This may not be the most noble reason to practice forgiveness:

… but it works for me :o)

I often think that if there’s one area that could use some happiness at work, it’s politics. I’d like to see more politicians who are not afraid to be optimistic, happy, cheerful, nice and friendly.

Well, here’s one who is:

Not only is Mayor Hazel McCallionhappy of the City of Mississauga in Canada happy at work, she is also 88 years old, has been elected 11 times, has a 91% approval rating AND has kept her city debt-free.

I think happiness is a powerful force in politics – it may even have been what got Obama elected president over McCain.

What about you – do you know any other examples of happy politicians?

Thx to Guilla for mentioning this fantastic video.

Two weeks ago I got a question from Mark in a comment, that began with these words:

My job has been literally killing my soul for the past 3 years. I have known this entire time I needed to leave. But I didn’t realize how seriously I was burning out, and now I feel like I am being pushed over the edge.

I have drank every night for the past three months. I am acerbic, aggressive and emotionally closed off. I hate the people I serve so much I cuss and spit when I have to see them. I have secondary trauma and can no longer sleep without medication. It is not possible to hate your job more than I do.

I passed the question on to all of you, and more than 25 people have taken the time to offer Mark ideas, thoughts or sympathy.

Well, Mark read your input, and here’s his reply:

Well what a response. You guys are something else… you are really so helpful I am kind of taken aback. My thanks to Alex for posting this… I was reticent at first but can take a lot from what everyone offered from their own life experiences. I don’t want to share too many details, for the sake of not being compromised at work, but I work in the helping field and have simply excessively burned out. This kind of help is something the Internet does best: allow people to share their deeply personal experiences in a generally anonymous manner.

Anyways, just to follow up, I went on a vacation and got some perspective re: having a choice as to whether I had to put up with this misery at work. I remembered that I do have a choice, which I had forgotten in all of my progressive unhappiness. To relate it back to the goal of this blog/website, I also realized that I had very high expectations for myself and my life that had become toxic; I was expecting things from myself that were based on comparisons to others and how I perceived my life trajectory should be. I was finding that the success train was not coming “on schedule” and I was internalizing failure based on my measuring myself up to others. This was a recipe for depression and for feeling like a victim.

Now, I still have to get out of this job. I am in a temporary good place because I see now, and with the help of you all’s input, that I can leave at any time (it’s staggering how I could have forgotten this). I have applied to the most menial of jobs (won’t say where for anonymity reasons) because I have accepted that it’s just life, not to be taken so seriously, and that sometimes you have to just do what you need to and forget how you think you might measure up to others

If my menial job options don’t come through -and maybe I’m saying menial when I have no right to- I will quit and force my own hand. I have family and friends to fall back on and do have options. I just need to remember that.

Anyways, this has gone on too long about myself. I do have the support of a counselor and I do exercise regularly. I am actually quite healthy aside from the job and drinking too much in response to it. But I will put some of your suggestions into practice and and very grateful for your input. Thanks so much for offering up your experience to me. And Alex, thanks for the website.

Mark

I was struck by two things in all of this: First of all, how deeply it affects us when we hate our jobs. It colors every aspect of our lives. I know, I’ve tried it. And secondly, how many people could relate because they’ve been there.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

How do you uncover a person’s true character in a job interview? When people know they’re being evaluated, they of course put on their best behavior and play nice. But are they really? You can ask them what they’re like, but will they tell the truth?

Here’s a fun way to uncover an applicant’s character that I found in a comment thread over on reddit.com. It involves a serious game of Jenga:

Where I work, we do our best to weed out the unhappy and cynical employees before they even get hired. Coworkers who are constantly cynical and unhappy are absolutely terrible for morale, and we do whatever we can to avoid it both before and after hiring.

After each candidate goes through his/her well-rehearsed and pre-meditated interviews with HR and management, the entire engineering team (small company) comes into the room, closes the door, and starts a game of Jenga like it’s no big deal. Meanwhile, we strike up a casual conversation with the candidate and insist s/he play with us.

Without fail, the candidates true colors are almost immediately revealed. Candidate scoffs at the idea of playing a game in an interview? Obviously too uptight for our group and not capable of handling rapidly changing situations. Focusing on Jenga also takes the candidate’s mind off of all of the pre-meditated answers and pages of ‘interview tips’ articles that we’ve all read at one point or another. The trick is to treat the game of Jenga like it’s serious business so the candidate follows suit and forgets about the formalities of the interview and whatever persona s/he is trying to craft for the interviewers. If the person can discuss intense technical topics without breaking a sweat while playing Jenga, then s/he likely knows the subject matter pretty well.

Works every time. We end up with engineers who get along, think on their feet, are laid back, and known their stuff.

I like it. It reminds me of this great story from Hal Rosenbluth’s book The Customer Comes Second:

CEO Hal Rosenbluth was once about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

His solution was brilliant: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here he showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

And he did not get the job.

I absolutely agree that no workplace should tolerate jerks and the best time to weed them out is before they’re ever hired. Playing games is just one way to make people forget themselves enough to show who they really are.

Your take

What do you think? Does your workplace do something similar? Have you tried something like this in a job interview?

Related posts

• The No Asshole Rule.
• How do you hire happy managers?
• Top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time.

Holy crap – one of the videos from our conference last year is featured on the front page of ted.com. And featured very prominently! Which means that it has now been viewed over 50,000 100,000 times!

And it’s no wonder – the presentation in question was one of the highlights of our 2009 conference on happiness at work: Dr. Srikumar S. Rao’s wonderfully inspiring and funny presentation.

It very satisfying for me to know that something we helped create has now inspired so many people in the TED community and around the world. Also, it’s a professional ambition of mine to speak at TED – and this way, I almost already have – by proxy :o)

You can watch Srikumar Rao’s entire speech here (18 minutes):

Dr. Rao is the man behind the pioneering course Creativity and Personal Mastery. This is the only business school course that has its own alumni association and it has been extensively covered in the media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, the Independent, Time, the Financial Times, Fortune, the Guardian, Business Week and dozens of other publications.

Most of us spend most of the work day sitting down. We sit at our desks, we sit in meetings, we sit down at lunch and we sit down for seminars, phone calls, orientations and just about anything else that goes on during a regular work week.

Which is why this excellent NY Times article by Zack Canepari is so important. It opens with these provocative words:

Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

We all knew that sitting down all day is bad for you, but I at least thought that you could offset this with plenty of exercise outside of work. I was wrong.

The article goes on to list two reasons why sitting down is so bad for your health. First, it’s extremely passive which means your body burns very few calories while you sit. Just standing up activates your whole system to a much larger degree and burns more energy. As the article says:

Part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

But it doesn’t stop there. Apparently:

…when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.
…
Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

There’s science to back this up:

A study of people who sit for many hours found that those who took frequent small breaks — standing up to stretch or walk down the corridor — had smaller waists and better profiles for sugar and fat metabolism than those who did their sitting in long, uninterrupted chunks.

Go read the whole article – it’s a great read.

To all of this, I’d add that in my experience being physically inactive also dulls my mind. If you sit down passively all day, this makes it harder to be creative, energetic and motivated.

So what’s the solution?

Given the problem, it’s obvious that solution can’t be all about exercising before and after your work day. This wouldn’t address the fact that you’d still be sitting still for long periods of time. The solution has to be about integrating movement into the work day.

Here are three things you can do about this:
1: Take a lunch walk
Make it a tradition to take a short walk with some co-workers every day after lunch. Not only is this a chance to get moving, it can also be a nice way to chat with your co-workers and refresh workplace relationships.

2: Get up and move regularly
Make it a rule to never sit down more than 30 minutes at a time. Then you must get up to stretch, go smoke, get coffee, go chat to someone in the next office, whatever.

Set a timer to remind you if that’s what it takes. There’s even software you can install on your PC to remind you to get away from the PC :o)

3: Work standing up some of the time
There are many things you can do at work, even if your butt isn’t firmly planted in your chair. You can have stand-up meetings which have the added advantage that they’re a lot shorter! You can do your phone calls standing up, which has the advantage that your voice sounds clearer and more energetic. You can even work on your computer standing up if you have a desk that raises or can find a high table.

Bonus tip
I really, really like the Specialized Lunch Ride:

Your take

How much of your work day is spent in a chair? Have you thought about how this affects you mentally and physically? What do you do to get out of your chair?

Please write a comment – I’d love to hear your take.

Related posts

• The science of touch
• Top 10 signs you’re unhappy at work
• Monday Tip: Get Out!

P.S.
I wrote this post standing up :o)

This dog lives across the street from our office:

He is regularly found at his post, surveying his domain which is (i’d guess) the whole street. I especially like how his elbow is up on the banister. It’s suave yet domineering!