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

Step 1: List the “true facts.”
You’ll be good at this by now, because this
was also a foundational step in the “good person, bad circumstance”
technique for handling difficult behavior in other people (in 
Chapter 9
).
You’ll remember that “true facts” are the things you truly know for sure. In
this chapter, we’re talking about a situation rather than another person, but
the advice is similar: as soon as you catch an emotional tone creeping in,
you’re in the territory of interpretation rather than facts. For example,
suppose you’ve had a performance review that isn’t as glowing as you’d
hoped. It would be easy to say “I’ve been shortchanged” or “They aren’t
recognizing my contributions.” Is that true? Maybe, maybe not. What you
know for sure is something more like this: “I was expecting to be rated a 5. I
was rated a 4.” It’s dry—but that’s the point. It helps take the heat out of the
situation.
Step 2: Highlight the assumptions you’re making.
Now you get the chance
to think about your interpretation of those events. Write down a series of
statements beginning with the words “I’m assuming…” For example: “I’m
assuming my performance was equivalent to a 5 rating, and they’ve failed to
acknowledge it.” “I’m assuming they’re trying to take me down a peg. I’m

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assuming it’s probably payback for ignoring their advice that I should close
down my pet project.” You get the idea. The trick is to check what you’re
assuming about all dimensions of the situation: the causes, the outcome,
yourself, and anyone who’s involved.
Step 3: Generate alternative interpretations.
Look hard at your
assumptions, and turn the biggest ones on their head. It may help to know that
they’re likely to be the ones that are 
personal
, 
pervasive
, or 
permanent
. That
is, you’re taking something highly personally, you’re assuming that an issue
has wide-ranging consequences, or you’re assuming the impact will endure
for a long time (or forever). For each assumption, ask yourself:
• What if that assumption wasn’t correct? For example, what if the problem
isn’t personal, pervasive, or permanent?
• What would be another way of seeing the situation? What else could be
going on? Don’t shy away from creative ideas, even if they feel initially
improbable to you.
• What evidence might support those alternative interpretations?
There are two basic approaches to generating alternative perspectives in Step
3. One is to minimize the negative interpretation: “I’m assuming this is a sign
that I’ve fallen out of favor, but that’s unlikely to be true because the face-to-
face conversation I had with my evaluator was very positive.” This approach can
stabilize the negative emotional spiral. But you can also explore positive
interpretations, something that experiments on appraisal suggest may boost your
mood further.
5
In this example of the performance review, what would be a
much more optimistic version of events? “They like what I’m doing. But they
want to send me a message that it’s not wise to ignore an experienced
colleague’s advice and that I need to be more collaborative. They intend this to
be a learning opportunity for me.” As you do this, it may dawn on you that at
least some of this could be true.
What’s remarkable about reappraisal is that entertaining a different
interpretation of the facts actually changes how people experience and remember
a tough situation—it’s not just warm words. Scientists like Kevin Ochsner of
Columbia and James Gross of Stanford, two of the most influential thinkers in
the field of emotional resilience, have shown that there’s less activation in the
brain’s survival circuits when people think about an unpleasant situation having

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attached a more positive story to it.
6
Adopting a different perspective shifts our
neurological reaction to the original unpleasant situation, making our emotional
experience genuinely different.
Reappraisal was an important tool for Bartek as he navigated his stream of
bad days during the Olympics. “I was making all sorts of negative assumptions,
seeing everything as doom and gloom, but then I realized I was in a kind of brain
panic. I needed to see the facts as they really were, and stop over-extrapolating
from that. So I learned to ask myself, ‘What do I really know for sure?’ and
‘What am I assuming?’ whenever I couldn’t stop myself from worrying.” Those
questions revealed to him that he was making one big “permanent” assumption:
that his ill-fated decisions were irreversible. When he challenged himself to
think differently, he saw it simply wasn’t the case. “In fact, we were able to
downscale more quickly than I expected, and business eventually picked up from
there.”
Bartek says his use of reappraisal techniques has left him with a more resilient
perspective on life: “I now feel much steadier when things go up and down.”
Which is exactly what Ochsner and Gross’s research suggests: the more we learn
to reappraise difficult situations, the easier it becomes for us to remain composed
when things don’t go as we expect. And that’s a very useful talent to have in the
modern workplace.