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Put simply: success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.
When I started to let go of my obsessions with discipline and focus instead on making work feel good, my horrific shifts started to get easier.
Play is our first energiser. Life is stressful. Play makes it fun. If we can integrate the spirit of play into our lives, we’ll feel better – and do more too.
‘Remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being.’
The study showed that people were a whopping 30 per cent more likely to recall a fact they found interesting, rather than a fact they found boring.
Dopamine is one of our feel-good hormones, and it also activates the part of the brain responsible for learning and forming memories. So for the study participants, engaging with their curiosity made them feel good – and they in turn became better at retaining information.
‘Being curious about everything not only makes you more creative. It enriches your life.’
Curiosity doesn’t simply make our lives more enjoyable. It also allows us to focus longer.
The first answer came to me immediately: if this were fun, there would be music. I realised that memorising tedious biochemistry pathways magically became a lot more interesting with the Lord of the Rings soundtrack playing through my headphones.
Csikszentmihalyi argued that if we can learn to focus on the process, rather than the outcome, we’re substantially more likely to enjoy a task.
Seriousness is overrated. If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, the first step is to approach your work with a sense of play. There are three ways you can incorporate the spirit of play into your life. First, approach things with a sense of adventure. When you step into the right ‘play personality’, every day abounds with opportunities to see life as a game, filled with surprises and side quests. Second, find the fun. Remember Mary Poppins: there’s an element of fun in every task, even if it isn’t always obvious. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun,
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When McCord used the word, she meant a sense of personal empowerment: the sense that your job is in your control, your life is in your hands, and that decisions about your future are yours alone.
When the going got tough, those who believed they could do it – regardless of their ability – were the ones who actually could. And, crucially, the students who were primed to be more confident ended up enjoying the exercise a lot more too.
Feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we’re doing it, and helps us do it better.
‘vicarious mastery experience’. This is when you witness or hear about someone else’s performance related to a task that you’re going to undertake yourself. You see other people’s examples, and it boosts your confidence.
process of learning through doing. Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power. Why? Because the more we do something, the greater our sense of control. We learn. We level up our skills. Our confidence grows. And we empower ourselves.
The researchers named this phenomenon the ‘protégé effect’. In the years
The material reward seemed to make people less engaged with a task, not more. This led Deci to conclude that the offer of a material reward can, peculiarly, decrease motivation.
As early as the 1980s, they were demonstrating that intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by a handful of forces, chief among them our sense of ‘autonomy’. In layperson’s terms, that’s a sense of ownership. And it’s our final contributor to the sense of power that energises us and our work.
of their service. Why might that be? Luks’s research showed that when we help others, our brains release a flood of chemicals that create a natural high. Feel-good hormones like oxytocin surge through our bodies, creating a wave of positive energy that can last for hours – even days – after the helping has ended.
that order). These random acts of kindness offer the first way to integrate the helper’s high into our day-to-day lives.
This concept is today known as the ‘Benjamin Franklin effect’. It suggests that when we ask someone for help, it’s likely to make them think better of us. It’s the flipside of the transformative effects of helping others: we can ask others to help us, which will help them feel better, too.
The unblock method encourages us to understand why we’re feeling bad about work in the first place.
This is a well-studied phenomenon; one that scientists call ‘uncertainty paralysis’.
Well, according to a review on the relationship between anxiety and uncertainty, there are a handful of processes that reinforce the loop between uncertainty, anxiety and paralysis.
The uncertainty surrounding the less stable path might set off this process as follows: Overestimation. You overestimate the negative consequences of choosing the ‘wrong’ career path, like not making enough money. Hypervigilance. You become overly attentive to signs that could indicate the success or failure of a particular career choice, like statistics that suggest that lots of people regret changing jobs. Unrecognition. You stop identifying the factors that would contribute to a successful outcome, like doing research on the company you’re considering joining. Avoidance. You decide to put
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Commander’s intent, as outlined in the Field Manual, consists of three crucial components – all built around the basic point of the mission: The purpose behind the operation The end state that the commander was aiming for The key tasks that the commander felt should be taken to accomplish the objective
The Five Whys
These little triggers to action are called ‘implementation intentions’. And the science of behaviour change indicates they can be revolutionary.
According to Gollwitzer, the best formula for implementation intentions is a conditional statement: ‘If X happens, then I will Y.’ If you want to practise
Time Blocking
It isn’t lack of talent or inspiration that’s holding you back. It’s fear.
happening. This technique is called ‘affective labelling’. Put simply, it’s the act of putting your feelings into words, which forces you to identify and get to know the sensations you’re experiencing.
10/10/10 rule. Ask yourself:
I’d fallen prey to an interesting phenomenon known as the ‘spotlight effect’. We’re highly attuned to what others think of us. This makes sense – as social creatures, our amygdala is always on the hunt for threats to our status.
the ‘five-minute rule’.
‘bias to action’.
First up, there are the burnouts that come about from simply taking on too much work. Your mood is suffering because you’re packing too much into each day. I call these overexertion burnouts.
there are burnouts that relate to a misguided approach to rest. Your mood is suffering because you haven’t given yourself the deeper periods of time off that you need – not just little breaks throughout the day, but the longer breaks that recharge the energy of your mind, body, and spirit. I call these depletion burnouts.
Finally, there are burnouts that relate to doing the wrong stuff. Your mood is suffering because of the weeks, years or decades when you’ve put all your efforts into something that doesn’t bring you joy or meaning, and it has worn you down. You’ve been usi...
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two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is where you’re doing something because it feels inherently enjoyable. Extrinsic motivation is where you’re doing something because of an external reward – like making money, or winning a prize.
‘relative autonomy continuum’ (or RAC):
