Working Smarter

As I'm sure you have noticed, the mind has a mind of its own. It nags, frets, and guilts with a steady stream of thoughts that get in the way of things we are trying to do. It would be nice if it could just clam up for a while, especially with the badgering about things on our to-do list.

A study at Florida State University (Masicampo, Baumeister) found that worries about unfinished business distract attention, reducing performance in the process. Trying to do a task with an unfinished one hanging over your head hinders performance by flooding short-term memory with anxious thoughts. The fragile state of working memory—three or four thought chunks we can hold onto for only a few seconds at a time—is easy prey for worries that intrude from the unhandled realm.

THE BADGERING BRAIN

It turns out that not handling things is a danger signal for a brain on the lookout for things that are wrong—and that thinks it’s the year 100,000 BC. The warning sign means we are not in control, not handling something, which in turn means that something has overloaded capacity to cope. That is the on-button for anxiety and the stress response.

To stay focused, we need to persuade the alarmist brain that things are being handled. That’s what good time management and work-life balance do. They shut down the nattering brain through prioritizing, planning, and adjustments to schedules that allow people to feel they are managing both sides of the work-life hyphen. As soon as the hectoring brain feels things are being handled, it lets up, say researchers. It doesn’t have to respond to the errant “something wrong,” “out of control” messages anymore.

The key to silencing the to-do nag is to get the item out of your head and physically in the world, on paper or a screen. You write down your next physical action, whatever that may be—picking up a phone, grabbing a pen, speaking with someone, and noting when you’re going to do the item. That lets your brain know you are on the case, and it stops pestering.

MAKE YOUR BASE CAMP

The same thing applies to really big projects you have yet to start that may be bugging you. The longer you procrastinate, the longer the mind will badger, but if you do something, anything to get started on the project, all of a sudden, the looming dread fades, and the brain releases its alarm button. Spend 30 minutes to get a big assignment started, and just the time spent thinking and semi-organizing it takes the pressure off. Break the task into micro-bits, say 30 minutes a day, and you can chip away at it. Better yet, the project that would not let up its drumbeat feels under control.

I call it the “base camp” approach. Legendary mountain climber, Ed Viesturs, the first American to summit all 14 of the world 8000 meter- peaks, told me he doesn’t look at the mountaintop when he starts his climb. Too overwhelming. Instead, he focuses on just getting to the base camp for the day.

It’s a methodical approach we can use every day. One step in front of the other, by learning how to prioritize, to separate the urgent from the important, by not falling for time panic that aggravates the angst of the undone, and keeping our focus on the day's base camp.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE FOCUSES ATTENTION

My work-life balance programs take the concept of clarifying attention to the macro scale, building in adjustments to demands, devices, and distractions, and giving people flexibility in areas that allow them to feel they are able to handle both work and home responsibilities.

I hear from parents a lot that they feel guilty when they are at work and not taking care of their kids and guilty at home when they’re not at work getting more done. Flexibility in start times or a day or two a week of telework can make a big difference in creating a sense that both sides of the balance ledger are better controlled. The mind lets go of the chastising, and you are able to focus on the task at hand without the intrusion of untaken care of issues.

We all have a job we have to do, but how we do it is where we can build in the flexibility that allows for more effective work practices, ones that can reduce strain and the static of unhandled business. In my work-life balance training programs we drill down to the task practices and bottlenecks that make work and life difficult and build in the adjustments researchers have documented are much more effective.

In a world where attention is under siege, we forget that it is our chief productivity tool. Anything that is blowing up working memory and concentration is undermining productivity and the bottom-line. That may be why people who report good work-life balance are 21% more productive than their colleagues, according to a survey by the Corporate Executive Board, which represents 80% of Fortune 500 companies. 

Making it as easy as possible for minds to work unfettered by mental sidetracking and thoughts of overwhelm should be the goal of every team and organization. When minds are waylaid by the strain of the unhandled, attention isn’t just disrupted, it’s also replaced by the addled and frantic decisions of the caveman/woman brain that takes the wheel when capacity to cope is overloaded.

As they say, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Work-life balance and time management strategies are your insurance plan for attention management.

If you would like to learn more about our work-life balance or time management training programs, including "Managing Crazy-Busy Workload," click the button below for more details.

THERE ARE SOME LIINES OF WORK where it pays to be a cynic—journalism, law, private investigating, car repossession. But when it comes to teams or organizations, cynicism doesn’t work so well. It’s the off-switch for effort and trust and spreads highly contagious negative affect like a virus.

Humans are designed to pick up on the emotions and expressions of others, thanks to the handiwork of mirror neurons in our brain, and that’s particularly true with negative emotions. We are wired to err on the side of the negative to begin with—a survival instinct—so it doesn’t take much to steer us in the direction of fear, betrayal, or ulterior motives. It takes three positive events to one negative to stay on the positive side, because the negative is so powerful, the University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson has reported.

COOL TO NOT CARE?

A cynical attitude is easily passed along to colleagues and customers. Misery loves company, after all. "Cynical employees tend to be less motivated, grumpy with customers, maybe rude to their boss. They’re bitter employees who don’t want to be there," says George Banks of Longwood University, a co-author of a study (Chiaburur, Peng, Oh, Banks, Lomeli) showing that cynicism reduces job performance.

We live in an era rife with distrust of institutions and anyone trying to sell us anything. It’s easier than ever to be a cynic, memes of which flow from TV, cable, movies and politics. It’s has become cool not to care.

That’s dangerous for individuals and the organizations they work in, since it makes people do exactly what their brains and leaders don’t want them to—which is to give up on effort, participation, and growth. Core needs such as autonomy and competence require that we be proactive and involved. Our brains want novelty and challenge more than anything else for long-term fulfillment. That requires curiosity and initiative, signs that you have interest, which the shield of cynical beliefs precludes.

Cynicism is a force field of suspicion that appears righteous—you won’t get fooled again—but is actually self-defeating on many levels. It’s an easy blanket indictment of everything, which writes off opportunities, people, and potential progress with the same stiff-arm. Suspicion undermines connection and health. One study that examined 97,000 women (Tindle, Chang et al) found that high levels of cynicism are associated with higher rates of mortality, heart disease, and cancer.

IN MORE EARNING POWER, WE TRUST

Another study found that cynical beliefs reduce earning power (Stavrova, Ehlebracht). People who are more trusting make more money, because they are open to collaboration and help from others.

Suspicion obviously isn’t the ticket to an engaged team. Instead, it creates just the opposite—the why-bother stance of presenteeism. Research shows that cynicism in the workplace leads to decreased job satisfaction and commitment, and increased motivation to leave the company (Dean, Brandeis, Dharwadkar).

Even though it has a big impact on organizations, cynicism is an issue almost universally avoided, because it brings up uncomfortable acknowledgment that something isn’t working in the culture, which can be hard to face. Yet employee engagement depends on facing it and understanding what is causing it. Willing effort to go the extra mile and deliver its dividend of 28% higher productivity will never happen in a cynical environment. It can only come from people who believe in their leaders and mission and feel trusted by them.

ENERGY SQUELCHER

Suspicion creates active disengagement. It undercuts individual competence and the organization’s bottom line. It fuels withdrawal and depersonalization, some of the same characteristics associated with burnout. And it drives negative affect, a state of grievance and grumpiness that drags in colleagues and customers.

Most of us aren’t aware of our “affect,” the way we broadcast our mood to others, but it’s clear that others get the message. When there’s high positive affect, people are enthusiastic, active, and alert, say researchers. With low positive affect, the mood is lethargic. Negative affect, meanwhile, prompts even lower energy. Which affect do you think would get more done and make people feel better about doing it?

Some people have a disposition or personal history that lends itself to pessimism and a route down the track to cynicism. Yet many others begin their jobs feeling positive and looking forward, but wind up in the defensive posture of cynicism as a result of organizational factors. Promises aren’t kept. Support never appears. Layoffs have left a bitter taste.

Where there is high overload, people can wind up feeling unfairly treated, which can lead to a cynical attitude (Banks, Whelpley, Oh, Shin). Those conditions also usually lead to stress, which specializes in driving false beliefs that lead to intense emotions and ruminating over them. There is also a connection between emotional exhaustion, a marker of burnout, and organizational cynicism (Johnson, O’Leary-Kelly).

The antidote to negative affect and cynicism is, not surprisingly, positive affect. It’s been shown to reduce organizational cynicism (Treadway). How do you encourage that shift? A company comedy troupe? A video game room?

The weapon is trust, the very thing that cynicism destroys, delivered by the antithesis of suspicion: engagement. Engaged employees exhibit the exact opposite trait of cynicism: dedication (Maslach, Leiter). 

EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS PICK THE LOCK

Work-life balance programs and employee engagement traiiangs are an excellent way to build trust, dedication and a more supportive culture. They help pick the lock on employee attitudes. I have seen it time and again in work-life balance training programs for clients, when you provide tools to people to work with less difficulty and more support and provide opportunities to contribute, self-manage, and recharge, the walls recede and minds open.

It’s my experience that people are not as hard to reach as we think—and are secretly waiting to be released from their boxes of suspicion. They want to believe in what they’re doing. Provide them with a credible and sustained demonstration that shows them they are valuable, and many will respond.

They want to contribute, be recognized for what they do, have resources to do their jobs, know what to expect—all levers of employee engagement—because that is what their brains are designed for: participating, not the spectating of cynicism.

Besides training and development, managers also need to build trust at the personal level with their staff. Among engaged employees, 87% know their manager well and have frequent communication with that person. When you give people a rationale for doing assignments, for instance, and include them in a more collaborative way in solutions, you can change how they think about their work and their role in it, and they can go from active disengagement to engaged.

All it takes to get that extra effort is a little effort. It’s there waiting to be unleashed.

If you would like to learn more about how our work-life balance and employee engagement trainings can help your organization unleash your greatest asset, your human talent, click the button above or reach out at 310-570-6987.

WHEN YOU ARE HAVING a bad day at work, chances are very good you are also having an unproductive day. Things like verbal cage matches with colleagues and visits from Mr. Murphy and his famous law impact how we think, and, as a result, how we use our thoughts to perform tasks.

Negative mood, stress, and anger are hazardous to performance. They undermine attention, close off the big picture, and keep minds ruminating off topic from the task at hand.

MOOD IMPACTS OUTPUT

The University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson has shown that positive emotions broaden minds, build interest, and energize, while negative emotions restrict thinking, and discourage receptivity to new things and initiative. It stands to reason, then, that employees with a more positive outlook, more satisfied with their work, would tend to be more productive.

And that's what work-life balance studies are finding. In a study where researchers observed employee behavior in meetings for months (behind a trick wall where they could observe the proceedings), Marcial Losada found that people who used more positive language, who were open to the opinions of others, and who didn’t retreat into defensive and pessimistic postures had higher sales, were more productive, and had better rapport with their colleagues.

One of the things that makes people feel positive at work is work-life balance. People who feel they have good work-life balance work 21% harder than those who don’t, according to a survey from the Corporate Executive Board, which represents 80% of Fortune 500 companies. That extra effort is the definition of the discretionary effort that comes from employee engagement. This is why employee development programs, such as our work-life balance program, Work Smarter, Live Better, and our engagagement training, Supercharging Engagement, are so valuable for talent and the bottom-line.

Contrast that with the negative effect work-life conflict has on employee performance—reduced work effort and performance and increased absenteeism and turnover (Anderson, Coffey, Byerly, 2002), reduced health and energy (Frone, Rusee, Barnes, 1996), and increased stress and burnout (Anderson et al, 2002). 

WORK-LIFE ENGAGEMENT

There is a direct and much overlooked link between work-life balance and employee engagement. People who feel they have some flexibility in how they do their tasks and take care of their home and life responsibilities respond in a proactive way that mirrors the engagement outcome every organization wants. They do more.

At work here is something called social exchange theory in the academic world. The organization offers something that benefits the employee, and the employee reciprocates in the form of going beyond the call of duty. 

“When treated favorably by the organization, employees will feel obliged to respond in kind, through positive attitudes or behaviors toward the source of the treatment,” explain T. Alexandra Beauregard and Leslie Henry in a meta study on the link between work-life balance and organization performance. “Using the provision of work-life balance practices as an indicator of favorable treatment, employees will reciprocate in ways beneficial to the organization – increased commitment, satisfaction with one’s job, and citizenship behaviors,”

Those behaviors are straight out of the employee engagement handbook, producing two of the main domains of engagement—dedication (commitment) and vigor/energy (citizenship behaviors), which drives the initiative of discretionary effort. They are highly sought-after traits, since, as Gallup reports, engaged employees are 28% more productive and the vast majority of people are unengaged. Only 31% of employees are engaged, with 51% not engaged and 17.5% actively disengaged.

THE VALUE OF CHOICE

In my employee development programs I see companies that want to increase engagement but don’t quite know how. I have found that work-life balance programs can provide the initial spark, swinging the door wide open to the conditions that prime engagement behaviors.

One of the most powerful factors in engagement is having a sense that you are valued and trusted. Work-life programs that allow flexibility in how tasks are done, where they are done, or when they are done give employees that sense of value with the vote of confidence that comes with choice, options, and responsibility.

Given a choice in how they work, people can work at time of peak productivity and alertness to maximize their productivity (Shepard et al, 1996), freeing up more time for other responsibilities and needs, or they can work more during the company’s crunch time, with a payoff of schedule flexibility later.

UNLEASHING COMPETENCE

We know from the research on human motivation that promoting choice and self-responsibility satisfy deep psychological needs, such as autonomy. That makes people feel competent and want to do more. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns says that the root of satisfaction comes from doing things that make us stretch or challenge us. The reward of a job well done is the brain’s party drug of dopamine, the chemical signature of satisfaction.

The payoff of a more engaged workforce is greater effort that leads to increased performance. That should lead to higher output that increases company value. Research shows just that. Work-life balance can have some pretty amazing effects on the bottom line. One study (Arthur, 2003) found that after companies started work-life initiatives, shareholder returns increased $60 million per firm in the study. That’s a WOW, ladies and gentlemen. And, like they say on the infomercials, there’s more!

A meta study that looked at the effect of one work-life practice, telework, on performance (Pitt-Catsouphes, Marchetta, 1991) found that productivity went up 10% to 30%. Reason: People worked more hours at home than in the office but enjoyed it more because they had more control over their time. Another report (Perry-Smith and Blum, 2000) analyzed performance at 527 U. S. companies and found that firms with a wider range of work-life practices had greater performance, profit-sales growth, and organizational performance.

RECIPROCAL PAYOFFS

Attitudes drive effort or the lack of it, no doubt along the same positive v. negative track of openness and initiative v. cynicism and disengagement. Studies show a connection between work schedule flexibility and satisfaction. Gaining more control over work-life conflict makes people feel less stressed, less guilt, and, in turn, grateful to the company. The reciprocation comes in the form of increased organizational commitment and reduced turnover intentions (Aryee, Luk, Stone, 1998; Halpern, 2005; Houston, Waumsley, 2003). People also want to make sure they stay at a company with a good work-life policy, so they put in extra effort to remain there.

Hopefully, the research will help more leaders to see the real connection between work-life balance practices and employee engagement. Work-life balance practices are a statement to any firm’s most important asset, its human capital, that, yes, they are valued and trusted.

It’s a no-brainer that people feeling good about themselves and their work are going to be more committed and engaged. When they have options to work more effectively, tools to manage demands and devices, and schedules that allow for flexibility to minimize work-life conflict, they go beyond the call of duty. And no one has to tell them to.

If you would like to learn more about how a work-life balance development program or employee engagement training can supercharge your team, click the button below for more details.

Cats can nod off upside down with their paws in the air. Dogs can be out cold in five seconds. The realm of sleep is a little more complicated for humans. There are those racing thoughts to contend with, the hyper state that won’t shut down when you want it to. Trying to do what for any pet is a snap costs Americans $41 billion a year in sleep aids. 

It’s kind of disconcerting that Rover and Fluffy can get the job done and we can’t, but there is hope for better nights ahead and spending a lot less money on sleep meds. The culprit in a bad night’s sleep for many is something we can fix, if we know how: stress. We can shut off the stress alarm just as we can the alarm clock in the morning. When we do, the stress response stops in four minutes.

BAD BRAIN ARCHITECTURE BEHIND INSOMNIA

Stress is part of our built-in survival equipment. It’s an alarm set off in the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system, which triggers a host of physiological reactions to allow the body to find the strength and speed to fight or run from danger. While it has kept us alive through the millennia, it’s a mechanism that was built for another time and place—African savannas 100,000 years ago—not for the social stressors of the modern world.

The stress response and its headquarters, the amygdala, don’t know how to compute the 21st century. They are out of their depth, out of whack with the nature of the threat they are reacting to, and so are we when they are allowed to run us. An impending deadline, 200 emails, or a conflict with a friend or family member may create tension, but they are not threats to life and limb. They are false alarms that come from bad brain architecture.

When something overloads our ability to cope with it, the modern brain is instantly hijacked by the ancient brain, as if the higher brain and the cerebral cortex that evolved on top of the limbic system didn’t exist.

This can happen before you even consciously feel you can’t handle someone or something. It’s very quick on the draw, and if we’re not just as quick to shut down the false alarm, we can fall prey to the host of physical maladies and conditions stress can set off. Because stress suppresses the immune, digestion, and tissue repair systems, it can lead to cardiovascular problems, irritable bowel, stroke, back pain, chronic fatigue, and, yes, insomnia, among many others.

INCREASE STRESS, DECREASE SLEEP

Research shows that stress lessens the length of sleep—not just how many hours we sleep, but how often we awaken during sleep. A whopping 78% of participants in one study (Bastiem, Vallieres, Morin 2004) reported a link between stress and insomnia.

At the most basic level, stress is at odds with the concept of sleep, which is the act of closing up shop for the day and shutting down. The stress response is an activation agent. It drives arousal. It's a stimulant. It doesn’t want to close down for the night, because you are going to die, or at least that is the message being sent by outmoded brain neurons.

One of the hormones that the stress response floods your body with to help you survive a threat is cortisol. It's not a sleep aid. Sleep starts when cortisol is at its lowest point, and you are ready to wake up when it is at its highest level. Too much cortisol interferes with sleep regulators such as the Hypothalamo-Pituitary Adrenal axis (HPA) (Kato, Montplaisir, Lavigne, 2004), activates the autonomic nervous system, and increases attention and alertness.

Acute and chronic stress have been found in studies of rats to decrease slow wave "delta" sleep, the deepest sleep, when the brain is less responsive to external stimuli, as well as REM, critical to our circadian sleep/wakefulness rhythm (Meerlo, Pragt, Daan).

When stress shuts down the immune system, that also impacts sleep. The immune system is critical to the work of cytokines, which signal immune system molecules such as interleukin-1 beta, tumor necrosis factor, and interferon, which regulate sleep. Without these elements, sleep is interrupted (Han, Kim, Shim, 2012).

THE OVER-ALERTNESS OBSTACLE

Stress-related insomnia itself aggravates these and many other physiological barriers to sleep in a vicious cycle that doubles down on the stimulant effect of stress. Insomnia causes many of the same problems that the stress that created it does—increased cortisol, heart rate, body temperature (which can also cause wakefulness), and oxygen consumption. If you have insomnia, you are in a higher state of alertness, even though you are fatigued from lack of quality shuteye. Insomnia has been dubbed an “over-alertness obstacle” to sleep.

Let’s take a cue from Fido and Ginger, and drop the stress. Just get rid of it. Animals don’t hang on to it. After a trespassing dog pads a few yards past your house, it's like the event never happened for your rabidly barking dog, now docile and ready for a snooze. We can do the same, by switching off the stress when it erupts. That means dropping the rumination and awfulizing that perpetuate stressful thoughts, and challenging the false beliefs behind negative events that keep our brain in the stress vise grip.

Stress is a broken car alarm that shuts off only when we grab the keys and switch it off—by convincing our brain that the danger is not real, just like thoughts aren't real. Only experience is. You are not going to die. You are going to handle it, whatever it is. You always do. 

The process starts by understanding the mechanisms of the stress response, that the first thoughts that go off when negative things happen are false beliefs, all-or-nothing, black-and-white distortions and exaggerations. We have to catch ourselves when stress sets the worries and dreads off and submit them to a vetting process—disputing, challenging,  contesting. False beliefs and fear projections can't hold up to scrutiny when we dig in and unmask them.

Proven processes I teach in my stress management trainings and coaching help you defang triggers that set off stress and bring back your 21^st century brain to resume command of the ship. You are no longer back in your hunter-gatherer mind, but present, and well-rested, in the 21st century.

If you are having trouble sleeping, have stress in your life, and would like to get back to restful nights again, click here or give us call at Optimal Performance Strategies at 310-570-6987. We turn off the stress. 

We say we don’t like repeats, but that’s only when it comes to TV episodes. On the behavior front, humans are creatures of deep habit, from buying the same brand of cereal to sitting in the same chair at the favorite restaurant. It’s even true with behaviors we don’t like, such as stress or chronic overload.

The tendency is to keep doing things that drive stress and overwhelm, instead of making changes. It’s called adaptation. Humans are experts at molding themselves to conditions at hand. We adapt to chronic stress with the aid of adrenaline or an out-of-whack personal life, setting up a date with burnout and worse.

We tell ourselves we are too busy to stop for a second or do anything different. Those are false beliefs, a byproduct of the stress response. There’s always time for a better approach, one that could get more done in less time or manage a schedule better. 

WRITING YOUR OWN SCRIPT

Luckily, it’s possible to exit the rut by tapping in to our very own core human needs for self-determination and progress. Researchers have found that we all have a powerful need to determine our own scripts and that helplessness is not our style. Those with the highest job satisfaction are people who feel a sense of progress in their work, which is largely the result of doing things that gratify self-determination needs such as autonomy and competence.

We can’t wait for these needs to satisfy themselves. We have to be proactive to make it happen. The way forward comes through knowledge and education, from strategies to change the reflex of repeat mechancial momentum.

PROGRESS AHEAD

One of the most convenient ways to do this is through online classes. You don’t have to get in the car, hire a babysitter, or fight traffic. Our new online work-life balance classes give you five courses to help you do what your brain wants—move forward and put the overwhelm, stress or burnout in the rear-view mirror.

Take your pick from work-life balance classes, stress management, time management, information management, or an inspiring life balance course. “The Missing Piece of Happiness.” Based on my book, Don’t Miss Your Life, the program shows through the science how to activate the most gratifying life outside the job.

I teach these programs in my employee development work for organizations from IBM to Kellogg’s and Budweiser, but the vast majority of people in the U.S. or around the world don’t have access to training programs where they work or live. Now anyone can log in to one of our Webex classes and get tools virtually to make dramatic improvement in their work and lives. You can take a single class or put together a training series with multiple courses.

Our online work-life balance classes offer five ways to get out of the unbalanced column:

1. Work-Life Balance: Work Smarter, Live Better

It’s hard to be balanced with your eyes closed, and that’s effectively what’s happening when we are not paying attention to how we work. It’s how we work—acting before thinking, time frenzy, doing more than we can do well—that’s at the bottom of unbalanced world. This class shows how to make the adjustments the science says make work and life less difficult, by setting boundaries, managing demands and devices, building attention and refueling and recharging the batteries.

You learn how to get control of an out-of-control world and put your life and personal responsibilities on the calendar at the same time.

 2. Stress Management: Stay Calm in the Storm

Stress is optional. It’s your reaction to what someone says or does, the story you tell yourself about the stressful event, that drives the stress. That’s great news, because it’s something we have the power to change. This class shows you how to manage stress, eliminate burnout triggers, and prevent the false alarm of stress from wreaking havoc on your thinking, health, and life. Five out of the six leading causes of death have stress as a factor, as well as some 75% of doctor visits. Learn how to turn off the danger signal of stress and manage any challenge.

3. Time Management: Manage Crazy Busy Workload

Most people I talk to these days are drowning in a flood of unbounded devices and demands. Studies show a vast number of people today feel overwhelmed by their workload. The feeling that things are out of control is one of the easiest triggers for the stress response. This class shows how to get control over events and cut stress and overwhelm by setting boundaries on the incoming and developing essential time management skills. One Harvard study shows that boundaries are a success tool. They are the most basic piece of self-management. This class shows how to put them into action, separate the urgent from the important, build better time estimation, manage interruptions, and control devices and intrusions.

4. Information Management: Control Message Overload

No matter what industry you are in, your real business these days is the clicking business, triaging through a siege of email, IMs, texts, and WhatsApp messages. Researchers have identified great ways to manage our messaging better, and we learn their secrets here. This course provides strategies to set the terms of engagement with devices, manage interruptions and distractions, and cut down on the time spent dealing with email and messaging run amok. Learn how to create the most productive email checking schedules, reduce email volume, and restore sanity.

5. Life Balance: The Missing Piece of Happiness

The other side of the work-life hyphen, life, gets lost in the shuffle, crowded out by more “important” things, but researchers tell us that nothing succeeds like recess—through engaged experiences. This class explores the skill-set of living the fullest life. We learn through the sciences of happiness, optimal experience, and intrinsic motivation that experiences make us happier than material things. You are as happy as the most recent positive and novel event you can remember. The power of now is 100% within the moment of active recreation, play, and fun. It requires the opposite skills of the work mind—from risk-taking to not caring about the result, to turning on the self-propulsion engine of mastery. 

The weight of habit can keep us grinding through a routine that outlived its usefulness long ago, if it ever had one. The law of least effort, another human wont, would have us believe that changing anything would be more work, even though it would have the opposite effect. The “I’m too busy mindset” is notorious for closing out better options.

Don’t fall for it. The skills we teach in our online work-life balance classes are what lead to real least effort—a more productive way to work. And a more gratifying way to live.

The route to the self-determined life we’re wired to lead is a participant path. If you are interested in a proactive step to learn more about our online classes, click the button below for details on our work-life balance class and visit here at our nline classes page.

If there's one thing that people around the world agree on, it's that being happy beats being miserable. But what exactly makes us happy? That's something that hasn't been crystal-clear over the ages, which has allowed others to decide for us that a certain luxury sedan or a 55-inch flat screen will do the job. It's also led to the habit of shortcut happiness through default pleasures—double fudge chocolate, "Grand Theft Auto"—that obscures the real deal.

Social psychologists have decoded much of the puzzle of subjective well-being over the last two decades, showing that the external metrics assumed to be the route to happiness can't deliver the goods. There's a momentary bump from toys, money or a promotion, and then it's gone, because these outer symbols are based on what others think. What works is the secret agent of happiness—the subtler art of internal gratification, and understanding it is a key piece of work-life balance.

PLEASURE VS. GRATIFICATION

We usually don't have time or patience for that. The reflex for positive mood states tends to gravitate to quick-fixes, the sensory and momentary delights that University of Pennsylvania's Martin Seligman calls "pleasures." The impulse is to make a beeline for that hunk of Swiss chocolate or boost the adrenaline with a cinematic nail-biter. You feel good briefly but it doesn't fill you up.

There's a big difference of opinion between the body's idea of happiness and that of the mind. Pleasures are fun, but they're cotton candy for your brain, which has a higher threshold for satisfaction and demands a more engaged version of happiness, what Seligman calls "gratifications."

The eye candy and bodily sensations of pleasure mode require little in the way of participation or thinking, so their effect on well-being is ephemeral. "Once the external stimulus is gone, the positive emotion sinks beneath the wave of ongoing emotion without a trace," Seligman has written.

Since pleasures are easy and what's drilled into us, they can wind up the only strategy for happiness, leaving us always wanting more. It's the "Is that all there is?" syndrome. They keep you chasing the next momentary hit while doing nothing to fill the void that fuels the chase.

It takes effort for the more lasting form of well-being, the gratifications, something I detail in my book on the power of participant experiences, Don't Miss Your Life.

HIGHER HAPPINESS

Satisfaction and fulfillment are not drive-thru affairs. These higher forms of happiness require challenging and involving activity. That's hard to fathom given the human default to what's easy. It seems that more and more comfort is the mission of life, but your brain neurons say no. They don't like terminal boredom. They want engagement, something required by our core psychological needs, say researchers.

What kind of gratifications can satisfy those needs over the long term? The research points to experiences that allow you to be absorbed and fully engaged, that let you feel you're freely choosing things, that make you feel competent and allow you to learn and grow, and that connect you with others through close relationships, social activities and service to others.

Active hobbies, learning new things, recreational pursuits and volunteering are primo gratifications, satisfying your core as few other things can through challenge and growth. Participant activities, from dancing to aikido to painting, deliver experiences that stick with you through the competence and relationships they build and the joy that lingers in indelible memories.

Unlike fleeting pleasures, gratifications are expansive events, giving your brain the forward movement it craves. "You're constantly learning," says Werner Haas, a chemist from San Jose who gets his gratification from two activities that are a world apart—orienteering and ballroom dancing.

THE SEEKING MINDSET

Another way to look at gratifications is that they come from a seeking mind-set, as opposed to the escapist mode typical of pleasures, as the University of Maryland's Seppo Iso-Ahola puts it.

Recreation seekers, who are driven by personal and interpersonal goals, are less bored, more fulfilled, and healthier than people fueled by the escapist motive, says Iso-Ahola. Spend too long in escapist mode and you become dependent on the entertainment served up until you don't know how to occupy yourself off the clock anymore.

You can find more gratifications if you manage attention better. The reflex to divert attention to phones and distractions in a free moment undercuts the engagement your brain wants.

Try to become aware when you have the impulse to shift attention to a distraction. Instead, think about what you can focus on before grabbing the remote, phone or the Skittles. Ask yourself: What can I learn? What can I try? What can I experience? Where can I discover something?

We don't put much thought into our free time, which we're led to believe doesn't have much value. Without planning or engagement skills, it leaves things up to autopilot escapes and pleasures.

We can opt out of that mode, though, by exercising choices we're not told we have—to go with the gratifications and the seeking mind-set, a prerequisite to finding things, such as satisfaction and missing lives.

If you would like to learn more, click the button below for info on my life balance keynotes, trainings, and coaching.

YOU CAN LEAD a horse to water, but, as we all know, you can’t make them drink the stuff. Like animals, people also have minds of their own. Getting them to do what you want can be dicey. Compulsion and nagging can fail miserably on humans, but there is something that is highly persuasive: giving them a rationale for why they need to do what you want them to.

Research from the University of Rochester’s Edward Deci and Richard Ryan has shown that we are much more inclined to buy in to doing a task when we feel as if we are part of the process. Give an employee a reason for why something has to be done, and you sidestep the default resistance adults have to being told what to do and activate a key lever of employee engagement, choice.

AGENT OF ENGAGEMENT

Offering a rationale, instead of just telling someone what to do, plays to one of our core psychological needs: autonomy. We all have a strong need to feel that we are freely choosing things and not being forced and controlled, says Deci.

How do leaders gratify that need when it’s the job of employees to do what others want? Through the agent of autonomy in the workplace, choice, in how the job is done—not what is done. We all have a job we have to do. How we do it is where we can build in choice, within limits, of course.

When you let someone know why he or she is being told to do something, it enables that person to feel autonomy by offering a sense of choice. Let them in on the purpose behind the action, and it makes them feel more a part of the team, more responsible, and a part of the decision to move forward. It’s a kind of jiu-jitsu that helps them feel they are doing the task because they want to.

That’s been the goal of leadership for a long time. As Dwight Eisenhower put it, “Leadership is the art of getting someone to do what you want because he wants to do it.” Now we have the science to tell us how and why this most potent of motivational systems works, whether on the job, at home, or anywhere you have to get folks to work with you. You let them satisfy core needs. They reciprocate.

The dynamic at the heart of autonomy and employee engagement is participation. Involvement gratifies two other core psychological needs—competence, or feeling effective, and connection with others. When all three needs have a chance to be expressed, people respond in a more participant way—taking initiative, more responsibility, going the extra mile willingly, which we know from the data on engaged employees can make them 28% more productive (Gallup).

SHIFTING LANGUAGE

Autonomy supportive leadership has been shown to increase trust, teamwork, and performance, Deci’s work and that of other psychology researchers show that, by turning loose the engines that motivate our deepest needs and drives, which come, not from external approval—the carrot-and-stick approach that runs counter to autonomy needs—but from goals such as excellence, craft, service, and learning, people are willing to do more, stick with it longer, and like what they’re doing more.

It’s a big shift from the command-and-control style of leadership we’ve all grown up with. For leaders, it requires a different language, less controlling, more informational. The idea is to forego the usual “have to,” “need to” phrasing and present tasks or issues in a way that allows others to play a role in the decision-making.

Getting a rationale for why something needs to be done allows the person to internalize the event, which creates a sense of importance and belief in the task. That holds true even if someone doesn’t want to do what he or she is being asked to do. When that is the case, letting someone express feelings about the task also results in a sense of autonomy through the act of expression, which makes the person more willing to do the task.

In this new world of leadership, the carrot and stick is supplied by the employee, enabled by the manager, just as Eisenhower observed decades ago. That is the definition of employee engagement—volitional extra effort, not because anyone demands it. We can’t command engagement, only enable someone else to unleash it with the proper tools, something our employee engagement training programs teach your team.

You can’t turn on the spigot of effort without filling up the tank with the juice: people driving themselves with proactive involvement for goals that satisfy inner needs. Follow the trail of motivation blazed by Deci, Ryan, and their colleagues, and you discover there is a better way to engage employees through strategies that make everyone a propulsion agent of both their own, and your, bottom line.

If you would like more information about how our employee engagement training can supercharge motivation and effort in your organization, tap the button below for details.

The surprising thing about stress is that it's not caused by anyone or anything else. The danger signal that trips the stress response is triggered, not by external events, but by what you think about those events. I hate to tell you this, but it’s the story you tell yourself about a stressful event, that activates stress. And that's very good news, because that means you can change the story and shut off the stress.

WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN

It certainly doesn't feel like good news when stress erupts. That's because the story set off by stress is a highly catastrophic one. The ancient part of the brain that trips the stress response thinks you are about to die that second. As a result, it feeds the brain with an extreme thought, a false belief that immediately jumps to worst-case-scenario thinking and ruminating about dire outcomes.

The pattern is autopilot, unless we stop the emotional reaction by bringing back the 21st-century brain and the right way to frame negative events. How long we stay trapped in emotional awfulizing and rumination depends on a style of self-talk known as “explanatory style,” how we explain why bad things that happen to us. 

Explanatory style is a concept that isn’t hard to grasp. I see the light bulbs go on right away in participants in my stress management programs. Our thoughts are the problem, not what anyone else is doing to us. Manage the thoughts set off by the default stress reaction, and you control the demands, instead of the other way around. Turn off the danger signal, and the stress response stops in four minutes.

CONTROLLING SELF-TALK

When a threat overloads capacity to cope with it, whether it’s an argument with a colleague or 300 emails, it activates ancient survival equipment in the brain's defense hub, the amygdala, which hijacks the modern brain and turns over command to a stowaway from the year 100,000 BC. The so-called caveman/woman brain then locks in irrational emotions and the thoughts they unleash, driven by the false belief of imminent demise.

That triggers dire and pessimistic self-talk—“I can’t handle it,” “I’m going to lose my job and be out on the street.” Pessimistic explanatory style entrenches the false belief that the sky is falling or that nothing will ever work out. We buy the catastrophic story because it’s in our heads—it has to be true! No, they are mere thoughts, and thoughts aren’t real. Only experience is real.

There is another explanation for what happened other than the black-and-white, all-or-nothing frame of pessimistic explanatory style. Optimistic explanatory style reframes the reaction by bringing back the rational 21^st century brain. Something simply didn’t work out. A mistake was made, and it’s survivable. You’ll do better next time. It’s hard, but you can cope.

PESSIMISTIC STYLE: HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

Explanatory style isn’t just key to controlling stress. Researchers who tracked the health of a group of Harvard students from college through their sixties (Peterson, Seligman, Vaillant) were able to show that a pessimistic explanatory style is a serious risk factor for poor health in midlife and late adulthood. The way we interpret why things happen to us can literally make us sick, set off major health conditions, and shorten our lives.

The reason is that the stress response was only designed to be active for a short period of time, since it does serious damage to our bodies in longer doses.

It suppresses the immune system, shuts down the digestive and tissue repair systems, sends blood pressure skyrocketing, and increases the bad cholesterol while decreasing the good kind. All this is intended to harness the body's strength and push blood to the arms and legs to help us fight or run during the brief time we are in harm's way.

This is why chronic stress that goes on day after day, week after week, sometimes year after year, is a factor in the leading causes of death and why it leads to absenteeism and presenteeism. Stress ravages bodies, brains, and productivity. It constricts brains to the perceived emergency, so the chief productivity tool, attention, goes missing in rumination.

It’s no wonder, then, that programs that teach people how to control stress with an optimistic explanatory style have an immediate impact on health and performance. Stress management training programs, for instance, have been shown to increase company revenues 23% and cut absenteeism 24% (Munz, Kohler, Greenberg). 

FROM PERMANENT TO TEMPORARY SETBACK

The right explanatory style can make all the difference for an under- pressure organization, team or personal life. The pessimistic style sees negative events as permanent, pervasive (affecting every aspect of life), and personal. It can lead to what the University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman identified as “learned helplessness,” a belief that there’s nothing that can be done.

That fuels pessimistic self-talk and terms that lock you in to the darkness—things “always” turn out bad, you’ll “never” make it. Seligman discovered that pessimistic explanatory style is a road that leads to depression.

Optimistic explanatory style reverses the negative self-talk with terms that reframe the situation from permanent to temporary. It’s a passing storm, like all storms. It’s not pervasive but specific to a certain situation. Therefore, it’s not going to affect everything you do for the rest of your life. And you don’t take the event personally. That takes the ego out of the equation and the emotions that gush irrationally from it.

The optimistic style brings back the analytical brain hijacked by the primitive emotional brain residing in the ancient limbic system. You can start to weigh pro and con again. The sky is no longer falling.

The power to manage stress is within us all when we shut down the false story of stress and reframe it with the right explanatory style. This skill can transform lives and workplaces. Without an understanding of how to frame pressure, pace, and workload, the default is to the reflex catastrophic story. With the right self-talk, you can manage any challenge. 

Stress management training can put your team on the path to effective performance. If you are interested in a program for your organization, click the button below for details on pricing and content. Reframe the overwhelm game.

I speak to engineers a lot, and they can tell you, even the strongest materials pull apart, subjected to the right amount of force and load. The same thing can happen to any organization when people and teams get overextended, easy to do in an unbounded world of 24/7 technology.

When we do more than we can do well, it’s a lose-lose for company and individual. The blowback comes in the form of costly dysfunctions—plummeting performance, turnover, absenteeism and presenteeism (there in body, but not in mind), and burnout, which creates the opposite physical and mental states needed for employee engagement.

UNDER THE SURFACE

As burnout scholar Christina Maslach reported in her research, the main dimensions of burnout—exhaustion and cynicism—are the antithesis of engagement’s main characteristics: energy and dedication. For someone in a state of chronic fatigue or overwhelm, there is no capacity or intention to go the extra mile and voluntarily put forth the discretionary effort that defines engagement, which make people 28% more productive (Corporate Executive Board). 

The toll on individuals is harder to see, but it’s there—poor morale, guilt, overwhelm, and frustration that they can’t take care of their responsibilities at work or at home. Feeling effective, or competent, is a core psychological need, and if we chronically feel ineffective, that undercuts motivation and drives a belief that things are out of control, which in turn fuels overwhelm and discontent.

No one wants to admit it when demands go beyond coping ability, so the problems stay under cover. They usually only surface in anonymous employee surveys, on questions asking employees about their work-life balance. My clients often come to me for work-life balance training after discovering on an internal survey that it’s a glaring issue.

CANARY IN THE COAL MINE

Less-than-stellar work-life balance scores are the canary in the coal mine, the signal that something harmful is in the air. If it’s not taken care of, it has the potential to turn the enthused and dedicated into the frustrated and disengaged. That can lead to lost productivity, resentment, cynicism, increased medical costs, and even the loss of top talent.

Giving employees a comprehensive work-life balance survey can surface issues that are critical to employee performance, satisfaction, and retention. People who feel they have good work-life balance are 21% more productive, studies show (Corporate Executive Board).

A work-life balance survey should be done anonymously to insure candid responses. I have my client's employees take the survey before we do our  work-life balance training program, and then I follow-up with another survey after the program to measure progress.

To help you get started, I have provided a list of 20 survey questions that you can use to take the work-life temperature of your team or organization. The first three items are listed here.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE SURVEY 

1. I feel I have good work-life balance.
2. I have more work than I can do well.
3. I feel valued by the organization.

For the complete survey of 20 questions, click the button below for our 22-page "How to Do a Work-Life Balance Survey E-Book."  The survey fleshes out, not just the state of work-life balance, but also its supporting issues, from poor time management, to information overload, to engagement and stress.

For each survey statement, respondees can answer: Not True at All, Rarely True, Somewhat True, Occasionally True, True, Often True, and Very True. Assign points for answers on a 7-point scale: 1 for Not True at All, 2 for Rarely True, 3 for Somewhat True, 4 for Occasionally True, 5 for True, 6 for Often True, 7 for Strongly True. Tally up average point totals per statement to find the hot-button issues. 

A good work-life balance survey can open the door to conversation and solving bottlenecks that get in the way of performance and people’s lives. In my experience, the vast majority of employees want to work hard and go the extra mile—if they feel they have a chance to participate in the process and feel valued. When they are introduced to a battery of tools in my employee trainings to manage work and life better, there is real enthusiasm that can kick-start engagement.

At one of my clients, a work-life initiative at IBM energized one department so much that people from other departments wanted to know what they were doing so they could get in on the act.

THE ROAD TO PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

The survey, though, is just the initial step. It needs to be followed up by course of action, or skepticism sets in and credibility is lost. A work-life balance training or development program takes the initiative to the next step, providing a road map forward.

Our work-life balance programs give your team a chance to zero in on concrete process improvements through discussion, interactive exercises, and evidence-based tools that help people work more effectively and carve out a better work-life.

Work-life balance isn’t pie in the sky. It’s a practical system of adjustments to how we work—from time management, to interruption management, to prioritization, stress management, understanding the most potent motivation, enabling engagement, and refueling and recovery strategies— that create a more sustainable approach on the job, more peceived control over events, and a more gratified life outside work hours.

The work-life balance survey can get it all started, by demonstrating the unspoken needs necessary for employees to be able to navigate the work-life divide in the digital era.

If you have interest in a work-life balance training for your team, just click the button below. Let's start exploring a more productive road to success.

Too much to do, not enough time. It’s the refrain of the crazy-busy age. But what if it wasn’t true? What if we had the time, but we weren’t using it properly? Studies by Geoffrey Godby and John P. Robinson (no relation to me) have found that we have more time than we think. It’s just not organized.

Organizing time isn’t just a case of savvy calendaring and prioritizing. The bigger hurdle takes place at the psychological and emotional level, in the beliefs we tell ourselves about the time we think we don’t have and the perceptions those thoughts lock us into.

THE MENTAL BLOCK OF "BUSYNESS"

Time operates on two levels—Greenwich Mean Time and the state of mind that interprets the world in temporal terms. The latter is the hidden key to time management and exiting the chronic frenzy and frazzle that happens when we confuse “busyness” with productive endeavor and make it our very identity. The “I’m too busy” mental block subverts time management and productivity on all sides.

If you tell yourself there’s no time, there isn’t any. If you tell yourself “I’m too busy,” you are. You’re too busy to have that extra conversation you need with a colleague, too busy to sit down for 15 minutes to plan priorities, too busy to get the recharge time to deactivate tension, too busy to understand the self-infliction of busyness.

In an unbounded, always-on world, it’s easy to get caught up in busyness. Yes, there is a lot to do, but we don’t have to do it all at one time, feel besieged, juggle all the to-do’s inside our head, default to terminal multitasking mode, or rush all day. Mental racing tells a part of the ancient brain that every minute of the day is an emergency. That turns on the danger signal of the stress response, i. e. fight-or-flight, and the false belief that we have to do everything faster than we’re doing it, or it will be Apocalypse Now.

EFFECTIVE PACE

Without stopping to think about what we’re doing, whether it’s a priority or not, and when the best time to do it is, the default is to action,  uninformed, reactive action that drives frenzy. The first step to time management, then, is a conscious mentality of effective pace. We have to step off the runaway train and put the conductor back at the cognitive wheel.

As Daniel Kahneman reports in Fast and Slow Thinking, time pressure makes us do stupid things. We default to what he calls System 1 thinking—reactive, instinctive, making decisions not based on analysis or facts but on rash diagnostic bias, what appears familiar, or the last thought in our head. Time pressure impairs cognitive ability and fuels bad decision-making.

Obviously, there are deadlines that have to be met and urgent issues that land on our screens that need quick turnarounds. But when time pressure extends beyond due dates and immediate tasks to all the time, even at home, it can lead to perpetual time urgency. This drives a fixation with the passage of time that makes every task an emergency.

But it's not. It's false urgency, since the emergency your outmoded brain misinterprets is that you are going to die. You may have 200 emails, but you're not going to die from them. Since time frenzy activates the stress response, it's no surprise that studies show that time urgency is a heart attack risk. The pattern goes: Impatience leads to irritability, which leads to anger and clogged arteries. Unconscious speed mode undermines performance, rapport, and health. 

THE SPEED TRAP

It’s a speed trap. Nonstop motion makes everything appear urgent when we haven’t taken the time to think about what is urgent and what isn’t. The way out of the frazzle and the first step to time management is to stop the busyness long enough to regulate pace, qualify urgency, prioritize, and change our perception of time and ourselves.

That means untangling identity from the reflex of unconscious busyness and redefining where true productivity comes from. When someone asks how we are, the tendency is to blurt out: Busy! Even if we’re not. Busyness has a habit of becoming ingrained with who we are. We wind up identifying as a person constantly in motion. Say "I'm too busy" often enough, and that is who you are.

Yet productivity is not a function of how busy you are or of constant commotion. Rote busyness is simply mechanical momentum, movement without an understanding of whether the commotion is moving things forward, without knowing where we are going or why and that we are creating extra work and stress by rushing through it.

It’s mobility that we want, not a badge of busyness and being able to say how swamped we are, which only intensifies time anxiety. Mobility comes from the opposite of hyperventilation—reflection and focused attention on the task, not the clock. This places us in the moment, instead of having to keep a part of our brain on the finish line. We get the work done faster without the ticking time bomb of the clock.

TIME MANAGEMENT IS ATTENTION MANAGEMENT

The perception of time changes from tormentor to friend when we take a breath to see what needs to be done and why at a given moment. When you set terms of engagement with tasks, you are in control, instead of a fearsome deadline or stack of to-do’s. The more you can be absorbed in what you are doing in the present, you remove the oxygen of time panic, which is agonizing about the future, a tense you can never be in anyway.

Time management boils down to attention management. If you are truly paying attention and not self-inflicting time stress by checking clocks or allowing unbounded distractions, you stay focused on the task you’re on. Attention comes from focus on a target. Trying to pay attention to multiple targets through multitasking or keeping to-do’s circling the mind like jets at LAX accelerates time tension and the chances of making a mistake while rushing.

So how do you or your team manage time, instead of being run by default fight-or-flight? It’s a daily practice, since the accelerators of time frenzy are all around us—emails, instant messages, texts, and the influence of others flying on hyperdrive.

We pick up on the emotions and expressions of others through mirror neurons. We have to make conscious choices to resist false urgency, our own and that of others. Here are a few keys to time management we don’t usually hear about:

1. “I’m too busy” is a story, not your identity. Getting things done is the goal, not nonstop commotion.
2. Stop, pause, and target attention. If you’re rushing for no reason, stop and stare at the clouds in the sky, or put on some music. Target your attention on something else. That breaks up the time frenzy entrainment.
3. Restrict the amount of self-deadlines. We drive a lot of stress by setting arbitrary self-deadlines for this task or that dry cleaners that no one is holding us to. Avoid setting yourself up by seeing these targets as more approximate deadlines.
4. Limit clock-checking. Each time we check the time, we self-inflict time stress and an interruption.
5. Resist the hurry-worry of others. Choose not to accept the time frenzy of others. "Yes, I see they’re freaking out, but that is them. I will not react."
6. Do time estimates of all your key tasks. It’s easy to be overly optimistic on turnaround times. Analyze how long it takes to do each of your main tasks. When you take an assignment, you know how much time to budget for it.

A classic false belief of the “I’m too busy” mindset is that, if you pause or even slow down, then you will fall behind. In fact, an effective pace insures that you won’t have to do everything over again by making the mistakes that come with rushing. It’s mechanical busyness, without thought as to where the busyness is going, that undermines progress.

Busyness and the time frenzy it fuels also do something more insidious. They make it impossible to savor accomplishments, since you have to instantly move on to the next thing and next thing on a treadmill that never ends to keep from falling behind the self-inflicted schedule.

They also make it hard to carve out time for your life, because you are always too busy to step back from hyperdrive.

If you would like details on our work-life balance, time management and productivity trainings, click the button below.