Category: The Top 1% Mindset: Optimism, Mental Clarity, Happiness, and Motivation

Unconscious bias is part of being a human. We all have emotions and points of view tied to our core beliefs. These core beliefs affect how we think and feel about everything in our life. How can we make our bias an asset?

Our biases lead us to seek out or even create an environment that reinforces our beliefs.  We build our daily activities around people, places, and things that make us feel safe and bring us comfort. As a result, in our daily lives, we don’t broaden our point of view.  Instead, we harden our biases.

Surrounding ourselves with people we like is normal.  People who look and think the way we do become our friends.   Following our biases, we become a member of a group that helps us advance our interests.

Therefore, in this case, unconscious bias is a good trait.

The Risks of Unconscious Bias

The painful triggers from our biases make us angry, even before we fully understand the situations that trigger us.

In these cases, unconscious bias is a thief.  It steals our happiness.  We not only suffer fear and anger.  These feelings can hijack our judgement. They can damage relationships and put us in pointless confrontations.

Likewise, the pleasant triggers put us at risk of accepting and even doing things that are not always in our best interest.  We fail to see the benefits of changing our beliefs and, therefore, our behavior.

Pause Before Acting

When unconscious bias triggers our emotions, we can do and say things that we soon regret.  Rather than risk harming ourselves socially and professionally through hasty reactions, we can do things to deal with the feeling before we act.

Here are some ways that we can pause before acting.

• Step away from the situation. Literally go to another location.
• Take a deep breath.
• If you are in a situation where a person is pressing you to act, ask for time to think.
• Write our feelings in a private note, but never send angry letters or emails.  Simply writing can take the sting out of painful feelings.
• Discuss the situation with a person who is not involved in the problem.
• Realize that doing nothing is, in some cases, the best way to handle a situation that stirs our bias.

The mere awareness of acting out of anger is a signal that we are at risk of increasing the size of a problem. Accept this awareness and pause before acting.

Understanding Unconscious Bias

By understanding our unconscious bias, we can grow.  We can learn ways to make better decisions.  We can become more effective as a friend, co-worker, or leader. Our lives can become more rewarding and happy.

Anger Management:  People who cannot control their tempers can ruin their career and the career of others.  How do some people manage anger to create success for themselves and their organization?

Anger protects us against danger. However, acting out of anger clutters our thinking and undermines our success.
~ www.jaywren.com

Four Steps to Anger Management

Here are four areas of anger management that can help you be more successful in building great relationships in stressful situations.

Pause Before Acting

When you first feel anger, pause and wait for your emotions to become less intense.  If possible, step away to process your emotions.

Avoid saying things when you are angry. Rational thinking can evaporate when our feelings hijack our reasoning.

Certainly, don’t say things or send angry letters or emails that you may regret later.

Seek Mentoring

A mentor might be anyone who can help you work through your feelings and take constructive actions.

Discussing our feelings with a person who is not involved can help us process our anger. Furthermore, just writing about our feelings can help remove the sting of our experience.  Once we have those feelings on paper, we can use our notes for our discussion with our mentor.

Let Go of Unproductive Emotions

If people have offended us, we feel sore.  A common response is to hold onto our anger.  Resentments are dangerous.  They can damage our health and our relationships.  When we feel angry for past wrongs, focusing on our breathing can help us get out of our head and into the present moment.

Set Boundaries

Negative, angry people cause us stress and damage our performance. They create anger in the people around them.

It is not always easy to avoid negative people. Likewise, changing the behavior of other people is difficult. However, speaking out to set boundaries on behavior that you will not tolerant is often all that we need to do.  Where possible, seek alliances with other people to help protect your boundaries.  Report abusive behavior.

Mindful Moments: How do great minds gain focus to make great decisions?

In the existence of humans, infinity is a series of moments. Mindful moments empower us to be alert, aware, and engaged. ~ www.jaywren.com

When I focus on my thoughts, I give them power.  Productive, healthy thinking leads to success. Distracted, painful thinking leads to mistakes.

When I am regretting the past or fearing the future, I am creating distractions with my own thoughts.  Furthermore, when I am analyzing my work instead of simply doing my work, I am creating mental clutter in the pathway of clear thinking.

Clearing My Thinking

I am responsible for the thoughts I hold in my head. Sometimes, all I have to do is change the conversation I am having with myself.  However, sometimes, I have to do some simple things to change my thinking.

A Fresh Mind

Getting plenty of rest from a good night’s sleep is the first step in having a fresh mind.

A second step is to take breaks during the day.  Going for a walk or simply stepping away from my desk and sitting quietly help refresh my mind.

Meditation also helps, both in the short term and the long term.  People who practice daily meditation in the form of breathing, mantras, or prayers develop healthier, more trusting minds.  These practices allow the person to become centered or have faith.  They see the world around them.

A Higher Level of Thinking

When athletes are at their highest level of thinking, their mind intuitively adjusts. They process decisions without analysis. They enter a state of mental flow.

This state is the healthiest form of thinking.  We are free from anxiety, regret, and distractions.  Our mind makes decisions before we realize that the need to make a decision.

Mindful Moments

Most people have mindful moments.  They sense life around them and have healthy emotions that are appropriate to their experience.  Likewise, they think clearly.

Building the flow of mindful moments leads to a more powerful way to think for success.

Happiness is easy when everything is going our way. Some people seem happy all the time. How can we be happy even when life is challenging?

Feeling unhappy is normal.  Staying unhappy is not.  ~ www.jaywren.com

Happiness Takes Place Inside of Our Head.

When things frustrate, disappoint, or anger us, we feel unhappy.

These unhappy feelings have a healthy purpose.  They alert us to problems.  The discomfort of unhappiness motivates us to make changes either in ourselves or our circumstances.

When we are mentally and emotionally healthy, we can make these changes.

Furthermore, realizing that feelings take place inside of us helps us understand that we can have control over our feelings.

The Questions for Overcoming Unhappiness.

First, can we simply let the feelings pass?  Thinking about the unhappy experience heightens our unhappiness.  Even years later, when we think of bad experiences, the unhappy feelings can return.  Therefore, not thinking about the cause of our unhappiness allows us to find happiness and return to the present moment.  A process for letting feelings pass is to sit with a feeling and focus on the feeling, not the things that we think are causing our unhappiness.

Second, can we change things that make us unhappy?  If we can, we can concentrate on solutions and not the problem.

Third, is the situation beyond our control? We can concentrate on not making the situation worse. Furthermore, we can avoid repeating mistakes that we made to create the problem.

Fourth, what is our role in the problem? Nobody enjoys looking at their mistakes. Why should we look at our role in the problem when we can blame other people, places, or things? A useful process is to write why we are unhappy. We include in our description what happened and how it affected us. Then we look at our role in creating the problem. From there we correct the mistakes that we made. In this process, we find that we can more easily accept what happened and move on beyond our happiness.

Fifth, is our unhappiness mood related?  To understand how moods affect the things that make us unhappy, pay attention to what is going on when the unhappiness returns.  Are you hungry, tired, or lonely?  These things and other things push us into lower moods.  Consequently, the things that make us unhappy swing into force with our moods.

Career Burnout: In a culture where people believe that working hard can overcome any obstacle, reality teaches us that we have limitations. We burnout. ~ www.jaywren.com

I am a few days late writing this article on purpose.  For the past two weeks I have had trouble writing.  During that time, I sensed that I needed a break.  Career burnout is not new to me.  I have learned from my experience that relentlessly pushing through obstacles leads to not being able to work at all.

Now that I feel better, I want to talk about the trouble that career burnout has caused me.

When Relentless Effort Becomes Destructive

The term “burnout” in reference to job performance comes from an article “Staff Burn-Out” by Herbert J. Freudenberger, first published in January 1974  in the Journal of Social Issues.
In 1980, Herbert Freudenberger collaborated with Richelson Géraldine to write the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement.

My Experience with Career Burnout

I am a high achiever who believed for years that I could work past any obstacle.

Whatever the job requirements, I would exceed them.  I believed that exceeding requirements would always create greater success. When my results did not match my expectations, I worked harder.

Pushing myself this way has led to periods in my life when I just could not work.

For me, recognizing the difference between a challenging period in my career and real burnout are hard to see. Here are symptoms I respond to before burning out.

• Depression
• Physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion
• Inability to engage mentally in my work
• Apathy
• Fear, anger, and uncertainty
• Despair of achieving my goals
• Inability to be present for my work or my family
• Inability to accept that my relentless pursuit of success was self-defeating

8 Steps I Take to Prevent Burnout

Here are 8 simple steps I take to prevent going over the edge into career burnout.

1. Taking breaks.
2. Finding emotional support through friendships and family.
3. Trying new things: new routine, new skills, new tools
4. Making a list of my work priorities.
5. Doing one thing at a time.
6. Getting regular physical exercise.
7. Using techniques for resting my mind from work: meditation, short breaks, meeting or calling friends to relieve stress.
8. Watching or listening to things that are relaxing, motivational, or inspirational

I continually work on balance in work, entertainment, exercise, family, and quiet time.  Experience has taught me that balance more than relentless effort leads to long-term success.

Perspective: How is it that some people live balanced lives while other people damage themselves and their relationship through a loss of perspective?

When perspective is not automatic, the happiest people create perspective. ~ www.jaywren.com

Perspective: How to Refocus, Realign, and Create Happiness

These three steps help me keep perspective. They may help you.

Refocus.

When we focus on any thought, that thought becomes the largest idea in our head. When we focus on things that people have said that angers us, we lose perspective on the value of what people say.

To get perspective, we must step away and try to understand what the person is saying.  Just because we are angry doesn’t mean that we don’t need to hear the other person out.

To get enough space to understand the point of the other person, we may need to take time and get advice on how to handle the question.

Gaining perspective is not always automatic.

Realign

Often our thinking is out of line with things that are best for us.  For example, when we hang on to damaging habits, our thinking is out of line and our reasoning can’t reach us.

At one time, I was a three-pack of day smoker.  I grew up in a culture where everyone smoked.  Smoking just made sense of as a way a of life.  It was sort of rite of passage into adulthood.

My thinking was so out of line that I could not even reason that the warning labels on cigarettes applied to my health.  For me, cigarettes were an addiction.  Like other addictions, nicotine addiction creates a denial of reality.

I couldn’t align my thinking to reality until I came down with bronchitis three times over a few months.  I finally said to myself that smoking was not for me.  I knew people who might, on occasion, have a cigar after dinner.  However, I was smoking myself to death.

It took a bit of work, but I built up a system of defense and support that enabled me to quit smoking decades ago.

Create Happiness.

I learned how to create a happiness perspective.  I found that I could not just stop being angry.  I had to do things to things instead of being angry.  I had to take a deep breath.  Second, I had to learn to listen.  Third, I had to learn to step away until my anger passed.

Perspective: How to Refocus, Realign, and Create Happiness

In closing, I still have trouble remembering that happiness comes from the inside.  Even when I have wonderful things happen to me, my attention can turn to the things in my life that I don’t like.

Furthermore, I am still at risk of not aligning my thinking to the realities of my life.

Therefore, I must continue to grow and work on creating perspective.