One of the ways that our new book, Strategy Driven Leadership and my work in resilience have dovetailed together is in how we’ve worked to identify and destroy the Negativity Bias.
You probably remember (or will experience today) our biological and cultural expectation to be overly critical and disapproving of any variety of behaviors we engage in, whether it be how we presented in a meeting or whether we listened with full attention to our daughter’s concerns about her soccer coach.
It is easy for us to beat ourselves up instead of recognizing the successes we have on a daily basis and building our skills from there.
In our new book (co-authored with Michael Couch), we discuss the importance of “Owning It” which relates to seeing our learnings and accomplishments and giving ourselves credit for those small and usually meaningful actions.
One of my clients, this past week, challenged her manager and her colleagues in a way that was respectful, but clear, and positioned herself as the “subject matter expert” in the room which, in fact, she was. Her persistence focused the group in the right direction and helped everyone from going down a worthless rabbit hole.
And the best part was that after she was done, she recognized her rightful authority and felt more emboldened to own her power.
Chalk up one for the positivity bias.
Your challenge this week: For the next week, identify a positive action that you took that brought about some measure of success (large or small). What you also must do is to share that success with someone else. In order for this to work, you must “Own It” and that requires sharing it with others.
BTW, If you would like a preview chapter of Strategy Driven Leadership, drop me a note and I’ll get that preview on over to you. Our publisher, Taylor and Francis promised us they would have that ready for us soon. Remember the book is released on November 22 and you can preorder it here.
© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2019
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