How To Be Happy At Work

August 14, 2012 5:01 am 0 comments Views:

Share this Article

  • TwitterTwitter
  • Facebook
  • DeliciousDelicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleuponStumble
  • RedditReddit
  • Follow Me on PinterestPinterest
  • Google+

Tags:

Author:

 Geoffrey James

Source:

 inc.com

If you’re unhappy at work-or anywhere else, for that matter-it’s because you’ve made yourself unhappy. There’s an easy way to change that.

Let me start off with a little story.

I once knew a saleswoman–young, divorced–who got a diagnosis of breast cancer.  She had to work and raise two kids while fighting the cancer. Even so, she managed to be happy at work, noticeably happier than her co-workers.  In fact, she not only won her battle with cancer but subsequently became one of the top salespeople at Bristol Myers.

She was not, as it happens, naturally cheerful.  Quite the contrary.  When she started full-time work, she was frequently depressed.  But she turned it around, using the techniques I’m going to provide you in this column.

That saleswoman once told me: When you’re unhappy, it’s because you’ve decided to be unhappy.

Maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision; maybe it crept up on you while you weren’t looking–but it was a decision nonetheless.  And that’s good news, because you can decide instead to be happy. You just need to understand how and why you make the decisions.

What Are Your Rules?

Happiness and unhappiness (in work and in life) result entirely from the rules in your head that you use to evaluate events.  Those rules determine what’s worth focusing on, and how you react to what you focus on.

Many people have rules that make it very difficult for them to happy and very easy for them to be miserable.

I once worked with a sales guy who was always angry at the people he worked with. The moment anything didn’t go the way he thought it should go, he’d be screaming in somebody’s face.  He was making everyone around him miserable–but just as importantly, he was making himself miserable, because just about anything set him off.

For this guy, the everyday nonsense that goes on in every workplace was not just important, but crazy-making important.

I once asked him what made him happy.  His answer: “The only thing that makes this !$%$#! job worthwhile is when I win a $1 million account.”  I asked him how often that happened.  His response: “About once a year.”

In other words, this guy had internal rules that guaranteed he’d be miserable on a day-to-day basis, but only happy once a year.

One of the other sales guys at that firm had the exact opposite set of rules.  His philosophy was “every day above ground is a good day.”  When he encountered setbacks, he shrugged them off–because, according to his internal rules, they just weren’t that important.  When I asked him what made him miserable, his answer was: “Not much.”  When I pressed him for a real answer, he said: “When somebody I love dies.”

In other words, the second sales guy had rules that made it easy for him to be happy but difficult to be miserable.

I’d like to be able to write that Mr. Positivity regularly outsold Mr. Negativity, but in fact their sales results were similar.  Even so, I think Mr. Negativity was a loser, because he lived each day in a state of misery.  His colleague was always happy.  He was winning at life.  He was happy at work.

Make Yourself Happier: 3 Steps

The saleswoman who had breast cancer was happy, too, and this is the method she used to make herself happy:

1. Document Your Current Rules

Set aside a half-hour of alone time and, being as honest as you can, write down the answers to these two questions:

  • What has to happen for me to be happy?
  • What has to happen for me to be unhappy?

Now examine those rules.  Have you made it easier to miserable than to be happy?  If so, your plan is probably working.

2. Create a Better Set of Rules

Using your imagination, create and record a new set of rules that would make it easy for you to be happy and difficult to be miserable.  Examples:

  • “I enjoy seeing the people I work with each day.”
  • “I really hate it when natural disasters destroy my home.” 

Don’t worry whether or not these new rules seem “realistic”–that’s not the point.  All internal rules are arbitrary, anyway.  Just write rules that would make you happier if you really believed them.

3. Post the New Rules Where You’ll See Them

When you’ve completed your set of “new” rules, print out them out and post copies in three places: your bathroom mirror, the dashboard of your car, and the side of your computer screen.  Leave them up, even after you’ve memorized them.

Having those new rules visible when you’re doing other things gradually re-programs your mind to believe the new rules.  You will be happy at work.  It’s really that simple.

Oh, and by the way … That saleswoman? She was my mother.

By Geoffrey James, from: http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/how-to-be-happy-at-work.html?nav=next

Geoffrey James writes the “Sales Source” column on Inc.com, the world’s most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World’s Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source

Leave a Reply



− two = 6

Latest News

  • EPM Finance Management Risk Management Stocks Perform Better If Women Are On Company Boards

    Stocks Perform Better If Women Are On Company Boards

    In the U.S., 36 percent of companies still have no women on their boards of directors, according to a report by researcher GMI Ratings on gender diversity released today. The average corporate board has about nine members.

    “Multiple academic studies have concluded that diverse corporate boards exercise more diligent oversight,” Michelle Lamb, author the study, said in a report. “They have better attendance records than homogeneous boards, and they invest more effort in auditing when the complexity of the business warrants heightened scrutiny.”

    Read more →
  • Careers EPM FYI Management Top Lists 7 Best Practices To Get More Creative

    7 Best Practices To Get More Creative

    “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality overcomes everything.” ~George Lois

    Continuing our series on How to Be More Creative, here are another 7 techniques for breaking through a creative block in order to create innovative solutions to your organization’s challenges.

    Read more →
  • Careers Management Strategy 5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

    5 Steps to Better Leadership Charisma

    Charisma is not a substitute for genuine leadership. These five steps can help you develop, and blend, the two.

    Leadership charisma and personal charisma are very different things. They both involve the same kinds of personal attributes-the ability to project confidence, the capacity to engage others, skill in articulating ideas, vision, and goals—which may explain why some leaders aim for one when they should be developing the other.

    Personal charisma is centered on the individual, as is the case with celebrities. Leadership charisma exists when a leader is charismatic in the service of the organization, for a greater good, or a higher purpose.

    While personal charismatic traits can help a leader, too much of a good thing becomes unhelpful. Leaders who concentrate on constantly influencing others, for instance, may reduce the motivation and ability of their people to stake out their own opinions.

    Here are several things to consider when growing your own leadership charisma.

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Management Strategy How to Boost Your Medal Count in Seven Easy Steps

    How to Boost Your Medal Count in Seven Easy Steps

    What do the Olympics and the global economy have in common?

    Many times, the teams that focus on their strategy, prioritize goals, and have the resources to focus on infrastructure, training, and process, are the ones which win the most medals.

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Management Analytics and Big Data – Press Pause on the Stairmaster

    Analytics and Big Data – Press Pause on the Stairmaster

    Our lives have become hectic.

    We are working harder and longer. We talk about life balance, but for so many of us we continue to have imbalance. Every once in a while we need to step back, press the “pause” button on the Stairmaster exercise machine, take some deep breaths, and reflect on just what the heck is going on. I’d like to reflect with you my take on what is driving the accelerating interest in analytics and Big Data.

    Read more →
  • EPM FYI Management Marketing and Sales Analytics Top Lists How To Be Happy At Work

    How To Be Happy At Work

    If you’re unhappy at work-or anywhere else, for that matter-it’s because you’ve made yourself unhappy. There’s an easy way to change that.

    Let me start off with a little story.

    I once knew a saleswoman–young, divorced–who got a diagnosis of breast cancer. She had to work and raise two kids while fighting the cancer. Even so, she managed to be happy at work, noticeably happier than her co-workers. In fact, she not only won her battle with cancer but subsequently became one of the top salespeople at Bristol Myers.

    She was not, as it happens, naturally cheerful. Quite the contrary. When she started full-time work, she was frequently depressed. But she turned it around, using the techniques I’m going to provide you in this column.

    Read more →
  • Careers EPM Featured Management Strategy Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

    Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

    In looking at the great leaders of history—whether they are political leaders like Julius Caesar or business leaders like Steven P. Jobs—many people probably assume that they must have taken a particularly active role in running their organizations. Caesar, after all, personally led his troops into Gaul, and Jobs was famous for checking the design of even the smallest inner workings of every product at Apple.

    “Most leaders do too much,” Murnighan says. “And when they do, they’re seen as micromanagers.”

    Read more →
  • Biz Intelligence EPM Featured Marketing and Sales Analytics ‘A Favorable Product Mix Caused Us To Miss Our Forecast On The Upside,’ Said No One Ever

    ‘A Favorable Product Mix Caused Us To Miss Our Forecast On The Upside,’ Said No One Ever

    What type of data do our brains need to evaluate one of the most important aspects of business planning, ie The Forecast?

    ———————————————————————————————————————-

    As leaders and managers of human beings with million year-old brain structures, as part of our managerial toolkit we need to keep ourselves knowledgeable about psychology and the cognitive science of how people make decisions. You have undoubtedly read about how innately bad we are at making certain types of decisions, especially those involving risk, probabilities and shifting time horizons.

    Part of the reason for this difficulty is the structure and function of our three-layered brain. The complexity and size of the neocortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex, is a very recent evolutionary development. Prior to this development, our mammalian ancestors still made decisions, but they did so relying heavily on the more intuitive, emotional limbic layer. It would be fairly accurate to say that our emotions are simply a different way to make a decision. It’s quick, can still be trained by experience and learning, and can be wired directly into rapid motor responses that most likely saved our ancestors lives countless times, who faced more binary decisions than probabilistic ones. Gut-feel is really “brain-feel”.

    Read more →