Banish Your Negativity Bias

Your brain is wired for negativity--but it's probably not helping you. Here's how to fight back.

Like it or not—and this one’s really hard to like—we all have a negativity bias. While we appreciate positive experiences, we are much more finely attuned and give much greater weight to negative experiences like fear, threats, or even just bad news.
According to neuropsychologist Rich Hanson, our "brain is like Velcro to negative experiences and Teflon to positive ones.”
Or as my non-neuropsychologist dad used to say, “It takes five pats on the back to make up for one, ‘Oh, crap.’”
That’s also why we tend to dwell on what other people do wrong. Every mistake, every misstep, and every slight is like a threat or potential loss, if only to our self-esteem.
As Hanson writes, we’re built that way: Negative stimuli produce more neural activity than positive stimuli. Negative events are also quickly stored in your long-term memory while you need to actively think about positive events for twelve seconds or more in order for them to be transferred to your long-term memory.
And that’s why an otherwise good day can be so easily spoiled. We give tremendous weight to negativity.
And so do the people around us—especially the people we work with and are close to, because to them our words and actions already carry substantial weight.
But we can fight back. Tomorrow let's all try an experiment. Make it a “No Negatives Day.” Commit to focusing on the positive and discarding negative thoughts or feelings as quickly as possible.
Granted, that won’t be easy. We have centuries of evolution to overcome.
One trick is to take on a difficult task, because when we focus on something mentally challenging, our brains divert resources that were previously devoted to experiencing a negative emotion. (That’s one occasion where our inability to multitask effectively is actually a good thing.)
Shankar Vedantam suggests performing a quick mental exercise when you get upset. Count backwards from 100 in steps of seven. Multiply 14 times 23. Try to remember the lines of a poem you memorized in school. When you do, you “forget” to be angry or sad: It’s like counting to 10, only harder.
Another trick is to just pause for a second and apply a little perspective. Even though they sometimes do hurt your feelings, your family loves you. Even though they do occasionally make mistakes, your employees and coworkers accomplish amazing things.
Even though you had to wait a couple minutes longer than you wanted for the check, your meal was superb.
Tomorrow, do your absolute best to focus only on the good. Dwell on every positive thing that happens for at least 10 or 20 seconds. Make sure the experience transfers to your long-term memory. If something really bad happens, do a little mental exercise and then toss in a dose of perspective to help you calm down and refocus.
Just as importantly, don't say anything bad about anyone or anything. No gossip, no snippy comments, no complaints... only positives. That will not only help you feel better, it will help others feel better too.
Then tell people what you’re doing. Ask them to hold you accountable. Ask them to adhere to No Negatives Day, too. Turn it into a game that everyone wins.
While all of our lives could be better, the lives we’re already living are pretty amazing. If only for one day, fight your negativity bias and let yourself—and the people around you—enjoy what we have.

 

8 Things Your Employees Need Most 8 Things Your Employees Need Most

8 Things Your Employees Need Most

Forget about raises and better benefits. Those are important -- but this is what your staff really wants.

Pay is important. But pay only goes so far.
Getting a raise is like buying a bigger house; soon, more becomes the new normal.
Higher wages won’t cause employees to automatically perform at a higher level. Commitment, work ethic, and motivation are not based on pay.
To truly care about your business, your employees need these eight things—and they need them from you:
1. Freedom. Best practices can create excellence, but every task doesn't deserve a best practice or a micro-managed approach. (Yes, even you, fast food industry.)
Autonomy and latitude breed engagement and satisfaction. Latitude also breeds innovation. Even manufacturing and heavily process-oriented positions have room for different approaches.
Whenever possible, give your employees the freedom to work they way they work best.
2. Targets. Goals are fun. Everyone—yes, even you—is at least a little competitive, if only with themselves. Targets create a sense of purpose and add a little meaning to even the most repetitive tasks.
Without a goal to shoot for, work is just work. And work sucks.
3. Mission. We all like to feel a part of something bigger. Striving to be worthy of words like "best" or "largest" or "fastest" or "highest quality" provides a sense of purpose.
Let employees know what you want to achieve, for your business, for customers, and even your community. And if you can, let them create a few missions of their own.
Caring starts with knowing what to care about—and why.
4. Expectations. While every job should include some degree of latitude, every job needs basic expectations regarding the way specific situations should be handled. Criticize an employee for expediting shipping today, even though last week that was the standard procedure if on-time delivery was in jeopardy, and you lose that employee.
Few things are more stressful than not knowing what your boss expects from one minute to the next.
When standards change make sure you communicate those changes first. When you can't, explain why this particular situation is different, and why you made the decision you made.
5. Input. Everyone wants to offer suggestions and ideas. Deny employees the opportunity to make suggestions, or shoot their ideas down without consideration, and you create robots.
Robots don't care.
Make it easy for employees to offer suggestions. When an idea doesn't have merit, take the time to explain why. You can't implement every idea, but you can always make employees feel valued for their ideas.
6. Connection. Employees don’t want to work for a paycheck; they want to work with and for people.
A kind word, a short discussion about family, a brief check-in to see if they need anything... those individual moments are much more important than meetings or formal evaluations.
7. Consistency. Most people can deal with a boss who is demanding and quick to criticize... as long as he or she treats every employee the same. (Think of it as the Tom Coughlin effect.)
While you should treat each employee differently, you must treat each employee fairly. (There's a big difference.)
The key to maintaining consistency is to communicate. The more employees understand why a decision was made the less likely they are to assume favoritism or unfair treatment.
8. Future. Every job should have the potential to lead to something more, either within or outside your company.
For example, I worked at a manufacturing plant while I was in college. I had no real future with the company. Everyone understood I would only be there until I graduated.
One day my boss said, "Let me show you how we set up our production board."
I raised an eyebrow; why show me? He said, "Even though it won’t be here, some day, somewhere, you'll be in charge of production. You might as well start learning now."
Take the time to develop employees for jobs they someday hope to fill—even if those positions are outside your company. (How will you know what they hope to do? Try asking.)
Employees will care about your business when you care about them first.

There’s a lot you don’t know about your employees, especially the things your employees will never tell you.
There’s also a lot employees don’t know about you. Here are 10 things business owners wish they could say to employees:
I care about whether you like me. I want you to like me. When I come off like a hard-ass who doesn’t care about your opinion of me, it’s an act. My business is an extension of myself. I want you to like it. And me.
I don't think I know everything. A few people stepped in, without being asked, and made a huge difference in my professional life. I will always be grateful to them. I don’t offer you advice because I think I’m all knowing or all-powerful. I see something special in you, and I’m repaying the debt I owe to the people who helped me.
I think it’s great when you’re having fun. You don’t have to lower your voice and pretend to be working hard when I walk by. I know it’s possible to work hard and have a little fun at the same time. Before I got all serious, I used to work that way.
When you enjoy what you do, it makes me feel a little better about my company and myself. I get to feel like I’ve created something more than just a business.
I want to pay you more. I would love to be the employer of choice in the industry or the area.  I can’t, mostly due to financial constraints but partly because the risks I’ve taken require a reasonable reward. If I go out of business tomorrow, you lose your job. That's terrible, I know. But I lose my business, my investment, my credit, my house… sometimes I lose everything.
Someday, when you start your business, I promise you’ll understand.
I want you to work here forever. Job-hopping may be a fact of business life, but as an owner it’s a fact I hate. I don’t see you as a disposable part. When you leave, it hurts. A part of me feels like I’ve failed.
I want to own the kind of business people hope to retire from.
Sales don’t appear by magic. I know you despise filling certain types of orders. They’re aggravating, they cause you to fall behind… they’re a pain. You wish we would sell other work. Unfortunately (from your point of view at least) sometimes the orders that take the most time are actually the most profitable.
And even if they aren’t, sometimes those orders are the only thing we can sell.
Sometimes I even take terrible work because it's the only way to keep the lights on.
I would love to turn you loose. You can't stand to be micromanaged. That's good because I hate micromanaging. But freedom is earned, not given. Show me you can fly on your own and I’ll gladly focus on something or someone else.
In fact, if you feel I’m micromanaging you, step forward. Say, “Jeff, I can tell you don’t quite trust me to handle this well. I understand, so I’m going to prove you can trust me.”
Do it and I'll get off your back and respect you even more.
I notice when others don’t pull their weight. I’m not blind. But I won’t discipline those individuals in front of you. No employees, no matter how poorly they perform, loses their right to confidentiality and privacy.
And sometimes I won’t discipline them at all, because occasionally more is going on than you know. You wouldn’t realize that, though, because oftentimes…
There are things I just can’t tell you. Even though I would love to, and even though you and I have become friends.
Ownership is the smorgasbord of insecurity. I worry about sales. I worry about costs. I worry about facilities and employees and vendors and customers and… you name it, I worry about it.
So occasionally I’m snappy. Occasionally I’m distracted. Occasionally I’m tense and irritable and short-tempered. It’s not your fault. I’m just worried.
More than anything, I’m worried about whether I can fulfill the trust you placed in me as your employer.

8 Nuggets of Wisdom Every Entrepreneur Needs

Advice to help you be more confident, manage more effectively, and sell more than you think you can.

I love listening to smart people.
I don’t like listening to smart people when they pretend they developed the wisdom they impart all on their own—like a Stephen Hawking fairy flew down and touched them on the head with a Wand of Wisdom.
It doesn’t work that way for most of us. Everything I know I was told by people who are smarter than me.
Like the following advice, some of which has stuck with me for years:
"Go ahead and be an 'individual.' Just do it on your own time." For a long time—longer than I care to admit—I let my personality overshadow my roles. That definitely impacted my performance and limited my opportunities. Sure, we're all individuals, but we all depend on others, just like they depend on us.
Your primary goal is to meet the needs of employees, customers, etc. on their terms.  Stay true to your ethics and values, but never “be yourself” just to prove something to yourself.
"Place no value on face value." It’s hard not to perceive the actions of others through the lens of how their behavior impacts us, especially if that impact is negative.
But there is always more going on. Most employees don't try to do a bad job. Most customers don’t intend to difficult. Most vendors don’t actively seek to miss delivery dates. There’s always a deeper level; fail to look for what may lie behind an action and you could miss the opportunity to make a bad situation better for everyone.
"He’s just as scared of you." I wrestled in high school, and during the summers I went to regional and national tournaments. Some wrestlers seemed larger than life simply because they were from different states and wore t-shirts from high-profile schools, camps, and wrestling clubs. Until a referee made an off-hand comment, I never imagined some might see me the same way.
The same is true in a business setting. Hiding underneath the Gucci and the Stanford b-school degree and the VC name-dropping is a person who might be just as nervous and intimidated as you. Symbols of success are just symbols. The playing field is always more level than it appears.
Sometimes it even tilts your way.
"When you fire an employee, you haven't done your job if you need to say more than, 'We have to let you go.'" Barring a major incident, firing an employee is the last step in a process. Identify sub-par performance, provide additional training or resources, set targets and timelines for performance improvement, and follow up when progress is lacking.
Termination shouldn’t be a surprise that requires a lengthy explanation. Do your job right and the employee already knows why he is being fired.
Even so...
"Firing an employee should bother you for days." Even if you did everything right, firing employees feels terrible. You've impacted their careers, their lives, and their families. ... It should bother you.
If you don’t feel terrible after you fire someone it’s time to rethink whether you should run a business.
"Always sell above your comfort zone." Selling, especially myself, doesn’t come easy for me. I felt more comfortable waiting for bosses to discover my talents and offer promotions. I feel more comfortable waiting for potential clients to somehow "discover" me.
That's a problem, because success in any field or profession is built on salesmanship: The willingness and ability to determine needs, overcome objections, and provide solutions.
Be enthusiastic, especially about yourself. Don’t worry: People will respond positively.
"Pick something to believe in and stick with it." When I raced motorcycles a former World Champion told me he always walked an unfamiliar track before ever riding a lap. That ritual let him discover details about the track and racing lines he might otherwise miss. Good enough for him, good enough for me, so I did the same thing.
Did it help? Placebo or not, I certainly thought it did. So, therefore, it did.
Create a routine to follow every time you face a task that makes you nervous.  Gradually the routine itself will give you confidence.
Think of it like wearing your lucky underwear (hey, don’t laugh, I know a guy who has lucky underwear), except in this case your "superstition" actually contributes to your performance.
"Sometimes you could just shut up." I used to talk even more than I do now. I thought I was insightful and clever and witty. Most of the time I wasn't. So why did I talk so much? Big hat, no cattle. I still sometimes realize I'm talking because I’m interested in what I have to say and not because the other person is interested.
Truly confident people don't feel the need to talk at all. Never speak just to please yourself. You end up pleasing no one.