Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Motivation

These are the Two Best Employee Engagement Questions

By Leave a Comment

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. The Speed Trap: How Extreme Pressure Stifles Creativity
  2. People Work Best When They Feel Good About Themselves: The Southwest Airlines Doctrine
  3. Treat Employees Like Volunteers
  4. The Hot-Desking Lie: How It Killed Focus and Gutted Collaboration
  5. Teams That Thrive make it Safe to Speak & Safe to Fail

How to … Make Work Less Boring

By Leave a Comment

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 Habits Stick
  2. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  3. How to (Finally!) Stop Procrastinating, Just Do It
  4. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

By Leave a Comment

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 Habits Stick
  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  4. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  5. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

By Leave a Comment

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.

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. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  2. If Stuck, Propel Forward with a ‘Friction Audit’
  3. Resolution Reboot: February’s Your Fresh Start
  4. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  5. Be Careful What You Start

How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life

By Leave a Comment

An “exercise snack” is a short little bite of physical activity you can do anywhere, anytime. You don’t even need to change your clothes. Try 10 push-ups, stair climbing, or a brisk walk or jog around the block.

Exercise snacking increases the amount of activity in your day, and breaks up sedentary time, which is increasingly being 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. Do Things Fast
  5. Make Time to Do it

Goal-Setting for Managers: Set Tough but Achievable Challenges

By 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.

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. From the Inside Out: How Empowering Your Employees Builds Customer Loyalty
  2. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  3. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

By Leave a Comment

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. Did School Turn You Into a Procrastinator?
  2. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  3. Do Things Fast
  4. Big Shifts Start Small—One Change at a Time
  5. First Things First

3 Ways to … Eat Healthy

By Leave a Comment

Mindful eating for wellbeing isn’t just about what foods to eat but also about establishing and maintaining a healthy relationship with food.

  1. Slow down and really be present while you eat. Mindful eating is best achieved when your focus is on the meal. Put your phone or book elsewhere and just focus on your food’s taste, smell, texture, and look. You’ll enjoy the food so much more when you savor it. Wolfing down your food leads to overeating because your brain doesn’t realize it’s had enough to eat.
  2. Honor your hunger and fullness—relearn what it feels like when you’re hungry and full. Don’t overeat or eat the wrong things because your environment triggers your appetite. Change your environment, so it works for you rather than against you.
  3. Use smaller plates. The larger the portion size, the more you’ll eat. Aim to eat healthy most of the time and allow some wiggle room. There’re no ‘bad’ foods, and identifying foods as ‘off-limits’ only makes you want them more. Practice portion control if you step off your diet for a special occasion.

Idea for Impact: Building wellness begins with really paying attention. Change behavior with simple nudges.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails
  2. Be Careful What You Start
  3. Eat with Purpose, on Purpose
  4. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  5. Your To-Do List Isn’t a Wish List: Add to It Selectively

You Shouldn’t Force Yourself to Be a Morning Person

By Leave a Comment

Since the dawn of time, the world has venerated early birds and propagated the notion that getting up with the lark makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise. The internet is full of references to the early-to-rise habits of Tim Cook, Michelle Obama, or some celebrity du jour. Those who struggle with mornings are slandered as slothful.

Even the wiser productivity gurus often fail to acknowledge that “4 a.m. is the most productive hour” not because of some configuration of the planets or some scientific phenomenon but simply because there are fewer distractions at that hour.

Night owls, no need to force yourself into a mold that doesn’t work for you. No need to completely adjust your life and feel weary and less productive throughout the day.

Overhauling your sleep times may not have much effect. Ultimately, productivity isn’t about the time you wake up. It’s accommodating your most challenging tasks when your brain is working at its peak.

Idea for Impact: All of us are born predisposed to function better at certain times of the day. The more you understand your chronotype and adapt your work around your naturally preferred times, the more productive you’ll be. Experiment with your sleep schedule, but don’t push too far out of your natural preference. Stick with what works.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Kickstart Your Day with Focus & Set a Daily Highlight to Stay on Track
  2. Don’t Do the Easiest Jobs First
  3. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress
  4. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  5. How to … Combat Those Pesky Distractions That Keep You From Living Fully

How to … Make a Dreaded Chore More Fun

By Leave a Comment

If everyday chores feel like a drag and you don’t have the motivation to do anything but be on your phone and laze around, consider the following actions that have most benefited my clients:

  • Find a friend you can talk to long-distance while you both tackle household chores. You can keep each other accountable.
  • Challenge yourself to beat the clock. Set a time to complete the task, and see how much ahead you can get it done.
  • Do “three-minute tidy” routines throughout the day. Choose a room or clutter magnet and go at it for three minutes. Sprucing up as-you-go throughout the day is more agreeable than a long list of must-dos that must be tackled at once.
  • Begin a dreaded chore in the morning or at the earliest you can. So the rest of the day is free for having some fun. The sooner you check off your to-do list, the more motivated you tend to feel.
  • Embrace the mess. It’s okay is good enough. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home. Think about it as a form of prioritization.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Five Ways … You Could Prevent Clutter in the First Place
  2. Get Unstuck and Take Action Now
  3. A Guaranteed Formula for Success: Identify Your #1 Priority and Finish It First
  4. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  5. The Mental Junkyard Hour