Happiness is a work ethic. A habit that we need to cultivate in our daily lives.
Here are two tactics that you can use to increase the opportunities and contain the threats, thus increasing the odds of increasing your happiness and upgrading your performance.
1. Use a circle as a guide, isolate and focus on 1 challenge at a time.
2. Surround yourself with stories of perseverance and success. Each moment, we have the opportunity to condition ourselves with positive resources that increase our ability to naturally see more opportunities.
This gives us a much better chance to increase our positive experience number to 2.901 for every negative experience that we encounter.
According to Shawn Anchor ” Waiting to be happy limits our brains potential for success.”
Research shows that optimistic sales people outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56%. That doctors who are put in a positive state, make an accurate diagnosis 19% faster. Students primed to feel happy before a math achievement test, far outperform their peers.
According to a study out of the University of Toronto, when we are happy, we are able to process more information through our visual cortex. The region of the brain responsible for sight. They showed that when people are primed with negative emotions, they don’t notice images in the background of a photo they are looking at. However, when people are primed with positive emotions. and experience what they call happiness, they notice everything in the picture.
What are the reasons this matters to you?
In your work, would you say it is important that you have the ability to see everything that is going on around you? Would it make you a better contributor if you were more aware of the people. environment, emotions of others? Opening up more possibilities in your thinking opens more doors for you and helps you to come up with solutions to complex problems more readily when your positive emotions are increased. Making you more resourceful and effective. Would you like to maximize your personal or business performance?
So what exactly is happiness?
We all know when we feel it, but how do we explain it to our boss, spouse or children?
Happiness is a number, 2.901.
A decade of research by psychologist Marcinelle Lucada has found that 2.901 is the number of positive experiences that you need to have for every negative one, if we want to unlock the feelings of happiness and reap the benefits it provides.
This means that you need to see 3 opportunities to every 1 perceived threat. 3 positive experiences for every negative experience and 3 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction. Dipping below this ratio and according to the research, performance starts to suffer. However, going anything higher than 6:1, and you might be escaping reality. There are real threats out there and we cannot avoid them all. We only need to be aware of them, we cannot have irrational optimism and simply ignore threats and hope to artificially get our ratio to 3:1.
If you need to work on upping the positive experiences, then reach out and see how we can partner in possibility.
Happiness fuels performance by making you more resourceful and increasing your problem solving ability. Happiness, can give you a significant advantage over your pessimistic counterparts.
Jennifer Jimbere is President of Jimbere Coaching and Consulting, Co-Founder and Resident Expert at Radical Joy Seeking Women’s Club and would like to explore synergies to work with you. Reach out to partner in possibility and learn how to up your positive experiences.
Maintain momentum and make it a great day!
Image credit and artist: LA artist and old friend Jennifer Verge
Inspired by: My email sign off:)
