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Are You Gritty Over Failure?
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Dear Friends of Balancing Act,
Welcome to the first day of Summer! Here's hoping the warm weather brings you more opportunities to get life in balance - with outdoor adventures and often family vacations. Just in case the summer temperatures don't add enough sizzle to your life, this issue contains hot tips for success and well-being. Read on to learn how gritty people see failure, how you can keep from getting sidetracked, and how you can showcase gratitude for others in a new alternative to Facebook. And if after all this, you find yourself bemoaning your lack of balance, as many of my coaching clients do, try and find the humor in the situation. As you'll see from my latest column, that's how I overcame my most recent exercise in imbalance: recumbent biking. Pat
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The Gritty View Of Failure
 | | Angela Duckworth |
What does failure mean to you?
It's a question I like to ask my coaching clients. And often, the answer is gloomy.
"The opposite of success." "Letting someone down." "Not meeting a goal."
A more helpful answer may come from the work of University of Pennsylvania psychology researcher Angela Duckworth, who has concluded that stick-to-itiveness, or grit, is more important than talent in reaching success. Duckworth believes that for the gritty person, failure is an opportunity to learn and try again and that success is more akin to a marathon than a sprint.
In this recent Ted Talk, she explains how grit works in the context of education.
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But What If You Get Sidetracked?
You may see yourself as a gritty person but still find yourself sidetracked on the way to your goals.
How to overcome this? Francesca Gino, a Harvard business school professor, offers strategies in her new book Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick To The Plan.
Among her strategies for staying with it are becoming aware of our self-defeating tendencies - for example, assuming we're experts when we really should ask for advice, letting ourselves be influenced by vanity, ambition and peer pressure, and losing sight of our own moral compass.
Could any of these factors be getting in your way? An honest romp through Gino's book might help.
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Fill Someone's Gratitude Bucket
 Tired of those self-serving posts on Facebook?
You may be ready for a FB alternative called the Gratitude Bucket. Created by positive psychology expert Zack Prager, the site lets you create an online bucket to post a picture of someone for whom you're grateful and list the reasons why.
You can then invite others to express their gratitude to this person as well.
So go ahead. Create a bucket on this very cool site, and reap all the physical and psychological benefits that the powerful positive emotion of gratitude has to offer.
Copyright 2013 Pat Snyder
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NEW TIME-SAVING
STRENGTHS TEST
Are you naturally courageous? Creative? Prudent?
The Values In Action inventory, developed by positive psychologists to detect your highest character strengths,
is now faster to take than ever.
The free online inventory has evolved from its original 240-question version to a slimmer 120-question model that takes around 20 minutes.
Why bother? By using your top strengths daily in a new way for two weeks, you can increase your positive mood and well-being. And when you apply your strengths to the work you do, you can increase your energy level and flow.
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LEASH LAW
NO. 53:
DRIVE-THRU MEALS
Even with the healthier versions that drive-thru restaurants have concocted, your best bet for fast summer meals is a cooler full of apples, arugula and other fruits and veggies.
If you've ever indulged in a fast food salad and saved the plate, it fits right on top in a cooler. Good health and recycling all in one!
This is a continuation of the 74 leash laws offered in Pat's book, The Dog Ate My Planner: Tales and Tips from an Overbooked Life.
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