The fantasy of a cheerful workplace

The idea of a cheerful workplace was always in mind along my career years. I was always checking back what could make my team happier during pursuing their daily activities. There was always this frown look on the faces of most of the employees while going to work in the morning. Usually you can’t judge if they were expecting some intimidating situations. Or, they were bored from doing the same tasks repeatedly. May be meeting some colleagues had drawn the same reaction again on their faces. Not to mention the memory of useless meetings and fights about basic stuff and seemingly conventional requests. When I had started to jot down some lines about what could make you frown while going to work, I had collected a big list of my own and many more lines from side discussions.

I tried to remove the reasons that were repeated in different words and different situations when their root cause was the same.

I don’t want to forget the mistrust that many employees carry about their workplace. They have a continuous doubt that any new rule, objective of project won’t be in their favor. That’s regardless if it is organizational or a technical one.

Usually when I try to ask someone “What’s Up?” when I see a look of anxiety or anger on their face. You find that the answer is not coming up smoothly. Many times they weren’t really thinking of one specific thing. They had many open files running in their back mind and this facial expression was just a sum up.

Ask the correct question?¡¡

All these above questions are the wrong ones. Don’t fall in the same trap. When I had started thinking about the the subject, I was trying to find the reasons of why this heavy energy exists in the workspace? When you ask about the negative side of any topic, you are served a lot more of it. Not directly to you, but around you. So when you ask why there is frustration and heavy energy, you find a lot of proofs and situations that validates the existence of heavy energy. Consequently frustration is a logical consequence. You find many proofs of what you are thinking about.

On the other hand if you shift your focus towards what can elevates the workplace energy? You might find some flickers of subtle ideas that pops up. Why their voice is low and may vanish quickly? Because they don’t match with the dominant vibes all around so they are easily covered. By the way, you are the first one to cover them.

You can delve deep into how to ask the correct question in this article: Expand Your Choices.

How to open a door for a happiness breeze?

Did you hear this quote before?

Be the change you want to see happen

Or, Be the change you wish to see in the world.

The meaning is said by many, the earliest one of them was Gandhi

Even if not, you need to give it a try. Can you make yourself happy and cheerful along your working day? I believe that for many of us it is difficult to be happy and cheerful along a vacation day or a complete few days vacation holiday. That’s due to many reasons. Some of the top reasons can be:

• Things happening in a different way than what we planned. Then we are afraid to lose control.
• Results are not satisfactory. This means that we had placed high expectations before hand.
• Missed some of the events. This brings negativity from two folds:
  • Feeling the scarcity of having no other chances to experience those missed events
  • Not grateful for what we had accomplished

You can see that those frustrating thoughts are enough to draw sad impressions on our faces in the midst of vacation. If you spare sometime within your work day to sense your feelings, you would find some or all of the reactions listed above dominating your day.

So the first one who deserves a break with a happiness breeze is you. When you manage to find this cheerful window, you will be able to cultivate it in the work space but take care of the following

Take a step that you can build upon not retract from

Whether you belief in spiritual guides or in physical laws, you can find in either of them the correct size of the step that you can take to move forward. Spiritually, moving from an emotion to the opposite emotion can cause self destruction or what thy call self sabotage. Why? Because the emotion is not just a feeling it is a feeling that has a biological effect on your body. This biological or chemical effect generates a physical reflection internally and externally on your body. So, trying to convert sadness into happiness or fear into love is like you are trying to reverse your body chemicals from one side of the scale to be on the opposite side. So you need to balance the body chemicals first, then drag it to other side of the scale.

From the mechanics point of view, what happens when you need to reverse the direction of an object moving in a certain direction? You apply a force that will gradually bring it to zero speed then push it in the opposite direction. Trying to reverse it instantly implies the need of a collision and a lot of energy is wasted in this collision. This lost energy can come out as a high collision sound or can be stored in the body deforming or destructing it.

So the right step brings you to the balance or zero speed state. At this state the biological and physical effect on your body is eased or released. This gives you a chance to select an action instead of a reaction. Moreover you may see new directions that you would never known while rushing with your full speed.

In conclusion of the first step to a cheerful workplace,

What brought us here was the quest for a cheerful workspace. Where we have reached? A new destination of a neutral and calmer point in life. Where shall we head next? Focus our efforts to shift from negative perceptions to neutral ones on the journey to embark to a cheerful workplace

Meanwhile, I will leave you below a couple of articles with practical steps and profound understanding to shift your thoughts and consequently emotions to the direction you want:

• For Well-Being:5 Practical Steps to shift between thoughts
• Jump to the right pendulum

Also we had chatted before about the managers role so you can read it here: Manager’s Role to facilitate creativity