November 02, 2022
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Assuming that we could all use a little boost of happiness these days, I want to share some thoughts from a great book with you. If you get something out of it, I highly suggest getting your hands on the book for the full read. Below is a mix of Achor’s words directly from his book, The Happiness Advantage, my own summary of some of his points and my own reflections, including some thoughts on how this might be applicable to volunteer or donor management. Many of us have been taught that if we become successful, we will then become happy. The success, we’ve been told, has to come first. But Shawn Achor calls that whole notion into question. Recent research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience have proven that we’ve had the order in the relationship between success and happiness all wrong. It is not that success leads to happiness, but rather, that happiness leads to success. Doctors in a positive mood demonstrated almost 3 times more intelligence and creativity in diagnosing a case than doctors in a neutral state, and they made accurate diagnoses 19 times faster (and all it took to make them think happy thoughts was to be given a lollipop!) Optimistic salespeople outsell pessimist salespeople by over 50% Students made to feel happy about something before a math test outperform their neutral peers This has three important ramifications in volunteer management and donor relations. If you start your day or ready yourself for a challenging task by reflecting on things that make you happy or doing something that makes you happy, you’ll perform better for it. The environment in which your volunteers are engaged clearly matters. If they are happy, what they will succeed in accomplishing for you will go up. Campaigns encouraging donors to give out of a sense of happiness create a different experience with your organization than campaigns encouraging donors to give out of a sense of guilt. Happiness can act as an inoculation against stress. Tax season, as you can imagine, is a very stressful time for tax auditors. To put his seven principles to the test, Achor delivered three hours of positive psychology training to 250 managers at KPMG. When tested again later on, those auditors that had gone through the training reported significantly higher life satisfaction scores and lower stress levels than the control group who had not received the training. Change is possible. You might think that you are who are and that’s that. A growing body of science is teaching us that this just isn’t the case. Advances in the field of neuroplasticity show that the human brain has enormous growth potential. We don’t know the limits, but we do know that science has proven that brains can and do change and grow, that there are numerous ways we can rewire our brains, and that adopting the habits that improve our mindset have proven, long-lasting effects.
January 26, 2022Can you imagine an organization said to support Black people with no or just one Black person on the board? It’s like a panel discussing women’s rights with no women (which also happens). It makes no sense. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair,” is a famous quote by Shirley Chisholm I often hear in advocacy groups. I still believe it’s sound advice, but it also doesn’t capture how hard it can be for some people to carry around their chair everywhere, all the time. And it takes the pressure off the others at the table — they don’t have to change a thing. They are comfortably sitting in their chairs and don’t even have to acknowledge your chair is different or how much effort it took for you to bring it to the table. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair”
June 30, 2022In 2002, when Marty Olsen Laney wrote The Introvert Advantage, it was believed that only one-third of the general population had introverted tendencies. But in a 2010 article in Psychology Today, Nancy Helgoe noted that introverts make up 50% of the U.S. population. Why the discrepancy? According to Helgoe, “Our perceptual biases lead us to overestimate the number of extroverts because they are noisier and tend to hog the spotlight.” In reality, many introverts describe themselves as social, creative and, yes, dynamic. Checking your assumptions and learning as much as you can about introverts are positive first steps toward engaging them in your organization.
