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

START WITH POSITIVE FRAMING
Our most important or interesting tasks often involve solving problems—
something that can be an energizing experience when we reach a good outcome.
But when it’s not immediately obvious how to address an issue, it’s easy to feel
a little tense. And when we’re worried about a challenge, or we’re put on the
spot with a question we don’t know how to answer, our automatic system may
identify these situations as threats to our sense of competence and social
standing. If we’re not able to prevent the fight-flight-freeze response that
follows, we can find ourselves getting a little dumber—more black-and-white in
our thinking, or more reckless in our actions—just when we want to be
thoughtful and wise. In other words, our deliberate system deserts us just when
we most need it.
So how can we improve the quality of our thinking when we’re wrestling with
tasks that matter? The trick is to neutralize the sense of threat, so we operate in
discovery mode rather than defensive mode. And it doesn’t take a lot to
encourage that—we just need something appealing to focus on for a moment. In
fact, some researchers found that when volunteers were given a puzzle where
they had to navigate a little mouse out of a maze, all it took to lift their
performance by 50 percent was seeing a picture of some cheese next to the exit
instead of a menacing owl.
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For us, the metaphorical “cheese” might take the
form of thinking about the positive aspects of the job at hand, acknowledging

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progress to date, or even just remembering the best parts of the day so far. All of
these are ways to shift our brain’s focus from threat to reward, so that we’re
better able to access the full range of our cognitive resources.
Ros, the senior healthcare executive we met in 
Chapter 10
, starts every
meeting with this in mind. “We’ve got a huge project where 95 percent of it is
going fine, but three things aren’t going so well,” she says. “We’re getting a lot
of questions about those three things, and I can see my team tensing up
whenever we talk about them. So now I always begin our meetings by talking
about what we’ve recently achieved. And you can see how it calms everyone
down and helps people think more clearly.” She’s keen to emphasize that “it’s
not about trying to spin or gloss over the problems. But beginning with what’s
working well puts everyone in a more open frame of mind, meaning we can look
at what’s 
not
working without people getting defensive.”
Notice that the aim is not to make everyone so relaxed that they ignore the
issues they’re facing, or forget to check for the kind of cognitive blind spots I
mentioned in the last chapter—confirmation bias, groupthink, default bias,
recency bias, endowment effect, and processing fluency. If our shortcuts go
unchecked, we’re more likely to make bad decisions. But if we can explore
difficult topics without putting ourselves and others into defensive mode, it’s
easier to discuss those potential blind spots in a constructive way. And then you
have the best of all worlds, intellectually speaking: you’ll be relaxed enough to
be expansive in your initial thinking, but still rigorous enough to kick the tires on
your ideas.
Here are some practical ways to make sure that you’re tackling even your
most challenging, crisis-ridden work in discovery mode: