Many of you probably already know I’m a big advocate of personal development in the work place. The more we can reflect on our lives and do more of what we know makes us happy, the easier it is to create the habits that support our goals.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how hard people are on themselves. It’s this inner bully that can wreck much of our happiness if we don’t learn to tame the beast. This article will give insight into loving your inner bully.

You expect to make more money, be a better parent or get better grades. Very few of us can actually exceed our own expectations because as soon as we meet them we want a little more. This is common, but can be very detrimental to our growth.

I understand that you have high expectations of yourself, but you can’t be good at everything. It’s best to pick a couple of skills, master them, then move on to improving new talents. This advice is easy for me to say, but actually hard for me to live.

My Inner Bully Can Be A Tyrant

I’ve put in many 8 hour days on a Saturday and Sunday to improve Work Happy Now, and at times I still feel disappointed in my accomplishments. I still get angry at myself, although not as often, because of my lack of productivity. I’m tough on myself because I expect great things.

A few months ago, I realized that my inner bully was too harsh. I had put in another 16 hour weekend of work and I couldn’t fall asleep because I was thinking about what I didn’t get accomplished.

I tried to just ignore him, but that didn’t work. It only made him angrier. I tried reasoning with him, nope, didn’t work. I tried many methods that all failed. The technique I should have tried which (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and every other major religion encourages) is compassion.

I needed to give my inner bully a big ol’ hug and thank him for all his caring, but also let him know that he needed to tone down his harsh ways. I wasn’t sure how to actually do this. I’m a progressive guy, but I feel weird about wrapping my arms around myself and giving a big hug while saying, “I understand your pain and I know why you push me so hard, but you need to take it easy. I can’t conquer the online world in a few months. These things take time.”

I decided to create a little visualization that has helped me bring more compassion and happiness to my life. I call it the “Bullies Need Hugs Too.”

Before you try this visualization, you must find a comfortable chair, sit in it and close your eyes.

Bullies Need Hugs Too – Visualization

Now imagine that you are sitting in a tranquil room all by yourself. You are feeling relaxed…Now in comes your inner bully. That mean bloke who is never satisfied. The only difference between the two of you is s/he has on a red shirt that says, “I’m sorry” in bright white letters with a sad face underneath. How can you stay mad?

First, you must thank him/her for all their hard work. You’ve cultivated this inner bully to get stuff done. Believe me, if you didn’t have this inner bully you probably wouldn’t have kept going into work. S/he does good work, but sometimes s/he gets out of control.

Second, admit that you are at fault. You allowed this inner bully to get more and more power because you thought it was helping you.

Third, explain that you are trying to cultivate a more encouraging attitude. You understand that s/he meant well, but you are able to do good work without your inner bully being a big tyrant. Let him/her know that you don’t want him/her to disappear.

When you’ve only been able to sleep 4 hours and you have an important meeting, you want your inner bully to kick his/her big bulliness into high gear. In cases such as when you work your butt off and things don’t all go according to plan - you need the inner bully to sit in the corner and cheer you on. Try to imagine your inner bully just smiling and giving you amazing compliments that make you smile too.

Fourth, Stand up (in your imagination) and give your inner bully a hug. Tell him/her that you both have a lot of work to do to realize your dreams, so s/he better be ready for even more encouragement and tough love, depending on the situation.

When we meet our inner bully half way, we can create a relationship that won’t wreck our confidence or our love of productive work. If your inner bully is strong, I would suggest using your break at work (10 minutes) sitting by yourself and practicing this visualization for 7 days in a row. After 7 days you’ll see a big improvement in your attitude. You’ll enjoy taking on new challenges and you’ll find it easier to appreciate your accomplishments.

I’ve been able to enjoy my hard work without worrying about what didn’t go quite right. It has taken many years, but I’ve finally formed a friendship with my inner bully. We are now partners in blogging crime. :)

Do you have a technique to calm your inner bully that you would like to share with us in the comments? I’ll see you there.

Karl Staib writes about unlocking and kicking open the door to working happy at his own blog: Work Happy Now! If you enjoyed this article, you may like to subscribe to his feed, follow him on Twitter or read one of his most popular articles, Your Company Should Do Annual Career Counseling.

Image courtesy of Eddie~S

Knowledge workers are architects, designers, writers, programmers, etc… People whose input and output of work is immaterial, rather than physical. In recent years, these people have turned out to be very prone to stress and the mini-conference examined this phenomenon.

Christine Ipsen presented the results of her phd study, which examines the source of this stress. Two friends of mine, Lene Thomsen and Nina Tange spoke about meaning at work and how this can reduce stress.

The main point of my presentation was of course that we can’t be focusing on fighting stress. That only makes people more stressed. We need to focus on promoting happiness at work – when people are happy at work, they’re not stressed. I also talked about some myths about stress.

I’ve previously blogged about the fact that happiness at work is important to all kinds of employees. It’s not limited to people in creative, high-paying or high-status jobs. But that being said, I think happiness at work is even more important for knowledge workers.

Here’s why:
Happy knowledge workers are more motivated
If you’re a welder, you can probably weld even if you’re not very motivated that day. If you’re a trash man, you can still take out the trash. But what if you’re an architect trying to come up with a new design, a programmer trying to solve a tricky problem or a journalist writing a tricky article?

When most of the work you do goes on inside your head, motivation is critical! And of course happy people are waaay more motivated.

Happy knowledge workers learn better
For all knowledge workers, the knowledge you have is almost never enough. That stuff tends to go obsolete real fast. You need to constantly learn new things. And all studies show, that people learn much better when they’re happy.

Happy knowledge workers form better relations at work
Relationships and teamwork are crucial to most knowledge workers. And you form much better relationships at work and participate much more efficiently in teams when you’re happy.

Happy knowledge workers share knowledge
Most companies that deal in knowledge also want employees to share that knowledge. As I wrote about previously, people only share knowledge, when they’re passionate about what they work with. People who don’t care, don’t share. Which is why so many corporate knowledge management systems fail miserably. The systems are fine – they’re simply asking people to share information they couldn’t care less about.

As you probably know from reading this blog, I believe that everyone should be happy at work. It’s just that happiness has an even bigger impact on the productivity of knowledge workers than it does on others.

So if you work mainly with knowledge, increase your happiness at work. If you lead knowledge workers, do everything you can to make them love their jobs.

So how do you make knowledge workers happy? Same way as everybody else. Read all about it.

Here’s some typical thinking on workplace stress:

• Mike is getting stressed at work, but that’s just natural these days.
• In fact, if Mike isn’t stressed, it probably means that he’s not really crucial to the organization.
• The solution is to let Mike work less and with fewer responsibilities for a while until he recovers.
• Or to let Mike work more for a while until he’s no longer falling behind and getting stressed over that.
• And of course to send him on a stress management course to teach him all about stress.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yes, workplace stress is a serious problem. Yes, the cost to people, businesses and society is enormous. Yes we must do something about it.

But some myths exist around stress that mean, that most of what we do about it isn’t working. Often, it even makes things worse.

Here are the top 5 myths about workplace stress.

Myth #1: Stress is normal, it means you’re important and it’s even good because it pushes you to perform

Some people seem to think that if you’re not too busy, you’re not really crucial to the organization. These people revel in having full schedules, long working hours and too much work.

But stress does not mean you matter. It either means that somethings wrong at work or that you’re not doing a good enough job of matching your tasks to your time. Worse, it also means that you get less work done, because stressed people are less efficient, worse communicators and worse at making good decisions.

To accept stress as a normal condition of work is bad for people and bad for business!

Myth #2: Stress is caused by working too much

But then why do some people work 80 hours a week and feel great, while some people work 30 and get serious stress?

Here’s why: Stress has nothing to do with the number of hours you work, and everything to do with how you feel during those hours.

If you work 100 hours a week feeling great, having fun and taking pride in what you do, you won’t be stressed. If you work 30 hours a week feeling inadequate, bullied or unappreciated you will be stressed.

Myth #3: Stress is cured by working less

Most workplaces react to stress by reducing employees’ workloads, responsibilities or working hours and in serious cases by giving people long sick leaves. According to Danish medical researcher Bo Netterstrøm who has studied workplace stress for 30 years, this is a mistake.

People hit by stress need to increase their capacity and confidence at work, and while time off from work can be necessary to treat the immediate symtoms of stress, a long absence from the workplace does exactly the opposite. When people return to the workplace, they’re even more vulnerable than before. Worse, some never return to work at all.

Also, reducing work or leaving work remporarily doesn’t fix any underlying problems. When employees return to work or to “normal” work conditions, nothing has changed and the stress returns quickly.

Myth #4: Stress is cured by working more

“Yes, I’m a little stressed at work right now because we’re falling behind. If I work really hard for a while I’ll catch up and it will go away.”

No it won’t. For two reasons:

1. Workplace stress does not come from falling behind at work. It comes from how you feel about falling behind.
2. In most businesses, people will always be behind. There is simply too much work and finishing all your tasks simply means getting assigned more work.

A temporary push to reduce a pile of work or meet a deadline is fine. But all too often that temporary push becomes the new standard.

So the solution to stress is not to work harder to catch up because in most workplaces this is impossible. The solution is to feel good about the work you finish and not to get stressed about the work you don’t finish. It’s not that you should stop caring, it’s just that you should remember that being stressed makes you less productive, which means you get less work done and become more stressed. That’s a vicious circle right there and we need to break it.

Myth #5: Stress is cured by focusing on stress

I’ve seen a lot of the literature and training about workplace stress, and the typical content is:

• What is stress
• Symptoms of stress
• Health implications of stress
• How to fight stress

This is often presented by a stress consultant. Here in Denmark that consultant may even come from the rather unfortunately named Center for Stress (shouldn’t that be against stress?)

A recent study showed that people who return from anti-stress training felt more stressed than people who didn’t attend. No wonder, because focusing on stress is not the way to remove it – it’s a great way to create more stress. Instead, you must focus on what gives you peace and energy. Here’s a great way to do that every day at work.

The truth on stress

Repeat after me: Work does not give you stress. Feeling bad about work gives you stress.

This means thant changing your workhours, your responsibilities, your priorities or your work environment is meaningless, unless it also changes the way you feel at work.

Those stress management courses will not do the trick either, unless they can achieve just that.

If you’re stressed, you must take charge and make whatever changes are necessary to go from feeling anxious, inadequate or drained at work to feeling appreciated, proud and energetic.

Which will not only remove workplace stress, but will also make you more efficient, creative, successful and happy at work.

Additional reading

Want to know more about reducing workplace stress? It’s in my brand new book Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How to Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at work.

“It’s very, very good. It’s incredibly well-written.”
- David Maister

Read it free online or buy it on paper or pdf.

If you enjoyed this post, I’m pretty sure you’ll also like these:

• The cult of overwork
• Top 5 business maxims that need to go Part I – Part II
• How to lose your fear of being fired