• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Motivation

How to … Change Your Life When Nothing Seems to be Going Your Way

May 4, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stay Positive When Nothing Is Going Your Way

Recollect what it means to be human: we go through ups, downs, shortcomings, triumphs, losses, confidence, and apprehensions are all just a part of life. While unpleasant, failure is also a common and essential element of life. Bearing failure with equanimity is more likely to help you find success and get what you want.

Next, think about something that’s challenged you in the past and consider how you’re better off for having been through that experience. When you acknowledge you’ve overcome setbacks before, you can recognize that you can—and will—weather this one, too.

Ponder about whatever challenges you presently and see if you can reframe it. Try to perceive it as an opportunity for growth and consider what gifts could come from this experience. Visualizing successful outcomes is the best way to reset or repurpose your goals.

Idea for Impact: Developing resiliency isn’t easy, but excessive rumination and dwelling on past failures for longer than necessary will keep you stuck. When things aren’t going your way, challenge yourself to find any upsides, no matter how small. Find the good in the less-than-ideal. You’re more likely to get unstuck by trying a low-risk baby step forward.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. 12 Sensible Ways to Realize Self-Responsibility
  2. Perspective is a Fabulous Gift. Your Life is Your Contribution.
  3. Choose Pronoia, Not Paranoia
  4. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy
  5. Nothing Like a Word of Encouragement to Provide a Lift

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Adversity, Attitudes, Discipline, Emotions, Mental Models, Motivation, Resilience, Success, Wisdom

Tidy Up in a Snap: Harnessing the Power of 3-Minute Chores

May 1, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Three-Minute Chores to Help You Focus

The root cause of clutter is often procrastination when it comes to making decisions, even small ones. For instance, choosing to toss your keys and wallet in random places instead of setting them in the same spot each time you arrive home. Neglecting to hang your coats or putting away your tennis racquet can also contribute to the problem.

Many of us tend to ignore household chores until the mess becomes overwhelming. But even if you feel like you can’t tackle the entire house, committing to just three minutes of tidying up can make a huge difference in the appearance of your home. This small amount of time can be incredibly valuable if you use it intentionally.

Here’s a hack to help you get started:

  1. Recognize the power of three minutes.
  2. Set a timer for three minutes and choose an area to focus on until the timer goes off.
  3. Confront the mess and clean it up.

You’ll be surprised at how much more orderly your home will look in just three minutes. Making your bed, picking up clothes from the floordrobe and the chairdrobe, stowing away shoes, unloading the dishwasher, vacuuming one room, or taking the recyclables to the car trunk are all simple tasks that can transform your living space. By repeating these tiny time investments throughout the day, you’ll see a significant change in the overall cleanliness of your home.

Idea for Impact: As you begin tidying up even a small portion of cluttered areas, you’ll notice momentum starting to build. Before long, you may find yourself actively seeking out additional spaces to tidy. Within a matter of days, it becomes clear that letting things go unchecked is what led to being overwhelmed by clutter in the first place. This sense of progress can be incredibly motivating, making it more likely that you’ll stick to your new habits and achieve success in your efforts. In an ideal world, we would all adopt the mindset of cleaning up as we go.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun
  2. Dear Hoarder, Learn to Let Go
  3. Thinking Straight in the Age of Overload // Book Summary of Daniel Levitin’s ‘The Organized Mind’
  4. Elevate Timing from Art to Science // Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’
  5. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Clutter, Discipline, Motivation, Procrastination, Productivity, Tardiness

Treat Employees Like Volunteers

April 20, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Treat Employees Like Volunteers Treat your employees as volunteers—as if they’re free to leave at any time. Volunteers want to connect to a mission. They want to make an impact by investing their time and energy because they want to, not because they need to. Moreover, unlike employees, volunteers aren’t constrained by the command-and-control structure.

You’ll pay greater attention to the non-monetary needs of your employees, and you’ll better align your goals and their goals. You’ll be more intentional, preferring transformational motivation, not transactional motivation.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions
  2. Create a Diversity and Inclusion Policy
  3. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity
  4. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  5. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around

Filed Under: Leading Teams, Managing People Tagged With: Great Manager, Human Resources, Motivation, Performance Management, Workplace

These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions

March 30, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions Engaged employees are more likely to be effective, stay with your company, and nurture a favorable corporate culture. To gauge employee engagement levels regularly, run a pulse survey and ask these two questions:

  1. To what degree are you proactively engaged in improving the tasks you’re responsible for? Does your workplace actively seek your ideas to make those improvements?
  2. To what degree do the processes that you are working with enable you to be highly successful in your job?

Seek ideas meaningful for improvements from people on the job. Demonstrate commitment to taking significant action and follow through.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Treat Employees Like Volunteers
  2. Employee Engagement: Show Them How They Make a Difference
  3. Create a Diversity and Inclusion Policy
  4. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity
  5. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

Filed Under: Leading Teams, Managing People, MBA in a Nutshell Tagged With: Great Manager, Human Resources, Leadership, Motivation, Performance Management, Workplace

How to … Make Work Less Boring

January 28, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to ... Make Work Less Boring Time passes faster when you divide a big chunk into lots of smaller chunks. So, if you’re on an inescapably boring path, break it into units. And, for each dreaded task, ask yourself, “What’s the most fun way I could do this?” Work at a coffee shop? Listen to your favorite music? Reward yourself upon its completion?

As Mary Poppins pleaded, “In every task that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick
  2. Five Ways … You Could Stop Procrastinating
  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress [Mental Models]
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Discipline, Lifehacks, Motivation, Procrastination, Stress, Time Management

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

January 5, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

  • Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
  • Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
  • Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
  • Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick
  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  4. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  5. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Anxiety, Change Management, Discipline, Goals, Lifehacks, Motivation, Procrastination, Stress

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

January 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Developing Consistency When Creating New Habits

The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Habits Take a Long Time to Create Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  2. Real Ways to Make New Habits Stick
  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  5. Small Steps, Big Revolutions: The Kaizen Way // Summary of Robert Maurer’s ‘One Small Step Can Change Your Life’

Filed Under: Living the Good Life, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Change Management, Discipline, Goals, Lifehacks, Motivation, Procrastination, Targets

How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life

December 23, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to ... Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life An “exercise snack” is a short bite of physical activity you can do anywhere, anytime. You don’t even need to change your clothes. Try ten push-ups, stair climbing, brisk walking, or jogging around the block.

Exercise snacking increases the physical activity in your day and breaks up sedentary time, which is increasingly linked to chronic health risks.

It may not seem like much, but several scientific studies show that interleaving brief fitness routines a few times into your day not only encourages your body to feel better, but also contributes to meaningful gains in fitness and overall health. It improves your mood, stimulates creativity, and enhances focus, making it an all-around win for your health and productivity. Best of all, exercise snacking removes the pressure of committing to a long, once-a-day sweaty session.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  2. How to … Nap at Work without Sleeping
  3. How to Keep Your Brain Fresh and Creative
  4. Easy Ways to Boost Your Focus & Break That Awful Multitasking Habit
  5. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus

Filed Under: Health and Well-being, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Balance, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Motivation, Time Management, Wellbeing

Goal-Setting for Managers: Set Tough but Achievable Challenges

December 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Finding the middle ground between setting the bar too low and too high can challenge managers.

Sure, aggressive goals can spark great accomplishments, but they also can induce employees to bend or break the rules in pursuit of those goals, as the Wells Fargo and Volkswagen scandals illustrate.

Set Tough but Achievable Challenges When employees get comfortable with their usual tasks, it’s time to push them outside their comfort zones. New responsibilities can propel employees to take on new challenges and learn new things.

However, before giving employees new tasks, take away some of the older responsibilities they’ve already mastered. Many people feel they have an unrealistic amount of work to do already. If you aren’t prudent enough to keep your employees’ workloads in check, giving “stretch” assignments can lead to burnout, not growth.

Idea for Impact: Goals that are too high or low can be demotivating. Set goals that are challenging and inspiring but with extra effort, realistically attainable.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. Don’t Push Employees to Change

Filed Under: Leading Teams, Managing People Tagged With: Coaching, Employee Development, Goals, Motivation, Performance Management

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

November 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action While it is helpful to be motivated and get into the right mindset to, say, exercise, it’s far easier to just show up at the gym and get started on a small quest, even when you don’t really feel like doing it. You’re likely to habituate to new behaviors in a way that circumvents your innate resistance to change.

Minor adjustments can add up and make a big difference. As Harvard psychologist Susan David writes in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016,)

Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view—that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habitual parts of life, which then afford tremendous leverage for change.

Idea for Impact: Waiting for the right mindset to “show up” can be a losing strategy. Taking action is often easier than controlling your mental state. Don’t overly focus on the very thing that’s harder to control. Take the next baby step forward.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Banish Your Inner Perfectionist
  2. This New Year, Forget Resolutions, Set Intentions Instead
  3. First Things First
  4. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  5. 5 Minutes to Greater Productivity [Two-Minute Mentor #11]

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Decision-Making, Discipline, Getting Things Done, Goals, Motivation, Procrastination

Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Popular Now

Anxiety Assertiveness Attitudes Balance Biases Books Coaching Conflict Conversations Creativity Critical Thinking Decision-Making Discipline Emotions Entrepreneurs Etiquette Feedback Getting Along Getting Things Done Goals Great Manager Leadership Leadership Lessons Likeability Mental Models Mentoring Mindfulness Motivation Networking Performance Management Persuasion Philosophy Problem Solving Procrastination Relationships Simple Living Social Life Social Skills Stress Thinking Tools Thought Process Time Management Winning on the Job Wisdom Worry

About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

Get Updates

Signup for emails

Subscribe via RSS

Contact Nagesh Belludi

RECOMMENDED BOOK:
Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express

Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express: Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie has her brilliant detective Hercule Poirot hunt for a killer aboard one of the world’s most famous passenger trains.

Explore

  • Announcements
  • Belief and Spirituality
  • Business Stories
  • Career Development
  • Effective Communication
  • Great Personalities
  • Health and Well-being
  • Ideas and Insights
  • Inspirational Quotations
  • Leadership
  • Leadership Reading
  • Leading Teams
  • Living the Good Life
  • Managing Business Functions
  • Managing People
  • MBA in a Nutshell
  • Mental Models
  • News Analysis
  • Personal Finance
  • Podcasts
  • Project Management
  • Proverbs & Maxims
  • Sharpening Your Skills
  • The Great Innovators
  • Uncategorized

Recently,

  • How Thought-Stopping Can Help You Overcome Negative Thinking and Get Unstuck
  • Potluck Perfect: The Dos and Don’ts of Etiquette
  • Inspirational Quotations #999
  • Availability Heuristic: Our Preference for the Familiar
  • The Bikeshedding Fallacy: Why Trivial Matters Eclipse the Important Ones
  • The Streisand Effect: When Trying to Hide Only Makes it Shine
  • Mise En Place Your Life: How This Culinary Concept Can Boost Your Productivity

Unless otherwise stated in the individual document, the works above are © Nagesh Belludi under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. You may quote, copy and share them freely, as long as you link back to RightAttitudes.com, don't make money with them, and don't modify the content. Enjoy!