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

“What Do My ‘Crucibles’ Tell Me?”
I talked in 
Chapter 10
about ways to boost your colleagues’ performance by
helping them feel capable of solving their own problems. Now let’s apply that
technique to ourselves. When something happens to make us feel frustrated or
inept, it helps to remind ourselves of our accumulated skills and experiences, and
how they can equip us to rise above the challenging situation we’re dealing with
right now.
Harvard Business School professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George
explains one way to do this in his book 
True North.
9
There, he writes about the
bolstering effect of revisiting your “crucibles”—by which he means the big trials
you’ve overcome in your life, that have helped to forge who you are today. They
don’t necessarily have to be in the professional realm—your crucibles might be

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testing times you’ve handled in your personal life, too. Ask yourself these three
questions:
“When have I handled a difficult situation well in the past?”
“What personal qualities enabled me to overcome that?”
“What does this tell me I’m well equipped to do in my current situation?”
Bartek found that revisiting his crucibles gave him more optimism about his
ability to recover from his mistakes. “Probably the toughest point in my life was
when I came to London with nothing.” He remembered he was resourceful and
flexible, willing to mop hotel floors as a route to get ahead. And he knew he still
had those strengths in him now. “It made me think, ‘Okay, been there, done
that,’ when I was worried about losing my job. I knew I was strong enough to
cope if I had to. And that helped stop me from going round in circles with
worry.”
“What 
Really
 Matters?”
Scientific research on resilience also indicates that having a sense of purpose
tends to help people bounce back from adversity.
10
Sometimes the idea of
“purpose” can feel too big to get our heads around—the meaning of life may not
be obvious right here and now. But we can always take a moment to think about
the bigger picture, by reflecting on the things that matter most to us and
considering what that might tell us about the best way to react to a difficult
situation. This takes us right back to the beginning of the book, in a way, since a
simple first step toward restoring a sense of purpose is to revisit your intentions.
Bartek says that it almost always helped him think more clearly when he did
this, by asking himself:
“What matters most right now?”
“What do I really want to have happen here?”
Bartek says the answer was “sometimes about doing the right thing for our
staff, or sometimes it was about being a good dad, if I was trying to find the right

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trade-off between work and family. It was always clarifying, and it made me feel
less uptight quite quickly.”