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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Liz Fosslien
Started reading
February 10, 2019
Beyond the leader-employee relationship, emotional dynamics affect our motivation, health, communication, decision making, and more. Yet most of us ignore those emotions.
I want this printed out so I can hang itup.
the future of work is emotional.
By ignoring our feelings at work, we overlook important data and risk making preventable mistakes. We send emails that cause unnecessary anxiety, we fail to find work meaningful, and we burn out.
Effectively processing what you feel gives you the power to do more than bring your whole self to work: it enables you to bring your best self to work.
Caring too much about a job is unhelpful and unhealthy. It makes small problems seem exceptional and throwaway remarks feel appalling.
“Be less passionate about your job” doesn’t mean “stop caring about work.” It means care more about yourself.
“You’re not allowed to make judgments on your life when you’re short on sleep.”
Stop falling into the type-A trap of compulsively making your hobbies more work than work.
Studies show when we mathematize our experiences—by tracking our steps or measuring miles hiked—we don’t enjoy them as much.
Researchers find that your impact bias, the gap between what you think you will feel and what you actually end up feeling, often leads you to “miswant”: you pine for futures that don’t end up making you very happy.
“I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don’t like because you think it will look good on your résumé. Isn’t that a little like saving up sex for your old age?” asks Warren Buffett.
It’s time to shed the unhealthy habit of glorifying the future to justify a miserable present.
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
Chronic venting, when you rehash the same problems without trying to understand or solve them, makes you and the people listening to you feel worse.
(And managers, a great question to ask at the end of every meeting or one-on-one is, “Did you get everything you needed today?”)
Psychologist Martin Seligman identified the “three Ps” we tend to focus on after a negative event: Personalization: thinking that the event is all your fault Pervasiveness: thinking that the event is going to ruin every aspect of your life Permanence: thinking you are going to feel like this (e.g., bad) forever
“What advice would I give to a friend who felt similarly?”
“Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action,” notes the American painter and writer Walter Anderson.
‘Enough’ has to be a metric that is within your control. For example, ‘By the end of the week, I’ll have sent the program designs to the printer.’ ‘Enough’ can’t be ‘When I feel good,’ because feeling good is a moving target.”
Employees had overwhelmingly supported one statement: “Trust me with my time. Trust me to do my job and I will deliver results and be a happier employee to boot.”
Motivation is a mess of chicken-and-egg relationships. Have you stopped making progress because you’re bored, or are you bored because you stopped making progress?
the four main reasons why you might be lacking motivation: (1) you have no control over your work; (2) you don’t find what you do meaningful; (3) you’ve stopped viewing work as a place to learn; and (4) you don’t like your coworkers.
“Ask yourself: ‘Is there one small thing within my own realm I can do differently tomorrow?’
LIZ: If you want to get really crazy about staying motivated, set up a variable reward system for yourself. I created a habit of focusing on a single task (no checking Reddit or email!!) by pressing a random number generator button every time I successfully concentrated for an hour. If the generator (which was set to pop out a number between 0 and 10) gave me a 2, 3, 4, or 7, I allowed myself to eat a bowl of ice cream (cookie dough!) after lunch that day.
I love this idea
Ask your manager to define outcomes rather than processes. Members of teams who are able to create their own processes are more motivated.
Office hours are an opportunity for your reports to come to you with questions. Instead of constantly monitoring their work, give them the chance to problem solve and reach out when they need help.
“It’s not that I’m lazy,” explains Peter in the movie Office Space. “It’s that I just don’t care.”
If you cultivate a sense of curiosity and keep an open mind, you can find something you are interested in within any job.
Push yourself to learn something new about your company, its products, or your coworkers.
And it turns out that excellence is a bigger motivator than even money; baseball players are often willing to take a pay cut in order to be on a winning team.
motivation can be jump-started. You can increase your sense of autonomy, find more meaning or purpose in your work (or zero in on the parts of your job that could become meaningful), reframe work as a place of learning, or make more friends at work.
To increase your autonomy, make small changes to your schedule. Job craft: shift your responsibilities toward the things you enjoy to make your work more meaningful. Push yourself to acquire new skills. The more you know, the more you’ll enjoy your work. Invest in workplace friendships to give yourself another reason to look forward to work.
Mollie used to feel anxious about making her clients happy, but she has learned that the desire driving this anxiety is to feel useful. She now proactively asks her clients, “What can I do to be more helpful?”
Still, there’s a lot you can do to curb bias. The best way is to clearly outline what missing skills your team needs to succeed and then objectively test if a candidate can do those things.
