Crush stress with this technique

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• Growth mindset beats fixed mindset

• Embrace negative feedback like a boss

• Change your scenery to unleash productivity

• This technique crushes stress in work and life

• Tolstoy explaining to the slow-witted

ON YOUR CAREER

Growth mindset v fixed mindset

There are few more important decisions in life than to decide whether you are going to defend a fixed mindset or cultivate a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is limiting for you and others. It contains beliefs that a person’s capabilities are largely fixed. Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychology professor, coined the term growth mindset. A growth mindset is characterised by:

• Regarding challenges as opportunities

• Welcoming smart failures

• Seeing collaboration as 1 + 1 = 5

• Having a commitment to lifelong learning

• And embracing negative feedback

Maintaining a growth mindset helps you succeed in your career. It’s also a more enjoyable way to work.

COMMUNICATION

Embrace negative feedback like a boss

Our brains have approximately five times the resources dedicated to threat perception than to reward perception. In the workplace, negative feedback can trigger a fight or flight response. Negative feedback, however, that is considered and well-intentioned, is a gift to receive. This feedback helps us grow.

High performing leaders welcome positive and negative feedback from colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders. A useful approach to receiving negative feedback includes:

• Presume good intention by the feedback giver

• Listen without interruption and as if you could be wrong

• Maintain open body language

• Focus on their message, not their style - cut them some slack

• Don’t rush to respond - give time for the speaker to contribute additional feedback

• Seek potential solutions from them

• Seek right outcome, not being right

• Agree what actions you will take (could be to think about their feedback and revert)

• Thank the feedback giver for caring

PRODUCTIVITY

Change your scenery

Changing the location where we work can give us a burst of energy, creativity, and productivity. Novelty provides a reboot. It taps into our dopamine system which is a motivator. The location change could be minor: leaving your desk to work in a meeting room. Or major: travelling to a different country. Motion can also free our brains. Working on a train or plane can also move a project forward. Change your scenery to accelerate your work.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Don’t elevate your sensible preferences to absolutist demands

The psychologist, Albert Ellis, studied irrational thinking. He attributed much human stress and suffering to when we elevate sensible preferences to absolutist demands. This is often expressed in language like ‘he should’ and ‘she must’ and be accompanied by catastrophizing thoughts. We have better relationships at work, and in our private lives, when we maintain perspective. We also have agency to make things better. Examples:

If you feel frustrated, disappointed, or even angry, it’s worth asking yourself if you’re elevating a sensible preference to an absolutist demand. If so, de-escalation is the mental technique to crush stress in work and life.

GET SMARTER

Tolstoy explaining to the slow-witted

Tolstoy is correct. Learning new things and understanding different perspectives require an open-mind. We want to be experts. But arrogance and hubris wreck businesses and careers. Maintaining a growth mindset protects us from being over-confident.

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