Tag Archives: work-life balance

Happiness At Work #109 ~ our ordinary power

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Several years ago while I was enjoying the fun and reward of making learning programmes with him, Mike Phipps posited this great question, which turned out to be compelling enough to found a new leadership development practice, Politics at Work…

“As you go about your day-to-day activities, where do you get your power and influence from…?”

I have always loved this question, and this week’s Happiness At Work theme considers the potency and power to be found in the ordinary and the everyday.

How can we learn to be happier with what we already have, without having to make any radical changes or costly additions to our current circumstances and without having to depend upon the decisions, actions or behaviours of other people?

What is perhaps already there, right under our noses and within our reach, that we might draw from to advance our own and each other’s success and happiness?

What new potency and life can be discovered in the everyday material of our lives if we would just give ourselves a bit more time and attention to notice?

These are the questions that this collection of articles helps to highlight…

 

Power & Politics at Work – Mike Phipps

Imagine what you could do if you no longer had to ‘play politics’ at work to get things done? How much time would you save?

Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power

Far too many Americans are illiterate in power — what it is, how it operates and why some people have it. As a result, those few who do understand power wield disproportionate influence over everyone else. “We need to make civics sexy again,” says civics educator Eric Liu. “As sexy as it was during the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement.”

 

12 Things People in Denmark Do That Make Them the Happiest People in the World

by Remi Alli

On March 20th — the International Day of Happiness — the United Nations recognized “happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world.” And when it comes to the happiest people, the “World Happiness Report 2013” identified the bacon-loving country of Denmark as holding the highest levels of happiness … but why?

1. They understand the meaning of “It takes a village …”

The Danes place tremendous importance on social, economic and overall security, thus this common quip holds true. In general, volunteerism is given high priority. Ultimately, it appears that community support helps Denmark the most.

2. They are one of the most generous.

Denmark ranks third in the most recent figures for foreign aid expenditure per capita, very generously providing for developing countries and disaster relief.

3. They treat each other with respect.

The Danes are often extremely proud when another Dane launches a successful career, regardless of where they are in the world. For example, the actors Scarlett Johansson (Danish father) and Viggo Mortensen are very popular. Perhaps their cultural regard towards one another also leads to the low reported incidence of corruption in their leadership too.

4. They don’t believe in income inequality.

With an unofficial but recognized $20 minimum wage rate, workers have many reasons to be happy. In addition, their roughly 80% unionization provides them relatively decent leverage if they don’t receive worker benefits. Even still, there are quite a few wealthy people along with a high standard of living, and many wealthy job providers don’t consider their businesses successful until they are able to pay for their workers to have comparable lifestyles to themselves. Employers often cover employee health insurance, too. Denmark is also known for its large GDP per capita.

5. They view certain milestones in reverse (to the U.S.).

Perhaps the Danes are well versed in the psychological reasoning that banning something only increases its desirability. There is no minimum drinking age, for example; Denmark allows parents to decide for their children under age 16. At 16, certain types of alcohol can be bought, while at 18 any legally sold alcohol can be purchased. Eighteen is also the legal age to drive.

6. They don’t support violence.

Other than soldiers in the United Nations, Denmark is not currently involved in any wars, which many believe often create more problems than they resolve, including generations of despairing, disillusioned and forgotten veterans. They also do not have guns readily available and boast an estimated 90% voter turnout rate.

7. They believe that education is a right.

The Danes teach their youth not only Danish but English, giving them a wide perspective and ability to relate as global citizens. Also, university is mostly free to willing students and these students also receive grants towards tuition as an educational incentive. Specifically, the government provides around $1,000 monthly for 70 months towards a degree and students can often easily sign up for loans.

8. They are pretty advanced in social equality.

Denmark outlawed job discrimination against gay people in 1948 and hold values such as tolerance and community accountability quite high — no victim mentalities here.

9. They believe in a military relative in size to its population.

A proportional militia allows more government funding to flow directly to its citizens, rather than subsidizing real or perceived threats.

10. They hold socialist (and capitalist) values.

The Danes believe that people come before profit. Thus, the Danish government provides quite a lot in pensions, unemployment, subsidized child care, free education for professionals, quality infrastructure and sickness benefits, which the Danish understand and appreciate.

11. They understand and appreciate what their taxes subsidize.

Danes pay a pretty penny in taxes: anywhere in range of 36% to 51% in state taxes, along with a 25% sales tax, and around a 1% voluntary church tax. Their Government is also quite astute in managing these particular financial affairs, allowing Danes fairly decent retirement funds and sound infrastructures. While most European countries’ middle class pay more tax than in the United States, the Danish belief in taking care of its citizens means the wealthy pay more in taxes than the working class.

12. They prioritize health.

Many food additives are banned, such as the trans fats that are mostly found in cheap, fried food items. To top it off, with plenty of flat land and a small population, much of Denmark is ideal for the avid bicyclist. The Danes also boast a healthy life expectancy.

Link to read the original article

Happiness: you can work it out

Ditch the guilt, banish your inbox and stop blue-sky thinking. As we return to our desks after the summer fun, Richard Godwin finds the formula for feeling good in the office

Early on in his new book, Happiness by Design, Paul Dolan relates a conversation he once had with a friend who is (or rather, was) a high-powered media executive. She spent most of the evening complaining that her line of work made her miserable. Her boss, her colleagues, her commute — all of it brought her down. When she came to pay the bill, however, her final statement took him by surprise. “Of course, I love working in Medialand!” It is apparent contradictions such as this that illuminate Dolan’s central thesis.

A professor of behavioural sciences at LSE, Dolan came from what he describes as a “lower working-class” family in east London to become one of the world’s leading experts in the emerging study of happiness. Daniel Kahneman, the fabled Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, views him as something of a protégé. The Office for National Statistics has employed him to help establish the framework of David Cameron’s national wellbeing survey.

He is part of a wave of social scientists whose discoveries at once confound your expectations and provide an appreciable way of acting on that knowledge. It’s self-help for pseuds, in other words, in the best traditions of Kahneman’s own Thinking, Fast and Slow, or Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, and full of facts that make you go: “Huh.”

Did you know, for example, that accidents among small children — which have been in decline for decades — have risen since the invention of the smartphone? (Distraction is one of the most significant barriers to happiness, as well as to responsible parenting.) Or that people who tweet about how they’re trying to lose weight actually lose more weight than people who don’t? The rate is 0.5 per cent of weight loss per 10 tweets. Dolan includes that as an example of how peer pressure may be turned into a positive — if losing weight is indeed what makes you happy. The evidence suggests that it does not in the long term.

Dolan’s central insight is that how we evaluate our happiness is very different from how we actually experience it. His media friend thought she was happy (“I love working in Medialand!”). But what was really important, Dolan argues, is her day-to-day experience of it. “[We] generally pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focusing on what actually does,” as he puts it. If we want to be happy, we should get better at working out what makes us happy in the moment.

For this he cites what he calls the “Pleasure Purpose Principle”. We need to balance both pleasure and purpose to experience happiness. It explains why we “solve” a crappy day at work (purpose) with an evening in front of the TV (pleasure). However, when pleasure has no purpose, that doesn’t make us happy either — which is why we’ll often choose to watch some worthy documentary over a silly romcom. Likewise, if there is no pleasure in our purpose — for example, if we’re working on something that we know is a pointless waste of time — it makes us unhappy. Take the dreaded “unassigned” Hooli staff in the sitcom Silicon Valley. Making money from doing nothing does not make them happy. As Dolan counsels: “Happiness is ultimately about the pleasure-purpose principle over time.”

And while the insights are applicable in many areas of life, it’s at work they are most acute. It’s where we spend most of our conscious lives, after all. Here are 10 of the take-home lessons.

Your attention is a scarce resource. Use it wisely …

All work and no play leads to regret …

Future happiness does not compensate for present misery…

…But do consider the present benefits of future decisions …

Change your environment …

Making decisions is difficult. Seek help …

Don’t think about the weather …

Minimise distractions …

Surround yourself with people who increase your happiness…

…But do not compare yourself too much with people around you …

Link to read the full article

Ask Your Employees These 4 Simple Questions to Elicit Productive Feedback

by Susan Steinbreacher

[It is all too easy to become] caught up in the “bigger picture” and the intricacies of your role. But by doing so, it is possible to become disconnected from the day-to-day operations of your business, particularly your impact on employees, customers and suppliers.

When you are only thinking about this broad view, you may notice a downturn in sales, more customer complaints, or employee productivity taking a dive. You may begin to question the way in which you [are working], spending many long, exasperating hours trying to determine why [you are] not moving in the right direction. That is when the “human-side” of the operation — the satisfaction of employees, customers and others who interact with the company — is negatively impacted.

It’s at this point that you’d better start asking questions.

To improve employee engagement and make positive changes in the workplace, leaders should be asking employees for their honest opinion about what is working — or not working — in the organization. If handled properly, the results can yield feedback that may enable you to bolster morale, streamline systems and increase customer satisfaction.  It may even help you to become a better leader.

To get employees talking, you don’t need to have them fill out a huge questionnaire. Instead start with these four simple questions.

1. What are we doing when operating at our best? The goal here is to extract out best practices. The answers you receive will also speak to the culture of the organization and will allow you to leverage those best practices in your marketing collateral as well as when recruiting employees.

2. What are you hearing customers say about our business? The objective of this inquiry is to capture — directly from the front line — what customers or clients are saying. Look carefully for emerging patterns.

3. If you were in my shoes and could make all the decisions, what would you do and why? The purpose of this question is three-fold. First, it engages the employee and demonstrates that management cares about what they think. Second, it puts part of the responsibility on the employee to think more like a leader and put themselves in your shoes. Not only does this instigate creative thought, but it also generates empathy for the responsibilities of company leadership. Most importantly, since the employee is closest to the customer, they will be able to suggest clearly-defined opportunities for improvement.

4. What is the “one essential thing” I need to know in order to make this business a success? This question gets to the heart of how your organization’s time, resources and initiative should be directed in order to prosper. Once again, look for patterns and, if possible, further validate those findings through customer surveys or focus groups.

Be aware that some associates may be fearful of backlash and not be willing to tell it like it is. To avoid this response, meet in small groups, one-on-one (or even allow anonymity) during the process. Determine what works best for your company and don’t forget to show appreciation for the feedback you receive. Recognize that you may be inclined to disagree or provide an explanation for some of your employee’s reactions — so try to keep an open mind.

This exercise achieves multiple benefits. You acquire worthwhile data and, at the same time, the employee will feel that they are recognized, heard and respected.

Take your employee’s feedback and work with it. Build a supportive environment that promotes creativity. Get clear about the relationships between associates, suppliers and customers. Keep it positive and let your employees know that you are receptive to new ideas. Finally, do a little soul searching on your own contribution. Use your insight and focused attention to instil confidence and commitment in your employees that will support them in their efforts to do their very best for your organization.

Link read the original article

 

How To Rewire Your Brain For Greater Happiness

by Jane Porter

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could hack into our own brains and rewire them to be happier?

Science has shown we actually can thanks to a phenomenon called experience-dependent neuroplasticity. “It’s a fancy term to say the brain learns from our experiences,” says Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness. “As we understand better and better how this brain works, it gives us more power to change our mind for the better.”

Hanson assures he isn’t just talking new-age mumbo jumbo. “This is not just ‘smell the roses,'” he says. “I am talking about positive neuroplasticity. I am talking about learning. … The brain is changing based on what flows through it.”

Understanding how our brains function can help us better control them. Here are some key takeaways from Hanson on how our brains work when it comes to wiring for happiness:

~ Recognise your negativity bias…

~ Don’t just think positively.  Think realistically…

~ Know what’s going on in the brain…

~ Follow the 10-second rule…

~ Think of your brain like a cassette recorder…

…Our brains are working just fine, you might be thinking. Why mess with something that’s not broken? But the fact of the matter is happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you can teach your brain to experience more fully.

“We should not fool ourselves,” says Hanson. “We’ve got a brain that is pulled together to help lizards, mice, and monkeys get through the day and pass on their genes. We’ve got a brain that’s like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good. Be muscular from the inside out. Grow the good stuff inside yourself.”

Link to read the rest of this article

 

How To Accept A Compliment (Without Just Giving One Back)

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We’d be lying if we didn’t admit that getting a compliment is an instant mood booster. While we all know there’s a difference between meaningful compliments and ones that are more surface-level, how you act on the receiving end of praise is just as important as how you act when offering it.

A recent survey found that the majority of us know how to properly respond to a compliment, but do we really know how to accept them? For those who get squeamish, self-deprecating or just all-around awkward when someone applauds you, here is how to master the art of accepting a compliment:

Notice your body language.

How we carry ourselves is key to any conversation, but when it comes to really accepting compliments, body language could be your greatest ally. Our bodies can sometimes say way more than the words we speak — and they can also influence our thought patterns. As social psychologist Amy Cuddy explains in her TED Talk on the power of body language, standing confidently, even when you don’t feel that way on the inside, can influence cortisol levels in the brain and can potentially influence success.

Bonus: Research shows that when we flash those pearly whites,we’re instantly boosting our mood. The same goes for our posture — standing straight can boost our self-esteem. No room for bad thoughts when you’re too busy feeling comfortable in your own skin.

Two words: Be mindful.

At its core, mindfulness is about having total awareness of your thoughts as they happen — and with this awareness also comes alack of judgment or categorization of these thoughts. By practicing mindfulness, we’re recognizing the compliment and our initial thoughts on it — and then choosing not to react in a negative manner. Need help incorporating more mindfulness in your everyday life? Try these tricks.

Realize the difference between humility and self-deprecation.

There’s a quiet power in modesty — it helps you see the good in others, it makes you more conscientious and a better leader. However, there’s a fine line between being humble and putting yourself down.

Even women with high self-esteem reject compliments, but mainly because they want to appear more modest, social psychologist Laura Brannon told TODAY. But in reality, humble people accept themselves for who they are. “Many people think of humility as … thinking very little of yourself, and I don’t think that’s right,” Mike Austin, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, previously told HuffPost Healthy Living. “It’s more about a proper or accurate assessment. A big part of humility is knowing our own limits, our strengths and weaknesses, morally or otherwise.”

Don’t compliment them back right away.
How many times have you been paid a compliment only to feel compelled to return the favor? This behavior — while inherently kind — isn’t the most effective way to help you accept genuine praise better.

As psychologist Susan Quilliam tells the Daily Mail, many women do this because it gets the attention off of them — another habit that could reinforce the idea that you don’t deserve the compliment in the first place (and you do). Complimenting others just for the sake of it can also feel disingenuous — so it’s better to leave it at a simple “thank you.”

Store it in your memory.

When we have self-critical thoughts after hearing kind remarks, it usually stems from the delusional idea that people don’t really mean what they say — or worse, they’re wrong about your positive qualities. And simply put, that’s just not true. Next time someone pays you a genuine compliment, file it in your memory and think about it when you’re feeling inadequate. The sooner you start believing you’re worth the praise, the easier it will be to accept it graciously — and you’ll be much happier for it.

Link to read the original article

The Irritating Reason That Overconfident People Get All The Breaks

by Dr Jeremy Dean

People who are overconfident in their own abilities are considered more talented by others than they really are, a new study finds.

These overconfident individuals are probably more likely to get promoted, to become the leaders of organisations and even nations.

On the other hand, people who are not so confident in their abilities are judged as less competent than they actually are.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, provide evidence for a controversial theory of the evolution of self-deception (Lamba & Nityananda, 2014).

Being better at deceiving yourself makes you better at deceiving others, some have argued, and this study provides evidence for the theory.

Dr. Vivek Nityananda, who co-authored the study, explained:

“These findings suggest that people don’t always reward the most accomplished individual but rather the most self-deceived.

We think this supports an evolutionary theory of self-deception.

It can be beneficial to have others believe you are better than you are and the best way to do this is to deceive yourself — which might be what we have evolved to do.”

The study shows how belief in your own abilities doesn’t just affect you but also those around you, who also pick up on your levels of self-belief very quickly.

The authors conclude that…

“…[since] overconfident individuals are more likely to be risk-prone, then by promoting such individuals we may be creating institutions such as banks, trading floors and armies, that are also more vulnerable to risk.

From our smallest interactions to the institutions we build, self-deception may play a profound role in shaping the world we inhabit.” (Lamba & Nityananda, 2014).

Link to read the original article

The Psychology of Our Willful Blindness and Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

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How to counter the gradual narrowing of our horizons.

In Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, serial entrepreneur and author Margaret Heffernan examines the intricate, pervasive cognitive and emotional mechanisms by which we choose, sometimes consciously but mostly not, to remain unseeing in situations where “we could know, and should know, but don’t know because it makes us feel better not to know.” We do that, Heffernan argues and illustrates through a multitude of case studies ranging from dictatorships to disastrous love affairs to Bernie Madoff, because “the more tightly we focus, the more we leave out” — or, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz put it in her remarkable exploration of exactly what we leave out in our daily lives, because “attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”…

“Whether individual or collective, willful blindness doesn’t have a single driver, but many. It is a human phenomenon to which we all succumb in matters little and large. We can’t notice and know everything: the cognitive limits of our brain simply won’t let us. That means we have to filter or edit what we take in. So what we choose to let through and to leave out is crucial. We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs. It’s a truism that love is blind; what’s less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore. Ideology powerfully masks what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd and there’s much about how, and even where, we live that leaves us in the dark. Fear of conflict, fear of change keeps us that way. An unconscious (and much denied) impulse to obey and conform shields us from confrontation and crowds provide friendly alibis for our inertia. And money has the power to blind us, even to our better selves…

“Our blindness grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more snugly inside our affirming thoughts and values. And what’s most frightening about this process is that as we see less and less, we feel more comfort and greater certainty. We think we see more — even as the landscape shrinks…

And yet wilful blindness, Heffernan argues, isn’t a fatal diagnosis of the human condition — it may be our natural, evolutionarily cultivated tendency, but it is within our capability to diffuse it with the right combination of intention and attention. She reflects on the heartening evidence to which the various studies reviewed in the book point:

“The most crucial learning that has emerged from this science is the recognition that we continue to change right up to the moment we die. Every experience and encounter, each piece of new learning, each relationship or reassessment alters how our minds work. And no two experiences are the same. In his work on the human genome, the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner reminds us that even identical twins will have different experiences in different environments and that that makes them fundamentally different beings. Identical twins develop different immune systems. Mental practice alone can change how our brains operate. The plasticity and responsiveness of our minds is what makes each of us most remarkable… We aren’t automata serving the master computer in our heads, and our capacity for change can never be underestimated…

“We make ourselves powerless when we choose not to know. But we give ourselves hope when we insist on looking. The very fact that willful blindness is willed, that it is a product of a rich mix of experience, knowledge, thinking, neurons, and neuroses, is what gives us the capacity to change it. Like Lear, we can learn to see better, not just because our brain changes but because we do. As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don’t know? Just what am I missing here?”

Link to read the rest of this  Brain Pickings article

Ziyah Gafić: Everyday objects, tragic histories

Ziyah Gafić photographs everyday objects—watches, shoes, glasses. But these images are deceptively simple; the items in them were exhumed from the mass graves of the Bosnian War. Gafić, a TED Fellow and Sarajevo native, has photographed every item from these graves in order to create a living archive of the identities of those lost.

Happiness At Work edition #109

All of these stories and many more are collected together in this week’s new Happiness At Work collection

We hope you enjoy the surprise of unearthing something delightful that was already there sometime over the coming week…

Happiness At Work #107 ~ leadership lessons for us all

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How can we all draw from some of the latest (and some of the oldest) leadership thinking to increase our own happiness and success at work, and the happiness and success of the people we work with, whether or not we have formal leadership written into our job descriptions?

This week’s post draws from and deliberately considers some of the latest and most influential ideas about leadership alongside our thinking about happiness at work.

And, because we know that our happiness is hugely affected by our own thinking and behaviour, we take this same principle through into accepting the contemporary challenge for us all to be able to bring leadership capabilities and intelligence to our work now, whether or not our job title explicitly recognises this to be part of our role.

All of these articles are collected with many others in this week’s new Happiness At Work edition #107.

 

Organisational Change Can Start Wherever You Are

By Jesse Lyn Stoner

Do you wish senior leaders would make some changes in your organization?

Instead of waiting and wishing for someone from above to provide leadership, you can make a significant impact no matter what your role is.

“Most people think of leadership as a position and therefore don’t see themselves as leaders.” (Steven Covey)

The assumption that organizational change has to start at the top is wrong.

Peter Senge says to “give up traditional notions that visions are always announced from ‘on high’ or come from an organization’s institutionalized planning process.”

Michael Beer of Harvard Business School agrees. “Managers don’t have to wait for senior management to start a process of organizational revitalization.”

You might be wondering, “How can I change my organization when my boss and senior managers can’t?” The truth is, you have more power and influence than you might think.

Make your own world better.

The place to start is in your own backyard. What is your sphere of influence? Consider not only your position, but your sources of influence.

You have the greatest opportunity to provide leadership with your own team. Focus your leadership efforts on:

  1. Helping your team identify a clear purpose and the practices to achieve it.
  2. Providing access to resources, removing roadblocks, representing your team in the larger organization and protecting them from demands from on-high that will derail them.

Don’t try to do it alone.

If you just announce the changes you think need to be made, chances are they won’t be implemented well. Provide leadership by focusing your team’s attention on the right questions and involving them in finding the answers.

As a team, discuss these questions:

1. What is our purpose? What is the value of the service we provide?

2. What would we look like if we were magnificent at fulfilling our purpose? What would we accomplish? What results would we see?

3. What could our relationships look like? -with each other on the team and with other departments?

4. How would we be working together? What would be happening and not be happening?

Once you are in agreement on the vision, you can begin to look at changes you need to make that will help you get there. Start with changes that are within your control as a team – internal communications, coordinating efforts, decision-making. Consider creating a Team Charter.

The Ripple Effect

As your team changes and begins to thrive in new ways, others will notice, and like the ripple effect, it just might begin to spread to other areas of the organization.

Link to the original article

 

 

How to Grow Your Emotional Intelligence

An interview  by  with Steve Gutzler, author of Emotional Intelligence for Personal Leadership

Steve Gutzler: I have often said leadership is like a multifaceted diamond. In other words, it is not a one-cut diamond. It has character, vision, influence, execution, and inspiration to start with. Those are a lot of skills to obtain. I’ve found that leaders breed leaders. If you can sit under or partner with a great leader, you can speed up your leadership development.

Also, lead where you are. The best way to learn a skill is by doing…practicing…

Any great vision at its core includes others. Their hope, dreams, needs, wants and desires. Often a vision falls flat because it does not stir and inspire greatness in others. Any truly great vision not only taps into the aspirations of others… it also leads them to a cause greater than themselves.

Each of us has a secret desire to meet someone who will inspire us to accomplish things greater that our own desires. Invite others to partner with you. “Let’s build it together, let’s give ourselves to a cause that matters!”

I don’t know if we can ever master our emotions, but we can learn to manage them more effectively. First, we need to honor our emotions and realize that we are emotional. Those emotions go up and down. If I don’t learn how to emotionally manage myself, I might end up sabotaging my own success and personal relationships.

Healthy emotional self-management can lead to meaningful communication and connections with others. Start with understanding emotions drive our behaviors. Take ultra-care of your physical life, it is powerfully linked to emotional balance. Finally, try not to push into conversations when you are emotionally depleted. Rest, recover, and re-engage to replenish your emotional bank account. You’ll improve communication two-fold by simply being emotionally healthy and practicing better self-care.

We are all driven by something; parent approval, greed, recognition, success, and even failure. Being purpose driven predetermines your true north. We all have a propensity to drift, to slide toward selfishness or self-promotion. Every week for the last several years, I’ve taken an hour on Friday afternoon to review my life-purpose and my personal “code of honor.” It grounds me and recalibrates my motives, my goals, and gets my vision clear. I want to be purpose-driven with my family, my career, my finances, my personal development plans, my health and fitness, my spiritual peace and even my fun. My purpose shapes my priorities and provides me with the right intended results.

Schawbel: What can the science of our brains teach us about leadershipand influence?

Gutzler: There is a small part of the brain called the amygdala. It’s the site of emotional memory, the site of emotional learning. When it gets triggered, or hijacked by feeling threatened, it can actually override the rational mind. Smart leaders, influential leaders allow time and space. They allow the emotional brain to neutralize…to settle down in order to find solutions, solutions that are not made in the heat of the battle. It is in those hotly contested emotional moments where your true leadership and reputation is established. Try to remember: give time and space, stay calm, and pause before reacting.

Link to read the original article

 

How to Influence Your Manager: Passive Versus Proactive Followership

from the book, Followership: What Is It and Why Do People Follow? by Laurent M. Lapierre and Melissa K. Carsten

…Followers are essential to any organization. Without followers there are no leaders and without proactively engaged followers there is little room for company growth. Proactive followers are not ‘yes people’. They support their leaders by questioning their assumptions and offering competing views on how to overcome important challenges. In the current climate, a lack of proactive followership may lead to company-wide failure. There is however, a fine line between constructive and destructive behavior.

Excluding situations where a boss continues to make decisions to the detriment of the organization and its people, it’s important to balance the line between a passive and proactive follower.  A passive follower is one which is strictly obedient and refrains from questioning their leader’s decisions or ideas even if they disagree. Conversely, a proactive follower is one that contributes to decisions which affect the group and displays independent thinking. As such, this style of followership is more of a partnership.

So, if you are given the opportunity to actively influence your leader, how do you do so constructively?

Offer Your Expertise, Not Your Inexperience

Evaluate the worth of your advice before you give it– where does this come from? Can you support your advice with experience? Have you thought about the potential implications? By holding back on weakly grounded ideas, or by exaggerating their worth, you could be hindering the decision process. Play devil’s advocate. Ask yourself whether the information is significant to the manager’s decision, and whether the decision is based on solid evidence or facts. If not then it may be advisable to keep quiet and let another colleague have the opportunity to voice their experience in this situation.

A proactive follower is one that contributes to decisions which affect the group and displays independent thinking. As such, this style of followership is more of a partnership.

 Be a Trusted Contributor

Regardless of whether you are largely a passive or proactive follower, if there is no trust you cannot influence, and it is a key factor on the leader / follower partnership. A passive follower has to be trusted to do their job to the best of their ability and a proactive follower needs to give trustworthy advice.

If a proactive follower gives their advice in a manager relationship where there is no trust, the leader may see the guidance and involvement in decisions as a threat to their position. In this occasion it may be wiser to display passive behaviour. The more that the subordinate shows that they have earned the manager’s trust; it is more likely that the proactive followership will be well received.

Be Aware of your Manager’s Stress Levels

We have all been there, when a sudden deadline means you have to react swiftly. During these times your manager will be have a limited time to make a decision. Decision making delays such as challenging assumptions or even their logic can lengthen the process and this delay could actually be costlier than accepting the leader’s decision. Displaying proactive followership should only be done if the opinion or challenge will significantly improve the final decision. Otherwise the advice will be treated with contempt or manifest itself into distrust.

Link to read the original Switch & Shift article

 

A Googler’s Critique of Google Performance Reviews

This post was written anonymously by a current Google and former Microsoft employee.  It details the author’s perspective on her first-hand experience with Google’s performance review system.

“Confidence… thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.”  –Franklin D. Roosevelt

Institutions are built on the trust and credibility of their members. This maxim holds true for employees and their employers just the same as it does for citizens and their government. Whereas the electoral process in modern democracies allows you and me to rate our government’s performance, performance rating systems make employees the subject of evaluation. In both cases, however, faith in the integrity of the process is the only thing that ensures order.

Managing a performance rating system that motivates, rewards, and retains talented employees across an organization tens of thousands large is a grueling, never-ending challenge. How does an organization balance values core to its DNA and its continued success — merit, openness, innovation, and loyalty — all while maintaining perceptions of fairness?

As someone who has lived through cycles of the ever-evolving performance evaluation and rating mechanisms at tech giants Microsoft and Google, a few observations emerge:

Forced curves undermine the spirit of collaboration and foster a mindset of hoarding pie instead of expanding it

There are particular specialized organizations that benefit from having a defined numerical goal. For example, a quarterly sales quota is a very clear measuring stick, as are portfolio returns, bugs resolved, or customers satisfied. But absent specific, level measures of productive output, large firms face the uphill battle of linking performance to rewards.

When you force fit a curve to the array of employee responsibilities, which vary in scope and complexity, it becomes virtually impossible for one lowly employee to pinpoint what distinguishes “good” from “poor” or “great”.

I’ve found myself asking, “Did I score well because I put in the hours or because I got an easy draw?” Or, “Is managing a profitable line of business more merit worthy than building a floor for a failing business?”

In my experience, people managers suffer through this ambiguity just the same. Despite the wealth of data they have about their direct reports, they’re unable to articulate the rationale (or broader context within the cohort) underlying the numerical scores they assign. And in the absence of transparency or an understanding of how individual contributions compare to team success, self-preservation rules supreme.

And even with the recent moves away from strict numerical curves, there remains a finite pool of awards to be distributed, which doesn’t reflect the mentality they’re trying to foster.

Celebrating performance through evaluation cycles (quarterly, semiannually, annually) creates a sense that every day work does not matter

The climb toward credible ratings grows steeper when you divorce an accomplishment from recognition with an annual or semiannual review. The emotional impact of a successful presentation or a new policy is nowhere to be found in a set of six month old notes. Worse still, seeing changes to compensation or a performance rating system in response to months old polling data address past concerns (and possibly the concerns of past employees).

Even data-rich, data-loving companies shy away from being transparent about how they arrive at individual ratings which produces a perception of arbitrary assessment and a false notion of precision

How do employees adapt and improve if they aren’t working at the trading desk or privy to examples of exceptional performance? They turn to Glassdoor, HR brochures, or worse of all, personal anecdotes to bolster their own assessment of whether they are receiving a “fair” deal. Unfortunately, not one of these third party sources has the nuanced understanding of an employee or his/her team necessary to provide context. What’s often left is a broken, trust-less relationship.

Performance rating systems are reactive and intended to buoy the ship against alarming trends in survey data and rates of attrition; improvements and tweaks are subject to lengthy implementation cycles

Employers seek to improve their performance rating systems and do so by soliciting regular feedback from their employees. The intention is that a system designed in collaboration will better serve all and engage employees. Where these good intentions run awry is at the implementation stage — it takes at least one quarter for to synthesize feedback and evaluation potential changes. The feedback loops for employee performance as well as the performance review system are out of sync with actual job performance and employee sentiment.

How to Do Better

So what can these firms do to win the war for credibility? Be transparent. Throw open the doors and share the notes. Make measurement and compensation public. Have peers drive the rating process. The power of transparency is well understood. There are already measures in place to build engagement among employees and alignment within teams:

• Empowering employees to reward one another

• Have everyone share in company profits (e.g. stock awards or profit sharing)

• Create awards for exceptional team performance (e.g. working across divisions or elevating the division through combined efforts)

• Pool risk vertically (e.g tying manager performance to team performance)

Increased context and knowledge builds comfort and trust for employees and managers alike. When employees know how they’re measured, there’s less room for suspicion. And when they know can connect the dots between individual performance and team success, there’s greater job satisfaction.

Ultimately, the goal of a performance rating system is to reward and retain capable employees by keeping them happy and feeling like they have a fair deal.

Transparency goes a far way toward lending credibility to the process and building commitment to the company, but it isn’t a silver bullet. Giving employees greater flexibility in what they take on and the efforts they lead also builds a sense of ownership and commitment. Opportunities such as 20% projects (wherein employees spends 20% of their time working on something about which they’re passionate) or cross organizational initiatives (e.g. building a volunteering program) are excellent examples of empowering employees through choice. But there’s room for this notion of self direction to go even further — a completely open allocation (e.g. 100% self directed time) or letting employees choose their manager are two programs I would certainly sign up for.

What it boils down to is that employees want to know how they are being evaluated and want to know that they’re making conscious choices. Because while you vote with a punch card at the election booth, in the workplace you vote with your feet.

Link to read the original article in full

 

Ditch the Fear, Leaders Need to Create a Culture of Fun

from 360degree feedback: A Leadership Blog

Many people agree: a workplace culture of fear limits employee engagement, productivity, and retention—and by turns, the bottom line. But often, leaders aren’t cognizant that they’ve created that environment. However, Gallup surmises that lost productivity due to lack of employee engagement costs U.S. companies $300 billion annually. Other studies show that happier—and therefore more engaged—employees are more likely to be more “creative, productive, and committed.” In other words, good leadership doesn’t have to be with an iron fist—in fact, more often, it shouldn’t include iron or fists at all.

One way for leaders to ensure that they aren’t creating a culture of fear is to consciously do the exact opposite—create a culture of happiness and fun. Which can be daunting; after all, to some leaders, “fun” might seem frivolous, and other leaders might see “happiness” as the employee’s responsibility. However, just a few changes to the environment can make all the difference to an employee’s productivity.

To start, you can try something small, like improving consistency, timing, and relevancy of your performance feedback. It’s hard to capture everything an employee has done over a year in just one annual review; sending an email, writing a quick note of thanks, or even just a little face-to-face recognition once or twice a week can help your employee feel valued and therefore happier. To get into the habit, try choosing one day each week (Feedback Friday, perhaps) when you’ll focus on something each of your employees has accomplished in the previous week.

Once you’ve mastered regular, timely feedback, try creating a culture of celebration—the wins, the triumphs, the key learnings your team experienced are all worth public note. Gather your group together (whether for a quick conference-room meeting or even an after-work happy hour) and let everyone know what their teammates have been up to. You’ll show your employees their worth, and you could be starting to create a stronger, more supportive and reciprocal team atmosphere.

To continue creating a fun workplace, allow your staff to actually have fun. Let them bring their personalities into the office. It doesn’t have to be extensive, and you can certainly set limits, but remember that employees often like to feel comfortable in their work-spaces, and that can start with a little decoration. You can lead the parade in your own work-space, by adding hints or bursts of decoration, and you can even go a step further by adding a level of relaxed enjoyment through daily banter. Once your employees see you acting that way, they’ll likely follow suit.

Link to read the original article

 

4 Surefire Ways to Foster Creativity in Your Organisation

By ,

Here are 4 Surefire Ways to Foster Creativity in Your Organization

  1. Pet Projects. Institute time and resources for employees to fund and work on pet projects. This is time spent away from teams and leadership who can stifle creativity simply because of their natural influence on the employee. A simple remark from a manager can redirect an employee’s focus, and potentially move them away from creative solutions. This doesn’t have to be uncontrolled free time; you can develop timelines and budgets to ensure productivity and output expectations are in place.
  2. Coach. Some organizations, such as Chipotle, have begun rewarding staff based on their ability to produce and promote successful team members, rather than their skill at boosting the bottom line. Managers manage, leaders lead — but coaches develop their employees, identify their strengths, and push them away from failure and towards success.
  3. Upend Reviews. The typical review process ensures that an employee’s goals align with the organization and provides the employee with constructive criticism on how they can improve their performance. It could be argued that an employee’s performance isn’t the responsibility of the employee, but instead, of the leaders they work under. Upend your reviews, and have your employees review the leadership of the company to garner feedback on what type of environment they require to increase creativity. Then, make the necessary changes.
  4. Reward Risk. Many of the most monumental failures both educate and drive change in an organization. You don’t want to risk your company, but it’s time to eliminate the “Employee of the Month” politics and, instead, develop a program where creativity and risk are rewarded. Don’t single out one employee — identify a positive result attained from each employee, and recognize them for their creativity. Then, sit back and watch the inspiration and genius blossom!

We Are in the Age of Creativity

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin says it best:

“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.”

If we’re to overcome the stagnation we’ve institutionalized within our national education and management systems, it’s going to require dramatic change. I hope each of us will embrace the change needed to foster creativity within our organizations.

Link to read the original article in full

 

7 Secrets Of Happy Small Business Owners

by 

Here are the top 7 secrets of happiness from everyday small business owners that we can all learn from…

1) Associate with a Good Cause

When things get hectic or frustrating around the office, it will help your mental state to remember you are also working to make the world a better place. To feel the most fulfillment, do more than just donate money. Participate in charitable events, lunches or meetings. You’ll meet great people, become more connected to the cause, and experience increased levels of happiness. The human brain releases a pleasure inducing chemical after altruistic actions — it’s that simple!

2) Work & Life Balance

However much you may love your job or business, it can’t truly replace the psychological fulfillment of family, friends or fun! It may sound cliche, but having a work and life balance will make you a happier worker. The happiest small business owners make ample time for family and entertainment, even if it’s just on the weekend. Not only will your family dynamic be improved by your presence, spending time with family is proven to lower stress levels and increase one’s overall happiness. The trick to making quality family and friend time work, however, is to avoid talking about your job or business! For those without families, you can experience the same effects from pursuing a hobby that interests you, even if it’s as simple as reading a book!

3) Disconnect & Recharge

Similar to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, small business owners who describe themselves as “happy” agree that taking time to disconnect and recharge every day greatly contributes to their sense of well being. You should take a midday break, and disconnect in the evenings. Walking around (hopefully outside) at lunch actually helps get your creative juices flowing. Once you get home, giving yourself a break from emails and app alerts in the evenings will lower your stress levels and improve the quality of your sleep. After all, you’re the brains behind your small business operation, don’t you want to give the ole’ cerebrum a chance to rest?

4) Get to Know Your Team

Water cooler chit chat may seem like an unproductive use of time, but getting to know your employees well will dramatically increase the quality of your work life. Not only will you be able to decipher who your most trusted and valuable assets are, but when you have a good relationship with your employees, you’ll find that you derive pleasure and happiness from their individual successes right along with them.

5) Be Your Own Biggest Fan

There’s no way around it: words of encouragement make you feel better. While it’s important to remain grounded in reality, don’t hesitate to give yourself a pat on the back when you deserve one. Being cheered on makes you feel great, but there might not be someone around to give you kudos for many of your accomplishments. It may seem a bit silly at first, but trust us, you’ll experience the positive mental boost even if you’re congratulating yourself.

6) Open Communication

Don’t let frustrations or innovative ideas build up — that sort of stress can take years off your life and dramatically impact your day-to-day happiness. Instead, develop workplace strategies to clear the air, and open up the communication channels amongst your team. Small business owners rate “good intra-team communication” as one of the key factors to an improved quality of work life. So long as you’re respectful and constructive, there is no reason to keep your thoughts and feelings hidden. Try holding weekly retrospective meetings, or giving the Kaizen philosophy a try! It’s a great idea to not only express your constructive criticisms, but also your hopes and dreams for the company. Being heard and understood simply feels great!

7) Focus on Accomplishing Small Tasks

It can feel daunting and overwhelming to work for months on end to accomplish a major business goal. Instead, visualize longer-term objectives as a series of individual tasks that you must accomplish. This way, you’ll get to enjoy the encouraging sense of achievement more often. Accomplishing tasks (and then giving yourself kudos for it!) more frequently will help you stay motivated and increase your overall feeling of job satisfaction.

Link to the original article

 

Marcus Aurelius: Debts and Lessons

by 

Aurelius, the ruler of the Roman Empire for almost two decades, was also the author of the immortal Meditations…

“The questions that Meditations tries to answer are metaphysical and ethical ones,” Hays writes. These are timeless questions that we are still asking. Why are we here? How can I cope with the stresses and pressures of daily life? How can I do what is right? How can I cope with loss and pain? How can I handle misfortune? How do we live when we know that one day we won’t?…

From his adopted father, Aurelius learned:

Compassion. Unwavering adherence to decisions, once he’d reached them. Indifference to superficial honors. Hard work. Persistence. Listening to anyone who could contribute to the public good. His dogged determination to treat people as they deserved. A sense of when to push and when to back off. … His searching questions at meetings. A kind of single-mindedness, almost, never content with first impressions, or breaking off the discussion prematurely. His consistency to friends-never getting fed up with them or playing favorites. Self-reliance, always. And cheerfulness. And his advanced planning (well in advance) and his discreet attention to even minor things. His restrictions on acclamations-and all attempts to flatter him. … His stewardship of the treasury. His willingness to take responsibility—and blame—for both. … And his attitude to men: no demagoguery, no currying favor, no pandering. Always sober, always steady, and never vulgar or a prey to fads.

Link to read the original article in full

Businesswoman

working woman

 

High performance leadership: You can’t lead when you’re running on empty

by 

Here are some words for the wise on high performance leadership:

1. Take care of yourself

If you aren’t displaying high performance leadership, it affects your clients, your employees and your family. Are you working out? Do you get enough sleep? How’s your nutrition? What changes do you have to make to be able to stay in top form not just today — but for the long-haul?

2. Keep short accounts

When issues come up between people it takes time and energy to resolve them. That’s time and energy that you could be using to get work done! Most days it feels so much more rewarding to get that work done than to have some dramatic conversation resolving things with a co-worker. But over the long-haul those unresolved conversations become like weights dragging down the performance of your whole team. Take a minute to apologize when you blow up, or resolve issues when you become aware of them. Not only will you be free from that weight, but dealing with those issues in the moment will mean more productivity in the long run.

3. Be brave…

Your team is there to support you. If you have the right team they wantyou to succeed. So let them know what you need from them. Be clear.

You need things from them. Be clear, and ask for what you need.

4. …and kind.

Catch some people doing something good — let them know how much you appreciate their support. When we are paying their salaries it can be easy to think, “Why do I have to thank them, I’m paying them!” Even when you are being paid, it feels good to be thanked, to have your efforts recognized. And, for some people, that “thank you” means more than the paycheck.

Link to the original article

 

Remembering Warren Bennis

by Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business

Warren Gamaliel Bennis passed away on July 31. For those of us who personally knew this influential writer and commentator on leadership and organizations, one of his most notable attributes was his understanding of the paradox of human nature: our ability to simultaneously drag ourselves down and rise to great heights. His famous aphorism—that while managers know how to do things right, leaders know how to do the right thing —is one of his many legacies; it’s a guiding principle for anyone with influence. Risk-averse decision makers, Warren said, don’t become effective leaders, because excessive caution keeps them from doing anything important.

While managers know how to do things right, leaders know how to do the right thing.

Of course, doing the right thing is far harder than many leaders want to admit. Warren set impossibly high standards for himself, but he also forgave himself (and everyone else) full-heartedly for not meeting them. This forgiveness was one reason, I think, so many people were drawn to him. He never let us forget our potential, or feel limited by our failure to realize it.

He was a living symbol of pragmatic humanism: the ability of people to make a better world by mustering the efforts of our imperfect selves toward perfect ends. And he was an uncommonly prescient observer of the political and social milieu of his time. He foresaw the collapse of Russian communism (in the 1960s), the dangers of total transparency (people need a little secrecy to collaborate across boundaries), and the cultural colloquy between young and old (articulated in his terrific book Geeks and Geezers, coauthored with Robert J. Thomas and published in 2002, when Warren was 77 years old.)

Warren’s personality, which was visible in everything he did, was one of erudite conviviality and perceptive generosity. He was an incorrigible, but discreet gossip—interested not in spreading the worst about other people, but in sharing insights about their essential selves.

…another classic Bennis idea, “the unconscious conspiracy,” which proposed that, unless leaders are careful and skilled, the realities of everyday life will always combine to drag them away from their true purpose.

Link to read the original article

 

The Four Leadership Lessons Millennials Really Need

by Steve Denning, who writes about leadership issues from a Millennial perspective.

1. There is no Eureka moment

Everyone tells you to “follow your dream.” But few of us in our twenties actually know what that is. At this point in our lives, we’re still exploring. In her bookThe Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter, psychologist Meg Jay describes the twenties as a “developmental sweet spot that comes only once.”

What people don’t tell you is that your calling develops over time. It doesn’t come to you in an epiphany. In How to Find Fulfilling Work, Roman Krsnaric writes: “I regularly hear people lament that they are ‘still searching for their vocation’ or envying others who have ‘found their ultimate calling.’ […] Their search, however, is almost certain to be unsuccessful. Not because vocations do not exist. But because we have to realize a vocation is not something we find, its something we grow – and grow into.”

Dan Pink offered a similar perspective in his Weinberg College commencement speech: “The smartest, most interesting, most dynamic, most impactful people … lived to figure it out…. Sometimes, the only way to discover who you are or what life you should lead is to do less planning and more living— to burst the double bubble of comfort and convention and just do stuff, even if you don’t know precisely where it’s going to lead.”

2. 100 percent is easier than 98 percent

It’s not news that winning at life requires good execution. But why do we still have such a hard time actually getting things done? In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt writes: “The mind is divided in many ways, but the division that really matters is between conscious/reasoned processes and automatic/implicit processes. These two parts are like a rider on the back of an elephant. […] Learning how to train the elephant is the secret of self-improvement.”

One way to train the elephant is to form habits. By forming a habit, you train your brain to go into autopilot. Which is why, to steal the line from Clayton Christensen, “100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent of the time.” By making it a rule, you are removing the decision-making part of deciding to do an activity. This is especially critical for activities we don’t want to do. Exercise, diet, studying for the GRE, paying bills, you name it. If you skip it just once, you are sending a signal to your brain that you can skip it. From there, it’s a slippery slope. You are back to having to decide whether to exercise or watch TV. And very rarely will exercise win that battle.

Turning long-term goals into habits is especially critical. Malcolm Gladwell has reminded us in Outliers: The Story of Success that to become an expert you need to put in 10,000 hours. That’s about equal to 5 years! Putting in that kind of time requires discipline. But if you don’t actively take control of what you spend your time on, your expertise could easily become Facebook or Candy Crush. And no one wants that. Shane Parrish in Farnam Street elaborates on how procrastination can engulf you. If you don’t control your own mind, your mind will control you.

David Foster Wallace addressed this brilliantly in his Kenyon commencement speech in 2005: “[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

Psychologically, many of us find it easier to say we never tried than to say we tried and failed. Don’t be that person. Be the doer, not the dreamer, no matter how hard.

3. Networking: Become the buyer, not the seller

The problem with networking today is that most people see themselves as the seller and the person they are networking with as the buyer. People are so uptight that it isn’t fun for anyone. Reframe the situation: you are now the buyer. You will have much more fun and it will lead to a much more fruitful meeting.

The good news is once people start actively “networking,” they actually likedoing it. Dr. David Hamilton explains that “doing good deeds triggers an increased level of dopamine in the brain. The good feeling associated with this is commonly known as Helper’s High.”  This principle is also documented in the Ben Franklin effect. You are more likely to do a favor for someone that you have previously also helped.

It’s important because it has been shown that how you get your future jobs or salary raises is often not through your immediate circle of friend, but your acquaintances. The economist James Montgomery studied the concept of “weak ties” and explains “that weak ties are positively related to higher wages and higher aggregate employment rates.”

Networking might seem like a high investment in time. But the reward (both for your work and your happiness) will be well worth it. Most people know who they want to get coffee chats with or who they can connect with for the benefit both parties. The difference is that the best networkers actually act on it.

4. Trust yourself: no one has the right answer

Recent graduates often wait for the moment when they will be 100 percent in control — the moment when they will have graduated to be a full-blown “grown up.” The truth is that that moment never comes. Everyone is fudging it.  “You’ll meet a lot of people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re talking about. … Develop your own compass, and trust it.” says Aaron Sorkin.

Ultimately you have to trust your gut. Steve Jobs still said it best, “Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”

People often conflate success with salary and job title. But life is composed of so many variables. It is subject to change at any given moment.  Real success is a long-term game. The only thing you can control is yourself: your will, your desire, your perseverance. Success will follow whoever wants it most.

Link to read the original Forbes article

 

Happiness At Work edition #107

See more articles about leadership and learning, creativity and happiness at work in this week’s new collection

Happiness At Work #106 ~ so much more than a nice to have feeling

by

The world of work is most definitely changing.  A whole variety of irresistible social, economic, technological and human forces are combining to revolutionise, not just for how we work, but the fundamental reasons at the heart of why we work and what we expect in return.

Our growing intelligence about happiness at work lies in the engine room of this revolution, encapsulated, informed and enriched by an increasing pressure for higher levels of work fulfilment and our increasing intelligence about what this means – whether this is articulated in the drive for greater employee wellbeing and engagement, or the drive for greater meaning and recognition for what we do, or in the drive for greater flexibility, autonomy and work-life balance in how our work is organised.

Happiness at work as an idea is gaining credibility and traction, but it is still not always easy to present as a call to action inside apparently more important and urgent organisational concerns such as uncertain economies, overloaded work demands, escalating accountability requirements and ever-increasingly complex and insistent customer and staff expectations.  Happiness is considered by many as too slight, too subjective and personal, and/or too transient a thing to be the proper concern of a serious workplace.

But our contemporary sciences are building up compelling evidence to show that happiness is so much more than a nice to have feeling.

Happiness at work means feeling that we are achieving our potential.  It is mixed and made from high levels of commitment, confidence, conviction, contribution in a culture that aligns with our best selves and provides us with ample amounts of pride, trust and recognition (Jessica Pryce-Jones 5 C’s Science of Happiness model)

Or, if you prefer, it is work that brings us high quality positive emotion and engagement and relationships and meaning and accomplishment ( Martin Seligman’s PERMA model for flourishing.)

We now know that, at most, only half of our happiness is comes to us as our genetic predisposition, and, even more surprisingly, only 10% of our happiness is dependent upon our circumstances.  This means that at any time, no matter what we are facing, at least 40% of our happiness is down to our own voluntary choices: how we choose to think about things and what we choose to do.

Not only that but real revolutionary discovery has been that happiness leads to better outcomes – greater success, better relationships, higher learning, problem solving and creativity, higher performance and productivity, better and health and even a longer life – not the other way round as we used to have it.

And we can all learn to be happier.

This post pulls together stories from this week’s new Happiness At Work collection that all variously help to fill out and amplify our understanding about what happiness at work means in its fullest, most vital and imperative sense: why it matters, how it matters and what are some of the ways we can learn to harness its potency.

Maybe these ideas will be helpful to progress your own thinking and maybe they will be helpful to bring these ideas more persuasively to people you work with…?

The Importance of Happiness in the Workplace

Many people feel that if they become successful at work, they will automatically become happy. But according to Shawn Achor, founder and CEO of Good Think, Inc., that scenario should be reversed. It’s important to become happy, which will then help you become a success. Achor makes it his business to study the psychology of happiness in the workplace. He consults with organizations worldwide and regularly publishes his findings on his website (www.shawnachor .com). His ground-breaking book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, was published in 2010.

It’s important to organizations for employees to be happy, and not just for the employees themselves. “The greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged workforce,” Achor says. And happiness as a concept is poorly understood, inside and outside of the workplace. In his book, happiness is defined as “the joy we feel striving after our potential.” It occurs along the way to achieving one’s potential, not just when that potential has been achieved.“This definition is crucial for leaders to understand,” Achor says.

“Without it, happiness can create irrational optimists.” He suggests that what is needed is the cultivation of “rational optimism.” The latter “requires taking a realistic assessment of the present, both the bad and the good, while maintaining a belief that our behavior matters. Rose-colored glasses will not help, but an optimistic brain will help your team overcome the biggest challenges.”

People can also help fulfill their potential by better understanding the role of social support at work. The key to remember is that giving support is even better than receiving it. “In an era of do-more-with-less,” Achor says, “we need to stop lamenting how little social support we feel from managers, coworkers and friends, and start focusing our brain’s resources upon how we can increase the amount of social support we provide to the people in our lives. The greatest predictor of success and happiness at work is social support. And the greatest way to increase social support is to provide it to others.”

Achor was also the head teaching fellow for psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar’s happiness course at Harvard. He found that lessons learned there could also be applied to organizations. “In the working world,” he says, “working with leaders, I began to discover that some of the same principles that caused Harvard students to rise to the top were also the same principles used by leaders to become more successful. Those seven research principles became the basis for The Happiness Advantage.” Closely related to happiness is the concept of thriving. Gretchen Spreitzer, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and her coauthors delineate this concept in their paper “Thriving at Work: Toward Its Measurement, Construct Validation, and Theoretical Refinement,” published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

“Thriving is like happiness in that it also involves the experience of positive emotions,” Spreitzer says. “But it is focused on a specific type of positive emotion—what we term as vitality or energy. When people are thriving in their work, they feel alive at work. Their work is literally fueling them with energy. But thriving is also more than positive emotions. It also includes a sense that one is growing, learning or getting better at what they are doing. This suggests that thriving is about making progress or having positive momentum rather than languishing or feeling stunted.”

Everyone at work can consciously help themselves to thrive more. Some basic strategies involve managing energy by sleeping well, eating a balanced diet that includes frequent high-protein snacks, and taking breaks, ideally every 90 minutes. But Spreitzer and her colleagues also found that the way people engaged in their work had an effect on how well they thrived. “When individuals engage their work in a way that helps others, learn new things, and find meaning in their work, they report higher levels of thriving,” she says. “So the challenge is for individuals to find ways to craft their work so they have more relational connections, more chances to try new things, and can see more of the impact in what they do.”

This research suggests that leaders can create the kind of workplaces that can help people thrive. Spreitzer says, “Leaders can (1) provide their people with more opportunities for decision making discretion, (2) share more information about the organization, its strategy, and competitors, (3) set and reinforce norms that promote civil and respectful behavior, and (4) offer performance feedback, especially about what is going well. When leaders create workplaces with these characteristics, their people feel like they can grow, develop, and thrive in their work.”

Fully engaged, thriving employees finish the day not depleted but, Spreitzer contends, “with energy for their family life, hobbies, and community service.”

Link to the original Leader to Leader article

Why Happiness At Work Really Matters

by 

Are you happy at work? Are the people you work with happy? Should you even care as long as the job is getting done?

It turns out you should – happy companies are more successful on a range of metrics – but creating a happy work environment is counterintuitive. Research and practice both show that what makes people happy in the workplace is not obvious, and relatively easy to provide things like good pay, free food or perks, are over-rated.

The benefits of happiness at work

Researchers from the University of Warwick in the UK found that people who are happy at work are about 12% more productive. Shawn Anchor, author of The Happiness Advantage, has quantified the benefits of a happy company – sales increase by 37%, productivity 31%, and accuracy on tasks improves by 19%, not to mention the health and quality of life improvements for staff.

You might think providing perks such as free food, massages in the office, on-site medical services and gym facilities, would ensure a happy workforce. Google has led the way in perks for some time, even ensuring its building designs are fun (like the slide at its Zurich office pictured above).

But the equation is not that simple – it’s not just a case of perks in, happiness out. While such benefits are helpful in attracting people to work at your firm, they are not that effective at improving company performance. No wonder Google is keen to stress that it’s passion not perks that are the biggest contributor to its success.

Part of the problem is that humans are incredibly good at adapting and we get used to almost anything – good or bad. The classic study on this was done by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman at the University of Massachusetts in 1979. Comparing lottery winners to accident survivors who were paraplegics and quadriplegics they found no significant different in general happiness. People who had won big on the lottery were happy about their good fortune but in fact took less pleasure from everyday activities than the accident survivors.

Salary is not the key to happiness either. It actually comes in to play as a factor of unhappiness – we will be unhappy if we think others in our company or industry are being paid more to do the same task.

A Princeton study found that people who are highly paid are relatively satisfied but are barely happier day to day, tend to be more tense and do not spend their time doing more enjoyable things, than lower paid people.

Alexander Kjerulf, a Danish management consultant, who styles himself the Chief Happiness Officer and has advised Ikea, Lego, Oracle, Tata, and Pfizer amongst others, says that results and relationships are actually the most important factors for ensuring people are happy at work. Gallup research backs him up – perks are less important than engagement, which occurs when staff feel they are contributing to something significant.

Tech investor Craig Shapiro tweeted his “org chart for happiness”. On the work side he highlights “fulfillment”, which is in turn a function of productivity, recognition and giving. In other words doing worthwhile work that others appreciate, while also giving back to others, is Shapiro’s recommendation for happiness.

Zappos CEP Tony Hsieh literally wrote the book on happiness in tech. In Delivering Happiness he describes how he built the corporate culture at Zappos by valuing happiness. While Zappos operates some quirky policies eg new hires are offered $2,000 if they decide to quit after the first week, Hseih’s book also highlights the importance of things such as helping staff grow (both personally and professionally), ensuring customer service is everyone’s responsibility and building strong relationships with your team.

Taking inspiration from firms like Zappos, Moo.com, Valve, Buffer and Mailchimp, there’s even now Happy Startup School, which aims to educate entrepreneurs in how to create happy, sustainable and profitable businesses.

Kjerulf, the Chief Happiness Officer, says that while values are important “happiness at work is something you do”. Here’s five tips he offers to foster it at your company:

1. Random acts of workplace happiness. When was the last time you brought a co-worker a cup of coffee unprompted or without warning? Scientific research shows that the random element of these acts really matters. The pleasure/reward centre of the brain is less active when we know something good eg a monthly bonus, is coming, but can be stimulated up to three times as much when the act is unexpected.

2. Hire happy people. The sandwich chain Pret A Manger says you can’t hire someone who can make a sandwich and teach them to be happy, but you can teach happy people to make a sandwich. Kjerulf also cites Southwest Airlines as a company that hires for attitude and trains for skill.

3. Stop negative behaviour. Gossip, rudeness and other negative behaviours act like a cancer at the heart of the company if they are unchecked, says Kjerulf. This is because negative emotions are three times more contagious than positive ones.

4. Celebrate success. Kjerulf consulted with Lego, which a decade ago had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy thanks to a relentless pursuit of innovation coupled with a lack of financial controls. New CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp announced the company’s first profit in several years at a company wide meeting but the news was greeted by silence. Lego had no culture of celebrating success and so people simply didn’t know how to react. Now item 0 on every meeting agenda is celebrating something one of the participants has achieved recently, a simple tactic which has helped transform meetings and make them more productive.

5. Celebrate mistakes. If you do then people will be more open to admitting they have made a mistake. Ben & Jerry’s has a flavor graveyard in Vermont where headstones are erected to its retired flavours including short lived flops like Oh Pear and Cool Britannia. NixonMcInnes, a British social media consultancy, in addition to measuring and tracking staff happiness every day, has a monthly event called Church of Fail, where staff are encouraged to share their failures. The company wants to make it ok to fail, because the more it fails, the more it can innovate and succeed.

Making your staff happy is not about expensive benefits, it’s about offering them meaningful work. What company can’t afford to do that?

Link to the original article

Happiness At Work with Dr Timothy Sharp

Positive Psychology is the science of thriving and flourishing. In a workplace context, it can be argued that when individuals thrive and flourish, they’re also more innovative, creative, collaborative, resilient, and ultimately, more productive. Positive organisations also attract and keep the best people so it’s a classic win-win for all involved, as Dr Tim Sharp explains in this recent interview with AIM.

Tim shares an overview of the exciting field of Positive Psychology, focusing on optimism, hope, resilience, facing up to the tough times, rewarding positives and the important of doing “the right thing”.

Link to the article with the full transcript of this video

Why Happy Workers Make Better Workers

By 

Growing interest in employee happiness is putting companies on their toes. Business press and blogs are revealing psychological findings, case studies and strategy insights that make happiness a must-have for profitable workplaces.

After issuing their Global Human Capital Trends, Deloitte concludes that workers today want more.

“They want something different. They are demanding, they want meaningful work, and they expect their employer to make work more rewarding in many ways.”

So why do happy workers make better workers?

Three reasons: they care more, they give more and they stay longer…

Today’s typical worker is overwhelmed. People are working harder and longer, they are constantly connected and invaded by technology and they are losing their bearings when it comes to a work-life balance.

Companies translate this into worrying leadership pipeline issues, retention and engagement numbers or talent recruitment challenges.

It’s time for workplaces to focus on employee engagement and happiness. Not because it brings more revenues and lower turnover rates, which it does, but because we owe it to ourselves turn to what truly matters:  sustainable growth through people’s wellbeing.

Link to read this article in full

The Happiest People Pursue the Most Difficult Problems

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Lurking behind the question of jobs — whether there are enough of them, how hard we should work at them, and what kind the future will bring — is a major problem of job engagement. Too many people are tuned out, turned off, or ready to leave. But there’s one striking exception.

The happiest people I know are dedicated to dealing with the most difficult problems. Turning around inner city schools. Finding solutions to homelessness or unsafe drinking water. Supporting children with terminal illnesses. They face the seemingly worst of the world with a conviction that they can do something about it and serve others.

For many social entrepreneurs, happiness comes from the feeling they are making a difference.

I see that same spirit in business teams creating new initiatives that they believe in…In research for my book Evolve!, I identified three primary sources of motivation in high-innovation companies: mastery, membership, and meaning. Another M, money, turned out to be a distant fourth. Money acted as a scorecard, but it did not get people up-and-at ‘em for the daily work, nor did it help people go home every day with a feeling of fulfilment.

People can be inspired to meet stretch goals and tackle impossible challenges if they care about the outcome.  People stuck in boring, rote jobs will spring into action for causes they care about.

Heart-wrenching emotion also helps cultivate a human connection. It is hard to feel alone, or to whine about small things, when faced with really big matters of deprivation, poverty, and life or death. Social bonds and a feeling of membership augment the meaning that comes from values-based work.

It’s now common to say that purpose is at the heart of leadership, and people should find their purpose and passion. I’d like to go a step further and urge that everyone regardless of their work situation, have a sense of responsibility for at least one aspect of changing the world. It’s as though we all have two jobs: our immediate tasks and the chance to make a difference.

Leaders everywhere should remember the M’s of motivation: mastery, membership, and meaning. Tapping these non-monetary rewards (while paying fairly) are central to engagement and happiness. And they are also likely to produce innovative solutions to difficult problems.

Link to read the full Harvard Business Review article

The Importance of Defining Core Values

The Social Employee Engagement platform, Officevibe, is one of this decade’s fast growing success stories.  IN this post, Gowth Manager Jacob Shrier talks through the core values that underpin the why and how they do what they do, and, very probably, the why and how of their continuing escalating success.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it – Simon Sinek

This quote is from the famous TED talk where Simon shows that if you communicate your “why”, and understand your purpose, you can sell more and be more successful.

The most interesting part, is that this is all biological, and works every time.

This might be an extreme comparison, and a bit of an exaggeration to make a point, but core values are like the ten commandments – rules to live your life by.

Core values are your company’s “commandments”, and is the foundation for making sure everyone is on the same page.

Also, hiring for culture fit becomes so much easier, because you have all of your “requirements” written down already.

As an employee, when joining a new company, if you align yourself with the company’s core values, meaning you share similar values, that, to me, is the definition of a good culture fit.

Zappos, in my opinion, is the authority on company culture. They are probably the most referenced company of a company that gets culture right, and it took them years to define their core values.

Even though our core values guide us in everything we do today, we didn’t actually have any formal core values for the first six or seven years of the company’s history. – Tony Hsieh, Zappos founder

The OfficeVibe mission and values

Mission: Build the most epic place to work, have fun and innovate.

In one sentence, if we had to sum up what we’re trying to do, this is it.

1. Without fun, it sucks.

Having fun at work is incredibly important for employee engagement. We want to let all of our employees and new hires know that we actively encourage people to have fun at work.

We often go out for happy hours, and lots of the employees play in our arcade and game room.

You need to have a good time while you’re at work, otherwise, life just sucks.

2. More than yesterday, less than tomorrow.

This is a reminder that we really value personal growth.

What this one means, is that I know more than I did yesterday, but I understand that I know less than I will tomorrow, because I will always be learning.

Passion, and personal growth are hugely important qualities for us.

3. We’re an ambitious family

This is all about camaraderie and team building.

First, it’s important that we all recognize that we’re a family. We love each other, and we’ll do anything for each other.

Second, we’re ambitious. Together, as a team, we’re going to change the world.

In all honesty, that’s my goal with Officevibe. I want to make the world of work better. I truly believe that everyone deserves to enjoy their work.

4. Our customers fall in love with us

We always go above and beyond for our customers.

Many people in the company have gotten incredible praise from customers, and we keep track of all of it, in our internal social network (Yammer).

Hubspot, another company I’m in love with, does this, and they call it solving for the customer.

As a core value, this is important for us, as we’re always trying to help our customers be better.

5. Simple is beautiful

I love this one, because simplicity is beautiful, but it’s so hard to achieve.

But it’s an important reminder to everyone, when designing websites or building new features for products, keep it simple.

This is of course inspired by other industry leaders like Apple or Basecamp, and we try our best to keep everything as intuitive as possible.

6. Passion is not optional

We need to be passionate about what we do, and we need to hire people that share that passion.

I would hate to hire someone just because they’re looking for a job.

If I hired someone for Officevibe, they would need to be as passionate as I was about changing the world of work.

7. Quality without compromise

This is an important reminder to always maintain a high level of quality in everything we do.

Often times, clients or users want things yesterday, so a natural instinct is to rush something through to shut them up.

This is a very silly mistake, and will only last short term.

It’s important that we have high standards for ourselves, and we try our best to maintain them.

8. Nothing is impossible

We should always be aiming higher, and always pushing ourselves to be the best at what we do.

Again, this ties back to personal growth. We want to work with people that are always pushing themselves to be the best.

Combined, these core values help shape who we are, what we believe in, and who we should be hiring.

What Do You Think About Core Values?

What are your organisation’s core values?

What ideally would you say about why you do the work you do, what values and principles are essential to the way you do it?

How much of this is inextricably linked to the positive experience – your happiness at work – that you and the people you work with have in the doing of this work?

Link to   see the original Officevibe article and its accompanying images 

The 10 Reasons Why Happiness At Work is the Ultimate Productivity Booster

by Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer

If you want to get more done at work, the productivity gurus out there will tell you that it’s all about having the right system. You need to prioritize your tasks, you must keep detailed logs of how you spend your time, todo-lists are of course essential, you must learn to structure your calendar and much, much more.

But that’s not where you should start. You should start by liking what you do.

The single most efficient way to increase your productivity is to be happy at work. No system, tool or methodology in the world can beat the productivity boost you get from really, really enjoying your work.

I’m not knocking all the traditional productivity advice out there – it’s not that it’s bad or deficient. It’s just that when you apply it in a job that basically doesn’t make you happy, you’re trying to fix something at a surface level when the problem goes much deeper.

Here are the 10 most important reasons why happiness at work is the #1 productivity booster.

1: Happy people work better with others
Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better relations at work. This translates into:

  • Better teamwork with your colleagues
  • Better employee relations if you’re a manager
  • More satisfied customers if you’re in a service job
  • Improved sales if you’re a sales person

2: Happy people are more creative
If your productivity depends on being able to come up with new ideas, you need to be happy at work. Check out the research of Teresa Amabile for proof. She says:

If people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day.

There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.

3: Happy people fix problems instead of complaining about them
When you don’t like your job, every molehill looks like a mountain. It becomes difficult to fix any problem without agonizing over it or complaining about it first. When you’re happy at work and you run into a snafu – you just fix it.

4: Happy people have more energy
Happy people have more energy and are therefore more efficient at everything they do.

5: Happy people are more optimistic
Happy people have a more positive, optimistic outlook, and as research shows (particularly Martin Seligman’s work in positive psychology), optimists are way more successful and productive. It’s the old saying “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re probably right” all over again.

6: Happy people are way more motivated
Low motivation means low productivity, and the only sustainable, reliable way to be motivated at work is to be happy and like what you do. I wrote about this in a previous post called Why “motivation by pizza” doesn’t work.

7: Happy people get sick less often
Getting sick is a productivity killer and if you don’t like your job you’re more prone to contract a long list of diseases including ulcers, cancer and diabetes. You’re also more prone to workplace stress and burnout.

One study assessed the impact of job strain on the health of 21,290 female nurses in the US and found that the women most at risk of ill health were those who didn’t like their jobs. The impact on their health was a great as that associated with smoking and sedentary lifestyles (source).

8: Happy people learn faster
When you’re happy and relaxed, you’re much more open to learning new things at work and thereby increasing your productivity.

9: Happy people worry less about making mistakes – and consequently make fewer mistakes
When you’re happy at work the occasional mistake doesn’t bother you much. You pick yourself up, learn from it and move on. You also don’t mind admitting to others that you screwed up – you simply take responsibility, apologize and fix it. This relaxed attitude means that less mistakes are made, and that you’re more likely to learn from them.

10: Happy people make better decisions
Unhappy people operate in permanent crisis mode. Their focus narrows, they lose sight of the big picture, their survival instincts kick in and they’re more likely to make short-term, here-and-now choices. Conversely, happy people make better, more informed decisions and are better able to prioritize their work.

The upshot

Think back to a situation where you felt that you were at peak performance. A situation where your output was among the highest and best it’s ever been. I’m willing to bet that you were working at something that made you happy. Something that you loved doing.

There’s a clear link between happiness at work and productivity. This only leaves the question of causation: Does being productive make us happy or does being happy make us productive? The answer is, of course, yes! The link goes both ways.

Link to read Alexander Kjerulf’s  article in full

Why the Workplace Will Be the Future of Health and Fitness

By Shana Lebowitz

The month-long NEWM initiative is the brainchild of Virgin HealthMiles,an organization that’s part of the Virgin Group run by Richard Branson, and that helps companies develop a culture of health and wellness.NEWM is about pushing business leaders to make employee wellness a priority and highlighting the workplace as an important factor in helping people stay healthy.

While NEWM has been around for half a decade now, employee wellness programs have never gotten more attention than they have in the last few months.

Most media coverage of employee wellness is based on the assumption that these programs can help employers cut healthcare costs. And, for a while, the main question about corporate wellness was: How cost-effective are they? But recently, the conversation around employee wellness has changed. Health and wellness experts are taking a step back, wondering whether wellness programs are ultimately about cutting costs, or if maybe they’re about something bigger, that has to do with improving people’s lives.

Over the last few years, the number of workplace wellness programs has drastically increased. Among large companies (those with at least 200 employees), 92 percent offered wellness programs in 2010. That’s  an increase of 34 percent since 2009.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s prompted the recent growth in employee wellness programs, but perhaps the most obvious reason is the fact that Americans work more than ever before (8.8 hours in 2012, compared to7.9 hours in 2007). Whereas health experts once focused on the home environment, there’s a new focus on the importance of the workplace for promoting long-term health solutions. We’re hearing about how coworkers can motivate each other to start working out, and how posting calorie counts in office soda machines can keep us away from the sugary stuff.

Corporate wellness programs take advantage of the fact that most businesses are at least partly based on people working together. Part of the reason why a walking challenge is so appealing is that it’s something coworkers can do in a group, whether they’re competing against each other or working together to achieve their goals.

Corporate wellness programs don’t just benefit employees by enabling them to get more fit. They also tend to inspire people to like their companies more. According to the Virgin HealthMiles survey, almost 90 percent of employees said they consider health and wellness offerings when deciding where to work, and research suggests wellness programs are as important to job satisfaction as raises and promotions. For Boyce, inspiring people to love where they work is central to his concept of success.

According to the Virgin HealthMiles survey, the biggest obstacle currently facing employee wellness is measuring the impact of these programs. Some health experts insist that a successful employee wellness program will save employers a significant amount of money in the long term; others are less certain.  Perhaps we’ll never be able to measure the real impact of employee wellness.

The question, then, is whether we should pursue these programs at all.  Baun talked about the difference between ROI (return on investment) and a less official term called “VOI,” or value on investment. The second term refers more to what happens when you improve people’s lives, and is substantially harder to measure.

Still, anecdotal evidence consistently suggests these programs have something to offer. Baun, who’s been in the business of employee wellness for more than 30 years, told me multiple stories about employees who’d started practicing an overall healthier lifestyle with the help of workplace wellness programs.

In so many of these cases, it would be impossible to measure the effect of a workplace wellness program, he said. But even without the clinical data, he was able to say with confidence: “It changed their lives.”

Link to read the full original Greatist article

Happiness At Work edition #106

All of these stories and many more can be found collected together in this week’s new Happiness At Work #106.

I hope you find things here to use, to enjoy and to help grow your own sense of happiness…

Link to the full Happiness At Work edition #106 collection of stories

 

 

Happiness At Work edition #100 – how we achieve our potential

by

ladder to the sky edit

Science of Happiness At Work expert Jessica Pryce-Jones discovered through her research in dozens of different organisations that what lies at the heart of happiness at work is achieving our potential.

If we feel we are doing this, we will probably feel that we have high levels of trust in the work we are doing, and pride in and recognition for what we are achieving.

This week, as we celebrate our 100th edition of the Happiness At Work collection, I want to headline stories from this week that shine a light on different ways we can all reach out and into our best and fullest potential.

We use Jessica Pryce-Jones’ 5 Cs model in our happiness at work training because it has been rigorously researched in organisations and because it provides a practical framework to grow and sustain increased levels of happiness at work, both as an individual and collectively as an organisation or team.

Slide2

“Happiness at work is a mindset which allows you to maximise performance and achieve your potential.  You do this by being mindful of the highs and lows when working alone or with others.” Jessica Pryce-Jones

The first key to happiness at work is your approach and being aware of it.  Being mindful allows you to have a perspective on a situation, which means you’ll manage it better.

Secondly, our definition of happiness focuses not only on the individual but also on their role within the group because that’s where most work takes place.

Thirdly, it’s important to recognise the “yin and yang” effect.  Growth of any sort involves accepting that discomfort and difficulty are part of the process.  Happiness at work doesn’t mean that you have to feel good 100% of the time.  Or that you shouldn’t feel the usual negative emotions you do at work.  Like anger, frustration, disappointment, failure, jealousy or shock.  Just like the times when you feel so stretched that you aren’t sure how you will cope.  Those are the moments that help you achieve your potential.  The times that you look back at with a sense of accomplishment and achievement.

Moving from struggle to success to the next struggle to the next success in a repeated upward spiral is how you grow, develop and achieve more.  It is what peak performance is made of.  And it is how you become happy at work.

And lying at the heart of all this is

Achieving Your Potential – if you think you are – you will be happy at work,

Slide03

This is strongly associated with:

Feeling energised – pay attention to what energises you because it is a good internal marker of your happiness.  (Doing long hours may mean you don’t have enough recovery time.  And it looks like a 48hour week is the maximum you can work before productivity starts to rapidly fall off.

Using your strengths and skills – work to your strengths but don’t lose sight of weakness – successful people are aware of both, and spend time boosting and refining their skills too.  We now know with certainty that when we use our signature strengths we not only find things easiest and ‘natural’, we also do our finest work, and we feel energised and nourished doing it.

Remember the fastest way to develop your potential is to learn.

Overcoming challenges – like most people, even when you enjoy overcoming a challenge, you won’t like having to face especially hard difficulties, and it is normal to experience less happiness when you start tackling a difficult project and more as you work your way through it.

And part of our humanness is to feel greater pride for achieving things that have been difficult for us, more than the things we might do more brilliantly but, for us, are no big deal because they lie within our natural or existing strengths and capabilities.

But what if you don’t feel you are achieving your potential?

Well here is where the 5 C’s come in – and each of these are areas that we can learn how to develop and grow stronger.

First is Confidence

Slide04

Most of us take Confidence for granted when it feels strong and only notice it when don’t feel like we have it. Even though this scored the least important element after the other C’s, Confidence is the one on which all the others depend – you can’t have high levels of Contribution, Conviction or Commitment without it.

If you’re one of those people who have the highest level of happiness at work you will have 40% more confidence than other people.  And when you have high confidence you’ll also have 25% more self-belief; and 180% more energy and get 35% more done.  And you will feel like you understand your role backwards & forwards.

Slide05

Contribution is the most important component of Happiness At Work and is made up of two dimensions:

The Inside-Out aspects are what you bring to your work. 

These are:

Feeling Secure In Your Job

Raising Issues That Are Important To You

Having Clear Objectives

and Achieving Your Goals

There is a huge body of research, which shows that if this bit of your working life is right, a lot of the rest will fall into place. And, as we have already noticed, iti’s only difficult goals that increase our happiness over time.  Easy ones just don’t make you feel good.

The Outside-In aspects are what you get from your work;

Feeling that you are Listened To is the most important element in the Outside-In group.  It is fundamental to your happiness at work and productivity.

Feeling Respected By Your Boss and Getting Positive Feedback really build Contribution.  We need at least 3x and ideally 5x as many positive comments to equal the effect of one negative criticism, and we do our very best work when we are feeling positive.

Feeling Appreciated At Work means feeling validated for who you are and what you bring, as well as getting thanks for what you do

Slide06

Conviction is the engine that means you deliver come what may.

It’s what keeps your Contribution on course when things are going well and means you won’t stall when they are not.  Conviction is the second most important element for happiness at work after Contribution.

High Conviction means you have high Motivation

Motivation comes from the Latin word meaning “to move”.  We need a compelling reason to get moving and this can be either TOWARD something we desire and want to get closer to having, or AWAY FROM something we don’t want or wish to avoid happening.   Being motivated involves purpose, direction, and effort.  And it’s enhanced when you feel you have choice, when you feel competent and when you feel strongly and positively connected with the people around you.

With high Conviction you also feel Resilient  – ready to deal with the challenges you might face.

And you feel that Your Work Makes A Positive Impact on the world.

Slide07

Commitment is a dynamic balance between what we believe and what we feel – our head and heart if you like.

One of the elements of having a high Commitment is believing in the Vision of your organisation And – above that – believing that what you are doing is worthwhile – that it adds up to something that extends beyond your own self-interest.  Your commitment will be stronger for work that connects to what you are interested in and like doing.

And all of this is boosted by strong bursts of positive emotion – enjoying what you are doing.

Slide08

And the 5th C is Culture

This is the environment in which you work.  Culture when looked at through a happiness lens means working in a place where your preferences for how you like to work are matched.

In a large organisation you may have less control over Culture than you do over your Confidence, your Contribution, your Conviction and your Commitment.  But it will have a big effect on you. When it is right you almost don’t notice it.  But when it’s wrong it’s really wrong because you will feel you just don’t fit.  And this can easily lead to you doubting yourself rather than the place you’re working in.

High levels of satisfaction with your work Culture come from:

Having a fair ethos at work 

and Feeling in control of your daily activities.  The more autonomy or choice (real or perceived) that you feel you have in your job, the more you can deal with its daily pressures.

People who are most happy at work experience a 33% greater sense of control than their least happy peers.

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And round the outside and emanating out from the 5 C’s are Pride Trust and Recognition

Are you proud of your work?

Do you trust your people you work with?

And do you feel you get enough recognition for what you do?

Pride and Trust work like a pair of facing mirrors.  While one mirror shows your front, the other shows your back, together they reveal multiple aspects of the same thing:  your happiness at work.

Recognition is related but different.  Pride and Trust are what you give to your organisation and Recognition is what you get back from it.

Recognition is when others inside or outside your organisation acknowledge what you do and the way you do it.  It is your payback and it means much more than money.  We know this because there is a strong negative correlation between Recognition and pay, which means that the more you want Recognition, the less you will be happy with money in its place.

You need all three in place if you’re going to feel really happy at work. Pride and Trust without Recognition will make you ask: “Why do I bother when no-one notices what I’m doing?” And lots of Recognition without Pride and Trust will just feel fraudulent – unearned and undeserved.

Pride, Trust and Recognition map strongly onto all of the 5 Cs and the scores you give to these will not only give you a very clear indicator of how happy you are at work, but will also tell you how well the 5 Cs are working for you

The outer wheel aspects of Pride, Trust and Recognition help you to understand more specifically what our happiness at work is bringing you,  They are the golden wheel that is turned by the spokes of the 5 Cs, and you need all of these to be strong to keep your Pride, Trust and Recognition strong and unbroken.

And at the heart of everything is your central hub of Achieving your Potential that is directly affected by the strengths and balance of all of the others.

We are each responsible for our own levels of happiness

The good news is you have much more room for manoeuvre than you may think.  And there are always choices.

The most important first start point is self-awareness:  the more you know about yourself, and your situation, the greater the range of possibilities  and choices that you will be able to discover to start to make a positive difference. Here’s what Jessica Pryce Jones tells us – a call to action if you like:

If you continue to put up with what you’ve always had, that’s what you’ll always get.   And if we all do that, nothing will change.

We need to make a fundamental shift to work that brings together some of the key recent findings in organisational research, neurology, psychology, behavioural economics, psycholinguistics, and anthropology.  To create new models, new practices, and a new approach…regardless of sector, nationality, product, service, role or status. 

The only way to do this is to galvanise around something that is practical, that’s compelling for individuals as well as organisations, and that produces real results, results of real and lasting value.

Or as American psychiatrist Theodore Ruben puts it…

“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.”

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Here are some more articles fro this week’s Happiness At Work collection that add further ideas and techniques for achieving our potential…

8 Not-So-Obvious Signs You’re Actually Doing Work You Love

 Renee Masur writes…

When we find a job we feel passionate about, there are a lot of signs that we love it. But finding work we love does not always mean that it’s easy. And when the work begins to challenge us, or when we hit roadblocks (which everyone will) it’s not as easy to tell if we’re actually doing work we’re meant to do.

Finding work you are truly passionate about can feel a lot like falling in love. You become infatuated, excited, and you can feel yourself changing for the better. But what happens when you get used to it? New is now familiar, and that loving feeling is not as “sparkly” as it once was. In some cases, when relationships last for this long (with a person or a career) it can be difficult to tell if you still want to be in it for the long run. Here are some signs that you’ve found the one.

1. There are never enough hours to accomplish everything.

There is always a constant stream of work coming in. But you don’t let it paralyze you. There is so much to be done because you keep getting it done. You’re in the work flow…

Hemingway always stopped writing when he had more to say. It was better than writing ’til he ran dry, which meant picking it up the next day with nothing ready to write. This is you at work. There’s always a to-do list ready to go the next day.

2. You often remind yourself of the “bigger picture.”

There are always going to be little mundane tasks that have to get finished—even if we don’t want to be the one to finish them. It’s easy to lose yourself in the nuts and bolts of a project without envisioning it’s completion. It’s even easier to get hung up on how difficult and time consuming the little projects can be.

But when you love the work you do, you always find a way to see the forest through the trees and remind yourself of what you are working toward.

3. Your frustration is born out of something not being good enough.

When we care about the work we do and something doesn’t live up to our standards, it can be really disappointing. If this frustration comes from wanting something to be better than it is and (here’s the kicker) taking extra time and effort to bring it up to those standards, then you are actually doing work that matters to you.

Even if the struggle feels like a huge pain, working toward the end result you want will give you an even greater sense of reward once you get it there.

4. You talk about your work during breakfast and dinner.

You seriously can’t help talking about the thing you’re working on, even if it frustrates you. You try to talk out the issue with your loved ones, thinking maybe another perspective can help you “hallelujah” your way to a solution. Complaining about your job does not fall into this category.

There will always be days or even weeks at a time when things just feel like they’re working against you, but you keep talking about your work through every kind of phase. Work does not end when you walk out the door at the end of the day.

5. You feel like the day just started when it’s suddenly lunchtime.

Have you ever done this? You’ve gone through a couple of tasks, maybe answered a few quick emails, or tidied up some things left from the previous day and are ready to dig into the bigger work when you look at the time and it’s 11:47 a.m.? Where the heck did the morning go?

If it’s easy for you to get into flow, meaning you’re working on something that is not too easy but not so challenging you can’t do it, you’re doing work that is juuuust right for you.

6. You are constantly inspired by the people around you.

The things they seem to accomplish can sometime blow you away. You admire their tenacity in their work and you want to support them any way you can so that they can keep being awesome. You love what you are all working toward collectively as a team.

Typically, when we are feeling good, we see the good in others. So by admiring the work of others, it’s coming from a place of admiring your own work as well.

7. You find yourself looking at your extracurricular life in terms of work.

You are not strict about mentally checking out of work when you don’t have to be there. You like your work, so you also like thinking about it outside of office hours. You find yourself solving problems, brainstorming ideas, and thinking in terms of how something in your life relates to something in your work.

Like Newton and the apple, sometimes your greatest ideas come to you when you are far from the office.

8. You don’t dread Sunday night.

For people who don’t like their jobs, every day of the week has a certain quality. Monday is for the blues, Wednesday is halfway there, and Friday is the sweetest day of the week because it means they are one lazy work day away from the weekend. Many Saturdays are occupied by a hangover, and Sunday, well, even though it’s a day off, it can feel like one of the most dreadful because another work week is around the corner.

But when you like the work, Sunday is a great day! Just like most of the other days. It’s always so nice to have time to take care of our homes, spend quality time with family and friends, or just go out and explore. But when Sunday does finally come around, it’s almost exciting to get back to work after a refreshing weekend.

Link to read the original Lifehack article

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Inspire learning through emotional connections

Kasmin Cooney writes this article about what great trainers do, but is so true also of great leadership that I have enlarged what Cooney writes to include managers and how we can help people to achieve their greatest potential in a role as a trainer, facilitator or manager…

…For me the ability of a trainer or facilitator or manager to inspire people to move out of their comfort zones and make change is extremely powerful. Effective learning, ideally, will put the delegate or learner at the centre of the event, rather than the event to provide a platform for the trainer or facilitator or manager to spout on about their own personal achievements. So, if a programme is being led properly, the trainer or manager themselves cannot be the centre of attention, no matter how wonderful their own experiences. Learners must be the centre of that particular universe. The trainer or manager with the edge truly believes that everyone holds their own key, which can unlock the potential within. A fabulous trainer or manager believes in her or his delegates’ abilities and potential to shine. For me it is the belief, held by the trainer or manager, that the people sitting before them can be amazing, that provides the difference between the trainer or manager who can do a good job and one that can inspire change. The exceptional trainer or manager not only believes the people before them are amazing; they help them to realise the fact too. The trainer or manager’s faith alone in people’s abilities to shine is not quite enough.  Each person must believe in their own potential, otherwise the magic doesn’t happen. Those trainers and teachers and managers that can wield magic and open doors, will inspire hope, ignite imagination, and build confidence in people to be the best they can be. 

Link to read the original HRZone article

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7 Roles of an Exceptional Team Leader

Continuing the theme of helping others to achieve their potential, here is a great set of roles that highlight the different things we need to be and bring to help different people at different times to progress and advance in their learning, confidence and work.

Used together they provide a sufficiently complex and rich array of responses to help us to achieve our real change and transformation.

Karin Hurt writes…

Team leaders wear many hats, not always all at the same time. Concentrating on these 7 roles in your leadership development efforts will go a long way to exceptional frontline execution. #1 The Translator

  • Key Question:  What’s most IMPORTANT?
  • Important Duties: Makes company vision relevant; identifies key priorities.

#2 The Galvaniser

  • Key Question:  How do WE make a difference?
  • Important Duties: Rallies the team around a concrete picture of success; Shows the team that they are vital and able to accomplish something magnificent.

#3 The Connector

  • Key Question:  How can we best work TOGETHER?
  • Important Duties: Knows each team members strengths and motivations; Draws on strengths to create synergy.

#4 The Builder

  • Key Question: How do we IMPROVE?
  • Important Duties: Stretches individuals and the team; Expands individual and collective capacity.

#5 The Backer

  • Key Question: How can I HELP?
  • Important Duties: Offers support and removes roadblocks; Digs in and supports the team.

#6 The Accelerator

  • Key Question:  How do we accomplish MORE?
  • Important Duties: Challenges the team to break through to new levels; Inspires creative ways to do more with less

#7 The Ambassador

  • Key Question:  How do we SHARE our success?
  • Important Duties: Advocates for the team; Showcases team and individual accomplishments.

Link to read the original Lets Grow Leaders article

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The role of the coach: Applying sport and organisational psychology to business

What can business learn from the world of sport?

Some of the key theories and practices used in executive coaching will be detailed by Olympic gold medallist Adrian Moorhouse MBE at the Alec Rodger Memorial Lecture on Tuesday 24 June at Birkbeck, during Business Week.

In his keynote address, Moorhouse, managing director of Lane4, which helps organisations build competitive advantage through individual and team development, will explain what he believes business can learn from sport and how concepts within sport psychology and organisational psychology more broadly can help to create high performance business environments.

Resilience, learning mindset and high performance leadership are three of the elements that Moorhouse highlights as key for organisations to learn from the sporting world…

The name ‘coaching’ is of course derived from sport, and has helped raise its perceived value in business as it has a more performance edge compared to ‘counselling’. The focus is on ‘reaching your full potential’, ‘increasing your performance’, and ‘finding solutions’…

Moorhouse points out that, like the best sporting coaches, successful leaders engage with their teams, particularly when times are hard, they confide in them and share the problem at hand. They frame the long-term mission not just the short-term financials.

Moorhouse explains:“If my swimming coach had walked poolside when I was training for the Olympics and constantly told me that I had to reach a 62-second speed, it would have been morale-crushing. Instead, he would remind me that I am in winter training, that I am recovering from an injury, and that I am trying my best, but also that the Olympics are on the horizon and my purpose is to be a world-class swimmer.”

Increased resilience

It is vital to drum home the broader objective behind what your organisation is doing and how the workforce can play a meaningful part in achieving that.  Leaders should help their employees become more resilient and not through the macho approach of telling them to stick with it and work harder, but the emotionally intelligent way of nurturing resilience by balancing well-being with performance. A manager must avoid burn-out, just like an athlete…

Interestingly, Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) research, also referred to as contextual performance, maps the extent to which altruism, civic virtue, sportsmanship, courtesy and conscientiousness are manifested at work and why investing more time cultivating OCBs makes commercial sense, even in today’s fast-paced organisational cultures. And one important predictor of OCB is leadership – if there is a good relationship between the leaders and the employees, more examples of helping behaviours will be found, as well as higher performance levels (Motowidlo, 2011).

And it is perhaps here that an executive coach can really make a difference.

Link to read the original HRZone article

sleeping

6 Strategies to Sleep Soundly, Wake Rested and Accomplish More

Michael Hyatt writes…

Most research shows that we don’t get enough sleep, and our deficit is seriously hurting our productivity, our physical health, even our mental wellbeing.

There are a lot of factors working against us, but many of these are easy to address. You don’t have to follow any of these perfectly—I certainly don’t, at least not all the time—but here are six strategies for getting more and better sleep starting tonight.

1. Get Committed

How many times have we been up later than we wanted because there was one more link to click, one more episode to watch, one more page to read, one more whatever?

Researchers call it “bedtime procrastination,” and it’s really about willpower. If we want the benefit of extra sleep, we have to decide on the tradeoff: one less link, one less episode, one less page.

Determine to go to bed at a set time and then do it.

2. Set an Alarm

To help follow through on that commitment, set an alarm. There’s an inertia to being tired. We’ve all experienced this. It’s easier to just go on than go to bed. But a calendar alert or phone alarm can help us change gears when we might otherwise cruise along for another hour or more.

Blogger Eric Barker started using an alarm to signal sleep time and reports it’s even more beneficial than a morning alarm.

3. Establish a Ritual

It’s easier to do just about anything when there’s a pattern or a rhythm we can follow. As parents and grandparents, we know bedtime rituals work for our kids, but they can work for us too— especially if the ritual includes things that are helpful in making the transition to sleep, like:

  • getting a warm bath or cup of herbal tea
  • meditation, prayer or devotions
  • a novel saved just for bedtime
  • writing up our Gratitude Journal
  • processing the day with our spouses in bed

The key is to follow the same pattern most nights, even on weekends.

4. Go for a Run, but Not Before Bed

We all know about the benefits of exercise for health and longevity, but it’s crucial for improved sleep as well. Research shows that exercise in the morning or afternoon can benefit sleep.

David K. Randall’s survey of sleep science, Dreamland, confirms these findings and adds another side benefit of exercise, particularly outdoor activity. Exposure to sunlight helps “keep the body’s clock in sync with the day-night cycle and prime the brain to increase the level of melatonin [the sleep-regulating hormone] in the bloodstream,” he says.

The important thing is to avoid exercise right before bedtime, which will make it harder to fall to sleep.

5. Kill the Lights

Just as important as getting enough natural light during the day, it’s critical to extinguish artificial light at night.

More than nine in ten of us use electronic devices before sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Not only can the tweets, emails, videos, and articles we consume leave our minds buzzing and unrestful, the light from the devices themselves—even little LEDs—can compromise our slumber.

To prevent experiencing what expert Michael J. Breus calls “junk sleep” consider:

  • turning off TV’s, tablets, and other screens an hour before bedtime
  • putting your phone in a drawer or leaving it in another room
  • getting black-out curtains for summertime or sleeping with an eye mask
  • reading a genuine paper book instead of a tablet before bed—remember those?

There’s no sense getting to bed on time if we’re getting poor sleep throughout the night.

6. Blow off Work

For high achievers like us, this is really important. Let’s agree to let the report wait for morning — the design comps, too, and the email. Unless we’re already totally exhausted, all of these things just keep our minds active long after we close our eyes.

Our bosses don’t own our sleep. And if you — like me — are your own boss, then let’s give ourselves a break! If you can’t let something go, just write it down, hit the hay, and deal with it in the morning.

The evidence for the importance of sleep is clear at this point. All that remains is for us to take it seriously enough to change our habits. After all, becoming more productive, efficient, and effective in every other area of our life is pointless if we cheat our minds and bodies the rest they deserve.

Link to read the original article

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." ~ Dan Gilbert (photo by Mark Trezona)

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” ~ Dan Gilbert (photo by Mark Trezona)

Happiness At Work edition #100

All of these article and many more and included this week’s Happiness At Work edition #100.

I hope you find much here to enjoy, use and add to your existing repertoire of approaches for being successful, happy, creative and resilient in your work and life.

Happiness At Work #97 ~ why our learning matters more than ever

by

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Happiness At Work edition #97

Here are some of our favourite stories collected in this edition, beginning with this story that eloquently makes the case for learning inside our organisations and provides this week’s headline theme…

Organisational Learning in the Network Era

by Harold Jarche

W. Edwards Deming, American management visionary, understood that systemic factors account for most organizational problems, and changing these has more potential for improvement than changing any individual’s performance. Therefore the role of executives should be to manage the system, not individuals. But the real barrier to systemic change is hierarchical management, as it constrains the sharing of power, a necessary enabler of organizational learning. People have to trust each other to share knowledge, and power relationships can block these exchanges. Just listen to any boardroom meeting and see how power can kill a conversation. If learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive, then structural barriers to learning must be removed.

A key factor in sustaining any enterprise is organizational learning. Knowledge gives us the ability to take effective action (know how) and this is the type of knowledge that really matters in both business and life. Value from this knowledge is created by groups and spreads through social networks.

First of all, learning is not something to get. In too many cases we view learning as something that is done to people. It’s almost as if we are goin’ to get some learnin’! We think we can get an education or get people trained. This is absurd.

…

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own, so organizational knowledge management should first support personal knowledge mastery. PKM is an individual discipline of seeking, sense-making, and sharing that helps each of us understand our world and work more effectively. In addition to PKM, groups should promote working out loud to ensure common understanding and to address exceptions to the norm, as this is where group learning happens. The organization can then ensure that important decisions are recorded, codified, and easily available for retrieval.  Each of us is responsible for our own learning but our responsibility to our peers is to share this learning. If nobody shared what they have learned, there would be nothing like Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web. The same pertains to sharing inside organizations.

…

In an open environment, learning will flourish, as it has on the Web. When we remove artificial boundaries to working and learning, we enable innovation. Andrew McAfee, at the MIT Center for Digital Business, wrote

“The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.”

…

As Frederic Laloux notes in Reinventing Organizations, the key role of a CEO is in holding the space so that teams can self-manage (and learn for themselves).

If you are in a position of authority and you are not removing barriers to learning, then you are not serving your organization in the network era.

Link to read the full unedited article

Julia Middleton: Cultural Intelligence (CQ)

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE:

The ability to cross divides and thrive in multiple cultures.

Organisations often appoint leaders for their IQ. Then, years later, sack them for their lack of EQ (Emotional Intelligence). Common Purpose argues that in the future they will promote for CQ – Cultural Intelligence.

Participants on Common Purpose programmes, as they learn to lead beyond their authority, need to be able to cross boundaries: between east and west, and north and south; between faiths and beliefs; between public, private and voluntary sectors; and between generations.

Founder and CEO of Common Purpose, Julia Middleton, speaks about Cultural Intelligence – the ability to cross divides and thrive in multiple cultures.

Check out her book Cultural Intelligence here

Strategy Is No Longer a Game of Chess

by Greg Satell

Legendary strategists have long been compared to master chess players, who know the positions and capabilities of each piece on the board and are capable of thinking several moves ahead.

It’s time to retire this metaphor. Strategy is no longer a game of chess because the board is no longer set out in orderly lines. Industries have become boundless.  Competitive threats and transformative opportunities can come from anywhere.  Strategy, therefore, is no longer a punctuated series of moves, but a process of deepening and widening connections.

…

So we find ourselves in an age of disruption, where agility trumps scale and strategy needs to take on a new meaning and a new role.  We can no longer plan; we can only prepare. This requires what Columbia’s Rita Gunther McGrath calls a shift from “learning to plan” to “planning to learn”.

Continue reading this article

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5 neglected behaviors that make dreams happen

  1. Identify and gain customers. “Build it and they will come,” only works in the movies. Dreams without customers are a waste of time.

  2. Think like a dreamer. Talk like a doer. Dreamy-talk doesn’t inspire confidence in others.

  3. Learn from detractors, rather than brushing them aside.

  4. Develop people and grow teams. Dreams that don’t require others are too small.

  5. Listen more. Everyone isn’t a complete idiot.

Dreamers set reasonable people on edge. But, every team needs at least one irritating dreamer.

Continue reading this article

The Price of Happiness? £478 per employee

Research shows that SME bosses could spend £476 per employee on social outings and training courses and see happiness increase by 35 per cent.

Spending less than £500 per employee each year on social outings and training courses could increase workforce happiness by over a third (35 per cent) in UK small business, new research has revealed.

The survey by Viking reveals that employees in small businesses believe training and development, benefits such as flexible working and social events and regular company updates from bosses are as important as a pay rise.

By investing £286 on training courses and £190 on staff outings per employee, levels of happiness at work would increase by 35 per cent, according to analysis of the key drivers of happiness.

Continue reading this article

11 Simple Tricks That Will Make You Happier And More Productive

These include one or two that are dear to our heart and central to our teaching…

1. Truly listen to people.  Pay attention to their body language, and mirror it with your own. Listen graciously rather than waiting to talk. —Adam Goldman

4. Learn basic mindfulness meditation. It doesn’t have to be a major commitment, just 10 minutes in a day. All you need to do is pay attention to your breath as it goes out and comes back in. Remember, it’s not about clearing your head of thoughts. “Real Happiness at Work” author Sharon Salzberg says mindfulness means having a “balanced awareness” of what’s happening around you, so that you can understand your experience rather than just react to it. —James H. Kelly

11. At the end of the work day, reflect on what you did well. Research out of Harvard Business School shows that keeping a journal of your daily successes improves your performance and wellbeing.

Read the full list

Happiness Researcher Shawn Achor On The REAL Reason Success Can’t Make You Happy (VIDEO)

Work hard, achieve your goals, become happy — that’s the happiness formula many believe to be universally true. But happiness researcher Shawn Achor says that this success-leads-to-happiness model is fundamentally flawed. In a sit-down with Oprah for “Super Soul Sunday,” Achor explains why.

“It’s scientifically broken for two reasons. The first reason is that because success is a moving target, even if you hit success, you immediately change what ‘success’ looks like for you,” Achor says…

“When we study it, we find that your happiness levels don’t really move very much as your success rates rise. But flip around the formula,” Achor says. “The research says that being successful doesn’t automatically make you happier, but being happier — being more positive — makes you more successful.”

Continue reading and watch the video clip

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Closing the Gender Divide: Why Confidence and Leaning In Alone Won’t Cut It

by Lydia Dishman

It’s a leadership catch 22. While we can all agree that confidence is an essential tool for career success, a raft of research indicates that women are less likely to speak up in meetings, negotiate for raises or promotions, and generally underestimate their ability to perform.

When women are selected less often to lead than their male peers, even though they outperform the guys, it’s no wonder the gender gap persists.

A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Strategy& found that in eight out of the last 10 years, there have been more women heading into the corner office than stepping out. Despite that encouraging trend, female CEOs comprised only 3% of leaders of public companies in 2013, a 1.3 percentage point drop from 2012. And they’re more likely to be forced out.

But why?

Books such as The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman,Find Your Courage by Margie Warrell, and even The Next Generation of Women Leaders by Selena Rezvani all suggest that the chasm is caused by the gap between competence and confidence.

There’s plenty of science to lend credence to their theory.

…

Support, even in the face of failure is one way to foster the female leader. As Susan Glasser writes at Politico:

“The leaders who succeed are the ones who are allowed to make mistakes, who have the time and space and breathing room and support from their bosses to push and prod, experiment and improvise until they get it right. Because all of journalism is in the midst of upheaval right now, and that Silicon Valley cliché about failing in order to succeed really does apply. It turned out I did not really have the support of my boss, and I believe that to be the actual—and much more prosaic—story of many of these contretemps over controversial editors and executives who happen to be women.”

Continue reading the full article

Over communication: 7 reasons to learn “Mench”

by Dorothy Dalton

…is over communication strictly a gender issue?

I don’t think so. I know any number of men who could talk for their countries.  Women often make comments about the monosyllabic “report” style communication patterns of the men in their lives, thinking that the rapport we create via our own delivery is much better.

But Lynette Allen, Co-Founder Her Invitation suggests that over sharing (over communication) can indeed be a female characteristic which we use to our detriment seeing it as an  “unconsciously displayed behaviour which actively holds women back. They have to learn to be more succinct in the workplace and not tell the whole story and even more.”  

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review  suggested what happened to a senior woman in a meeting ” was like a snowball going down a hill and picking up stuff in its path”  and was a real barrier to being taken seriously.

…

What is your style? “mini- series” or  “book cover blurb.”

So why does over communication cause mis-communication, isn’t it important that everyone has all the details?

  1. Your thinking appears cloudy and muddled if you are unable to be succinct and your message becomes blurred in verbiage. If you forget the point of why you’re telling something, you have gone seriously adrift. People stop listening and you fail to get your message across.  You have become a snowball and snowballs melt. Ding!
  2. It seems that you don’t respect other people’s time if you over communicate in any situation, you run the risk of your listener shutting down and retreating, either physically or psychologically. At the far end of the spectrum they will avoid you totally. In all cases your message is not going through. Ding!
  3. It seems that you don’t respect your own time if every time a simple social question of “How are you?” produces a twenty-minute discourse on your health or what is going on for you,  you give the impression of being a poor time manager.  Ding!
  4. It suggests that you are not in touch with your audience as you don’t recognise social cues.  So just as if you were going to France you would try to speak a bit of French, If you are delivering to a male audience then try to speak in a language they will understand. Mench?Ding
  5. It indicates a lack of empathy especially when you fail to pick up disconnected body language signs (loss of eye contact, fidgeting) If you are talking, you are not listening. Ding! Ding!
  6.  If you need to talk to wear someone down with your voice, then they are agreeing under duress. That was not successful communication. It could even be considered a form of passive aggression if you don’t allow your listener the opportunity  to participate. Ding!
  7. It suggests that you think what you have to say is more important than what others have to say and conveys arroganceDing! Ding!
  8. It confirms that you like the sound of your own voice, email etc. See point 7. Ditto Ding!

So does this mean that women and chatterboxes in general have to learn  “Mench,”  the abridged speak of a certain type of male?  Lynette felt that while organisational culture is male dominated this is a necessary work- around to get our voices heard. Isn’t this another one of those fix women things? No apparently not, it can be completely gender neutral. Factor in a general reduction in people’s attention span, then anything prolonged is going to be ineffective for both men and women alike. We have already seen the one minute elevator pitch cut back into the 30 second commercial.

So perhaps the converse  can also apply  Maybe we should start saying  “OK that was the book cover blurb  – now give me the mini-series”

Link to read the full unedited article

Dads Who Do Dishes Raise Ambitious Daughters

Dads who equally divided the drudgery of household chores with their wives tended to have daughters whose “when I grow up” aspirations were less gender-stereotypical, suggests an upcoming paper in Psychological Science.

Moms’ work-equality beliefs did also color their daughters’ attitudes toward gender roles, but this study found that a stronger predictor of girls’ career goals was the way their dads handled domestic duties. The daughters of parents who shared housework were more likely to tell the researchers they wanted to be a police officer, a doctor, an accountant, or a “scientist (who studies germs to help doctors find what medicine each patient needs),” lead author Alyssa Croft wrote via email, quoting one little girl in the study.

Continue reading this story

How To Say “Thank You” At Work: a guide to showing gratitude to peers, managers and employees

…It tends to be really easy to see when you’ve done “saying thank you at work” wrong (because the other person is uncomfortable, offended, or just doesn’t know how to react), but hard to know when you’re doing it right.

In this post, I want to create a guide for how to say thank you at work based on the best widely accepted rules and smart strategies for forming trust and stronger relationships with your peers and coworkers.

Why saying thank you matters

At work, it’s often easier to say nothing than to risk saying “thanks” in the wrong way. And as such, a lot of us go about our days feeling under-appreciated or not realizing the impact our work has on other people.

People thrive at work when they know their contributions have meaning. Letting people know the ways in which their work matters — to you, to the company, to their team — helps you to keep the people around you engaged and excited about their work. Especially if you are a manager, this is an important part of your job.

Saying thank you helps to build trust and stronger relationships with the people you work with too. When people know you value them, they are more likely to value you in return and want to work with you (since you make them feel great about their contributions).

Plus, expressing gratitude isn’t just good for the people you’re thanking — it’s actually good for you too! People who say thank you are happier (it makes sense right? It feels good to help other people feel good) and are more well-liked. It’s like a self-perpetuating cycle; the more positivity you spread, the more is out there to come back to you.

Read the full article

iStock_000019063405Large

12 Unusual Ways To Spur Creativity During Meetings

Holding brainstorming sessions is easy. It’s the actual brainstorming that’s tough — and often ineffective. As the boss, how do you get your team to come up with great ideas on the spot, and then actually follow through? Members from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) share some ideas.

Ask Your Team to Think Fast!

Encourage thinking on your feet, so every meeting typically includes a spur of the moment prompt, where each person quickly throws out an idea that comes to mind. Crazy is OK.

Show Gratitude

In order to get the most out of my team for a brainstorming session, we ask everyone to reach out via phone to someone they are grateful towards prior to the session. When we start the meeting, everyone comes in with a positive and open mind. The results are spectacular.

Ask for the Worst Idea in the Room

When creativity is at a standstill or a project is particularly difficult, I like to challenge our team members to come up with the WORST idea possible. Sometimes we even make it a competition, trying to one-up each other with even more ridiculous and off-the-wall ideas.

Know Your Team

One thing that helps to spur creativity is to have your team take a personality trait test and share their test results amongst their peers at a meeting. It’s a fun and different way of helping to foster a deeper understanding about each team member that will incite new and more effective/creative ways to think collectively.

Make It a Team Effort

To spur creativity, we play “Yes… and….” For a given problem each team member provides a solution that is not to be judged by anyone. Instead, another team says, “Yes I like this idea because…. and we can also….”

Incorporate Humour

Humor is brain juice. Dopamine and endorphins keeps tension low, morale high, and bring people toward a state of engagement. Everything in a brainstorm session should be fair game for making FUN of. Bring people into the room who can make people laugh.

Extra credit points for having Play-Doh and other fun tactile objects that stimulate various regions of the brain. Also make sure people are fed. Forming new ideas takes up a lot of chemical resources.

Know When to Stop

Sometimes there’s only one right answer to a creative conundrum, from how the trade show booth should look to the headline and font for the new campaign. The simple, elegant, smart choice wins, and often the best answer comes up early on because it didn’t require too much thinking.

Take a Walk

When I want to get the creative juices flowing on our team, we go for a walk. We call these “walkies,” where we go for 15 minutes and talk about life. Generally, the conversation always goes back to work.

There is something about nature that spurs a person to be more creative. It will help you see the world better. I find that being healthy and alert will always boost up the creative side in people as well.

Provide Special Incentives

We value the creativity of our employees in routine brainstorming sessions and always encourage them to think “outside the box.” To show our appreciation for their creativity and implementation of a successful project, we reward them with special incentives like a weekend getaway.

Showcase Your Ideas

Our office has a massive whiteboard that we use to brainstorm and stay focused. Being able to walk into the office everyday and see your ideas in front of you is a constant reminder of what needs to get done. It is definitely an accomplishment to be able to erase something when it has been completed.

Don’t Brainstorm

In place of a brainstorming session, we break each task down into very specific areas and have each team or individual attack each idea with a purpose. This gives them not only a starting location, but also a direction, and produces great results when combined with other teams/individuals who are given different tasks and directions.

Bring Wine—And Demand Results

Every Friday my team gets together for what we call the “Eatin’ Meetin’.” This is our time to relax, throw around ideas and talk about our deliverables for the week. Everyone eats cheese, drinks wine and brainstorms.

When someone throws out an idea and it’s well received, we simply talk about how we can make it happen and who can lend a hand. And that becomes their deliverable to report on for the next Eatin’ Meetin’.

Read the full unedited article

Happiness At Work edition #97

All of these rticl;es and many more are collected together in Happiness At Work edition #97, online from Friday 30th May 2014.

I hope you find things here to use and enjoy.

What does ‘keeping it real’ mean these days?

by
Blue Trees ? -Sue Ridge

Blue Trees ? -photo by Sue Ridge

This week’s theme considers what it means these days to be real – and/or to be seen to be real.
I’ve collected here some stories about the blurred relationship we have between what we think of as authentic and what we think of as manufactured and whether one is better than the other.
And stories that question some of the assumptions we might be making about what is good – or bad – for us, at least attempting to interrogate a little more brightly one or two of the maxims we hold to be true in our early 21st century age.
There is a wonderful rambunctious rant by the always deliberately outrageous provocateur Tom Peters, who here is listing some the Blindingly Obvious Things we continue to ignore.
Perhaps some of things that some of us have long believed to be true and looking more sure:  one of this week’s top research news stories reports the London School of Economics findings that participating in arts activity brings us more happiness than a £1,000+ pay rise.  So too does sport, which I suspect more of us thought we knew already.  The bigger news is that arts participation and spending time in libraries turn out to really be up there in the high happiness returns too.
The best happiness provider is swimming, so if you want to combine pool time with arts participation and get the extra bonus of being part of a international community event, you might want to check out the Brockwell Lido Fun Palace 2014.  (And if you’re not a Londoner this may inspire you to make your own Fun Palace – there is still time.  Just.)

And before you take the plunge into all the words that make this post, you might like to first give yourself a 5minute dip into artist Sue Ridge’s meditative, languorous, hyper-realised video: The Swimmer, which you will find in the video section of her website.   (And my big thanks to Sue Ridge again for her inspirational photos that headline and end this post.)

The Blue Trees in London - photo by Sue Ridge

The Blue Trees in London photo by Sue Ridge

Trees for Cities – The Blue Trees In London

The colour and the Tree come together to transform and affect each other; the colour changing the Tree into something surreal, something out of this world, speaking of the importance of trees in our urban environment. 

“By colouring the trees blue, we want people to stop and notice these beautiful trees, which are so often taken for granted”, says Sharon Johnson, Chief Executive of Trees for Cities. “It is well reported in the UK that there has been a decline in urban trees over the last decade, and the threat from disease is on the increase.  Over 80% of the population will live in cities by 2050.  We urgently need to protect and plant more trees to help foster a sense of well being and happiness in our cities”.

With the Blue Trees, the colour and the Tree become a sculptural work referencing people’s lives, their daily existence and how individually and collectively we shape the world we inhabit.

Konstantin Dimpoulos, Australian artist and creator of the Blue Trees said: “I have always known that art is and always has been an extended part of nature and that art can effect social change.  For that to happen one has to move out of the art institutions and galleries and move outside among nature and human beings in their living spaces”

Link to the Blue Trees  in London website

Konstantin Dimpoulos’ Blue Trees

“What do you think of when you think of trees…?”

Dancing makes people as happy as a £1,600 pay rise

By , Senior Political Correspondent

Official figures reveal for the first time how culture and sport make people as happy as being given pay rises worth thousands of pounds

Visiting the library, dancing and going swimming makes people as happy as a £5,000 pay rise, official figures have shown for the first time.

Researchers from the London School of Economics found that sports, culture and the arts can have a significant impact on people’s happiness.

They then assessed how much money it would take to give people a similar boost in their level of well being.

They concluded that playing sport on a weekly basis is worth the equivalent of being given £1,127 a year, while regular involvement in the arts such as music, dance and plays is worth £1,084 a year.

The most beneficial activity is taking part in dancing, which is worth £1,671 a year, closely followed by swimming which is worth £1,630 a year. Visiting libraries on a regular basis is worth £1,359 a year…

The report suggested that swimming had a more significant impact on people’s well-being than almost any other sport, almost than twice as much as football and cycling.

The research suggests that taking part in cultural activities, as opposed to being in the audience, makes people significantly happier.

As well as the benefits of dancing, taking part in craft activities is equivalent to a £1,000 pay rise.

By contrast listening to music is worth £742 a year, although going to plays is a significantly more valuable experience worth £999 a year.

The analysis also found that people who regularly enjoyed the arts were 5.4 per cent more likely to report good health, while those involved in sport were 14.1 per cent more likely to be healthy.

People who take part in sports save the NHS almost £100 a year, while those who enjoy cultural activities such as films, exhibitions and plays save the NHS £37 a year.

People who attended arts events and played sports were also significantly more likely to give to charity, while the research also suggested that culture and sport could motivate unemployed people to find work.

Link to read the original Telegraph article

Think authenticity is about being honest and open? Think again

by Dr Nina Burrowes is a psychologist and author of The Little Book on Authenticity

Authenticity is a concept often discussed in the workplace, especially when it comes to leadership. Today when people use the term “authenticity” they usually mean that they are being honest and open. To be an authentic leader is to be genuine.

Whilst being genuine in the workplace is both challenging and valuable, to use the term “authenticity” in this way is to misunderstand its original meaning, not to mention missing out on the true value that authenticity has to offer.

If you want to understand the true meaning of authenticity you need to go back to its root. The Latin root of the word “authenticity” is “author”, so being “authentic” doesn’t mean being honest about who you are, it’s about being your own “author”. Authenticity is an active and creative process. It’s not about revealing something, it’s about building something; and that something is “you”…

If you want to be authentic in the workplace, don’t focus on revealing who you are, instead focus on creating and truly becoming yourself.  Read the article

Why You Need To Stop Bragging About How Busy You Are

by Lisa Evans

Author Brigid Schulte says companies should stop rewarding overworked employees and focus on productivity instead.

In her new book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, Schulte argues a workplace culture that rewards those who are overworked is flawed and she challenges managers, business owners and leaders to adopt a new attitude of work, one where performance rather than time, and a life outside of work rather than a life consisting of work is the norm…

“In the breaks, that’s where the ‘aha moment’ comes,” says Schulte. It’s in the moments of leisure time that the brain is working to solve issues so you can begin your next burst of intense work with a renewed perspective.

“When you look at human performance science, there’s such great evidence that working all of those hours really doesn’t get you where you want to go,” says Schulte. While you may be able to work a few 60-hour weeks, eventually you will be so burnt out that you lose the ability to be creative and innovative…

Schulte sought out real-life examples of workplaces that implemented this theory in practice and found it in one of the most shocking places–the Pentagon. Long hours at the office were leaving Pentagon staff burnt out and struggling to balance the demands of family and personal time. Alternative work schedules and flexible work policies were implemented that reflected a fundamental shift in cultural values.

“People were no longer bragging about long hours. If they bragged at all, it was about how they got their work done more efficiently,” says Schulte. After this cultural shift that invalidated busyness rather than rewarding it, the Pentagon noticed the quality of work improve and thinking became sharper.

Link to read the full Fast Company article

Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when no one has the time – book review

In her Guardian review of Schulte’s book  writes:

Fighting “the overwhelm” means identifying the problem, and there are three villains in this book: our jobs, our expectations and ourselves. Give a small cheer here if you live in Europe, because it turns out that America really, really hates its citizens and wants them to be unhappy. “The US is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers paid time off,” Schulte writes. “Nearly one-quarter of all American workers get no paid vacation, most of them low-wage and part-time workers.” Oh, and don’t expect any paid maternity leave either; there is no legal requirement to offer it. All this is a legacy of the religious right’s dominance in the 1970s, when firebrands such as Pat Buchanan decided that nurseries were probably a plot to indoctrinate children and make them into tiny commies. Schulte gazes longingly towards Scandinavia, with its family-friendly policies, but the US situation sounds so bad I even felt a twang of pride for Blighty.

The next cause of the overwhelm is a construct Schulte calls the “ideal worker”. The ideal worker is the perfect capitalist machine-part, never seizing up or breaking down, always ready for overtime or foreign travel, never missing a day to look after a sick child or parent. Many businesses are in the grip of “presenteeism”, imagining that there is a perfect correlation between time spent with bum on office chair and productivity. There isn’t: research shows most people can only do eight hours of quality work a day. After that, they are just desk meat, surreptitiously playing Solitaire in a browser window or daydreaming about dinner. A macho long-hours culture hurts men just as much as women: when new dads ask for flexible working, they get burned both by the assumption they are not dedicated to the job and the assumption they are big old Girlie Men.

 We can’t blame everything on heartless employers, though. The relatively affluent have to take some responsibility for worshipping at the Altar of Overwork, an attitude Schulte calls “busier than thou”. Just as having a tan became a status symbol once it denoted that you could afford foreign holidays, so being overwhelmed is a badge of honour for middle-class professionals. Oh, between Jonny’s clarinet lessons and my Mandarin classes and Steve getting promoted to partner, I don’t have a minute to myself, they trill. Having no free time makes the point you don’t just have a job. You have a career. You are Going Somewhere.

Schulte’s prescription is simple: decide whether you love the bragging rights of being busy enough to live in a debilitating whirlwind of activity. If you don’t, perhaps leave the clarinet unmolested and the boxercise class undone. As for housework, one researcher’s message to women is refreshingly simple: be a slattern. “Do you have to be able to do open-heart surgery on the kitchen floor?” he asks. Also, make sure Himself pulls his weight.

This book’s strength is mixing research and anecdote in a lively, accessible way, with a reporter’s eye for detail.  The obvious criticism is that Schulte’s message speaks largely to uptight overachievers in creative fields, and being told to lobby for a four-day week or a 4pm hometime won’t cut much ice if you are on the minimum wage or a zero-hours contract. (The author does acknowledge that the figure for average working hours is misleading because it obscures the gulf between the crazy-busy top of the labour market and the underemployed bottom, yet is otherwise prone to breezy generalisations.) But, of course, a book like this can’t hope to tackle every aspect of such a complex subject, and even if it did, no one would have time to read the result. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Link to read the full Guardian review of Schulte’s book

Cultivating happiness often misunderstood, says Stanford researcher

Stanford research explores the concept of maximizing happiness, and finds that pursuing concrete “giving” goals rather than abstract ones leads to greater satisfaction.

by Clifton B. Parker

The paradox of happiness is that chasing it may actually make us less happy, a Stanford researcher says.

So how does one find happiness? Effective ways exist, according to new research.

One path to happiness is through concrete, specific goals of benevolence – like making someone smile or increasing recycling – instead of following similar but more abstract goals – like making someone happy or saving the environment.

The reason is that when you pursue concretely framed goals, your expectations of success are more likely to be met in reality. On the other hand, broad and abstract goals may bring about happiness’ dark side – unrealistic expectations…  Read this article

Why Chasing Happiness May Leave You Feeling Unhappier Than Ever

Reporting this research in Forbes magazine, Amy Morin writes:

Sometimes people incorrectly assume that having children, getting a new job, or becoming self-employed will automatically equate to increased happiness. But often, these changes don’t result in the increased happiness that people expect. When attempts to increase happiness fail, it can leave people feeling unhappier than ever.

Here are some examples of concrete and attainable prosocial goals:

  • Instead of saying you want to make someone happy, set out to make someone smile.
  • Rather than deciding that you will help the less fortunate, decide to donate two bags of groceries to a food pantry every week.
  • Substitute changing the world for working at a soup kitchen one day a month.

Creating attainable goals helps establish reasonable expectations for how much happiness you’ll experience when the goal is accomplished. Following through with your action steps to help other people can increase your overall life satisfaction and sense of happiness. Set out to make the world a better place one small step at a time and your happiness meter is also likely to climb.

Link to read the full Forbes article

“Mr. Peters is an enthusiast, a storyteller and a lover of capitalism. He says that effective management is management that delivers more value to customers and more opportunity for service, creativity and growth to workers. He is saying that the decent thing to do is also the smart thing. It’s a wonderful message.”
paul weaver, hoover institute, in the wall street journal

Tom Peters:  Excellence.  No Excuses

Here are some of the headings from Tom Peters’ 603-page superdoc rant: “Excellence. NO EXCUSES” which you can also access in PDF and PowerPoint formats.

What started when Tom copied a few Twitter conversations and made them into a PDF has turned into a magnum opus, now 57 parts,

As he points out (p.21), “Most of our conscious life will be at work. Like it or not. Waste your work life and you have effectively wasted your life.”

a ‘BLINDING FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS.’ – something we KNOW but relentlessly time and again fail to practice.” (Peters’ own capitals throughout; my bold emphases)

Blinding Flash of the Obvious:

We know putting people REALLY first translates into mid- to long-term growth and maximized profitability. SO WHY DON’T WE DO IT?

We know … GREAT TRAINING … pays for itself 100 times over—in business just much as in sports and the arts. SO WHY DON’T WE DO IT?

We know a simple “THANK YOU” is the greatest of all motivators. SO WHY DON’T WE DO IT?

And on—and on—it goes.

Frankly, I am in a rotten mood. If I was preaching rocket science, and people didn’t “get it,” that’d be one thing. But each of the 27 points in this brief introductory section do amount to, beyond doubt, a … BFO/BLINDING FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS:

BFO #1: If you (RELIGIOUSLY) help people — EVERY SINGLE PERSON, JUNIOR OR SENIOR, LIFER OR TEMP — grow and reach/exceed their perceived potential, then they in turn will bust their individual and collective butts to create great experiences for Clients — and the “bottom line” will get fatter and fatter and fatter. (ANYBODY LISTENING?) (PEOPLE FIRST = MAXIMIZED PROFITABILITY. PERIOD.) (ANYBODY LISTENING?) (FYI: “People FIRST” message 10X more urgent than ever in the high-engagement “AGE OF SOCIAL BUSINESS.”)

BFO 2: ENABLING “ALL HANDS” GROWTH IS LEADER DUTY #1. (And ALL good things flow from there.)

BFO 3: The “CTO”/Chief Training Officer should (MUST!) be on a par with the CFO/CMO. (In a 45-minute “tour d’horizon” of the enterprise: I GUARANTEE 9 out of 10 CEOs* [*10 of 10?] wouldn’t once mention training. THAT = DISGRACE.)

BFO 4: OUT-READ ‘EM. AGE 17. AGE 77.
2014: READ & GROW … or wilt.
(One financial services superstar pegs CEO prob #1: “They don’t read enough.”) STUDENTHOOD (OBSESSION THEREWITH) (for ALL of us) FOR LIFE!

BFO 5: Organizations exist for ONE reason … TO BE OF SERVICE. PERIOD. (And effective leaders in turn are … SERVANT LEADERS. PERIOD.)

BFO 6: The … HEART OF THE MATTER (productivity, quality, service, you name it) … is the typically under-attended … FIRST-LINE BOSS. (Your FULL CADRE of first-line bosses is arguably … ASSET #1.)

BFO 7: WTTMSW. (Whoever Tries The Most Stuff Wins.)
WTTMSASTMSUTFW. (Whoever Tries The Most Stuff And Screws The Most Stuff Up The Fastest Wins.)
“A Bias For Action”: #1 Success Requisite in 1982.
“A Bias For Action”: #1 Success Requisite in 2014.

BFO 8: “Fail faster. Succeed sooner.”
“Fail. Forward. Fast.”
“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”
“REWARD excellent failures. PUNISH mediocre successes.”
Book/Farson: Whoever Makes The Most Mistakes Wins.

BFO 9: Enabling change: It’s NOT NOT NOT about “vanquishing (ignorant) foes.” It’s ALL ALL ALL about recruiting and nurturing … ALLIES.

BFO 10: Year = 220 lunches. WASTE NOT ONE. Cross-functional SNAFUs (Situation Normal, All F****d Up) #1 problem for most orgs. Software … WILL NOT … fix it. ONLY … “Social Stuff” works—e.g., makin’ pals in other functions; lunch = Strategy #1.
Goal: XFX/Cross-Functional Excellence … or die trying.

BFO 11: Excellence is NOT an “aspiration.” Excellence IS the next 5 minutes. (Or not.)

BFO 12: In Search of Excellence theme song: “Hard is soft. Soft is Hard.” (e.g., Numbers are the “soft stuff”—witness the crash. Solid relationships/ integrity/trust/teamwork = True “hard stuff.”)
Strategy is important.
Systems are important.
CULTURE is … MORE IMPORTANT.
(Serious change = Tackling the culture. PERIOD.)
(Even “Mr. Analysis,” in his autobiography, Lou Gerstner, IBM turnaround CEO, reluctantly acknowledged culture’s unequivocal primacy in the big-change-game.)

BFO 13: Apple’s market cap surpasses ExxonMobil’s.
Why?
D-E-S-I-G-N.
Are YOU obsessed by … DESIGN? (In EVERY nook and EVERY cranny of EVERY tiny or humongous enterprise—and in your own professional affairs.)

BFO 14: WOMEN BUY EVERYTHING. WOMEN ARE THE MOST EFFECTIVE LEADERS. WOMEN ARE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL INVESTORS. (Does your organization … UNMISTAKABLY … reflect that from stem to stern?)

BFO 15: Forget B-I-G. (100% of biggies UNDER-perform long-term.) Instead build national wealth around … “MITTELSTAND” companies—MIDSIZE SUPERSTAR NICHE DOMINATORS—in ANY category you can name. (C.f., Germany.) (Battle cry: “Be the best. It’s the only market that’s not crowded.” WHY ELSE BOTHER?)

BFO 16: The problem is RARELY the problem. The lackluster RESPONSE to the problem is invariably the real problem. Answer? Slavishly adhere to these two response commandments: OVERKILL. UNEQUIVOCAL APOLOGY.

BFO 17: What do people (most) desire—including thee and me?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.
So: Show your appreciation … BIG TIME/ALL THE TIME. (Track it … RELIGIOUSLY!) (“Acknowledgement” is … THE MOST POWERFUL WORD IN THE LEADER’S VOCABULARY.)

BFO 18: The two most powerful words in the English language are?
No contest: “THANK YOU.”
(ACT ACCORDINGLY—e.g., OBSESSIVELY.)

BFO 19: Have you done your MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around … TODAY? If not, why not? (Hint: There are … ZERO ACCEPTABLE EXCUSES.)

BFO 20: Your CALENDAR knows your TRUE priorities.
Do YOU?
You … ARE … your calendar.
Your calendar … NEVER LIES.

BFO 21: What is the individual’s/organization’s #1 enduring strategic asset? Easy:
ASSET #1 = INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE EXCELLENCE AT …
L-I-S-T-E-N-I-N-G.
(Listening can be … TAUGHT. Listening PER SE is a … PROFESSION. Are YOU a “stellar professional listener”? THINK ABOUT IT. PLEASE.)

BFO 22: Aim to make EVERY internal and external experience (PRODUCT/ SERVICE/SYSTEM/EMPLOYEE INTERACTION/CUSTOMER INTERACTION/ COMMUNITY INTERACTION) a … WOW!
WOW = WOW. USE THE “W-WORD” PER SE!
E.g., Do 4 out of your Top 5 projects score 8 or above on a 10-point “WOW Scale”? If not, get on it:
NOW.
TODAY.
(WITHIN THE HOUR.)

BFO 23: While on the topic of … WOW:
White collar work is by and large ticketed to fall prey to artificial intelligence/eye-popping algorithms as well as globalization. Stand there and take it on the chin?
NO.
My answer (1999 book, The Professional Service Firm 50):
CONVERT EVERY “DEPARTMENT”/”UNIT” (AND YOURSELF) INTO A FULL-FLEDGED … “PSF”/PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRM … WHOLLY DEDICATED TO EXCELLENCE & WOW & ADDING SKYSCRAPING VALUE TO THEIR CUSTOMERS’ (USUALLY INTERNAL CUSTOMERS) ACTIVITIES.
Why not?
There is no good reason not to proceed in this direction within the fortnight!

BFO 24: EVERY DAY PROVIDES A DOZEN (LITERALLY) LEADERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES FOR EVERY ONE OF US. (Every = EVERY. From the most junior—and even the 3-day temp—to the Big Dudes.)
GRAB AT LEAST ONE.

BFO 25: CIVILITY WORKS. CIVILITY PAYS.
E.g.: K = R = P.
Kindness = Repeat business = Profit.
(ONE MORE TIME: “Kindness” is N-O-T “Soft.”)

BFO 26: Most of us/most organizations discount … INTROVERTS. THAT IS A … FIRST-ORDER STRATEGIC BLUNDER. (Please read Susan Cain’s book QUIET. It was a no-bull lifechanger for me.)

BFO 27: Listen (HARD) to my old D.C. boss, Fred Malek:
“EXECUTION IS STRATEGY.”
(Execution: That all-important … “LAST 99 PERCENT.”)

Read the original article

small changes in the work space can go a long way

small changes in the work space can go a long way     photo credit

10 Unusual Ways to Improve Employee Productivity

by 

The University of Warwick in the UK recently published research highlighting that happiness can increase employee productivity by up to 12%. Separate research by the New Economics Foundation in 2013 suggested that in some creative industries, happiness can improve productivity by up to 50%. Furthermore, academic research in the US found that when employees were in a good mood they performed their least favorite tasks better than when they didn’t feel as happy.

With employee productivity so crucial to business growth, it should be encouraging to companies to learn that employee happiness is so closely connected to their performance, because employee happiness is not a myth; it can and does exist.

What was interesting about the original Warwick University research was how quickly and easily employees’ moods were boosted by eating chocolate and watching comedy for ten minutes. While this is an affordable and active way to boost somebody’s mood in the short-term, it is perhaps not the most cost- or time-efficient approach to ensuring employee happiness, and thus productivity, in the long-term.

For many years academics have been conducting surveys and research to establish proven ways that improve happiness in the workplace. The findings – many of which are summarised below – include a number of quick, easy and low-cost ways companies can start boosting employee happiness and productivity.

Get Some Plants…

…working in an environment with plants was very effective at improving staff health by reducing coughs, headaches and skin ailments.

Better Use of Space and Better Furniture…

…small changes to the working environment can go a long way. Research in New Zealand has shown that investment in ergonomic furniture and effective use of space could increase productivity by up to 64%.

Organised Exercise Breaks…

…The same research in New Zealand showed that when exercise breaks were encouraged there was a 25% increase in staff productivity and separate research shows that taking four short walks a day can boost a person’s mood for as long as 11 hours.

Keep Your Promises…

…many employees consider a good manager to be someone who keeps their promises and puts employees first.

Make Managers Happy…

Professor Cary Cooper of Lancaster University explains that the main cause of unhappiness in employees is line managers. Investing in line manager happiness as a priority and encouraging this to “drip down” is a very logical and effective way to improve staff happiness. When studies have shown that over two thirds of employees feel their manager has an impact on their career it’s important to ensure that it’s a positive one.

LOL…

…Research also shows that regular laughter reduces stress, helps us sleep better and can even boost the body’s immune system. If laughing in the workplace isn’t appropriate, then organise a work trip to a comedy club or share recommendations for funny movies that employees can watch at home.

Let Employees Go On Facebook…

…In a recent interview with Entrepreneur, Richard Branson stated that one of the key reasons Virgin introduced flexible working was to show employees they were trusted and this in turn improved their productivity. This article also argues that some of the world’s most successful CEOs are very active on social media, and they use it to promote their company.

Start a Book Club…

…Neurological research has shown that brain functions are significantly boosted after people finish reading a novel and the additional benefits of reading include greater social perception and empathy.

Encourage Sharing…

When we introduced the Noticeboard feature for our customers on Findmyshift we expected it to be used to share work-related memos. In reality it’s used by our customers to share a variety of information about social events, personal announcements and yes, even book club updates! In a recent survey we conducted it was listed as one of our most popular features by staff and managers alike.

Let People Get On With It…

Arguably the most welcome and cost-effective way proven to make your staff happy and more productive is to simply let them get on with their work. This is supported by Harvard Business Review research which showed that what motivated them most was not financial reward or public recognition, but progress.

There is some comfort in knowing that employees are motivated by the same thing managers are and in many ways it confirms the strong link between happiness and productivity; we all like to feel useful. Of course, you don’t need to be an expert to understand why happier employees are more productive employees, but perhaps we all need to take a bit of extra time to do what we can to make our employees happy when they come to work and not just when they leave.

Link to read the original Switch & Shift article

 

Why Chocolate Is Good for Us

By Gretchen Reynolds

In recent years, large-scale epidemiological studies have found that people whose diets include dark chocolate have a lower risk of heart disease than those whose diets do not. Other research has shown that chocolate includes flavonols, natural substances that can reduce the risk of disease. But it hasn’t been clear how these flavonols could be affecting the human body, especially the heart. New findings from Virginia Tech and Louisiana State University, however, suggest an odd explanation for chocolate’s goodness: It improves health largely by being indigestible…

The “stomach” and “small intestine” broke down and absorbed some of the cocoa. But while many of the flavonols previously identified in chocolate were digested in this way, there was still plenty of undigested cocoa matter. Gut bacteria in the simulated colon then broke that down further into metabolites, small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream and known to reduce cardiac inflammation. Finally, the last undigested cocoa matter, now mostly fiber, began to ferment, releasing substances that improve cholesterol levels. And there was another health-giving twist to this entire process: The gut microbes that digested the cocoa were desirable probiotics like lactobacillus. Their numbers appeared to increase after the introduction of the cocoa, while less-salutary microbes like staphylococcus declined in number.

Sadly, Dr. Neilson also points out that cocoa is not a chocolate bar, something whose added ingredients and processing reduce the number and type of flavonols, increase calories (cocoa itself has very few) and possibly change the response of gut bacteria to the cocoa. “The evidence does not show that you can eat a chocolate bar every day and expect to improve your health,” he says. A few tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa powder sprinkled onto oatmeal or a handful of cocoa nibs — bits of the cacao bean, available at natural-food stores — would be better, he says less than sweetly.

Link to read the full article

Temptation -Sue Ridge ©

Temptation –Sue Ridge ©

 Happiness At Work edition #94

You will find many more stories about what happiness and productivity and success and leadership mean in our ever-changing work and lives in this week’s new Happiness At Work edition #94 collection.

I hope you find things here to use and enjoy.

Action Learning – a better way to collaborate and communicate together…

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Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3194 photo: Mark Trezona

Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3194
photo: Mark Trezona

Here are my newest thoughts about the discipline and magic that make Action Learning so potently transformational…

I had lunch last week with Alison Johns, a wonderful friend and colleague who I first met nearly twenty years ago when we were completing our MAs in Management Learning & Leadership. This was when I first discovered Action Learning, the framework that has changed my practice forever, as much, I confidently dare to believe, as it has transformed the lives and accomplishments of many of the people who have participated in its process.

In the Shaky Isles Theatre Company we have used Action Learning as the main framework for coming together to grow and sustain the company for a year now.  And more and more we are also using Action Learning inside our performance making process, as well, to sustain and nourish our creative learning alongside our show creation.

I am also currently facilitating Action Learning with a group of Rajni Shah Project artists to support their co-creation activities, and here, too, the discipline and framework of Action Learning is weaving across and into Board meetings, producing some really exciting new conversations and ways of working together.

In another application, Nicki Maher is starting to use Action Learning as a way to develop and grow Opaz, the Turkish music ensemble she leads.

And I am about to work with Tesse Akpeki to deliver training in using Action Learning for people who support or lead Trustee Boards.

These newer applications of Action Learning are continuing to amplify the belief, trust and joy that I have always found facilitating this process with very many very different groups of professionals and leaders, teachers and artists, teams and freelancers – not to mention my own invaluable membership of an Action Learning group that have been meeting regularly together since 1998.

With this in mind I wanted to try to uncover some of my newest thinking and insights about the disciplined magic that is Action Learning, and, alongside this, to provide a jumping off point for you to try it for yourself with the people you either work with or feel drawn to spend some time with uncovering fresh ideas and new ways to progress the things that most matter to you.

Sky Through Soundpod (Chelsea College of Art & Design, 2013) photo: Mark Trezona

Sky Through Soundpod (Chelsea College of Art & Design, 2013)
photo: Mark Trezona

A Practitioner’s Guide to Action Learning

Reg Revans invented Action Learning to provide a ‘clean space’ in an overly noisy and overly directed world, to give people enough freedom and enough solid framework to be able to uncover and discover our own best thoughts and insights to become freshly inspired to act, fuelled by our own creative expectations and sustained by our continually expanding capabilities.

Revans was convinced that for an organisation to survive its rate of learning must be at least equal to – and ideally greater than – the rate of change in its external environment – this became known as Revans’ Law: Learning must be > or = Change.

The Action Learning process has developed over the last sixty years as a method for individual and organisational development. As a process Action Learning can be challenging and informative. Within organisations Reg Revans described it as “the outward communication of doubt” – an opportunity for people to engage with and work through what is unfamiliar, uncertain and not known and identify action which could make a positive difference to their own and the organisation’s effectiveness. For example, he was one of the first to introduce to the National Health Service the idea that nurses, doctors and administrators needed to listen to and understand each other – and action learning groups offer the opportunity.

In any attempt to describe Action Learning, it is essential to say that Revans rightly advises us that the only way to really know what it is, is to do it. With that in mind, here are the instructions we follow in our practice, which we hope will give you enough to be able to try it for yourself.

In the form of Action Learning we use, the available time is divided first into two parts: a first part for Action Learning itself, and the second part to work the ideas and progress the material that has emerged out from the individual contributions.

The Action Learning time itself is divided equally among the individuals present. Each person then has that amount of Clean Space time to bring to the table whatever is most live and prescient for each of them.  And during this time the rest of the group cannot interrupt or comment in any way. Once each person has said as much as they want to, the rest of us offer them open creative thinking questions for whatever Clean Space time remains.

The Clean Space Process

Space:

1. A continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied

2. A stretch of time

3. The amount of material used or needed to write fully about a subject

4. The freedom to live, think, and develop in a way that suits you best

Before you start agree how much Clean Space time each person will have and who will keep time.

In your Clean Space time…

1 ~ Say whatever you want to say. Be as selfish as you can be about what you want to bring to the table.  Talk from your own head and heart and don’t worry or care about what anyone else needs to hear. 

No interruptions, comments or questions from anyone else during this phase.

2 ~ Once you have said all you want to say, you respond to open creative thinking Questions given to you by the rest of your group.

Again, be completely selfish about how you want to respond to any question you get: you decide what it means and how you want to answer it, if at all.

The rest of the group seek to bring you moments of spontaneity – questions that open you up to fresh new thinking and insights.

Resist saying anything except Open Questions during this phase. The best questions will be a gift for the person who receives it, and they will feel and often say “That’s a great question…”

Use “Why…?” questions sparingly.

3 ~  (optional and only if time –at least 2minutes of each person’s Clean Space time) 

You ask whatever you want to from others in the group.

If there are no questions you want to ask people, use this time to draw together the thinking and ideas you are going away with.

Allow about 10% of Clean Space time for this, but shift into it sooner if the person who has the Clean Space is repeatedly saying “I don’t know…” to your questions.

Helpful Capabilities for Action Learning

o   Being fully present

o   Alert, neutral, open, heightened listening

o   The Fine & Difficult Art of Asking Really Great Open Questions

o   Being utterly selfless and tuned in to what the Clean Space holder is trying to get when it is not your Clean Space time

o   Being supremely selfish about what you want to bring and get from your own Clean Space time

o   Wondering your not-knowing out loud: bringing what you don’t know to the table

o   Being open to surprise

Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3191 photo: Mark Trezona

Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3191
photo: Mark Trezona

This set of simple rules sets up the conditions for a very different way of thinking and communicating that lead almost inevitably to new insights and fresh possibilities for action.  When repeated over a series of meetings it replaces our usual default ways of listening and thinking with better ways that are far more open, expansive, diverse, inclusive, and actively engaged.  And over time, the disciplines and capabilities it demands from us start to become easier, more natural, and much more our new ‘normal’.

We shift our perspective; we shift our balance…

…from only paying attention to the information that immediately interests us to listening out and trying to pick up much more of what is being said and its many nuances;

…from narrowing the conversation down and heading off too quickly on a particular tangent, to exploring the situation in greater depth and from a wider range of perspectives;

…from talking more about things and re-presenting conclusions and ideas that we have already decided upon, to uncovering what we think and feel during the act of talking about it;

…from bringing our certainties and defending our established points of view, to bringing more of our uncertainties and opening out what we don’t know or yet have answers or solutions for: dialogue means discovering the meaning through communication;

…from only having the ‘need-to-have’ conversations, to unearthing extraordinary and surprising insights and solutions from conversations that arise out of what matters most to each of us;

…from tending to get most of the input from the more talkative amongst us, to getting and thus profiting from, an equal contribution from all of us, realising and optimising the inherent diversity that otherwise lies hidden and buried underneath our different communication styles and preferences;

…from prescribing the desired goal or outcome and restricting our thinking to what seems to be most relevant and strategic to its achievement, to keeping more open to discovering higher value aspirations that emerge and progress organically from the material of what people bring to the table;

…and from excited intentions that are too soon forgotten or lost to louder demands, to achieving ever widening results that spiral up from our collective learning ~ out to action ~ back into heightened learning ~ and out to new action ~ and so on in an increasingly reliable and self-powered momentum.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery to be made in Action Learning is that, very often, our greatest joy and discovery comes less from what we bring during our own Clean Space and much, much more from what we get from the ‘enforced’ listening we give during other people’s.

It is also helpful to know that Action Learning is not only for a team of people who want to use it to make work together, but equally powerful and potentially transformative for a group of individuals who choose to come together to hear and widen each other’s thinking entirely in terms of each person’s own personal agendas.

Action Learning and Collaboration

I have been thinking a lot recently about just what it is that makes Action Learning so enjoyed and successful and surprising and special, especially when it can be experienced by a group over a repeated series of get-togethers. These reflections have drawn out these five attributes:

  1. In-Betweenness 
  2. Listening In-ness
  3. Slowness
  4. Togetherness
  5. Connectedness

1 ~ In-Betweenness

This quality is not so much walking blindly through fog, as the more delightful experience of flying through clouds, up in the air and above it all, happy and trusting that we will get to where we want to get to without having to see ahead to our destination.

This is the ability to inhabit the grey areas between boundaries, to hold ambiguity and complexity with far less need to define it, fix it, bolt it down, categorise and name it.  It involves being simultaneously inside and outside the flow of thinking, both alert to what others are saying and what matters to them while at the same time aware of the live fresh dancing of our own thoughts colliding with what we are hearing.

This quality is especially enhanced when we can keep our not-knowingness wide open and transmitting, sensing out rather than seeing straight ahead, wondering out loud, teasing out our unformed ideas, uncertainties and barely yet understood intuitions.

2 ~ Listening In-ness

This quality is about hearing in real time (rather than anticipating ahead of what is being said and so hearing only what we expect).  It demands that we stay with the material as it unfolds in the here-and-now instead of projecting our own versions of reality on to things. This is the capability of tuning in with the deliberate intention to notice more and receive more fully.  It is HD hearing that picks up the finer inflexion, nuance, repetition and other poetic aspects of our thinking.

It requires us to lean in, bringing a particular kind of presence and concentration to stay with what is being said as it is being said, resisting our usual inclination to decide quickly on what is meant from the smallest fragment of information.

This needs our fullest energy, commitment, presence and attention. But, when the conditions of Clean Space are activated, it seems to happen with remarkable ease and reliability.

3 ~ Slowness

The listening we do in Action Learning recognises that…

…you can’t flick through sound;

…you can’t take a meaningful still of sound;

…you can’t glance at sound;

…you can’t sensibly hear sound backwards, or broken up, un-sequenced;

…you just have to start at its beginning and stay with it through to its end.

Mindfulness, a deliberate, disciplined, meditative practice of slowing down and tuning in, is becoming a mass practice across the globe, perhaps filling in and replacing our older religious rituals with something more secular and better suited to our times.  But, perhaps too, its popularity is building from a growing awareness that we need times of slowness, stillness and quietness that reconnects us into the rhythm of our breathing selves as a counterbalance to the incessantly turned on, turned up, turned out lives we are now living.

Stopping, and making a quieter stillness to listen and notice better are premium qualities in Action Learning. And much is yielded from the heightened waiting and trusting this gives us.

4 ~ Togetherness

Action Learning gives us a new way of co-creating – making something from the collective material that emerges from us all – and a better way of collaborating – making joint decisions and sharing out the work.

The material we uncover to work with is always richer and more multidimensional than any ordinary discussion could give us. This happens without force in a process akin to the sculptor’s art – drawing out and revealing and shaping and clarifying and heightening and unifying what is most fine and delightful and compelling from inside what we already have amongst us, waiting to be discovered.

5 ~ Connectedness

In Action Learning meanings, ideas and solutions emerge from making patterns. As humans we make sense of things by forging connections: that thing to the thing we already know (or think we know); this thing with that thing with the other thing to make the new thing.  Then the more we repeat, reinforce and practice anything the more strongly it becomes ingrained into our integral circuitry.  The repetition and cyclic iterations of uncovering and revealing and testing and rethinking we get in Action Learning deepens and strengthens our commitment to the ideas we most connect with.

Action Learning demands a kind of patient urgency – a different kind of dynamic that still has to move us forward with a sense of necessity and compulsion, but alongside a more careful, intimate and delicate holding on and out for what is still unfolding

Action Learning creates and sustains our propulsion from…

…the avoidance of rush and fixing too fast and hard alongside the necessity to make progress;

…the avoidance of jumping too quickly into action alongside the necessity for application and getting things done;

…the avoidance of the usual imperative to define desired outcomes and set the focus on the Vision alongside the necessity of getting somewhere worth arriving at.

Action Learning and Making Great Audience Experience

All of this I have come to know and trust from my many years sitting inside and outside dozens of different Action Learning groups since I first found it.

What is new for me is to start to wonder what might come from the explicit aspiration, or even the gentlest intention, to try to make the qualities we experience in Action Learning with our audience – whether they be our beneficiaries or our customers or our partners or our stakeholders or our public…

Audience: the people who come to give us their hearing.

What if… we could come together as a community of listeners?

And return to listen together again and again, each time able to listen better?

What might our better listening lead us on to do better?

What if…?

What next…?

What now…?

Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3193 photo: Mark Trezona

Serpentine Summer Space 2013 IMG_3193
photo: Mark Trezona

Do please feel welcome to contact us if you would like to know more about how to make Action Learning part of your work or learning.

This post was developed from the one I originally wrote for Shaking Out, the Shaky Isles Theatre Company blog

Happiness At Work edition #90

If you enjoyed this, you may also find more stories and techniques for becoming more productive, happy and creative in this week’s new Happiness At Work collection, our weekly collection of the best stories about leadership and learning, mindfulness and happiness at work, resilience and self-mastery.

Enjoy…

 

A Collection of Treats to Celebrate International Day of Happiness 2014

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Fun things to do near you -A day trip to Mars - Sue Ridge ©

Fun things to do near you -A day trip to Mars – Sue Ridge ©

In celebration of International Day of Happiness 2014 this week’s post contains mostly good things, starting with Sue Ridge’s magical imagining of a day trip to Mars.

This year is only the second time this day has been celebrated, but already I notice that there is significantly more media, social and international attention than the same day seemed to get last year.

One of the major themes this year has been about reclaiming happiness back from the advertisers who would tell us our happiness depends upon buying their thing.  Instead, today’s global celebration reminds us that it is our relationships that lie at the heart and soul of true happiness, and spending time enjoying being with our family, our fiends and our colleagues is about the surest way there is of getting a happiness boost.

In this spirit, I have collected together my favourites from this week’s array of offerings, with a bias on the treats that you can enjoy and/or use, and I really hope there will one or two things here that you can take to treat yourself with.

Happy Happiness Day.

On International Day of Happiness, UN urges action to end poverty, build harmony

Of course there is nothing frivolous about this global call to action by the UN as their press release makes abundantly clear…

20 March 2014 – Marking the International Day of Happiness with calls to promote social inclusion and intercultural harmony, senior United Nations officials today urged the global community to make real the UN Charter’s pledge to end conflict and poverty and ensure the well-being of all.

“Happiness is neither a frivolity nor a luxury. It is a deep-seated yearning shared by all members of the human family. It should be denied to no one and available to all,” declared Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message for the Day.

While acknowledging that happiness may have different meanings for different people, the UN chief said that all could agree that it means working to end conflict, poverty and other unfortunate conditions in which so many of human beings live.

“This aspiration is implicit in the pledge of the United Nations Charter to promote peace, justice, human rights, social progress and improved standards of life,” he said, adding: “Now is the time to convert this promise into concrete international and national action to eradicate poverty, promote social inclusion and intercultural harmony, ensure decent livelihoods, protect the environment and build institutions for good governance. These are the foundations for human happiness and well-being.”

In April 2012, the UN held a high-level meeting on “Happiness and Well-Being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm” at the initiative of Bhutan, a country which recognized the supremacy of national happiness over national income since the early 1970s and famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product (GDP).

In July of that year, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 20 March the International Day of Happiness, recognizing the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in people’s lives and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives.

In that spirit, current General Assembly President John Ashe said the Day celebrates unity and called on the international community to support the three pillars of sustainable development – social, economic and environmental.

As the UN family sets out to identify the goals for an inclusive, people-centred post-2015 development agenda with the eradication of poverty as its overarching objective, he invited Member States, international and regional organizations, as well as civil society, including non-governmental organizations and individuals, to raise public awareness of the aspirations of human beings around the world.

“Happiness is a fundamental human goal, and improving public policies in countries that can contribute thereto is essential to promoting equitable societies for all,” said Mr. Ashe.

Link to read the original article

In the UK, Action for Happiness provided an exuberance of provisions to help make the day fly, including these new research findings, and more social and participative, their #happinessday Let’s Reclaim Happiness Wall of photos inviting non-commercialise images of what happiness looks like for different people across the planet.

National Happiness Matters More Than National Wealth

87% choose happiness and wellbeing over wealth as their priority for society

Reducing inequality seen as most important for national happiness
Relationships seen as most important for personal happiness

 In a week that includes both the UK Budget (19 March) and the United Nations International Day of Happiness (20 March), a new survey has found that the vast majority of people think levels of happiness and wellbeing matter more than the size of the economy.

In a YouGov poll commissioned by Action for Happiness, a majority (87%) of UK adults were found to prefer the ‘greatest overall happiness and wellbeing’, rather than the ‘greatest overall wealth’ (8%), for the society they live in. This majority was found to be broadly consistent across all regions, age groups and social classes.

When asked to select the three changes they thought would most increase the overall happiness and wellbeing of people in the UK, ‘more equality between rich and poor’ came out as the most selected factor, with 45% of people choosing this; the next highest response was ‘improved health services’ (39%). Of the choices offered, the least important were found to be ‘improved school standards’ (16%) and ‘improved transport and infrastructure’ (16%).

When asked to select the three most important factors for their own happiness and wellbeing, ‘my relationships with my partner/family’ was the most selected factor, with 80% of people choosing this; the next highest was ‘my health’ (71%), with ‘my money and financial situation’ a distant third (42%). The least important factors were found to be ‘my possessions’ (4%) and ‘my appearance’ (4%).

Commenting on results, Action for Happiness Director, Dr Mark Williamson said:

“The economy dominates our political and social discussions, but this survey shows that happiness is more important to people. The vast majority of people would prefer society to be happier rather than richer. So we need to spend less time focusing on the size of the economy and more time focusing on how to help people live happy, healthy and fulfilling lives.”

LSE economist and co-founder of Action for Happiness, Lord Richard Layard said:

“Our national priorities are clearly out of touch with what really matters to people. Our top priority should be people’s overall happiness and wellbeing. Above all, we should be giving much more attention to mental health, supporting positive family and community relationships and creating a more trusting society.”

Link to read the original Action for Happiness press release

It’s Time to Reclaim Happiness

Director of Action for Happiness, Dr Mark Williamson writes in the Huffington Post…

In recent years I’ve asked hundreds of parents what they want above all for their children. Although their answers vary, nearly all of them say something like “I really just want them to be happy”. Happiness is the thing we want the most for the people we love the most.

But the problem is that our happiness has been hijacked.

We’re bombarded with false and misleading images of happiness. Advertisers tell us it comes from buying their products. Celebrities and the media pretend it comes with beauty or fame. And politicians claim that nothing matters more than growing the economy.

Everywhere we look the story is the same: buy and achieve these things and then you’ll be happy. But remember, you’ll then need to keep getting more in order to stay happy and keep up with your peers. And if they start to get ahead then just keep consuming!

On and on we go in a mindless and seemingly endless cycle.

I could of course point to many studies confirming how wrong this all is – lasting happiness does not come from what we consume, how we look or how much we earn. But, let’s be honest, you probably knew that already!

So how can we put this right? Firstly we can each try to live more mindfully and avoid getting caught in the “I’ll be happy when…” trap.

But we can also reclaim happiness, by sharing a more authentic view of what really makes us happy. And this week is the perfect opportunity to start this together.

Thursday (20 March) is the United Nations International Day of Happiness. To celebrate this special day, Action for Happiness is running a global campaign, with support from over 40 organisations and many thousands of people around the world.

Their shared mission is to show the world what happiness really looks like – and in doing so, to reclaim happiness back from the advertisers, celebrities, media and others who try to manipulate us. Here’s how you can get involved…

  • Step 1: Find. Look through your photos right now for a picture of something that really made you happy.
  • Step 2: Capture. When something makes you happy today or in the coming days, remember to take a moment and capture it on camera.
  • Step 3: Share. Share your images of happiness with others using the #happinessday hashtag (e.g. via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc)

There are already lots of inspiring examples of people sharing #happinessday images: children playing in a garden, flowers outside an office, friends celebrating a birthday, a family walk on the hills, outdoor fun in the sun and many more.

Unlike the fake images in adverts and magazines, these authentic photos help to remind us of what really matters. We may not be able to change the world overnight, but together we can share a vision of happiness which is far more inspiring that the one we’re sold.

So why not take a moment to find (or take) a picture of something that makes you happy and share it right now. It might be profound, or perhaps profoundly silly. But however small and personal, the fact that you have noticed it makes it quite important enough.

Action for Happiness will be building a huge collection of these #happinessday images from around the world and, as well as taking social media by storm, the hope is to present a selection of these images at the United Nations later this year.

Let’s focus on the things that really matter. Let’s reclaim happiness together.

Link to  the #happinessday What makes You Happy photo wall

Reclaim your happiness at work on the International Day of Happiness

by Nic Marks, director of Happiness Works and on the board of Action for Happiness

The average Brit spends 100,000 hours at work and if we were happier at work, we’d be happier in our whole lives• Find out how happy you are at work compared to the national average

Thursday was the UN’s International Day of Happiness – a day set aside to raise global awareness that happiness is a fundamental human goal. Global issues such as human rights, peacekeeping and sustainable development are what we would expect the UN to have on its agenda. So why has it decided that the seemingly frivolous idea of happiness is worth championing?

If we could create a world that was more inclusive, equitable, and balanced, a world where all people were happier, most of us would agree that this would be progress. When understood like this, happiness suddenly seems a much more serious issue, one that belongs on the global agenda. The UN is so serious about it that in a 2012 resolution it called for a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes … the happiness and well-being of all peoples”.

All too often, the concept of happiness is hijacked by advertisers and the popular media and then sold back to us in the form of materialism and glamour. In reality, the important things for our happiness are rarely even things at all. They are more about the quality of our relationships and whether what we do in our home and working lives feels purposeful.

The London-based campaign group Action for Happiness is co-ordinating many global events this year under the banner of “reclaiming happiness”. Falling on a Thursday, this year’s International Day of Happiness is a workday for most of us. Let’s ask ourselves the question: how would the world be if we were all happier at work?

It is quite a radical question. For many, work has come to signify the exact opposite of happiness. It’s where we go to earn the money to buy the things we hope will make us happy. We don’t expect to be happy at work; we expect to endure it until we clock out or log off and return to our real lives – a life outside of work.

But hang on a minute. The average Brit spends 100,000 hours at work during their lifetime – that’s more than 11 and a half years. Work is part of our real life and if we were happier at work we would be happier in our whole lives. We’d be better partners, better parents, better people. So happiness at work is good for us, as individuals.

But what about business? Let’s ask another question: what happens to a business if its employees are happier at work?

Far from spending the day lolling about and chatting with colleagues, as some sceptics might assume, happier employees are more creative, more innovative and more focused on their work. Every day they make more progress with their work than their unhappy colleagues. They also are much less likely to leave – who leaves a job they love?

When we do the maths, the costs of ignoring happiness at work are substantial. An average UK company will employ about 250 people. If it is average in all aspects, then about 40 of them will leave each year and over 1,000 days will be lost due to absenteeism. If the company had a really happy, engaged workforce, then staff turnover would typically halve, absenteeism would be cut by 25%, and productivity would increase by about 20%. The cost of ignoring happiness in an average UK company, paying average wages, works out to be in excess of £1m every year. Happiness at work is not a threat to business; it’s an opportunity.

Creating happy profitable businesses may work for the few but surely the world will continue on its current path towards an inequitable, unbalanced, and unsustainable future, regardless?

This is where the happiness perspective gets really interesting. Most of us feel happier when we work for an organisation that is seeking to make a positive impact in the world. In fact, many of us forgo higher salaries to work for organisations and on issues that are aligned with our personal values and sense of purpose. Organisations that create products and services that make the world a better place will surely be rewarded with employees who are happier, more engaged, and genuinely proud to work there. There is a win-win-win here for individuals, business and society.

So today, let’s reclaim our happiness – at work as well as at home. Let’s follow the example of the UN and put happiness at the core of everything we do and we can work together to a make a better world for all of us.

Link to the original article

Happy Habits: how do you score?

Another offering from Action for Happiness is this short quiz that will let you check out your own happiness level, and quite possibly give you some gentle insights in to those areas that are most and least strong for you at the moment.

Happiness. All of us want more of it, but how many of us know how to make it happen – not just for ourselves, but for those around us too.

Scientists have discovered the habits that tend to make people happy. Now, the nice folks at Do Something Different and Action for Happiness have got together to help you explore these and see how you’re doing.

Take our simple 10-question quiz to get your Happy Habits Score and discover ways you could boost the happiness in your everyday life. Just answer each question as honestly as you can…

Link to take the Happiness Quiz

Pharrell Williams song Happy was chosen by the UN to be the anthem for this year’s celebrations, and people from across the world used this as the soundtrack to make their own videos, revealing the wonderful universality and singularity of being human.  I loved noticing the different inflexions and cultural qualities that are hinted at in these different performances of the same some by people in different countries.

You probably won’t want to watch all of these versions in line sitting, but I recommend you pop back to this playlist for another one any time you feel like you need a bit of a boost to your energy or spirits over the coming days and weeks.  I’ve set this playlist to start with Santiago’s video.  Chile has been topping the Happiest Planet Index over the last year or so and maybe you can detect why from this showreel of their streets…

I hope you will enjoy as much as I have the simple delight and fun in these dances…

Ice Breaker Games: How To Get To Know Your Office

After listing out those games that are cringe-worthy or just plain embarrassing to have to do (see if you most loathed is on the list), Jacob Shriar, Growth Manager at Officevibe, offers up his favourite activities for breaking the ice for new team members and loosening up relationships at work.  Maybe there’s one or two here that you might want to try – even just for fun…?  The Trust Walk, for instance, requires people to be willing and up for it, but if they are it is a very special experience to be guided blind through the world, giving up all control into the trust of your partner.

The Good Icebreakers

The next list of 10 ice breaker games are great for getting to know your new colleagues. Feel free to split your group up into smaller teams to make it easier (and faster) to play these games.

  1. Two Truths And A Lie: This is one of the more popular icebreakers and is pretty easy to play. It doesn’t require any equipment or anything which is good. The way it works is each person is supposed to tell three quick stories, with one of them being a lie. The object of the game is for whoever is listening to the story to guess which is the lie. It’s a fun way to get to know one another.
  2. Lost On A Deserted Island: This is a really fun icebreaker, and is also a cool way to see what really matters to people. The way this one works, is if they were stuck on a deserted island, name one thing that they would bring, and why. If you want to get really advanced with this game, ask people to pair up into teams, and to figure out how they can use their one object together to increase their chances of survival on the island.
  3. The Trust Walk: This is a great activity for building trust among your team, and learning how to listen to your coworkers. The way this one works is people are paired into teams of two, and one of the team members is blindfolded. Then the person who isn’t blindfolded leads the other one around by following their voice and listening for cues. The only bad part about this activity is it required a decent amount of space, so maybe do this one outside.
  4. The One Word Icebreaker: This one is great, because it requires everyone to be creative. Split the group into teams of four or five people, and get everyone to come up with one word to describe something. What topic you have them describe is up to you, but my advice would be make it something about their work. For example, if you could describe your company culture in one word, what would it be?
  5. The Five Favorites: This icebreaker is simple, and is a really good way to learn more about coworkers. The way this works is you ask each person to list their five favorites of anything, whether it’s movies, songs, TV shows, it doesn’t really matter. The point is to get some discussion started, and see where people have things in common. For an advanced version of this game, make the question more professional, like the five best qualities of a leader, or the five ways managers motivate employees.
  6. Speed Dating: It’s not “dating” in the sense that you’ll go for a fancy dinner, but it’s modeled after speed dating. The way speed dating works is each person has a few minutes to chat and get to know someone else before being moved to the next person, to get to know them. This works very well in a corporate setting, because it gives everyone a chance to have a quick one-on-one with someone new.
  7. The Interview: Think of this one as a more structured version of the speed dating example above. The way this icebreaker works is people split into teams of two, and they interview each other, asking each other questions about anything. At the end of the interview, each person has to come up with 3 interesting facts about the person they just interviewed. It’s a nice way to get to know someone.
  8. What’s My Name: I’m not that good at remembering people’s names, especially if it’s in a large group. This is a really simple, fun way to learn people’s names. The way it works is, each person says their name out loud with an adjective that begins with the same letter as the first letter of your name. Ideally, you call the person by that name for the rest of the day. Joyful Jacob? Jazzy Jacob?
  9. Would You Rather: This is one of my favorite games to play, and I play this one even when I’m not icebreaking. You go back and forth asking creative questions (often nonsensical) about whether the person would rather do X or Y. For example, would you rather eat nothing but insects for 3 meals straight, or not be able to watch TV for a year. It’s funny and light, which is always nice for relaxing the mood.
  10. World Geography: This ice breaker game really challenges people to think, which is always fun. I’m sure many of you reading this have played this game before, but the way it works is you say the name of a country, and then the next person has to say another country, starting with the last letter from the previous one. For example, Canada → America → Afghanistan → Nigeria…

Bonus Icebreaker – Twenty Questions: This game is so much fun, and I’ve played this one a lot on a long drives. The way it works is someone thinks of something, whether it be a person, place or thing, and everyone can ask Yes or No questions (for a total of 20) to figure out what it is.

Link to the original article

12 Most Effective Time Management Principles

We are getting more and more requests for training in time management and balancing multiple priorities across multiple roles in an increasingly always turned on world.  And much of our potential to enjoy time with the people most important will be ruined or hijacked completely if we are unable to make the time and space to fully with them in the first place.

This list by  creams some of the best techniques out there for making time work better, and if this is an issue for you, I hope you will find something here that you can add to your existing repertoire to help you feel more in control and on top of things…

1. Determine what is urgent and important

We’re all faced with a lot of different tasks that fight for our attention and time each day. How do you decide what is most worthy of your time? The best approach is to prioritize those tasks that are both urgent and important.

A task that is highly time sensitive is urgent. Important tasks may not be time sensitive, but they are valuable and influential in the long run.

Stephen Covey’s time management grid can be extremely helpful for seeing what tasks should be prioritized. A common mistake is to get bogged down with things that are urgent, but not necessarily important. By using the grid you can be sure that you’re focusing on things that will have a real impact.

2. Don’t over commit

If you’re someone that tends to say “yes” to every request for your time, you may find that all of these commitments prevent you from making effective use of your time. Make an effort to only commit to things that you can realistically accomplish with the time that you have available. You’ll also want to be sure that committing to something won’t prevent you from being able to do other things that are important to you.

3. Have a plan for your time

Each of us is different and not everyone works in the same way. I prefer to have a detailed to-do list that keeps me on task for each day and each week. Someone else may feel overwhelmed by a list of things to check off each day. Regardless of your approach or preferences, you need to have some method of planning your time. Not having a plan leads to a less efficient use of your time as you’ll wind up getting off task or working on things that really aren’t important. Find a system of planning that works for you and use it in your daily routine.

4. Allow time for the unexpected

It never fails that something unexpected will come up and demand your time and attention. No matter how well you plan your time, things are bound to come up — so make sure that you leave some time in your daily schedule. When I’m creating my to-do list for any given day, I tend to assign myself tasks that I anticipate will take about 75% of my time for the day. That leaves another 25% for tasks that take longer than anticipated or for unexpected things or emergencies that need to be addressed. Avoid the temptation to plan your time so full that you won’t be able to deal with important issues that arise.

5. Handle things once

Rather than dealing with something several different times before completing a task, make an effort to handle it only once. Email is a great example here. If you read through an email, make an effort to respond and take care of the issue at one time. I’ve found myself at times reading through emails and then deciding I’ll get back to it later. When I do get back to it, I have to read the email again and it winds up taking more time. Multiply that by several times throughout the day and it adds up. Whenever possible, handle it once and be done.

6. Create realistic deadlines

You may have deadlines for your work that are set by a boss or a client, but it’s also important to set deadlines of your own. If you do have deadlines from bosses or clients, it can be helpful to break up the project into smaller chunks and set deadlines to keep yourself on track. If you don’t have anyone giving you deadlines for your work, try setting your own deadlines.

In addition to simply having deadlines, it’s also important that these deadlines are realistic and will give you enough time to do your best work. If your boss or client is pushing for a deadline that isn’t realistic, explain why you need more time and the possible consequences of the project being rushed, and suggest a more realistic deadline.

7. Set goals for yourself and your time

Setting goals is an important part of achieving maximum efficiency. Your goals can include things that you want to accomplish in a particular day, week, month, or year. Goals can be used with major accomplishments or smaller tasks that are important to you. Whenever you’re setting goals, it’s best to set a date or deadline for achieving the goal.

8. Develop routines

Habits and routines can be quite powerful. When used effectively, routines can help you to get more done and to make better use of your time.

I use routines to take care of several small tasks that I need to do each day. First thing in the morning, I go through a routine that includes checking email and responding to messages received overnight, a few minutes of networking via social media, moderating comments on my blogs, publishing new content that has already been written and prepped, and a few other small tasks. The result of my routine is that I can get a lot of small tasks off my daily to-do list in a small amount of time right at the beginning of the day. After that, I can have the most productive part of my day for essential tasks that require more of my time and concentration.

9. Focus on one thing at a time

Multitasking is overrated. Sure, in theory it would be awesome to be able to do several different things at once, but the problem is that you won’t be able to do your best work when multitasking. If you focus on one thing at a time you can move through tasks quicker and the quality of your work will be better. Multitasking can lead to a lot of mistakes that you have to go back and correct later, which is wasted time.

10. Eliminate or minimize distractions

Distractions are all around us. If you’re working at home you may have distractions like kids, other family members, house guests, television, phone calls, and all kinds of personal responsibilities and tasks. If you work in an office you’ll probably have plenty of distractions from co-workers.

While it’s impossible to totally eliminate distractions, you can improve your situation by minimizing them or avoiding them whenever possible. For those who work at home, you can set up a dedicated office space with a door that you can close. In an office, you may want to go in to work early to get some distraction-free time before co-workers arrive, or maybe shift your lunch time so that you can get some peaceful time while most of your co-workers are away at lunch.

The key is to recognize the most significant distractions that are hurting your productivity, and then you can work towards solutions that will minimize their impact.

11. Outsource tasks or delegate when possible

Part of being efficient with your time involves deciding what tasks require your own attention. There may be things that could be done by someone else. Outsourcing work is a great option for freelancers and small business owners. Delegating responsibilities may be an option if you’re in management or if you’re part of a team.

Resources like Elance and oDesk are great for finding freelancers when you need to outsource some of your work. You can typically find qualified workers with very affordable rates, which allows you to dedicate your own time to tasks that may be more important to you.

12. Leave time for fun and play

While the purpose of time management is to use your time wisely and to improve efficiency, it’s also important that you don’t burn yourself out by working too much or too hard. Be sure to leave some time in your schedule to do things with friends and family, or even on your own. Getting time away from work is essential for dealing with stress, for refreshing your energy, and for living a balanced life.

Making efficient use of your time is important regardless of what type of job or career you have. If you can make even small improvements in your own time management, you’ll see noticeable results in terms of how much you can get done, the quality of your work, and your stress levels.

Link to the full original article

Living in “flow” – the secret of happiness

And here is a free ebook from Australia’s Think and Be Happy.  If you’re not already familiar with Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s groundbreaking work this is great introduction.  Csikszentmihalyi’s research investigates the conditions of optimum performance, from which he has given us the idea of FLOW ~ that state of complete absorption when we are totally immersed in what we are doing and time seems to both stand still and fly by, and we feel delightfully and rewardingly stretched to our finest capabilities…

You probably know what it’s like to not be in a state of flow. This can be when there’s a lot going on and you have to focus on many things at once. For example, if you’re cooking dinner and trying to help your teenager do their homework and catch up on some emailing all at once, chances are you’re not having a flow experience. How can you when your attention is so fragmented? Or maybe you’ve had a hectic day at work and are now zonked out semi comatose in front of the TV too tired even to switch channels even though you can’t stand reality TV shows. The point is none of these activities are engaging you fully. Not even close. Worse, in doing them you’re most likely feeling bored, distracted or irritated.

On the other hand, to be in flow is to be so engrossed in what you’re doing – and this can be in any activity although we often tend to associate this state with creative pursuits and elite sport – that literally nothing, not the passing of time, your full bladder or the fact that you haven’t eaten since breakfast, impinges on your awareness. And yep, as anyone who’s been in such a condition of single-minded immersion knows, you feel fabulous not least because it’s not about YOU for once, it’s about the thing that you’re doing.

Of course there’s a lot more to the psychological state of flow than that which is why we’ve dedicated an eBook to the topic.

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about flow … based on the work of world leading psychologist Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Enjoy and share!

Link to download the free ebook

The complete guide to listening to music at work

By Adam Pasick

It has never been easier to tune in to your own customized soundtrack—or more necessary to tune out your open-office coworkers, cubicle mates, and fellow coffee-shop denizens. But not all music is created equal, especially when there’s work to be done. How should you choose the best office soundtrack for a given task? Which songs will help you get energized, focused, or creative—or even just through a very long day?

Let’s start with the basics.

Listening to music affects your brain

Putting on those headphones provides a direct pipeline from iTunes or Spotify into your auditory cortex. As the music plays, many different brain centers can be activated, depending on whether the music is familiar or new, happy or sad, in a major or minor key, or—perhaps most importantly for work purposes—whether it has lyrics or not.

Some tasks are easier with music playing…

Research shows that music goes best with repetitive tasks that require focus but little higher-level cognition. A landmark 1972 study in Applied Ergonomics found that factory workers performed at a higher level when upbeat, happy tunes were played in the background.

…and some are harder

Don’t fool yourself: Listening to music means that you are multitasking. Any cognitive resources that your brain expends—on understanding lyrics, processing emotions that are triggered by a song, or remembering where you were when you first heard it—won’t be available to help you work.

Studies have shown that reading comprehension and memorization both suffer when music is playing, for example. And just try putting numbers into a spreadsheet while listening to this:

Find the right balance

The downside of listening to music at work is that it places demands on your attention. The upside is it can make you feel more energetic and improve your mood. It’s also useful to drown out distracting background noises. The trick is to choose your music carefully, and match your tunes to the task.

For a cognitive boost, pick music that doesn’t have lyrics…

This makes intuitive sense to anyone who has listened to music at work, especially if your task is word-related. Your brain’s language centers can’t help but decipher the words you’re hearing, which makes it much harder to concentrate on, say, composing an email.

If you simply can’t find music without lyrics, you can pick something in a language that you don’t understand—like the invented “hopelandic” language used by the band Sigur Rós:

…and has a steady rhythm and mood

Your brain is a prediction machine, making a endless series of guesses about what’s going to happen next. When it comes to music at work, you don’t want your brain to spend cognitive resources predicting what it’s about to hear.

Listening to constant, relatively unchanging music—songs that don’t have a lot of emotional peaks and valleys, or changes in mood—has been shown to enhance some simple cognitive skills. Other research has shown that “low-information-load” music—simple tunes without a lot of complexity—have the strongest positive effect.

For instance, check out the steady, phased repetitions of “Music for Airports 1/1″ by Brian Eno:

Some studies suggest that major-key music (a song that sounds more happy than sad) makes time seem to pass more slowly. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how much you have to get done before you go home.

Don’t play music all the time

The widely cited 1972 study found that the benefits of music disappeared when it was constantly played. And sometimes your brain just needs all the cognitive resources it can get. One 1989 paper wryly noted that “complex managerial tasks are probably best performed in silence.”

Music as a pick-me-up

There’s an one category of workplace listening that has a totally different set of rules: the kind of listening you do when you’re tapping into the power of music to trigger an emotional response. Try playing a rock anthem or an action-movie soundtrack to jump-start your mood, or listen to a favorite song as a reward for a job well done. This gives you many of music’s cognitive benefits but without any of its distracting downsides.

Here’s one to play before a big meeting:

Hit shuffle for a dopamine rush

As mentioned above, your brain thrives on predicting the future, so throwing some randomness into the mix can reward you with a surge of the pleasurable neurotransmitter dopamine. To harness this neurological pharmacy, use a streaming music service like Spotify, Pandora, or Rdio to automatically serve up songs you might like.

Some of the best genres to work to

If you’re ready to experiment with what music best suits your work style, here are some suggestions (links to songs via Spotify):

  • Jazz: A massive variety of moods and tempos are available, most of them without lyrics. Try Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk.
  • Classical: An even larger variety here. Many people swear by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach for its elegantly mathematical processions and variations.
  • Minimalist composers: Repetitive by design, at their best they can induce just the sort of trance-like flow that you’re looking for. Try Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
  • Chill-out: The name is self-explanatory. Try Bonobo and Cinematic Orchestra. 
  • Ambient: You will barely know it’s there. Listen to Brian Eno or Aphex Twin.
  • Movie soundtracks: Use these to get your heart thumping, like the Top Gun theme song above; or find a particular mood with Daft Punk’s score for Tron or Trent Reznor’s for The Social Network.
  • Video game soundtracks: As one redditor observed, these are designed to keep you engaged without being too distracting. The London Symphony Orchestra recently recorded nearly two dozen, or there’s this spare, beautiful music from the game Minecraft.

Try the Quartz work playlist

And here is a playlist of songs, again via Spotify, that the Quartz staff picked as some of their favorites to listen to as they work (A version of the playlist in Rdio can be found here

Link to the original article 

UN International Day of Happiness: These people are way happier than you

Metro ran this story to celebrate the day with a series of looped videos that highlight moments of happiness in perpetual foreverness that we know of course is just not an option with real happiness.  But see if at least one of these doesn’t make you smile…

Today is the United Nation’s second International Day of Happiness. The UN wants us to remember that it’s friends, family and emotional well-being that actually make us happy, not cars and handbags. And then to share what makes us really happy with everyone else.

Which, if you’re not a fan of cute kitten pics, multiple exclamation marks and mega LOLs, might be making you consider shutting down your Instragram/Twitter/Facebook account and hiding in a dark place for the rest of the day.

Not a fan of organised happiness? Feeling a bit meh? Yep, these people are way happier than you today…

Link to see the gallery of stupidly happy people

Chemists discover secret to dark chocolate’s health benefits

by Monte Morin

Could this be the best news story yet…?

For years, chocolate lovers have remained blissfully unaware of the precise reason bittersweet dark chocolate seems to improve cardiovascular health. At least until, now that is.

On Tuesday, researchers at meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Dallas said they had solved the confection conundrum: Specific chocolate-loving microbes in the gut convert an otherwise indigestible portion of the candy into anti-inflammatory compounds, they said…

“These little guys say, ‘Hey —   there’s something in there that I can use,’ and they start to break it down,” Finley said.

The smaller molecules that result from this fermentation can travel through the gut wall and be used by the body, researchers said.

“These materials are anti-inflammatory and they serve to prevent or delay the onset of some forms of cardiovascular disease that are associated with inflammation,” Finley said.

A number of short-term studies conducted in recent years have suggested that dark chocolate can cause blood vessels to dilate, and thus lower blood pressure, although this is not the case with white chocolate and milk chocolate.

Finley said that the amount of cocoa powder that appeared to produce beneficial effects was about two tablespoons a day.

One of the issues involving dark chocolate, Finley said,  was the amount of sugar and fat that chocolate candy contained. He said you could avoid those substances by putting cocoa powder on oatmeal, as he does…

Link to the original article

Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The long reach of reason

And lastly, here is a rather wonderful animation of a debate about relative importance of our intuition and feelings or our reason for the successful flourishing of our species.  It’s packed with ideas but in this heightened pictorial representation, the ideas sing.

Here’s a TED first: an animated Socratic dialogue!

In a time when irrationality seems to rule both politics and culture, has reasoned thinking finally lost its power? Watch as psychologist Steven Pinker is gradually, brilliantly persuaded by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein that reason is actually the key driver of human moral progress, even if its effect sometimes takes generations to unfold. The dialogue was recorded live at TED, and animated, in incredible, often hilarious, detail by Cognitive.

Enjoy.  And see if you agree with their final confusions…?

Happiness At Work edition #89

All of these stories – and many more – are collected together in this week’s new Happiness At Work edition #89

Link to the Happiness At Work collection

Becoming More Happy, Creative & Productive ~ a back to earth toolkit of tips and techniques

by

After last week’s post putting our heads in the clouds to think and expand our thinking about thinking, I thought it might be helpful this week to come back to earth with a post that is grounded in practical How To tools and techniques.  I hope you find something in this selection to enjoy and use with what you are trying to make and make happen in your life and work.

The loudest story to catch my attention this week, turning up across a range of different sites, is Sharon Salzburg’s ideas brought together in her new book:

Practices For Having A Happier Day At Work

Margarita Tartakovsky writes in Psych Central’s blog World of Psychology:

…In Real Happiness at Work Salzberg discusses eight pillars of happiness in the workplace:

  • balance;
  • concentration;
  • compassion;
  • resilience;
  • communication and connection;
  • integrity;
  • meaning; and
  • open awareness.

At the end of each chapter she features formal meditations that take about 10 to 20 minutes, along with mini meditations and practices throughout the book.

Below are some of my favorite tips from Salzberg’s book for helping us have a more peaceful and happier day at work. The great thing about these exercises is that they’re simple, small and totally doable ways we can enjoy greater calm and satisfaction.

  • Before starting a project, meeting or even a conversation, ask yourself: “What do I most want to see happen from this?”
  • Before starting your day, set an intention. Salzberg gave this example: “May I treat everyone today with respect, remembering each person wants to be happy as much as I do.”
  • As you sit down at your desk, spend several moments listening to the sounds around you. Take note of your reactions to the sounds.
  • Notice how you’re holding something in your hand, such as a pen or cup. Are you holding on tightly? “Sometimes, we exert so much force holding things, it exacerbates tension without our realizing it.”
  • Try to perform a simple act of kindness every day. Salzberg included these examples: “holding an elevator door, saying thank you in a sincere manner, or listening to someone with a clear and focused mind.”
  • Pay attention to your feelings. For instance, if you’re feeling irritated toward a co-worker, pay attention to your irritation, “not so much the story of why you’re irritated, but the actual feeling of it.” What does it feel like in your body? Where do you feel it? Identifying irritation as it starts helps you prevent an action you might later regret. “With a more immediate recognition of what we’re feeling, we have a choice as to how we want to respond in that moment.”
  • As you heat up your lunch, stop, and simply pay attention to your breath until your hear the ding of the microwave.
  • If you’re feeling upset, consider helping someone out. (“The more you help, the happier you can be.”)
  • Think about the people who make your job possible, such as a housekeeper, elevator operator or fundraiser – and thank them.

As Salzberg writes, “Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime and anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart. We need only to take the first step.”

Link to the original article

‘Real Happiness at Work’ is an Inside Job

Love Your Job’s reviewer ‘Olivia Greene’ writes

In Real Happiness at Work, Sharon Salzberg’s first question to her readers is, “When we took this job did we expect it to make us happy?”

…Stuck in a rut at work, mostly of my own making, I stumbled across this book and I decided to read it every morning on my way to work for ninety days. My subway commute is about forty minutes, so I had time to get into the philosophy of the book and choose an exercise for the day before I walked through my office’s doors.

Using some of her exercises began to change my work day:

Unitask!
So many of us pride ourselves on our capacity to multitask, but that mindset can lead to a lot of stress. Salzberg’s exercises call for us to do one thing at a time, give that one activity our attention and thereby give ourselves a break. Once I tried this, I realized I was happier if I was unitasking, not multitasking. It is exhausting to stretch our attention in two or three different places — and it’s unnecessary.

Notice our Stress
Salzberg writes that every job has stress, but each of us gets stressed about different things. I tried an exercise that calls for writing down every thing during the work day that stressed me. Looking over my list, I found out it was different stressors than I realized — and a lot of the stress came from my own thoughts, which I could slowly change.

Mindful Emailing
Before reading Salzberg’s book, I answered an email as quickly as possible. Responsible for an inflow of hundreds of emails a day, the key for my professional survival seemed to me to be speed. But that was making me harried, unable to appreciate what I was writing or reading. Instead, I tried her mindful emailing exercises: I read emails twice entirely before replying and found out I was missing important points, I considered more carefully how my emails would be read and I added more kind words, and I decided I didn’t need to check my email while walking or riding the elevator. This mindful emailing made me, quite simply, happier at work.

Plant seeds
I made lists of accomplishments I hoped for at work, and noted which parts of success I could control — and which I couldn’t. It helped to ground me when I considered that I could set intentions, I could work towards something, but every outcome was dependent on forces beyond my control.

Notice sounds
Most work environments are noisy, with sounds we have no control over. Stationed between an employee social area and a crucial work area, I’m surrounded by sounds I can not control and do not need to pay attention to. I learned that when they begin to overwhelm me, I can stop, truly notice the sounds without feeling the need to stop them, and then gradually return to work with more ability to focus.

Take a deep breath!
While it’s core and basic advice I’ve heard countless times, Sharon Salzberg writes convincingly of the power of breath to restore and center us. In moments when I feel afraid and lose my calm, I learned that taking a deep breath can restore a sense of peace and vitality. It only takes three seconds and it works wonders.

I found that using these exercises allowed me, after a year of wishing I had the courage, to point out the amazing accomplishments I’d had over the past years and ask my boss to help those be recognized. I’ve also found the strength to apply for other jobs. I know that something wonderful is on its way, and I embrace what is happening right now instead of wishing it were different. Most importantly, I remember that finding happiness at work is an inside job. Only I can find it. My boss, my colleagues, and my company can not give it to me. I need to reach for it every day by making the time to breathe, to mini-meditate and to remember a greater sense of purpose. That’s my real responsibility — and it’s a big job.

Link to the original article

Sharon Salzberg, “Real Happiness at Work” | Talks at Google

Here you can watch Sharon Salzburg talking about her research and ideas and leading some guided mindfulness exercises in this video talk.  When you can give this the time to listen to, there’s lots of gentle wisdom here and a very easy mindfulness experience to enjoy at 23’55”:

“Life is full of surprises when we pay attention…”
And here is Sharon Salzburg writing the illustrative story she tells in this video, extracted from her book:

Self-Forgiveness at Work

…before too long, we got stuck in unthinkably bad traffic. I don’t recall ever seeing such traffic. As we crawled along, trying to go cross-town, then trying to go uptown, then cross-town again, trying anything, we barely made any progress. I wondered if I would make it to the talk at all. More than anything, I felt bad for the cab driver, wondering if he would get a fine for returning the cab late. I began to apologize, “I am so sorry. You were nice enough to pick me up and now you’ll be late. I can’t believe this monstrous traffic. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m so, so sorry.” He interrupted me, “Madam, traffic is not your fault.” Then he paused a moment, and added, “Nor is it mine.”

I just loved that he added “Nor is it mine.” I thought of how many times customers probably blamed him for their own tardiness, for bridge closings and tired toll collectors and wild drivers of other cars. I thought, “That was a wonderful teaching. Actually it would be okay if I don’t make it to the lecture at all” (I did, by barely a second).

When we challenge the habit of unfair self-blame, we learn to focus our energy on areas of the job that we can manage and let go of the rest. When we take time to focus on the part of the environment we can control – most particularly ourselves — working life becomes less emotionally fraught.

Patience is a much-underrated tool for dealing with frustrating work situations. Cultivating a flexible perspective, and the ability to let go, is essential to whatever kind of work we do. As we learn to delay the story lines and mental habits that we typically bring to our work, and simply become available to our circumstances in the moment, we’re able to adapt to things as they actually are. Patience at work begins with the full acknowledgment of conditions exactly as they are.

This includes the restless, critical or stubborn states of our own mind. A student of mine was amazed, on the morning of a job interview, when mindfulness practice enabled her to catch herself in the middle of a long-held assumption regarding her confidence and self-worth (“I’m not good enough! I can’t compete. I’ll never get it!”). Barraged by fear as well as impatience over the interviewer’s response, her mind in the past would have spun out of control, kept her on tenterhooks, and beaten herself up in the interim. Had she not been patient enough to stop, sit quietly and observe her self-defeating thoughts, she would never have been able to notice this pattern — and compose herself enough to land the job.

The more time we spend on meditation practice, the more rewarding it becomes as rather than rejecting difficulties as bothersome interruptions, we can acknowledge our work with all its complications and challenges as an invitation to wake up and live our lives more honestly and fully.

Link to the original article

Self-acceptance: a key to a happy life, but difficult to achieve

A new survey has found that self-acceptance is the “healthy habit” people struggle with most.

The UK charity Action for Happiness in conjunction with online behavioral change program Do Something Different asked 5,000 participants to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on ten “happy” habits. These habits, identified as “keys to happiness” via scientific research, plus the questions used to identify them, were as follows:

Giving: How often do you make an effort to help or be kind to others?
Relating: How often do you put effort into the relationships that matter most to you?
Exercising: How often do you spend at least half an hour a day being active?
Appreciating: How often do you take time to notice the good things in your life?
Trying out: How often do you learn or try new things?
Direction: How often do you do things that contribute to your most important life goals?
Resilience: How often do you find ways to bounce back quickly from problems?
Emotion: How often do you do things that make you feel good?
Acceptance: How often are you kind to yourself and think you’re fine as you are?
Meaning: How often do you do things that give you a sense of meaning or purpose?

While questions about Giving and Relating each scored an average of more than 7/10, the Acceptance question scored the lowest of the bunch: an average of 5.56 out of 10, just below Exercising (5.88/10).

“This survey shows that practising self-acceptance is one thing that could make the biggest difference to many people’s happiness,” says Professor Karen Pine, a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire and co-founder of Do Something Different. “Exercise is also known to lift mood so if people want a simple, daily way to feel happier they should get into the habit of being more physically active too.”

Do Something Different and Action for Happiness have created a Do Happiness programme, which sends people messages to help them practice scientifically backed healthy habits. Some of the recommended actions include being as kind to yourself as you are to other people, spending quality quiet time by yourself, and asking a trusted friend what he or she thinks your greatest strengths are.

Link to the original article 

Russ Harris: ‘How To Build Genuine Confidence’ at Happiness & Its Causes 2011

In this talk Russ Harris uncovers the real causes of lack of self-confidence, and gives us three rules for building our confidence in those times when we do not feel it naturally:

Rule 1 – Genuine confidence is not the absence of fear and anxiety, it is a transformed relationship with fear and anxiety.

Rule 2 – The actions of confidence come first, the feelings of confidence come later.

Rule 3 – Focus full attention on the task in hand.

And at this point in the talk is where I have set the video to play from, when Russ Harris’s shows a quite different mindfulness technique for doing this…

The Secret to Managing Stress: Adding the Opposite

How many of you are stressed about something right now? Did I hear an overwhelming “yes?” Well, I’m not surprised—a whopping 83% of Americans say they’re stressed at work.

And sure, you can find plenty of advice online about how to manage stress—from working out to using relaxation techniques like yoga or mediation to socializing with family and friends.

But I want to add another, rather unique tool to your stress-management kit. You may not have heard about it before—or you may have, years ago: It’s based on a strategy for teaching math to kids, known as “adding the opposite.”

In the classroom, this technique is used to help explain the idea of subtracting a negative—by adding a positive instead. Instead of 4 – (-6), for example, the student is taught to think of the equation as 4 + (+6).

Turns out, this is a great way to deal with stress, as well: Instead of trying to mitigate the negative effects of stress, think about what you can do to create a positive outcome, instead. Also referred to as “proactive coping,” this technique has worked wonders for my clients and has been proven in studies to reduce levels of worry and anxiety.

To help illustrate exactly how to use this method, read on for three ways you can “add the opposite” in common stress-inducing situations at the office.

1. Focus on the Positive

We’ve all had that kind of day: Your boss was a crank, your co-workers were annoying, you had a killer all-day headache, and you’re about to take this workday stink home and share it with your family. (Won’t they be thrilled?)

Not so fast! According to the University of Minnesota, you can greatly reduce evening stress levels simply by jotting down a few positive things that happened during the day. And they don’t even have to be work-related! Maybe you received a great compliment, nailed a presentation, or made a new friend in the office. Whatever you write, make sure to note why these things made you feel good. This will help you remember all the positive attributes, skills, and people you have in your life, and focusing on the “why” helps you appreciate those things even more.

You see, instead of dealing with stress by rehashing your terrible day to anyone who will listen, you can add the opposite by reminding yourself of what went well.

2. Envision Success

I don’t live downtown, but I have to go there frequently for meetings. And up until recently, I dreaded everything about it. Between the unfamiliar territory, one-way streets, ever-present construction, and full parking garages, I knew that it was always going to take much longer than I expected to arrive, find parking, and get to the meeting on time. It was harried and stressful, and I dreaded it.

Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t keep operating that way, and I started trying to proactively cope. So, whenever I had a city meeting, I’d envision myself leaving the office with plenty of time to spare, effortlessly finding a parking spot, and arriving well ahead of time, relaxed, unstressed, calm, and ready to conduct business.

And you wouldn’t believe the difference it made. I realized that by working myself up mentally and always picturing the worst possible experience, I was creating my own stress. But when I shifted my outlook, I had a completely different experience. I actually did arrive early, find parking, and had time to gather myself before the meeting.

Whether you dread city parking, presentations, meetings, performance reviews, or any number of other stressors, try adding the opposite by shifting your outlook from dread to anticipation and imagining a positive outcome. You’ll be able to ditch the stress—which will put you in the right mindset to succeed in any situation.

3. Start a Conversation

I often work with clients who complain that their managers are a constant source of stress, but they avoid tackling the issue head on. Why? They feel uncomfortable confronting an authority figure, or aren’t sure what to say or how to say it. And so, they take no action at all—and the stress continues.

To add the opposite in this situation, try focusing on the goal you want to achieve in that conversation and taking the steps to make it happen.

For example, let’s say your stress stems from your boss’ tendency to assign projects right as you’re about to leave the office. Instead of panicking about those last-minute tasks, directly confront the issue with a conversation—perhaps asking if you can meet each morning to outline the day’s assignments.

You’re instantly replacing that fear, dread, and avoidance with a proactive with a focus on the desired outcome—and that’s a much better way to replace that end-of-day stress.

The next time you anticipate a stressful event, focus on creating positive outcomes and aligning the resources you need to be successful. Doing this before stress has a chance to get to you has a much better effect on your personal well-being—rather than simply recovering from stress after the fact. That means a healthier body, a healthier mind, and a happier life. I challenge you to take steps to proactively cope with those tough situations by adding something positive. Your well-being depends on it!

Link to the original article

How to Help a New Co-worker (When You Have Your Own Work to Do)

The latest water cooler gossip has leaked the news that someone new is finally getting hired, which means your overloaded plate may actually see some lightening in the near future.

But, before you can let out a sigh of relief, you remember what a chore it was the last time someone new joined the team—and your excitement is quickly replaced with a feeling of dread.

Adding a new person to your team in the office can be a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, when he or she finally gets up to speed, your workload should get a lot more manageable, and ideally, your team will become more efficient. On the other hand, new hires—no matter how experienced they already are— require a lot of training.

Fortunately, you’re not necessarily doomed to suffer through a months-long ramping up period for a new hire. Here’s how to handle the inevitable barrage of questions with style and grace—and stay sane.

1. Flash Back

…I reminded myself what it was like when I first started several years before. From accidentally setting off the office alarm after forgetting the code to completely botching one of our daily reconciliation procedures, I was probably a nightmare to my peers. I also remembered how cohesive the team was and how hard it was being the “outsider” trying to break in to the group. With that in mind, I was able to keep my frustration in check and be much more compassionate about what she was going through as she adjusted to life with our tiny team.

2. Set Boundaries

I know, boundaries sound like limitations, but try to think of them less like restrictions, and more like a roadmap for a happy relationship. No matter who you are, there are rules to the road that you just won’t know when you first start out. At least, not until someone tells you. And, that’s where the boundaries come in.

…Sometimes, you can see a disaster from a mile away, so don’t be afraid to head it off as soon as possible. If you’re a tyrant before your morning coffee infusion, make sure the newbie knows not to come knocking unless the office is on fire. Not a fan of the 4 PM Friday afternoon team meeting? Make sure your new hire knows that on day one, and you’ll avoid resenting him for rest of his tenure. Whatever your pet peeves and professional thorns in your side may be, the more upfront and honest you are about your own boundaries, the happier and more productive everyone will be.

3. Get in the Game

Sometimes, you just can’t avoid all the questions. The job is complicated, and the culture is unique, and whoever is joining the team will need the secret handbook if he or she stands a chance at being successful—not to mention, help you out. That’s when it’s helpful to view the newbie onboarding process as a game, rather than an added burden.

This tactic was especially helpful to me when I had a recent graduate join my team. I had well over a decade of experience over her, so looking at her joining as a coaching opportunity just made sense. I knew things she couldn’t possibly know, and it was my responsibility to teach her. And, if I did it well, we’d both come out winners. While I’d have to give up about half the hours in my day until that point, I liked those odds. I ended up sharing everything I knew with her and answered all her questions with the same enthusiasm as my junior high basketball coach had when I asked him to explain a certain offensive play. And it worked.

At the end of the day, a job is just like any other game. There are rules and certain ways to get things done that work better than others. And, in many cases, taking the time to step back and be a coach—even if it’s not necessarily your job—is the only way to make sure your team will work effectively together.

Whether it’s the ins and outs of how to complete the TPS reports or the idiosyncrasies of the coffee machine, your new colleague is going to have a lot of questions, and chances are, you’ll be answering some of them. Keep these tips in mind, and you’ll soon enjoy the benefits of having a new, awesome, addition to your team in no time.

Link to read the full original article

Be Happier at Work—This Week With Huffington Post’s The Third Metric

The previous two posts both come from The Muse, a new website I discovered by signing up for the free five-day programme they are offering in partnership with The Third Metric.  Its a great site and so far, two days in, this has been a great programme.

Is your job leaving you over-worked, over-stressed, tired, and unhappy? It doesn’t have to be this way. This class, in partnership with The Huffington Post Third Metric, will give you smart, research-backed strategies for how to re-think about your daily grind and be happier at work. Starting now.

Here’s the link to check out the offer and sign yourself up

A bit more about this programme:

Introducing The 5 Day Program To Find Happiness At Work

by  Jordan Freeman

Small things can help you be happier at work. It comes down to choices, and you really can choose happiness. The Huffington Post has partnered with the career experts at The Daily Muse to lead the way, putting together a five-day lesson plan on how to be “Happier At Work.”

At HuffPost, we focus on something called “The Third Metric,” which seeks to redefine success beyond money and power. We want to introduce a third metric to success that includes well-being, wisdom and wonder. We explore happiness as part of this initiative — especially happiness at work. For many, career success means working harder, longer, and faster — which tends to lead to burnout, sleep deprivation, and driving ourselves into the ground. Not quite the picture of success and happiness we imagined.

Our lessons will teach you smart, research-backed strategies for how to re-think your daily grind, stop making yourself crazy, and be happier at work every day.

Here is an overview of some of the tips and tricks we’ve put together for you.

Day 1: Is “Busy” Helping or Harming You? 
Sometimes, being busy feels good — it makes us feel productive and important. But it can also hold us back from big-picture thinking and even happiness. Learn why it’s so important to take a break and how to do it the right way.

Day 2: The Happiness Booster Sitting Next to You 
It’s easy to separate your work and personal lives, but the truth is, having friends at the office can go a long way toward making you a happier (even better!) employee. Learn how to get to know people outside the office and why it’s important to do it now.

Day 3: The Pursuit of (Im)perfection 
Do you know perfection is impossible, yet continue to strive for it anyway? It could be bringing you down, big time. In this class, we’ll show you just how valuable a little imperfection can be.

Day 4: The Meaning of Your Work 
Even if you don’t love your job, there are still ways to find meaning in it — and get excited for it. We’ll show you practical ways to find purpose at work.

Day 5: Happy Today, Happy Forever 
Here’s a secret about happiness: You have more control over it than you think you do. In this last class, we’ll show you small activities you can do every day that can make a big impact on your happiness.

Sign up here.

Link to the original article

7 Ways to Make it Easy for People to Work with You

by  

“It all depends on who you’re working with.”

That was the feedback from team members to a recent survey about the state of collaboration within our department. The feedback was consistent. Collaboration is…well…inconsistent.It all depends on who you’re working with.

In all organizations you’ll hear people complain about the difficulty of working with certain colleagues. The common refrain is, “If only they would _____…”— communicate better, be more responsive, give me all the information I need…fill in the blank with whatever reason suits the occasion.

Instead of being frustrated with other people not being easy to work with, shift the focus to yourself. Are YOU are easy to work with? If you are easy to do business with, odds are you’ll find others much more willing to cooperate and collaborate with you.

Here are seven ways to make it easy for people to work with you:

1. Build rapport – People want to work with people they like. Are you likable? Do you build rapport with your colleagues? Get to know them personally, engage in small talk (even if it’s not your “thing”), learn about their lives outside of work, and take a genuine interest in them as people, not just a co-worker who’s there to do a job.

2. Be a good communicator – Poor communication is at the root of many workplace conflicts. People who are easy to work with share information openly and timely, keep others informed as projects evolve, talk through out of the box situations rather than make assumptions, and they ask questions if they aren’t sure of the answer. As a general rule, it’s better to over-communicate than under-communicate.

3. Make their job easier – If you want to gain people’s cooperation, make their job easier and they’ll love you for it. But how do you know what makes their job easier? Ask them! If handing off information in a form rather than a chain of emails makes their job easier, then do it. If it helps your colleague to talk over questions on the phone rather than through email, then give them a call. Identify the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) from your colleague’s perspective and it will help you tailor your interactions so both your and their needs are met.

4. Provide the “why” behind your requests – Very few people like being told what to do. They want to understand why something needs to be done so they can make intelligent decisions about the best way to proceed. Simply passing off information and asking someone to “just do it like I said” is rude and condescending. Make sure your colleagues understand the context of your request, why it’s important, and how critical they are to the success of the task/project. Doing so will have them working with you, not against you.

5. Be trustworthy – Above all, be trustworthy. Follow through on your commitments, keep your word, act with integrity, demonstrate competence in your own work, be honest, admit mistakes, and apologize when necessary. Trust is the foundation of any healthy relationship, and if you want to work well with others, it’s imperative you focus on building trust in the relationship. Trust starts with being trustworthy yourself.

6. Don’t hide behind electronic communication – Email and Instant Message have their place in organizations, but they don’t replace more personal means of communication like speaking on the phone or face to face. I’ve seen it time and time again – minor problems escalate into major blowouts because people refuse to get out from behind their desks, walk to their colleague’s office, and discuss a situation face to face. It’s much easier to hide behind the computer and fire off nasty-grams than it is to talk to someone about a problem. Just step away from the computer, please!

7. Consistently follow the process – Process…for some people that’s a dirty word and anathema for how they work. However, processes exist for a reason. Usually they are in place to ensure consistency, quality, efficiency, and productivity. When you follow the process, you show your colleagues you respect the norms and boundaries for how you’ve agreed to work together. If you visited a friend’s home and were asked to remove your shoes at the door, you would do so out of respect, right? You wouldn’t make excuses about it being inconvenient or it not being the way you do things in your house. Why should it be different at work? If you need to fill out a form, then fill it out. If you need to use a certain software system to get your information, then use it. Quit making excuses and do work the way it was designed to be done. Besides, if you consistently follow the process, you’ll experience much more grace from your colleagues for those times you legitimately need to deviate from it.

No one likes to think of him/herself as being difficult to work with, yet from time to time we all make life difficult for our colleagues. Focus on what you can do to be easy to do business with and you’ll find that over time others become easier to work with as well.

Link to read the original article

3 Ways To Handle Criticism Like A Pro – And Actually Grow From It

Be smart about the way you ask for feedback and you’ll realise you can’t live or learn without it.
Here’s how to ask the right questions and get the answers you need.

Ignoring this feedback can have detrimental effects on your company’s success, yet many of us are still averse to criticism. Sheila Heen, author of the new book Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well says there’s a powerful reason this.

“Feedback sits at the juncture of two core human needs,” argues Heen. While on the one hand, we have a desire to improve and grow, we also have an innate need to be accepted and loved the way we are. “Feedback suggests that how you are now isn’t quite A-okay,” says Heen. High-achievers, in particular, struggle with this. “We think we should be doing it all and handling it all, if not perfectly, at least perfectly enough that other people don’t notice.”

So, how can we embrace criticism and learn to grow from it?

1. LET GO OF YOUR FIXED MINDSET.

Whether we view feedback as threatening or helpful depends on how we see ourselves, says Heen. Some people view themselves through a fixed identity. They have a mindset that says: “I am how I am. I’m either smart or stupid, capable or not, I’m going to be a success or a failure.” Such individuals take feedback as a verdict about their core being.

On the other hand, people who maintain a growth mindset assume that how they are today isn’t necessarily how they will be in the future. Thinking this way will allow you to accept feedback as a way to learn and grow.

2. IGNORE WHAT YOU DON’T AGREE WITH.

Not all criticism is helpful. “Getting good at receiving feedback doesn’t mean that you actually have to take it. It simply means that you resist the temptation to instantly either reject it or let it overwhelm you and instead work to understand it better,” says Heen. Knowing which opinions to accept and which to ignore means taking the time to fully hear people out.

Since the majority of feedback tends to be vague (“You need to be more of a team player” or “You need to be more responsive to the market”) you might need to push for more specifics. You could ask: “What specifically prompts you to say this?” or “What do you think I should be doing differently?” Getting answers to these questions will help you decide whether the message is useful or not.

3. DON’T FISH FOR A CANNED RESPONSE.

How you ask others for their opinions of you and your work will determine whether or not their responses are useful. “Asking ‘Do you have any feedback for me?’ is overwhelming for the giver and it’s not clear how honest you want them to be,” says Heen.

Instead, be more specific in your questioning. For example, asking “What’s one thing we could change that would make a difference to you?” makes clear the type of response you’re soliciting. You’ll be rewarded with more detailed thoughts that can help you and your business grow.

Link to the original article

Introverts: Know Your Strengths, And You Can Flourish At Work, Too

By Laura Pepper Wu, editor, The Write Life Magazine.

In business culture, we often favour extroversion. Yet the latest research suggests introverts make up one-third to one-half of the population. Author Susan Cain’s recent book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking, shines a positive light on us more modest individuals.

In fact, Cain suggests that their traits can actually be strengths — personally and professionally.

Are You an Introvert, Extrovert or Ambivert?

The term introvert is often used inaccurately. Introversion does not necessarily equate to shy, though some introverts are shy — as are some extroverts. Instead, Cain defines introverts as “people of contemplation,” who may enjoy the company of others, but are also comfortable with solitude. They are sensitive, contemplative, modest and calm, and spend a lot of time thinking and reflecting. They can enjoy social occasions, but crave restorative time afterwards. They do their best work alone in quiet places since they are easily overstimulated by noise, lights and action.

In contrast, extroverts are “people of action.” They gain energy from other people, are sociable, excitable and light-hearted. Unlike introverts, extroverts can tolerate a higher level of noise and work well collaboratively. And if neither of these temperaments resonate with you strongly, you may be an ambivert, someone who sits somewhere in the middle of this wide spectrum.Whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, Quiet emphasizes that there are strengths that come with your temperament. You can also minimize the impact of the so-called weaknesses with self-knowledge.

Here are a few tips for introverts (and their bosses) to flourish in the workplace:

  1. Reduce noise. Shut the door to your office for stretches at a time, or wear noise-cancelling headphones. You’ll produce better work in a more satisfying environment.
  2. Set some rules for your interactions with colleagues and collaborators. If you have the luxury of doing so, let people know that you prefer email rather than phone conversations. Work in a conference room or coffee shop where you can’t be interrupted. Schedule regular meetings into your calendar to limit the need for spontaneous ones.
  3. Recognize your need for rest. After a big presentation, give yourself permission to restore your energy levels. This is essential for introverted workers to stay on top of their game. While it is important to bond with your work peers outside of the office, focus on quality over quantity.
  4. Let your temperament shape your career path. Since introverts flourish in quiet spaces with minimal interaction, careers such as graphic design, writing, programming and accountancy are all good choices.

The best tip of all is to commit to understanding more about the strengths associated with introversion. You’ll focus more on what you do best, and stress less about the differences between you and the louder voices who get more airplay at meetings. Introverts are observant, so they’ll often ask poignant and important questions, and see a different angle on something. Managers can respect these quiet strengths by asking questions and allowing everyone to speak during meetings. By understanding individual differences in a team, everyone wins.

Link to the original article

Eight Habits that Improve Cognitive Function

What daily habits improve brain structure and cognitive function?

by Christopher Bergland in The Athlete’s Way

On March 11, the New York Times published an article about the “brain fitness business“ titled, Do Brain Workouts Work? Science Isn’t Sure. I believe the answer is no. Without a variety of other daily habits, these “brain-training games” cannot stave off mental decline or dramatically improve cognitive function.

Most of these brain-training games will have some benefits—but it’s impossible to optimize brain connectivity and maximize neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) sitting in a chair while playing a video game on a two-dimensional screen.

In order to give your brain a full workout, you need to engage both hemispheres of the cerebrum, and both hemispheres of the cerebellum. You can only do this by practicing, exploring, and learning new things in the three-dimensions of the real world—not while being sedentary in front of a flat screen in a cyber reality.

Digital games are incapable of giving the entire brain a full workout. These digital programs can’t really exercise the cerebellum (Latin: “Little Brain”) and, therefore, are literally only training half your brain. These “brain-training workouts” are the equivalent of only ever doing upper body workouts, without ever working out your lower body…

For this post, I did a meta-analysis of the most recent neuroscience studies and compiled a list of habits that can improve cognitive function for people from every generation. These eight habits can improve cognitive function and protect against cognitive decline for a lifespan.

Eight Habits that Improve Cognitive Function

  1. Physical Activity
  2. Openness to Experience
  3. Curiosity and Creativity
  4. Social Connections
  5. Mindfulness Meditation
  6. Brain-Training Games
  7. Get Enough Sleep
  8. Reduce Chronic Stress

The secret to optimising cognitive function can be found in daily habits and exercises that flex both hemispheres of the cerebrum, and both hemispheres of the cerebellum. The eight habits I recommend here exercise all four brain hemispheres. If performed consistently, these habits can improve cognitive function and protect against cognitive decline.

Link to read the full set of of findings in the original article

Why Young Leaders Drive Old Leaders Crazy

by Leadership Freak

NOTE: Definition of a leader: ‘someone who influences the activities of an individual or a group in efforts toward goal achievement in a given situation’.  (Hershey & Blanchard, Situational Leadership, 1977)
This is probably you – whatever your job tile reads.
Only you know of course whether you are an ‘old’ or a ‘young’ leader…

Old leaders feel superior to young leaders because young leaders haven’t paid their dues. Young leaders devalue the value of experience when they think, “Paying your dues is over-rated.”

Young leaders don’t appreciate what old leaders put on the line to support them. When young leaders screw up, they don’t realise they diminish the prestige of those who selected them.

Young leaders who walk away when things get hard weaken old leaders who are gutting it out.

10 Tips for young leaders:

  1. Make everyone around you look good. Nothing good comes from pointing out the bad in others when you’re a young leader.
  2. Celebrate and thank more. One strength of young leaders is dissatisfaction. But, when dissatisfaction turns negative, influence declines.
  3. Slow down when you feel barriers lifting. Enthusiasm and good ideas don’t lower resistance – connection does. People won’t see how smart you are when they’re protecting themselves from you.
  4. Use personal rather than accusatory language. “Our slow progress makes mefeel trapped,” is better than, “You aren’t moving fast enough.”
  5. Respect and answer the fears of old leaders. You scare old leaders when you don’t appreciate their fears.
  6. Channel passion, enthusiasm, and excitement into focus and resolve. Calm determination has more power than vein popping enthusiasm.
  7. Tease out the suggestions of experienced leaders. Say something like, “So, if we go the way you suggest, the next steps are…” Old leaders love to be taken seriously.
  8. Don’t pressure people to get on your team. Get on theirs.
  9. Say what you want. “How can I gain respect?” “Will you help me gain a voice?”
  10. Honour experience.

Link to read the original article

BUT BUT BUT – there is always another side to the coin…

Looking Down on Young Leaders

by Leadership Freak

The hope for dying organizations isn’t found in old leaders who don’t have the guts to say they created the problem.

Organisations reflect the age and attitude of their leaders. The older some grow, the more they lean toward no, and “no” isn’t going anywhere.

Transform organisation by integrating young leaders.

Dedicated young leaders:

  1. Feel impatient.
  2. Address issues elders sweep under the carpet.
  3. Complain when stuck in bureaucracy.
  4. Consistently ask, “Why?”
  5. Care deeply.
  6. Yearn to make a mark.
  7. Embrace diversity.

4 Tips for maximising young leaders:

  1. Push them past the “all talk” stage. Let them struggle and support them at the same time.
  2. Take their perspective. Learn from them.
  3. They don’t know what they don’t know. Teach rather than scoff.
  4. Realise many of the qualities you look down on are the ones you need.

Youth alone isn’t the answer. I’m advocating for respectful age integration.

Link to the original article

see also:

Why Millennials are the New Greatest Generation (infographic)

by 

Generation Y is constantly being given a reputation of being entitled and uncompetitive in the workforce that is very undeserved.

But what if I told you, in spite of this public perception and bad luck, or perhaps even because of it, the Millennials are actually the most generous, educated and civic-minded generation since the Greatest Generation? Don’t believe me? The following infographic debunks many of those Gen Y myths.

See for yourself what this generation has accomplished and how hard they work despite the less than favorable job market they face…

The Top 6 Questions Leaders Have About Communications

by David Grossman

I talk to a lot of leaders who say they want to communicate effectively, but they’re not sure how to. They have questions about how to overcome communication challenges, how to share tough news with employees, and how to measure the effectiveness of their communication. I thought I’d answer the top six questions I get from leaders about communication.

1. If communication is so critical to leadership and business, why isn’t there enough communication in business today?

Communication is often seen as an “add-on” to “hard” or “technical” business skills. Communication is often perceived as someone else’s job. Sometimes leaders spend their time and resources focusing on goals that directly contribute to the bottom line, not knowing that communication does too.

And there are a myriad of myths about communication that get in the way, myths such as “talking is communication” or “people won’t interpret situations or give them meaning if leaders don’t talk about them,” both of which are far from the truth.

2. Why do leaders need to be effective communicators?

Today’s leaders need to be effective leadercommunicators and use strategic communication as a way to achieve the business goals they seek. Leading is communicating; you can’t separate communication from leadership. Without communication, employees lack direction and can’t measure their performance. They lack an ability to see themselves and their work as part of the bigger picture. They can’t add value by contributing as a thinking member of the team.

And what’s most important is that you can’t lead if you can’t express yourself.

Your technical skills and abilities can take you only so far. Leadership is much more. It’s about getting things done and moving a business forward through other people.

3. What traits are most important for a skilled leader communicator?  

Asking questions and listening are critical. Leaders create engagement by focusing on productivity, creating morale and building relationships. Before you can understand a business problem or achieve a goal, you have to understand what the situation is. Asking questions is the best way to come at a problem from varied perspectives. If a leader problem solves from assumptions or only the information at hand, he or she won’t be effective.

4. What’s the greatest communication challenge for leaders?

The greatest challenge leaders face is failing to remember that everything they do communicates.  Whether they intend to or not, everything leaders do (and don’t do) communicates something, so why not communicate well? It’s no secret that people will read into your behavior. They interpret situations and give them meaning, whether or not you communicate about it. Communication provides the right information and prevents misinformation. Leaders need to remember that they make the weather every day for their people.

5. How can leaders measure the effectiveness of their communication?

You can ask others. You can listen (and then listen some more). You can also use a 360 to assess how you’re actually communicating, as compared to how you may think you’re doing.

We all have blind spots, and most of us tend to overestimate our skills. Leaders who are extroverted typically say and do a lot, but the quality of their communication suffers. On the other hand, introverts tend to think they’re communicating more than they actually are.

Effective leadercommunicators practice just like great athletes. Look at Serena Williams. She’s one of the best tennis players in the world, but she still practices every day. Leaders don’t have to be perfect, but we all need to work on flexing our leadership muscle so it gets stronger over time.  A great place to start is to listen to see how you’re doing in meeting you team’s needs: listen to the questions people ask, and look in the mirror and check your reflection.

6. How can leaders inspire their employees when they don’t have good news to share?

The test of great leadership is to ensure understanding in the tough times as well as in the good times. The best leadercommunicators communicate even more in challenging times. They place greater emphasis on two-way dialogue and face-to-face (or at least voice-to-voice) communication, and they’re visible. They listen more than they talk. They ask questions.

They’re genuine, honest, and empathetic.

Be assured, too, that as a leader, it’s OK to not have all the answers.  The three best credibility-building words a leader can say are, “I don’t know” (and then go out and find the answer).

Link to the original article

And here’s a quirky new piece of science that I loved discovering, not least because it lends weight to the realisation that listening is much more complex and skilled and demanding than merely the absence of talking…

Different Brain Regions Handle Different Music Types

Functional MRI of the listening brain found that different regions become active when listening to different types of music and instrumental versus vocals. Allie Wilkinson reports in Scientific American

Vivaldi versus the Beatles. Both great. But your brain may be processing the musical information differently for each. That’s according to research in the journalNeuroImage. [Vinoo Alluri et al, From Vivaldi to Beatles and back: Predicting lateralized brain responses to music]

For the study, volunteers had their brains scanned by functional MRI as they listened to two musical medleys containing songs from different genres. The scans identified brain regions that became active during listening.

One medley included four instrumental pieces and the other consisted of songs from the B side of Abbey Road.

Computer algorithms were used to identify specific aspects of the music, which the researchers were able to match with specific, activated brain areas. The researchers found that vocal and instrumental music get treated differently. While both hemispheres of the brain deal with musical features, the presence of lyrics shifts the processing of musical features to the left auditory cortex.

These results suggest that the brain’s hemispheres are specialized for different kinds of sound processing. A finding revealed but what you might call instrumental analysis.

Link to hear the podcast of this story with short snatches of the music it references

Pharrell Williams – Happy (Official Music Video)

And on the subject of music, here is Pharrell Williams’ Happy, which has been chosen to be this year’s song for UN International Day of Happiness on 20th March.

Clap along and enjoy…

Happiness At Work Edition #88

All of these stories and plenty more are collected together in this week’s Happiness At Work collection of stories.

I hope you find something to take away from this to use and grow and profit from.

Happiness At Work #87 ~ sometimes it’s good to be up in the clouds

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This post invites you to put your head in the clouds for a while and think about creative thinking…

'Sometimes its good to be up in the clouds' photo by Sue Ridge

‘Sometimes its good to be up in the clouds’
photo by Sue Ridge

This week’s title comes from a new photo by artist Sue Ridge, which heads up this selection of stories that invite us to think about what our thinking, and especially our creative thinking, might ideally be made of…

Insight test – how much do you know about insightful working?

To get started with this, here’s a quick and surprising challenge to test your existing thinking by Gary Klein, author of Seeing what others don’t: the remarkable ways we gain insights:

Our ability to create insights is critical for innovation and adaptation.

Otherwise we would remain stuck in mental ruts formed over our lifetime. Insights let us see things in new ways. Many people, however, have the wrong ideas about insights. Here is a short test, only 12 items, to assess your knowledge of insights. For each item, note down the number at the left if you agree with the statement and think it has been sufficiently established.

  1. Brainstorming is an effective method for groups to generate insights.
  2. Insights depend on having fresh eyes, which is why greybeards – the so-called experts – tend to be trapped by their previous experience.
  3. Organizations desire insights and encourage their workers to come up with out-of-the box ideas.
  4. The way insights emerge is that we run into an impasse, struggle for awhile, then let our minds wander until suddenly there is a flash of illumination.
  5. Correlation doesn’t imply causality, so we shouldn’t get sidetracked by coincidences.
  6. A major barrier to insights is when we have flawed beliefs and assumptions.
  7. To correct flawed assumptions we should use critical thinking methods such as listing all the important assumptions we are making, to see which might be wrong.
  8. Scientists generate insights by running controlled experiments to test their hypotheses.
  9. Good scientists work carefully so that they won’t make erroneous claims.
  10. To handle a challenging project we should start by pinning down the goals so that we can systematically achieve success.
  11. Good ideas often come about by accident so we should expose ourselves to lots of different fields and different types of specialists.
  12. A well-designed computer workstation, tailored to the way we work so that it filters out irrelevant data and highlights the important cues, can boost our chances for having insights.

Let’s see how you did. Review your responses, changing any that don’t seem quite right. And here is the answer key: Zero. None of these items has been clearly established. Some are just wrong, contradicted by the data. Others seem unlikely and have not been supported by evidence. Here are some brief explanations:

  1. Brainstorming is a popular technique but the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that groups using it get fewer ideas, and less creative ones.
  2. Experience doesn’t get us into a rut unless the task is so repetitive and mindless that we tune out. A study of insights that I conducted found that experience was essential in 2/3 of the incidents.
  3. Organizations resist insights because they are dis-organizing and disruptive, and get in the way of smooth management. Most people view novel ideas as impractical and unreliable.
  4. This impasse strategy sometimes holds, but it is only one of several different ways that insights emerge. In a sample of 120 insights, only 25% involved impasses.
  5. Correlation doesn’t prove causality but many important insights started out when someone noticed a coincidence.
  6. People who gain insights often held flawed beliefs. What set them apart is that they were able to abandon these beliefs whereas others fixated on their flawed beliefs and were trapped by them.
  7. The strategy of listing assumptions has never been shown to improve performance, and it doesn’t even make sense because the beliefs that trap us are often based on hidden assumptions that we aren’t aware we are making. So we would never list them.
  8. When scientists run experiments and get results that support their hypotheses they haven’t gained any insights at all. Only when the results don’t work out as expected do scientists have to seek insights. Other parts of the scientific method, such as just observing the phenomenon of interest, are richer sources of insight.
  9. Claims that can’t ever be wrong are usually pretty bland. Scientists would do better to make the most extreme claims they can defend. Unfortunately, too many scientists are so risk averse that they censor themselves.
  10. Many challenging projects involve “wicked problems” that don’t have a clear goal. The only path to success is to gain insights about the goal along the way. Locking in on the initial goal is likely to lead to failure.
  11. There is no clear evidence that deliberate exposure to lots of diverse ideas will result in more insights.
  12. A well-designed workstation may feel comfortable but it will trap us in our traditional routines and make it harder to have insights about better ways to do the job. If the workstation filters out “irrelevant” cues, it may filter the cues that might spark insights.

The field of insight is marked by myths and superstitions. Only by exposing these outdated ideas can we expect to make progress in using our uniquely human talent to make discoveries and achieve insights.

Link to  the original article

Mindfulness Bell: a 5 minute meditation

This 5 minute mindfulness bell meditation is wonderful for whenever you want to clear your mind, relax and then get on with your day.

The recording contains nothing but the pure sound of a Tibetan singing bowl being repeatedly struck with a soft mallet. It was taken from Mindfulness Bells Volume 1. Christopher Lloyd Clarke recorded this bowl in his personal studio in 2011 using some of the most high-end microphones and audio processing equipment in his collection. Christopher is known for being a bit obsessed with sound quality, so we hope that you can appreciate the lovely tonal balance and detail that is present in this recording, even if it’s just in YouTube video format.

This calming sound is a wonderful focal point for meditation. Simply absorb your attention in the sound of the mindfulness bell. No mantra is required, no special breathing techniques are needed, just let your awareness be consumed by the sound of the bell.

Your mind will become clearer and more calm with each and every bell strike, and as the bells fade into silence, your mind is given the opportunity to experience a very natural state of stillness.

A high bell sound rings out at the conclusion of the meditation.

Please come back often and enjoy this 5 minute meditation anytime you want to clear your mind and relax!

For more information or to download the full 60 minute version, please visit http://www.the-guided-meditation-site…

career maze4

The Golden Ratio for Productive Creativity in the Workplace

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Perhaps the most defining barrier in the modern workplace is the ability to seamlessly integrate creative and productive processes. The challenge is faced by both leaders and employees. Though they welcome constructive creativity, the former find it difficult to integrate workflow beyond simple productivity. Creative solutions are often seen as an experimental indulgence, though no less desired from team members. Employees on the other hand find the productivity warp-drive seems to rule their every move, particularly in environments where managers are less project-focused and more task-focused. In fact, an Adobe study called “State of Create” showed that an estimated 75% of participating employees felt like ‘their employers put more pressure on them to be productive than to be creative. Simply put, this group finds little time for (or reward in) creative pursuits.

An organization’s survival is based not only on its productivity, but also on quality and ability to innovate – two traits that are pivotally dependent on creativity. An organization’s ability to integrate productivity with creativity is entirely dependent on taking an “outside” point of view, a broad scope of the entire structure from top to bottom. Here is where you’ll find a golden ratio of creativity-based productivity measures that will help you finally fill this elusive gap.

Hard-wired to be Creative: How Creativity Precede Productivity
It all begins with reimagining creativity as a concept. Some would protest they’re not gifted with creativity. However, while some people have more raw talent than others, creativity is a tool of the mind that (like any other mind-based approach) can be sharpened though disciplined practice.Jonah Lehrer, the author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, comments that while “Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code.” Creativity, as Lehrer discusses in an article withMashable writer, Josh Catone, can be taught. Lehrer adds definition to the kindled realization that imagination can be cultivated and improved upon.Programmed to be creative, we’re doing ourselves a disservice by eliminating it from our corporate culture – and moreover, from the fundamental way in which we do business. If we’re hard-wired to be creative, then aren’t we performing at diminished levels if we proceed without this deeply incubated and inherent capacity to create and perform?
On the Shoulders of Giants: How Leaders Are Responsible for Fueling Creative Productivity
As leaders, we set the benchmarks. Our role in spearheading creative productivity is by recognizing that “true leadership requires original thought and imagination that can motivate others, solve problems, and cultivate innovation and initiative along the way.” Pulled from a Forbes article entitled “The Content You Read Shapes How You Lead”, by Glenn Llopis, succinctly highlights why it’s critical for leaders to place the first proverbial stepping stone laying the foundation for a creatively productive corporate culture.Leaders are encouraged to treat creativity as a tool necessary for innovation. For those with an aversion to a word that has been associated with crafting and a flood of Pinterest-inspired ideas, know that a creative mind is a strategic mind. As I mentioned in an earlier post entitled, “The Creativity-Productivity Paradox: Play and Time”, creativity is the ability to connect the dots. To add weight to the argument, I quote Liane Davey’s Harvard Business Review post entitled “Strengthen Your Strategic Thinking Muscles”, in which she writes, “Strategic people see the world as a web of interconnected ideas and people and they find opportunities to advance their interests at those connection points.” The individual (and the organization) that is able to flex this type of creative thought has a higher chance on coursing through a path that is more result-driven rather than task-driven. In a nutshell, the creative mind has produced the productive mind.

Link to the original article

WHY Music: The New Power Shake – Blending Creativity, Well-Being and Learning

by Frank Fitzpatrick, multi-Platinum record producer, Grammy-nominated songwriter, social entrepreneur and award-winning filmmaker

As the world continues to spin in more unpredictable and exponential ways, the worlds of ideas-once-separated are being tossed into the same blender.

What is great about the omnipotent ingredient of music is that music is the juice that can make it all work together: cognitive and social development, motivation and emotional engagement, and mindfulness and well-being. Maybe it is because, as Beethoven taught us, music understands humankind in a way that humankind is yet to understand music. Sadly, because music has been so devalued and misunderstood by those leading in these other fields, it is underutilized at best.

…

One of the emerging trends …that I find encouraging is the desire to move toward creating greater well-being for the individual learner – being more conscious about what we put into the mix and shifting the values around priority outcomes. It is reassuring to have health, well-being and mindfulness be part of a dialogue that too often gets dominated by test scores and brain capacity.

We still have a long way to go, however, to get music fully embraced as a critical and omnipotent ingredient for education, successful learning, and the well-being of [today’s young people]. Music here has been removed from school curriculums, and public funding for the music-based arts programs has all, but disappeared. In one of my weekend meetings with the education gurus, I learned about an upcoming two-day global think tank that will help set the framework for open learning analytics to be used to measure learner outcome in education for the next fifteen years. Of the 50 experts at the table, music and the arts don’t have even one representative. Shocking! With all the evidence about the impact of music on learning and creativity, the development of the human brain, and the vitality of the human spirit, it should be a no-brainer to insist on music as an integral part of every child’s education.

So, as I head off to Austin for another education forum, armed with the latest in new technology, leading scientific research, a box of power tools for emotional engagement, and enough creative ideas to fill a 747, I will take my WHY Musicsoapbox with me. Maybe if I throw some magical ingredients into the blender and sing my mantras at the top of my voice — like “There is no M in STEM without Music!” — I might get a few more music warriors to join the movement.

Link to the original article

12 Questions to Exponential Knowledge

One of the very best ways to think about anything is through questions, and the fine art of asking really great questions is perhaps one of the most important capabilities for us to keep practising, practising, practising.

I have adapted some of these really great questions from the Leadership Freak to increase their openness and relevance for us all…

Knowledge and questions:

‘The opportunity of knowing is “not knowing,” effectively.’

Few things surpass the beauty of questions from someone with knowledge. You learn the most about others by the questions they ask, not the statements they make.

Use what you know to know more. Even ignorance can ask great questions.

7 ways to gain knowledge:

  1. Argue to apply. Theories are wonderful. Application brings them to life.
  2. Challenge to prove right.
  3. Go with not against.
  4. Explore for clarification not to devalue. It’s easy to shut others down and learn nothing.
  5. Understand purpose before discounting ideas. Knowledge seeks the reason behind reasons and ideas.
  6. Bring context to discussions. How might supervisors view this, for example.
  7. Pursue clarity until action emerges.

‘Action creates it’s own clarity.’

12 questions toward exponential knowledge:

  1. What impact has this had on your life and/or work?
  2. How did you come to these ideas?
  3. How could others put these ideas into practice?
  4. What difference does it make?
  5. Why does this matter?
  6. What are you trying to accomplish?
  7. Who else is affected by this, and how?
  8. Who benefits? Why? How?
  9. What happens if you try?
  10. What happens if you don’t try?
  11. What if you fail?
  12. What if you succeed?

How can we grow our knowledge, especially when we think we know enough already?

Link to the original article

Mary Lou Jepsen: Could future devices read images from our brains?

As an expert on cutting-edge digital displays, Mary Lou Jepsen studies how to show our most creative ideas on screens. And as a brain surgery patient herself, she is driven to know more about the neural activity that underlies invention, creativity, thought. She meshes these two passions in a rather mind-blowing talk on two cutting-edge brain studies that might point to a new frontier in understanding how (and what) we think.

Can Cognitive Training Make You Smarter?: Interview with Author Dan Hurley

An interview by Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D with author Dan Hurley exploring the promise of cognitive brain training.

Dan Hurley‘s popular feature in The New York Times Magazine, “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?” brilliantly presented multiple perspectives in the cognitive training debate. In his latest book, “Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power“, Dan expanded his investigation of the cognitive training literature and also reviewed other interventions that attempt to increase intelligence. 

How do you define “intelligence”?

Psychologists define it with tests. But those tests are ultimately designed to measure the real-world ability to figure things out, solve problems, and see meaningful patterns in the world around us. And it’s not just “book smarts.”  It includes our ability to understand ourselves and those around us, to handle whatever life throws at us, to make sense of things. Intelligence is what allows us to learn from our experience, to gain insight into life, to juggle multiple demands. With the internet these days, information is everywhere. But intelligence is how we make sense of all that information.

You spend some time in the first chapter defending the importance of intelligence. Why did you feel the need to do that. Do you think intelligence is underrated in society?

If you’ve ever been called “stupid,” as I was a kid, you know how intensely personal and important it is. If you’ve ever had a learning-disabled child, or if your parent is becoming impaired by Alzheimer’s disease, you know how important intelligence is. …These days, it’s become politically incorrect to talk about intelligence. The intelligentsia (pun intended) prefer to talk about grit and determination, or “emotional” intelligence. But wishing away the importance of intelligence doesn’t make it go away.

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What areas of the cognitive training field are most contentious?

Even some of the psychologists who have found strong benefits for training feel nervous about the commercial advocacy of companies like Lumosity. We all know that physical exercise builds muscles…but we don’t yet know exactly which kinds of cognitive exercises work best. That said, I have counted about 75 randomized, placebo-controlled trials (and they’re all cited in my book) demonstrating significant benefits from various kinds of cognitive training—from “working memory” training to physical exercise, learning a musical instrument, mindfulness meditation, transcranial direct-current stimulation and more. I found only four randomized, placebo-controlled trials that found no benefit whatsoever. That’s pretty overwhelming.

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You spoke to K. Anders Ericsson, who studies the development of expertise. Does he think that cognitive training increases in intelligence are irrelevant to the development of world-class expertise?

Ericsson believes that the benefits you get from practice apply only to the specific skill you’re practicing. He published studies showing that even if you practiced memory tricks to learn how to remember a hundred random numbers in a row, you still were no better at remembering a hundred letters in a row, or anything else. In the lingo of psychologists, he believes that training doesn’t “transfer.” Malcolm Gladwell made Ericsson famous in “Outliers” by describing his so-called “law” of 10,000 hours of practice. Ericsson has published studies suggesting that talent doesn’t matter, and that the only thing that does matter is practicing for 10,000 hours in order to become an expert. Whether you want to be a concert pianist or a world-class chess player or anything else, supposedly all you need to do is practice for 10,000 hours and then you’ll be a master.

What do you think of Ericsson’s perspective?

Ericsson’s claims have not been supported by other researchers who have found that talent does matter, and that training in certain tasks does result in “transfer” to improvements in other abilities. Some chess grandmasters practiced for much less than 10,000 hours before they reached the top, whereas other people can practice for much more than 10,000 hours and still not make it. The same is true of intelligence as a trait. Just because you study and study and study doesn’t mean you’re going to get into Harvard. We all know that. Some people are smarter than others. The real question is whether you can increase your intelligence so that the hard work you put in will pay off better.

What kind of effect does cognitive training have on the brain?

There is no question that training causes structural and functional improvement in the brain, as seen on MRI. Most of the changes are seen in the frontal areas of the brain, where high-level thinking occurs. Mindfulness meditation, for instance, has been shown to produce increased white-matter connections between the anterior cingulate cortex, an important region for complex decision-making, and the rest of the brain.

What cognitive functions did you find are most trainable?

Working memory is the ability to juggle multiple items of attention, to manipulate and analyze information. If you try to multiple 26 by 37 in your head, the reason it’s so hard is because of the demands it puts on your working memory. Tons of studies, including the latest one by Randy Engle, show that by training on certain kinds of working-memory tasks, you can improve your working memory overall. This is profoundly important for your ability to multi-task and think through complicated problems.

What interventions are the most effective in improving cognitive ability?

Working-memory training has proved really useful, although exactly which kinds of working-memory tasks are most useful remains unclear. Susanne Jaeggi has focused on the N-back task, which anyone can check out online at www.soakyourbrain.com.  Others prefer various other kinds of working-memory tasks. But plenty of research also shows that physical exercise, learning a musical instrument, and mindfulness meditation can all bring significant benefits. One of the coolest parts of my training was learning to play the Renaissance lute.

Teenagers everywhere want to know: are there any cognitive benefits of first-person shooter games?

Absolutely. These games are so good at improving reaction times that they are used by the U.S. military to train pilots and operators of drones. These games can also improve the “useful field of view,” your ability to see and respond to stimuli at the periphery of your vision, which is incredibly important when driving a vehicle. Other computerized games have been shown to improve older people’s ability to distinguish very fine differences in shades of gray. Strangely, this ability has been shown to be one of the single most important markers of longevity. So if you get better at it, will you actually live longer? That’s not yet clear. But improving your ability to see and respond to your environment can be potentially lifesaving.

How important is exercise?

Research has proved beyond doubt that the brain is actually connected to the heart and lungs via something called the “neck.” Physical exercise is perhaps the best-proved method for improving cognitive function in older people. It’s also critical for children and middle-aged sloths. Some researchers believe that cardiovascular exercise is best, while others insist that strength training is more important.

What about vitamins? Which one should take the most of if I want to think more quickly? Or should I just continue to drink lots and lots of caffeine?

I know that many people believe in the benefits of vitamins and dietary supplements. But there are no good studies showing that any of them really help cognitive function. Large studies of fish oil given to pregnant women have even suggested that there might be some risks to the intellectual abilities of their children. Caffeine, on the other hand, has been repeatedly shown to enhance not just attention, but motivation and even, most recently, memory. And if you can believe it, nicotine also helps. Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are of course extremely dangerous and greatly increase the risk of cancer, heart disease, and much more. But studies in both humans and animals confirm that nicotine, given through a patch or gum, can be a great cognitive enhancer. I actually started using a 7 mg nicotine patch and found it useful, without any noticeable addictiveness.

Can mindfulness meditation make you smarter? What cognitive functions are most affected by mindfulness meditation?

A series of studies by Michael Posner and Yi-Yuan Tang have shown that mindfulness meditation can enhance all kinds of cognitive abilities. Mind-wandering is not helpful when you’re trying to write an article or take a test. On the other hand, some recent studies have suggested that allowing your mind to wander can also be helpful when you need a breakthrough. Some of the greatest scientific insights have occurred when scientists were spacing out.

How transferable are improvements in specific cognitive functions to intelligence more generally?

It’s easy for psychologists to give you a series of tests, have you practice some exercises, and then run follow-up tests to see if you improve better than people who didn’t do those exercises. But figuring out what the real-world benefits are to those improvements is much, much harder. A recent study of older adults given just ten hours of training found that even ten years later, they still enjoyed significant benefits in daily functioning. A hundred years of studies have proved that IQ tests and other tests of cognitive function are very, very predictive of real-world abilities. They’re not perfect—no test is—but on average, just like blood-pressure tests, they’re pretty good at predicting how you’ll do in the future. Many large corporations, as well as the U.S. military, give these tests not because they love tests, but because they really help pick out people who can be successful from those who just lack the ability to learn and function.

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After you assess the results of your own cognitive training, you put it all in perspective by saying:

“And so what? Those are just numbers on a test. In the end, for all of us, the best test of cognitive abilities is one for which there is no answer key. It’s called life.”

Link to the full original article

What’s so positive about positive psychology?

asks Robert Biswas-Diener in Psychology Today

Chances are, if you are reading this then you are at least passingly familiar with the emerging field of positive psychology.

Although every religious and philosophical tradition through antiquity has offered insight into the “good life” it is only in the last couple decades that we have truly been able to turn scientific attention to this important topic in a sophisticated way. Modern scientists have used careful research designs, validated assessments and rich theory to produce new and sometimes counter-intuitive ideas about age-old topics such as happiness, resilience, and hope.

Among the set-pieces of this modern movement are so-called “positive psychology interventions.” These are, more or less, simple behaviours in which a person can engage to improve her own well-being. The most famous of these is the “gratitude exercise.” In this exercise people are instructed to jot down “three things” for which they are grateful. The list might include a reliable automobile, a sunny afternoon, or a healthy child. The list will change from person to person and from time to time. The results are in, however: the gratitude exercise appears to boost individual happiness and buffer people from the deleterious effects of depression. This finding has been replicated and most famously so with a randomised controlled study conducted by positive psychology founder Martin Seligman and his colleagues.  

Since that initial study appeared in 2005 there have been other positive psychology interventions that have been tested and have shown—at least in a preliminary way—evidence for small boosts in happiness. One of these is the “counting kindnesses” intervention conducted by Keiko Otake and her colleagues. As the name implies people who kept a tally of their daily kindnesses felt a little spring in their step as a result.

The publication of the counting kindnesses intervention set me to wondering what the causal mechanisms were that might form the foundation of positive psychology interventions. Could it be, for instance, that the gratitude exercise actually boosts appreciation and this improved mindfulness translates to a better mood? Or might it be that gratitude works primarily by reminding people to appreciate things they overlook, and in this ways functions primarily by acting as an antidote to the natural human tendency to adapt.

Privately, I have been worried by what I see as the uncritical acceptance of these intervention techniques by some coaches and other human service professionals. It’s nice to know that these techniques work — for the most part — but isn’t it even nicer to understand how they work?

For months I harbored a sneaking suspicion that positive psychology interventions such as counting kindnesses and the gratitude exercise were simply “listing interventions.” That is, I was curious to know if we might find the same rise in happiness if we had people simply list anything positive. Imagine having people keep a daily “courage diary” in which they listed three ways they didn’t let discomfort hold them back. Or picture a scenario in which people tally hopes, such as “three things that are likely to happen in the next two weeks that you are eagerly looking forward to.” Could it be that any instance of pen, paper and positivity constitutes an effective positive psychology intervention?

Interestingly, this exact premise was tested in a study that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. The researchers replicated the classic Seligman study using a sample of nearly 1,500 adults ranging in age from 18 to 72. They included the gratitude exercise, a “positive placebo” in which they had participants write for 10 minutes each evening about a positive memory, and a control placebo in which they had participants wrote for 10 minutes each evening about an early life memory (not necessarily a positive one). Using the same happiness assessment employed by Seligman in the original study, the researchers discovered that the positive memory exercise performed roughly in the same way that the gratitude exercise did: both boosted happiness and did so over three and six month follow-ups.

Now, on the one hand, it would seem that the researchers have created yet another positive psychology intervention. Hooray! We can now add the “positive memory exercise” to the stable of happiness boosting activities.

In the end, however, the researchers draw much the same conclusion I do: there is some common factor that acts as the therapeutic mechanism for many of these “listing interventions.”  According to the researchers, engaging in any activity that makes positive self-information more accessible is likely to have a tonic effect on people. This does not mean that we should dismiss positive psychology exercises as somehow “fake.” It does mean that we should not rush to mental closure on their effectiveness or the ways in which we use them. This is an important study because it opens the door to exciting new research questions:

  • Are there different types of positive psychology interventions?
  • Will some types work better with certain people than with others?
  • Are there people for whom these activities are contra-indicated?
  • Is salient positive self-information as powerful as positive information about loved ones?
  • How might these interventions be modified to be more effective across cultural boundaries?

We are just scratching the surface of these tools.

Link to the original article

A Calling To Be Creative

by Douglas Eby

What leads, urges, even compels so many of us to be creatively expressive?

Given that everyone is creative to some degree, why do many people choose careers in the arts, or work that actively engages their creativity?

Most of us will never be actors or other filmmakers – especially ones that are seen and acknowledged publicly – but many of those creators talk about what calls them to engage in creative work, despite the challenges.

One example: Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actress on March 2, 2014 for her role in “12 Years a Slave.”

In her moving acceptance speech, she noted one source of inspiration for her portrayal of a slave: “It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s. And so I want to salute the spirit of Patsey for her guidance.”

She also thanked director Steve McQueen: “You charge everything you fashion with a breath of your own spirit. Thank you so much for putting me in this position, it’s been the joy of my life.”

Creating can be more or less dispassionate, guided by engineering, product development or social needs, for example – but much of what we value in the arts comes from a place in the soul as well as mind.

“Acting is hardly a common career in Kenya for the child of a powerful politician, but Nyong’o’s father, one-time health minister Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, said the family had always supported her dreams.

“She started acting very young, right from kindergarten, and even at home with just the family, she would come up with make-believe stories and perform them for us. She was always imaginative and creative.”

She “was inspired to follow an acting career after working as a production assistant on the 2005 drama ‘The Constant Gardener.’ Actor Ralph Fiennes then told her only to get into acting if she couldn’t live without it. “It’s not what I wanted to hear, but it’s what I needed to hear,” she said.

That idea of pursuing acting – or another art, of course – only if you “can’t live without it” or be happy unless you do it, is something many of the actors and other artists I have quoted over the years say fits for them and their own “calling.”

In her article “The Special Challenges of Highly Intelligent and Talented Women Who Are Moms,” Belinda Seiger writes that in her private psychotherapy practice and her personal life, she has “known many gifted women who seem to possess what I refer to as the ‘rage to achieve.’

“They are constantly driven to learn, to create and to be intellectually productive even while raising young children. Many of these women face periods of frustration when the demands of family and their need for intellectual immersion collides.”

But, Seiger adds, being a mother and actively engaged in other work is not easy: “As one friend who was getting her second master’s degree put it: ‘mass chaos’ ensues when one attempts to become immersed intellectually while simultaneously remaining attentive and available for family responsibilities…”

She notes that “Like gifted children and young adults; gifted adults are distinguishable not only by their IQ’s but by their intensity, multiple talents, high energy, curiosity and obsessive need to increase in-depth knowledge in subjects that interest them. Trying to ignore these qualities can result in a depressed mood, anxiety and feelings of being unfulfilled emotionally and intellectually.”

Link to the original article

Mindfulness Can make You More Creative

by Jeremy Dean, a psychologist and the author of PsyBlog. His latest book is “Making Habits, Breaking Habits: How to Make Changes That Stick“.

An ‘open monitoring’ style of meditation can promote divergent thinking, a crucial aspect of creativity, finds research published in the journalFrontiers in Cognition (Colzato et al., 2012).

Divergent thinking is the kind which is often used at the start of the creative process, in which new ideas are generated.

The typical psychological test of divergent thinking asks participants to name as many uses as they can for a mundane object like a brick or a pen.

In the study by Dr. Lorenza Colzato and colleagues, participants who’d been meditating in an ‘open monitoring’ style came up with the most uses for the mundane object.

An ‘open monitoring’ style of meditation is where you don’t focus on a particular object or sensation, such as your own breath; rather you pay attention to whatever thoughts or sensations you are experiencing at the time.

Problem-solving

The results are fascinating because the study of how meditation affects creativity has had mixed results over the years.

Part of the problem is that there are many different types of creativity and many different types of meditation, which are not often delineated by the studies.

However, this is not the only study to make finer distinctions and show the benefits of meditation for creativity.

A study by Ren et al. (2011) has looked at another crucial area of creativity: problem-solving.

This requires different skills because it’s about gaining a vital insight into a problem that’s already defined.

In this study, people were given insight problems to try and solve.

The results showed that, compared with a control group, those who learned a simple meditation technique, involving focusing on the breath, solved more of the insight problems.

Benefits of meditation

Together these two studies suggest that different types of meditation may be useful for different aspects of creativity.

For generating new ideas, an open monitoring style performs best, then for solving an existing problem, a more focused attention style provides the best results.

It also may begin to show why the previous studies on the connection between meditation and creativity have provided such mixed results.

→ Read on: the benefits of meditation.

Link to the original article

The Heart of Mindfulness

by Marina Illich, Co-founder and Principal at Broad Ventures Leadership

A Sioux saying has it that the longest journey we’ll ever make is the journey from our head to our heart. As an Ivy League-trained academic, some part of me still winces when I hear this kind of adage, thinking it sounds a bit trite or misguided.

But if there’s one thing that more than 20 years of mindfulness training has taught me, it’s this: Few challenges are more important than making that short and inestimably long trip from head to heart.

What brings me to this topic? America is in the throes of a “mindfulness revolution” (see Time magazine’s cover article and Wisdom 2.0). In every sector from business to politics, education, parenting and the military, people are using mindfulness techniques to become more self-aware.

This is good news. Across the nation, women and men are learning simple practices to handle the overwrought stresses of post-modernity with more grace and aplomb. Corporations are teaching executives how to increase focus and attention. Schools are teaching children to be more self-aware and self-regulating. And books offer sage counsel to help parents navigate modern child-raising without losing their marbles. In myriad ways, mindfulness is offering us critical and fabulous skills to slow down and reconnect.

But I also see a worrisome trend afoot. Increasingly, mindfulness is being equated with stress reduction or learning how to center under pressure to enhance performance. This is cause for alarm.

The intention of mindfulness is not to make us more “chill” with the insanities and inanities of our post-modern lives.

It is not designed to help us better tolerate the steam-rolling experience of 12-hour work days and three-hour commutes, short shrift meals and dwindling hours of sleep. It is not there to make us endlessly up our performance inside a crushing cascade of information overload. And it is certainly not designed to have us watch calmly as the earth’s weather patterns erupt into a contagion of calamity.

Mindfulness is not meant to make us better at living lives that drain our ingenuity, silence our compassion, or demoralize us into a state of collective catatonia.

The purpose of mindfulness is to wake us up. It’s designed to reconnect us with our intrinsic ingenuity and our indestructible, innate excellence. The Buddhist world that modern mindfulness practices emerged from is explicit about this: human beings are wired for excellence.

It maintains six ways — known in Buddhist Sanskrit as paramitas — that we are designed to be extraordinary.

1) We are wired to do the right thing, no matter how much the world tests us.

2) We are wired to tolerate what feels intolerable to become fearless in making the world a better place.

3) We are wired for stamina, the kind that has us stand by our vision, unflagging, even when no one believes in us.

4) We are wired to be decisive, acute and undeterred in pursuing what really matters.

5) We are wired to see ourselves and others with the wisdom of kindness and tolerance.

6) And, finally, we are wired to kindle greatness in others through our generosity of spirit.

I’ve taken some liberty in translating from the Sanskrit to make a point: Mindfulness is not about retreating into some bastion of heady, personal calm. Mindfulness is about courageously turning our hearts inside out so that we can actualize our deeply human ability to find solutions and stand in our universal goodness, no matter what the circumstances.

…

Practice mindfulness to be calmer. Hone your breathing meditation so you can be more resilient at work and more present with your kids. Do your noting practice so that you know yourself better. But more than anything, practice mindfulness to break your heart open to your extraordinary excellence and the excellence of everyone around you.

Maybe, just maybe, if we do this kind of work – thankless, heartbreaking, and upending though it may be – we can usher in the kind of collective ingenuity that our world calls for.

Link to the original article

Happiness At Work Edition #87

All of these articles, along with many others, are included in this week’s new collection of ideas about creativity and learning and leadership and resilience and happiness, when the new collection publishes online on Friday 7th March.

Link to the full Happiness At Work Edition #87 collection

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