Critical Chance

Category: Positive Psychology

  • October Updates – Why Happiness at Google?

    These past few weeks, I’ve been traveling across the country to present my talk, “The Happy Key To Success,” to teams across Google. I was invited to offsites in Atlanta, Boulder, and Los Angeles.

    But wait, why talk about happiness at Google?

    One thing we fail to understand is that our external world does not necessarily correlate to how we feel inside. Only 10% of your happiness is predicted by external things like you drive a nice car, or you work at Google. Whereas 90% of your happiness is predicted by your perception and how you view the world – something I was fortunate to learn from Shawn Achor +8 years ago.

    Important points:

    1. Happiness leads to success, not the other way around
    2. Your perception, quite literally, shapes your reality
    3. Our attitudes and choices impact those around us

    I feel lucky to have the opportunity to bring these ideas to the forefront. Huge thanks to all of the organizers who invited me to speak, and the attendees who were open to these ideas. People who work at Google are already very smart and talented, and I get excited when I think about how much more they can achieve with positive psychology.

    It’s the small things that we choose to focus on, that shape us into who we become.

    If we can just slightly change your perception, we can dramatically influence your happiness, and create a real revolution.

    Now get going!

    If you’re interested in having Alex speak at your company, you can express interest here.

  • Forward vs. backward looking goals

     

    Written on February 22nd, 2018

8 minute read

    Forward vs. Backward Looking Goals

     

    We tend to confuse the two and that’s a big mistake.

    If you’re like myself, when you set your most ambitious personal goals, they tend to sound something like this:

    • Appear on the Forbes, ‘[insert age] Under [insert age] List’
    • Get promoted at work
    • Increase my net worth to $XX

    What do they all have in common? These are all backward looking indicators. In other words, they are signals that you’re doing well, but in the past. While achieving these accolades does correlate with success, they aren’t predictive of future success. Rather, they are proof that success has already happened, in the past.

    Your goals should really sound more like this:

    • Learn a new (seemingly unrelated) discipline
    • Embrace a new positive habit backed by science
    • Reach out to non-local friends more regularly

    The difference? These are all forward looking indicators; they don’t show off as accomplishments in the typical way we view “success.” Yet, if you do any of these things, it’s easier to predict your performance in the future. Following through on these goals won’t get you a celebrated medal, but they are the positive tactics that actually get you there.

    Learning from successful people 

     

    What do Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban, and Bill Gates have in common? They are vivacious learners. They dedicate many hours each day to reading about new subjects, because it challenges their mindset and allows them to connect independent ideas. That’s a forward indicator – agile mental models produce novel ideas but will never receive an accolade for habit itself.

    What do they also have in common? They are all Billionaires. Their net worth continues to climb and is a testament to their consistent ability to keep growing as individuals, entrepreneurs, and thought-leaders. That’s a backwards indicator – it reflects back on their total economic output to date, in the past.

    That’s the formula.

    The most powerful forward indicator is happiness

     

    Compared to their neutral or stressed counterparts:

    • Doctors are 19% more accurate at diagnosing their patients
    • Sales people are 37% better at closing
    • Operationally, we can be up to 31% more productive

    That’s just the beginning; there are studies that show we are more creative, better at problem solving, and more resilient and innovative when we are happy versus neutral or stressed. *

    When we increase wellbeing in the present, all of our our future outputs rise. We are a product of our environments. So, elevating these inputs also helps those around you; your family, friends, and co-workers. Start with happiness and finish with more success.

    We should be challenging our employees and organizations to set forward looking predictors

     

    • How are you going to push yourself to self-learn this year?
    • What’s the one positive habit you will commit to practicing this quarter?
    • When will you find time to connect with your network this week?

    Ignore the accolades, because they come later.

    Remember, when our team commits and crushes the small stuff, we need to celebrate too. Our brains are wired for short-term feedback loops, which makes forward predictors hard to set and follow through on. It’s easy to choose a well-known award to gauge success, but it’s the abstract and consistent daily habits that really produce it.

    By adjusting our measuring stick of success, we can elevate everyone around us. Eventually producing more backward predictors that we know and love.

  • Perception pivots and why they matter

     

    Written on February 8th, 2018

12 minute read

    Perception pivots and why they matter

    You should always focus on valuable realities; a familiar statement I tell Googlers attending my happiness course.

    There are 11 billion pieces of information communicated to us every single second.

     

    Crazy, right? If you look around, there are 11 billion things your brain can focus on. What do you think your brain can actually process (per second)?

    Here is where the really optimistic people shine. Some will shout out, “one-thousand” or even “ten-thousand,” but the answer is actually 40 bits per second. You don’t have to be a math expert to know that 40 is a really, really small slice of 11 billion. That’s the equivalent of choosing 58 people on the entire planet!

    Whatever you focus on, is the reality that you live in; and everybody focuses on something different. This is pretty nuts, and what we’re finding is people are quite literally living in different realities. If you’re a Stranger Things fan, we’re having the same thought; the upside down is being played out in real time! Well, not quite that dramatic, but directionally it’s actually correct.

    There’s an important group of people, who we call, “Positive Geniuses.” They focus on the right pieces of information in their environment, leading them to faster solutions, higher levels of creativity, productivity… the list goes on. They’re using perception to their advantage.

    There are two specific ways you can train your mind to become more like a “Positive Genius,” and I decided to try them out myself for 30 days.

    Daily Gratitudes – there’s a lot that you’re grateful for, so take the time to recognize it

    • Write down 3 things you’re grateful for each day, it can be really abstract or really simple
    • IE: Good music, cute puppies, and the opportunity to learn something new everyday
    • This rewires your brain to look for the positive things in your environment (the better 40 bits)

    Reframing Challenges – multiple realities exist and we need to select the most valuable reality

    • Choose something you’re struggling with and write down three ways you currently view the task; then, contrast it by writing down three alternate yet equally true ways to see that same problem
    • IE: I have a lot of work to catch up on, but I also have a lot of responsibility and control in my job
    • This forces you to view situations in multiple ways and, by doing so, you recognize new factors in your environment you typically miss (a different 40 bits)

    Would I start seeing the positive details in my environment? Could I be missing the most important 40 bits? Will it have any measurable impact on my performance at work or at home?

    The second exercise was most fascinating to me, and it flows into something I dub the “Perception Pivot.” We’ve all experienced it before – you learn a small fact about a situation and suddenly your option or outlook does a 180. IE: You thought the cashier was a terrible person, but suddenly you couldn’t have more compassion for them. Here’s an example that underscores this incredibly well, and it comes from my friend, Sean. At the time, he was a manager of an Apple Store.

    One Thursday, it was busier than normal and the wait was long. One woman in the iPhone repair queue was getting extremely agitated at the staff. She began acting out and screaming at employees. The other customers in line were looking at her like she was a lunatic, they tried their best to just ignore her. Eventually, she demanded a manager and Sean did his best to truly understand the situation by asking her a series of questions. After a few minutes, he found out something critical; she was a chemotherapy patient and used some of the applications on her iPhone to schedule her medical treatments. The longer she waited for her phone to be fixed, the more treatment appointments she was missing.

    I think anyone in that line, if they had known this fact, would have acted differently. Even you, feel completely different about her behavior at this point, right?

    Boom. Perception pivot.

    Back to my research, the short answer is yes; I began to have a more positive outlook everyday, I felt more satisfied at work and even found stronger meaning in my social circles with friends and family. It felt as though the exercises were working, I was certainly more grateful and saw challenges with new vantage points. But my conclusion was only anecdotal; I needed something else to show the exercise was working. And that’s when something incredible happened.

    I was meeting a friend after work who lived in downtown Ann Arbor. The building’s tenant base was predominantly graduate students and newly working 20-somethings. As I came through the lobby, I saw an older woman stacking large moving boxes; there must have been at least 4 of them, each full with belongings. She was having trouble moving them alone, and each lobby-goer passed by as if she wasn’t there.

    It was so strange. I mean, if you ran an experiment showing various situations and asked, “what doesn’t fit?” I think 10/10 test subjects would have chosen this woman. Nothing lined up, she was middle-aged, not recently graduated; moving out, not moving in; visibly upset and unhappy.

    In real life, you’re not forced to pick out things that don’t fit. In fact, we’re usually running on autopilot, deep inside our heads, there’s a lot we miss. Everyone assumes the script is always the same, but many times it’s not. Ah-ha! My perception exercise was working.

    Instead of passing her, my eyes met hers and I just began moving boxes. We didn’t say anything, I just started helping. Suddenly her individual operation evolved into a circuit formation. 10 additional boxes were transported from the lobby, to the parking lot, to the trunk of an SUV. At the car, there were two adults waiting, both in a saddened mood. After we packed the last box away, I answered their thank-yous and walked back towards the building.

    I had almost reached the entrance when I heard, “Wait a minute!” …she had followed me back inside. As I turned around, I noticed eyes held back tears. “That was really kind of you.” she said. “The two parents at the car just found out that their daughter had passed away. It was sudden. I knew her well because I am a professor at the University and she was one of my students, a great person. What you did means so much, it’s hard for me to describe. Getting help from from people in the community has been so important.”

    Boom, perception pivot.

    You should always push yourself to see how situations may be different.

    Angry at the driver who cut you off?

    • Maybe he’s driving his wife to the hospital, she’s in labor with their first-born.

    An employee comes to work late each day of the week

    • Maybe she’s taking care of an ailing parent, hasn’t been home earlier than 11pm each night

    See a stranger moving out of your apartment building?

    • Maybe she’s helping a friend who needs it more than you can imagine

    We tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, but never offer others that same chance. It leads us to miss what’s going on right in front of us because we’re stuck in our own heads. We need to constantly challenge our perceptions, everyday, in every way.

    I challenge you to pick up a positive habit this week and view your reality differently. When we become Positive Geniuses, we don’t just elevate ourselves, but instead, we lift everyone up.

    Perspective pivots matter because they help us reach our greatest potential.

     

     

  • The Cost of Letting the Good Ones Go

    Originally written on November 16, 2014

8 minute read

    The Cost of Letting the Good Ones Go

    Every company is different, but one thing is certain; great employees require major investment. Recruiters will tell you that’s a no brainer, and it should be. However, time and time again, companies overlook the bottom-line cost when top talent leaves.

    Let’s start with an example. You have a manager who’s been in the organization for 4 years, a top performer. Based off a variety of reasons, they put in their two weeks notice. What’s that really cost your business?

    You can break this down into two categories; one hand are the benefits to the company if they stayed, the other hand are the costs of leaving. I’ll just breeze over the benefits, because the costs are the most overlooked and ignored. Here we go:

    Benefits of Staying: Remember this is a top performer. Most often, they have stronger skills than someone who could replace them. If they stay, their skills keep growing and they challenge the rest of the organization to keep up. These are the ones who teach their skills to other co-workers, the reason why the best perk is the people.

    When they stay their output keeps climbing. A number hard to measure, but we would expect them to keep producing great stuff that matters. And that’s disregarding the intangible and unforeseen stuff, because usually our best people surprise us with things we couldn’t imagine.

    Costs of Leaving:

    Costs vary by industry, but when we’re talking about top talent,  initial costs can be upwards of 200% of their salary. *

    How could that be? Consider our investment in them for a moment.

    • Recruitment: We pay an entire department just to find these people. Every resume or interview, someone’s being paid to search. If we’re really finding top talent, for every 10 interviews we pay for, maybe we find 1 candidate.
    • Training: Before the employee can fully contribute in their role, they need to be trained. Training varies depending on industry of course, but initially we expect the new hire to be asking more questions than producing. If we have formal training, someone is on the pay-role to conduct that too (another cost).
    • Output: We sacrifice a lot when they start. Productivity and performance will most likely be low compared to our tenure folk. We know it takes time and we’re playing the waiting game before we see their potential. If they are only half as productive, we’re paying them 2x what they are producing (at first).

    Here’s the Irony: We understand it takes time for people to develop, but when are they most likely to leave? It’s once they are finally developed and successful in their role. We’ve waited, invested in their growth, then they walk out the door. If the average attrition in your company is 20% YOY, that could mean upwards of 40% of your costs each year are just salvaging who you’ve lost. Woah.

    There are plenty of ways to keep employees engaged and invested in you. Here are my top two:

    #1 Challenge Them: Most top talent have one thing in common, they never stop learning or growing. Give them freedom, allow them to participate in discussions about the business. If they have an idea for something that can help the business, let them work on it. First make sure they are excelling at their core role though. If they are a top performer, they’ve earned the credibility to work on other ways to impact your bottom line.

    #2 Recognize Them: Studies are beginning to glean that recognition is more motivating than money or rewards. Another ironic part to this, recognition takes almost no time. Working into weekly conversations that you are thankful for their effort goes a long way. As an anecdotal story, I was fortunate enough to be recognized by one of our directors a few months ago. That was almost more fulfilling than completing the project. It energized me to keep furthering some of those ideas. If you’re in a position of power, your greatest strength is recognition.

    Sum it up; losing good people costs good money. Make sure your talent is challenged and recognized. Take time to ensure they understand your company’s mission and purpose. Otherwise it will end up costing you more than you bargained.