How To Become Happy And An Optimist - Shawn Achor

Here is a great talk by psychologist Shawn Achor talking about the work of Emmerson & McCullough where they made people go from being pessimists to optimists and improved the performance of the company.


This is based on work that was done by Emerson and McCullough. They went to a company much like yours and they had everyone of their employees, as a first thing when they came into to work,  write down 3 new (i.e. in the last 24 hours) things they were grateful for in a word document.
3 new things for 21 consecutive days results in 63 things you are grateful for but that is not the important thing. It doesn't matter what you write down , what matters is that the brain is scanning the world for things that are positive. a  lot of times we train our brain to scan for the negative and we are incredibly good at doing that because our brain is a single processor  so we denote our finite resources to scan the world for the negative and continue to miss out on the positive things that are happening in our environment.

If you do this for 21 days you  can take pessimists, who have always been tested as pessimists, who we know have genes for pessimism and they become optimists.  They ended up  testing as low  to moderate level optimists.

One thing they did at the company, is they started their meetings by saying one thing they were personally grateful for , one thing they were grateful about their team, and one thing about one member of their team.

Then they talk about the fires they need to put out, but not treat them as threats but challenges. The entire performance of the team then started to rise.