Motivation

Take Time to Savor Life’s Little Pleasures

September 27, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Happiness researcher Meik Wiking’s The Art of Making Memories (2019) observes that the Danes are famously happy despite “horrific weather and some of the highest tax returns in the world” because they take time to savor life’s little pleasures. It’s part of Hygge (pronounced “hue-guh,”) the Danish wellness mindset that encourages a spirit of contentedness.

When life gets busy, it’s way too easy to rush through the motions without paying attention to little experiences. Our lives ultimately consist of these tiny movements, one after the other. Fresh sheets. The smell of wet earth after rain. An old favorite song at the right moment. The kindness of a stranger. We take these gifts for granted and brush by them without really breathing in their grace.

Wiking suggests that you can truly rejoice in life by training your brain to focus on the positive in your day-to-day experiences. At the end of each month, reflect on the past month by celebrating the “Happy 10.” Look through the photos on your phone, choose your favorite ten memories, put them in an album or journal, and think about why you enjoy them.

Idea for Impact: Happiness isn’t determined by circumstances. Happiness is what happens when you decide to relish joy.

Savor the beauty and richness of simple pleasures. Take a moment at the end of each day/week/month/year to appreciate what you’re grateful for.

Employee Engagement: Show Them How They Make a Difference

September 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The sure-fire way to assist employees find meaning and fulfillment at work is to get them to have even a small interaction with people who directly benefit from the work they’re doing.

One research showed that radiologists developed a stronger sense of the significance of their work if a photo of the patient were attached to an X-ray. “It enhanced their effort and accuracy, yielding 12% increases in the length of their reports and 46% improvement in diagnostic findings.” Radiologists typically don’t interact with patients directly—they work in the background providing interpretation services to other doctors.

Idea for Impact: People are inspired less by what they do and more by WHY

How people see themselves and their meaning and purpose in this world may be the most significant incentive of all.

Empower your employees, especially those that aren’t on the frontlines, with direct reminders of task significance. Invite next-down-the-line customers (virtually or in-person) to share meaningful insights, give appreciation, and share feedback. Promote regular dialogue with customers to help stay relevant and become responsive to customer issues as they arise.

Do These Three Things In The Morning For A Better Day

August 12, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mornings can be challenging to get up and get going, especially when work is home and home is work. If you want to hit the ground running each day, do these three simple things to make your mornings much less frenzied:

1/ Wake up to a clean space. Waking up to a disorganized home, overflowing trash, or a sink full of unwashed dishes can really put a damper on your day. The clutter and untidiness can wind you up if you have no clean cups and plates for your breakfast or you can’t find whatever you need to get your day started. Have a more pleasant and productive morning by taking care of all these chores the night before. Organize together everything you need for the next day.

2/ Make time to exercise. Exercising first thing in the morning doesn’t just perk up your body; it also boosts your spirit and metabolism and leaves you feeling invigorated. If you aren’t a morning-exercise kind of person, try to wake up 15 minutes earlier to do a few simple stretches, pushups, lift hand weights, and pace up and down the stairs a few times. You’ll kick off your day feeling a little more vibrant and refreshed.

3/ Make a to-do list. Start your morning by identifying what your day is going to look like. This way, you’ll feel more in control of your time and get more done. Ask yourself this question, “When the day is over, and I’m getting ready to go to bed, what would I have accomplished today to give me a tremendous sense of achievement?” Prioritize things that have to be at the forefront. Planning is easiest when your mental clarity is sharpest, which, for most people, is first thing in the morning.

A simple morning habit allows you to take control of your emotional state. It sets precedence and intent for the day.

The #1 Reason Why Employees Don’t Speak Up

August 5, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Notwithstanding management’s well-intended open-door policies, employees avoid voicing concerns when they don’t feel safe doing so. They think it’s more harmless to “duck and cover” than to speak up and help the organization.

Employees don’t want to jeopardize their jobs. They don’t want to be labeled troublemakers and alienate themselves from co-workers and supervisors. In some cases, employees’ fears may not be of immediate retaliation but instead a deferred reckoning that could upset their careers years down the line.

The self-preservation motive is so dominant that the perceived risks of speaking up are very personal and immediate to employees. In contrast, the potential benefits to the organization from sharing concerns seem distant and abstract.

Consequently employees often instinctively play it safe by keeping quiet. Often, they rationalize their implied compliance by saying that the concerns are none of their business—and wishing that somebody else would speak up.

Idea for Impact: The freedom to raise questions, concerns, and ideas is at the heart of an open organizational culture. Unless employees are convinced that they’ll be supported to do the right thing, they could hesitate to speak up and help remedy problems before they can blow up.

Change Must Come from Within

July 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you want to become the type of person who wants to change, you must become the type of person who embodies that change repeatedly. You must deliberately weave the change into your sense of identity. Seth Godin notes in The Practice (2020,)

If you want to get in shape, it’s not difficult. Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done.

That’s not the difficult part.

The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.

When you use your actions to drive your identity, you’ll naturally become confident in your ability to make fundamental decisions that sustain—and enhance—who you are.

Idea for Impact: Habits stick when they respond to your sense of identity. Change your identity, change how you want to be seen, and you’ll change your life.

The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails

July 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Weight Watchers (WW) was born from an unmet personal need, as is true with many businesses. Founder Jean Nidetch had struggled with her weight all her life. In her late 30s, she went to a city-run obesity clinic in New York and finally lost the weight she wanted.

Then, when her resolve to maintain a healthy weight wavered, Nidetch recognized that losing weight is easier if she weren’t doing it by herself. Dieting is more than “calories in, calories out.” Eating the right number of calories and exercising doesn’t always work. It isn’t the occasional overindulgence that creates obesity; it’s the steady over-eating—often in surprisingly small amounts.

Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

According to Memoir of a Successful Loser: The Story of Weight Watchers (1970,) Nidetch realized that what people struggling to keep a diet program needed was one another. Dieters needed a space to talk openly about their diet struggles and became answerable to one another.

Determined to stay on track, Nidetch started with the diet that the obesity clinic had given her. She mimeographed it and handed it out to a group of six overweight but determined friends that she invited to her apartment in the Queens. At the first meeting, Nidetch confessed to an addiction to cookies. Her friends sympathized and shared their own calorific woes. Everyone had a good time, and the group agreed to meet the following week again.

Nidetch’s pattern of programming and social support spread quickly. Meetings grew in size. When Nidetch ran out of chairs, she shifted the sessions to a formal assembly room. Weight Watchers was thus born.

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Weight Watchers has outlasted many fad diets, and it continues to be a popular program. People go to Weight Watchers because it works. The program makes its members think of the regimen not as a diet but as a different way of living.

Collectively, members feel positively about their desire to lose weight. They offer support and grant forgiveness for failures to lose weight. Members aren’t thinking of restrictions; they’re thinking of flexibility and abundance. If they tend to be foodies, they don’t need to stop enjoying food.

Weight Watchers groups meet weekly. (7,000 coaches run the meetings.) Each member contributes. Everyone feels invested in accomplishments. The group celebrates as one.

The robust process of celebrating and retelling success stories reinforces the shared goal of pushing limits. In addition, the interaction helps with accountability and encourages participants to stick with their goals.

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Shared interests get us, humans, to show up and be present. We need structure, tools, and support to be successful. We need a community because the fellowship of others with a shared empowering purpose gives us the accountability and inspiration that motivates us to lose weight—or bring about any lasting change.

Do More of What Makes You Productive

June 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

American playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Social Network, and The Newsroom) takes six to eight showers a day whenever he suffers from writer’s block. After realizing that a quick refresher allows him to collect his thoughts, Sorkin had a small shower unit fitted in his office to keep his creativity flowing.

Indeed, per “incubation,” the best solutions to problems can sometimes come about suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your issues.

Idea for Impact: Do more of what makes you productive. Expose yourself to as many productivity ideas as possible. Test different productivity approaches. Keep what works for you; discard the rest.

How to Embrace Multitasking

May 27, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Multitasking imposes cognitive limitations. Incessantly jumping between tasks leads to subpar performance. Not only that, when you’re skittering on the surface of yourself in many places at once, you’re denying true experience.

Evolutionary biologists have argued that the brain wasn’t designed for heavy-duty multitasking. Think of your brain as having multiple processing channels—visual, linguistic, tactile, and so on. Some channels can do only one thing at a time. Therefore, when you’re multitasking and moving attention back and forth between tasks that use different channels, there’s a cognitive penalty to reset and refocus.

In Defense of Multitasking: How to Do It the Right Way

Never double up on tasks that use different channels. Writing two reports simultaneously with a stock market ticker running along the top edge of your screen won’t work. But there’s no harm in surfing Instagram while watching yet another rerun of Seinfeld—you can afford to lose focus on either subject.

If you’re listening to music to improve your focus, avoid songs with lyrics because they’ll engage your brain’s language channel, creating a new distraction.

If something needs your full concentration, give it. Don’t listen to an audiobook when you’re trying to land an airliner in high crosswinds.

Never Multitask Under a Tight Deadline

Pair high-cortical involvement tasks (those that involve judgment) with routine, physical tasks that the cerebellum, the brain’s autopilot, can handle. Chitty-chatty on the phone with your mom is okay while folding laundry. But get off the phone when you’re behind the wheel in bumper-to-bumper city-center traffic.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Shun Multitasking. Put it to Work for Your Life Instead.

Life is a juggling act. In the complex, fast-response world we live in, focusing on one task to exclude others isn’t always an option anymore. Often, you have to address immediately whatever shouts most at you.

Some activities are so dull (driving cross-country through miles and miles of mildly interesting scenery) and aversive that if it weren’t for multitasking, they would never get done at all.

Know when and how to multitask. And when not to. Carve out time for deep thinking and doing the essential things. Learn to protect your “intense focus” times.

Perfect—Or Perfectly Miserable?

May 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The American actor Mandy Patinkin has a reputation as a “self-oriented” perfectionist. He’s one of those who impose exacting standards on themselves and engage in rigorous self-evaluation.

In this interview for The New Yorker, Patinkin reveals how he overcame this tendency:

My children watched me be too hard on myself for years. They’d come to performances, concerts. Then they’d hear their father criticizing it afterwards. One day, my son Gideon and I are walking down the street on the Upper West Side and he wants to talk about his life. He’s talking about bad nights, good nights, et cetera. And he says, “I watched you suffer for so many years over things that I could never understand what you were suffering about, because I was there and I saw it and it was great. I watched you suffering, and I learned that it was meaningless, that it had no worth, it was for nothing.” And I started to weep. My sons knew that it was never worth it.

Idea for Impact: If you tend to fixate on undue self-standards, ask yourself, “To what end?” Recalibrate your expectations. Don’t let your perfectionist tendencies hold you back.

Why You Should Celebrate Small Wins

May 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Small steps are more manageable than big, daunting ones. Small wins aren’t just a great way to make progress. They’re good for your emotional well-being too.

Peter Sims writes in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (2013,)

Small wins are like footholds or building blocks amid the inevitable uncertainty of moving forward, or as the case may be, laterally. They serve as what Saras Sarasvathy calls landmarks, and they can either confirm that we’re heading in the right direction or they can act as pivot points, telling us how to change course.

In the acclaimed paper in which [University of Michigan psychologist Karl] Weick described small wins, published in the January 1984 issue of American Psychologist, he used the example of how helpful it is for alcoholics to focus on remaining sober one day at a time, or even one hour at a time. Stringing together successive days of sobriety helps them to see the rewards of abstinence and makes it more achievable in their minds. Elaborating on the benefits of small wins, Weick writes, “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

Each time you accomplish a small step, have a little voice whisper in your ear, “You accomplished more than you had ten minutes ago!” This affirmation can help you recognize the momentum you’ve created and stimulate you to get absorbed in more of the task. By the end of the hour or the day, you’ll feel like you’ve had multiple wins on your way towards the larger goal.

A big hurdle to change is the resistance from believing that the pain of attempting major change is too rarely worth it. But researchers believe that any accomplishment, no matter how small, activates your brain’s reward circuitry, releasing dopamine, the pleasure hormone. That can evoke the motivational appeal of an outcome, which in turn can hook you toward achieving even more.

Keep sight of the small victories. Those are the ones that keep you going. If you’re a manager, celebrate even ordinary, incremental progress—that’ll improve your team’s engagement.

Idea for Impact: Celebrate your small wins—it’ll make you feel good about yourself. Attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of fear and hopelessness—this is the crux of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT.)

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Motivation

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Idea for Impact: People are inspired less by what they do and more by WHY

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Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

In Defense of Multitasking: How to Do It the Right Way

Never Multitask Under a Tight Deadline

Idea for Impact: Don’t Shun Multitasking. Put it to Work for Your Life Instead.

Wondering what to read next?

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