Three Ways To Be A Better Person.

As you know – I have little patience for people who are forever telling us how they are ‘living their best life‘.

Its not that I am jealous exactly – I just wish they would just go about their awesome lives with a little less fanfare. Great – whatever, I am happy for you – but is it entirely necessary to rub your ‘best life’ in my ‘kinda-Ok-doing-my-best’ and ‘occasionally-falling-apart-at-the-seams’ day to day existence?

Anyway, I digress. Today, let’s worry less about those people and their fabulous lives (because we know that comparison is the thief of joy) and take a look at three ways we can be a better person. Starting from today.

1. EAT YOUR FROGS FIRST. This is a pretty simple life upgrade. It refers to how we should – Do the worst thing on your to-do list first. Often the most important thing we need to do each day is the one thing we procrastinate or delay over the most. Inspired by Mark Twain’s quote ‘Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day’ and adapted in to Brian Tracy’s bestselling book ‘Eat That Frog’ it is a total-game-changer. The Upside? Increased Productivity: By doing your worst (most important) task first you set yourself up for success for the rest of the day. Minimise Stress: The pressure of a deadline/dreaded phone call/ large task can hang heavy and no amount of clever procrastination can make that feeling go away. Create Good Habits: Motivation is a myth – stuff doesn’t happen unless we set up good habits. Exercise that muscle enough and it becomes routine. Maximise the 80:20 Rule: The Pareto Principle states that 80% of our profits/happiness/well being comes from 20% of our efforts – so by doing the most important task first (eating that frog) you are increasing your chances to get your life closer to where you want it to be. Fast.
2. START MONO-TASKING. On the days when your to-do list is off the charts and you are suffering serious overwhelm, it can be helpful to remember that by doing more, you are often getting less done.  In fact multi-tasking has been scientifically proven to increase errors and can affect overall productivity by up to 40%. Every time we switch between tasks – having a quick check of your emails or a scroll through Insta, whilst dealing with a work problem for instance – our neural resources are depleted. A recent study showed we switch between tasks up to 400 times a day, which explains why we feel so damn exhausted at the end of it. In addition to being distracting, when it comes to our relationships, multi-tasking can be fairly unfriendly and rude – half-listening, looking at our phone or thinking of a clever reply instead of giving the courtesy of our full attention. Focusing on ONE thing at a time takes practice, but if it can make us more productive, less frazzled, not to mention better parents, partners and friends, that’s a lot of return for doing less.
3. SPREAD THE LOVE. I am always staggered how keen people are to share the mean stuff. I was at a lunch last week and the woman I was speaking to was trying to pay me a compliment. She told me how much she enjoyed my company and then expressed her surprise at the fact because ‘X never has a nice word to say about me.’ Ouch. So much of what we share is unnecessary, unhelpful and often quite unkind. Be the better person and just share the good stuff – pass on compliments you have heard about that person or notice and comment on something specific that he/she might be doing right or better than before. Professor Nick Haslam, from the University of Melbourne agrees, reminding us that ‘Compliments can lift moods, improve engagement with tasks, enhance learning and increase persistence.” However, to do the trick they need to be genuine (which is why no one likes a brown-nose!) – ‘Faux compliments are likely to have the opposite effect as genuine ones. People who receive them will often feel they are insincere and not well intentioned, and that undermines any positive effects they might feel about being praised,” Haslam says. The good news is that the compliment giver gets as much of a mood boost as the receiver. Two birds. One stone – Just saying!

This GET HAPPIER Post is brought to you by someone who will take her compliments wherever she can get them.