Happiness at Work

At Monday's  faculty/staff/trustee breakfast, I referenced the Work Quality Test that assesses how happy people are at their job. Rank on a scale of 1-10 each of the three following statements:

•   You absolutely love the people you work with, both the students and the adults

•   Your job offers you interesting and enjoyable challenges and offers new opportunities to make progress in—and learn about-your field and your profession.

•   You know what your responsibilities are, but you have lots of encouragement and leeway regarding how you use your talents to fulfill them 

For me, those three statements perfectly capture my experience at Trinity thus far. It's we fortunate ones who can score close to 30 on those statements. (My hope is that most of us at Trinity have a score of nearly 30.)

A recent article by Bob Marzano lists the following three elements needed for a satisfying career:

•   The work is challenging and it takes hard work to get better at it

•   The work affects others in a positive way

•   The workplace gives individuals a degree of autonomy to express their creativity

This is similar to Daniel Pink's  thesis of his book Drive: what motivates people in their jobs--and in their lives--is  1. autonomy (desire to direct one's own life), 2. mastery (urge to get better at something that matters) and 3. purpose (yearning to do what one does in service of something larger and more enduring than oneself).

To me there is a symbiosis between the environment/culture of where one works and the attitude one brings to work—hence, work culture is shaped and maintained by the people in it.

While I am not a fan of self-help books, the article below was intriguing to me in that it succinctly consolidates the advice of self-help books from the past decade.

We benefit from working in a great environment like Trinity, yet we are also better teachers when we have a clear sense of who we are and what motivates and fulfills us---what psychologist Abraham Maslow calls self-actualization.

So the article summary below is not about education or educational issues per se, but advice/dashboard markers about how we can be fulfilled both personally and professionally. The connection to school is if we are fulfilled personally and professionally, we are most likely better teachers. 

There aren't any a-ha epiphanies below, yet I do see the value of all us periodically reflecting on who we are (not just at work but off-duty as well) and how happy and fulfilled we are.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

What The Greatest Self-Help Books Of The Last Decades Can Teach You

There are thousands of books out there brimming with ways to radically improve your life. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll find that while each author may take a different approach, the advice they’re giving isn’t as different as you might think.

In our journey through the last decades’ most popular self-help books, we noticed certain similarities emerge and thought, hey, why not condense them and see what we get?

The result of that experiment is the following 7 pieces of advice given to everyone striving to lead a more productive, happier life.

The Big Picture: Find the “why” that drives you: A common refrain is to identify early what you want in the long term: find your mission, or “why,” and allow the “what” and “how” to flow from there. And if the why you identify comes from a place of intrinsic meaning, all the better! In his book, Drive, Daniel Pink references an experiment in which psychologists asked university students about their aims in life. Some named extrinsic profit targets, like wealth, while others specified more intrinsic goals, such as personal development or helping others. Years later, the students with profit goals were no closer to contentment, but those with intrinsic goals were happier. So start looking for your why now – once you find it, it will help you organize your tasks, meet meaningful goals, and even feel happier.

Mastery: To succeed, practice your craft and learn from others: Knowing what you want to achieve is the first step. Next? Actually getting things done. But be advised – if you want to stand out, you’ll have to do quite a lot of things. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Robert Sutton’s Weird Ideas that Work show that most people who are considered geniuses today actually spent a great deal of time acquiring their skills. The “10,000 Hour Rule” is a key concept from Gladwell’s book. As Robert Greene says in Mastery, your main goal in a new field should not be immediate success or money, but to learn as much as possible. One of the ways to maximize the time you spend on honing your skills is to find someone in your field to learn from. Attempting to go it solo, we make preventable mistakes, but a mentor can show you how to use your resources most effectively.

Innovate: Embrace failure and keep on trying: Successful people don’t sweat failure, they just keep on trying until they succeed. In fact, greats like Mozart, Picasso, and Thomas Edison produced many instances of rather subpar work. Innovation, it would seem, is often born of a long series of failures. So, how do you stay motivated in the face of challenge? In herbook, Mindset, Carol Dweck offers a great strategy: adopting a growth mindset. While a fixed mindset prizes talent and smarts above all, a growth mindset focuses on learning and improving. By adopting a growth mindset, you can free yourself from assumptions about intrinsic ability and leave room to fail big first and succeed spectacularly later.

Focus: Be effective, not efficient, and declutter: It’s easy to lose your focus to emails or people clamoring for your help, but spending a lot of time on these tasks is dangerous. You’re better off being effective – focusing on things that bring you closer to your personal goals – than efficient and eliminating “urgent” tasks that pop up. Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek suggests never starting off your day with email. Another simple tool is one suggested by Leo Babauta in The Power of Less: MITs, or “Most Important Tasks First.” Before you finish work for the evening, define the most important task for the next day. It should be something that can be done in under an hour, and done first. When you’ve already done the MIT for the day, even if you spend the rest of it in meetings or answering email, you’ve made important progress.

Positivity: Live in the present and banish negative thoughts: To err is human; to worry, even more so. In our evolutionary history, worry and fear were important – they kept us from being snacks for saber tooth tigers. However, many of us still get mired in fretting about the past or making negative projections about the future. David J. Schwartz’s The Magic of Thinking Big suggests edging away from negativity and giving yourself a pep talk instead – one that reads like an advertisement in which you sell your best self. Say this commercial out loud in private at least once a day, and read it silently a few times more. Soon, you’ll believe in yourself so much that the outside world’s negativity won’t matter.

Cooperation: Think win-win and make a good first impression: As we evolved, we developed the ability to cooperate: doing so helped us survive. The Magic of Thinking Big reminds readers that success frequently depends on others, so treating everyone with respect is good for all involved. Fair play might reduce your chances of winning, but it will help you in the long termbecause you’ve collected allies. In How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie counsels that the first step in a successful cooperation is making a good first impression, so smile and act friendly when you meet someone new.

Human needs: Accept your inherent irrationality and learn to fight it: Human beings are neither robots nor computers – and as it turns out, we’re not even all that rational. Many great self-help books put forth the idea of a divided inner self. While your rational side might be able to make a decision about what’s best for you, such as quitting cigarettes, eating healthier, or abstaining from social media, the impetuous irrational self who favors short-term gratification – smokes, booze, and endless hours on Facebook – can derail you. Set up disincentives for irrational behavior: If you promise to give 1,000 dollars to Scientology for every cigarette you smoke, you give your rational side far more power than if the only motivation is a fleeting New Year’s resolution.

A final thought: Make small changes for big results: Most self-help books share this nugget of advice: change is most lasting when it’s built on small positive habits. Find tweaks you can make today and you’ll be on your way to building practices that make for a happier, more productive tomorrow.