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5 Ways to Be Happier – And More Successful

December 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What does happiness have to do with success? As it turns out, a lot – 75%, to be exact. That’s because the dopamine that floods your brain when you’re happy also turns on all the learning centers in your brain.  Thus, happiness breeds success.

According to Shawn Achor, author of the international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage, and a leading expert on the connection between happiness and success, your brain is not only open to learning when you’re happy, but you actually perform better when you’re happy – your energy level, creativity, and productivity all increase.

In my last blog post, I shared Achor’s 3 criteria for success – optimism, social support, and the ability to see stress as a challenge rather than a threat. Raising your level of optimism to increase your happiness requires you to rewire your brain.

Despite what it may sound like, rewiring your brain is not hard. Simply do the following 5 things every day for 21 days:

3 gratitudes: Write down 3 new things you are grateful for each day, and you will automatically look for the positive, not the negative.

Journaling: Journal each day about 1 positive experience you had that day, and your brain will relive it, adding to your feeling of happiness.

Exercise: As you work out every day, you will teach your brain that your behavior matters.

Meditation: Meditating daily will help you overcome the ADHD society we live in, allowing  you to focus on one task at a time.

Random acts of kindness: Each morning when you open your email, send a short, positive message to someone in your network.

Achor says that if you do these activities, you will work more optimistically and successfully. With scientific backing to support his ideas, it is worthwhile to start them today. Select at least one you can commit to and work towards your 75%.  Good luck!

Filed Under: Tips

The New Formula for Success

December 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

 As a leader responsible for an organization’s success, one thing that is always in the back of your mind is how to improve performance at work – your own performance and your employees’ performance.

The answer lies in psychology, specifically positive psychology, and one of the best people to learn about improving performance at work is Shawn Achor, author of the international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage, and a leading expert on the connection between happiness and success.

During his TEDx Talk in 2011 (which is very funny and worth watching), he said that if you change the lens, you change the reality.  What he means by that is if you change the way you look at the world, you can shape your success, because 90% of our happiness level is predicted by how we look at the world.

Achor says that right now, the accepted formula for happiness and success is backwards. We think that if we work harder, we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, we will be happier.  But this is wrong for 2 reasons:

  1. Every time we achieve success, we change the goal posts for success.
  2. By constantly changing what we consider successful, we will never reach happiness.

We need to completely change what we consider success, and the first step is understand that 75% of our success relies on our:

  1. Optimism levels
  2. Social support
  3. Ability to see stress as a challenge rather than a threat

In my next post, I will share Achor’s formula for changing our happiness levels. Till then, spend 15 minutes writing down how can you improve each of the above 3 elements.

Filed Under: Tips

3 Ways to Build a Career You Love

November 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

In my previous blog post, I gave an overview of author and Georgetown University professor Cal Newport’s new book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, in which he argues why skills really do trump passion.

 

 

In this article, he says:

“there’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions that can be transformed into a career…. Instead of daydreaming about what else is out there, turn your attention toward getting the most out of what you have now. Aim to cultivate passion, not follow it.”

Newport provided 3 strategies that anyone – at any point in their career – can follow to build a career they love:

Focus on what you offer your job, not what your job offers you

Competence in a job or skill gives you more freedom over what you do and how you do it.  Ask yourself, “How do I get better?” to put yourself on the path to a compelling career.

Leverage your value

Once you have gained competency and autonomy in a job – and are therefore valuable to your organization – you can leverage that value to move closer to your dream lifestyle. Though it can be hard, be patient as you build your skills and be ready to take advantage of your value once you have earned it.

Seek flexibility, not specificity

When you are choosing between positions or deciding whether or not to leave  a current position, prioritize flexibility. Ask yourself, “Will this job offer me interesting options if I start to become really good at what I do?” This ensures you won’t focus on specifics of the job, which will change, but rather on the flexibility you will have to create your dream job.

Filed Under: Tips, Uncategorized

Why it is More than Following Your Passion

November 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to author and Georgetown University professor Cal Newport, following your passion is bad advice. In his new book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, he makes a good argument for why skills really do trump passion.

Newport says that

“…preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work…. [The advice to follow your passion] can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.”

After spending time with people who love their jobs – from organic farmers to freelance computer programmers – Newport details what they did to develop their careers – and what mistakes they made along the way.

“Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter…. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

So, what do you need to do to develop a career you love?

  1. Master a difficult, valuable skill
  2. Build career capital – skills, relationships, and a body of work
  3. Develop a craftsman mindset – look inside and ask what you can offer the world
  4. Take small steps to expand your capabilities

Once you open up your options and better understand what you really like to do (and are good at doing!), you can create a career that you are passionate about.

Filed Under: Tips, Uncategorized

How Can You Be Happy At Home And Live A Life Of Integrity?

October 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In my previous blog post, I recounted how Harvard Business School’s (HBS) 2010 graduating class asked Professor Clay Christensen to speak to them about how to apply his principles and thinking around developing new technologies and building new growth businesses to their personal lives.

He asks his students to use the same techniques they learned in class to form answers to three questions:

  1. How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
  2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
  3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

My previous post helped you answer the first question; let’s move on the second and third.

How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?

Prof. Christensen said you must create a strategy for your life, just as a company creates a long-term strategy for its own success.  How do you want to spend your time, talents, and energy?

Think of all the aspects of your life that demand those 3 resources: your spouse, kids, hobbies, sports, friends, family, career, etc. Just as a company has a limited amount of time, energy and talent, so do you.

Create a schedule that allocates your time, energy, and talent to each aspect of your life to ensure you keep your life balanced, healthy, and fulfilling.

How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Or, how can I live a life of integrity?

In our personal lives, we often make excuses when we choose between right and wrong. We say, “I know this is against the rules, but if I do it just this once, it’ll be OK.” The consequences of doing something wrong “just this once” are ignored, and it can become a slippery slope.

As Prof. Christensen said, it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. Think about yourself what you stand for from an ethical and moral standpoint. Jot them down and then create rules for your life around your principles. Read over your rules once a week to keep them top-of-mind.

An experienced and certified coach can help you make the time to answer these questions and create your schedule to better allocate your time, energy and talent.  Winning Ways offers assessments that identify your top values and helps you understand how to use the information to hold to your principles 100% of the time.  Call to find out more.

Filed Under: Tips, Uncategorized

How Can You be Happy In Your Career?

October 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked Professor Clay Christensen to speak to them about how to apply his principles and thinking around developing new technologies and building new growth businesses to their personal lives. In response, he shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life.

 

 

First he explained that on the last day of class, he asks his studens to use the same techniques they learned in class to form answers to three questions:

  1. How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
  2. How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
  3. How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

These are tough questions to answer, including the 3rd one, which on its surface, is quite funny.  However, considering that 2 of the 32 people in Prof. Christensen’s Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail and that Jeff Skilling of Enron was a classmate of his at HBS, well, you get the picture.

How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?

Remember that finding happiness in your career has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.

As Prof. Christensen explained, “Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.”

Spend 10 or 15 minutes jotting down all the ways you can maximize your happiness at work.  What is something new you’d like to learn? What project would you like to take on? How can you help others within your organization? How can your supervisor better recognize your hard work?

Then distribute those questions to your employees or direct reports.  Their answers can guide you to become a more effective leader.

In my next post, we’ll focus on the second and third questions.

Filed Under: Tips

8 Elements of Running Productive Meetings

September 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One hallmark of effective leaders is their ability to run productive meetings, a.k.a meetings that connect people and ideas and are informative.

To ensure your meetings make a team even more cohesive and produce action items to further a program or project, here is a checklist to keep you on track:

 

1. Clear objective: make sure your meeting has one or two goals, and that all attendees are informed of them.

2. Circulate an agenda: to keep a meeting focused, share an agenda so attendees know what to expect and how they can contribute.

3. Discuss new items: don’t rehash old business or topics if everyone is already well-versed in them; focus on new topics that are forward-looking.

4. Stick to the agenda: it can be hard to keep discussions on focused, so if a conversation veers off onto a new topic, offer to discuss it offline, after the meeting.

5. Keep your eye on the clock: be respectful of everyone’s time by starting and stopping your meetings on time.

6. Encourage interaction: ask for and encourage questions, comments, and ideas throughout the meeting to keep everyone involved.

7. Avoid being repetitive: share a thought or idea once, and move on. If a meeting attendee keeps repeating himself, gently cut him off to move on to the next topic.  If someone arrives late, don’t repeat everything they missed; instead, offer to bring them up to speed after the meeting.

8. Confirm action items: before the meeting adjourns, briefly review all action items, who is responsible for them, and when they are due.  In doing so, you will be reminding attendees that their time was well spent.

Filed Under: Leadership, Tips

3 Steps to Becoming a Confident Leader

September 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No matter how confident and successful the leader, they occasionally doubt themselves.  Have you ever thought:

• I did the wrong thing

• I shouldn’t say anything

• They’re going to disagree with me

If you have, you are not alone. Those doubts often creep in when you start worrying about the worst possible outcome.  It is important to remember that confidence comes from caring enough to make tough decisions and being cognizant of what the various outcomes could be – but letting go of the worries.

To build and reinforce your confidence when you are worried, here are 3 simple things to do:

 Listen to yourself

Trust yourself enough to act on not only what you feel, but what you know. By the time you are ready to make a big decision, you have done the research, weighed the pros and cons, and investigated the various outcomes.

Analyze your thoughts

Think about if any of your doubts are even true – or likely to happen.  If you worry about speaking up or trying out an entire new way of doing something, how likely is your message or new process going to be rejected?

Confirm your expectations

Put a plan in place around what you are going to say and how you are going to handle the situation when it comes time to make the big decision.  Once you are mentally prepared, you will be able to handle whatever comes up with confidence.

Filed Under: Leadership, Tips

The 7 Ways of Leading – and How to Improve Your Skills

August 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A successful leader is not afraid of change.  He or she is comfortable taking risks and making the big and small operational and organizational changes that will increase profits, expand market share, and even transform an industry.

Understanding the unique strengths necessary to be a successful leader begins with understanding how you interpret your own and others’ behavior and how you maintain power or protect against threats. There are 7 ways of leading, all with their own strengths and weaknesses:

Opportunist: Good in emergencies and pursuing sales, but so focused on winning in any way possible that few people will follow them over the long-term.

Diplomat: Good at keeping a team together and on track, but avoids conflict, thus making him or her unable to provide harsh feedback or make difficult decisions.

Expert: Good as an individual contributor, but relies on logic, numbers, and expertise and lacks emotional intelligence.

Achiever: Good at meeting strategic goals, managing others, and working on a team, but lacks the creativity to develop long-term strategic plans.

Individualist: Good in highly innovative and creative industries, but ignores inconvenient rules, processes, and people in order to complete projects.

Strategist: Good at generating organizational and personal change, collaborating, integrating their vision with the pragmatic steps needed to get there, and challenging the status quo.  As a leader, no weaknesses.

Alchemist: Good at generating social transformations and reinventing organizations in historically significant ways.  As a leader, no weaknesses.

One of the most effective ways to develop the skills of a strategist is by establishing a mentorship group with people in your network, such as board members, executives, and industry leaders.  By challenging each others’ assumptions and practices, you will all develop into stronger leaders.

Filed Under: Tips

Lead Yourself First: Books to help you get there

July 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

 

 

Feel the Fear . . . and Do It Anyway
by Susan Jeffers, Ph.D

Are you afraid of making decisions . . . asking your boss for a raise . . . leaving an unfulfilling relationship . . . facing the future? Whatever your fear, here is your chance to push through it once and for all. In this enduring guide to self-empowerment, Dr. Susan Jeffers inspires us with dynamic techniques and profound concepts that have helped countless people grab hold of their fears and move forward with their lives.

Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor E. Frankl

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

The On-Purpose Person: Making Your Life Make Sense
by Kevin W. McCarthy

Nothing adds more fullness and meaning to your life than discovering your purpose and living it out every moment of your life. With The On-Purpose Person, you’ll be on your way to greater order and clarity within 30 minutes of picking up the book. This entertaining story format provides clear principles that are easy to apply to everyday life. You’ll put them into practice immediately. Regardless of whether you’re in your teens or well into retirement, being on-purpose will inspire and guide you to live true to yourself..
Find Your Courage: 12 Acts for Becoming Fearless at Work and in Life
by Margie Warrell

From popular life coach and motivational speaker Margie Warrell comes an inspiring, practical guide for finding the courage to change any–or every–aspect of your life. Warrell’s “12 Acts of Courage” challenges you to rethink your “life scripts,” overcome everyday fears, and dream bigger. Each chapter includes proven strategies and “Courage Exercises” to help you harness their inner strength and make meaningful changes in your personal and professional lives.

Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee

Drawing from decades of research within world-class organizations, the authors show that great leaders excel not just through skill and smarts, but by connecting with others using Emotional Intelligence competencies like empathy and self-awareness. The best leaders, they show, have “resonance”–a powerful ability to drive emotions in a positive direction to get results–and can fluidly interchange among a variety of leadership styles as the situation demands. Groundbreaking and timely, this book reveals the new requirements of successful leadership.

Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently
by Marcus Buckingham

Read Find Your Strongest Life and discover: How to make the most of the role you were born to play; How to get others to understand who you really are; The successful strategies of other women like you.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
by Patrick Lencioni

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.
Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

Kiss That Frog!: 12 Great Ways to Turn Negatives into Positives in Your Life and Work
by Brian Tracy and Christina Tracy Stein

Just like the lonely princess in the fairy tale who was reluctant to lock lips with a warty frog and transform him into a handsome prince, something stops many of us short of attaining our dreams. Our negative thoughts, emotions, and attitudes can threaten to keep us from achieving all that we’re capable of. Here bestselling author and speaker Brian Tracy and his daughter, therapist Christina Tracy Stein, provide a set of practical, proven strategies anyone can use to turn those negative frogs into positive princes.

Tracy and Stein present a step-by-step plan that addresses the root causes of negativity, helps you uncover blocks that have become mental obstacles, and shows how you can transform them into stepping-stones to achieve your fullest potential. The book distills, in an accessible and immediately useful form, what Tracy has presented in more than 5,000 talks and seminars with more than five million people in fifty-eight countries and what Stein has learned through thousands of hours of counseling people from all walks of life.

The Choice
by Og Mandino

Choice! The key is Choice. You  have options. You need not spend your life  wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame,  and self-pity. But, hold on! If this is true then  why have so many among us apparently elected to  live in that manner? The answer is obvious. Those who  live in unhappy failure have never exercised their  options for a better way of life because they have  never been aware that they had any  Choices !

One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way
by Robert Maurer, Ph.D.

Introducing the practical and inspirational guide to incorporating Kaizen and its powerful principles into one’s daily life. Rooted in the two thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching–”The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”–Kaizen is the art of making great and lasting change through small, steady increments. Kaizen is the tortoise versus the hare. Kaizen is the eleven Fortune 500 companies that significantly outperformed the market through moderate, step-by-step actions. Kaizen is losing weight not by a crash diet (which more often than not crashes) but by eating one bite less at each meal–then, a month later, eating two bites less. Kaizen is starting a life-changing exercise program by standing–just standing–on a treadmill for one minute a day.
Written by an expert on Kaizen–Dr. Robert Maurer, a psychologist on the staff at the UCLA medical school who speaks and consults nationally–One Small Step is the gentle but potent way to effect change. Beginning by outlining the all-important role that fear plays in all types of change–and Kaizen’s ability to circumvent it–Dr. Maurer then explains the 7 Small Steps: how to Think Small Thoughts, Take Small Actions, Solve Small Problems, and more. He shows how to perform mind sculpture–visualizing virtual change so that real change comes more naturally. Why small rewards motivate better than big rewards. How great discoveries are made by paying attention to the little details most of us overlook. Hundreds of examples of Kaizen at work grace the book, as well as quotes from W. Edwards Deming (who brought Kaizen to Japanese industry), Peter Drucker, coach John Wooden, and others.

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in their groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. Their Full Engagement Training System is grounded in twenty-five years of working with great athletes — tennis champ Monica Seles and speed-skating gold medalist Dan Jansen, to name just two — to help them perform more effectively under brutal competitive pressures. Now this powerful, step-by-step program will help you to: Mobilize four key sources of energy ; Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal ; Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do; Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals.

            The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully. It provides a clear road map to becoming more physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned — both on and off the job.

Developing the Leader Within You
by John C. Maxwell

Few of us are natural-born leaders, according to John C. Maxwell, author of Developing the Leader Within You. Fortunately though, “the traits that are the raw material of leadership can be acquired,” he promises. “Link them up with desire and nothing can keep you from becoming a leader. This book will supply the leadership principles. You must supply the desire.” True to his words, Maxwell offers a detailed and inspiring primer on becoming a leader. Even the Table of Contents reads like a motivational poster.

Maxwell (The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader), who is the founder of INJOY, a Christian-based leadership program, debunks the myth that strong leaders must have big egos and spend all their time harnessing personal power. Instead, he elevates leadership to a spiritual act of service: “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” Maxwell relies on real-life anecdotes, short paragraphs, charts, and numerous lists to make his wisdom accessible. As a result, his writing often seems simplistic, with a self-help tone. Nonetheless, in teaching readers how to bring out the best in themselves as well as others, Maxwell offers a worthwhile life lesson that extends far beyond the workplace.

 

All book descriptions from Amazon.com.

Winning Ways is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
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