you’re not quite feeling it).
Know thyself.
Identify where your typical energy highs and lows
usually occur. Notice what tends to boost or drain you. (Look for
patterns in the mental, physical, and social activities involved;
surroundings and times of day; the themes of the seven boosters above
—gratitude, generosity,
curiosity, achievement, connection, purpose,
and humor.) Decide on one or two reliable strategies you can use to
preempt or reverse a slump when it happens.
End on a high note.
Plot how to end each day—and indeed every
interaction or task—on a high note, to take advantage of the peak-end
effect. Try the three good things as an evening routine.
And to underpin all of this,
do refer back to
Chapter 5
on
downtime
and
Chapter 19
on
staying strong
to remind yourself why and how to
build enough energy-boosting breaks and bodily maintenance into your
schedule.
TWENTY-ONE
Playing to Your Strengths
Most of us seek to better ourselves if we can; we don’t want to stay in an entry-
level job all our lives. That’s not only because we might crave greater financial
security or social standing. Decades of research by Carol Dweck, the eminent
Stanford psychologist, suggests it’s also important for our psychological well-
being to know that our talents aren’t fixed and that we have a chance to develop
our abilities over time.
1
It helps us bounce back after mistakes and gives us a
sense of possibility and novelty—things that our brain finds rewarding.
But if we’re not content with standing still, it’s likely that there will be times
when our work stretches or exhausts us. We might have thrown ourselves in the
deep end
of a new professional project, and be struggling to remember how to
swim. Perhaps we’re in a tough or dull role that we’re seeing as a stepping-stone
to something better, or we’re pushing ourselves hard in the hope of making the
next career leap up the ladder. How can we navigate these kinds of professional
challenges (and multiple metaphors) with energy and enthusiasm? In this
chapter, I’m going to show you that the answer often lies in being more
deliberate about playing to our strengths, to help us stay in discovery mode as
we move through the more testing aspects of our work.
This approach stands in contrast to the way
that many of us have thought
about self-improvement in the past, where our focus has often been on fixing our
weaknesses. There’s a point to doing that, of course—if we’re terrible at
something that’s important in life, like basic arithmetic or turning up on time,
it’s worth bringing those abilities up to an acceptable level. But it’s problematic
if this fix-it mentality comes to dominate our attitude to personal development at
work, because focusing on our failings tends to undermine our sense of
competence—and, as we know from
Chapter 9
, that can all too easily provoke a
threat response in our brains. And when we’re in defensive mode, it’s harder for
us to think clever thoughts—making us even less good at what we’re doing. It
can end up being a vicious circle.
What does the strength-based alternative look like? Broadly speaking: we
figure out what our strengths are, then we find ways to play to them more fully
—especially in the more difficult challenges that we’re facing at work. (I’ll
explain more about how to do this in a moment.)
As a result, work might still
feel tough, but it’s easier for us to keep our brain in high-performance discovery
mode when we’re not constantly beset by a feeling that we’re incompetent.
There’s lots of research describing the motivation and performance gains that
are associated with this approach. For example, in a series of large-scale studies,
Gallup has consistently found that people’s job satisfaction improves when
they’re given feedback on their personal strengths and guidance on how to play
to them more fully in the role they’re in (e.g., “You’re great at X—here’s how
you could use that skill more fully in challenges Y and Z”). They observed that
profitability was 9 percent higher in companies with this strengths-based
approach to performance feedback, versus comparable businesses with a more
traditional “fix the weakness” approach to appraisals.
2
The Corporate Leadership
Council found even sharper correlations. In a
large study of nearly twenty
thousand employees from thirty-four organizations, seven industries, and
twenty-nine countries, performance was between 21 percent and 36 percent
higher in companies where managers emphasized strengths.
3
And whether or not you work for an organization that has seen the light, quite
extensive research suggests that you can put this knowledge to good use for
yourself. Psychologists
Alex Wood and Alex Linley, at Stirling University and
the Centre of Applied Positive Psychology, respectively, found that when
volunteers were encouraged to find a new way to use their personal strengths
each day over the course of a week, they went on to report higher levels of well-
being,
self-esteem, and something the researchers called “vitality” (what I’m
calling energy in this part of the book). Meanwhile, the volunteers also reported
lower stress. And, importantly, those gains were sustained when researchers
checked in three and six months later.
4
That’s a good return on investment for a
few minutes of reflection.
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