The Impact of Perspective on Happiness

Are you a leader that is creating the right environment for your team to be happy?  Many may answer in terms of pay, benefits, opportunities, safety, training and so on.  What can be missed is the approach and perspective you bring as a leader to driving performance and measuring any number of metrics in your business.

We see 99 out of 100 tasks were completed or goals achieved and what does everyone want to focus on? The 1 out of 100 that didn’t get done or the fact that 20 more were completed than the last review?  Ever been in that meeting?  Ever been the one leading that meeting?  It is an opportunity to motivate or demotivate and the perspective you bring to the discussion can make all the difference.

Change the focus of the teams you lead to the positive GAIN against where you and they started vs the GAP to perfection.  A new book, The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence and Success, provides some thoughtful analysis and insight into how we approach these situations can make a world of difference for ourselves and our people.

We hear a lot about living in the moment and appreciating each and every day.  If you aren’t ready for a whole new book on this, try this article, “How your brain sabotages your happiness” it is a good read on why we might have so much trouble following that advice, “You’re in the GAP every time you measure yourself or your situation against an ideal.”  We see this in companies as well as people.