3 ways to be effective and happy and healthy....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 6-19-2012

This post will be a bit brief but it may be the most important one I’ve ever done.

All the things that I post about to keep you healthy and long lived work.

But if you are happy and work well with people and are effective, those things are far easier to do and the extra life you gain is much more worth living.

What are these 3 magic things?

Kindness, gratitude, and moderate challenge.

1.  Kindness. 

Make a strong special effort to be good to the people around you, find reasons to care about them, and avoid harming them when it can be avoided.

A man in old China had a very large family that was so uniformly happy that he and his family became famous throughout China.  Their story is apparently based on a real family.  They had one simple family rule:  “Always be kind.” 

This goes well with optimism. 

If you realize that most of the time when people are in a bad mood or do things you dislike, this is because of specific causes that may not repeat or can be fixed or that would affect you the same way if you were subjected to them, it’s far easier to be kind to them.  People get in bad moods or have or are in challenging circumstances or are sick or low in energy.  It happens.

Only people with brain damage or who had grave and harmful early life circumstances are horrible people all the time.  For everyone else, it’s temporary.

Since there are such people and sometimes even temporary issues can cause people to harm you or try to, you do have to protect yourself at times.  If that happens, to protect yourself you do need to act to escape or stop them.  But with that one exception, always be kind.

When you treat people with kindness usually they respond well. But even if they don’t for whatever reason, YOU will feel better and your stress level will be less and your neurotransmitters will make you think better.  And, by being kind even when the response is poor, you stay in the habit and will then be kind later when the response is very good.

So always do it.

2.  Gratitude.

Your life is as good as your experience in it.  But for virtually everyone there are good things and bad things and good events and bad ones.  There are efforts that succeed or that help you learn something that will keep you out of trouble or help you succeed later.  And there are efforts that simply don’t work at all.

But your mind is in many ways a focus machine.  If you make a habit of noticing when things go well or you enjoy something or you did something that worked or you learned something and then you focus on it when you remember it later, your life experience will be good.

Some things are good enough that if you listed things you are thankful for, you’d include them.

Take time to do notice these things when they happen and list things you are grateful for occasionally. 

New studies have found that people who do this often or learn to do it regularly are far happier and their quality of life is better than people who don’t.

What has gone well in your life recently?  What are a few things you are grateful for?

One Thanksgiving I was reminded to do this.  I listed a few things.  Then a day later, I realized I’d forgotten a few things as I did the day after that.  I wound up with something like 50 things many of which I was and am very happy about and grateful for.  But I’d not focused on them much lately at the time when I did that.

I was far happier afterwards!

Similarly, combine the two, kindness & gratitude, and take time to thank people when they do something to benefit you or they please you.

Just like the other ways to be kind to people it may or may not seem to do much for the person you thank or let know they pleased you.  But it virtually always will make YOU feel better.  And the more you do it the more people will react well.  Any one time, it may or may not do much for them.  But if you do it a 100 times, the positive effect you create will be huge.

3.  Moderate challenge.

I’ve seen 4 sources for different versions of this idea.

a) A psychologist at Harvard, David McClelland studied the habit of mind that produced significant achievement and progress.  He found that in societies with little kid’s books and children’s stories modeled these habits, they had much more robust economic growth when those children grew up than in societies that did not.  He called one of the 3 factors he found “Need for Achievement” which consisted of having goals and focusing on effective ways to achieve them.  He found that people high in this consistently worked at a level of moderate challenge.  They set goals that were worthwhile and easy enough success was possible but hard enough they had to make a moderate effort to achieve them.  People high in this did NOT set goals they could do with no effort nor did they set goals they had no chance of achieving.

(The other two factors he found were:

Working by persuasion, negotiation, and agreement instead of force or coercion.

& Making a very strong and focused effort when it counts most.  He called that one hard work but what he found was a bit more working hard when it would make the most difference to the result.)

b) Unfortunately I don’t remember the title or the name of the authors.  But a psychologist couple who worked with high level executives wrote a whole book on moderate challenge.

Their key point was that by keeping the challenge level moderate most of the time it IS possible to do quite hard work and achieve a lot but do so without burnout.

c) Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the related concept that if you have a low level of anxiety or worry about something, you often will be complacent and miss things that will cause you to do badly.  Or if your anxiety and worry level is too high for more challenging things it will distract you enough to cause poor performance while for routine things, you can still do them but it will wear you out from the extra effort needed.

The ideal is a moderate level.  You worry enough you find and indentify potential problems which you then work ahead of time to prevent or get ready for.  Then you usually perform well.

d)  But the most detailed and helpful description of high preparation and moderate challenge in acting to achieve is in Jim Collin’s new book, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.

His description of what he calls the “twenty mile march” concept is very detailed on how on preparation and taking worthwhile actions known to work and consistently doing a moderate amount of those actions every day creates great success.  He highlights why doing too much more on easy days creates LESS success than “stopping at 20 miles.” (It creates burnout or complacency.)

He found that even in companies with less good luck or more bad luck, the ones that did this were unusually successful while those that didn’t were not -- thus the title:  “Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All.”