We cannot want to empower children by protecting their rights and not empower women and men, vice versa; everyone matter.

 

Life is supposed to be lived in a balance. That is why too much of anything even common drinking water drunk in excess can lead to death.

Same way, society must cater for everyone and for everything. We cannot want to empower children by protecting their rights and not empower women and men, vice versa; everyone matter.

I updated my MTN Caller feel with “Men matter, they are first human before they are male!” and just like people react whenever I mention that I advocate for Men empowerment, the questions have been pouring in.

You see, people have told me that men are already empowered by birth; and I ask, really? Some are of the opinion that women are the ones who have been marginalised, and thus the parity drive and equity and inequality campaigns, and I agree as well as disagree. Well, the matter is that I feel, we must focus on everyone and that is the way, we can all choose which part of the ‘elephant that is our responsibility to eat’ in our drive for development in Nigeria and across Africa. It is a communal effort.

I happen to believe that Men are the fulcrum upon which women and children’s lives rotate, and if that is not far from the truth, then we must ensure they are ‘fixed’ and are ‘whole’ for women and children to be preserved.

Dear Mother and Father, are you still prioritizing grooming, training, mentorship for your daughters, and being slack with the sons? You are a big part of the problem.

If Nigeria will arise from the quagmire of lack of human dignity that has brought infidelity, absentee fatherhood, emotional torture among married couples, drug and all sorts of addictions as well as physical violence in homes on the rise, then we must give our sons some ‘humanity’. Allow them share issues or inquisitions about their sexuality with us, share about their moods, cry when they feel like, get counsel when they need it, teach them about money and savings, teach them to make and sell something, teach them about their headship under God, teach them about women, girls and daughters’ care, teach them survival skills like cooking, washing and doing chores; that is the only way that they can grow as whole men.

Men with big achievable dreams. Men with honour. Men that can mentor other boys. Men that women revere and respect. Men that can lead their communities. Men that have integrity. Men that can lead their homes and provide love and warmth. Men that can live healthy lifestyles. Men that can represent the country globally. Men that will partner with women to soar and lead. Men that will stand up for women and children rights. Men that will leave lasting legacies that will cushion the effect of the vagaries of the next generation.

That is the pride of governance and nationhood.

In the past weeks, I have been in various campaigns; most significantly the call for Nigerian government to invest more in the health sector by implementing their commitments up to the 15% budget allocation as agreed in an instrument called the Abuja Declaration of April 2001.

More so, I learnt in the course of partnerships that a 1% of Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) should be for the health sector according to the National Health Act of 2014. These for me are commendable and just like every sector need not just more investment but more effective and conscientious implementation to ensure citizens’ welfare are evenly catered for.

If we must make progress, we must go beyond paying lip service to women and children’s rights to actually implementing them in all aspects as well as ensuring equity because Albinos matter, People living with disability matter too, also men in all of these constituencies have women and children under their purview; so we must empower them to think right and act right.

By Honor Whiteman; Culled from Medical News today,

Fruits and vegetables are a pivotal part of a healthful diet, but their benefits are not limited to physical health. New research finds that increasing fruit and vegetable consumption may improve psychological well-being in as little as 2 weeks.

Study leader Dr. Tamlin Conner, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and colleagues found that young adults who were given extra fruits and vegetables each day for 14 days ate more of the produce and experienced a boost in motivation and vitality.

The researchers recently reported their findings in the journal PLOS One.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, adults should aim to consume around two cups of fruits and around two to three cups of vegetables daily.

One cup of fruits is the equivalent to half a grapefruit or a large orange, and one cup of vegetables is proportionate to one large red pepper or a large, baked sweet potato.

As part of a healthful diet, fruits and vegetables can help reduce the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer.

In recent years, studies have suggested that fruit and vegetable intake may also improve mental health. For their study, Dr. Conner and team set out to investigate this association further.

Increased motivation, vitality with higher intake of fruits and vegetables

The researchers enrolled 171 students aged between 18 and 25 to their study, and they were divided into three groups for 2 weeks.

One group continued with their normal eating pattern, one group was personally handed two additional servings of fresh fruits and vegetables (including carrots, kiwi fruit, apples, and oranges) each day, while the remaining group was given prepaid produce vouchers and received text reminders to consume more fruits and vegetables.

At the beginning and end of the study, participants were subjected to psychological assessments that evaluated mood, vitality, motivation, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and other determinants of mental health and well-being.

The researchers found that participants who personally received extra fruits and vegetables consumed the most of these products over the 2 weeks, at 3.7 servings daily, and it was this group that experienced improvements in psychological well-being. In particular, these participants demonstrated improvements in vitality, motivation, and flourishing.

The other two groups showed no improvements in psychological well-being over the 2-week period.

Furthermore, no improvements were seen in symptoms of depression and anxiety in any of the groups. "The majority of research linking depression to dietary patterns has been longitudinal, meaning that possible differences in ill-being may be established over a much longer period of time rather than our brief 2-week period," note the authors.

Still, the researchers say that their findings indicate that increasing the intake of fruits and vegetables through personal delivery may lead to rapid benefits for psychological well-being.

The team concludes that:

"Providing young adults with high-quality FV [fruits and vegetables], not texting them reminders to eat more FV and giving them a voucher, resulted in improvements to their psychological well-being over a 2-week period.

This is the first study to show that providing high-quality FV to young adults can result in short-term improvements in vitality, flourishing, and motivation. Findings provide initial validation of a causal relationship between FV and well-being, suggesting that large-scale intervention studies are warranted."

Every creature on earth is guided at some levels by a certain kind of safety culture howbeit on different degrees. Animals and birds strive to stay safe in their own unique 'beastly' way, keeping themselves and their offspring from harms’ way (predators). A study of the behaviour of animals gives that understanding. It is a natural phenomenon. From territorial protection and construction of "apartments" such as nests, holes etc. to storing up food for the rainy days. It's a daily struggle to keep at it. Animals have it inherently engraved in their DNA.

 

Humans have only taken this natural and instinctive phenomenon of staying and being safe to a more deliberate and sophisticated level. Mankind has developed several safety strategies and methodologies thereby giving it a more demonstrable and objective appearance. At the heart of all of these programmes and schemes is the fact that safety is commonsense. The successful implementation of occupational health and safety management system in any organization including at work sites depends largely on intricate processes and systems which are hinged on very simple principles. More often than not the simple safety principles are overlooked and organizations struggle to impact convoluted and sometimes mystifying codes and standards. This is precisely where many organizations get it mixed up.

 

It should be stated at this point that effective safety implementation is largely dependent on effective safety coaching and mentoring starting from first principles.

 

I have come to know in my experience as a safety professional that no organization wants incidents or accidents, injuries, fatalities, damage to equipment or environmental impact in their operations.

They all have a desire to have a safe workplace and the pivot in this drive is the safety coaching process.

 

When an adequate safety coaching program is implemented, people begin to view it as core value of the organization. The workforce has to be engaged because it is everyone’s responsibility.

When a firm safety foundation is set through proper and effective coaching and mentoring, it provides a platform for a strong safety culture. The benefits to a strong safety culture are myriad. Morale is typically higher in organizations that have minimal incidents. The benefits go beyond the often obvious measurable ones including the significant savings that can be generated from having a sustainable safety culture that produces few incidents and losses if any. It is about loss prevention.

 

Safety coaching is the concept of facilitating the safety performance, learning and development of another person through support, observation, feedback and accountability. An effective safety coach will express support for the safe behaviours they observe and offer useful and caring feedback regarding at-risk behaviours observed. The safety coach will then share the observations with the management and employees involved, who will analyze the information and come up with strategies and procedures to prevent that behaviour in the future and make the workplace safer.

 

The safety coaching process has been successful in many organizations because, although it can be time-consuming to implement, it is one of the most effective ways to affect an organization’s safety culture, and in turn, change employees’ attitude towards safety.

 

Some tips to consider

1. In the safety coaching process, it is important to teach personnel how to safely carry out a task, but just teaching is not enough. A more critical approach would be to get full engagement by teaching personnel why it is vital to undertake a task the way specified.
2. Safety coaching helps to empower employees as co-owners of the process. When employees are engaged in setting safety rules, they are more likely to comply with them than rules imposed or thrown at them.
3. To show that management truly values the coaching initiative, it should be actively involved in the process not just in terms of setting goals and targets but also in providing incentives and rewards. This motivates employees’ participation and accountability.
4. Many organizations set consequence management side by side with reward and incentive schemes, some paying more attention to the former. As much as trying to even out is concerned this bears relevance, but in the end the system should not be tuned to finding and focusing on the negatives. It should rather be to encourage the positives and create an environment to support and coach the offenders to always do the right thing.
5. The safety coaching system should use non-directive communication technique to drive home a point. A good safety coach focuses on the behaviour, not the person. Feedbacks should be constructive to encourage not necessarily castigating and condemning. Safety coaches and their organizations must stop focusing on the things that go wrong and start measuring things that go well.
6.  As much as data gathering and utilization is valuable we must be mindful not to become over-analytical. What is most important in developing a safety culture is the process of interpersonal observations and feedbacks not just graphs and charts to give a facelift.
7. Organizations must pursue continuous improvement. As the safety coaching process is being implemented, organizations would have to make refinements based on results. Safety perception surveys can be a valuable tool for assessing employees’ feelings about the organization’s safety culture.
8. Organizations should set up a program to mentor potential safety coaches from within employee ranks. Part of a safety leader’s job is to develop additional safety leaders and coaches.

These tips and others can help to assist understanding of the safety coaching program and therefore significantly help improve organizations’ safety performance.

 

In a future article we will consider how management must lead by example and correctly apply certain factors to monitor performance through a comprehensive assist and assure program.

 

Godson Diaso

(Safety Coach/Professional)

08060482808

We are a product of the different influences in our lives. What we are now and what we will become are a sum total of all the influences that characterize our experiences. Influence basically is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behavior of someone. There are mounting bodies of research that discusses how the different influences in a child’s life shape them. Expose a child to a life of abuse and ridicule, a life of constant pain and negativity, you are very likely to get a social deviant that sees life in dark shades and crooked colors, but raise a child in an atmosphere of love and affection, an environment where laughter is the only song they know how to sing, where infectious smiles trail every comment because compliments are given freely, and you are very likely to have an upbeat person who sees life in many beautiful shades, they see the world as their playground with so many possibilities to explore.

Understanding the power of influence over our outcomes and our lives generally, it is imperative that we are deliberate about the influences that we subject ourselves to. Rather unfortunately though in our cognitive development; the period in our lives when our personality are actively being developed is between the ages of 0 to 12 years, which coincides with a period of our lives that we have no conscious control of the influences on us and hence the input into our cognitive make-up. Parents and guardians therefore have a major role to play in the kind of influences that accompanies children as they grow

Three powerful Sources of influence that we must control for our kids and also even for ourselves as adults are

1. The Mass Media

In recent times, the mass media (Television and radio) has emerged as a powerful tool for shaping people and society. The perception we mostly carry about the world and things are those which have been created in many instances by media propaganda. The power in the mass media is in its ability to affect a lot of people all at once.

Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought where critical analysis is done in the brain, while the right hemisphere is the seat of our emotions. Incoming data are treated uncritically and absorbed into our subconscious mostly becoming part of our cognitive system. In plain English, television has the potential to modify our thought process.

Parents must be deliberate about what television programme their kids watch and what they listen to, this way that source of influence can be appropriately harnessed to engender an appropriate pattern of behavior from children.

2. The books we read

Books are major sources of influence. According to a study by Geoff Kaufman published in the journal of personality and Social Psychology titled “You are What you Read”, books have the ability to shape people’s social reality. The research reveals that in many instances readers tend to take up the thought pattern of the books they read and it becomes their own. That is why for avid readers of novels, the emotions, fears and thrills depicted in the fictional characters are felt by the readers, the influence is indeed very powerful. What kind of books do you read?

3. The company we keep

John Maxwell; Leadership expert and author opines that the people we spend most of our times with invariably rub off on us and we start exhibiting similar tendencies. Friends and companions are powerful influences. We reflect the nature of the company we keep in the things we say and do. It is often said that people who you spend time with take you on their journey. This is very profound. If you have a plan about where you want to be in your career, business, and life generally the question we must answer is, “will the company I keep take me there?” you cannot be going to Lagos and get on a bus going to Abuja and expect to arrive at Lagos. If you want to be wise, keep company with wise men, if you want to be wealthy, Keep Company with wealthy people; and their daily routine will gradually become yours. Wise men do not sit in the company of fools.

4. The internet

Over the last few years, the internet has evolved as a very powerful influence on people. There is a gamut of information that constantly flood the web beckoning for attention. Most of these information are primarily geared towards prompting users of the web to take action. Increasingly, the web is tending to be amongst the most potent tool of influence because of the amount of time people spend online. We currently now have 2 realities; physical reality and virtual reality, and of course people now have dual identities to fit into these 2 realities. Rather unfortunately, the internet is uncensored and so we find things in there that are unverified and sometimes untrue serving as the source of influence over people’s behavior. Utmost discretion and caution must be applied as we expose ourselves to this very potent source of influence.

Determining your influences

The foregoing sources of influences in the write-up so far can actually be harnessed for the imposition of positive influences as well as negative influences. Note that for adults, it takes a longer period of exposure to these influences for them to result in any significant character modification. Again this depends on the strength of earlier influences that constitutes our “vehicle” to the place we currently are in terms of character. However for children these sources of influences (Mass media, Books, Friends and the Internet) are very potent and must be carefully used so that desirable traits are engendered; studies in “Child Psychology” expresses this truth.

For both adults and children though, the following sources of influence can be actively used to create positive outcomes in our lives

1. Mentors

Mentorship is a relationship whereby a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced and knowledgeable person. One who refuses to seek the advice of others will eventually be led to a path of ruin. A mentor helps you to perceive your own weaknesses and confront them with courage. Mentors are important because they have gone through the journey that protégés intend to take and they know the ropes. According to Romain Rollan, “If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself”. In choosing mentors, we must have it in mind what exactly it is we desire, so we can ascertain who it is can shed light through his experience on how to get

2. Coaches

While mentoring is a long term relationship between a mentor and a protégé, coaching is a project or task based relationship of influence. Both have their place in creating positive environments of influence. A coach is like an instructor who gives guidance on specific areas of skills and aptitude required to excel at a thing. The influence of coaches can be judged quickly over a short span of time with regards to the result produced from the relationship. There are many aspects of our lives that we may not have the required expertise to thrive in and we need people who can bequeath us with such expertise, coaches come in handy in this regards

3. Role Models

Role models are people looked up to as an example to be imitated. This source of influence is such that there may not necessarily be a relationship between the two parties. By the words that make up the term, we can safely say that one can have a plurality of people who they admire and would like to emulate depending on the different roles of their lives that a model is sort. In many instances parents by default make up the earliest role models for children. That is why very importantly right attitudes must be portrayed for children to emulate. As much as there would be times when your influence would wane as children grow older, the earliest influences are more likely to form the core of their character.

Influences are subtle shapers of our world and social reality. The very nature of which re              quires insights. Truth is, our minds are like gardens that if not tended to will grow weeds and all kinds of undesirable plants, but if well cultivated will become beautiful places. It is along this line that the good book admonishes that we should “guard our hearts (minds) with all diligence, because out of it are the issues of life”.

Communication is the act or process of using words, sounds, signs, or behaviors to express or exchange information or to express your ideas, thoughts, feelings, etc., to someone else. It is important that information is presented in a manner that recipients can understand and interpret.  We also acknowledge that different approaches are required for different organizations and situations (e.g., access to computers, non-English speaking background) when sending out these information.

Vital and effective communication has been an integral part for our achieving an injury-free workplace/operation in TECHDaer. Most injuries are due, in part, to risky behaviors, yet employees often are reluctant to provide safety-related feedback to co-workers. We have been able to improve on our safety culture (and performance) by providing sound guidelines to improve safety-related communication, providing and receiving safety feedback more effectively and praising or appreciating employees that have been exhibited good safety-related behaviors. This is evident in the recent statistics of over 12 LTI -free years,  recorded in TECHDAER across all her operations and HSE awards received from various clients in recent past for active participation in maintaining a safe working environment while on their location.

One of the most effective ways to improve a safety culture and prevent injuries is to optimize safety-related communication throughout an organization (Williams, 2003).

There are many examples of technical strategies for safety communication within TECHDaer. The most commonly used methods for both  internal and external communication include; presentations to senior management, staff and HSE Committees, team meetings, emails, notice boards, newsletters, poster displays and signage, annual reports, publications, telephone enquiries, and submissions to government on changes to legislation, HSE mission statement, policy and strategic plan,  STOP cards, HSE statistics, Safety induction, Risk assessment, Manuals, checklists and operating procedures, Hazards, incidents and near-misses, training, HSE Website, brochures, videos, safety Week, safety campaigns , HSE conferences etc.

Unfortunately, numerous obstacles or barriers can cause communication to break down. For instance; when too much information is being communicated all at once, when the message lacks clarity, when expectations are not clearly defined, when a safety message is communicated without taking the time to listen carefully to the response of employees or when employees’ concerns and priorities are not taken into account.

Failure to communicate safety information effectively can have serious negative consequences, including: Accidents, injuries, and illness, Lost workdays, reduced productivity and delays, risk-taking by employees, inability to comply with regulations, higher workers’ compensation and health insurance costs, damage to materials, equipment, or your facility (for example, in a workplace fire caused by carelessness or lack of knowledge), risks to community and environment (for example, in a release or improper disposal of hazardous chemicals), employees may feel left out and end up with bad feelings.

An employee’s perceptions about support for safety can strongly influence his or her willingness to speak up. Some common barriers to upward communication (feedback to management) include fear of retaliation, concerns that the communication will be filtered as it goes up the chain of command, perceptions that management is resistant to critical feedback, and fear of creating interpersonal conflict. These communication barriers, if unaddressed, can have a negative impact on information exchange, organizational learning, and ultimately safe performance.

In conclusion, we will continue to create an environment that is supportive, encouraging, and accepting of both positive and negative feedback, so employees will always feel free to speak up and this will also facilitate effective upward communication in the organization.