Sending somebody a thank you e-mail, can improve your productivity by 31%!!

Last week's blog focused on the "what" of "positive psychology", which is revolutionising the way that scientists look at the human brain. The scientific data that the researchers in this field have come up with proves conclusively that your brain performs significantly better when it is in a positive state, rather than in a negative neutral or stressed state. This week I want to take a look at the "how".

I think most of us have probably been brought up believing that life requires of us that we work hard, initially to attain some form of education, we then apply the knowledge that we have gained through that education to some form of commercial venture, and if we work long and hard enough, we will then achieve success. Achieving the success then makes us happy.  The field of positive psychology is now saying that this theory is actually fack to bront (back to front), and from a scientific perspective it is therefore not only backwards, but also broken. What happens in reality is that every time your brain has a success, you change the goalpost of what success looks like. If you achieved good grades, you must now get better grades; if you have a good job, you must now get a better job; if you achieve your sales target, you must now achieve a higher sales target, and so on and so on. As a society, we have pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, and by doing so ended up in a situation that if happiness is on the other side of success, your brain will never get there!

Most of us have had the unpleasant experience of working really hard to attain a particular goal, believing all the time that this particular goal will make us happy and "fulfilled", only to find that once we have achieved the goal, the deliverable in no way meets up to the expectation. It is almost the reality of a dog chasing a car, and actually catching it! Now that he's got it, what is he supposed to do with it? And it all stems from the belief that if we are successful, then we will be happy.

The science is now proving that our brains actually work in the opposite direction. If we can raise our level of positivity in the present situation, our brain will experience what is now being called a "happiness advantage". What this means is that your brain in a positive frame performs significantly better than when it is negative, neutral or stressed. So if we can find a way of becoming positive in the present situation, our brains will work even more successfully and we will be able to work harder, faster, and more intelligently! How we can do this is actually simpler than you would think.

You can train your brain to become more positive in an average of 2 minutes per day, and if you do that consecutively for at least 21 days in a row, you can effectively "rewire" your brain. This will allow your brain to work more optimistically and thereby, more successfully. So here are a couple of things that take less than 2 minutes a day that have been proven to work: –

1. Be grateful – write down 3 new things that you are grateful for every day for 21 days in a row. At the end of the 21-day period your brain retains a pattern of scanning the world for positive things first, rather than the negatives
2. Journal – journaling about at the least one positive experience that you've had in the last 24 hours allows your brain to relive that experience. Reliving the experience puts your brain into a positive frame of mind
3. Exercise – exercising helps to teach your brain that your behavior matters! Positive behavior results in a positive frame of mind.
4. Practice a spiritual discipline – prayer, or meditation, focuses the brain on the task at hand, which allows it to reverse the attention deficit that we create by fooling ourselves that multitasking is a good thing.
5. Be kind – random, or intentional acts of kindness will also create a positive frame of mind. Make a daily habit of sending a positive email, praising or thanking somebody in your support network, before you attend to any other email.

All of these activities work to train your brain, in exactly the same way as you would train your body. Doing them for 21 days in a row allows you to reverse the formula for happiness and success, and once you get them in the right order, you will reap the benefits of the happiness advantage.

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