The following post is a guest post from Walter Chen, the founder of a unique new project management toolDone this. More about Walter at the bottom of the message.
So here's the thing right at the beginning: I've always been uncomfortable with the traditional ideal of the professional: cool, collected and competent, checking off tasks left and right, all the numbers and results and making it happen, please, without any form of criticism. hair out of place. An efficient employee, no fuss, no fuss, every manager's dream. You could just as well describe an ideal vacuum cleaner.
I admit that I have never been able to work that way. There is one thing that always came first for me:How do I feel today?I discovered that it's easy to see emotions as something that gets in the way of work. Growing up, I often heard that they hinder reasoning and rationality, but I believe that as humans we cannot shut off our humanity when we come to work.
Emotions provide important feedback during our working day. There is no point in pretending that it is best or even possible to keep our feelings and our work separate, and to treat our ability to feel and think as weakness. I wanted to investigate whether there was more than a gut feeling in my suspicions about keeping head and heart separate in entrepreneurship.
What do emotions have to do with our work?
It turns out to be quite a lot. Emotions play a leading role in business success because they influence how hard you try, and this is often misunderstood by managers and executives.
Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer interviewed more than 600 managers and came to a shocking result. 95 percent of managers don't understand what motivates employees. They believed that what motivates employees is earning money, receiving raises and bonuses. After analyzing more than 12,000 employee diary entries, they found that the most important work motivator was emotion, not financial incentives: It's the feeling of making progress toward a meaningful goal every day. Actually Dan Pinkfound itthat in fact the exact opposite is true:
'The greater the monetary reward, the worse the performance. Money doesn't motivate us at all, emotions do.
In the famous experiment of Dr. Edward Deci again made it clear whether emotional feedback or money would influence the work. People sat in a room and tried to solve a puzzle, while Deci measured how much time they put in before giving up. To group A, he offered a cash reward for successfully solving the puzzle, and predictably, these people spent almost twice as much time solving the puzzle as the people in group B who were not offered a prize.
The next day something surprising happened when Deci told Group A that there wasn't enough money to pay them this time: Group A lost interest in the puzzle. In contrast, Group B, who were never offered money in exchange for working on the puzzles, worked longer and longer on the puzzles in each successive session and maintained a higher level of sustained interest than Group A. So if it's not money, then what? motivates us even more?
The 3 real reasons that motivate us to work hard every day
PinkexplainsMoreover, there are really only 3 very simple things that make almost all of us work hard:
- autonomous: Our desire to live our own lives. Basically: “You probably want to do something interesting, let me get out of the way!”
- To deal with: Our urge to get better at something.
- Goal: The feeling and intention that we can make a difference in the world.
If these three things go well together, Amabile and Kramercalled thisthe somewhat obvious 'inner work-life balance' and emphasize its importance for how well we work. Inner work life is what goes on in your mind in response to everyday events that affect your performance.
The components of inner working life – motivation, emotions and perceptions of how the above three things work together – feed off each other. So ultimately our emotional processes, ultimately our motivation to work.Ultimately, they are the most important influencer of our performance.
Deci's experiment found that payment actually undermined intrinsic motivation because such extrinsic rewards thwart our "three psychological needs: to feel autonomous, to feel competent, and to feel connected to others." As he saidBBC.com, “You need thinkers, problem solvers, people who can be creative and use money to motivate them, you don't get that.”
What happens in our brains that connects our emotions to motivate you as a thinker and problem solver?
Amabile and Kramer tell us this:
“Depending on what happens with our emotions, motivation for work can rise or fall (or barely change).”
So how do our brains deal with emotions and connect them to practical outcomes like motivation and productivity? The ironic thing is that tthe parts of the brain that deal with emotions are actually connected to the parts that deal with cognition. Richard J. Davidson explains how emotional and cognitive functions are linked. To get "smart" about this:
The brain connection between cognition and emotion is not separate. The idea is that your 'limbic system' is the seat of emotions [...] and crucial for your cognitive processes (e.g. the hippocampus for memory).
Emotions are directly linked to our thinking and cognitive functions such as memory, attention and reasoning.
Let's change this. We know what happens when we positively influence our emotions. But what about the other way around? Famous psychologistAlice Isenfound that positive moods facilitate creative problem solving.Negative emotions, on the other hand, cause us to think more narrowly:
"Negative emotions such as fear and sadness can lead to brain activity and thinking patterns that are detrimental to creative, productive work: (a) risk avoidance; (b) problems with remembering and planning; and (c) rational decision-making."
Personally, I found this particularly interesting. I have always had a good feeling that positive thinking will improve my daily performance. The impact of negative emotions has never been more apparent and gives me a lot to think about working hard to limit these emotions.
The 3 most important things to improve your inner work life and control your motivation:
Yes, it's done! Knowing the impact of a positive inner work life and the connection between our emotions and good performance, I believe we are winning the battle against the reserved, rational robot.
The most important thing for me is that we are more aware of our feelings and thoughts. It's simple: we use them to be even better at what we do. Following on from the above studies, the following three main actions have been shown to yield the best results in keeping our emotions and positive thinking high:
- Exercise - How to start and why: We've discussed it in detail beforehow exercise makes us happier. Every exercise automatically releases mood-enhancing chemicals and endorphins into your blood. This can immediately improve your mood and reduce stress. Exercising and maintaining our physical health increases our emotional health. Of course, the hardest part here is how to start an exercise habit. Whatever you want to go into, the key is to start with an easier task than you could actually do. Yes it's true. If you feel comfortable lifting 20 lbs, make it 5.The art is in the beginninglike this post found.
- Set yourself up for success: here's how: Amabile and Kramer's key finding is that progress at work is the most important way to foster a positive inner work life. Making progress is easier said than done, but it can be helpful to break it down and ask what will make progress easier. Identify and remove barriers, whether it's too many meetings or micromanagement. Identify enablers and implement or improve them, such as better communication or greater autonomy. The feeling of progress triggers the emotions and brain activity that result in creativity and your best work.
- Reflect and review through work diaries: Pay attention to your inner work life by writing down thoughts and feelings about your work day all at oncework diaryalone or with your team using a tool such asDone this. Regular reflection can help you recognize patterns, gain insight into your work and working relationships, celebrate and appreciate achievements and gestures, and unravel what helps and hinders progress. Journaling in itself will improve your inner work life, uplift your emotions and...staffcognitive processing and adaptation. Take ten minutes out of your day to reflect, vent, and celebrate.
Quick final fact: emotions are key to making your daily decisions
Here's one last interesting fact for you.To take decisionsIt's all about our intellectual ability, isn't it? That's what I thought too, turns out to be completely wrong. In an experiment by Antonio Damasio, calledDescartes' f*ckshe discovered that the most important element in making daily decisions is having strong emotional feelings:
“One of Damasio's patients, Elliot, suffered damage to the ventromedial frontal lobe, and although he retained his intelligence, he lost the ability to feel emotions. As a result, he lost his ability to make decisions and plan for the future, and he could no longer do so. persevere in a job.”
The way our brains are built necessitates that emotions “overshadow” our judgments. Without all those vague feelings, we wouldn't be able to reason, have motivation, or make decisions.
Of course, I'm sure you have a lot more insight into how to manage your own work-life balance and what things help you stay motivated every day. What do you think is your main motivation for coming to work every day? Do you think some of the new habits mentioned above could be helpful? I'd love your opinion in the comments.
Photo credit:open source way
Over by author:Walter Chen is the co-founder of iDoneThis, an easy way tosustain and celebrate progress at work, every day that great companies like Zappos, Shopify, and Reddit use. He'd love to hear from you on Twitter at@fewer.
