Success on Your Own Terms with David Pollay
Senia Maymin, PhD
Chief People Officer | Stanford PhD | Data-driven, ROI-focused, people-first leader | Board Presentations, HR Strategy, M&A, Employee Life Cycle
How do we set things up so that we achieve success on our own terms? What can we do on a day-to-day basis to set ourselves up for success that includes happiness and good health?
David Pollay walks us through his formula for living a successful life. For more ideas for following this formula, read his two amazing bestselling books: The Law of the Garbage Truck and The Three Promises.
To view the whole discussion, click here or start the video below.
All the words below are from David J. Pollay.
Today I thought I would throw a formula at you that is helpful for achieving success in your career, with success defined the way that you want.
I ask my executive coaching clients that have children or want them, "How would you fill in the blank in this statement, 'What I most want for my children is ________.'”
Almost everyone says, "I just want my kids to be happy." Although one time I was speaking to an audience of executives and one in the front row yelled, “I just want my kids to be quiet." I started laughing on stage and the whole audience joined in.
Then I ask, "Okay, happy is what you want for your kids. What else?" Usually there are two other answers that come up. One is healthy, the other is successful. They want their kids to be happy, healthy, and successful, or at least make enough money to move out of the basement.
Then I'll ask, "What do you most want for yourself?" This is a core question, separate from establishing business needs and performance goals, the usual meat of executive coaching. For this core question, the answer is basically the same. "I want to be happy. I want to be successful. I want to be healthy."
"What do you most want for yourself?" ..."I want to be happy. I want to be successful. I want to be healthy."
With that in mind, I want to share with you a formula to help you think about what you include in your day-to-day living to help you enjoy a successful day, because a successful career is made up of successful days over time.
Here’s my formula. To be happy, successful, and healthy depends on your ability both to create fulfillment every day and to navigate negativity.
Navigating Negativity
To navigate negativity, remember the Law of the Garbage Truck: I don’t let others dump on me. I don’t dump on others.
When I asked the question, "How often do you let a bad driver, or a rude waiter, or a curt boss, or an insensitive employee ruin your day?" People will say, "Boy, it's natural to be off your game when people do that." That's when you have to navigate negativity.
For more on navigating negativity, I invite you to view my earlier presentation in this series on navigating negativity.
Creating Fulfillment
I'm going to break the first part of that formula down. Creating fulfillment every day comes from three things. I’ve tested this formula, asking people to follow it for a week to see how it changes their feeling of happiness and success.
Creating fulfillment comes from:
- Finding joy every day. That means experiencing many positive emotions during the day.
- Doing what you love. That means using your natural strengths in something that you feel really good about doing so you get creative and excited.
- Making a difference. Generally, that means making a difference in the world of other people and making a contribution to the world.
I claim that that, if you can't create your own feeling of fulfillment on a day-to-day basis, you're not going to be happy, healthy, and successful. You're going to have too much stress, which is not good for your health. You're not going to be at your best. You're not going to display much positive emotion, a key component of happiness
Positive Triggers
Let’s start with Finding Joy. The key is to increase positive emotion in your day, your career. and your life. One of my bosses years ago used to say that employees are a whole collection of connected gears. When the leader is feeling good and turns, everyone around them turns towards the positive. That has a positive spiral effect.
If leaders are not in charge of their positive emotions, they can turn the wheel the other way. Then negativity rolls down the line and hits people all across the company. The key is to know how you trigger your own positive emotion.
One day years ago, I have to admit that I wasn't feeling great. I did what people typically do when they’re not feeling good. I looked down at the floor. Then all of sudden I started laughing. I saw that I had stickers on my shoes. My little girls, two and three at the time, had stuck stickers on my shoes when I was kissing my wife goodbye. Just imagining them doing that and getting away with it because I didn’t notice it was happening made me laugh.
Then I looked at the time. It was 11:15 in the morning. Where had I been all morning with stickers all over my shoes? The stickers on my shoes had been a positive trigger, making me feel positive emotions. Later I learned about research showing that positive emotions increase success in so many ways. Positive emotions cause us to help people more often, feel better, and be more creative, curious, and grateful. So watch for triggers that bring you positive emotion. For me, music often does.
Then I looked at the time. It was 11:15 in the morning. Where had I been all morning with stickers all over my shoes?
It helps to set an intention before you start your day. Who do I want to be today? How do I want to show up? How do I want people to experience me? There's so many ways of asking this question. What's my brand? All of these questions help set the intention. Maybe you want to be lighthearted. Maybe you want to be attentive.
My Invitation to You
In closing, I invite you to remember: Success on your own terms = Navigate negativity + Find joy every day + Do what you love + Make a difference.
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