Do you have what it takes to stop feeling stuck? According to Psychologist Paul Saunders, feeling happy in the workplace and performing at peak performance is attainable when you develop a growth mindset and take charge of three things:
Your Goals
Your Focus
Your Dialogue
Try this quick exercise for your dialogue, to experience how you can make a huge impact and start developing a positive growth mindset, improve your mood and remain focused on previously challenging tasks.
What you do: (It requires the use of just one word)
The next time you think or say – ‘I can’t do that’ or ‘it never works’ notice how you feel in that moment. I’m guessing you probably do not feel good. You are probably feeling sad, mad, angry, frustrated or annoyed etc.
Now repeat that same thought/sentence…but this time add the word ‘yet’. E.g. “I can’t do that - yet’ or ‘It has not worked - yet’. Now notice how that makes you feel. I’m imagining you feel much lighter, more positive and even a bit hopeful. The addition of the word ‘yet’ immediately changed the dynamics of your reaction to your thought/sentence.
The addition of the word ‘yet’ implies there is a future, some other time and result, it has a hopeful connotation. This hope is reflected – within nanoseconds, in our feelings and thoughts.
Changing your dialogue is one way to stop your personal feelings of inertia and if positive dialogue becomes a norm for your whole team or workplace then you are one step closer to achieving a happy high performance workplace because nothing positive was ever achieved with a negative mindset.