The Four Keys To Accelerating Your Happiness At Work

(a 5 min read)

For our CareerBlast interview series, Ora Shtull and I recently talked with Robert Glazer, the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners and the author of the wildly popular newsletter “Friday Forward,” which has a readership of more than 100,000 devoted fans. We discussed his new book, Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others (which coincidentally dropped on October 1st - the same day my new book dropped ;) I’m pleased to share the highlights of our inspiring, super-charged conversation with you. 

William Arruda: Can you talk a little bit about capacity building—what it is and how we do it?

Robert Glazer: Sure. In a nutshell, capacity building is how you get better. There are four elements—spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional capacity—and every high performer I've seen across every aspect of life is really locked in on these four things.

Spiritual capacity is about understanding who you are, what you want most, and the standards you want to live by each day. It's really your core value and your core purpose—your “why.” Intellectual capacity is about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline. So this starts with a commitment to improvement in having a good mindset, being proactive, and setting your short- and long-term goals, which become a manifestation of what you want most. Physical capacity is your health, your well-being, and your physical performance . . . maintaining a healthy lifestyle, getting sleep, managing stress, embracing competition, building resilience.

Those three are mostly internal. The last one is about how you deal with the external world—emotional capacity. How do you react to challenging situations? What's your mindset? And what is the quality of your relationships? For a lot of people, that starts with overcoming self-limiting beliefs and leaning into discomfort and challenge.

Ora Shtull: As an executive coach, I can tell you that all my clients have a common challenge right now: they're short on time. How do we fit this all into our busy day?

Robert: It's not about doing more, it's about doing the right things. When the framework became clear to me, one of the first things I did was stop doing stuff. I quit boards. I quit relationships. I quit things that don't fulfill my values and purpose. However, the thing I didn't quit was this crazy little newsletter that I was writing every Friday. When people ask me why I was doing it, because I wasn't getting paid for it, I could literally check every box on my core value list. It was the thing that I wanted to be doing, not the thing that I had to be doing.

A lot of times, we'll talk about a successful businessman or successful businesswoman. Well, when we think of them as successful, if their spouse or kids aren't speaking to them because they're working so much, that is this “trick” of success. When you hear the word success, it’s not people talking about themselves, it’s about people talking about their perception of other people's success. What I really want most may not look like success to you. But it's what would make me happy.

Think about the brilliant person with no emotional capacity. They have these great ideas. But if they can't relate to the world, they can't talk to people, they can't connect, and inherently, their ideas will not get community impact.

William and Ora: Let’s talk about strategies. Help us out. What should we do?

Robert: An exercise in spiritual capacity would be to take a piece of paper and start writing down notes about times when you were really happy in the things that you were doing and you felt really fulfilled, and times when you didn't like you were doing. Do a personal and a professional version, and just keep writing. Start to circle the themes, and start to group things together. If you want to dive into the deep end of the pool, take that pen and write the eulogy for your funeral that you would like someone to read about the impact that you had made on their lives. And I can promise you that the verbiage of two or three of your core values will show up in there because it comes out as the impact you want to make on the world and others.

Intellectual capacity? Tomorrow, get up 15 minutes earlier. Don't turn on the news. Don't turn on your phone. Make your coffee. Pick up something that's interesting to read. And then write down these three most important things that you need to get done that day, and commit to do them before noon. And then you can go look at your email and all that other stuff. Because that'll put you on the proactive. That puts you on offense rather than reacting to everything that's going to be there. And unless you are a heart transplant surgeon, there probably isn't an email that came overnight that couldn't have waited 15 minutes. You shouldn't celebrate being busy.

So physical capacity. Pick an event, whether it's a 5K, a 10K, a sprint triathlon, or something a little out of your comfort zone, and just go pay the entry fee for a future date, because that will lock that in for you and that will force you to start training. And it is amazing how a $25 entry fee is a motivator for you to have some discipline about exercise, and routine, and regimen.

There are some fun ones for emotional capacity. You want to get into discomfort and out of your sandbox. I found that traveling to different countries, where you're actually out of your comfort zone, is really helpful in terms of getting out of your routine. Or eat lunch in a new place. You could drive home a different way. Make an uncomfortable cold call. Things that pull you out of your routine. On social media tonight, share something that demonstrates vulnerability rather than the highlight reel that we all see. That will start to change your conversations and your relationships.

Listen to the complete CareerBlast.TV interview.

Get a copy of Robert's brilliant book: Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others

Connect with me on LinkedIn

And get a copy of my new book: Digital YOU: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age. Here's why I am donating all my book profits to an amazing organization: Free2Luv

William Arruda | CareerBlast.TV | Reach Personal Branding | William @ Forbes