It’s Monday – what you need this week? Here’s some great tips for increasing your mental energy to get the best out of your week.
What’s really important? What do you want to achieve? What’s foremost on your mind?
Our job is to make it easier for you to get more out of your day. We use neuro-science to bring to the forefront of your mind every hour what you want to focus on and create. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed and tired, or energised and motivated, this week can make a difference.
Using YOUR JOURNAL in the YOUR GOALS section is a good way to start with three things you are thankful for. This may sound cheesy to some, but this has a very specific action on the brain; when you look for things to be grateful for, it lets the brain observe opportunities better. When your brain is in this state you are more able to solve problems and more likely to achieve more. We added this element because when we studied the most successful people in the top Fortune 500 companies, they all took time in the day to feel gratitude.
Use BE Intent as a gentle friend to help your brain and body make small simple steps that have a cumulative effect.
“When I use BE Intent with intent – LOL, even though it takes half a minute every hour, at the end of the day it feels like I’ve had another hour of productivity. It really helps me consciously manage my energy throughout the day.”
Four easy ways to get your energy pumping.
Our research shows that 97% of people are in a mental energy crisis and between 20 -50% of your team were tired this morning!
Here’s a few good ideas that you could try this week to help keep your mental energy fired up and sustainable and reduce those midday yawns and drooping eyes. Have you seen the light? Get the right light, and you’ll have lots more energy. But that can be a challenge when we work indoors and don’t get to be in the sunshine (which contains brain-activating short-wavelength blue light). “Our circadian rhythms are more sensitive to blue light than any other kind,” says Mariana Figueiro, assistant professor at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Go outside as often as you can during the day (especially right before you need to be extra-alert), says Scott Campbell, Ph.D., director of the Human Chronobiology Laboratory at New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Westchester, New York. Even 5 minutes of sunlight throughout the day makes a big difference to your energy especially when you are feeling overwhelmed or anxious … try it. Get pumped with protein Unless you plan to run a marathon, carbo-loading for energy is out. Instead, eat protein to increase mental alertness and energy, says Debra Hollon, M.S., R.D., a clinical nutritionist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Protein contains tyrosine, an amino acid that elevates the brain chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine. It increases satiety, too. And when you feel fuller, you’re not apt to overdo the breads and sweets that induce rollercoaster highs and lows. Eat plant or animal-based protein throughout the day — an egg or high-protein cereal for breakfast, 10 almonds midmorning, a cup of low-sugar yogurt in the afternoon — and your stamina should stabilize. Random acts of kindness get your bliss chemicals happening …. Research shows that you get a “helper’s high,” a rush of endorphins that lasts for hours, when you volunteer, says Kimberly Kingsley, author of “The Energy Cure: How to Recharge Your Life 30 Seconds at a Time.” You don’t have to look far to help out, she says. “There may be a single parent in your family who needs a babysitter or a lonely neighbor who’d love to chat or a shy team member who might enjoy some company at lunch time. One researcher shows that the experience of the dopamine element when you do a kind act is similar to that of taking some recreational drugs. Judith Orloff, M.D., a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist and author of “Positive Energy: 10 Extraordinary Prescriptions for Transforming Fatigue, Stress, and Fear,” agrees, and she often folds anonymous good deeds into her day. During her morning coffee run, she sometimes buys an extra cup for someone in need. “When you make someone happy, you feel filled up again,” Orloff says.
It’s all in the breath … There is one thing that can instantly change mental energy and help reduce stress and increase energy. You can go to YOUR FIX and find specific breathing exercises for a whole range of states.
Each week we’ll highlight a few more energy tips.
Do you know if you’re in an Energy Crisis? Have you taken the Energy Crisis Quiz yet? Take 5 minutes to find out your energy profile and get your personalized report. www.beintent.com/energycrisisquiz
Perhaps because the word positive automatically brings to mind the insufferable yellow smiley face, the field of positive psychology is struggling to get the respect that it deserves. Two articles in the Fairfax press this year – (30 March and 1 September) – have reinforced common misconceptions about positive psychology – in terms of both what it is, and how it is applied.
Positive psychology is not and has never been a “positive thinking” movement. Rather, it’s the study of what allows people to operate at the peak of their potential: to live longer and healthier, participate in more satisfying friendships and marriages, and have more engaging and meaningful careers. It’s also the study of what makes communities and institutions stronger and more resilient.
In contrast to the way positive psychology is portrayed in the media, research within the area has explicitly debunked the notions that “putting on a happy face,” pursuing short-term pleasures and external rewards, or boosting self-esteem are effective means of creating long-term well-being at home, at work, or in schools. Positive psychology is more about finding meaning and lasting fulfilment.
But books such as The Secret and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have bastardised positive psychology and regurgitated it into a crowd-pleasing and a multimillion-dollar “positive thinking” industry. And misunderstanding and ill-informed commentary have compounded the problem and produced a bitter backlash against the science. The source of this backlash’s power is easy to identify – it is ignorance about the field.
Positive psychology is focused on understanding what enables us to flourish and achieve our potential at home, at work, and in schools. The field contrasts with the majority of work in the discipline of psychology which has traditionally focused on the goal of reducing illness and negative states. While understanding and alleviating sickness and depression is a worthy goal, it only addresses part of the well-being equation.
The pursuit of money does not make us happy. Madeline Puckette
Some of the findings are exciting and challenge our thinking on what it takes to live a happy and healthy life. One key set of findings is that the pursuit of money and status that so pervades our culture and political discourse is unhelpful in making us happy. People adjust very quickly to something that gives them pleasure or pain. A famous study of lottery winners and victims of spinal injuries found that while those who won the lottery were briefly much happier and those who became quadriplegics and paraplegics were briefly much less happy, everyone soon returned to their original levels of happiness.
Seeking extrinsic rewards, such as money and status, doesn’t build lasting happiness, it simply sets us up to run on an addictive “hedonic treadmill”, which keeps returning us to where we started. Positive psychology research has found that long-term well-being is driven by cultivating trusting and nurturing relationships, having interesting and engaging work, and setting meaningful goals and feeling yourself progress towards achieving them.
Another clear set of findings suggests that individuals gain at least as much, if not more, from building on their strengths as improving areas of weakness. Management research has found that even though problematic employees demand more attention, managers who invest the most time with their best people perform between two and three times better than managers who spend more time with their worst.
Similarly, managers who create environments allowing employees to regularly exercise their talents have more productive workers and lower turnover. The findings don’t suggest we ignore negativity but create conditions where individuals and groups can thrive.
These are only a few of the numerous findings from positive psychology that inform how we can arrange our lives, schools and workplaces to be more engaging, productive, and resilient. The express goal of the field is to bring an evidence-based approach to helping individuals cope with and grow from disengagement, isolation, depression, stress and trauma and take advantage of their collaborative ability, creativity, vitality to build wellness and to flourish.
Putting on a happy face is not effective for creating long-term well-being. Chantel Beam
People who know the field know that it is not a positive thinking movement and that it doesn’t even focus exclusively on the positive but extends to the study of adaptability, strength, and growth out of hardship and failure.
There are certainly legitimate critiques of positive psychology: the field is still relatively new and evidence is still being generated and integrated. And its focus to date has been on the individual and primarily in Western contexts. But most critiques have been levelled at the ways positive psychology is applied. As with any emerging movement, the tendency for some to sell services or write books under the guise of positive psychology but with only a cursory understanding of the field is ever present.
And as with any field, there are increasing numbers of poorly-trained practitioners and consultants claiming to practise positive psychology without truly understand the research or the challenges of implementing its conclusions. Such consultants are likely to promise too much, deliver too little, and create resistance to change that could have been beneficial if positive psychology principles had actually been understood and implemented.
But a few bad apples shouldn’t damn an entire field or the many qualified and competent researchers and practitioners who are implementing well-validated positive programs or testing new interventions to address some of the most pressing issues of the day.
Adam Barsky is affiliated with Applied Research Consulting which consults in the area of Positive Education and Positive Leadership, both are informed by Positive Psychology.
Michael Zyphur does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
Adapted from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Win to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
Article | Fri, 01/06/2012 – 00:00
By Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
To understand what makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work, we have been studying what we call inner work life—the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivations that occur continually throughout the workday. When inner work life is positive, people feel happy, have positive perceptions of their work and those they work with, and are highly motivated by the work itself. When inner work life is negative, everything is reversed. In our quest to find the forces that rule inner work life, we discovered that lower-level, local leaders —such as team leaders—can be surprisingly powerful. The route to this discovery was an interesting one.
Because inner work life is usually not observable, we knew that, to learn about it, we would have to study people’s inner thoughts. To that end, we asked 238 people working on 26 creative project teams in seven companies to complete a diary form at the end of each workday over the course of an entire project. The major question on the diary form asked people to describe an event that stood out from the workday. Along with the diary narratives, we collected data on a number of other measures, including creativity, productivity, emotion, and motivation. In the end, we had nearly 12,000 event-of-the-day narratives, revealing people’s thoughts and feelings about their work, their colleagues, and their organizations.
We made two major discoveries. The first was the inner work life effect: People are more creative, productive, committed to the work, and collegial when their inner work life is positive. For instance, when people are in a good mood, they are more creative. Not only are they more creative on the day they are happy, but they are also more creative the next day, even when we control for their mood on the next day.
But what makes for good inner work life? When we looked at the days when people’s inner work lives were at their best, by far the most common event that occurred was simply making progress on meaningful work. In fact, progress occurred on 76 percent of best days. And it wasn’t only huge breakthroughs. We found that, very often, small steps forward were sufficient to boost inner work life. That was our second discovery, and we call it the progress principle.But there is a dark side. Setbacks in the work had the greatest negative effect on inner work life.
The lesson from our research is clear—if you want workers who are fully engaged, productive, and creative, then you must do everything in your power to support progress and to remove obstacles that can lead to setbacks for the people who work for you. We identified two pairs of action types that managers can take to support progress and inner work life; catalysts/inhibitors and nourishers/toxins. Catalysts directly support progress in the work, while their opposite, inhibitors,derail progress. These include things like supplying needed resources. Nourishers, actions that make people feel valued and respected as human beings, directly support inner work life; their opposite, toxins, poison it.
Many people think it is obvious that people will be more happy and engaged when they are making progress. But when we surveyed 669 managers about how important supporting progress is, we found out differently. We asked managers at all levels from companies around the world to rank order the importance of five motivators, including support for progress. The other four items were straight from conventional management wisdom: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, and clear goals. Supporting progress came in dead last. In fact, only 5 percent of managers picked it as their No. 1 motivator. Moreover, when we looked at the teams and companies that took part in our research, we saw that most managers acted like supporting progress was a low priority.
We had expected that the people at the top of an organization would have the greatest influence over inner work life, by supplying or withholding the catalysts and nourishers. C-level executives definitely did have an impact. But we were in for a surprise. Our study revealed that—holding other factors equal—“local” sources of catalysts, such as team leaders and immediate coworkers, had a stronger influence on inner work life than “broad” forces such as top-level managers and organizational systems. This certainly doesn’t mean people were impervious to the effects of these broad forces, but it does mean local leaders have special leverage on the inner work life of a team. In fact, they can be a more important day-by-day source of the catalyst factor than top managers. By analyzing the team leader actions that led our research participants to see their team leaders as supportive (or not), we identified a set of catalyst leverage points.
As a team leader, do. . .
Gather information constantly that could, in any way, be relevant to the team’s work.
Involve the team in making important decisions about the project.
Develop contacts with people outside the team who could be important sources of information and support for the project.
Sell the project; fight for a good project if it is threatened.
As a team leader, don’t. . .
Fail to disseminate project-relevant information to the team.
Micromanage; don’t stifle team members’ autonomy in carrying out their work.
Fail to motivate and inspire the team by what you say and, especially, the example you set with your own work habits.
Avoid solving problems or cause problems through your own timidity or arrogance.
Fail to provide clear, appropriate, meaningful assignments and goals.
Because of their close working relationship with subordinates, team leaders also have an especially powerful impact on inner work life through the Nourishers they provide or fail to provide. In fact, they may have even more power than top managers to create a supportive or debilitating work environment for members of a team. They can even attenuate the negative impact of an unsupportive upper management. If you are a team leader, our research identified direct actions you can take—or avoid—if you want to support your team’s inner work life through nourishers. Even if you are not a team leader, you can apply the same tools—whatever your level in your organization.
As a team leader, do. . .
Show that you respect people and the work they do.
Recognize and reward the accomplishments of your people.
When needed, provide emotional support to those who work under you.
Create opportunities for the development of friendship and camaraderie in the team.
As a team leader, don’t. . .
Act dismissive, discourteous, or patronizing.
Display apathy toward your team members or their projects.
Obfuscate roles, responsibilities, and formal relationships, or change them haphazardly.
We all want workers who are engaged, creative, and fully productive. The progress principle describes how to do that. First, use nourishers to support the inner work lives of the people who work under you (and for that matter, your colleagues). Second, support progress every day through the generous application of catalysts. Your organization and its people will share the benefits.
Adapted from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Win to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Her studies have focused on creativity, motivation, and performance in the workplace. She has a Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher, writer, and consultant. He has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Virginia.
Michelle, a rehab nurse specialising in head injury rehabilitation, recently used BE Intent’s wellbeing software to provide support to one of her clients (Sarah) as part of her vocational return.
Sarah was about 4 months into her head injury rehab and had returned to her fulltime office role. She was still receiving support from Michelle and the team as needed, but the main focus was on promoting independence and getting back into her work. Sarah still had problems with fatigue and as such her pacing and scheduling skills were essential to achieve a graduated and successful increase in her work duties.
Michelle gave us her information on fatigue- and self-management and using this we created a tailored programme for Sarah in BE Intent. This meant that, while she was at her desk, Sarah would receive reminders every hour to take a break and pace herself; at the same time, she would also receive a “nugget” of wisdom about managing her fatigue, which reinforced the messages she received during her initial care with Michelle and the team.
We sat down with Sarah for a cup of tea to talk about her experience with BE Intent as part of her return to function. Two of the main areas in which she noticed BE Intent’s influence were:
Being reminded of her fatigue management skills during the day, especially in periods of increased workload – times that she needed these skills the most.
The feeling that she was being supported in the workplace without the need for too much practitioner input
So Sarah found the tool to be a fantastic support during her recovery. It meant that the material and messages that Michelle and the multidisciplinary team had taught Sarah during the early stages of her rehabilitation could be reinforced while she was back at work, speeding Sarah’s return to her normal lifestyle.
That’s a great outcome for all involved and we’re really glad that we could help. We’re looking forward to helping other clients and health professionals.
Supporting clients in their independence
Working with Michelle, we created a fatigue management education package using BE Intent’s software
Because it was using material that Michelle and her team already had, it was evidence-based and it aligned with the messages Sarah had received during earlier stages of her recovery
Once all set up, Sarah received regular reminders throughout the day to motivate her to employ the self management skills she’d been taught
As a result, Sarah found the tool a fantastic adjunct to the support she received from her health professionals
A quick note: to protect privacy we haven’t used the client’s or the therapist’s real names.
