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• Pages: 176

1. The Power of Progress

Of all the things that can drive people in their work and make them feel good about it, the single most important is simply making progress on work that they find meaningful. That's the progress principle.

Unfortunately with all kinds of work events, negative is stronger than positive. It's particularly important to avoid the minor hassles that can derail people's work during the every workday.

There's a lot that people can do for themselves to try to harness the progress principle. The most important is to focus. The other thing you can do is keep track of your small wins each day. That can be very motivational.

2. Managing the Hidden Stress of Emotional Labor

Emotional labor is the effort it takes to keep your professional game face on when what you're doing is not concordant with how you feel. Emotional labor is a near universal part of every job, and of life, often it's just called being polite. A person can "deep act" in a way that is still connected with their core values and beliefs at work ("yes, the customer is being patronizing, but I empathize with her and care about solving her problem") or "surface act" (I'll be nice here, but deep down I'm really spitting nails"). When people habitually evoke the stress of surface acting, they'll be more prone to depression and anxiety, decreased job performance, and burnout.

The ideal, of course, would be to work in a job to which you are so well suited that your actions and feelings are always in perfect harmony, eliminating the need for you to be exhaustingly inauthentic all day. In real life, however, the goal of keeping your surface acting, where the role is aligned with who you truly are, is a more attainable one.

• Remind yourself why you're in the job you're in
• Explore "want to" thinking
• Do some job crafting

3. How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don't Want To

Reason #1: You are putting something off because you are afraid you'll screw it up -> Solution: Adopt a "prevention focus."

You can do something because you see it as a way to end up better off than you are now - as an achievement or accomplishment. As in, "If I complete this project successfully I will impress my boss," or "If I work out regularly, I will look amazing." Psychologists call this a promotion focus, and research shows that when you have one, you are motivated by the thought of making gains, and you work best when you feel eager and optimistic. If you are afraid you will screw up on the task in question, this is not the focus type for you. Anxiety and doubt undermine promotion motivation, leaving you less likely to take any action at all.

What you need is a way of looking at what you need to do that isn't undermined by doubt but rather, ideally, thrives on it. When you have a prevention focus, instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you already have - to avoid loss. For the prevention focus, successfully completing a project is a way to keep your boss from being angry or thinking less of you. The more worried you are, the faster you are out of the gate.

Reason #2: You are putting something off because you don't feel like doing it -> Solution: Make the Spock and ignore your feelings. They're getting in your way.

"Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it?"

If you are sitting there, putting something off because you don't feel like doing it, remember that you don't actually need to feel like it. There is nothing stopping you.

Reason #3: You are putting something off because it's hard, boring, or otherwise unpleasant -> Solution: Use if-then planning.

If it is 2 p.m., then I will stop what I'm doing and start work on the report Bob asked for. If my boss doesn't mention my request for a raise at our meeting, then I will bring it up again before the meeting ends.

By deciding in advance exactly what you're going to do and when and where you're going to do it-there's no deliberating when the time comes. There's no Do I really have to do this now? Or Can this wait till later? Or Maybe I should do something else instead. It's when we deliberate that willpower becomes necessary to make the tough choice. If-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed on your willpower by ensuring that you've made the right decision way ahead of the critical moment.

4. Four Ways to Mange Your Energy More Effectively

The key to success at work and in life isn't really starting strong; it's staying strong. And one of the keys to having that staying power is the idea of self-regulation. This entails operating within lower and upper boundaries of activity by predetermining the minimum and maximum amount of action you will take toward a specific goal within a certain span of time (such as a day or a week). This keeps you from getting derailed because you dropped off or lost interest, or overdoing it and finding yourself too exhausted to continue.

Set Upper and Lower Boundaries

In Greg McKeown's book Effortless, he suggests the idea of making concrete boundaries for both how little and how much you will do in a given day on your important priorities for instance, for hitting sales numbers, you may determine to never make fewer than five sales calls in a day and never more than 10 sales calls in a day.

You can extend this into any project or goal that you want to accomplish. For example, if you want to author a book, you might decide to write no less than 30 minutes per day and no more than three hours per day to avoid burning out. Or for exercise, you may decide to work out no less than three times per week and no more than five times per week, so you get a sufficient workout in and also have time for your other priorities like spending time with your family or personal tasks.

These boundaries give you some wiggle room but also give you the ability to stay on track over time. When you're setting your own upper and lower limits, think through what's the least you could do in a particular area to feel like you are keeping up your momentum. The goal on the low end is to not feel like you "stopped" and need to exert extra effort to break the inertia and restart. And when you're defining your upper limits, think about where you need to limit yourself so that your investment in this particular area doesn't take so much of your time that other areas of your life suffer.

Invest your energy

1. Notice your energy, where do you spend it?
2. Know what matters to you.
3. Plan wise energy investments.
4. Most importantly, plan where not to invest your energy.
5. Don't spend too much time thinking about it. You don't have to get it right, just better than yesterday.

Understand Your Tendency

When facing a goal, do you tend to get into a high-drive gear and try to remain there 24/7? Do you operate at a low-drive level most of the time, often having to scurry to the finish line at the last minute? Do you find yourself vacillating between extremes where one day you compulsively work until the wee hours of the night, and the next day you crash and do next to nothing?

Depending on your tendency, you can proceed in one of the following three ways:

• High-drive category, you'll need to give yourself permission to be human, to rest, and to have real downtime. Keep a close eye on whether you're going over your upper boundary of activity and headed for burnout.
• Low-drive category, keep a close eye on whether or not you're staying above your lower bound. You want to ensure that you're doing at least the minimum before chilling out (as tempting as that may seem).
• Fluctuating-drive category, you'll need to keep an eye on both bounds. Avoiding going over your upper bound should prevent you from falling below your lower bound the next day.

"Do not do more today than you can completely recover from by tomorrow."

Build In Rest and Recovery

As humans, we're designed for cycles of activity and rest. That's why we sleep at night, why weekends are an essential part of a productive workweek, and why even elite athletes can't work out every waking hour.

• If you're a high-drive individual, you'll need to remain especially conscious about giving yourself planned times of rest and recovery.
• If you operate at a low-drive level, make sure you've at least hit your lower boundary of activity be-fore taking a break. That means that you can still take ample breaks, but only after you've made progress on a goal.
• If your drive fluctuates, you'll need to remember to have rest and recovery on the days when you feel on top of the world and like you can work 24/7 so that you don't crash the next day. That could include the basics like taking time to eat, moving from your chair by stretching or walking, and not staying up crazy late-no matter how energized you feel. Force yourself to stop when it's a reasonable time for you to go to bed so that you can begin again fresh the next day.

Give Yourself Breathing Room

To have staying power, you need to keep your work within sustainable boundaries-and you need to work at a sustainable pace. There are days when back-to-back meetings are necessary or when you need to go from task to task to task. But for most people, this strategy doesn't have long-term viability.

I encourage you, if at all possible, to have at least a few hours in a day or week where you're not in meetings. And even better, if you can block out larger chunks of time for accomplishing bigger projects, you can give yourself permission to really be immersed in the work without the pressure of a tight time window.

Life isn't a sprint. It's an ongoing journey. And to stay high-performing, healthy, and happy both inside and outside of work, you need to have staying power. Look closely at how you work and follow these tips to ensure that you're working effectively, productively, and within your bounds.

5. When Your Motivation Dips, Focus on Results

No matter how generally motivated we are, all of us have some tasks that we don't want to do. Maybe we find them boring, pointless, draining, time-consuming, annoying, or anxiety producing. So how do you get moving in these types of situations?

Find Your Why

The first step is to recognize that getting motivated doesn't mean that you have to experience a particular feeling, like excitement or anticipation. Instead, motivation is simply one or more reasons you have for acting in a certain way. You can decide to do something without ever getting excited about it by finding a personally meaningful why.

For example, you could choose to do something because it will:

• Lower your anxiety
• Benefit someone who you care about
• Lead to financial gain
• Avoid a negative consequence
• Make you feel good about yourself
• Clear your mind
• Align with your values
• Reduce stress

Develop a Strategy

• Put a low-frequency activity ahead of a high-frequency activity. For example, I can't open my email until I've filed my expense report.
• Give yourself a standard time. Every Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., I have time blocked in my calendar for weekly planning, and I honor that time as sacred for that activity.
• Limit the time commitment. I need to work for 10 minutes a day on this task and then I can stop if I want to do so.
• Set the bar low. I just need to take one action step a week on this activity.
• Get it done. I want to get this entirely off my plate, so I'm setting aside a whole day to complete the task.

Pair the Unpleasant with Something Pleasant

A third set of action-taking methods involves pairing unpleasurable activities with pleasurable ones to boost your overall mood. This could involve giving yourself permission to do a more difficult task, like writing or putting together a presentation, in a location you really like, such as a cozy coffee shop or even a park if the weather is nice. You can also try layering tasks, such as listening to music or a podcast while organizing your office. Even getting a little physical activity in during the process can help.

6. Maximize Burnout by Making Compassion a Habit

Why is stress on the rise? A lot of it has to do with uncertainty in the world and constant changes in our organizations. Many people are overworking, putting in more hours than ever before. The lines between work and home have blurred or disappeared. Add to that persistent (sometimes even toxic) conflicts with bosses and coworkers that put us on guard and make us irritable. Under these circumstances, our performance and well-being suffer. Work feels like a burden. Burnout is just around the corner. And happiness at work is not even a remote possibility.

Here's the good news: Some people don't get burned out. They continue to thrive despite the difficult conditions in their workplace.

Why? The answer lies in part with empathy, an emotional intelligence competency packed with potent stress-taming powers. Empathy is "compassion in action." When you engage empathy, you seek to understand people's needs, desires, and point of view. You feel and express genuine concern for their well-being, and then you act on it.

Not only do others benefit from our empathy, but we benefit, too.

Practice Self-Compassion

If you really want to deal with stress, you've got to stop trying to be a hero and start caring for and about yourself. Self-compassion involves: (1) seeking to truly understand yourself and what you are experiencing emotionally, physically, and intellectually at work; (2) caring for yourself, as opposed to shutting down; and (3) acting to help yourself. Here are two practical ways to practice self-compassion:

• Curb the urge to overwork. When the pressure is on at work, we're often tempted to work more hours to "get on top of things." But overwork is a trap, not a solution. Just doing more and more, and more, and more-rarely fixes problems, and it usually makes things worse, because we are essentially manufacturing our own stress. We shut the proverbial door on people and problems, thinking that if we can get away, we can at least do our job without getting caught up in others' drama. When nothing changes or it gets worse, we give up. This is a vicious cycle: Overwork leads to more stress, which leads to isolation, which causes us to give up, which leads to even more stress. So, instead of putting in more hours when you're stressed, find ways to renew yourself. Exercise, practice mindfulness, spend more time with loved ones, and dare we say, get more sleep?
• Stop beating yourself up. Stress is often the result of being too hard on ourselves when we fail or don't meet our own expectations. We forget to treat ourselves as living, breathing, feeling human beings. Instead of letting self-criticism stress you out, acknowledge how you feel, acknowledge that others would feel similarly in the same situation, and be kind and forgiving to yourself. Shifting your mindset from threatened to self-compassion will strengthen your resiliency.

Give Empathy

Taking steps toward self-compassion will prepare you emotionally to reach out to others. But let's face it: Empathy is not the norm in many workplaces. In fact, lack of empathy, even depersonalization of others, are symptoms of the emotional exhaustion that comes with burnout. Here are a few tips to make empathy part of your normal way of dealing with people at work:

• Build friendships with people you like at work. Most people can rattle off a dozen reasons why you shouldn't be friends with people at work. We believe just the opposite. Real connections and friendships at work matter-a lot.
• Value people for who they really are. Ask yourself, "How can I understand where this person is coming from?" Listen with an open mind so that you gain their trust, which is good for your stress level and your ability to influence them.
• Coach people. When we care enough to invest time in developing others, we become less preoccupied with ourselves, which balances the toxic effects of stress and burnout.
• Put your customers, clients, or patients at the center of your conversations. If misaligned goals with coworkers is a source of your stress, try physically moving your conversations to a place where you can put other people's needs at the center.

One caution about empathy and compassion: They can be powerful forces in our fight against stress-until they aren't. Caring too much can hurt. Overex-tending your empathy can take a toll on your emotional resources and lead to compassion fatigue, а phenomenon that occurs when compassion becomes a burden and results in even more stress. So pay close attention to your limits and develop strategies to rein in excessive empathy if it gets out of control.

It's worth the risk, though. Once you commit to caring about yourself, you can start to care about others, and in the process, you will create resonant relationships that are both good for you and good for the people you work with.

7. The More You Energize Your Coworkers, the Better Everyone Performs

We "catch" energy through our interactions with people-something called "relational energy" - and it affects our performance at work. This is what my colleagues Bradley Owens, Dana Sumpter, Kim Cameron, and I learned. We were motivated to do this research because energy is a vital personal and organizational resource, but research on the sources of energy have neglected a source that everyone.

If you have an energizing boss, chances are that you feel engaged at work. Focusing on relational energy between leaders and members of a large health-care organization, we found that the experience of relational energy with a leader increases one's motivation at work, attention to tasks, and absorption in work activities. This translates into higher work performance. Members of this health-care company who experienced relational energy with their leaders were more engaged at work, which then led to higher productivity.

You are a source of relational energy as well as a recipient. When you generate relational energy in the workplace, your performance goes up. The more people you energize, the higher your work performance. This occurs because people want to be around you. You attract talent, and people are more likely to devote their discretionary time to your projects. They'll offer new ideas, information, and opportunities to you first.

The opposite is also true. If you de-energize others, people won't go out of their way to work with you or to help you. In the worst case, they might even sabotage you at work.

• Build high-quality connections. By definition, high-quality connections generate relational energy.
• Create energizing events. Organize and run events with an explicit focus on creating energy, not just on delivering content, products, or services.
• Use tools that promote a "giver" culture. The act of helping someone at work creates energy in the form of positive emotions - the "warm glow" of helping. Receiving help creates energy in the form of gratitude. Gratitude for help received encourages paying it forward and helping others.
• Try mapping relational energy. "When you interact with each person, how does it affect your energy?" Responses could range from "very energizing" to "neutral" to "very de-energizing." The resulting data enabled us to draw relational energy maps of an organization. The results are quite revealing. In a large petrochemical company, for example, we found a lot of de-energizing relationships-and most of them emanated from the leaders. With this objective map, they could identify where they needed to make positive improvements.

8. How Women at the Top Can Renew Their Mental Energy

• Know Your Psychological Superchargers
• Find a Work Ally
• Overcome Anxiety by Channeling Your Values

9. Five Ways to Focus Your Energy During a Work Crunch

• Accept the situation: acknowledging the reality of the situation with awareness so that you can take clear actions.
• Observe and label your underlying emotions: observe your thinking and emotional state, and assign a word to what's happening, such as "pressure," "guilt," or "worry."
• Preserve your sense of choice and agency: bring greater vigilance to assessing your priorities, making tough trade-offs, and incorporating self-care where you can.
• Communicate with colleagues and loved ones: re-negotiate deadlines, set tighter boundaries, ask for help and support.
• Practice self-compassion: "if you really want to deal with stress, you've got to stop trying to be a hero and start caring for and about yourself."

10. Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

The very lack of recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems.

And just because work stops doesn't mean we're recovering. We "stop" work sometimes at 5 p.m., but then we spend the night wrestling with solutions to work problems, talking about our work over dinner, and falling asleep thinking about how much work we'll do tomorrow. The scientists cite a definition of "workaholism" as "being overly concerned about work, driven by an uncontrollable work motivation, and investing so much time and effort to work that it impairs other important life areas." Resilience is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure

The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology. Homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well-being. Positive neuroscientist Brent Furl from Texas A&M University coined the term "homeostatic value" to describe the value that certain actions have for creating equilibrium, and thus well-being, in the body.

As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have written, if you have too much time in the performance zone, you need more time in the recovery zone, otherwise, you risk burnout.

"Internal recovery refers to the shorter periods of relaxation that take place within the frames of the work-day or the work setting in the form of short scheduled or unscheduled breaks, by shifting attention or changing to other work tasks when the mental or physical resources required for the initial task are temporarily depleted or exhausted. External recovery refers to actions that take place outside of work-for example, in the free time between the workdays, and during weekends, holidays or vacations." If after work you lie around on your bed and get riled up by political commentary on your phone or get stressed thinking about deciding how to renovate your home, your brain has not received a break from high mental arousal states. Our brains need a rest as much as our bodies do.

11. What You Don't Know About Motivation

Maslow's idea that people are motivated by satisfying lower-level needs, such as food, water, shelter, and security, before they can move on to being motivated by higher-level needs, such as self-actualization, is the most well-known motivation theory in the world.¹ There is nothing wrong with helping people satisfy

Autonomy is people's need to perceive that they have choices, that what they are doing is of their own volition, and that they are the source of their own actions. The way leaders frame information and situations either promotes the likelihood that a person will perceive autonomy or undermines it. To promote autonomy:

• Frame goals and timelines as essential information to ensure a person's success, rather than as dictates or ways to hold people accountable.
• Refrain from incentivizing people through competitions and games. Few people have learned the skill of shifting the reason why they're competing from an external one (winning a prize or gaining status) to a higher-quality one (an opportunity to fulfill a meaningful goal).
• Don't apply pressure to perform. Sustained peak performance is a result of people acting because they choose to-not because they feel they have to.

Relatedness is people's need to care about and be cared for by others, to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives, and to feel that they are contributing to something greater than themselves. Leaders have a great opportunity to help people derive meaning from their work. To deepen relatedness:

• Validate the exploration of feelings in the workplace. Be willing to ask people how they feel about an assigned project or goal and listen to their response. All behavior may not be acceptable, but all feelings are worth exploring.
• Take time to facilitate the development of people's values at work-then help them align those values with their goals. It is impossible to link work to values if individuals don't know what their values are.
• Connect people's work to a noble purpose.

Competence is people's need to feel effective at meeting everyday challenges and opportunities, demonstrating skill over time, and feeling a sense of growth and flourishing. Leaders can rekindle people's desire to grow and learn. To develop people's competence:

• Make resources available for learning. What message does it send about values for learning and developing competence when training budgets are the first casualty of economic cutbacks
• Set learning goals-not just the traditional results-oriented and outcome goals.
• At the end of each day, instead of asking, "What did you achieve today?" ask, "What did you learn today? How did you grow today in ways that will help you and others tomorrow?"

12. Why People Lose Motivation - and What Mangers Can Do to Help

Take Tom, a website developer whom I met on a consulting assignment at an accounting firm. When Tom was hired, fresh out of college, he was excited because he had been told that there were opportunities for learning and growth. But the honeymoon didn't last long. "I soon found out my supervisor had no time or patience for experimenting," he told me. "He was more concerned with protocol than personal development. It's like he's afraid of me trying new things because it might not go exactly as planned. It doesn't leave me much room for learning."

At first, Tom wasn't deterred. He worked to improve some processes and tried to inject some personality into his work. But since Tom's boss was under pressure to meet a number of website metrics, she didn't have the flexibility to implement his ideas. As the weeks turned into months, Tom's work became routine and boring, and he shut off as a result.

We shouldn't blame Tom for his reaction, because he reacted the way we're all designed to react. Shutting down is our body's way of telling us that we were meant to do better things. To keep exploring and learning. This is our biology; it is a part of our adaptive unconscious to know that our human potential is being wasted.

The key for leaders is to find ways to activate employees' seeking systems.

• Self-Expression: employees want to be valued for the unique skills and perspectives they bring to the table, and the more you can reinforce this and remind them of their role in the company at large, the better.
• Experiment: create an experimental safe zone that includes play and supportive social bonding. Play not only stimulates the seeking system but also pushes back anxiety and fear. Experiment safe zones create intrinsic motivation, which is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation because they unleash creativity.
• Purpose: the feeling of purpose also ignites when we can see the cause and effect between our inputs and our team's progress. Purpose works best when employees get to interact directly with the people they are affecting with their work.