Instead of pushing away or self-medicating difficult feelings like stress, practice radical acceptance by feeling them fully. This counterintuitive approach allows you to move through the discomfort rather than letting it own you.
Clarify your core motivations and what matters most to you, establishing a ‘North Star’ purpose to guide you through life’s ups and downs. This helps you stay grounded and less affected by minor setbacks or external comparisons.
Shift your focus from self-serving goals to an other-oriented purpose, as doing things for the benefit of others significantly boosts your well-being. This approach makes it easier to navigate personal challenges and feel good about your contributions.
As a manager, actively foster an environment where even the most junior team members feel comfortable speaking up without fear. This involves warmly calling on junior people, making everyone feel included, and rewarding those who express difficult truths or point out your mistakes.
View self-care and self-compassion not as self-indulgent, but as mission-critical for your ability to manage work, balance home life, and support colleagues. Schedule and prioritize activities that recharge your battery, as it’s hard to be effective when you’re overwhelmed.
When facing structural inequities or negative emotions, treat yourself with kindness first, like a friend. This self-compassion can provide the ‘fierceness’ and bandwidth needed to effectively fight problems and advocate for change.
When someone speaks, listen carefully without planning your response, then briefly repeat the essence of their message in your own words. This technique makes the other person feel seen and heard, and acts as a circuit breaker for your own reactive responses, preventing misunderstandings.
To start mindfulness meditation, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and bring your attention to a neutral sensation like your breath or body. When your mind inevitably wanders, gently return your focus to your chosen object, treating each return as a success to become familiar with your mind’s patterns.
When overtaken by strong emotions during meditation, instead of returning to your breath, examine the emotion by noticing its constituent parts, such as physical sensations or accompanying thoughts. This process disambiguates the emotion, reducing its power over you.
Recognize that social comparisons are often flawed because you’re comparing your ‘insides’ to others’ ‘outsides,’ missing their internal struggles or the full context of their successes. Understand that what appears great externally might not be so great if you experienced it yourself.
When feeling jealous of others’ achievements, adopt the Stoic practice of considering the effort and sacrifices required to attain those ‘gifts.’ Ask yourself if you are willing to put in that same work, which can help you realize if the perceived reward is truly worth it for you.
Develop consistent ways to remind yourself of your core motivations and purpose, such as a daily mantra or a visual cue like a tattoo. This helps you stay focused on what truly matters and not get stuck in trivial setbacks or competitive feelings.
When things feel overwhelming or bad at work, actively seek opportunities to do one nice thing for a colleague to make their life a little easier. This simple act can have profound positive effects on your own well-being and serve as an effective remedy for negative feelings.
Combat feelings of loneliness, especially at work, by reaching out and trying to alleviate loneliness in others. Taking action to help others connect will, in turn, make you feel less lonely and foster a sense of connection.
Engage in Mudita meditation by envisioning someone experiencing success and sending them phrases like ‘may your happiness increase.’ This practice, the opposite of schadenfreude, helps counteract jealousy and cultivates genuine joy for others’ well-being.
Understand that while humans are inherently selfish, ‘wise selfishness’ involves being altruistic because helping others ultimately leads to your greatest happiness. Harness this natural feature of human design to feel good by being useful to others.
As a manager, cultivate the reflex to take full responsibility for problems within your team, recognizing that issues often originate from leadership. This mindset helps you proactively address root causes and improve team dynamics.
Regularly ask yourself, ‘How am I complicit in the conditions I say I don’t want?’ This inconvenient but helpful question, especially for those in power, provides a lens into your influence and potential contributions to workplace issues you wish to change.
Prioritize creating a sense of belonging at work, as it is the biggest factor in employee happiness and performance. This involves ensuring people feel their work matters and fostering opportunities for genuine social connection, including developing friendships among colleagues.
Improve your sleep by maintaining basic sleep hygiene: keep your room cold, avoid blue light from devices before bed, get direct sunlight early in the day, and incorporate exercise to tire yourself out.
Motivate yourself to adhere to sleep hygiene practices by consciously tuning into the severe pain and negative impact of not getting enough sleep. Acknowledging how awful sleeplessness feels can be a powerful driver for change.
If anxiety or anger manifest as physical restlessness, especially before bed, practice walking meditation by slowly walking back and forth while focusing on body sensations. This helps calm the mind and body, preventing you from teaching your brain that bed is a place for struggle.
When struggling to sleep, avoid catastrophizing about the next day and instead tell yourself, ‘It will be fine; you’ve dealt with sleeplessness before and survived.’ Giving yourself permission for it to suck and for you not to sleep can paradoxically create the relaxation needed for sleep to unfurl.
If you find yourself tossing and turning in bed, get up and do something else, such as walking meditation, watching TV, reading a book, or even getting some work done. This prevents your brain from associating the bed with struggle and allows for potential relaxation to return later.
In meditation, when thoughts arise, recognize them as just thoughts with accompanying physical sensations, not objective facts. You can imagine them coming from an external source to diminish their power and control over you.
Employ techniques like singing your ruminative thoughts to an annoying pop song or visualizing them scrolling away like Star Wars text. These methods help create distance from your thoughts, allowing you to see them as separate from yourself.
Instead of saying ‘I’m angry,’ try the linguistic trick of saying ’there is anger’ to create distance from the emotion. This helps you recognize that emotions are passing phenomena rather than inherent parts of your identity.
When sitting with difficult emotions, observe how they change and pass over time, realizing they are not as permanent or intractable as they initially feel. This understanding provides relief and reduces the intensity of the emotional experience.
Before jumping ship to a new job, actively fight the cognitive bias that ’the grass is greener’ by accurately simulating what the new situation would truly be like. This hard work can prevent you from making unnecessary career changes based on fantasy rather than reality.
In virtual work environments, begin meetings with 10 minutes of informal social chit-chat to replicate the natural connections that occur in physical offices. This fosters social connection and belonging, which ultimately improves team performance.
As a manager, openly express gratitude for colleagues’ contributions, especially when they do something great or brave, and provide specific reasons why you appreciated it. This subtle yet powerful technique makes people feel their work matters and contributes to a sense of belonging.
For managers, take time to personalize birthday wishes to employees, mentioning a specific positive contribution they’ve made. This small gesture makes individuals feel seen, valued, and that their presence and work on the job truly matter to the company.