In her book  “The Happiness Track” Emma Seppala reminds us of a saying attributed to Confucius: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Now, she says, “The problem is that we can’t always choose to do what we love. However, we can choose how we approach our work so we can enjoy it more”. Rather than thinking of work as work, we can reframe it by thinking of what we love about it. Here are a few research-backed suggestions reported by Dr. Seppala.

Remember the Big Picture

Focus on the why, rather than the how, of a task or job. Understanding how your work connects to what you care about and to your values will restore your energy. You can think about how the device or product your company sells is helps people to fulfil their needs.

Adam Grant, Professor of Management at the Wharton School of Business studied a call centre in which employees made calls to raise money for financial aid. After Grant brought in one of the student recipients to explain what a big difference the aid had made in his life, there was a steep increase in productivity at the centre. Why? Because the centre workers were personally moved when they saw the impact their work was having.

Turn what you’re doing into something you want to be doing

What happens if you have a job that you don’t particularly like and that is not related to your happiness? In that case, think about how it is indirectly related to your passions. Remembering how your job allows you to indulge your passions will help you to appreciate the job rather than experience it as a burden.

Remember why you care about the work you’re doing. As a consequence, you’ll start to want to do what you are doing, rather than thinking you have to do it. 

Practice Gratitude

Research has shown that feeling grateful helps you replenish your energy in the face of fatiguing tasks. Maybe you don’t feel motivated. However, there are always things that warrant being grateful: You have a job when many others don’t. You enjoy the company of some of your colleagues. You experience positive emotions when you accomplish a goal.

Feeling grateful both increases positive emotion and helps you see the big picture.

Detach from Work When You’re Not Working

Psychological detachment from work is particularly difficult when the job’s your workload and time pressure are high, so many people take work home with them at night or do it during their time off.

Sabine Sonnentag, Professor at the University of Mannheim, has found that people who do not know how to detach from work during their off time experience increased exhaustion over the course of one year and are less resilient in the face of stressful work conditions.

Sonnentag has found that psychological distance from work is the fastest path to recovery (total absorption in a non-work-related activity) and leads, surprisingly perhaps, to increased productivity. “From our research, one can conclude that it is good to schedule time for recovery and to use this time in an optimal way.”

“Manage energy is done by cultivating calm” says Dr. Seppala. The result? Less stress, a clearer mind, and sharper focus to get your work done. “You get the same amount of work done, but you remain balanced and enjoy the process. Because you are able to think more clearly, you do a far better job. The best part, of course, is that because you are not as tired, your energy levels remain high. As a result, you are happier and more successful.”

Adapted from Emma Seppala. “The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success”. HarperCollins

Shani Tsadik, in his book “A Quick Guide To Happiness” says that all the people in this world, including us, deal with unhelpful thoughts every day, whether they are aware or not. 

These thoughts hold us back from developing and fulfilling our full potential. Some of them can even bring down our self-esteem and affect our identity and the way we perceive ourselves.

“Every time we allow these kinds of thoughts to be our truths, we put ourselves in situations where we attract negative situations, other than the ones that life throws at us. It creates a domino effect and makes us cope through unhealthy ways”, writes Tsadik.

We definitely need to know more about our negative thoughts and how they affect us.

In this article, we will get acquainted with these thoughts that Dr. Daniel Aman, a psychiatrist and brain health expert, calls ANTS – Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTS) . Here are the nine most common ANTS and some examples of our unhelpful self-talks:

Black or White

Thinking in terms of a dichotomy: things are good or bad, right or wrong. All the thoughts that view things at the extremes and with no middle ground or nuance.

Example: “I made so many mistakes! If I can’t do it perfectly, I might as well not bother fixing it at all.”

Negative filtering

These are the thoughts that make us concentrate on the negative side while ignoring the positive events or any other information that contradicts our negative view of the situation.

Example: “My boss said most of my submissions were great, but he also said several mistakes had to be corrected. He must think I’m hopeless.”

Negative fortune teller

Anticipating an outcome and assuming that our prediction is a fact. These expectations can be self-fulfilling. Predicting our actions based on past behaviors may prevent us from seeing the opportunity to change our situation.

Examples: “I’ve always been like this. I’ll never be able to change. I know it’s not going to work out, so there’s no point in trying.”; This relationship is going to fail again, for sure.”

Magnification

A tendency to exaggerate jokes and empty words. Even though it was a joke, we accept it as if the person really meant it. We just spiral down and make a big deal out of it.”

Example: “You look so wimpy today!”

Emotional Reasoning

Feelings are mistaken for facts. It refers to every lie about ourselves that we believed to be true because they feel real.

Example: “I feel like a failure, therefore, I am a failure. I feel ugly, so I must be ugly. I feel hopeless, so does my situation.”

Blame

Blaming ourselves, knocking down the motivation, and creating false beliefs about ourselves.

Examples: “It was all my fault”; “I shouldn’t have said that”; “I always ruin the beautiful things”;. “Why do I always bring bad luck?”

Personalization

Taking offense or feeling upset with what people say or do, thinking that their remarks are directed at us.

Example: John was in a terrible mood and didn’t notice you in the hallway. You took it the wrong way and thought, “It must be something I did. It’s obvious he doesn’t like me, otherwise, he would’ve said ‘hello.’”

Mind-reading

Making assumptions about other people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without checking the evidence, i.e., “John is talking to Molly, so he must like her more than me. Maybe he thinks I was stupid.”

Labeling

Generalizations and labels we give to ourselves as if it’s an innate characteristic or a burden we carry in our pocket.

Example: “I’m the black sheep wherever I go.”

As Plutarch said, “What we change inwardly will change outer reality.” Acknowledge these negative thoughts and getting rid of them is the first step to happiness. 

Adapted from  Tsadik, Shani D. “A Quick Guide To Happiness: Life Changing Tools and Techniques to Transform Your Life Immediately”, Ses Ventures

Cal Newport in his book Deep Work suggests to inject regular and substantial freedom from professional concerns into your day providing you with the idleness paradoxically required to get (deep) work done. 

At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning—no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely. If you need more time, then extend your workday, but once you shut down, your mind must be left free.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis’s gave subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better.

Dijksterhuis proved that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over.

Reason #2: Downtime Helps Recharge the Energy Needed to Work Deeply

A paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science describes a simple experiment. Subjects were split into two groups. One group was asked to take a walk on a wooded path in a botanical garden. The other group was sent on a walk through the bustling center of the city. Both groups were then given a challenging task called backward digit-span. The nature group performed up to 20 percent better on the task. The nature advantage still held the next week when the researchers brought back the same subjects and switched the locations: It wasn’t the people who determined performance, but whether or not they got a chance to prepare by walking through the woods.

Walking through nature exposes you to what lead author Marc Berman calls “inherently fascinating stimuli. These stimuli “invoke attention modestly, allowing focused-attention mechanisms a chance to replenish.

Reason #3: The Work That Evening Downtime Replaces Is Usually Not That Important

Anders Ericsson studied the practice habits of a group of elite violin players training at Berlin’s Universität der Künste and discovered that the capacity for deep work in a given day is limited. It follows, therefore, that by evening, you’re beyond the point where you can continue to effectively work deeply. Any work you do fit into the night, therefore, won’t be the type of high-value activities that really advance your career; your efforts will instead likely be confined to low-value shallow tasks (executed at a slow, low-energy pace). “By deferring evening work”, says Newport, “you’re not missing out on much of importance”.

The three reasons just described support the general strategy of maintaining a strict endpoint to your workday. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. As Newport says, “trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”

Adapted from Deep Work – Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport, Grand Central Publishing

In her book “Daring Greatly”, Brené Brown wrote about six myths surrounding vulnerability.

Myth #1: Vulnerability is weakness.

“I’ve asked fighter pilots and software engineers, teachers and accountants, CIA agents and CEOs, clergy and professional athletes, artists and activists, and not one person has been able to give me an example of courage without vulnerability. ” Says Brown. “The weakness myth simply crumbles under the weight of the data and people’s lived experiences of courage.”

Myth #2: I don’t do vulnerability.

Our daily lives are defined by experiences of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Pretending that we don’t do vulnerability means letting fear drive our thinking and behaviour. Choosing to own our vulnerability and do it consciously means learning how to rumble with this emotion and understand how it drives our thinking and acting.

Myth #3: I can go it alone.

Or, said in another way: “I don’t need to be vulnerable because I don’t need anyone.”  Neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo dedicated his career to understanding loneliness, belonging, and connection and he makes the argument that we don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather “from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together.” Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to support interdependence over independence.

Myth #4: You can engineer the uncertainty and “discomfort out of vulnerability.

Someone suggests that we should make vulnerability easier by engineering the uncertainty and emotion right out of it, maybe through an app and/or an algorithm to predict when it’s safe to be vulnerable with someone. This is the attempt to engineer the vulnerability and uncertainty out of systems and mitigate risk. However, Brown is talking about relational vulnerability, not systemic vulnerability. “Regardless of what you do and where you work, you’re called to be brave in vulnerability even if your job is engineering the vulnerability out of systems.”

Myth #5: Trust comes before vulnerability.

Conversations about relationships always bring up the chicken-egg debate about trust and vulnerability. “We need to trust to be vulnerable, and we need to be vulnerable in order to build trust.” In a research based on forty years of studying intimate relationships John Gottman was able to predict an outcome of divorce with 90 percent accuracy based on responses to a series of questions. Gottman says that trust is built in very small moments, which he calls “sliding door” moments. “In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. Trust is the stacking and layering of small moments and reciprocal vulnerability over time. Trust and vulnerability grow together, and to betray one is to destroy both.”

Myth #6: Vulnerability is disclosure.

Brown is not a proponent of oversharing, indiscriminate disclosure as a leadership tool, or vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake. Google’s five-year study on highly productive teams, Project Aristotle, found that feeling safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other was for team members “far and away the most important of the five dynamics that set successful teams apart.” Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines this as “psychological safety.” Vulnerability is the building block.

Adapted from Brené Brown, Dare to Lead, Random House

What is planning?

• Anticipate problems, roadblocks and threats and plan accordingly
• Develop practises and procedures to get things done the most efficient way
• Spend time on what’s important directing attention to critical and putting trivial aside
• Involve the appropriate people at the right time and keep them informed about relevant issues, progress and changes
• Recognize and take corrective actions when facing undesirable outcomes

To improve your planning skills, ask yourself:

• Do I have a clear idea of the desired outcome of this project?
• When was the last time I missed a deadline due to poor planning?
• Have I created a “sabotage” list of things that could go wrong?
• Do I know what resources are available for this project/assignment?
• When was the last time I was surprised by the impact of my plan on another group?
• Am I using the available technology for planning?
• Are others surprised by how my plan is unfolding?
• How much time do I spend planning?
• Is everyone in my group working off at the same page?
• How can this problem or project be structured so multiple tasks can be done simultaneously?

Train your planning skills

• Experiment tools and techniques to organize your work and discuss the usefulness with your coworkers.
• Work closely with your manager on planning a project meeting. Get feedback on your planning and organizing skills from your manager and those people involved in the meeting. Get feedback on how you prioritize the issues.
• Identify managers who have good planning and organizational skills. Ask them about what works for them. Apply at least one of these techniques to your projects.
• Ask to be the coordinator of a special event. List all of the different parts that make up the event. Develop a plan that integrates all the pieces. Seek feedback from those involved on how well you kept people informed and coordinated the different activities.
• Once collected feedback, think about what you learned and what you would do differently in the future.
• Organize a forum during which information about your group’s mission, products, services and technology is presented to interested people from other units.
• Take a liaison role between your team and another team with whom you work, and get feedback on your effectiveness in this role.

Euny Hong in her book ‘Nunchi, the Korean secret of happiness and success’ define Nunchi as the subtle art of gauging other people’s thoughts and feelings to build harmony, trust, and connection.

Nunchi is a part of daily life in Korea, because Korean culture is what is known as high context, which is to say that a great deal of communication is based not on words, but on the understanding of multiple  factors: body language, facial expressions, tradition, who else is present, and even silence. 

A skilled nunchi practitioner understands they are seeking answers to these two questions: ‘What is the emotional energy of this room?’ and ‘What kind of emotional energy can I emit in order to flow with that?’

When you enter a room, having good nunchi means observing before you begin to speak or interact. You should think of a room as a single living, breathing organism.

Have you ever been in a room when someone important walks in? Even if your back is to the door, and you can’t see who it is, you know from the reactions of everyone around you that something has changed. That is a simple example of nunchi in action.

Having great nunchi means continuously recalibrating your assumptions based on any new word, gesture, or facial expression, so that you are always present and aware. the more important a situation is, the greater the likelihood that the most crucial information is not expressed out loud, or not expressed truthfully.

At the same time, you should you care about what vibes you are transmitting. Why? It is best expressed in the saying: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

A well-honed and quick nunchi can help you choose the right partner in life or business, it can help you shine at work, it can protect you against those who mean you harm, and it can even reduce social anxiety.

Conversely, a lack of nunchi can make people dislike you in a way that is as mysterious to them as it is to you.

An intrinsic part of nunchi is the dimension of change: understand that everything is in flux. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wisely wrote in the sixth century BC, ‘You can’t step into the same river twice.’ Adapting that principle to nunchi: the room you walked into ten minutes ago is not the same room as it is now.

You are provided of a good Nunchi if:

You feel awkward saying something without knowing the other person’s mood/mental state

Even if someone is saying something indirectly, you still comprehend the subtext.

You are good at quickly discerning the other person’s mood and inner state.

You don’t make other people uncomfortable.

At a social gathering, you are able to distinguish easily between when it’s time to leave and when it’s not time to leave.

Everyone is born with the potential for nunchi, but in order to draw it out, you have to challenge some biases of Western culture are these:

Empathy is valued over understanding. Activation is valued over stillness and quiet. Extroversion is valued over introversion. Jagged edges are valued over roundness. Individualism is valued over collectivism.

Let’s declare now the eight rules of nunchi:

1. First, empty your mind. Step back, breathe, and remember that prejudice prevents you from learning anything about other people.
2. Be aware of the Nunchi Observer Effect. When you enter a room, you change the room. Understand your influence. Your presence is already changing the environment without you saying a word. 
3. If you just arrived in the room, remember that everyone else has been there longer than you. Watch them to gain information. 
4. Never pass up a good opportunity to shut up. If you wait long enough, most of your questions will be answered without you having to say a word. 
5. Manners exist for a reason. Don’t dismiss them as superficial; they’re used to make people feel comfortable.

1. Read between the lines. People don’t always say what they are thinking and that’s their prerogative. Pay attention to context and to what they are not saying.
2. If you cause harm unintentionally, it’s sometimes as bad as if you’d caused it intentionally. Intent is not impact, as the saying goes. 
3. Be nimble, be quick. Gather data quickly, process quickly, adapt quickly. Remember: survival of the fittest doesn’t mean survival of the strongest. It means survival of the most adaptable.

Exercising nunchi can dissipate some of the anxiety you have about social interactions. If you have quick nunchi, you can create a harmonious environment, which makes people want to be around you. You can be a better parent, partner, son or daughter, colleague, boss, and friend. Nunchi, according to Euny, is the currency of life.

Adapted from Euny Hong, Nunchi, the Korean secret of happiness and success, Penguin Books, 2019