Its been a hard time at work the last few weeks. I started a job at the end of last year and I’ve been uncovering unpleasant things about the finances ever since. Over the next two months I have to break this news to the senior bods, and its not going to be very much fun.
I found myself getting very grumpy about it – worrying about what people would think, would I be blamed, is my job at risk, is this going to be a black mark on my career. Rationally, none of those are even issues. There could be a bit of shoot the messenger perhaps, but its nothing ive done or not done.
What I found really interesting though, was how much it affected my productivity last week. On the way to work my self-talk got on a downward spiral – its not my fault, don’t blame me, its all so bad, why am i even bothering etc. etc. And somehow, even though I knew ‘rationally’ that I shouldn’t think like this, I kept on doing it. It was kind of like indulgence, and very hard to get out of.
Even more interesting, when I got to work I was totally off my game. I really couldn’t focus, i wasn’t enjoying the stuff I normally enjoy, and really hated the stuff I normally “prefer not to do”. I was less likely to attach my inbox and intray once or twice a day, and the “stuff” started piling up. Before I knew it I was getting that out of control feeling again.
Of course, having been very organised for the last few months, one week wasn’t going to knock it all out of whack – rather, having been organised, a little disorganisation is very noticeable. But I realised that it was important to knock it on the head.
So what did I do – well, there’s invariably no one thing that you can do to change your mood. However, the first thing was checked how I talked to myself – it can seem kind of forced at first, to tell yourself to be positive, everything will be fine, you’ll find the way to fix it – but its no more contrived than telling yourself the opposite. So i started there, telling myself positive constructive things about how well work was going, how it would work out, how I always found the answers and how the only thing Id have to deal with would be a few good hard days of work – something im never afraid of. Even better, I then started telling myself how good it was that I was having these hard times – its during the hard times that we grow, that we test out strengths, that we use the skills we bother to learn in the simpler times.
Other stuff happened that helped, but by the following week I was, mostly, back on good form. I’d managed to get the spring back in my step and more importantly, my productivity was getting back to normal. I’d start looking at the piles that would appear throughout the day, and going at them with a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves attitude.
I’m a big fan of Martin Seligman, and his various books, most notably Learned Optimism. Amongst other conclusions, one thing he found in his work was that optimistic people were by and large more successful. There are caveats, as ever, but if you could choose a mindset for success, optimism would be the one. However in Learned Optimism, he gained his conclusions via a statistical analysis, the biggest study being of insurance salesmen. Now that’s fine for a scientific study, and its what you would expect. What I found interesting last week was how the relationship between my own sudden dip in optimism and my own successes could be so immediate and so obvious ; this wasn’t a statistical connection this was a clear as day consequence over a timescale of few days.
My (non-statistical) conclusion would be thus; we all have an average (mean) level of optimism – however there is variation in that level over periods of time. To put it in meaningful terms – some days we feel better than others. Those days when we feel better and more optimistic, we’re more successful, and since doing things is an indicator of success to me – I get more things done when I’m in a good mood.
In a nutshell then, if I’m really interested in being productive, I need to stay positive.
