Just this week I did a spousal retreat day for a Vistage Florida group. I had CEO’s and their spouses in the room together and the topic was “Creating Happiness”. They picked the topic because they wanted to understand more about science is now telling us about the value of positive emotion. What a great group!

Tonight I found a half a piece of yellow lined paper with handwriting on it on my kitchen floor. I opened it up and on it was written the sentiment I had written for my nephew and his new wife last June.  I had a beautiful blank card for them and just before their ceremony I sat down to write the card. Right before I sealed the envelope I decided I wanted to be able to remember what I wrote so I grabbed a piece of paper and copied this message.

I will send it along to the group I was with this week and since it’s Valentine’s Week, I want to post it where I can share it.

My Three Wishes:  Divinity, Positivity and Romance.

Divinity – Remember every day to look for and find the Divine in each other. “Namaste”

Positivity – Make sure your ratio of Positivity to Negativity remains at about 5:1. Share five times more praise, admiration, affirmation, acknowledgment, compliments, congratulations, celebration, recognition and adoration than you share criticism, judgment, blame, cynicism or sarcasm. 5:1

Romance – Keep the romance alive. Keep courting each other. Continue to look with love, fascination and enchantment into the others eyes.

Practice these three things daily and practice forgiveness regularly and you’ve got a great chance!

There once lived a very old man in a small village. He was in extreme good health. He could be seen daily out jogging, playing with the local children, planting in his garden. People were curious about him and how it was that he was so very old and in such good health.

One day a young man approached him and inquired “Old man, how is it that you look so young and stay so healthy?” he asked.

“An apple a day,” the old man replied.

The young man didn’t believe him and went on to question him further, “Oh there must be something more – it can’t be as simple as that old man.”

“An apple a day,” the old man replied again.

Still not satisfied the young man persisted, “Old man – there must be something more.” he went on.

With a smile on his face and a shake of his head the old man looked at the young man and said “Yes, you have to EAT the apple.”

We all know the recipes for happiness, for good health, and for stamina – but without using them, practicing them, doing them daily, they won’t have the effect we want them to have. Use your skills daily, put them into positive practice and you too will be the one with the vibrant life and career.

Be Happy: Don’t Compare!

A few weeks ago, I was at a trade show where I got to spend some time with my colleagues in the field of customer loyalty and customer culture. I delight in catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. I thrill in learning what the leaders in the field are up to and eagerly capture the latest “findings” in my pages and pages of notes, which I eventually share with clients and the people that subscribe to my newsletters.

At conferences like this I’m with people that speak the same language and are passionate about the same things. We understand each other and we all understand that we are working together to make the world a better place. Click here to see my post on “changing the world.”

Much as I love these experiences, I’ve learned over time that conferences can be “slippery slopes” for me. Why? Because I have a tendency to compare myself to others. In and of itself, comparison can be useful. It can sometimes be motivating. But for many people “upward comparison” can be the death knell to happiness.

I have this crazy tendency to compare myself to people that have accomplished more than I have. I see their 300 page books, their newest research, or their snazzy new websites and immediately feel “less than.”

It’s an old habit and a bad one. It doesn’t matter where it comes from, or why it occurs, I’ve come to recognize it simply as a non-productive habit that depletes my energy and plays havoc with my self esteem, and so I hit the “pause” button when I feel it kick in.

I breathe. I acknowledge what I am doing.

“Uh-oh” I hear a little voice say, “This isn’t useful, this is making you feel badly about yourself, instead of proud of your own accomplishments. STOP. Just STOP.”

It’s my tough love approach and it works to help me shift my focus from comparing myself with those who do more, to acknowledging what I have done and not what I haven’t. My list of professional accomplishments are not too shabby, but frankly don’t compare to the “stars” in the field. Tom Peters, I’m not.

While studying Positive Psychology I learned that when we compare ourselves upwardly – with others that have more, do more, seem to be more – we inevitably feel unhappy.

When we compare ourselves with others who have less, do less, etc. we have the opportunity to be grateful, and when we allow ourselves to sit in that gratitude and reflect, happiness brews, contentment stirs, and we give peace a chance. Peace and harmony in my life are personal goals.

If you want to increase your Positivity ratio every day – stay away from comparison with others. Set your own personal goals, choose a picture of what your own personal best looks like and let that be your north star.

Comparison can breed feelings of lack, humiliation and even shame. These “low vibration” emotions then diminish your positive capacity. You know that makes you a less effective leader, friend, citizen or partner.

Protect yourself from “upward comparison” and orient to your own desires.

Star in your own movie.

JoAnna

Bonnie was a bright ray of sunshine and the last time I saw her I told her I’d be back in two hours for lunch. I told her I had to work but I would bring my work with me and I’d sit there at the beach enjoying my lunch, my work and the beach. She knew how I loved when I could make that happen.

I headed off to my class expecting to be back.

As happens often at this time of year in Southern Florida, it began to rain hard. The sky opened up and the prospect of packing up to get to the beach for lunch dissipated the hungrier I became.

I made a nice little spinach salad in my kitchen and sat on the porch in the rain to eat it.

Today I came home from being on the road. Bonnie’s gone. She died this last week – young. Some kind of bacterial infection then cardiac arrest.  It happened fast.

It’s sad and it’s scary.

Bonnie was a casual friend, she worked up at the beach where she was loved like family. She made quick friends with the people she took care of and shared her emotions ( I LOVE your mother!!) generously. She loved my granddaughter too and shared her sparkly green St. Patrick’s Day crown with her, telling her that she was the real “Princess.” Little Miss wore that crown day and night for the remainder of her visit here last March.

She was sassy and upbeat and she smiled. She moved with a sense of urgency and I loved that about her. She was focused on making people feel good in her presence. I will miss her presence in my life, we all will.

Bonnie, if you can hear me, I just want you to know that.

****************

I have a habit. A practice.

When I lose someone I care about, I think about the qualities in them I love the most and then I think about how those qualities can live on through me.

I started this practice many years ago when my friend Steve died unexpectedly at the age of 43.  Steve was real. No nonsense, he said it like he saw it.

Once, when he was interviewing me for a position with his company, a strategic partnership, he observed, “JoAnna – you want your cake and want to eat it too!”

“Why Steve!” I said, “That’s what cake is for.”

As the years went on and friends and loved ones passed from my life I always stopped the busy-ness long enough to think deeply about what it was about each one of them that I loved the most. Then I would choose one or more of those qualities to take on in my own life. In that, I would invite them to live, in part, through me.

Some people believe you can’t be happy if you are grieving, that it may be impossible to be positive at sad times, and that may be true. I cry easily and feel deeply but always find that when I focus on the goodness that that person brought to my life it eases the pain.

As strange as it is to admit, grief grows us. If we allow it to, grief gives us the opportunity to expand who we are and add to our vibration, the good vibes of those we’ve loved and lost.

We’ll miss you Bonnie. I’ll remember to smile more often and take my work to the beach on Sundays – or even better maybe even take more Sundays off and just relax.

When I am working, I’ll move with a sense of urgency and focus and generosity. Bonnie, it was so nice to have known you.

We learn in stages. Learning often starts with Unconscious Incompetence – that’s where you don’t know what you don’t know. Think about being a child – you don’t know there are skills involved in driving a car, tying your shoelaces, or writing your name. Before I studied happiness coaching I didn’t even know that it existed – so I didn’t know what I didn’t know about coaching for happiness. You didn’t know what you didn’t know about a subject before you learned it either.

As we hear about, see or experience something new we move into the stage of Conscious Incompetence, that’s where we know what we don’t know. It’s the stage where your awareness is raised. You get a sense of what you don’t know about strengths and how to use them to manage better or how to deliver feedback differently.

When you move into Conscious Competence, that’s where you are deliberately and consciously practicing the new things you learn. This is the time where it’s important to pay attention to how you change and the new learnings that you practice.

The last stage is Unconscious Competence – that’s “Auto-pilot” that’s’ the when your practice is so automatic that you hardly notice that you are doing it – when you know it so well you do it without having to think about it. The goal is that you get so good at listening for and giving feedback about strengths that it’s almost unconscious.

Be mindful of these stages as you – or others – learn. Be patient with yourself – and others – as you move from one stage to the next. The more you use and practice your learning the better you’ll get.

Remember that old dictum – Practice makes perfect? In this case “Practice makes Profit.” You, your team and your company will profit from your new skills as you make them a regular part of your Positivity Practice.

Ever had one of those days? You know the kind I am talking about. One of those days when it seems that everything you touch turns to… something icky? It happens to everyone time and again, once in a while. Less frequently now than ever before for me, because I learned a really cool tool for keeping myself from traveling down the road to gloom.

I pivot.

In basketball that means to keep one foot in place while holding the ball and moving the other foot one step in any direction. So now, when I find myself faced with a series of things that aren’t looking so good, I pivot. I don’t have to go far, it doesn’t take that much effort, and I get a different perspective.

Instead of seeing more of what I don’t want (the kind of day I’ve been having up until that point) I know have the power to shift my focus, pivot and ask myself, “What DO I want?” (Usually it’s something decidedly more positive than what I have.)

I have trained myself to look at negativity – what I don’t want – as “contrast”, so I can use it to help define what I do want. You see, once you know what you don’t want, it’s easier to figure out what you DO want.

It’s an amazingly useful skill.

You get what you focus on – so use the power of the pivot to shift your focus when you don’t want to get more of the same old thing.

The week before last, I was in NY with most of the whole family together, east coast and west coast. It was a very special time. We had a wedding, a new baby great grandson born, a belated birthday party and lots of time to hear Nannie tell stories (Tell me again Nannie!!) of big bad wolves, little pigs and sheep, and the whale that washed up on Rockaway Beach when she was a little girl.

My three year old granddaughter just loved the partying.

A week into the visit her Mommy and Daddy went to stay in the city and Little Miss got to spend the evening with her Nana and her Nannie – her grand and great grandmothers.

To be on the safe side we made plans to have dinner at my brother’s house where there are four more friendly faces and a big box of toy animals left from when their kids were little. On the way there my Mom told me she wanted to pick up a Carvel cake, same thing we did a week before when we went to my brothers for a barbeque and a belated celebration for my birthday.

She came out of the store with, of all things, a Spongebob themed cake.

“What on earth are we going to do with a cake that size – and really Mom, Spongebob?” I questioned. “Don’t worry, assured my mother, your brother in law is coming, it will get eaten.”

I hear a little voice come from the back seat. “Spongebob??”

“Nana?”

“Yes honey?”

“I always get cake Nana.”

“I know honey, and if you eat your dinner you can have cake tonight too.”

“Nana? We didn’t celebrate my birthday here.”

“Honey, you had your birthday party in California.”

“But Nana, I didn’t celebrate my birthday here yet!”

So that night Little Miss got to celebrate her birthday again, and we got a chance to celebrate her. We are already appreciating her strengths of creativity, imagination and her focus on getting what makes her happy.

In my book “54 Ways to Stay Positive in a Changing, Challenging and Sometimes Negative World”, #54 is called “Celebrate.” Here’s part of what it says. “Most people are good at celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and weddings. But the art of true celebration lives in the ability to celebrate life itself…”

“So today, ask yourself, “Did I recognize and celebrate the things that made me proud? Did I recognize and celebrate the beauty of life and the lessons I earned?”

In a world marked by chaos, master the art of finding the things that matter and ways to celebrate them. What are you proud of today? Where did your strengths show up?

YaY!!

What do Michael Jordon, Mylie Cyrus, Rosa Parks, Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos), Lady Gaga and families with healthy children in West Bengal India all have in common?

Positive Deviance. They’ve all done or are doing something that puts them at the far right end of the “bell curve” of normal distribution.  They are “deviant.” While that word has usually been associated with negative behavior, it doesn’t have to be.

Deviant comes from two Latin words. “De” means “from” and “Via” means “Road.” Deviate means “Off the beaten path.” People that demonstrate unconventional or uncommon behavior can be called positive deviants. I kind of like the term myself, and consider myself one of that group. Do you?

People who depart from the norm, walk to the beat of a different drum, think outside the box, go with their gut and otherwise step off the path of how-everyone-else-is-doing-things-around-here and are more successful because of it, ought to be watched. (And perhaps even imitated.)In 1990, Jerry and Monique Sternin worked with Save the Children in Vietnam. For years, the-way-things-were-done when it came to malnutrition, was to diagnose the nutritional deficiencies and then supplement the children’s rice based diet with foods that were not native to the local environment.

That worked fine until the outside organizations left and the children quickly became malnourished again. When the Sternin’s arrived they found some pockets of deviance, where the children were healthy and well fed, even though they were in the same kinds of villages as the sickly kids.What were these parents doing differently? What were they doing right?Turns out some of the families were feeding their kids small freshwater shrimps and crabs they pulled from the grasses. Some fed them sweet potato leaves which are vitamin rich. Workshops began in the villages where each was encouraged to develop similar and unique solutions based on finding more vitamin and protein rich food right in their areas. It worked. After the foreigners moved out, the villagers were now able to take care of themselves using local resources.

What’s happening in your rice paddies?

Are Positive Leadership tools helping you do a better job of leading? Are some of your efforts succeeding in ways you never thought possible? Is your team communicating better, collaborating on projects to change process, discovering their creativity? If not, why not?What departments rock? What places are doing cool things? Whose getting outrageous results?Remember engagement is the name of the game. Engaged employees perform better and produce more – and they help engage customers. That makes the emotional connection that builds loyalty.

Positive Deviance (PD) is an approach to personal, organizational and cultural change based on the idea that every community or group of people performing a similar function has certain individuals (the “Positive Deviants”) whose special attitudes, practices/ strategies/ behaviors enable them to function more effectively than others with the exact same resources and conditions. The premise of PD is that the superior practices of the Positive Deviants enable them to improve outcomes, and if those practices (also attitudes, thinking and behaviors) can be isolated then they can be used to improve the outcomes of others as well. (Source: Wikipedia)

Now that sounds good to me.

Some psychologists say that all it takes to create a new habit is 21 days of doing it and that will be enough to ingrain it. Some say 30 days.

And some neurologists say that it MAY take as long as six months to fully set a new habit in place if you are trying to simultaneously override an old one.

Oh my.

Here’s what my experience tells me – the first 21 days are the hardest. If you miss doing the thing you are looking to habituate even once you have to go back to day “1″ and start all over again.

Recently I made the commitment to practice a new change technology called Psych – K it’s a quick easy way to support the changes I am making in my own life. I made the commitment to doing 3 of the balance techniques I learned every day, so I would get in the habit of doing it.

Guess what?

Somewhere about day 5 I missed a day, then I missed day 7 and on day 8 I only did two out of the three. Uh oh. See the pattern? Here’s a practice that is not going to be habituated soon.

So I stopped. Thought about it. Made the choice to start again – I chose to do it without judging myself harshly for not doing it “right” the first time. I chose to do it without recrimination. I set my intention again – to do a minimum of 3 balance techniques every day.

I’m on day 6 six now and feeling pretty confident because I know if I don’t get it perfectly right this time, I’ll keep trying until I do – and somewhere between 21 days and, say, oh six months, as long as my desire remains consistent I will ingrain this good habit into my life, balancing and acknowledging myself for it, everyday.

As you are developing your new good habits remember to give yourself permission to be human. If it doesn’t work at first, that’s fine, just start again – and again – until one day you just find yourself doing it spontaneously. Trust me. If this old dog can learn new tricks – you can!

Every morning, before the day has a chance to get to you, set your intention for the day. I like to start my morning ritual with gratitude. I think about all things for which I am grateful (not the least of which is waking up.) I give thanks for the night’s sleep, the comfy surroundings, the safe home, the air conditioner that keeps me cool, the opportunity to serve another day, things like that.

Then I set intention.

Intention is a potent force that acts on your behalf to help you create the day you want.

You can intend to “be” a certain way or to “do” certain things. You might say “Today I intend to be kind and say something nice to everyone I meet.” Or you might say “Today I intend to be creative and look at all situations as opportunities” or perhaps you want to say “Today I will look for and find strengths in everyone I meet – and affirm those strengths when I hear them.”

You choose any intention you want. You can write it down on an index card and carry it with you if you wish, you can say it out loud in the mirror, give yourself a wink and start your day. It’s up to you. It’s a simple way to give your day direction and purpose.