Focus on the Positive
We experience hundreds of different events every day: positive, negative, and neutral. Yet most of us tend to focus all our attention on the negative. Unfortunately, this holds true for your customers too. Many of you are shaking your heads in agreement since as we all know, the thing people share most readily with their friends are their bad experiences with your service or product.
Evolution has a part to play in this. Way back when, you only survived if you spent a lot of time focusing on the potential threats and bad things around you. Miss a few and you’d become something’s lunch.
We still have a need for survival skills. We need them every time we pull onto a highway during rush hour, or when a big project goes south on us. The business world is filled with people hiding knives behind their backs.
And yet, focusing so much on negative things is bad for your health, your relationships, and your organization. It takes a lot of energy and tends to give you a warped view of your situation. Productivity lowers, stress increases, and creativity and innovative thinking diminish.
The result is less and poorer work results and more of those unhappy customers sharing their disappointment with everyone they know in their social circle…and don’t know, through social media.
It turns out there’s a simple way to turn your thoughts to the positive, to change your thinking in order to improve your physical and mental wellbeing, thereby getting more done, improving results, and pleasing your customers.
Start every meeting by taking a few minutes to have everyone briefly share a good thing in their professional or personal lives that happened in the last few days.
Do it for yourself too by starting your day writing down two or three positive things that happened recently. You had a great dinner at the new restaurant, your child has a role in the school play, your company was featured in an article as a great place to work, a customer decided to double their order.
That’s it. The whole solution. As long as you do it regularly.
Spend more time sharing positive events in the life of your organization. Let people know you see and appreciate all of the things they are doing well. Energize them with stories about excited customers and exceptional results.
Encourage everyone else to start their meetings with positive stories. Lead by example and make this practice a part of your culture.
It won’t take long to notice the effect of this change in thinking. It will lead to a change in perception. When people are primed to see the positive they’ll notice it more and will strive to add to it by creating more positive outcomes. Their outlooks will improve. As for negative things, their power will lessen and people will get over them quicker.
One of the skills that EOS teaches leadership teams is the art of running exceptional meetings. And an exceptional meeting starts with everyone sharing a good personal thing and good business thing that happened since you last met. It always gets people laughing and smiling and primed to dive into the issues of the meeting with energy and creativity.
Take time to recognize the positive. You’ll feel better, your people will feel better and your company will thrive.