Successful people don’t typically become successful because they fought their way to the top on their own, or because they crushed all their competitors into dust along the way.
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Many successful people value passion and optimism in their work and prefer to be surrounded with a team who values similar traits.
While being competitive and having a drive to succeed are certainly factors that influence success, having the right attitudes toward your work can influence your success, as well.
True success comes not through impersonal shortcuts but through the thoughtful cultivation of key attitudes and character traits. Below are four attitudes you should try to cultivate each day in order be happier and more successful at work.
1. Use Positivity As Your Lens
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The most important, fundamental attitude for success is positivity. The other three traits on this list all depend on a foundation of positivity.
If you want a humorous, heartfelt, rapid-pace explanation of the importance of positivity, I encourage you to watch Shawn Achor’s TED Talk. This Harvard-educated CEO of Goodthink Inc. has dedicated his career to understanding the ways in which positivity affects both happiness and success.
In his talk, Achor states that it is “not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.”
Shawn assisted Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar in teaching the most popular class at Harvard, How To Become Happier. In his 7 Lessons On Earning The Ultimate Currency: Happiness, Tal says, “Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account.”
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One of my first jobs was that of serving tables at a restaurant, and my boss was consistently negative and demoralizing. She made it her mission to always find something wrong. There was no praise for a job well done, no thanks for stepping up in a crisis and no positive acknowledgement of any kind – only nit-picking.
This attitude led many staff members to adopt a “who cares” outlook to their jobs. Why waste their efforts doing their best when it never made a difference?
My boss’s negative attitude – her lens – was the root of her own unhappiness and the biggest stumbling block to her success both as a boss and as a restaurateur. Her constant search for failure became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Achor’s says he’s found, through his research, that “75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat … Your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed.”
Why does the brain perform better with positivity? One word: dopamine. This neurotransmitter is released when we are positive and it serves two functions: It makes you happier and turns on the learning centers in your brain.
Positivity frees us from the constraints of a negative worldview and activates our brains in ways that allow us to learn and achieve more than we can in any other frame of mind.
2. Experience Pride In Your Work
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The problem with talking about pride is that the word pride is often used to refer to two very disparate attitudes. The positive, healthy pride refers to “a feeling of happiness that you get when you or someone you know does something good, difficult, etc. … a reasonable or justifiable self-respect” (Merriam Webster).
And, while this kind of pride is good for your self-confidence and morale, it’s important to cultivate a second kind of pride by taking pride in your work. This means choosing to do your job well, no matter the circumstances, no matter the task.
The “who cares” attitude my restaurant coworkers adopted revealed a lack of pride in their work. They were willing to put forth effort only if our boss thanked them for each and every task.
I will always be grateful for the example of one of my managers, who always sought to do her job to the best of her abilities. Her goal wasn’t to receive praise, but to put in a day’s work that she could be proud of, work that would provide the best possible service to our customers.
Taking pride in your work is, at its heart, about self-respect. Taking pride in your work means respecting yourself, knowing that your work will not only affect others but also serve as a reflection of you.
Positive pride and a strong work ethic enable you to work hard and continue to improve no matter what kind of job or boss you have. Rather than becoming run down or stuck thanks to someone else’s negative comments, this kind of self-respect will help you continue moving forward.
Read more at Forbes.