Just before I went on vacation I was interviewed on national TV on the “Good Morning Denmark” show. The topic was how to be happy at work when you return from vacation. It went very well, and you can see the entire interview here. It’s in danish, of course.
Category: Happy At Work
How to be happy at work
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Book review: Learned optimism
Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.
But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
* Optimists lead better lives
* Optimists live longer
* Optimists are healthier
* Optimists do better at work and in school
* Optimists have fewer depressions
* Optimists have more friends and better social livesAnd did you know that:
* The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
* The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
* An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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Good Work Project
Okay, here is a little guest blogger entry.
I saw Alexander this weekend at the countryside and he looked extremely well, tanned and happy – even without work ;-) Especially in volleyball and inventing games with the kids his karma shone.
Ok, I am the friend that Alexander has mentioned in other entries and I am proud to write on his site.
The sharing I would like to do here is to share a website about “The Good Work Project”. The guys behind this are no less than Howard Gardner (inventor of the Multiple Intelligences), Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (inventor of the concept of “Flow” and William Damon (probably inventor of something cool as well).
Through its various studies, The Good Work project, researches how leading professionals carry out work that is of high quality and socially responsible. Exciting….
If you want to know more about this, then go to: www.goodworkproject.org
Cheers out there!
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Book review: Open Space Technology
If you want to read about open Space Technology, this book is the only place to start. Harrison Owen who came up with the concept, explains the practicalities and the history of Open Space meetings in his usual clear, engaging and entertaining way.
Open Space meetings are characterized by their ability to consistently create the right background for incredible achievements. They are amazingly efficient and they also create enthusiasm, stimulate the open exchange of ideas and avert most conflicts. To me, Open Space is the meeting form that most acknowledges us as independent, self-reliant humans capable of taking responsility for ourselves and others.
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In the media
My main project (happiness at work) has come to the attention of the media. It’s actually a little too soon for my taste, I’d have liked to have more results before we “go public” but hey, it’s nice that people are interested.
Yesterday we were mentioned in Denmarks largest newspaper, in an article about how best to start work after a vacation. This is what I wrote about in an earlier post.
And today I was live on national TV (on Good morning Denmark), being interviewed by Michael Meyerheim. I’ll try to convert it to a digital format and post it on the site.
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Tips for returning from a vacation
The summer holidays are ending and as you or your colleagues return to work, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the best way to ease back into your job. Sometimes it seems as if all the energy you’ve gained on your vacation disappears very quickly, so here’s some tips on how to keep that good mood a little longer.
There are tips both for people who are returning from vacations and for their co-workers.
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Pride on the job
Once again an excellent article from Fast Company on the importance on pride at work.
There`s one thing I’d like to add, namely that you can’t “do pride”. Pride is not a practice, it is the result of one or more practices. The article even shows some of these practices like caring for employees, focus on learning, including employees in decisions and focus on long term results. Here’s the list of practices, that I believe promote pride and happiness at work.
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Job satisfaction and the bottom line
Gallup have a report from a study involving 200.000 emplyees from 36 different companies, that clearly links high job satisfaction with good financial results. Among other things the report shows that satisfied employees result in:
* Much lower employee turnover rates
* Higher customer loyalty
* Higher sales
* Higher profit marginsThis is great news for my Project Happiness at Work. And I would love to add something to this study.
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Book review: Man’s search for meaning
This is a very unusual book, spanning topics rarely encountered in one and the same volume. The author, Viktor E. Frankl, was a pshychologist and he spent most of world war 2 in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. And these two backgrounds have gone into this book which is both an account of his experiences in the concentration camps, a psychological analysis of how people react under such extreme conditions and a short introduction to his psychological school called Logotherapy.
The basic underlying theme here is meaning (logos in greek). Frankl argues, that what made some people endure the trials of the concentration camps, while many others gave up, was their ability to see meaning in their suffering. And in general, Frankl sees the drive to discover meaning as our most basic need, and he believes that many psychological problems (from neuroses to alcoholism) stem from a lack of meaning in peoples lives.
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Book review: The inner game of work
I discovered Inner Skiing about 15 years ago, and enjoyed it immensely. That book describes how the inner game principles pioneered by Timothy Gallwey can be used to create better learning conditions for skiers. Gallwey originally used it for teaching tennis, and the method basically consists of teaching not by telling people what to do, but simply by helping them direct their attention to different aspects of what they want to learn.
In this book, subtitled Overcoming mental obstacles for maximum performance, Timothy Gallwey applies the same principles to work. How can we create the best learning conditions at work and what advantages would this give us?
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