Alice Olins is a powerhouse of professional development, helping women thrive at work, who has built a brilliant community over at The Step Up Club. I have been inspired, motivated, challenged and encouraged by her work over the years. So, to mark International Women’s Day this Friday, she has written a guest post for Well Well Well about getting out of a work-related funk using a lesson from her three-year-old son…
In a former life, Rosamund and I were Red magazine colleagues. She sat in the Entertainment Director’s chair (I remember a lot of excitement in the office when Idris Elba was on her interview roster) and I was over the way as Fashion Features Director: great freebies, fewer hot males.
Today, I am without my fashion hat (buried long ago) and instead stand before you with nearly a decade’s worth of professional development experience in my back pocket. Nevertheless, when deciding what to write for this special IWD-inspired newsletter, I went so far around the houses that I lost my way a bit. Despite knowing all of the reasoning behind, and tools to mitigate, procrastination, the cobbler (me) sometimes still has holes in her own shoes. There is a pressure in picking up the microphone to someone else’s audience.
I flicked through old notes, went for a wander, called a friend, shut my laptop too forcefully, thought some more and deleted chunks of text. Usually, as a seasoned journo, I can bash out words with wanton abandon. But nothing felt quite right for you, for this International Women’s Day celebration.
And then it hit me. The endless, often thankless, battle of being a woman in the workplace is a layered, complex, sometimes brutal and unfair odyssey that we all face in some form or other: how to tackle all of this in a pithy and preferably entertaining manner? I figured that, in a three-minute read, we can’t possibly reorganise societal imbalance or reprogram systemic biases.
What we can do, though, is take a leaf out of my young son’s book of life.
For his recent birthday, Monty, who was turning four, declared that he wanted to go bowling. Now, I’m a fan of a little ten pin action, but three year olds have very small fingers and tiny baby arms - all I could see was a nursery class of injuries. But he was adamant. For context, Monty has two older sisters (12 and 10) so punches well above his weight on most things in his young life. There was no budging his birthday vision.
So we took 15 three year olds to the bowling alley. No one dropped a ball on their toe and, while the other parents shared a sense of confusion about his choice (every other kid has had an entertainer and apple juice cartons), Monty was buzzing.
Monty, I realise, epitomises the Attitude Advantage*.
In Monty’s case, optimism brought him the party of his dreams. For you, professional optimism - how you approach work - is the strongest predictor of success.
Success Brings Happiness? No. Optimism Brings Success.
As proven by research**, only 25% of your work success is predicted by IQ and knowledge. So what’s the other 75%, I hear you wondering? Well, that is shared between a positive approach to work, optimism, social support and, interestingly, your ability to view challenges not as threats but as opportunities. All of which, I see now, Monty employed with strategic brilliance.
Harnessing The Attitude Advantage.
How you work is within your control, and that is the most exciting bit of this story. Optimistic people - those with the Attitude Advantage (Monty types) - tend to be over 30% more productive and have three times higher levels of creativity.*** Since creativity is itself an indicator of workplace resilience (generating ideas, coping with change, embracing uncertainty), you can see where I’m going with all of this.
So after all of my roundabout ideas, Monty’s story, and some persuasive statistics, I am going to share how you too can leverage this self-driven advantage at work.
Flex Your Attitude Advantage: Alice’s 3 Step Plan
YOUR MINDSET: As Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968 became the first Black woman to be elected to the United States Congress, said: ‘We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.’ Ooof, this quote still kicks me in the gut. Who isn’t held back by the unfairly negative view that they hold of themselves?
I am not going to lie; strengthening your mindset takes hard work, tough self-talk and consistency. All of which you are capable of. Here are some ways to breathe optimism into your mindset, and enjoy the advantages it brings.Manage Your Chatter: That negative voice inside your head needs serious ring-fencing. Start by noticing what you repeatedly tell yourself. It might be that you’re not confident enough, not experienced enough, not able enough… you know what I am talking about. Write them down, then look at these beliefs and interrogate their truth. What we believe usually isn’t what exists. The best way to get to the truth is to find evidence to contradict your misplaced thinking. Each time that negative thought pops up, slap it back with facts. Ethan Kross’ book Chatter, which I recommend to almost all of my 1-2-1 clients, is brilliant on this topic.
Celebrate Discomfort: We are hardwired to think that discomfort equals failure. That, when your ship is in rocky waters, the worst will come to pass. Instead of getting sucked into the discomfort = failure thinking, tell your internal voice that perhaps the discomfort is actually a segue to something exciting and new. Change rarely presents itself in an unexpected puff of smoke. Look back on important work moments (big and small) and I bet the majority came about after some choppy waters. I tell myself, sometimes I literally speak this out loud: ‘OK, this feels shit, something exciting is on the horizon.’ It helps me cope with uncomfortable situations and keeps my optimism levels where they need to be.
BE A SELF-LEADER: Hands up if you consider yourself a leader. If you didn’t raise your arm, I’m going to politely suggest that you are wrong. We all lead in our own lives. In fact, we all lead externally too: leadership is not a position, it’s a behaviour. Just as we can lead others through positive influence, inspiration and role-modelling, we can treat ourselves with the same importance and vision. Be a self-leader, and you will naturally increase your optimism levels. Your Attitude Advantage rests deeply in your ability to lead yourself. Here are two ways to boost your self-leadership confidence.
Own Your Potential: When I ask clients how they lead themselves at work, or how they self-promote, they tell me that they share previous successes. This is great, as a starter. What they are missing, though, is sharing (and knowing) where they are going. One study showed that it wasn’t the most accomplished candidates that were successful in a job interview, but rather the ones who could articulate their potential. Do you know where you hope to be next year? Have you thought about what you’d like to achieve in five years’ time? Challenge yourself to think ahead and, crucially, share these thoughts and aspirations with others.
Initiate To Motivate: Motivation comes from doing, not the other way around. Have you ever noticed that you feel most motivated when you’re getting shit done? Yup, well the more that you can find opportunities to succeed, the higher your motivation will rise. From there comes happiness, optimism and scope for bigger and better. Your Attitude Advantage is deeply connected to your levels of motivation. Take the initiative and find good stuff to spend your time on, then feel the benefits.
SOCIAL SUPPORT: Goodness me, it is important to have a safety net of people when it comes to achieving work success. We are not automata yet. Humans need other humans to thrive. Your social support offers so many types of inspiration, open doors, diversity of thought, opportunities, challenges, comfort… the list is endless. Know your people, feel able to lean on them, and you will be happier and more successful.
Remember Helping Feels Good: We often, wrongly, believe that when we ask for guidance or help from others that we are a burden. Let’s look at that belief another way around. Think of a time when a friend asked you to speak to someone you didn’t know in their social circle. Perhaps it was to offer advice from your industry perspective, or maybe it was a request for a different, mutual contact. How did they make you feel? I am going to guess that you were flattered. It is nice to be able to support others. In fact, it feeds optimism and self-leadership levels, and you know how I feel about those. Next time you need a favour from someone, feel proud of your courage and jump right in. The more we lean on others, the better we do across pretty much every success metric.
Seek Diversity In Everything: It is normal to get siloed into our specific tracks of thought, our ways of doing things, the people with whom we interact. Just as there is joy and abundance in learning to be open to challenges, so the same is true of being open to difference. Check yourself next time you reach for the advice of your closest friend. Who else could you ask? With different perspectives, you fill your cup with a sense of new possibilities, or powerful creativity, because you learn to view work from a different place and, often, that place is wonderful and innovative. Look at your network and, if it requires an update, who can join the dots for you and bring these new perspectives? Often, expanding your network simply requires an email and a direct ask. This is another way of building your initiative muscle. You don’t need to go crazy and send hundreds of LinkedIn requests. Simply ask some friends to connect you to someone new, and your social support will grow in wonderful, inspiring ways.
Now, that is a lot of information. So, here is my final piece of advice: choose one thing to focus on for the rest of the month. I am a huge believer in micro-learning, which means little and often. I wanted to share a good chunk of information with you today, as I am not sure when we will meet again. That said, I am just over the way at The Step Up Club, so please do have a look, and perhaps consider subscribing.
I send useful, action-led emails every week, plus I host fortnightly meet-ups so that the community can share, support and work alongside each other in real time. It would be amazing to welcome you in.
Until then, remember, whatever obstacles stand in your way, investing in yourself can be as simple as learning to shift your mindset to optimism, and then enjoying all of the benefits of your newly polished Attitude Advantage.