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Tag: happiness

5 worldly happiness hacks!

Gretchen Rubin over at the happiness project has 5 happiness hacks that are worth considering.

Would following even one help you enjoy your life more?  Or make you more enjoyable to live with and work with?

# 1 Impulse to tidy up?

Add File 13 – the rubbish bin. See if you can fill it up!

# 2 Determined to exercise some self-control?

Cut down the times you have to self-control to no more than 2 a day! Stop beating yourself up.  Side-step nonsense.

# 3 Think you need a treat to lift you up?

Live well all the time!  Make each meal a treat. Tidy up as you go.  Live elegantly!

# 4 Think you need to help people in the world?

Help people close to home! Look around the room!  Halve some else’s irritation in your own kitchen, your own office, your own commuter train.

An irritation shared is usually quartered.

# 5 Resolving to do something?

Don’t. If you must have a resolution, have one, till it is done! Pick the most important and don’t put anything else on the list!

 

 

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The psychology of forward movement – kept real

Imagining goals doesn’t quite cut it

It’s a fact.  Our brains don’t distinguish very much between imagining something and doing it!  Mentally rehearse your perfect golf swing and your real one gets better.  Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?  Pity it doesn’t work with losing weight.

The trick is to imagine fully enough.  We have to be able to imagine something in its entirety and reasonably accurately.  We must have no objections or leave anything out!

That’s the rub.  By the time you can imagine something completely, or be totally confident that it will work, you have done it already, and probably often!

Using our brain’s confusion to our advantage but keeping it real

We want to capitalize on the inability of our brains to distinguish fact from fiction but we also want to keep it real.  We want to use our imagination to get us going, but bear in mind that we still have to do whatever it is that we do.  We still have to stumble and fall, and get ourselves up again.  (In fact, stumbling and falling and getting up again must be part of the story that we imagine – we need that skill of error recovery too!)

The ravine exercise

I’ve been using David Whyte’s story of walking alone in Nepal and coming to a ravine with a rickety bridge.  He couldn’t cross it and he couldn’t double back because he had insufficient supplies.  Panic!

We often find ourselves in similar predicaments.  We look at what we want – the other side of the ravine.  And we look at the bridge.  It’s too rickety to walk on.  The gap between where we are now and where we want to be feels too big.  We can’t help ourselves.  Our attention is drawn to the gap.   We stare at the ravine and the long drop down – and  we can think of nothing else.

The current advice is to do what you would do if you are on the edge of the ravine:  check your pockets, see what you have to help you, make sure you are safe.  Get your feet back on the ground. Then funnily, you find a way out of your predicament.  Or, at least survive until the rescue party arrives.

This metaphor works – but it is still hard to do.  The ravine draws our attention no matter how hard we try not to look at it.

The fast forward exercise

I’ve been trying out another mental trick but I haven’t tested it fully.  Would you try it too and let me know how it works?

Think of yourself as you are now, warts and all.  Now play yourself forward 10 years.  Don’t change a thing.  Just make yourself older and fatter!

You probably won’t like the image all that much. And you will be motivated to take the next step.  List the first thing to change and do it right now.

Do you do it?  Of course keep a record too.  In a few weeks, you’ll look back and be surprised at how much you have got done.

I’d also like to know how much effort it took and whether you got a lot done attending to little things.  The extra chocolate biscuit.  The internet banking that is not done.  Whatever!

The psychology of forward movement

The psychology is simple.  We keep our feet firmly on the ground rooted in now.  We imagine what we can imagine – what we understand – and roll it forward with obvious changes – slower, greyer, not as good looking.

Then do what has to be be done now.  It is so much easier!

At least, I hope it is.  Do tell me!

 

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Do you have the courage NOT to be happy?

If you came here saying “Yes!”, you probably also sat up straighter, jutted out your jaw just a little, and felt more determined.

We need one defensive pessimist on every team

You are probably what psychologists call a ‘defensive pessimist’.  You are essential to business and family life.  You think ahead and make sure things get done!

But do you really dare not to be happy?

What if I told you that happiness lights up different parts of your brain?  And in your steely resolve, you are shutting down processing power that you need, badly?

In short, you are running, well limping, like a computer that needs to be cleaned out sooner rather than later.

An organized person finds time to be happy

If you really are as organized and determined as you say, then you WILL find 5 minutes at night for some quiet time to reflect on the day.  You will have time to tick off everything that went well and you will have time to ask yourself a simple question: Why did I do so well?

So often, you’ve done well because you think ahead, because you are reliable and because you are persistent.  Carry on doing that!

Be organized.  We need you.  And be happy too.

Ask “Why did I do so well?” and marvel at how much better you sleep, how much you begin to enjoy hearing the birds sing, how much your appetite levels off (not too big or too small), how much you don’t have to push so hard but you get things done anyway.

You don’t believe me?

I thought you were the thoughtful one!  You can’t tell me I am wrong until you have tried.

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Gloom-and-doom is catchy! Ask 3 questions to find a positive spot in the recession

An example of a social network diagram.
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Back on February 6, when it was snowing, I made a list of 5 “recession speeds”.  In February, people were angry but not really doing anything constructive about restructuring their businesses.

  1. I am lucky. My business is OK.  People need us no matter what.
  2. This crisis is outrageous.  I take every opportunity to tell decision-makers.
  3. I have cut out all luxuries.  I’ll see this through by keeping my head down.
  4. I’ll wait and see.  I am optimistic that everything will work out all right.
  5. I am systematically reviewing my business looking for new opportunities and new alliances.

Mid-October, 8 months on, people are much clearer about how the recession will effect them.  At least, that uncertainty has resolved.

But few people seem to have any idea how to restructure.  They are just “hanging-in” or “working harder”.  The odd firm is booming but is not quite clear why!

Social networks affect on our attitude to the recession

In February, I also asked 3 questions about our social networks.

I want to ask these questions again because in the last 8 months, the media have publicized the network effects of happiness.  We all now know that we are more likely to be happy or sad, fat or slim, if our friends are.

And if our friends’ friends are -even if we don’t know them!

How much is your attitude to the recession affected by your friends?

  • Who are the 3 people on whom you most depend?
  • What is their recession speed?
  • How much does your recession speed help them, and how much does their recession speed help you?

I know I am positive because the business associates on whom I depend most are thriving.  Others are being resolute.  And I can avoid negative people with relative ease.

I’d love to know you situation and if these questions help you clarify any of your plans?

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Puzzled by young Brits? Ask Voicebox and ye shall be answered

Slurp, analyze, visualize, share

I was delighted to find Vinspired Voicebox this morning.  Young people are collecting data on young people in UK and presenting it online in interesting ways.

And you can share the data on Young Brits too!

  • What questions should Voicebox ask next?
  • What questions could Voicebox answer for you with a tweak or two of their current analysis?
  • What question should we ask other age groups?

This is good news.  Great work Voicebox!

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Do you live restlessly in the shadow of adrenaline-inducing goals?

This is what I did not know in my 20’s. That I would come to dislike the adrenaline-rush that made me feel so good.

In our twenties, we feel competent

We have smashing time. Suddenly we have a little money. We set ourselves up independently.  We take on responsibility at work.  We feel omnipotent.

We are in, a way. We have more energy than our jobs demand. And we throw ourselves into everything with gusto.

Until one day,

.   .  .  the story changes. We burn out.  We wake up in the morning so tired that the only thing to do is to sit quietly in the sun, if we can find it. We are too tired to read.   We are too wearied to put up with the banality on the TV.

From that day forward, we are wiser, if sadder

We resist the adrenaline-rush.  We put off being totally involved in anything because we know the withdrawal is not worth the excitement and the buzz.

We also become skeptical about what is accomplished while we are ‘high’.  We come to agree with poet, David Whyte. We are not nice people when when we are moving so fast that we trample over people who are moving slowly.

But we are also restless

When we are undecided, when we are still on the plains of ‘wish‘ and are still to cross the famed Rubicon river to the land of ‘intent‘, we feel restless and doubt we are achieving anything at all.

But does our restlessness have good cause?

I am not sure if anything gets done or nothing gets done when we resist the urge to become charged-up and driven. To my knowledge, no one has every compared our output in the two states.

Goal setting research has shown a more limited result. When our attention is focused solely on one goal, the goal is achieved.  Hardly surprising, is it?

We should be worried about more

The bigger question is what happens to other goals when we are focused on only one of the many things that are important to us.  What happens to everything else – including our health and the health of people around us?

In our thirties, we begin to get an inkling .   .  .

.  .  .  that we should pick our adrenaline-rush carefully.

How old do we have to be before we learn to balance our lives?

Do we ever learn the art of achieving balance?

Is it true that we achieve less when are lives are balanced?  Or is just that we feel cold in the shadow of a helter-skelter adrenaline-fueled chase of a goal?

Who is able to resist starting towards an overarching goal that destroys all else?  Who is able to go further and to dismiss such goals altogether and stop them casting a shadow over a life where all our different parts have equal call?

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Grittiness is happiness . . and prosperity

smaller Lorenz_Ro28.
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“It’s about survival, not ego”.

So said Techcrunch about Pandora’s founder.

Hmm. Losada used Lorenz equations to find 3 factors to distinguish successful business teams from unsuccessful teams.

  • Sincere requests for information slightly outnumber proposals for action
  • Positive comments outnumber negative statements by 5 to 1 (83% in other words)
  • Talk about the outside world slightly exceeds talk about the team.

So sometimes the team is complaining that the team is shite.   Inactive, negative and internal.  That’s fine.  As long as later in the day they are talking about what their customers like and the positive points they will push off from.

Unsuccessful teams get stuck in a place of gloom, or, in a place of self-congratulation.

Successful teams swoop gloriously around the whole emotional space like a happy butterfly tracing its own shadow and colouring in the outline in 3D technicolor.

Being in touch with reality in all its forms, good and bad, is what it is all about.

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3 secrets about goal clarity that I didn’t know I knew

Front-loading washer machine.
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I’ll be the last person so say that setting goals is easy – my life over the last 10 years has been as tumultuous as the life of a sock in a half-empty washing machine.

When we have to take a major turn in life – when we leave school, when we change career midstream, when we move countries – it is easy to feel utterly disoriented.

But it is undeniable that the day we stop dithering, the day we stop saying “I could do this, or I could do that”, when the humming and hawing ends, we lurch forward, taking ourselves, most of all, by surprise.

So how do we get from confusion to this state of goal clarity?

Shame – bad news – by hard work.

But take heart from my story of setting goals which dovetails oddly with positive psychology.

A long time ago, in my university lecturing days, in more stable and optimistic times, I was asked by a major multinational, whom you all make profitable on a regular basis, to be on a panel interviewing students for scholarships.

The company executive, who chaired the panel, asked every applicant the same question: what are the three things that you want out of life?

After the 10th candidate or so, I answered the question for myself:

  • I like to achieve.
  • I like to belong to something bigger than myself.
  • I like to have some comfort and style but I will sacrifice this for the other two.

So, I was somewhat amazed, some twenty years later, when my life had taken on the semblance of a sock in a half-empty washing machine, to learn that this is the scaffolding Martin Seligman suggests for positive psychology.

  • An engaged life.
  • A meaningful life.
  • A pleasurable life.

Seligman seems to think that most people waste too much time pursuing a surfeit of pleasure. I am not sure we do. I am not sure we spend most of our time pursuing pleasure, or do it very well.   But that is another story.

When we need to shrug off goal confusion and achieve goal clarity

It’s best to cut our goals down to 3, or at most 5, because that is all we can remember without looking up a list.

This three-fold schema is a good starting point.

  • The order of importance will be yours – there are 6 possible orders.
  • The weighting you give to each ‘life’ will vary – whether you go stark raving mad without it, or you would give it up for the others.
  • And the content will vary.

I’ve had to do some hard work rethinking what I want out of life in entirely new circumstances.

  • The order changed for me.  Meaning went up to No 1.  Pleasure went up to No 2.  And Engagement came in at No 3.
  • The weighting changed for each too. Order and weighting are intertwined a little.
  • The content changed slightly.  More on finding your content another day.

Achieving goal clarity for yourself

If you find yourself ‘humming and hawing’ and don’t have that sense of forward movement that comes of goal clarity, begin here.

  • What do you think about the three types of life?

And help me out a little:  Is it possible to think about these three lives beginning from the abstract principle?

That would be helpful for me to know, as I already thought that way before I heard the abstract principles.

More another day – probably on Wednesday!

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‘Pull’ organizations

The military do pull management so why don’t commerce & industry?

As I left Xoozya at the end of my first day, I encountered an old college mate in the car park talking spiritedly with other Xoozyians about a concept I hadn’t heard before: “recon pull.”

I just have to hear the word “pull” for my ears to prick up.  Pull marketing vs push marketing.  Pull HR vs push HR.  “recon pull” sounds military, and so it was.  And old military too – of at least WW II vintage.  The phrase ‘command-and-control’ may come from the military but they aren’t wedded to the push models of commerce & industry.

Recon pull

“Recon pull”, as much as I have gathered so far, means local action that is taken by forces on the ground who vary their orders to suit the situation they find – within the broad framework of the “commander’s intent”.

Googling this term once I got home, I found one theorist distinguished “Soviet” and “German” models of military structure.  Interesting – I’ve always contrasted Soviet and Chinese models of insurgency and German and Anglo-Saxon models of organization.

Anyway, the Soviet-style model assumes that we plan in advance and execute the plans as agreed because it is not possible to adjust to circumstances as we go.  The German model assumes that a high degree of adjustment will take place.

Another author also attributed this school of thought to Sandhurst.

“We have learned,” responded the authorities at Sandhurst, “that a wild young man can learn wisdom as he grows older—if he survives—but a spiritless young man cannot learn the dash that wins battles.”

The German corollary is:

“The King made you a major because he believed you knew when not to obey.”

A “recon pull” model is consistent with both these philosophies.  Troops on the ground seek a weakness in enemy lines, break through, and pull the rest of the troops in behind them.  Within this model, if they are given an order and they realize it would be unwise to follow through, they stop without further instruction.  It they see an opportunity consistent with the commander’s intent, they grab it without further instruction.  Hmm, this is supposed to be consistent with English common law.  Everything that is not forbidden is allowed.  Roman law is the opposite.  Anything that is not allowed is forbidden.

The investment in ‘organization’ and ‘communication’ in the ‘Soviet’ and ‘German’ models is quite different.  In a model that assumes local decision making, everyone must be well trained.  They are also trained to act rather than not to act.  As a general rule, sins of omission are believed to be worse than sins of commission.

Well, would this idea of “recon pull” apply to other organizations?

Mmm, in the military world, there is a sense of  ‘ground’ to capture and an enemy to defeat.  Neither is particularly relevant to a young organization.  The market is not necessarily stable and consistent. (Military minds might say that about the ground too.)  There also isn’t an enemy.  In a young organization, we are rather, creating ground, or weaving a new set of relationships.

Commander’s intent

And what would be the commander’s intent?  A company like Google has a vision – to organize the world’s information.  It sounds concrete enough but it isn’t really. And it is probably also constrained by habit.  One day, someone will have a new vision that undermines the foundations of what is a fresh and innovative vision today.

The truth is that every employee has a ‘Sandhurst spirit’ to some extent or another, and every employee has a landscape in their mind.  They may not be vigorous or articulate about evangelizing their landscape but they are likely to have one.  Their landscape might also be well protected – to continue to use the military metaphor.  Or in broader terms, change may not be readily possible

Equally, lack of change may be stuckness.  Though the definition of stuckness is somewhat circular, sometimes situations can be unstuck.  This is the subject of Otto Scharmer’s presencing and of the idea behind golfing-movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance“.  Don’t force the shot. Let the shot find you.  Sitting and waiting is sometimes the correct response.  That is, the situation requires it.  Where we feel stuck (here comes the circularity), we argue for a return to listening to the environment.

So what is commander’s intent in a situation like Xoozya?

I think we each have a sense of intent and what is required is the ability or ongoing attempt to describe the world around us in a way that makes sense to others, and that highlights what needs to be done.

Shared understanding of the company

Following this thought process, part of my work as a psychologist is to highlight work in the firm so that people are able to see what is unfolding.

Old techniques for developing shared meaning

Yes, we have traditionally done that for the senior management team.  We carefully organize away-weekends with a series of presentations so that senior managers can understand each others view of the company.  We hold round-robin meetings to facilitate strategic planning to find consensus before final strategy meetings.  We might arrange town-hall meetings for staff.  We might arrange talks and training for staff.  But it is all rather piece-meal – rather Soviet?

Common dashboards

What we need is a set of dashboards so that as people look up from their own work, they can see where everyone else is, and take other people’s activity into account as they re-imagine what the world could look like.  The underlying value proposition or question is whether our own work, individually or collectively is enhanced by knowing what others are doing around us.

If I were to use a mechanical form of evaluation, it might look like this.

1   Is Xoozya committed to profiling the activities of its staff and how often are these profiles updated?

  • Because of the amount of work that this entails, it is likely that the profiles will be compiled on a Web2.0 basis.
  • As 2.0 websites as compiled by users they tend to be uneven and untidy and I would follow with this question. How is the availability of information reviewed and what is both our a prior and growing understanding of what the information will look like?

2   Do staff look at the profiles and do they feel that looking at other people’s work and having other people look at their work helps them?

  • Using an ‘extreme policy option’ technique that I learned from Professor Michael Riley at University of Surrey, are we making reasonable assumptions about human behavior?  What happens when we can see each other’s work-in-progress?  Are we competitive?  Are we cooperative?
  • Is emergent behavior more valuable or less valuable?  How can we understand this process?  Can we monitor feedback loops?  And are feedback loops the critical concept?

3  Have we seen generativity or amplification as a result?

  • What examples of value-added have we seen?

4   Are we competitive?

  • How can we monitor greater value-added?  How can focus attention on economic matters such as use of overheads, salaries, etc.  What is the big picture that we convey to members of Xoozya and does this help them focus on their work and be more creative and productive?

Applied Research of Shared Understandings

Yes, I can see potential research projects here.   For example, do University Departments have shared understandings of their work across their discipline?  Do Universities have shared understandings across their Departments?  Do students share these understandings?  Do local people share this understanding of their university?  Do professions have a shared understanding of the frontiers of their field?  Do the Departments, for example, who have common understanding of their frontiers amplify each others work more than other Departments?

And in companies, do the employees share an understanding of the common frontiers and how can we communicate those frontiers?

And is this the right way to think about monitoring shared meaning?  Or could we use proxy measures like collective efficacy – that would be easy to measure at least. Monitoring collective efficacy would entail asking which groups in the organization believe which other groups are competent?

Or should we use a model like Losada’s model of happiness?  Could we look at

  • interconnectivity of people
  • the balance of inquiry and advocacy and
  • the balance of interest in one’s own work and the work of others.

If these three variables predict the success of management teams, it is quite likely they predict the success of teams and organizations as well.

My tuppenny’s worth

Yup, this is what I would look for in an organization trying to exploit “recon pull”.

  • For substance, a vibrant 2.0 facility where we it is easy to see what other people are working on.
  • A review of process based on Losada’s work.  Do we have positivity/negativity ratios of 5:1, does our inquiry exceed our advocacy and are we slightly more interested in other people’s work than our own?

Indeed, this was a good evening’s work from a conversation in a car park.

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