4 Ways to Manage Perfectionism for Success
Perfectionism has recently been a big topic for discussion in the workplace. While perfectionists are highly motivated, dedicated workers, a study on perfectionism published in the Harvard Business Review states, “perfectionism is strongly and consistently related to numerous ‘detrimental’ work and non-work outcomes, including higher levels of burnout, stress, workaholism, anxiety, and depression.” Not only that, but another recent study of nearly 42,000 people published in the Harvard Business Review indicates that perfectionism is on the rise in the US, Canada and the UK. Now more than ever, we need great strategies to manage perfectionism in the workplace.
How do we create a work environment that supports the assets perfectionists bring to our teams while helping to shield them from the potential harmful effects that can come from perfectionism? Here are 4 ways you can create a supportive environment where perfectionists can thrive, and your team can enjoy the benefits of having those highly motivated team members among you.
1. Model a Healthy Response to Mistakes
How do you handle mistakes or a missed deadline? If you respond with grace and compassion, you’re modeling healthy behavior for your team. We are only human, right? Creating a workspace where it’s safe and normal to make mistakes can help perfectionists combat the need to achieve perfection every time on every task. At KCC, we love to remind ourselves that we don’t save lives so, if something doesn’t go the way we planned it, we find a solution and move on!
2. Set Reasonable, Healthy Goals
Make sure your team’s goals are based on working at a sustainable pace. Having an all-hands, late-night, big push to complete a job once in a while is okay, but no one can keep up that pace indefinitely. In fact, it’s a recipe for burnout, especially for a perfectionist. Energy and expectation management are key! It’s important to emphasize resilience…Like Muhammed Ali once said, “There’s nothing wrong with getting knocked down, as long as you get right back up.”
3. Perform Regular Check-ins
As deadlines approach, check in with your team, especially your perfectionists. Are they feeling a lot of pressure? Do they need help to prioritize or to break down a large goal into smaller, more achievable tasks? Jump in and offer support and ideas to make all team members more efficient.
4. Give Regular Positive Feedback
It’s easy for a perfectionist’s inner critic to become the dominant voice giving feedback on their work. Offering regular, specific, positive feedback helps keep reasonable expectations and performance front and center. Remember, perfectionists are highly engaged people. Keeping that energy positive not only helps your team member stay in a healthier state, but brings even more motivation and energy to your whole team.
Build Your Best Team
Looking for more great strategies to build an effective team? Check out our workshop on Building Effective Teams and get information on best practices and tips for fully utilizing your team’s skills, styles and talents.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
4 Ways Personal Development Boosts Leadership Skills
It is exciting to lead people and it is a critical role. According to experts, leaders can have a direct impact on their team’s happiness and self-esteem. That said, in today’s new reality, with fewer resources and a hybrid workforce, being in charge of a team presents unexpected and complex challenges that can leave even seasoned managers at a loss. The solution? Focused personal development training or coaching gives leaders the effective tools they need to navigate these challenging times.
Personal development assists leaders and managers in critical ways. Here are 4 key reasons to take advantage of the “back-to-school” season and prioritize personal development to boost your leadership skills.
1. Identify and leverage your strengths and manage your weaknesses
Personal development often incorporates assessments that allow managers to discover strengths and opportunities for development. It also teaches how to strengthen both. This assessment is an important first step toward more effective leadership. Self-awareness is one of the top key competencies for leaders, and I always say that an assessment is like a mirror. Even if you know yourself well and/or if you have used them before, it’s always good to take stock again from time to time…and who knows, you may have blind spots!
You can choose any of these tools: a potential assessment, a psychometric questionnaire, a personality test, a 360° feedback process or a survey sent to your team. Pursuing personal development that includes identifying strengths to leverage, weaknesses to work on, and then after that targeting course corrections where needed, will give leaders huge opportunities to be more effective, retain employees longer, and meet or exceed goals.
2. Set goals and share with your team
Another important way personal development through training or coaching assists leaders is by identifying and breaking a large goal into smaller, achievable steps. This is useful not only in preparing your action plan. It also helps you make sure that your development is on your radar and remains a priority.
Communicating your plan with your team is also very impactful. It allows you to demonstrate authenticity and even your vulnerability. It also shows that you “walk the talk” when you say development is something you believe in and take seriously. This can inspire employees who would also benefit from personal development to take action as well. It helps boost team morale and improves employee retention.
3. Stay up-to-date
We’ve probably all experienced sometimes being a little behind the times professionally. The best practices of yesterday may not all apply today. With the fast-paced back-to-back changes in today’s world, it’s necessary and inspiring to look for new ideas. The latest, science-based trends, advice and recommendations on how to adjust and adapt your approach will help you to be as successful as possible.
4. Discuss and share ideas with others
Another way that personal development training assists management is through focused discussions. These conversations involve a trainer and other participants from or outside your organization. A training session gives you an opportunity to press pause on your go, go, go mode to step back and have value-added conversations with others; checking in on what others are experiencing and what solutions they’re proposing. Learning from others and sometimes just validating that you are not alone, or that you are on track, are great ways to re-energize. They help you feel even more prepared to be the best leader you can!
Are you ready to prioritize your personal development?
If you’re feeling that fall, back-to-school vibe and you’re ready to jump into personal development, stay tuned! The KCC team has a big announcement about our new Express Online Training Sessions which will launch in a few weeks. If you prefer a one-on-one approach, our certified coaches would be more than happy to set up a free exploration call with you.
Also, here’s a great test that will help you target leadership growth based on your leadership style: Work Personality Index (WPI) – Leadership Report.
This test takes about 20 minutes and identifies your leadership strengths. It helps you discover unleveraged potential and opportunities for growth. The step-by-step results show leaders exactly what to do—and stop doing—to unleash their team’s potential and maximize personal effectiveness.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
4 Amazing Benefits of Play
Summertime is here! Are you ready for a break? The wonderful truth is that taking a break and making time for play and fun actually creates lots of benefits in other areas of your life.
Now that the weather is lovely and warm again, it’s the perfect time of year to get outside and get our bodies busy making vitamin D, reconnecting with friends and family, and even getting some much-needed activity.
We all recognize the importance of play in the growth and development and happiness of children, but what we may not realize is the critical role that it plays in our adult lives. Spending time at play offers lots of benefits. Here are the top 4 amazing benefits of play that will help to increase your happiness.
1. Boosts Creativity and Problem-solving Skills
Sometimes all our brains need is an opportunity to think outside the box to get our creative juices flowing. Playing a game with friends or taking a pottery class can be just the thing to jumpstart the brain into thinking more creatively in other areas of our lives.
It also boosts problem-solving skills. For example, playing a game where you have to make strategic decisions is like a workout for that part of your brain. Some games depend on your ability to recognize patterns or predict likely outcomes. These skills can be extremely helpful in other areas of your life, and they can be strengthened by actually sitting down and having fun!
2. Improves Communication Skills
Another amazing benefit of play is that playing with others also improves communication skills. It gives unique opportunities to solve problems together or work cooperatively to reach goals. Enhancing your ability to communicate can be helpful in every relationship in your life.
Playing games together doesn’t have to be a competitive venture, either. There are lots of cooperative or team-based games that focus on a several players working together to defeat another team of players or to defeat the game. You might play a game in which you’re on a deserted island and have to decide which objects will help you survive or simply choose a “get to know you better” activity like the KCC team organized last week. There are lots of options.
3. Reduces Stress
Spending time at play can allow other parts of our brains to rest while we’re engrossed in a specific fun activity. Activities like fishing, surfing, cooking, planning a trip or just reading a good book might keep you focused on the activity itself for hours at a time. It gives our minds a break from worries or obsessive thoughts. Often it gives us an opportunity to find sometime we’re successful at and spend time doing it. Play activities also give us new, positive experiences to talk about with others, too.
4. Increases Energy Level
Obviously physical activities like playing sports can increase our physical endurance and boost energy in that way. One of the most amazing benefits of play is that even stationary fun activities have an effect on our energy levels. Having those positive experiences can boost our mood and give us activities that we genuinely look forward to, which also gives a lift to our energy levels.
Happiness Challenge
Are you ready for a happiness challenge? Take a few minutes right now and write down three fun activities you enjoy. These can be sports, video games, board games, artistic activities, or other recreational activities.
Now, look at your calendar and pick a date to do one of these activities. Invite a friend or two if you can. Try making time for play at least a couple times per month and look for signs of the benefits in your life.
Get More Happiness Tips in My Book
For more tips on building happy relationships and boosting your overall happiness, check out my book, 21 Days to Happiness. In each chapter, you’ll find simple, practical tips for how to increase happiness in one area of your life. It takes just minutes to read a chapter each day, and at the end of three weeks, you’ll have new ideas for 21 different happiness habits! 21 Days to Happiness is available as a paperback, e-book, and new interactive online sessions.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
4 Reasons Good Leadership Requires Friendliness
Leadership requires a lot of different skills. In addition to expertise in a specific field, it requires the ability to manage resources, budgets, projects and most importantly, employees. One of the best ways to invest in the people who make up your team is to make friendliness a key component of your relationship with them.
Friendliness isn’t the same thing as friendship. It’s possible, even beneficial, to craft a friendly management style and still maintain professional boundaries with your team members.
Why does good leadership require friendliness, now more than ever? Here are 4 good reasons to use a friendly approach with your team in order to boost morale and reap the rewards of success together.
1. People respond more openly and positively to friendliness.
Getting results through friendliness can take a lot less energy than getting results through direction. Task-oriented managers find it more difficult to motivating people.
Think about it this way: if you use a positive, friendly approach when communicating with your team, they’ll be far more likely to leave a meeting feeling valued and energized.
When team members feel like their boss is pushy or demanding, they may work more in the short term. In the long run, though, they’ll be less inclined to be fully engaged. They may also move on to a new job or boss more quickly than an employee who feels appreciated by a leader who understands them and shows that they care.
2. Friendliness increases the chance that others will buy in to the objectives.
Friendly leaders believe that the way they address people is a key part of what creates a happy team environment. It cultivates the feeling that you’re all in this together and shows an investment in them.
Friendliness also contributes to creating a safe environment for your team to ask questions. Employees are more likely to invest in objectives that they understand and believe in.
3. Friendliness in leadership sets the tone for your team.
Whether leaders realize it or not, the people they lead carefully watch their words and actions. People model their leaders, too, so adopting a friendly style and using that approach with your team sets the tone for how they deal with each other.
A warm tone and a positive approach reassure your team, especially in challenging circumstances. Bring out the best in people by showing them that you are not disproportionately results-oriented. As always, balance is key!
4. A friendly leader actually has greater impact on the team.
A leader who approaches his team with intense emotions—displaying anger, stress or frustration openly—might hurt the team over-reacting. Venting might feel gratifying in the moment, but it can also reduce the trust between a leader and his team. It creates a leader-versus-team dynamic rather than a sense of facing a challenging situation together.
Friendliness on the other hand, helps craft that sense of community and team spirit. A friendly approach shows the team that the leader views himself as part of the team. This tells the team that the obstacle or challenge is something to be faced together. It gives the team members permission to take ownership of the issue. It makes the team a safe place to offer ideas or put forth one’s own thoughts on possible solutions.
How to Become a More Effective Leader
Boosting your leadership with friendliness may take some time to yield results, especially if it’s a departure from the usual approach. Give the team some time to build trust and adjust to new ways of doing things. In the meantime, if you’re looking for other ways to target leadership growth based on your leadership style, I recommend the DISC (What’s Your Color?) Leadership Report.
This test takes about ten minutes and identifies your leadership strengths. It helps you discover unleveraged potential and opportunities for growth. The step-by-step results show leaders exactly what to do—and stop doing—to unleash their team’s potential and maximize personal effectiveness.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
5 Tips for More Effective Meetings
Meetings: people seem to love them or hate them. Some see meetings as a time waster, while others thrive on the collaborative energy that comes from regular check-ins or stand-ups. Whatever the emotions that seeing a meeting on the calendar causes, meetings are an essential tool for an effective, successful team. Crafting effective meetings takes a little time and planning, but it yields great results. Here are 5 tips for more effective meetings that will boost your team’s communication and success.
1. Craft a clear and inspiring agenda.
Before calling a meeting, establish the agenda. What are the meeting objectives? These days, more than ever, we should remember to include a more personal goal. On top of “taking care of business”, we need to ask people how they are doing, show that we care and offer our support when needed.
2. Make sure a team meeting is the best approach.
While meetings can resolve complex issues quickly, they also interrupt the workflow of the team. Before you schedule a meeting, ask yourself some basic questions.
- Is the issue best addressed in a team setting or one on one?
- Which people need to participate? We can inform the others after the meeting.
- Could the issue effectively be addressed via email or chat or via another medium?
Don’t just have meetings out of habit. Meetings are time and energy consuming, and effective meetings should always add value to each person participating.
3. Inform the team of the meeting agenda ahead of time.
Send a quick note to the team inviting them to the meeting and giving them an idea of the issues to be addressed. This gives team members a chance to think of questions or gather any relevant information before the meeting begins.
4. Make sure everyone is adding value and actively participating.
It’s tempting to have a meeting to update people and share information, but that could be done in an email, right? In order to get the most out of a meeting, make sure it’s an opportunity for brainstorming and getting people’s ideas and input.
5. Send a follow-up reminder after the meeting.
After the meeting ends, but while it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds, send a quick note to the team thanking them for their input and listing the highlights of the meeting. This list should include any questions that were raised that require follow-up and any tasks that were assigned to team members. Communicating these points to the team helps keep everyone on track and ensures that tasks get completed. Thanking the team also reinforces the value each member brings and offers much-needed appreciation. We all need that extra boost from time to time!
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
Join Us for a FREE Event March 23rd – How to Stay Connected While Working Apart
Join us for a KCC Coffee Chat! This coffee chat will be an interactive presentation in which three of our team experts share best practices on this current issue: how to stay connected while working apart.
Listen as 3 of our experts passionate about happiness and performance share their expertise and the recent trends on this subject:
Pat Rothenberger, Coach/Trainer
Jean-François Drouin, Coach/Trainer
Ingrid Kelada, President KCC Positive Business Psychology
Bring your coffee or tea and join us for this free event! We look forward to seeing you!
Mar 23, 2021, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Reserve your place here on LinkedIn.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
5 Ways a Daily Mindfulness Practice Will Increase Your Happiness
One of the most effective ways to increase your happiness and reduce your stress level is to engage in a daily mindfulness or meditative practice. You don’t have to spend hours a day in order to achieve results, but you do need to do a little research and gather some helpful tools, like a quiet space, perhaps an app or video to guide you through your practice as you learn.
The goal is pretty simple. Mindfulness is a type of meditation that helps you to focus on what you feel or think and accept it without judging. You can do this in really short sessions—as little as two minutes to begin. There are a number of great free apps that offer guides to mindfulness practice. My favorite is CALM.
Before you know it, your daily practice will begin to bring results. Here are 5 ways a daily mindfulness practice will increase your happiness:
1. Reduce Stress Level
Regular mindfulness or meditation practice lowers the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the brain. A regular practice—and this can take just a few minutes each day!—can actually physically change the activity in your brain and alter your hormone levels so you feel less stress and anxiety.
2. Reduce Depression
It may seem counterintuitive to think that spending more time in your head would help reduce depressive thoughts and feelings, but the science doesn’t lie. A study at Johns Hopkins found that the effects of meditation were moderate, about the same as for antidepressants.
3. Reduce Job Burnout
Here’s something exciting to note: the research on mindfulness as a way to reduce workplace stress and burnout is so compelling that some companies are beginning to offer mindfulness training to their employees, such as nursing staff, who routinely experience high stress situations.
4. Increase Attentiveness
Spending a few minutes quieting your body and focusing your thoughts not only has an impact in the hormone levels in your brain, but also helps increase your ability to focus. A mindfulness or meditation practice is a great way to help teach your brain not to rush from thought to thought, but to be able to pause and hold one thought at a time.
5. Grow a Happier Brain
In my book, 21 Days to Happiness, I talk about some exciting studies that show how meditation and mindfulness practices can actually help you grow a happier brain. This is really exciting research, and it means that happiness really is something we can choose to pursue. Just like targeting a particular part of your body in a strength-training workout, you can target the happiness centers in your brain with a meditation or mindfulness practice of your own.
Are you ready to give it a try?
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
Try all 21 Days to Happiness in My Book
There’s never been a better time to pursue happiness with my book, 21 Days to Happiness. Each chapter offers tips and research on how to boost happiness in one area of your life. 21 Days to Happiness is available as a paperback, e-book, audiobook, and new interactive online sessions.
9 Positive Leadership Maxims
Being a great leader is more than a job—it’s a way of approaching life. It can sometimes be a challenging lifestyle, and can even be discouraging. Here are 9 positive leadership maxims to energize you in your leadership role.
1. To make a difference, be the difference.
Are you practicing the changes you want to see in your team? Leading your team by example is a powerful way to lead.
2. Leadership is showing people not that they MUST take a certain action but that they GET TO take that action.
The way we word something can make a huge difference in perception and motivation. “I chose you for this and here’s why it’s an opportunity…” sounds and feels better than “I need you or want you to do something…”
3. To get the best out of people, embrace the best in them.
What gifts and talents do your team members bring to the table? Are you leveraging those effectively? Consider making a list of each team member and what they do best, and look for new ways to use those abilities to enhance your team’s performance and success.
4. It’s not so much what you say as a leader that’s important; it’s your ability to inspire action that matters.
What are you doing to energize your team in meetings? Do they leave a meeting feeling excited to get to work on the next project? Use the last few minutes of each team meeting to inspire your team and instill some excitement for the tasks ahead. Connect what you’re doing to real life. How is your business making a difference in the world, and how do your employees’ actions directly contribute to that?
5. Half the art of listening is waiting.
Sometimes just giving people that extra pause before speaking shows them you’re truly open to what they have to say. It can indicate that you’re not only listening but also processing what they share.
6. If you are always right, you are usually wrong.
Nobody is perfect, and nobody is right all the time. One of the quickest ways to destroy trust with your team is by refusing to admit when you’re wrong. You may not always be ready to acknowledge it, but your team probably already knows you’ve made a mistake. The great news is that being humble enough to admit mistakes and correct course with your team will actually help build trust and better position your team for success.
7. The best leaders make use of the simplest of ideas.
Complex ideas can take a lot of energy to explain and to convey to others. But a simple idea that can be explained in just a few words? It’s more memorable, more energizing and easier to pass on to others.
8. Leadership is seeing hope in any adversity.
In leadership, you don’t have to expect the worst, you just have to make the most of it when it happens. It might take some practice to learn to see the positives in any situation, but not only will it help to energize you to face a problem, it will bring that energy to your team. It will help the group have confidence that you can overcome it together.
9. We ourselves are our own biggest obstacles to becoming better leaders.
It’s easy to spend all your time focusing on goals and building up your team members, but don’t neglect your most critical team member: you! Take time regularly to self-assess. Are you getting enough rest? Do you need to make changes to your own work or life? It might seem backwards to slow down a little bit in order to give yourself proper self-care, but you’ll be a much stronger, more effective leader when you are well-rested and healthy.
It’s also important to regularly assess your leadership abilities. If you find you get stuck having the same conversation or experiencing the same problem over and over, it may be that you need a new approach to the issue. Seek new assessment and training opportunities to sharpen your leadership skills and become a more effective leader.
How to Become a More Effective Leader
I hope these 9 positive leadership maxims help put a new spring in your step and feel more motivated and energized for the exciting things your team will accomplish this year.
If you’re looking for ways to grade your current leadership ability and target growth based on your potential, I recommend the DISC (What’s Your Color?) Leadership Report. This test takes about ten minutes and identifies your leadership strengths as well as potential that’s not being leveraged and opportunities for growth. The step-by-step results show leaders exactly what to do—and stop doing—to unleash their team’s potential and maximize personal effectiveness.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
5 Ways to Happily Celebrate the Holidays in a Socially Distanced Season
With the challenges and losses we’ve faced this year, gearing up for happy holidays may feel more overwhelming than usual. Some of our traditions may be altered or impossible this year. It’s easy to get focused on the things that are missing, to notice the empty spots on the calendar where a holiday party might once have been. It’s okay to grieve for those things.
What we don’t want to do, though, is let the losses swallow up our attention and steal the possibilities of other happy holiday celebrations.
Instead, take some time to reimagine your holidays. Are there things you can update or reinvent that allow you to celebrate in a socially distanced way? Here are 5 ideas to jumpstart your imagination and help you reframe your traditions and help you keep the happy in your holidays.
1. Send Videos to Friends and Family
Use an app like Marco Polo or another app that lets you record a video message and send it to a loved one. Then record yourself or your family. Make it as serious or as funny as you want. A quick Internet search will give you lots more ideas.
2. Have a Holiday Movie Marathon
Fix your favorite snacks and warm drinks and curl up on the couch with your household to watch holiday movies together. My favorites are Elf and Love Actually. What are yours? Some movie apps have a feature where you can set up a “watch party” and invite other households, so you can watch the movie together, even if you’re not in front of the same TV.
3. Make or Send a Gift Basket or Stocking
Many families will choose to forego or postpone an in-person gift exchange this year, but you can still send something special to the ones you love. Personalizing the gifts with notes on why you chose each item or what made you think of the receiver will help bring you closer together.
4. Choose a Special Holiday Dish to Prepare
Lots of holiday traditions center around food and sharing big meals together. It may be impossible to recreate those on your own, but choose one dish—maybe a favorite dessert or treat or Aunt Lucy’s famous sweet potatoes, whatever makes the holiday special to you—and ask your family member for the recipe for that dish.
Serve it with whatever you want, even order the rest of the meal prepared if you prefer. Share some pictures of your baking experience with your loved ones.
5. Volunteer and make someone else happy
In my book, I mention that one of the most effective way to increase our happiness is through acts of kindness. There are so many ways you and your family can pay it forward. Some people may be alone this year, why not make cards or cookies to let them know that they are special?
Make These Holiday Happiness Boosters Your Own
Try the ideas that sound like the most fun. Use them as a jumping-off place to inspire you to create and share more happiness through your holidays. Your holiday celebrations may be different this year, but you can still create happiness and share it with the ones you love this season.
Give the Gift of Happiness This Holiday
Still looking for the perfect holiday gift for that special someone? Give the gift of happiness with my book, 21 Days to Happiness. Each chapter offers tips and research on how to boost happiness in one area of your life. 21 Days to Happiness is available as a paperback, e-book, and new interactive online sessions.
The Difference Between a Boss and a Leader – 3 Tips!
Every leader is a boss, but not every boss is a leader. What’s the difference between a boss and a leader? It all comes down to how you do it.
A boss is in charge because of his or her position and title. He may be the company owner, or a senior level manager. Usually, a boss has years of experience and familiarity with the job, which are great assets to bring to a job. What truly determines the success of the team working with him or her, though, is not how much they know about the tasks to be done, but how they lead the people on their team.
A leader learns the tasks and familiarizes himself with the process, but the secret he knows that sets him apart and makes him successful is that he sees his team as the most valuable resource in his workflow.
Here are 3 ways a leader inspires his team and earns the respect that distinguishes him as a leader and a boss.
1. Focus on Solutions. A leader inspires the people he works with. When they face a problem, the leader focuses his team members on fixing the problem, not on fixing blame.
2. Use Your Team’s Talents. A leader recognizes the gifts and talents of his team members and assigns them tasks based on those strengths whenever possible. When a team member brings forward a suggestion, a leader listens with an open mind.
3. Invest in Their Development. A good leader mentors and trains the people he works with, coaching others every chance he gets. This not only strengthens the team as a whole, but strengthens the whole company.
Being a leader is a deliberate choice, and it’s one that impacts the entire team in a positive way. People work longer for a person that they trust and respect, and ultimately everyone wins as good leadership means the team is more happy, productive and successful.
Tools to Help You Build Your Leadership Skills
Looking for ways to grade your current leadership ability and target growth based on your potential? I recommend the DISC (What’s Your Color?) Leadership Report. This test takes about ten minutes and identifies your leadership strengths as well as potential that’s not being leveraged and opportunities for growth. The step-by-step results show leaders exactly what to do—and stop doing—to unleash their team’s potential and maximize personal effectiveness.
Ingrid Kelada
Owner of KCC Positive Business Psychology & Happiness Expert
Creating a Happy Family is an Investment
Family relationships can be some of the most challenging and most rewarding relationships in our lives. When relationships at home are going well, we feel much happier and better equipped to endure stressful situations in other parts of our lives. What better way to increase our overall happiness than to invest in happiness in our family relationships?
Here are 5 tips for creating and increasing happy family relationships that you can start doing right now. Each of these things takes only a minute or two to do. Try them all. See how they improve your family’s overall happiness.
1. Create Opportunities to Express Gratitude
Set up a bowl or jar with some scraps of paper beside it. Each day, perhaps just before dinner, ask family members to write down something they are thankful for. Periodically—such as when the bowl gets full, as part of your New Year’s celebration, etc.—read the thankfulness notes together as a family.
This creates opportunities for you to hear what’s meaningful in your family members’ lives. It also means you get to relive those positive moments together.
2. Give Positive Feedback Often
Everyone loves feeling appreciated and knowing they did a good job or that something they did was special to you. Make a point to compliment the people in your family when they do something helpful or good.
Relationship Tip: If you’re noticing a lot more conflict than usual in your home, try this. Suspend all criticism for two weeks. Don’t say anything critical, and instead focus on pointing out the good things your family members are doing. Be specific and genuine. See what happens after two weeks.
3. Display Pictures from Family Events Around the House
Frame that picture of the fish you caught while you were on the lake with your son. Hang the one of you with your daughters at the zoo on the refrigerator. Print the picture of you and your partner at the top of a hike and put it on your dresser. Use a digital frame to scroll through multiple experiences. You can even add new pictures over WiFi with some types of digital frames.
Posting these pictures where you can see them in your home means that as you go about your normal routines, you see images that remind you of those positive moments with your family, and you feel happier.
4. Create Electronics-Free Zones
This might mean no phones, TV or other devices at the dinner table, or no phones or devices for the first ten minutes in the car. Use the time to talk to each other. Ask open-ended questions. Listen without always expecting to have a chance to respond.
5. Eat Together Regularly
For some families, gathering around the dinner table every night is impossible with everyone’s varied schedules, and that’s okay! But it doesn’t have to mean that you never have the opportunity to gather over a meal together.
Try crafting at least one regular meal time each week when you can be together. My family eats together on Sundays and I look forward to this moment to reconnect.
If dinners aren’t possible, what about having breakfast together every Saturday or Sunday? Or perhaps lunch once a week?
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. The important thing is to have repeated times together where you get to connect with family members in a positive way. Eating together is a simple way to do that. No matter what else we’re up to in our lives, we all have to eat, right?
Make These Happiness Boosters Your Own
Feel free to take these happiness tips and adapt them to best suit your lifestyle and relationships. The important thing is to continue to invest in your family relationships in positive ways that promote happiness in each member. Instead of a gratitude jar, you begin a family meal by each sharing something positive that happened during your day or week. Find the method that works best for you, and keep doing it!
For more tips on increasing your happiness, check out our post on giving the gift of experiences.
Get More Tips on Happiness in Relationships
You can learn more about how to bring greater happiness to your relationships in my book, 21 Days to Happiness, which teaches 21 happiness habits you can practice daily for a boost to not only your happiness, but your energy and productivity as well! Chapter 19 of my book gives more tips and ideas for crafting a happy family life. Check it out and let me know what helped you!
Ingrid Kelada
Business Psychologist/Happiness Expert
KCC Inc.