Category: Money

We all have material needs and it goes without saying that we cannot experience life satisfaction without the ability to maintain shelter over our head or good nutrition for our body and our brood.

However, despite the turmoil we put ourselves through to arrive at the infamous “six-figure income,” a recent Princeton University study that analyzed the responses of 450,000 Americans clearly demonstrated that once ones’ income level reaches $75,000 per year, no matter how much more we make above that it makes no difference to our degree of happiness!

Changing our perspective on how we view money and our finances can improve our happiness. Let’s explore this together.

The Most Profound Way to Make Friends and Influence People

We invest much energy and time in trying to become a popular person. We beat ourselves up at the gym to have a nicer body; we starve ourselves to lose weight; we go under the knife to change physical attributes; and we go into debt to buy designer clothes and other material trophies. And what is the outcome of all of these efforts? We are more isolated and lonely than ever.

Do you want to know a secret? The key to being the most likeable person at work or at home is to be the person who is best at establishing safety with others!

 Why is safety the only quality that truly matters?

Our nervous system is built like a sounding board. Much like a mirror, our neurobiology perceives and reflects the internal state of the people around us. Research shows that when we see someone else in pain, the regions of our brain associated with pain get activated. We don’t have to be neuroscientists to witness our mirror neurons at work. Just notice how we tear up while watching a sad movie, although the sad story is not actually happening to us. Emotions are indeed very contagious.

When two people are interacting and one person’s internal state is not calm and balanced, it will activate threat-related neurons and the stress response in the other.

In fact, our nervous system appears to play a very important role in how we feel and behave without us even realizing it. Steven Porges, who developed the polyvagal theory, specifically uncovered compelling data on the role our autonomic nervous system plays in the regulation of affective states and social behavior. Most of our physiological responses occur without our awareness, due to neuroception—a sub-conscious process of threat and danger detection.

When we define others in a negative way, are critical and or contemptuous towards them, their stress response gets activated. The stress response shuts down the brilliant, thinking part of our brain and slows down critical functions, like our immune system. Needless to say, being under the emotionally hi-jacked state of our stress response does not feel good.

We will have a very hard time making friends and influencing people if we elicit the stress response in others when we interact with them.

Three million years have passed since the Stone Age, and we now seem to reside in the threatened brain era, where it is estimated that we activate our fight or flight response over ten times per day. Six hundred million years of evolution have yielded us a brain that has the propensity to assume the worst. What can we do practically to intercept our built-in negative bias and master the art of building safety with the people that matter in our world? Here are some ideas:

  1. Say what you will do and do what you say.

This is one of the best-kept secrets describing the quickest and most effective way to build trust with anyone. It appears to be challenging in the midst of it all to prioritize and remember all the things we said we would do for all the people in our lives. But if you wish to be more popular at work or at home, being the person others can truly depend on is gold. Knowing our own limits and not over-promising and over-extending ourselves is critical too. It is much better to say “no,” than to say we will do something and not do it. Being a man or a woman of our word is a potent ingredient in being liked and having influence over others and, may I say, it is extremely rare.

  1. Replace judgment and resistance with compassion. 

When another behaves in a way that rubs us the wrong way, we take it personally. At that point our threat-related neural activity increases and the right hemisphere part of our brain, which governs our relational ability, shuts down. It is then easy to slip and slide into becoming judgmental, defensive, and resistant to connection. What if instead we choose to focus on feeling compassion for the other person’s temporary inability to relate to us in a healthy way and take the high road in reinstating the sense of safety between us? Research from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism has uncovered that nothing releases bursts of dopamine (our “feel good” neurotransmitter) in our brain as much as compassion does. If you become associated with dopamine release in another, you can actually become addictive in a good, positive way!

  1. Practice having power over your mind.

When something in another triggers negative emotions in you, redirect your attention to identifying at least three positive things about them. Although not visible on the exterior, emotions are perceived under the surface through contagion neurons. And if you have any concerns that thinking positive thoughts about someone who is upsetting you is letting them off the hook, think again. Redirecting our attention from a threatened brain state to a calmer state will allow us to have the clarity of thought to handle this, and any other, situation effectively. In addition, this practice is critical to the mastery of self-control, a rare skill that everyone admires and is attracted to.

  1. When emotions run high, use “I language.”

Communication between two people is nature and science at work. Since it is natural for two people to have differences, we must exercise caution when expressing any discomfort we feel and not put our fellow human beings down. When we do, safety is immediately removed, and the person across from us is no longer interested in resolving our differences. They are now busy defending themselves.

When views, perceptions, and understandings are shared with “I language,” they do not trigger defenses. We feel honored and special when someone shares their feelings as opposed to defining us in a negative way. Think of your last, heated discussion with another. How would that conversation have ended if you had expressed your feelings and needs instead of blaming the other person for how things turned out?

  1. Invest wholeheartedly in your healing!

We don’t typically like to admit it, but we are complicated, powerful systems that come with no directions, driven most of the time on autopilot from procedural memory. As much as we prefer to be known as easy-going, we all have varying degrees of wounds, past pains, and baggage we carry along with us, which frequently get triggered when we least expect it.

We are hot beds of emotions driven by our never-ending efforts to get further away from pain and closer to pleasure. Nothing is more powerful than being the admired person and role model we strive to be. We do this best by processing, unpacking, and making coherent stories of our past experiences that otherwise hold our spirits hostage and disrupt and sabotage every effort and good deed we make toward connection and belonging.

As it turns out, it is not the perfect exterior but a well-regulated interior that appears to be the most attractive attribute we can bring to our personal or professional life.

Although we can continue to play the part, use the right words, wear the right clothes, and do things the way others like us to, we know that maintaining a status quo façade is an ineffective way to create authentic connection and trust with the people in our microcosm.

If we want to make a difference and be part of a small revolution, nothing can set us apart from the crowd like being people who are predictable, accountable, reliable, and who say what they mean and do what they say.

You can be the person others know they can depend on, no matter what. You can be the one they always feel calm and safe around.

And I promise you, a person like that is definitely the one everyone wants to be around and everyone wants to follow.

Performance Excellence and Frazzle

Have you ever had a day like this?

  • You are working hard, yet you cannot complete tasks effectively.
  • You forget what you were doing a minute ago.
  • You have difficulty concentrating, and—as much as you try to—you cannot keep your mind on one task.

If you have days like these, you are not alone. Many of us feel frazzled (hopefully, only occasionally) when stress becomes so great that it starts interfering with our performance.

Contrary to popular belief, stress is not all bad. In fact, stress can be a positive, motivational force that gives us the ability to sharpen our performance and rise to a challenging occasion. However, the relationship between stress and performance follows a predictable bell-shaped curve, where optimal performance deteriorates as stress increases (1908, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson).

DRAWING OF YERKES DODSON BELL CURVE.

What is frazzle?

Frazzle is the performance zone associated with what we know as distress. It is the part of the Yerkes Dodson bell-shaped curve just beyond optimal performance, where stress increases to a point that results in deterioration of performance. When in frazzle mode, the quantity of hormones released by our stress response lead to a cascade of events, which have the ability to interfere with our ability to learn, innovate, be creative, or even effectively manage our time. Furthermore, if we hang out in frazzle mode for too long, our body systems start malfunctioning, making us susceptible to illness and potential long-term damage to organs and bodily functions.

A different perspective on why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do

When I was first nominated to enter management development, I was expected to read a dozen best-selling leadership books as part of my mandatory training. As much as I enjoyed learning from this incredible list of experts, I noticed something interesting: Every single one of them looked at employees a bit like they were “problems” that managers had to “solve” in order to achieve individual and organizational performance excellence.

The truth is, most of the time the real culprit causing poor performance is not bad employees but negative, physiological consequences, which take place when we humans are stretched too thin without adequate time in between to reset.

We are not machines, but beautifully complex body systems requiring ample time to rest and digest experiences in between jumping over hurdles. Research has proven that performance is negatively affected when the demands of work and life become greater than our ability to bounce back to our calm, balanced state, known as homeostasis. When we are in our neutral state, our heart is beating at the correct rate (80-100 beats per minute), our temperature is just right (97-98 degrees Fahrenheit), we have access to the executive part of our brain, and our immune and digestive systems are working well. Every demand we place on an organism produces stress—a temporary state where our body goes off-balance to meet a demand.

When we are burning the candle at both ends—going to work early and then working late at night to meet yet another work deadline—we don’t consciously think how, in order to meet that deadline, we are actually taking our body off-balance temporarily. For example, whether we are an Olympian running to win a Gold Medal, or a mere, corporate executive giving a presentation to our peers and boss, our heart rate and body temperature will increase above and beyond our normal, balanced states to meet that demand. If we keep this up for too long, we spend less and less time at an optimal heart rate or temperature level.

The sum total of all the adjustments an organism has to make to return the body to its’ balanced state in the face of stressors is called allostatic load (McEwan and Stellar, 1993). The higher the allostatic load, the more our performance deteriorates and the higher the probability is that we will experience functional organ and body damage.

How do we incorporate all the insights that science has lent us regarding the impact of stress to increase individual and organizational health and optimal performance? Here are the most valuable lessons I learned from the team of eight people I had the privilege of leading in my very first job as a manager.

  1. 
 We need to start living our values outside of employee handbooks. Are we really supporting work-life balance if we are expected to give up our lunch to meet yet another deadline, or to take a Sunday night red-eye flight to be at a noon meeting across the country? Work-life balance initiatives sound great inside the pages of our employee manuals, but they actually lead to peak performance when these values are supported by actions.

 

  1. We need to invest in building a culture of community at the workplace. When life’s demands become too high, we humans tend to find comfort in the support kindly offered to us by people who care about us and show up at times of stress. Beyond revenues and corporate objectives, one effective antidote to frazzle is to create time and space to connect with employees as humans, above and beyond corporate meetings and performance metrics. Let’s face it, we all spend a significant amount of our life at work. It is unlikely that we will go the extra mile for a boss or a company that does not really care about us as human beings.

 

  1. We need to start talking about stress openly. We cannot possibly eliminate stress in life, but we can increase our stress resilience. How can we build stress resilience though, if we turn a blind eye to the hidden, negative impact of stress? What if our annual business plans included SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, results-oriented, and time-specific) goals around stress resilience?  We need to stop seeing stress as a sign of weakness in employees, but as a larger problem and a significant health and safety issue in the workplace.

 

  1. We need to put down the stick and give more carrots. Despite the robust evidence that behaviorism does not work, fear-based leadership still appears to be the king. In fact, carrot and stick leadership is wreaking havoc in corporate America, costing a staggering amount of dollars in lost productivity and health issues. It’s time to truly see employees as valuable assets. After all, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “Today is a great day for me to be a low performer.” Isn’t it time we see with eyes wide open how much a threatened brain hampers performance?

 

  1. Happy employees really do make productive employees. When we review the philosophy and strategies of the companies that continually make the list of the best companies to work for, we can clearly see that these companies provide their employees with unconventional perks that go beyond additional pay. These perks can include on-site gyms or childcare, flex-time options, or even providing employees with designated time to meditate or get massages at work. The common thread amongst these exemplary organizations is that they realize the importance of providing the time and space for their people to rest and regroup in order for them to do amazing things for their companies in return. And they often do!

 

I was extremely frazzled and stressed out when I was given the honor and responsibility to lead a team for the first time in my career a little over a decade ago.

As it turned out though, my people shone for me, and in nine months our team moved from ranking at the bottom of our company to being the number one performing team in the nation! Although I was somewhat unconventional in my leadership approach (I cooked Greek food for my team at my home and even succeeded in changing company policies a couple of times to support my teams’ needs) it was not really me, but my people who actually realized this great accomplishment.

Every organization in any industry needs to perform well in order to remain profitable and survive against market variables. That means we all have to stretch ourselves to meet performance expectations.

But if we wish to see exceptional performance then active steps—such as the five steps listed above—need to be implemented to neutralize the negative impact of frazzle and stress.

And, if we are truly serious about performance excellence, here’s the most potent thing we can do to launch our employees’ superhero: We need to actively reflect that we “have their back!”

Performance excellence and Flow

performance excellence

Performance excellence is a universal human pursuit. No matter where we come from or what our IQ is, we all strive to be our best. But not all of us arrive at self-mastery.

I have been a performer in the top 5% for the majority of my adult life. However, my performance plummeted in all areas of my life when I fell into the depths of burnout and frazzle and lost access to my best self.

But what are the two degrees of separation between our ability to perform a task beautifully with a deep sense of joy as opposed to expending all of our energy without arriving at a successful outcome?

Flow is the term that describes the state in which we can perform and feel our absolute best.

The term was coined by Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihályi, who in the early 1970’s began the quest of unpacking the characteristics of the state that allows us to perform at the utmost of our ability. Dr. Csikszentmihályi’s work launched a massive, global effort to understand how we can access the super powers that have allowed fellow humans to accomplish the impossible. More recently, neuroimaging techniques have lent us incredible insights regarding the state of flow, such as knowledge of the specific alterations in brain function that occur with this desirable performance state of being.

What is flow?

Flow is a positive state in which we are able to perform a task at hand at optimal levels while also feeling a deep sense of happiness and joy. It has been described as “the sweet spot” or being “in the zone” where we are completely enamored and engrossed in the task at hand and experience an extreme sense of heightened awareness, so much so, that we often lose track of time.

When we find ourselves in flow, we are highly-focused, exceptionally creative, and feel a deep sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Research, which includes the use of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), has revealed that the part of our brain—the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex—associated with the voice of doubt within us shuts down when we are in flow. That means that we are free to make decisions and access our creativity and innovation without having to waste any energy quieting the inner critic within us. We also know that the state of flow is associated with several pleasure-inducing neurochemicals, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

The benefits of flow.

Being in the state of flow appears to have an incredible impact. We can:

  • Learn twice as fast.
  • Solve problems more effectively.
  • Access solutions that we don’t have access to under normal circumstances.

In fact, research has shown that top executives are 500% more productive when in flow.

As we go through the mundane details of our daily existence, we may not often consider our ability to perform in a  similar fashion to iconic athletes like Magic Johnson,  But in actual fact, we are physiologically just as capable of doing what Roger Bannister did in 1954 when he broke the “four-minute-barrier”—running a mile in just under four minutes. Until Roger defeated that barrier, running a mile in under four minutes was not considered humanly possible.

Functioning at this exceptional level of competency and ability means we can not only accomplish whatever we set our minds to, but also that we can have more time for things that matter in life, like our family.

Tips on cultivating flow states

So, if all of us are capable of entering a state that has allowed some of us to conquer the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, how do we enter this state of flow? A large number of scientists around the world have developed lists of the essential components of flow and suggestions on shortcuts that we can practice to become better at entering the state of flow. These methods can be personal, environmental, and/or social.

But here are some simple every day ways you and I can take advantage of the state of human performance excellence known as flow, backed up by scientific research and my own humble experience.

  1. Practice mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the conscious decision of choosing what we focus on. Whether we are Michelangelo chiseling the masterpiece David out of marble, or we are a teacher giving a long division lesson to fourth graders, mastering the art of quieting thoughts that distract and dilute our attention is a very effective way of increasing our ability to experience conscious, focused attention. The more often and the more consistently we practice quieting our thoughts, one minute at a time, the more competent we become at being able to access the present moment instantly.

  1. Practice setting clear goals and priorities for both the smallest and largest pursuits of your existence.

Get into the habit of creating intention for everything in your life—your day, your work, your role as a parent. If we don’t have a specific destination for any part of our lives, we will get nowhere specific. A razor-blade-focus on our goals is critical in activating the parts of our brain that are involved with excellence and peak performance.

  1. Practice consistently aligning your skills to your endeavors in all work and life tasks.

If you ask me to play the guitar solo from Jimi Hendrix’s classic song, Voodoo Child, I will absolutely fail miserably. I don’t have much skill in playing the guitar. If we want to have more moments of peak performance in our life, it is important that we do not allow a desire for external approval to dissuade us and take us off course from our true path. For example, we may want to please our parents by following their chosen career path of practicing law, but if we happen to be Michelangelo, our incredible artistry would be wasted in law school, and we would be miserable!

We need to be really honest with ourselves and brave enough to take an active role in recognizing what jobs match our current skills and what skills we need to become better at. Flow can only be achieved when our skills are fully developed and utilized, so that we can continuously and effectively overcome challenges associated with a job or endeavor.

  1. Commit to actively practicing positive states of mental activity.

Our built-in negative bias is an essential part of life and what has kept us alive for millions of years. However, it is this same conditioned way of negative thinking that short circuits our metabolic energy and shuts down the parts of our brain where creativity and innovation come from. We often don’t know how to bypass our negative bias, or we are too busy to do so. Starting each day with just five minutes of listing what you are grateful for in a notebook or journal can do wonders for allowing you to shift into a positive state, which is a potent precursor for instilling an internal path to the magical space of flow.

  1. Do what you love and love what you do.

In this fast-paced, competitive era that we live in, we forget the importance of doing what we are truly passionate about. Choosing to align our best skills with something that truly excites us and that also makes a positive contribution to the world we live in is a great way to get closer to what Dr. Csikszentmihályi described as the “optimal experience” in life: when our abilities are matched with what we love, what we are best at, and what makes a difference in the world.

Although we tend to look for happiness in checking off endless lists of status quo expectations, it appears that not much can top the immense joy we experience when we can access the powerful, intrinsic state of flow in ourselves – When we do what we use our best skills doing what we are most passionate about, while making a positive contribution to the world, while we are at it!

Unlike the adrenaline rush of winning an award, or getting any external approval, the state of flow represents our ultimate ability to be in control regulate our internal state and channel it toward realizing our smaller and larger noble pursuits.

We cannot underestimate the happiness that comes from human touch, teamwork, or any other source of happiness dependent on external sources.

But the happiness that results from our own flow is the only one that is sustainable, 100% within our control, and invaluable in reinforcing the intrinsic muscle of self-worth that forms the building blocks to our own self-actualization.