Narrative 4 "i Feel Energized"

• Library: Positive Professionals: Creating High-Performing Profitable Firms Through Engagement (ABA) (2017 Ed.)

Narrative 4 "I Feel Energized"

Renowned management scholar Peter Drucker wrote, "Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you." We need energy to fuel work engagement—including physical, emotional, and psychological energy (Kahn, 1990). If we feel depleted, we can't be our best.

We next turn to strategies to build your own energy and the energy of those around you:

1. Instigate Positivity Infusions: Inject workplaces with energy from positive emotions.
2. Support the Constant Juggle of Work and Home: Enable people to invest fully at work while maintaining a happy home life.
3. Encourage Recovery and Rejuvenation: Protect activities that maintain energy in the face of ongoing work demands.

All of these strategies are designed to bolster the psychological experience of engagement in "I feel energized."

1. Instigate Positivity Infusions

Just like our iPhones need a daily charge of electrical juice, we need positive emotions to energize work engagement, motivation, and optimal performance (Junça-Silva et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2016). But, in our work as lawyers, the daily negativity onslaught can crowd out positive emotions. Below we explore two questions. First, is it really all that harmful when negative emotions often outweigh positive emotions? Second, what can we do to incorporate more positive jolts into our daily activities?

Outnumbering the Bad with Extra Good

Negative emotions aren't all bad. They can facilitate detailed-oriented, analytical thinking (Bledow et al., 2011). They also signal that something is not going well and provide motivation to take corrective action. Frustration, anxiety, and fear are emotions that often attend learning new things, tough decisions, meeting new people, and otherwise expanding our horizons. We need negative emotions to succeed.

But problems can arise when negative emotions get out of whack—as they so often can for lawyers. The continual negativity often arising in the practice of law is compounded by the "negativity bias," which is a natural predisposition to pay attention to bad things (Baumeister et al., 2001). To survive, it was critical for early humans to notice and react quickly to bad things—like poisonous snakes. Negative emotions had the effect of narrowing focus and attention, which aided quick, appropriate action to danger (Fredrickson, 1998, 2003). This quick reaction to threats would have been more important to survival than correctly detecting a positive opportunity. The result of our evolutionary history is that bad events produce stronger emotional reactions and have longer-lasting effects on our emotions and behaviors than good events (Baumeister et al., 2001). After analyzing over 240 articles in a review paper that spanned nearly 50 pages, a group of respected academics concluded simply: "Bad is stronger than good" (Baumeister et al., 2001; see also Rozin & Royzman, 2001).

This natural negativity bias can be worse for lawyers. As part of our jobs, our attention continually is captured by everything that might go wrong. We develop mental habits to constantly scan for the negative. Positive thoughts can get crowded out by all the risks and errors that we can't help but see. It's like we're inside a scary movie wearing night vision goggles and only we can see all the monsters lurking in the dark. The challenge is to take off the Monster Goggles when they're not necessary. Strategies for doing so through flexible optimism are discussed later (see pp. 167-172).

Although bad is stronger than good, well-being and optimal motivation still can prevail if positive emotions outnumber the bad (Baumeister et al., 2001; Fredrickson, 2013). Though there's disagreement about the exact balance needed, a variety of workplace studies indicate that the minimum "positivity ratio" in the workplace for high-quality performance is about 3:1 (Fredrickson, 2013). This means that, for people to feel psychologically well and perform well at work, three positive emotions are necessary to counteract one bad one.

Dr. John Gottman—a marriage relationship researcher—has made similar findings (Gottman & Silver, 2000). His work suggests that, at least in close relationships, bad interactions are five times as powerful as a good one. It also suggests that, for optimal relationships, decreasing negative behaviors may be as important (if not more important) than increasing positive ones. He has found that four bad behaviors are particularly destructive: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. These behaviors are so toxic that Gottman calls them the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." They're described in Figure 24 with real-life law firm examples to help you recognize and avoid them.

Based on his 5:1 ratio and the Four Horsemen, Gottman has developed an index that has enabled him to predict whether a marriage will end in divorce with an astounding 94 percent accuracy after observing a couple for only a few minutes. Although marriages are not the same as work relationships, Gottman's research provides persuasive proof of a positivity ratio for optimal functioning in relationships. It also suggests that we pay particularly close attention to reducing or eliminating highly damaging negative behaviors like the Four Horsemen.

Whatever the precise positivity ratio might be for the workplace, the main point is that law firms will not function as well as they can unless negative emotions are reduced and are substantially outweighed by positive emotions. While there might be some upper limit at which too much positive emotion becomes dysfunctional, research indicates that, generally, the more positive emotions, the better (Fredrickson, 2013).

Horseman	Description	Example
Criticism	Attacking the person rather than making a genuine, respectful effort to address the specific issue.	"No reasonable lawyer would've thought it made sense to do that."
Contempt	Engaging in disrespectful behaviors that communicate disgust; mocking with sarcasm, ridicule, name-calling, mimicking, body language such as eye-rolling.	"That argument makes absolutely no sense. What are you even trying to say here? Is this written in English?"
Defensiveness	Fishing for excuses when feeling unjustly accused; conveying that the problem is you not me.	"No, I didn't get that done yesterday like I said I would. Give me a break. What am I supposed to do when multiple people are always asking me to get things done at the same time?"
Stonewalling	Withdrawing; shutting down and closing off; lacking responsiveness by tuning out, turning away, acting busy.	Not speaking to an associate for a month after she says she doesn't have time to work on your case.

Figure 24 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Lisitsa, 2013)

Given how important positive emotions are and how frequent negative emotions intrude on lawyers' days, what we all need is a Mood Tracker—like a Fitbit for our emotions. Rather than tracking our steps and heart rate, Mood Trackers would track positive vs. negative emotions and set off an alarm when negative emotions get out of hand. Watching out for this ratio is important because excessive negative emotions can be corrosive to mental health and organizational success. It deflates work engagement (Kim et al., 2009), contributes to burnout (Swider & Zimmerman, 2010), and harms well-being and job performance (Barrick & Mount, 2009). Not surprisingly, negative emotions have a large and negative impact on follower performance—larger even than the positive impact that work engagement has on performance (Dalal et al., 2012).

We now can answer the inquiry I posed at the outset: "Is it really all that harmful when negative emotions often outweigh positive emotions?" The answer is a definitive yes. This makes it all the more important to address the second inquiry: "What can we do to incorporate more positive jolts into our daily activities?" Let's now turn to that question.

Injecting Daily Positive Jolts

Above, I already assured you that engagement strategies don't require that you install a Google-esque play room at your firm (though it couldn't hurt!). And I'm not going to break my promise now just because we're talking about boosting positive emotions. If Nerf Zombie Blasters, mini-basketball hoops, and pool tables aren't the answer, what is? Shall we obsessively chase feeling happy? Constantly monitor our happiness levels? Or concentrate on being happier by the sheer force of our will? The answer is no to all of these strategies. Happiness is like a finicky high school crush: Desperation is stinky cologne that turns them off. Similarly, forced efforts to put ourselves in a state of happiness can backfire and actually make us feel worse (Datu & King, 2016).

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

A positive emotion-boosting strategy that actually works is obvious and a little surprising at the same time: We should plan it. By that I don't mean that we should plan to feel happy but plan to do things that likely will make us happy. As the old adage goes, focus on the journey not the destination. Researchers have found that people who deliberately plan their days to incorporate opportunities that can lead to naturally occurring positive emotions actually experience more of them and have higher well-being. They have named this positive mental habit "prioritizing positivity" (Datu & King, 2016). People who prioritize positivity rate themselves high on questions like this: "A priority for me is experiencing happiness in everyday life." Abraham Lincoln had it about right when he said, "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be."

This seems pretty simple, right? Even so, I'll confess that I give myself mediocre ratings on scales like this. And I'm sure it was worse while I was practicing law. For task-oriented people like lawyers, even...