Archive for happiness – Page 2

What Went Well?

What are you grateful for today? What good did you do today? How were you helpful today? What went well today?

How did it feel to answer these questions? (It felt good, didn’t it?)

Most of us get so caught up in what’s going wrong in life that when something good happens, we often overlook it. When our minds are focused on the bad and the wrong we fail to notice the good and the right.

Here’s a little exercise that you can incorporate into your life to help you notice the good more readily and increase your feelings of happiness and gratitude. It’s called “What Went Well,” and while there are many variations, I especially like Marty Seligman’s. He suggests that at the end of each day, you take a few minutes to write down three things that went well. These things don’t need to be earth shattering in importance (“The corner store is carrying a new flavor of ice cream that I’ve been looking for”), but they can be important (“My daughter was accepted at her first-choice university”). Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote about your daughter being accepted at her first-choice university, you might write “because she was focused on her goal and took the steps necessary to succeed” or “she was very thoughtful in answering the essay on the admissions application.”

It may seem a little awkward at first to write about positive events in your life, but stick with it. It will get easier. You will begin noticing the positive events as they are happening and have the opportunity to RELISH them. I bet that six months from now, you will be less depressed, happier, more grateful and maybe even addicted to this exercise.

Are you already doing a variation on “What Went Well?” Please tell us about it in a comment below.

References

Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish. New York, NY: Free Press.

Image

Naito8 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What You Think About Is What You Think About

A Google search for gratitude + happiness yields 14,600,000 results (in .20 seconds).

Now that in itself is something that I’m grateful for AND it makes me happy. This Thanksgiving season, I explore the connection between gratitude and happiness and how to get more of both.

I’ve noticed that people tend to spend more time thinking about what goes wrong and not enough about what is going right in their lives. People in professions like tax accounting, auditing and law may be even MORE focused on the wrong – the mistakes – because that’s what they are trained and paid to do. To find the wrong and fix it.

What happens when we focus on what’s wrong more than what’s right and good in our lives? Harvard researcher Shawn Achor calls it the “Tetris Effect.” I call it “What You Think About is What You Think About.” Granted, Shawn’s title is a bit catchier, but mine is more descriptive.

Here’s the deal: 27 Harvard students were paid to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row. For many days after, the students reported that they couldn’t stop seeing the Tetris shapes everywhere they looked, with their brains trying to re-arrange everything – from buildings and trees on the landscape to cereal boxes on the shelf in the grocery store – so that they would fit together to form a solid line so as to move on to the next level of the video game. Put simply, they couldn’t stop seeing the world as being made up of sequences of Tetris blocks!

This is caused by a normal physical process that actually changes the wiring of the brain. These new neural pathways warped the way these students viewed real-life situations. So when people are focused on something – anything – their brains adapt and hone in on those circumstances and events. A tax accountant may be terrific at her job, but when she brings her way of looking at the world home, she will miss seeing all the good in her life and may be on the road to depression. The same goes for the great attorney – terrific in court, but not so much at home where family members feel like they are participants in a deposition!

So think about what you think about. Make notes. Later this week, I’ll share some proven techniques to help you focus on the good things in life, and this will increase your happiness AND gratitude.

References

Achor, S. (2010). The happiness advantage: The seven principals of positive psychology that fuel success and performance at work. New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group.

Is Happiness a Luxury Small Businesses Can’t Afford?

As I am preparing for next week’s “Leveraging the Science of Happiness at Work” presentation to the Rogue Valley Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), I’m reflecting on a comment a Facebook friend made the other day when I shared results from a Wall Street Journal survey on happiness in the workplace.

She wrote, “As a small business-owner, no matter the type of business, my primary concern is to make a living, to pay my staff, my taxes and my vendors. Since 2008 when the recession slammed all of us, it’s been a very, very hard slog. Like many other businesses, we’ve laid off employees and we’ve cut costs to the bone. I’m concerned about survival – of my business and of my family. Frankly, ‘happiness’ on the job is merely a luxury, an afterthought that I cannot afford.”

I expect that many people are feeling the same way. What business owners don’t understand is that happiness at work – defined as “a mindset that enables action to maximize performance and achieve potential” – actually saves them money.  In fact, research has proven it can enhance revenue.

Empirical research by iOpeners Institute for People and Performance, involving 9,000 people from around the world, reveals some astonishing findings. Employees who report being happiest at work:

  • Stay twice as long in their jobs as their least happy colleagues
  • Spend double their time at work focused on what they are paid to do
  • Take ten times less sick leave
  • Believe they are achieving their potential twice as much

This means greater outcomes and profits for employers.

And the “science of happiness at work” has big benefits for individuals too. If you’re really happy at work, you’ll solve problems faster, be more creative, adapt fastest to change, receive better feedback, get promoted quicker and earn more over the long-term.

So the next time start to feel that happiness at work is a luxury you can’t afford, think again. Give me a holler if you’d like to see how you can be happier at work. I’ll provide a free individual or team happiness assessment to the first person that contacts me.

 

 

 

Most employee problems are directly related to . . .

I’m presenting tomorrow at the University of New Mexico’s Mentoring Institute Conference on Leveraging the Science of Happiness at Work. Excited! Also doing a poster session and getting my paper published in the proceedings. A copy will soon be on this website.  

Today’s offerings opened with renowned researcher and publisher David Clutterbuck. I was pleasantly surprised that most of what he said was a refrain of the learning and research I have been doing – always nice to confirm!

He is colorful and has some pretty interesting points of view. 
1. Most employee problems are directly related to their supervisors. 
2. If succession planning works, then why do the wrong people keep getting to the top (I think his next book is on succession planning). 

Also, he shared some very powerful questions to use in coaching. 
1. What’s the risk in succeeding?
2. How many lies are you telling yourself about this?

He noted that men and women consistently tell themselves different types of lies. I invite you! Who wants to guess what the differences are?

 

Playing to the Edge in Las Vegas

What an incredible week as I attended the International Coaching Federation’s international conference! The theme was Playing to the Edge. With more than 1,000 coaches from around the world, we gathered together to continue our studies in the art and science of coaching and share perspectives on how we can help businesses and employees achieve their potential in our global economy.

Some of my personal highlights:

Having returned from the conference, renewed and invigorated, I was today’s guest on KCMX 880AM’s “Southern Oregon Live,” where I talked about happiness at work. In the next few weeks, I’ll be speaking at the 2011 Mentoring Conference at the University of New Mexico’s Mentoring Institute; return as a guest to KCMX, where I’ll appear on the “Open for Business” program; and also address the members of the Southern Oregon Chapter of the Society for Human Resources Managers in Medford, Oregon.

The Wall Street Journal is Measuring Happiness at Work

Check this out—The Wall Street Journal is measuring happiness at work using the same assessment tool I have been using with my clients. This link takes you to the article and gives people the opportunity to use the free (short report) assessment. They will be reporting the results next month.

PS: The blog author Jessica Pryce-Jones wrote the book “Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success” is the founder of the iOpener Institute for People and Performance. I’ll be hanging out with Jess this weekend at the International Coaching Federation conference in Las Vegas, where she is one of the speakers.

Cash in on Happiness

Cash in on Happiness
A lack of ethics and fairness in the workplace results in unhappy employees, who in turn become unproductive, lack creativity, and miss more days from work.  Happy employees work “more discretionary hours, take less sick leave, and stay longer in their jobs” (Pryce-Jones, 2010, p. 20). These findings are substantiated within the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and management (Achor, 2010).

Happy employees affect their colleagues and have an especially big impact on their followers (Achor, 2010; Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007; Pryce-Jones, 2010).  Repeated studies by Dr. Fred Luthans (and others) have demonstrated that leaders who have hope, efficacy, resiliency and optimism exhibit a contagion effect on those who report to them.  In a study on a high-tech manufacturing firm, 74 engineering managers received a 2.5-hour mini-intervention designed to increase manager hope, efficacy, resiliency and optimism.  After factoring in time away from the job for participation in the training, company overhead, and training costs, the return on investment was 270% (Luthans et al., p. 225).

The psychological capital and happiness at work concepts are recent phenomena, with their roots dating back to 2002. Research has substantiated their effectiveness in fields as diverse as engineering, law enforcement, insurance sales and manufacturing. The potential applications for other fields are endless, including (medical) helping professions, teaching, and athletics. In my view, increasing employee psychological capital and happiness at work will be critical for businesses wishing to have a competitive advantage in today’s global climate.

 

References

Achor, S. (2010). The Happiness advantage: Seven principles of positive psychology that fuel success and performance at work. New York, NY: Random House, Inc.

Luthans, F., Youssef, C., & Avolio, B. (2007). Psychological capital: Developing the human competitive edge. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Pryce-Jones, J. (2010). Happiness at work: Maximing your psychological captial for success. West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell.