Positive mindset

How can people cultivate a positive mindset over a negative one?

While researching resilience for You Are Awesome I found that cultivating a positive mindset often comes first. The stronger we are mentally the better we can bend … not break … when challenge comes.

Let me answer in three steps:

Step 1: Change your happiness model

Our parents lied! They said they wanted us to be happy (“I just want my kids to be happy!,” says everyone) but then they also encouraged us to get into a good school, to find a great job, to work hard for a promotion. Everyone’s parents are different but I would argue that most of us hear some version of this model told to us as children:

• GREAT WORK → BIG SUCCESS → BE HAPPY

You know, study really hard, get good grades, go be a doctor! (Are my East Indian roots showing?) Or work really hard, get promoted, be happy!

The first step to cultivating a positive mindset is flipping this model.

Based on research I share below, how does the positive mindset / happiness model really work?

• BE HAPPY → GREAT WORK → BIG SUCCESS

Yes, it’s the opposite! A phenomenal paper called “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect” (Lyubimirsky, King, Deiner, 2005) shows that if you're happy first... then you do great work, because you're happier doing it! You're 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales, and are three times more creative, amongst a host of other benefits.

So Step 1 is realizing that cultivate a positive mindset needs to happen first … and not as the result of work or success.

Step 2: Commit to a “20 for 20” happiness challenge

So we know we have to be happy first. But… how? Does anyone just wake up in a good mood every day? I don’t! Most people don’t. We have to work at it. (Sidenote: I think of it like yoga. It’s a practice. The goal isn’t to be perfect … the goal is to be better than before.)

Luckily there are dozens of incredible positive psychology studies that give specific, tactical practices that we can use to cultivate this mindset.

I often challenge people to commit to a “20 for 20” challenge which means you take one of these practices below and commit to doing it for 20 minutes a day for 20 days in a row. By then you will have created a new habit that will be harder to stop.

What are some of the practices? I’ve listed a few of my favorites below together with one study on each. Remember: These all take 20 minutes or less a day. And it’s a multiple choice question. Don’t do all! Just pick one.

• Journaling about the highlight of your day (Source)
• Taking a nature walk (or another exercise you like) (Source)
• Reading 20 pages of fiction (Source, few studies listed)
• (Sidenote: This big a-ha on reading is one of the reasons I launched my Apple “Best of 2018” podcast 3 Books … where I interview folks like David Sedaris, Judy Blume, and Malcolm Gladwell about which 3 books changed their life.)
• Playing the gratitude game “Rose Rose Thorn Bud” around the dinner table (Source)
• Singing (Source)

Step 3: Look back and recenter…

What do I mean?

I mean after a busy, stressful, or overwhelming week (we all have them) where you find yourself focused on the negative and stewing or feeling awful … just look back and ask yourself if you did enough happiness / positive mindset exercises throughout the week. Did you invest in your mindset? If you’re like me, this is when you see that you slipped off the wagon and skipped workouts, stayed at your desk at lunch instead of going for a walk, didn’t have time to read before bed, did meetings in the car instead of singing to music, etc.

We are all quick to devalue these seemingly overly simple strategies to cultivating mindset.

But I would argue that nothing we do is as important.

Be happy first.

Commit to a 20 for 20 challenge.

And keep recentering…

Good luck!