ms. Prial. Skeptics, however, abound. A federal initiative that trained about 3,000 airport screeners in similar techniques has sparked debate. In a May report, the Government Accountability Office called into question the effectiveness and the scientific foundation of deception-detection techniques.

[More from WSJ.com: Rewards Cards Lead to More Debt]
Jim Roth, founder of corporate intelligence firm The Langley Group, said the results can be inconsistent and less than telling.

"If you did nothing but deception detection, I don't think it gets you very far," he said. "In my world, I would characterize it as a small tool."

Mr. Roth said straightforward analysis can be more useful. When investigating a company for potential weaknesses, his firm looks for less subjective things: an exodus in the ranks of middle management, a spike in the ratio of accounts receivable to revenue, and unusual share sales by top executives.

Even professional lie detectors say that their work is fallible. Humans lack "a Pinocchio's nose," and some people simply can't be read with accuracy.

Insite wouldn't reveal its clients, and Ms. Prial doesn't keep any written record of her work. Christopher Falkenberg, a former Secret Service agent who founded Insite, said the value of the service is in identifying "hot spots," areas where some more probing might reveal a lie or information that a subject is trying to conceal.

Mr. Falkenberg said the idea to hire Ms. Prial was triggered by the fraud cases against Mr. Madoff and Allen Stanford, who slipped by formal federal inquiries many times.
"It occurred to me that had the victims called us, we would have utilized very standard due diligence techniques," he said. "But I can't tell you that we would have been able to find the very nuanced covers that were evidence of these scams."

[More from WSJ.com: Hard Call: When to Shut Down a Bank]
Ms. Prial, a relatively passive mutual-fund investor, is still getting used to the ways of Wall Street, after years spent analyzing criminals and terrorists.
People on Wall Street are better liars, she said. Fund managers she screens are more self-aware than common criminals or terrorists and thus more skilled at covering up their deceptions, she added.
Ms. Prial also said many honest investment professionals have behaviors that point to narcissism, a trait that often goes hand-in-hand with deception. She has had to learn that an inflated sense of self isn't a suspicious anomaly on Wall Street.

Quoted: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/111710/wary-investors-turn-to-lie-pros

The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage

Sustainable Love
The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: December 31, 2010

A lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage. Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons.

But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying. In short, they want a sustainable marriage.

“The things that make a marriage last have more to do with communication skills, mental health, social support, stress — those are the things that allow it to last or not,” says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor who directs the Interpersonal Relationships Laboratory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “But those things don’t necessarily make it meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual.”

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?
Not anymore. For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? (Take the full quiz measuring self-expansion.)
While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships, Dr. Lewandowski says.

“If you’re seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position,” he explains. “And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.”

The concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat them to new experiences, like a weekend away. But self-expansion isn’t just about exotic experiences. Individuals experience personal growth through their partners in big and small ways. It happens when they introduce new friends, or casually talk about a new restaurant or a fascinating story in the news.
The effect of self-expansion is particularly pronounced when people first fall in love. In research at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 325 undergraduate students were given questionnaires five times over 10 weeks. They were asked, “Who are you today?” and given three minutes to describe themselves. They were also asked about recent experiences, including whether they had fallen in love.

After students reported falling in love, they used more varied words in their self-descriptions. The new relationships had literally broadened the way they looked at themselves.
“You go from being a stranger to including this person in the self, so you suddenly have all of these social roles and identities you didn’t have before,” explains Dr. Aron, who co-authored the research. “When people fall in love that happens rapidly, and it’s very exhilarating.”
Over time, the personal gains from lasting relationships are often subtle. Having a partner who is funny or creative adds something new to someone who isn’t. A partner who is an active community volunteer creates new social opportunities for a spouse who spends long hours at work.

Additional research suggests that spouses eventually adopt the traits of the other — and become slower to distinguish differences between them, or slower to remember which skills belong to which spouse.

In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them.

People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner. When the trait described only one person, the answer came more slowly. The delay was measured in milliseconds, but nonetheless suggested that when individuals were particularly close to someone, their brains were slower to distinguish between their traits and those of their spouses.
“It’s easy to answer those questions if you’re both the same,” Dr. Lewandowski explains. “But if it’s just true of you and not of me, then I have to sort it out. It happens very quickly, but I have to ask myself, ‘Is that me or is that you?’ ”

It’s not that these couples lost themselves in the marriage; instead, they grew in it. Activities, traits and behaviors that had not been part of their identity before the relationship were now an essential part of how they experienced life.

All of this can be highly predictive for a couple’s long-term happiness. One scale designed by Dr. Aron and colleagues depicts seven pairs of circles. The first set is side by side. With each new set, the circles begin to overlap until they are nearly on top of one another. Couples choose the set of circles that best represents their relationship. In a 2009 report in the journal Psychological Science, people bored in their marriages were more likely to choose the more separate circles. Partners involved in novel and interesting experiences together were more likely to pick one of the overlapping circles and less likely to report boredom. “People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

Quoted:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/weekinreview/02parkerpope.html?no_interstitial