Women: we are hardwired for success. Ahead of International Women’s Day, we asked Amanda Gore, career guru, author and leader of The Joy Project, to break down why emotional intelligence and getting happier than happy are the keys to bigger business.
I’ve been working hard myself for a long time and I’ve made a career of speaking about success in business, and some time ago I realised that when I talked success and how to get it, I was really talking about joy. True joy. This is the beginning of our next amazing career move or promotion, it’s what’s behind better ideas. And it’s about much more than just doing work that makes you happy.
Joy is internal and deep. Happiness is like stumbling along a pitch black corridor, tripping over things, desperate to find the light switch… And then you do: happiness! But the light could blow or someone else could switch it off at any second and you’ll be plunged straight back into the black unhappiness. You don’t control it – you repetitively say, ‘When this happens, I’ll be happy.’ Joy is standing in the dark, breathing and noticing a glow that lights up everything is coming from inside you. If you stand still and focus, you will be your beacon. It’s self-empowering. It’s important at work, in business, in every way you can imagine.
Amanda Gore’s 13 Lessons Women at Work Need to Learn
1. Joy is the fire-starter for success, not the result of it
Being joyful is the key to being the best at what you do. There’s a whole lot of research, from institutions like Harvard, saying that joy is linked to increased sales, productivity and reduced errors – and all of that should reset how we look at work. Sean Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage (goodthinkinc.com) pulls a lot of the stats together.
2. Women are built for success under stress
There was a really interesting study done at UCLA (The University of California in Los Angeles) which shows that women and men respond to stress differently: we ‘tend and befriend’, as the study called it, while men go into fight or flight. Women, naturally, like to talk about the problem with someone until we’ve covered every aspect and we feel better. That’s the preferred female way, how we’re wired. It’s much better for conflict resolution, and for [most things]. And it’s healthier.
3. But the corporate set up isn’t built for the ingenious way women naturally work.
Because the corporate world is geared toward men, it’s not really a place where women can talk to other women and have that time be seen as productive or constructive. We all end up not talking and stuck in this stress feeling alone. So it’s important that we understand that we are different, in many ways, from men, and if we want to stay well and be our best, we need to reconsider how we’re operating.
4. Find a joy spot in the office
It can be a physical place you designate, where you go to do something physical – juggling, hula hooping if you like – that changes how your brain is thinking under stress. But it’s not always easy to do that in some workspaces, so your joy spot can be a folder on your desktop where you look through photos from a fabulous time or a video that makes you laugh. The joy spot can fit into your work culture – it’s just got to change your physiology and move you toward feeling good again when you’re stressed.
5. Start a joy tribe
The idea of the joy tribe started as kind of a book club for my book Joy is an Inside Job (amandagore.com) , where people would get together and work through the chapters. But the idea of a joy tribe can work at work, too. Find women who’ll talk through your stress, who can talk through theirs with each other. Invite men! They don’t talk naturally – most of the time they ‘go into the cave’ and don’t even recognise how they feel. The more people who have a joy tribe, the better. It makes us into teams and collaborators.
6. If you’re the boss, do happiness interviews
Managers or CEOs who buy employees a coffee every so often and ask what’s going right, what they’re happy with, what’s making them feel good will see the power in being part of that conversation about happiness. It has an astonishing impact. It’s an investment in more productive teams and pro-active leaders. Naomi Simson [an investor /judge on Shark Tank and Founding Director of Red Balloon] a friend of mine, actually, and her whole business is based around joy. [She’s publically talked about how a huge staff attrition rate in the early days of the business taught her that shared joy at work is key to her multi-million dollars of success]. She’s got a new book called Live What You Love (naomisimson.com).
7. There are 12 pillars guaranteed to build big joy
Joy doesn’t necessarily just happen. It’s a project – and that means if you don’t have it, you can make it and have it. There are qualities you can work on that, together, I believe make joy: gratitude, laughter, compassion, listening, love, generosity, hope, energy and vitality, forgiveness, reverence, cheerful enthusiasm, and equanimity. It’s a no-brainer that all of those joy qualities make you better at your job – just being a better listener makes you a greater negotiator.
8. Joyous people get hired, not fired
Think about it the people who are enthusiastic, helping other people, leading high-performance teams – they’re often the joyful people who are loving what they do. If you’re not one of those compassionate, energetic and fair listeners, why not? One of the core fears in work, as in life, is ‘I’m not good enough’. When we don’t feel worthy, our behaviour is defensive, egotistical because we overcompensate, and we do the the political manoeuvring and backstabbing of people we don’t feel confident enough to compete or share with. Joyous people don’t self-destruct their own success that way.
9. Rewiring fear and finding joy spikes Emotional Intelligence. And that outranks IQ in business.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) in its simplest definition is: know yourself, manage yourself and manage others. How is that not important in every single way at work? Business is all about feelings. To talk like it’s not is ridiculous. Business is made up of and about people and we humans are 80 percent rational and 20 per cent emotional, roughly speaking. Every business interaction is impacted by feelings. Will you do it with someone you don’t trust? We all give our business to people we like and we won’t want to take risks with people we don’t.
10. Women have a naturally high EI, but we dumb it down too much at work
Some men are great at it, but women connect more. We are often more tuned in to non-verbal nuances. But without out joy tribes, when we’re not doing that connecting at work, our heads and our hearts become disconnected. It’s a corporate disease. We make all these ‘rational’ decisions while ignoring the emotional stuff that helps us maximise people in business. That blocks avenues for bigger success and it also reduces joy.
11. Fear is the enemy of all success
There a part of our brains called the amygalda and it regulates fear. It developed, initially, to tell us to pump adrenalin and run from the sabre tooth tiger. But it hasn’t evolved now that fears are less about tigers and more about work and it can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. So when presentation freaks us out, our amygalda works like we’regoing to die. Adrenalin and cortisone go off and we can’t think straight or focus – we just react. So we procrastinate because we’re scared of failing and we avoid opportunities that make us feel that pressure.
12. Say ‘FARC it’
If you’re going to change behaviour, a strategy I call FARCing takes you through the four steps that will change your brain’s reaction:
Focus on the behaviour you want to change, like losing it while presenting to the board. Recognising you’re doing it has to come first.
Awareness of the fears that are driving that behaviour. So it could be the fear that you’re not good enough at your job.
Repeat the new behaviour. It ties a new line in your brain. Every time you present and don’t die, you’re retraining yourself to see it as less of a threat.
Celebrate. Savour that moment of success when you do something new. The brain likes the reward and will begin to link the new behaviour, like public speaking, with the high of celebration rather than feeling like an idiot.
13. The more you FARC, the more joy you feel…
Do all the FARCing you can. I tell people that the single most important thing in life and in business is how you feel about yourself. That’s what will change everything.
Amanda Gore will be speaking at the Women on Top one day event in Sydney tomorrow. Learn more about the event here.