8 Habits That Are Making Your Work Life Harder

If you get decent value from making to-do lists, you'll get huge returns—in productivity, in improved relationships, and in your personal well-being—from adding these items to your not to-do list:

Every day, make the commitment not to:

 

1. Check my phone while I'm talking to someone.

You've done it. You've played the, "Is that your phone? Oh, it must be mine," game. You've tried the you-think-sly-but-actually-really-obvious downwards glance. You've done the, "Wait, let me answer this text..." thing.

 

Maybe you didn't even say, "Wait." You just stopped talking, stopped paying attention, and did it.

Want to stand out? Want to be that person everyone loves because they make you feel, when they're talking to you, like you're the most important person in the world?

 

Stop checking your phone. It doesn't notice when you aren't paying attention.

Other people? They notice. And they care.

 

2. Multitask during a meeting.

The easiest way to be the smartest person in the room is to be the person who pays the most attention to the room.

 

You'll be amazed by what you can learn, both about the topic of the meeting and about the people in the meeting if you stop multitasking and start paying close attention. You'll flush out and understand hidden agendas, you'll spot opportunities to build bridges, and you'll find ways to make yourself indispensable to the people who matter.

 

It's easy, because you'll be the only one trying. And you'll be the only one succeeding on multiple levels.

 

3. Think about people who don't make any difference in my life.

Trust me: The inhabitants of planet Kardashian are okay without you.

But your family, your friends, your employees—all the people that really matter to you—are not. Give them your time and attention.

They're the ones who deserve it.

 

4. Use multiple notifications.

You don't need to know the instant you get an email. Or a text. Or a tweet. Or anything else that pops up on your phone or computer.

 

If something is important enough for you to do, it's important enough for you to do without interruptions. Focus totally on what you're doing. Then, on a schedule you set—instead of a schedule you let everyone else set--play prairie dog and pop your head up to see what's happening.

 

And then get right back to work. Focusing on what you are doing is a lot more important than focusing on other people might be doing. They can wait. You, and what is truly important to you, cannot.

 

5. Let the past dictate the future.

Mistakes are valuable. Learn from them. Then let them go.

 

Easier said than done? It all depends on your perspective. When something goes wrong, turn it into an opportunity to learn something you didn't know—especially about yourself.

 

When something goes wrong for someone else, turn it into an opportunity to be gracious, forgiving, and understanding.

 

The past is just training. The past should definitely inform but in no way define you—unless you let it.

 

6. Wait until I'm sure I will succeed.

You can never feel sure you will succeed at something new, but you can always feel sure you are committed to giving something your best. And you can always feel sure you will try again if you fail.

Stop waiting. You have a lot less to lose than you think, and everything to gain.

 

7. Talk behind someone's back.

If only because being the focus of gossip sucks. (And so do the people who gossip.)

If you've talked to more than one person about something Joe is doing, wouldn't everyone be better off if you stepped up and actually talked to Joe about it? And if it's "not your place" to talk to Joe, it's probably not your place to talk about Joe.

 

Spend your time on productive conversations. You'll get a lot more done—and you'll gain a lot more respect.

 

8. Say "yes" when I really mean "no."

Refusing a request from colleagues, customers, or even friends is really hard. But rarely does saying no go as badly as you expect. Most people will understand, and if they don't, should you care too much about what they think?

 

When you say no, at least you'll only feel bad for a few moments. When you say yes to something you really don't want to do you might feel bad for a long time—or at least as long as it takes you to do what you didn't want to do in the first place.

 

This story was originally published by Inc.

Read more: http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/8-things-you-should-not-do-every-day.html#ixzz2QYEw3kxX

Why You Have Your Best Ideas In The Shower

“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others?

If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength.

It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I was very happy to discover, is that any and everybody is creative. In fact, we are all extremely creative.

And the following science will hopefully prove it, in case you ever had any doubts about your own creativity. After all, creativity, at its very core, boils down to this:

“A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful (or influential) in a particular social setting.” – Alice Flaherty

This applies to every field Flaherty explains, including programming, business, mathematics together with the more traditional “creative” fields, such as music or drawing. And yet, there is still a very distinct process behind it:

Our brain on creativity: The example of free-style rap

So, what is actually active in our brain when we are doing something creatively? That’s always been extremely hard to track as creativity has always been considered a very vague activity. Until recently researchers Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu had a genius idea: Track the brain activity of rappers doing freestyle and turn it into a research study.

Free-style rap is a great example of a creative process that is both relatively easy to track and can be translated into lots of other areas. What they found was fascinating. When we are being creative, some of the everyday brain areas are completely deactivated, whilst others we don’t use in every day lives light up:

“Artists showed lower activity in part of their frontal lobes called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation, and increased activity in another area, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The areas that were found to be ‘deactivated’ are associated with regulating other brain functions.”

To make it a bit more understandable:

“We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity,” says Braun.

So, the areas in our brain, that we use to make decisions is largely inactive. The “medial prefrontal cortex” area, which is responsible to learn association, context, events and emotional responses however was extremely active on the other hand. This graphic of brain activity probably describes it best:

The reason the above is so fascinating, is that for the first time, there was an activity, that was deeply creative and also fairly straightforward to measure. When I read through some other studies measuring brain activity, it never felt that the people were performing something actually creative.

 

 

So it makes a lot of sense to substitute free-style rapping for writing, drawing, solving programming problems and more mentions Braun. That’s why this example is so great. It is also similar to our brain activity whilst we sleep.

 

Why do we have great ideas in the shower then?

The fact that free-style rapping shows us a high level of creativity, still doesn’t explain why great ideas happen in the shower.

 

Alice Flaherty, one of the most renowned neuroscientists researching creativity has an answer for us. Another ingredient, that’s very important for us to be creative is dopamine: The more dopamine that is released, the more creative we are, she says:

“People vary in terms of their level of creative drive according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system.”

This graphic shows beautifully how dopamine gets taken up by certain brain areas which then get increasingly active and trigger more creative wanderings:

Typical triggers for events, that make us feel great and relaxed and therefore give us an increased dopamine flow are taking a warm shower, exercising, driving home, etc. The chances of having great ideas then are a lot higher.

Still, that’s not all there is to it. Dopamine alone, which gets triggered in hundreds of events, where we aren’t very creative, can’t be the only reason. Another crucial factor is a distraction, says Harvard researcher Carson:

“In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.’’

Especially if you have thought long and hard all day about a problem, jumping into the shower can turn into what scientist call the “incubation period” for your ideas. The subconscious mind has been working extremely hard to solve the problems you face and now that you let your mind wander, it can surface and plant those ideas into your conscious mind.

Lastly, after you have received an influx in dopamine, can be easily distracted by an extremely habitual task like showering or cooking, a relaxed state of mind is absolutely important to be creative, says Jonah Lehrer:

“Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease–when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain–we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights. ‘That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers,’ Bhattacharya says. ‘For many people, it’s the most relaxing part of the day.’ It’s not until we’re being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we’re finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. The answers have been their all along–we just weren’t listening.”

So this seems to be the magic combination: If you are in a relaxed state of mind, easy to distract and full of dopamine, your brain is most likely to give you your best, most creative ideas.

 

3 most successful ways to capture your creative spirit

From all the research I have read, this is the most important thing to take away I found: Every day, everyone of us is extremely creative. The trick is not to optimize for how to spark your creative spirit. The trick is to make sure you capture it, whenever it happens.

 

Instead of looking for better ways to brainstorm or otherwise come up with ideas, the key is to not let go of the tiny, fragile ones, once they enter our heads.

 

Here are some of the best ways that some of the most successful people manage to capture their ideas:

 

Keep a notebook with you at all times, even in the shower

This is by far, the most successful technique to capture more of your creativity every day: a simple notepad. What is extremely difficult, is to keep a notepad with you at all times. If even Richard Branson forgets ideas as quickly as they enter his head, how can we expect to be any different. For that exact reason writing everything down, even if doesn’t seem that important at the time is absolutely crucial says Drew Hansen:

“Don’t judge [your ideas] at this stage, either. There’s a reason they occurred to you this way.”

With that, the emphasis really lies on “all times”. It is easy to bring a notepad to the office or have it lying on our desk. Yet, that’s not when our most creative moments happen. Here are some of the areas where we typically forget to keep a notepad:

• In your car
• In the gym
• Whilst Running
• While grocery shopping
• In the shower

These are some of the most typical activities where our creative moments happen, capturing them then and there is absolutely crucial. As for the shower, don’t worry, I recently discovered Acqua notes as a great way to capture your ideas:

Plan disengagement and distraction: The outer – inner technique

Similar to what Shelly Carson from Harvard called “the incubation” period, I’m using a technique that has greatly helped me to capture this. I call it the “outer-inner” technique.

I generally start my day with the most important task for Buffer in the morning. Say this is a blogpost:

 

I will do all the research, jot down notes into my word editor and not worry at all about the actual blogpost. That is the first outer task. Then I have a few inner task follow. I will respond to emails, might have a brief chat with the team and do other tasks. Then, towards the end of my day, I get back to the second half of the outer task. I would sit down and then actually write the article, edit pieces and put into publishable form.

 

The amazing thing that happens is that even I don’t work on the blogpost during my inner tasks, my subconscious brain does. It will do all the work, and then gradually present the solutions to me when I get back to working on it later on.

 

Overwhelm your brain: Make the task really hard

Another very well researched technique is to overwhelm your brain. Have you ever started to work on a task, where you quickly realised was insanely hard and you will most likely fail solving it? Keep working on it says Robert Epstein.

 

If you are a programmer, try to solve something you’ve never attempted before and always thought you can only do a lot later in your career, as a writer, write a piece longer then you think you can write. Your brain will be put in a shock situation and naturally engage more of your creative area then it normally would. And although you might not succeed at the task at first, you will find that other tasks will come a lot easier through your increased brain activity then.

 

Quick last fact: “The left side of our brain manages creativity” myth

Ever since I went to elementary school, I was taught that “For creativity, use your left side of the brain!” Fortunately, that is not at all true:

“In the 1970s, based on studies of split-brain patients, the idea that the right hemisphere “controlled” creativity became very popular, especially in the public’s imagination. This model is now considered overly simplistic and outdated.”

Instead, creativity happens in multiple areas all across our brain, best aligned with the 3D model you can see above.

 

I tried to bust as many of the common myths around creativity above as possible and I’m sure there is lots more that you’ve discovered in the past! What are your best tips for working creatively? I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

Read more: http://blog.bufferapp.com/why-we-have-our-best-ideas-in-the-shower-the-science-of-creativity#ixzz2Q54RpmoM

Ease Your Stress By Using Simple Delegation Skills

Are you swamped? It’s easy these days to get overloaded since so many organizations are trimming back and focusing on doing more with less. That doesn’t mean you have to do it all. You might think you’re effective at juggling a ton of tasks, keeping your projects straight with a board full of sticky notes that cite status and completion data. But the truth is you’re probably not. And on top of that, if you’re doing it all what are your team members doing?

To be an effective team leader, it’s important you have strong delegation skills — not only to save your sanity, but to achieve the goals of the organization and help grow your team members’ skills. But you can’t jump on the delegation bandwagon without some proper planning no matter how much you have to do or you’ll end up with a disaster. Heed these guidelines for delegating properly and you’ll end up with less stress and plenty of successes under your belt.

First, let’s be clear what delegation means so we’re all on the same page. Wikipedia describes delegation as:

…the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person to carry out specific activities. However the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated work. Delegation empowers a subordinate to make decisions, i.e. it is a shift of decision-making authority from one organizational level to a lower one. Delegation, if properly done, is not abdication.

I agree with that definition except that delegation doesn’t always have to occur from a higher level employee to a lower level one. It can occur laterally or you can even delegate up a level — but those are topics for another day. Let’s get a good handle on the delegation skill before you tackle those.

There are some real advantages to delegating properly. The biggest benefit is that it frees up your time so you can spend it doing what you should be doing — leading your team. Also key is ensuring your team members are willing and able to take on tasks in your absence along with providing them with opportunities to stretch and grow.

Here’s what you need to do.

• Determine what to delegate — You can’t just grab something off your desk and give it to someone else to do. Take some time to define what you do. Start by making a list and then determine what you are willing to let go. You can delegate anything — easy tasks, tough tasks, tasks you hate to do, tasks that are better suited to other people.

• Pick the right team member for the job — Assess the skills and abilities of each team member. What are their strengths? Are they willing to grow? Do they have the time to take on a new task and be successful accomplishing it?

• Focus on outcomes, not steps – None of your team members will do a task exactly as you would. But that’s okay. What’s important is for you to define the end result in clear terms and then get out of the way.

• Delegate responsibility and authority – Clearly explain the scope and boundaries for the task. Ensure that you have identified the who, what, when and why behind the work that is to be done. Give the person the authority to make decisions and do what is necessary to be successful.

• Follow up – This is probably the most important step in successful delegation. Don’t just turn a team member loose with a new task. At the beginning set a follow up schedule so you can determine progress towards the goal and address any issues or road blocks that are getting in the way.

It may be tough at first to delegate tasks to others. You might have a tendency to want to micromanage by providing too much direction and review. It will be a delicate balancing act for you until you get used to it. But the benefits to you and your team members will be worth it.

What do you think? Have you tried making delegation an important part of your team leadership? Let’s talk about it.

Denise O'Berry

Denise O’Berry — aka the Team Doc — has been working with teams and team leadership in the public, non profit and private sectors for over twenty years.

2 Essential Rules You Should Keep In Mind When Resigning

You're preparing to leave your job, and it looks like you'll get a job offer any day now. When should you let your current employer know that you're going to leave, and how much notice should you give when you do?

You want to proceed carefully here. While it's an exciting time, there's potential for doing real harm if you misstep. There are two cardinal rules that govern when and how to tell your employer that you're resigning.

 

Cardinal Rule No. 1: Never Give Notice Until You Have Accepted a Formal Job Offer

Too many people give notice when they're "pretty sure" that an offer is coming their way, or when they've only received an informal offer. This can be a huge mistake, because offers fall through all the time. No matter how promising things look with a prospective employer, things can and do change. The company might have a hiring freeze, or a new manager might come in and cancel the position, or the company might hire an internal candidate at the last minute. And if that happens and you've already told your current boss that you're leaving, she's under no obligation to let you rescind that notice. Your current company may have already started moving forward with plans for filling your position, and you won't necessarily get it back.

 

What's more, not only should you never, ever count on an job offer until you actually have it, preferably in writing, but you shouldn't count on it until you've accepted it too. That's because it's possible that you won't be able to come to terms with the company on pay or benefits or start date, and your negotiations could fall apart. So you want to make sure not just that you have an offer, but that you've formally accepted that offer. Only then should you give notice at your current employer.

(The exception to this is if you have an excellent relationship with a boss who you know will take the news well and not push you out earlier than you're ready to leave. If you're lucky enough to be in that situation, you can feel safer giving your boss a heads up that you're thinking about leaving.)

 

Cardinal Rule No. 2: The Amount of Notice You Give

Most people know that professional convention requires them to give at least two weeks notice, but many people wonder about giving more. If circumstances allow you to give your company a more generous notice period, should you?

 

The answer depends 100 percent on how your manager and your company operate. How have they handled other employees who resign? Are people shown the door immediately? Pushed out earlier than they would have otherwise planned to leave? If so, it's safest to assume that the same may happen to you and give two weeks and nothing more. But if your employer has a track record of accommodating long notice periods, has been grateful to employees who provide long notice, and has generally shown that employees can feel safe being candid about their plans to leave, take your cues from that.

 

Of course, both of these rules would be unnecessary if employers handled departing employees differently. It's actually in employers' best interest to make it safe for employees to give longer notice periods, but too few of them do. As a result, employees need to make sure they protect themselves.

Read more: http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2013/04/01/how-much-notice-should-you-give-when-you-resign#ixzz2PEJSwzDV

The Debate About 'Feminine Traits' At The Office Is Getting Absurd

It seems like everyone is arguing about whether feminine traits are a strength or weakness for executives.

Sheryl Sandberg says in her controversial book that women should embrace their "feminine emotions" even if this means crying at work. She says women need to stop pretending that they're not human at the office.

Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, an associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, writes in The New York Times that the skills women naturally posses, such as "demonstrating respect and sensitivity" and "taking an interest in employees" elicit trust from employees, creating a more productive work environment.

But Alan Goldman, a professor of management at Arizona State University West disagrees in another Times articles called "Tough Guys Win For A Reason." Goldman, who consults Fortune 500 companies, says that "[d]espite current attempts at demonizing old-school male behavior, it continues to rule" and that the "veneer of male dominance" is what's going to earn you respect in the end. In short, women need to be more assertive and self-promoting because "distasteful male leadership works."

Shutterstock

So what's the answer? Should women at the office behave like men or like women?

We think this obsession with characterizing traits as "male" or "female" is getting absurd.

 

First of all, anyone who has taken a gender studies course in college will tell you that these terms are problematic. Calling assertiveness a male trait, for instance, references thousands of years of human history when women were not granted equal rights and were discouraged from asserting themselves. Thinking in these terms is not only meaningless, but it also reinforces sexist assumptions.

Second, it's ridiculous to think that anyone should choose between two positive traits. You don't have to decide whether to be a compassionate person or an aggressive person. A good executive, or person, exhibits a wide range of positive traits.

 

While the rise of women to the board room is a major opportunity to shake up old ways of doing things, it helps no one to cling to unenlightened gender norms.

 

Speaking of which, Google's Sergey Brin needs to stop calling smartphones emasculating. That's just stupid.

 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-women-too-feminine-to-be-ceos-2013-3#ixzz2OZbFBXZR

People Are Getting Married Later, And That's Great For Women

Men and women are getting married later than ever before, pushing 30 by the time they walk down the aisle. The Brookings Institution put together a report on the current state of marriage in the U.S., Knot Yet, about this fascinating shift, which transcends socioeconomic status.

 

"Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a 'capstone' rather than a 'cornerstone,'" say the researchers. "That is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood."

 

They found that women are now getting married at 27, and men at 29, on average.

 

This trend is good for women. College-educated women who marry after 30 make $18,152 more annually than college-educated women who marry before age 20. With men, it's a different story: they make more money if they get married early.

 

"Men who had never married had some of the lowest levels of personal income—lower even than those who married before age twenty," the researchers report. "Marriage makes men, including twentysomething men, harder, smarter, and better-paid workers."

 

However, they also found that people who marry later aren't necessarily happier, and married couples report being more satisfied with their lives:

Thirty-five percent of single men and cohabiting men report they are “highly satisfied” with their life, compared to 52 percent of married men. Likewise, 33 percent of single women and 29 percent of cohabiting women are “highly satisfied,” compared to 47 percent of married women.

 

Here are some interesting charts from the report:

Brookings Institution

Men still get married later than women:

Brookings Institution

Women of all education levels earn more the later they marry:

Brookings Institution

Postponing marriage primarily helps women economically:

Brookings Institution

For men, it's not the case:

Brookings Institution

And across the board, most men and women want to marry:

Brookings Institution

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/brookings-marriage-report-2013-3#ixzz2OL8n2TIL

This Stay-At-Home Feminist Has No Interest In 'Having It All'

New York Magazine's new cover story inflames the debate over women "having it all." Reporter Lisa Miller talked to a few women who consider themselves feminist housewives, including Kelly Makino:  

 Kelly calls herself “a flaming liberal” and a feminist, too. “I want my daughter to be able to do anything she wants,” she says. “But I also want to say, ‘Have a career that you can walk away from at the drop of a hat.’” And she is not alone. Far from the Bible Belt’s conservative territories, in blue-state cities and suburbs, young, educated, married mothers find themselves not uninterested in the metaconversation about “having it all” but untouched by it.

 

Makino, 33, originally wanted to be a "power couple" with her husband, but has since changed her mind:

 

[She] believes that every household needs one primary caretaker, that women are, broadly speaking, better at that job than men, and that no amount of professional success could possibly console her if she felt her two young children—­Connor, 5, and Lillie, 4—were not being looked after the right way. The maternal instinct is a real thing, Kelly argues: Girls play with dolls from childhood, so “women are raised from the get-go to raise children successfully. When we are moms, we have a better toolbox.” Women, she believes, are conditioned to be more patient with children, to be better multitaskers, to be more tolerant of the quotidian grind of playdates and temper tantrums; “women,” she says, “keep it together better than guys do.”

 

Ultimately, Makino made the choice because she says it was too stressful and unhappy a life when she and her husband were both working and caring for kids.

 

Anne-Marie Slaughter makes this point in her popular article, "Why Women Can't Have It All," and ultimately blames the system.

 

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg takes a different approach. She argues that we're in a "stalled revolution" and that women need to take more responsibility for their own success.

This debate is far from over, and probably never will be, until, in Sandberg's terms, we're in a 50/50 world.

 

Read the full New York Magazine article here.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-mag-feminist-housewife-story-2013-3#ixzz2NxYUIRhD

Take Your 'Emotional Temperature' Before Making Decisions

Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School and has done a number of fascinating studies in social psychology exploring the sometimes crazy things that influence your behavior and the biases the human mind seems inherently prone to.

 

In her book "Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan" she compiles many of her findings and lays out a strategy for overcoming your brain’s common errors so you can make better decisions.

What are her recommendations?

 

Via "Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan":

• Raise your awareness. Because our views of how capable and competent we are as individuals are often overly positive, we rely too much on our own information and ignore the valuable opinions that others have to offer. By raising your awareness, you can keep your self-views in check and recognize when they may be taking you off track.

• Take your emotional temperature. Even when triggered by situations or events unrelated to the decision at hand, emotions can derail us. They can lead to inaccurate analyses of the information at hand, thus moving us away from our plan of producing correct analyses. By taking your emotional temperature, you can examine what your emotions are telling you and whether they are clouding your decisions.

• Zoom out. We often focus too narrowly on the decision at hand and our own views about it. As a result, we fail to see the bigger picture, including other people’s roles. By zooming out, you can include more relevant information in your decision-making process so that you can avoid derailment.

• Take the other party’s point of view. There is always another side to a story: the other person’s viewpoint. Failing to recognize the potential for a different perspective can prevent us from sticking to the plan. By taking the other side’s point of view, you can analyze the decision you face from another person’s perspective.

• Question your bonds. As social beings, we easily form connections with others based on subtle factors, such as sharing the same birthday. These connections may expand our networks, but they can also derail our decisions. By questioning your bonds, you can carefully reflect on your ties and similarities to those around you and consider whether these bonds are affecting your choices for the worse.

• Check your reference points. The people around us provide natural reference points to help us understand where we stand across a variety of dimensions, from attractiveness to performance. How we measure up in these comparisons matters and can easily result in derailment. By checking your reference points, you can uncover the real motives behind your decisions and re-adjust accordingly.

• Consider the source. We look at the effort others put into their decisions to evaluate the quality of those decisions. When evaluating the quality of decisions, we examine their outcomes. Finally, we also discount how situational factors led to a given outcome. These biases lead us to judge others inaccurately. By questioning your sources, you can carefully examine the information surrounding your decisions.

• Investigate and question the frame. We can view the same glass as half empty or half full. Similarly, we can frame our offers and messages to others in different ways. Simple changes in framing can have significant effects on our motivation to act. By investigating the frame, you can ask questions about the way tasks, rewards, and choices are structured and learn how to avoid decisions being derailed.

• Make your standards shine. Our plans commonly reflect our desire to be moral individuals and to listen to our moral compass. Yet, from the amount of lighting in a room to the amount of resources at our disposal, subtle forces can send us off course. By making your standards shine, you can remind yourself of the importance of keeping your standards salient and become more likely to stick with them.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bakadesuyo/~3/iAkS4ExoIwA/#ixzz2NrizXVaI