This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you want to know how to be happy at work? How can changing your mindset lead to a better time in the workplace?
Shifting your mindset from negative to positive can have incredible benefits for your personal and professional life. Approaching your daily tasks differently will help you understand how to be happy at work.
Keep reading to find out how to be happy at work.
Here’s How to Be Happy at Work
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor shows how your mindset and mood can dramatically alter your performance in the workplace. Below, you’ll find some helpful tips for how to be happy at work.
If it’s true that your mental approach to an experience actually impacts the outcome, how can you use that to your benefit? First, alter your perspective of tedious, daily tasks to increase your engagement and motivation. If you’re dreading a meeting that you perceive as a waste of time, find something you can gain from the experience: Maybe it’s an opportunity to observe your manager’s leadership style or to practice your active listening skills. Similarly, when you prepare for a task that makes you feel nervous or inept, prime yourself beforehand to focus on your strengths or recall other times when you performed well.
This mindset shift affects not only your work productivity, but also your leisure time. When you consider spending time with family or doing a crossword puzzle as valuable opportunities to unwind and recharge, you will more readily reap the rewards of those breaks. By contrast, when you perceive such activities as distractions and inefficiencies, you’re more likely to squander the benefits and fail to feel refueled afterward.
Since your expectations affect your experiences, here are three steps for how to be happy at work:
Step 1: Believe in Your Ability
If you want to know how to be happy at work, it’s important to believe in yourself. Research shows that an employee’s confidence in her own ability to perform her job well is a better predictor of her actual job performance than her training or skill level. Be confident in your skills and talents—within reason. Don’t overlook your weaknesses or overcommit to things you can’t accomplish, but do focus on your strengths as you approach the tasks in front of you. You can only accomplish something if you first have the audacity to dream it and the confidence to try it.
(Shortform note: To read more about the power of mindset and the importance of dreaming big, check out our summary of As A Man Thinketh.)
Step 2: Believe in Your Ability to Improve
Whether you think you can improve your skills and knowledge is a major determinant of whether you actually improve. This is the key to understanding how to be happy at work. Psychologist Carol Dweck proposes that people have one of two mindsets about their intelligence and abilities:
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Happiness Advantage summary :
- How happiness isn’t the result of success, it’s the cause of it
- The benefits of happiness—from increased creativity to improved health
- Strategies for adopting a positive mindset and raising your happiness baseline
