How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Part II
. Grant reports that “six
weeks later, their managers and co-workers rated them as significantly happier
and
more effective.”
7
And that’s something we would surely all say yes to.
P
LAYING TO
 Y
OUR
 S
TRENGTHS
To sustain your professional energy and enthusiasm (and boost your
performance) over time:
Identify your signature strengths.
Set aside time to reflect on your
signature strengths—the personal qualities, values, and skills that are
characteristic of you when you’re at your best. Examine your peaks, ask
others for input, and take a survey. Notice the themes that emerge.
Apply your strengths more consciously.
Every day for a week, find a
way to play to one of your strengths more fully in the way you
approach your work. When you take on new challenges, consider how
to use your personal strengths to help you embrace the things you need
to learn.
Harness your personal interests for reinspiration.
Be creative about
ways you can relate your personal interests to your work. What insight
or tool might you be able to bring into your professional life?

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POSTSCRIPT
Making It Stick
I’d like to leave you with some final words of encouragement as you try out the
approaches in the book, because I know it can sometimes feel hard to break old
habits and adopt glorious new ones. We might mean to set deliberate intentions
for an important conversation, but then forget to do it until we’re already
halfway through the meeting. We might like the idea of using “brain-friendly
feedback” techniques with our junior colleagues, but then find ourselves doing
what we’ve always done: simply telling them what they should do differently.
None of that is surprising given that our brains seek to save energy by running
on autopilot where they can. Left to themselves, they’ll tend to run the same old
routines.
And yet, despite the stickiness of our habits, our brains are tremendously
adaptable. Every single new thought or experience channels a fresh set of
connections between our billions of neurons, with the result that our neural
networks are always changing. That’s why Professor Michael Merzenich of U.C.
San Francisco, one of the world’s experts on the brain’s ability to reorganize
itself, describes the brain as “soft-wired” rather than hard-wired: partly fixed,
yes, but partly flexible.
1
This soft-wiring is what gives us scope to develop new
skills and practices, 
if
we know how to nurture our inherent capacity for change.
So what can we do to shift the balance from autopilot to adaptability? Three
useful pointers emerge from the research: reward, remind, and repeat.
REWARD
When you do score a success in trying a new approach at work, do you stop to
congratulate yourself? Most people don’t. As we saw in 
Chapter 10
, we tend to
bank successes without too much reflection, because our attention is naturally
drawn to the things that 
didn’t
work so well. But neuroscientists, economists,

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and psychologists all agree that we’re more likely to repeat a behavior if we find
it rewarding, because the payoff motivates our brains to seek out more of that
behavior. So if you want a new habit to stick, it’s a good idea to find some way
to reward yourself for any effort you make.
What kind of reward am I talking about? Well, most obviously, you could
allow yourself a personal treat—a break, a snack, a chat. But rewards that
involve reviewing our successes are even more useful, since reflection is a
cognitive process that enhances our ability to learn from our experience (as we
saw in 
Chapter 5
).
For example, suppose you tried a brain-friendly feedback technique when
talking to a colleague, and it resulted in a satisfyingly productive conversation.
Like Peter in 
Chapter 10
, you started by detailing all the things you liked about
something they’d done, before saying what would make you like it even better.
Your colleague was visibly energized rather than demotivated by your input, and
came up with an excellent plan for improvement. Great! But it will be easy for
you to forget about that triumph once the next challenge of the day rolls around.
So you should take a moment to review what worked well—ideally, make a note
of it, too—and let yourself feel good about it for a few seconds.
I know one professional who extends the reward further by keeping a tally of
these kinds of successes on a whiteboard by the door in his office (using a code
that only he understands); he says it gives him a boost each time he walks past it.
You can also add a social dimension to the sense of reward, by telling others
about the changes you’re making and the interesting results you’re seeing.
Bigger triumphs can even be added to a running list of achievements to talk
about during your next performance review, as Cristine showed in 
Chapter 16
.
All these actions help to feed your brain’s reward system, as well as reinforcing
what you’ve learned.
What if you do something new and it doesn’t work exactly as you’d hoped?
Draw on the fact that we find it rewarding to discover new information, by
choosing to view the experience as an experiment. Ask yourself the “How
fascinating! What can I learn from this?” question from 
Chapter 17
. And salute
whichever aspects of your “experiment”
did
work—even if it’s merely that you
remembered afterward what it was you were supposed to do.
REMIND

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If you want to change your behavior, it helps to make the shift as effortless as
possible. One way of doing that is to decide on a very specific, achievable aim,
and then to link that desired new behavior to something that’s already part of
your day. The trick is to identify a cue that you’ll definitely encounter—perhaps
an activity, a situation, or an object—and to associate that cue with the action
you want to take. As I said in 
Chapter 2
, research suggests that establishing these
sorts of “when-then” reminders can triple your chances of achieving your goals.
Which is pretty great.
For example, if you’re trying to get better at building exercise into your day,
it’s going to take time for your brain to form all the new connections needed for
you to develop a whole new gym habit. But you can make immediate progress if
you use something you already do regularly (e.g., go to lunch) as a prompt for
the action you want to take (more exercise). You might say to yourself, “
when
I
go to lunch, 
then
I will take the stairs rather than the elevator.” You might go
further and say “
whenever
I see a choice between stairs and elevator, 
then
I’ll
take the stairs.” Going back to the example of the brain-friendly feedback
techniques, you might make a note of the steps on your phone, and decide:
“
when
I feel a burning need to provide input to a colleague, 
then
I will check my
phone to decide which feedback technique to use.”
For a more visual approach, you could take inspiration from several of my
clients who use their screensavers as reminders of the approaches in this book.
One of them has an image of an iceberg on her screen; when she looks at it, she
remembers the “good person, bad circumstances” idea, because the submerged
iceberg reminds her that everyone’s behavior reflects hidden influences below
the surface. I met another person who prefers tactile reminders; he keeps a
pebble in his jacket pocket, because he says it helps him remember whatever
new habit he’s working on whenever he touches it. (It’s not a bad idea: pebbles
are cheap and have great battery life.)
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Everyone’s different. Choose whichever
reminders make sense to you and are easiest to build into your daily routine.