Feeling stuck?

Sometimes we get stuck. Our creativity seems to have disappeared, or we stay in job that's not working, a relationship that should be over, or we just keep banging our heads against the wall hoping that something will change but feeling the doom of no-way-out. 

This condition is what I call Imagination Constipation. Thankfully, there's a way out. And it's quite fun. 

Take a look at this talk I gave at the Gamification Summit, about how to use play to reignite your fluid capacity for seeing new solutions. The GSummit attracts over 500 HR and Marketing innovators from companies like Google, Home Depot, The Gap, LinkedIn, awesome start ups, and beyond to explore how games motivate and engage. If you want to learn more about gamification check out my friends at gamification.co. 

I'd love to know your thoughts! Please leave comments or write me - stella@woopaah.com. 

Best,

Stella

The Wisdom of Gossip: A chat with Robb Willer

Photo by Matt Griffin via FlickrOh. Em. Gee. I got here way early today, and I saw Lisa putting the community snack bars in her Prada bag. Like, she took ALL the snack bars. And I was really surprised, ‘cause Lisa already had breakfast, and, like, who takes the last snack bar? So, anyway, you’d better grab your snack bar before she comes in tomorrow.

Recent research suggests gossip can be good for the group -- if it’s the right kind.

Robb Willer, professor of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior at Stanford talked with us about what kind of gossip is really ‘good.’ (Audio of the interview will be posted soon!)

“In general, gossip gets a bad rap. People think of gossip as a way to slander other people, they think of it as unreliable information.” But, this is only one kind of gossip. “Often, people pass on negative information about people who have behaved in an antisocial, immoral, or exploitative way. They pass this on to new people with the intention of, essentially, protecting those people.”

In a nutshell, gossip that conveys information about someone’s selfish or immoral behavior can help others be more vigilant in future encounters with them.

But what motivates this beneficial gossip? Robb and his team actually monitored the heart rate of their participants and found that people became agitated when they saw someone acting selfishly. The more frustrated they were, the more motivated they were to warn others about the selfish behavior. 

It hurts to watch!

Some people tend to be more prosocially motivated, in general, than others. These people are more chronically generous and tend to care a lot about other people. When they saw selfish behavior being exhibited, these prosocially-oriented people experienced a more extreme negative emotion than the average participant. In turn, they were more motived to prosocially gossip about the behavior, and also felt even better than the average person once they passed on the knowledge. 

Positive potential tattletaling

It turns out that, had Lisa known I might send news of her snack-bar-snatching habits down the grapevine, she probably wouldn’t have taken so many. People tend to be pretty good when they think they might be gossiped about.

Just as some people are more prosocial than average, there are people who are less prosocial than average, who tend to be more selfish, in general. These chronically selfish folks were more affected by knowing that they could be gossiped about, acting even more generous and prosocial than the average person.

This effect, that gossip motivates better behavior is part of the larger story Robb and his colleagues are finding about how gossip helps maintain cooperation and community. “If people have no means of distributing reputational information about one another, there’s little to deter bad behavior from happening. There’s little reason why you wouldn’t just engage in antisocial, exploitative behavior against others, if you have those sorts of motivations. However, if there’s some means for policing bad behavior, then that can reform the egoistic behavior of a more selfish individual, essentially lifting their levels of cooperation and prosociality to levels comparable with those with sincere prosocial motivation.” 

So, gossip can actually be a tool in facilitating cooperation. The snack bar example is a little silly and small, but these findings have larger implications. Robb mentioned previous research showing that people are more likely to vote if they think their neighbors will find out whether or not they did. He also suggested that prosocial gossip might apply to projects like arranging soup kitchens with people who live in similar areas or with similar interests. If you care what those people think of you, you’ll be more likely to continue helping. He’s also working on another study, examining whether the reputation of a community’s carbon footprint can spur action to lower it.  

Reputation matters to most people, and gossip is one way reputation is created. Gossip Wisely.

Robb Willer is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology, Psychology (by courtesy), and the Graduate School of Business (by courtesy) at Stanford University. His work focuses on morality, status, politics, and masculinity. Robb’s research has appeared in such journals as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Social Networks. 

Genevieve Douglass is a composer and researcher at WOOPAAH. She also consults in NYC on motivation, burnout, and vitality, writes about various psychological phenomena, and enjoys frollicking in the park with her two tan dogs and pale husband.

How I deal with negative feedback...

Yesterday I met up with my mastermind group, a posse of entrepreneurs with whom I meet monthly to swap notes, stay accountable, celebrate, and commiserate. I was telling this group very enthusiastically about my upcoming course, Happiness Hacks, and I received an overwhelming sense of positive validation. I also received some very valuable constructive feedback.

Even though the comments were totally positive all I could focus on was the stuff that was wrong.  My whole mood plummeted. I went from feeling totally excited to deflated and hopeless. I started doubting myself and retracting inwards. I noticed I stopped fully engaging in our meeting and instead ruminated about how everything sucked. Does this ever happen to you? Thankfully, I knew what was causing this insanity and roped myself back into the present moment. 

What happened was a case of my brain’s negativity bias. 

But it’s not just me, everyone's brain is designed with a negativity bias. Our attention naturally - AUTOMATICALLY - goes towards what’s bad, dangerous, and wrong. This instinct is a relic of our caveman ancestors who needed to pay mind to anything that threatened their livelihood.  We’ve inherited a way of thinking that helps us survive, but not one that necessarily helps us live our dreams and thrive. 

So are we doomed? Yes and no. If you continue to let your mind control you - then, my friend, things don’t look good. But you have a choice! You can hack your system!

That’s why I'm developing the Happiness Hacks course. I’ll be taking you through the latest research that reveals what drives our happiness and how to flourish. Stay tuned - it’s coming out later this Fall (I’ve got to integrate all that constructive feedback I received :). 

In the meanwhile, you can get started with these insights on how to hack your negativity bias by Genna Douglass, a fellow MAPPster, and WOOPAAH’s research extraordinare. Genna asks the question: Why does being present really matter? Do you really know?

PS If you enjoyed this - tell a friend to sign up for our newsletter and lighten up with our updates!
PPS If you have any questions, just holla! stella at woopaah.com

My best,

Stella

Stella Grizont if the founder of WOOPAAH, a company on a mission to awaken individuals to their most awesome, creative, and productive selves through play and positive psychology! She has a masters degree in the science of happiness from the University of Pennsylvania. She writes, keynotes, and enjoys wearing outrageous colors. 

Why does being present matter?

“Be in da now,” he said for about the 16^th time this class, as he led us into a wide-legged forward bend.  Be in the now… Okay. Focus on my fatiguing hamstrings, now somewhere between a dull ache and a foaming burning feeling? I’m not sure what’s so fantastic about ‘the now’ – I’m definitely not enjoying this. Sweat is running into my eyes. Ew. When are we gonna change poses? I really need to bend my knees. I might be close to tearing a muscle. Am I still in the now? I guess I’m frustrated. That’s the now, for me. Is that really what he wants me to be thinking?

This is just a snippet of my crazy thought-train during a few seconds of a yoga class, in which I was struggling to be mindful. “Be in the now” or “be mindful” or “stay in the present” are all phrases that have begun to lose their meaning for me. So, let’s refresh them.

Why be in the present?

There is an abundance of research forming around the benefits of meditation practice. Much of it is around mindfulness meditation – usually defined as “paying attention in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”

Here is just light round-up of a few of these findings:

-       Decreased stress, worry, anxiety, depression, and anger

-       A sense of greater well-being, even when mindful for just a moment

-       An increased sense of joy, hope, vitality, contentment and inspiration.

-       Better ability to control emotional reactions

-       Increased self-awareness

-       Improved immune system function

So how does mindfulness work?

A Buddhist model of mindfulness created by British Columbia researchers theorizes that every sensation we experience carries a “feeling tone” of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We experience thousands of sensations in the space of a second, so we usually don’t even notice this feeling tone, but it’s this subtle pleasantness that creates desire, and the subtle unpleasantness creates aversion. For example, the uncomfortable tightness just below the ribs that indicates what we label “hunger” creates a desire for food.

Because there are so many sensations passing so quickly, it’s easy for our desires and aversions to become habit and then identity. As a result, we think we love chocolate, or we don’t like our mother-in-law, or we need coffee every morning. Mindfulness allows us to break habits. Habits in the way we think, feel, and behave.

It’s not the thought that counts.

One of the most common ways to begin meditating is by focusing on your breath. You see if you can bring your entire attention, without dividing it, to your breath – maybe the way it feels going in and out of your nose. Maybe the sense that some hairs are wiggling, or that one nostril is a little more restricted, or whether the breath is smooth or jagged as it goes in and out.  But doing this alone is not necessarily a mindfulness practice. It’s a concentration practice.

During your concentration practice, thoughts and feelings are bound to float into your focus. The mindfulness comes in, according to renowned mindfulness teacher Sharon Salzberg, when you notice. It’s the noticing that is important, not the concentration. “This is where you have the opportunity to be different,” she says. You can decide to let go of the thought and go back to the breath. You can decide not to judge yourself or your experiences.

I was doing a lot of judging in my yoga class. I didn’t like holding the pose or the sensation in my hamstrings. These are both judgments that I made about my experience. From those judgments came desire – a desire to get out of the pose. As meditation teacher James Baraz points out, once you are noticing, you’re no longer busy judging. Your attention is no longer bound up in liking or disliking because it’s busy observing. Just by noticing what you’re desiring or what you have an aversion to, you’re often freed from that desire or aversion.

Don’t be put off by the formal practice – noticing what you are aware of doesn’t need to involve sitting cross-legged on a special pillow. The reason that you sit down and practice in a quiet place is so that you can do it more easily during more distracting times. Like when you’re in a yoga class and sweat is dripping into your eye.  

Noticing is key in breaking habits and forming new ones – it’s what gives you space to shape your life. 

Profit from the Positive: Book Brief and Interview

A new workplace well-being book has hit the shelves. Profit from the Positive is a quick read, filled with insightful and easily-applied strategies to create healthier work environments.

Authors Margaret Greenberg, MAPP and Senia Maymin, PhD have broken down their thoughtful findings into three main parts. The first is devoted to you as a leader, describing techniques for being more productive, how to be more resilient and emotionally in-control, and how to capitalize on your strengths as a leader. The second part discusses the team. It details often-missed aspects of hiring, how to engage your employees, and how to change “the usual” practices of meetings and performance reviews to create more value. The last part helps you put it into practice. I’ll give you a few examples of their strategies below, along with some snippets from our interview with author Senia Maymin. (The full interview will be available soon!)

1. Want to increase productivity? Don’t finish your work

It’s called the Zeigernik Effect; it says that unfinished tasks are better remembered than completed ones. Leave something unfinished from the day before in order to kick start your productivity on that task the next morning. Your mind tends to wander to and keep chewing on open-goals. If you’ve got one staring at you in the morning when you sit down, you’ll be able to jump right in and get to work. (After just a few days of testing, we can report that it has helped us cut down on several hours of morning web-surfing.)

2. Take more time off to get more done  

This one is quite comforting: people are more productive when they have scheduled time off. At the behest of Harvard researchers, several Boston Consulting teams switched to a four-day work week. The teams were also told they couldn’t check their work email or voicemail during certain hours. The teams actually accomplished more in less time.

3. Don’t tell them they did a “good job”

Instead, give Frequent Recognition and Encouragement (FRE). Simply saying “good job” every now and then doesn’t inspire people to do a better job. Specific feedback about the process (rather than about the person) with some underlying empathy is key.

Ex: “I really appreciate the time and attention you put into analyzing those reports when I know you had a lot of other responsibilities.”

This kind of recognition and encouragement “was found to increase self-confidence and resilience in employees” as well as creating an increase of 42% in productivity. You might already do this to some extent, but FRE often gets lost as stress enters the picture -- so thinking about it as a tool you can put to use can really help you to keep up the habit. (BTW, included in the book is a survey that you can give your employees to find out if they are receiving FRE.)

4. Caution: perfectionism can drive procrastination

Here’s Senia’s advice to help overcome this common affliction:

• Set limits. For example, if you need to write a blog, tell yourself that you’ll write for only 30 minutes or until 500 words. Having limits helps keep your perfectionist in check by keeping things from feeling daunting and infinite.  

• Start anywhere and start small. By small, we mean really small. For example, if want to run a marathon but don’t have the habit of running, start by walking to the end of the block the same time each day for one week. Senia suggests that, even if we don’t know how a whole project is going to unfold, we should make a start anyway, “and that start may not be the start that you end up using.” But that’s okay. It will get you moving.

5. Beware of the familiar

“People tend to fly to the familiar, especially when they’re under pressure. So, if you are… rushing to the airport, and you really need to get there fast, and you know that you always take this route, even if you look on Google Maps and it tells you your route is going to take longer than this other route, most people will still take their own route…[This is] because they are very stressed out, and it’s comforting to do something that’s familiar. Which is a mistake!” It’s often not beneficial to stick to the familiar, even though it makes us feel safer. We need to get in the habit of doing what is going to be better and more productive, even if it’s uncomfortable.

What ‘s the biggest thing you can do as a leader is in order to create positive change in your organization?  Senia says it involves a blend of the ingredients in her book:

1. Organize a support posse: “You should speak to the key people who you think can help you on that goal.”

2. Tell them what you believe. (For example, that giving more FRE is important).

3. Tell them why you believe it.  (Such as, the research shows it increases productivity by 40%).

4. Tell them the specific actions you, as the leader, are going to take (In this case, maybe noticing what’s right in one of your team members three days a week).

5. And request the one or two actions that you’d like them to take.

6. And feel free to go undercover -- no need to announce “we’re going to be doing things differently” -- just do them!

There are about 30 different techniques and tools like these outlined in the book. For more goodness, get your own copy of Profit from the Positive and start working better!

Senia Maymin, PhDSenia Maymin, Ph.D., is the co-author of Profit from the Positive. She has been featured in the media—including PBS’s This Emotional Life, Business Week, Public Radio International, and USA Today—primarily for her work as a positive psychology executive coach. Senia holds a BA in Math and Economics from Harvard, a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and PhD in Organizational Behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She speaks Russian, French, and Japanese. She lives with her family in California. You can visit the research news website that she co-founded at www.PositivePsychologyNews.com, the coaches network at www.PositiveCoaches.net, and her personal website at www.senia.com.

Her co-author, Margaret Greenberg is a sought after executive coach by Fortune 500 companies.  In 1997, after a fifteen year career in corporate HR, she founded The Greenberg Group, a consulting firm dedicated to coaching business leaders and their teams to achieve more than they ever thought possible. A pioneer in the field of positive psychology, Greenberg also designs and leads workshops, webinars, and conferences for business audiences and is an expert on creating strengths-based organizations.  Greenberg’s research has been featured in the popular Gallup Management Journal and she is a regular business contributor at www.PositivePsychologyNews.com.  She has also been interviewed by national media outlets in the US (Entrepreneur Magazine) and Canada (The Globe and Mail).   She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Hartford, a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania, and is recognized by the International Coach Federation as a professional certified coach.  Greenberg lives in Connecticut with her husband and two dogs. They have two grown daughters.  For more information, visit Greenberg’s website at www.thegreenberggroup.org.