The secret to becoming more charismatic in just 2 minutes a day for 21 days - (Slatcher & Pennebaker, 2006)

Would you like to become more charismatic and a better leader in 21 days by doing a 2 minute exercise a day? Here is a great talk by Shawn Achor on how to do that. Fascinating, inspiring and empowering.



This is the one that is least adopted especially at the senior leadership level. It's the most powerful intervention we have on record right now for raising other people's perception of your positive charisma that is compared to any leadership training that we've seen so far. The reason is that this is so successful is what we have you do is over the past 24 hours you think about one meaningful experience you've had, just one and it could be very small, a conversation you had with a client, with a child,  seeing a sunset, watching snowfall in London, maybe it was a book you were reading, whatever, for 2 minutes that is it, into a blank word document you just write down every detail you can remember about the experience and done. You don't talk about your whole day. Just for 2 minutes just write down every detail you can remember. The reason you are doing that is that you are actually getting your brain to relive that experience because if I hold my hand in front of my face, area 17 of my visual cortex lights up and says hand. Close my eyes and think about my hand in front of my face and area 17 of  my visual cortex lights up and says hand. My brain can't tell the difference between visualisation and actual experience.  So when you do this you've just doubled the most meaningful experience of  your past 24 hours. You do this for 21 days in  a row and your brain connects the cognitive dots for you, creating a trajectory of meaning running throughout your life. So now those emails that you have, those meetings,  the commute you have actually wrap around the trajectory of meaning, which raises your authenticity. Authenticity is just ajudged by how meaning connects to the actual activities you are doing within your life. When authenticity rises, if we take videos of you guys speaking, and  show it to naive raters, 21 days after doing a journaling exercise like this. Even though those raters don't know you or know that you are doing the journaling exercise, they judge you as having significantly higher levels of  positivity and charisma as a leader. It is remarkable.

Taking Action - Exercise (Babyak et al., 2000)

Here's a great talk by psychologist Shawn Achor on why exercise is good for your success and happiness.



Everyone knows exercise is supposed to make you happier but we tell you the wrong reason for it. Usually we say  if you run enough maybe endorphins might get released and you might get addicted to those. Endorphines, these neurochemicals, they give you short term happiness but we are talking about today is long term quantifiable happiness and what we found is exercise does this but for a completely different reason. Exercise does this because it changes your tetris effect. What it does is people who exercise  also started eating healther on average. Why because their brain says I've been successful in one domain I bet I can be succcesful in  another domain.  which is why we found when senior level executives exercise in the morning they are better at dealing with their inbox at 2 oclock in the middle of the day. Two separate functions at two separate parts of the  day  and yet linked to the same activity. That activity is that you are getting your brain to believe your behaviour matters. If you exercise and go to work and you look around at other people you think I exercised and look at all these people that didn't , Even though that's the fist time you've exercised in a decade. you feel a moment of success and that moment of success translates into the very next action you take and just like we see in sports we see they get into the momentum of success that happens because they have an initial victory which leads to a cascading effect and those individuals start building an entire constellation of positive habits around them based on that first belief that my behaviour matters.

How to get a laser focus - Meditation - Shawn Achor

Here's a great talk by psychologist Shawn Achor talking about how to get a laser focus.



I did this with Adobe CEO and senior leadership staff and take their hands of the keyboard for 2 mins a day and just watch their breath go in and out. they are breathing anyway so we just made them watch it. What they are doing is they are trying to get their brain to do one thing at ta time and as everyone in this room knows it is quite difficult because you are balancing so many balls at the same time.  Your brain is creating a Tetris effect of multitasking and a Tetris effect of a form of cultural deficit disorder, where it is very difficult to focus on  anything for a long period of time. We thing that's good but adolescents are much better at multitasking than anyone in this room for the most part because they play all these video games and have all these stimuli.  They are better at multitasking on average but by definition, even the best multitaskers drop their  success rates on both tasks by multitasking and significantly raise the stress on their systems and the best multitaskers in the united states are exactly the ones we have banned from driving and talking at the same time because it  quadruples the chances of an adolescent getting in a car accident. We find that multitasking is one pattern of dealing with multiple tasks but there is a better cognitive strategy to do multiple tasks by doing them with the entirety of your brain's focus by shifting form one to the other. You have to practice and train your brain to not split your cognitive resources and  mediation is the fastest way we have found to do that. For 2 minutes a day of watching your breath go in and out you can  undo the negative effects of multitasking and start getting your brain give you a focus like a laser on tasks instead of having a diffuse light of your intellectual  resources shined on it.

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.

The Daily 2 Minute Secret to Happiness - Shawn Achor

Wouldn't it be great if you could be happy by doing something for just 2 minutes a day? Well that's exactly what the data and research shows. Watch this great talk by psychologist Sean Achor to see how you can do exactly that.

Taking Action- Random Acts of Kindness (Lyubomirsky, 2005)

What we had the CEO's do is before you open up your inbox, for the first thing in the day, before reading a single email and that's actually the only hard part of this study, you had to write a 2-minute email just praising or thanking someone in your social support network, not a coworker but  it's a family member or an old teacher or coach or someone you met at the conference, just someone you want to thank or praise for something. Just  2 minutes and you're done. What we found is, if you do this for three days you're hooked. All day long you think about that one email you sent this morning and being such a great person for sending such emails.

The reason why you do this experiment is over period of 21 days in a row your brain learns you have a robust social support network. You have 21 people in your social support network who have meaning to you and you just activated it in a meaningful way. As a result we found a correlation between CEO's social support and the happiness is 0.7 which doesn't sound that sexy but that's significantly higher than the correlation between smoking and cancer so if you had social support you definitely have a great chance of having happiness and without it that's the very first thing that goes with the happiness.

In my book I have a whole chapter on social investment which is studying individuals and companies that in the midst of challenge, instead of divesting from The Social Network they invest, they actually ramp it up and in doing so the success rate continues to rise where's the others continue to flag. I was working with UBS and one of the managers was telling me that there's a vehicle that would go round on Friday afternoons (the beer cart) after the markets close and it was a great way of bonding with everyone and if you're tired after working on the week and he said when the economy starts to fall, they cut back and the first thing of course you cut is the things that seem frivolous like the beer cart but of course if you cut the  social support its a mistake but that is what they did and they cut the beer cart but this manager reached into his own pocket to buy beer for his team. He said "I'm a professional investor I've done this for 20 years and it's the best investment I've made because my team in the midst of all the struggles while we losing people to other companies I didn't lose a single person on my team and they continue to do many of the things they want to because they saw me as a person who cared about them". This  just confirms the research that shows employees are more engaged if they believe that their manager cares for them.

I don't think we need to buy some beer for people to win their social support but I think we can write a two minute email to somebody in our social support network to ramp up a belief in our social network and improve happiness 

7 techniques to feel better and be successful - Tony Robbins

We all go through ups and downs and sometimes you just keep telling yourself to feel confident but your brain and body don't believe you. That's because you are communicating in the wrong way. Here are 7 techniques to improve how you feel and get success that I've found from Tony Robbins.

 The techniques are:

1 Model someone else for a few days
2 Priming
3 Absolute certainty
4 Change your focus 

5 Change your focus - use questions 
6 Immediate feeling change - think
7 Immediate feeling change - action

1.Model someone else for a few days

We all create an identify for ourselves. You can tell someone's identity by the gestures they have, the way they move. It's all to do with your belief system.

One thing that we all try and do is being consistent. So we talk in our heads to be more confident but it doesn't work. So what can you do?

The easiest thing to do is pretend to be someone else for a few days. Eg who is the most confident person you know (or if you can't think of someone think of someone from TV or film). Then just act like them for a week. Move like them, talk like them, have a posture like them. Think like them, behave like them. It might be difficult at first but if you get a few successes then it will build momentum and you will find it easier and easier.

2.Priming

Tony Robbins has a morning priming routing, which creates a rapid change in his physiology. Why don't you try something similar?  His program goes something like this:

1. Cold water plunge ( but you could just have a quick cold shower) 
2. Breath walking: Simply walk for a few minutes using a breathing cycle of 4 short inhales through the nose, then 4 short exhales through the mouth 
3. For 3 minutes feel grateful. Fill your soul with gratitude because when you are grateful it is impossible to be angry or fearful at the same time. 
4. For the next 3 minutes have a total focus on the feeling of the universe coming in and healing everything in your body, mind, emotions, relationships, finances and solving anything that needs to be solved. 
5. For the last 3 minutes, focus on three things that you are going to make happen. See it as though its already been done. Feel the emotions. 

3.Absolute certainty

Many people try something without conviction and then fail and then they say, see I told you it doesn't work. But you've got to be certain. But how can you be certain in a world of uncertainty? The trick is to think of the results in your head as if its already happened successfully.

4.Change your focus 

Seek and you shall find. Whatever you focus on you find. It is like when you buy a new car and then you see the same make of car everywhere but before you didn't. Your brain filters out and if you focus on the  negative then you will find the negative and it will take you into a negative direction. Focus on positive things, how you can improve, what great things you can do, how you can help yourself and your friends.

5 Change your focus - use questions 

Your focus is controlled by the questions you ask continually. If you ask questions like why does it happen to me, why I can't I lose weight you will find negative answers. Instead ask questions like what can I learn from this to be better next time or how can I lose weight and have fun.

6.Immediate feeling change - think

When you are trying to do something but in the wrong mood it doesn't work so how can you change? Try the following

1. Shake your body out. 
2. Think what are you proud of or what could you be proud of in your life today? Maybe you overcame a problem or did something good? Now when you feel proud, how do you breathe, how do you stand, how do you move, how do you think, how do you feel? 
3. Think of an area you are grateful for. Really get into the feeling. How do you feel? 
4. Think of something you are excited about. How do you feel? How do you speak? 

If you really get into this feelings your state should have changed.

7.Immediate feeling change - action

Emotion is created by motion. It is hard to talk your way to feeling better but action helps change how you feel. So take action. Shake your body, stand taller and start doing. Immediate massive actions is the cure all for everything. Do it and if the initial action doesn't work, change it and redo

2 minute a day, 21 day program for success - The happy secret to better work | Shawn Achor

We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.




He's worked with schools and companies in over 45 countries and found that happiness is not due to the external world but how our brain processes the world.

If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, he's found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.

If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formulaso we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of.Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brainallowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.




When your brain is positive it produces dopamine which makes you happier. It also opens learning centres in the brain, making you better able to adapt to the world.




So how can you get more positive and productive? How can you rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully?

Spend 2 mins a day for the next 21 days doing the following daily:




1. Write three new things you are grateful for (Emmons & McCullough 2003)

2. Journaling one positive thing that happened in the last 24 hours (Slatcher & Pennebaker 2006)

3. Exercise (Babyak et al 2000)

4. Mediation (Dweck 2007)

5. Random acts of kindness (Lyubomirsky, 2005)

1. Write down three new things you are greatful for.

Write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first

2.Journaling one positive experience you've had in the last 24 hours

Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it

3.Exercise

Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters

4.Meditation

We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand

5.Random acts of kindness

random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.





So by doing these 5 things, you can train your brain, just like people train their bodies and create positivity, productiveness and success.