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

Take your space.
Plan to give yourself five minutes beforehand to
stand straight, throw your arms wide, and square your shoulders. In the
situation itself, make just as sure to “take your space” then, too, by
sitting tall rather than hunching over with folded arms.
Score more personal recognition.
Apply all the influencing advice
from 
Part V
in the way you talk about your personal achievements, as
shown in the list above. Keep track of your small day-to-day successes,
so that neither you nor your boss has to rely on imperfect memories to
recall all you’ve achieved.

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Do also revisit the advice from 
Chapter 3
: 
mental contrasting,
priming,
and 
mind’s-eye rehearsal.
All those techniques can help
boost your self-assurance when you’re facing a challenge.

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PART VI
Resilience
Sailing Through Setbacks and Annoyances
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
–WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 
HAMLET
So far in this book, I’ve emphasized what you can control. But, of course,
barely a day goes by without something unexpected happening—a deadline
that moves, a decision that doesn’t go your way, or a crisis unfolding out of
thin air. Perhaps you’ve set your intentions for the day and are trying to pay
attention to positive things, but then you realize you’ve made a huge
mistake about something. Maybe someone fails to do what they promised,
or just keeps you waiting for an answer you need. These kinds of
uncertainties and unwelcome surprises cause us stress, but there’s no
avoiding them. They’re part of life.
The good news is that we’re surprisingly resilient in the long term. As
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert has shown in his decades of research on
affective forecasting
, we have a tendency to overestimate the personal
impact of every life event, good or bad. Even with the worst that life can
throw at us, we have a remarkable capacity to adjust to new circumstances
and get back to our former levels of happiness.
1
But when we do get
derailed by disappointments and irritations, it can be scant comfort to know
that someday we’ll get over it.
So I’d like to add to your “good day” repertoire by sharing some reliable
science-based techniques to help you get back on track quickly when you
hit a bump or two. I’ll talk first about ways to get back onto an even keel

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when you’re hit by something unpleasant. Then I’ll talk about ways to
bounce back and move on from situations that have been dragging you
down for a while. I’ll show you how to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity
gracefully and skillfully. And finally I’ll cover some advice on the best way
to handle a situation where someone else has let you down, so you can keep
merrily sailing along.

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