 Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Welcome back to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today we're talking about 10 ways to improve performance. Now all of us want to improve performance at something, and if you're a manager, not only do you want to improve your own performance, but you want to improve your staff's performance. So we're going to talk about some things that you might be able to do to improve performance. First is get enough quality sleep. Any sleep is not good sleep. Quality sleep is when you're getting that good, deep, restorative sleep. So encourage your staff to learn about sleep hygiene. If you have an employee assistance program, have them come in and do a presentation on sleep hygiene. So people know that, you know, an hour before bed, they should have a blue light filter on any of their electronic devices, that they need to not take a hot shower right before bed because the body needs to cool down, that they need to create a sleep routine, for example. For more information about improving your quality of sleep, we have videos on our YouTube channel that you can review. So even though you can't control what your staff does, you can't educate them about how to get more rest. Another thing that you can do that can also help them get enough quality sleep as a supervisor, or even as an employee, set work life boundaries. Make sure that when you leave work, you leave work at work. And don't bring it home. Don't be checking your email at 10 o'clock at night. And as a supervisor, don't be emailing people at 10 o'clock at night because that can trigger a stress response that can keep people up past when they wanted to go to sleep. Ensuring your staff has enough quality sleep will help them have a better mood, better morale, and be sick less often. The second step is to eat well. That sounds pretty basic, but it's important because your body makes the brain chemicals responsible for happiness and concentration and everything else based off of the foods you eat. So if you're eating crap, then you're going to get crap. Eating well doesn't mean eating, as my father would say, rabbit food all the time, necessarily. What it means is making sure that you're getting good quality proteins. You're eating some fruits and vegetables and drinking enough water. So that's not horrible to do. So eating well, one tip that I was told by a dietitian friend of mine is try to have three colors on your plate at every meal. That will help make sure that you're getting a variety of nutrients. Begin with the end in mind. When you have staff start a project or when you start a project, you don't want to just start and say, OK, I need you to do this today. You want to have everybody involved in the project on board and you want to have a vision of what the end looks like. If it's just you, you still want to have a vision of what the end looks like because that's your goal. And then from that goal, you're going to figure out the individual steps you need to do in order to get there. If you just start out with a kind of a loosey-goosey haphazard goal, then your path to get there is going to be loosey-goosey and haphazard. If you have a clear, defined goal, then your path to that goal will also be clear and defined and much more efficient. Know your temperament and know the temperament of the people whose performance you're trying to improve if it's not yours. Temperament varies for different people. Extroverts need to be around people. They crave interaction. They draw energy from other people. So putting an extrovert in a cubicle is not going to maximize their performance. Letting them work in a group is going to be more helpful. Letting them work in a work environment where there are seating areas, instead of having everybody at desks, that can improve performance. Introverts on the other hand are going to do much better in a cubicle with less distractions. A lot of introverts have difficulty switching gears and don't deal with distractions well. If you want to improve performance, you want to make sure that people can maintain their best focus. Extroverts also think things out while they talk. So if you put them by themselves in a cubicle, they may talk to themselves, but they're not going to be as effective as if they're bouncing ideas off somebody. So just think about temperament. The other part of temperament that goes with improving performance is knowing whether you're a judge or a perceiver. Perceivers love deadlines. They tend to do really well with order and structure. Perceivers feel very oppressed with deadlines. Now in work, as in life, we all have to have some sort of deadlines. A judge is going to create time limits and goals for each sub-goal. A perceiver is going to do better if you say, you know, by the end of the month I need these three things accomplished. That gives them a little bit more wiggle room in terms of how quickly they get things done and they don't feel quite as stifled. Synergize. Put people together who have opposing interests and skills and abilities. If you are trying to improve your health and wellness, for example, and that's not your strong suit, find somebody who is knowledgeable about that kind of stuff and pull off of their knowledge and they will probably pull motivation from you because you're really motivated and excited about making this new change. But synergy means using different people's skills to enhance your own. So think about your friends. Think about their different skills, their different tools, their different talents. What can they bring? How can you synergize? And you can even think about things like time management. So maybe one of your good friends is a stay-at-home parent and you're trying to get a promotion at work and, you know, it would be really helpful if that person could pick your kids up three days a week from school because then you wouldn't have to leave quite as early and you could work towards your goal. So, you know, if you can get them to do that, what can you do for them? And synergy is about give and take. Synergy is about balance and helping each other out to make the most of everybody's quality of life. Think about synergy within your own household. In my house, my daughter is extraordinarily structured. And I mean, she runs a tight ship, let me tell you what. My son is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. He is very fanciful. So the two of them can butt heads sometimes, but they also balance each other out really well because he keeps her from getting too structured and rigid. And she keeps him from, well, she makes sure that he gets his stuff done. So synergy can work in a household and it's important to recognize and play off of everybody's strengths. Improve communication. This is another really important thing, whether you're improving your own performance and you need to be able to communicate your needs and wants effectively, but you also need to be able to understand other people's needs and wants effectively. So if you're improving your performance at work, that's great, but you need to make sure it fits into your team because you probably don't work in isolation. So if you want them to give you certain things, you need to understand what they need in exchange. And for example, when I used to work as a supervisor at a mental health facility and I needed my staff to get their progress notes in at the end of every single day. And that is a huge task when you work in a residential facility. So that is what I needed and they could do it and they had to do it. However, what did they need from me in order to help them make that happen? So I was able to use my managerial powers to free up some time for them every day so they could get their notes done. So we synergized. Synergy can also be great minds think alike. When I would write grants, I am not a detailed person. I am the broad strokes person. I love creating the plans and doing the research, but when it comes down to writing the budgets and the nitty gritty details, I miss things. I know that's not my strength. So I would take, I would write the initial draft of the grant and I would give it to my partner who would review it and she was much more detail oriented and able to pick up on the stuff that I probably missed. So we worked well together in order to produce a really good end product. Improving communication going back to that one also means being willing to communicate. Some people won't ask for help and that is one of the greatest hindrers of performance. If you need help, ask for it. My son will do that now when he's working on something and he can't get it instead of asking for help, he'll try to figure it out on his own and it takes him 7, 8, 20 times longer to get it done than if he would have just stopped and gone, you know what, I need some help with this. So look at the reasons why you're not willing to ask for help. Improve your communication when you work with people and you need something or you're trying to communicate something. Always try to communicate it in the form of a win-win. If I can do this, this is how it will benefit you. Or if you give this to me, whatever it is that you need, this is how it will benefit you. So make it a win-win situation. Eliminate distractions. For some people, especially introverts, that means auditory distractions, visual distractions, a lot of introverts really like being either in a lab or in a cubicle where they can focus. And even for extroverts, we need to eliminate too many distractions like Facebook and other things that are going to pull their attention away from work. Now, they may be sitting in a lounge area discussing a project. That's not a distraction. But we don't want to have the discussion wander off into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles latest movie or, you know, where they're going to go partying for the weekend or whatever. Make sure we maintain a focus and eliminate distractions as much as possible. Encourage your team to visualize. And we talked about this back with goals. If they can visualize the end product, then they're going to be more excited to work towards it. When you're putting a puzzle together, you know, ostensibly, when you bought the puzzle, you're like, oh, this would be so pretty to put together. And or cool or whatever word you want to use. Once you get the puzzle, it comes in a thousand pieces. You need to continue to visualize the puzzle as you put it together in order to know where the pieces go, but also to help you stay motivated to get it done. Because you know that even though sometimes it doesn't seem like you can find a piece that fits anywhere, if you just push on through and and you're consistent, you will achieve the end result that you had hoped for. Set smart goals with deadlines and smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time limited. A smart goal that's specific means I'm going to say exactly what it is that I want to accomplish instead of quote, get in shape. I'm going to say I want to be able to run a 5k in under 30 minutes. That's a specific goal. Or I want to be able to squat 150 pounds 15 times. That is a goal and it's measurable because anybody can look at it and go, did she run a 5k in under 30 minutes? Did she squat 150 pounds so many times? Those are things that are measurable because you can see them and you can say it's either a yes or a no. Achievable is just what it says. Don't set goals that you can't achieve. I am never going to be able to squat 300 pounds or, you know, at least not in the foreseeable future, but probably never. So that's not something I want to set. I am not going to, at my age, suddenly become a bodybuilder. Not going to happen. What I can do is get in good shape for somebody in my age group, which also goes with realistic. Don't set goals that aren't realistic. Like if I said I wanted to win some sort of bodybuilding pageant. Well, I could theoretically enter, but I'm almost 50 and I'd be competing against people who are 20 and they've been working out harder and they're able to work out harder than someone in my age group. Yeah, I don't like admitting it. But as you age, you can't work out quite the same way you did when you were 20. So I need to be realistic about what my goals are and also realistic in terms of setting a goal that is in line with my priorities. Getting in shape is great. And theoretically, yes, I could become a professional bodybuilder at this age if I really wanted to. I know some. But that would mean quitting my job and pretty much living at the gym and not having time for the farm, not having time for my kids. So as far as realistic, becoming a bodybuilder at this age in life, at this stage in my life is not realistic. And T is time limited. We need to have goals that you're going to be able to do this by. And realism kind of plays in your time limits. For example, setting a goal that you're going to be able to run a 5K in under 30 minutes, two weeks from now, that's not realistic. Six months from now, that's realistic. So be realistic in terms of how quickly under the best circumstances even you could achieve that goal, but also where that goal fits in terms of all of the priorities and obligations you have in your life because you may not be able to devote unlimited time to it. If you're working with a team, still set smart goals with them specific. Let them know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. If you hand somebody a project and you say, I want to know how to get more clients in. Well, OK. What type of clients, how many clients, give me a little bit more to work with. So if they say, if the supervisor says, I want to know how to improve our base revenue by $15,000 a month. Now that's specific. And then the team can get together and brainstorm different ways to do that. Measurable $15,000 a month is a very measurable goal. You either hit it or you don't achievable. Now, depending on your team and the business that you're in that may. $15,000 a month may or may not be achievable. But set what's achievable for you. And generally, if you're looking at a month, you want to look at a 3% to 5% increase at most. That sets you up for success. If you set yourself up for failure, then you're likely going to get frustrated and lose motivation. Realistic, what can your team actually accomplish? Now, if they had $100,000 for marketing, then they might be able to increase your base revenue by $15,000 a month. But if they don't have that and they're working on a shoestring budget, what is realistic for them to achieve? And time limited. We keep talking in this particular example about a month. So that gives, that tells you when you're going to, what time frame you want to increase the revenue, but how long do they have to plan? Because they can't just start today and be bringing in an additional $15,000 a month by the end of the month. So make sure to give them time limits on this is your planning period. It needs to start this initiative, needs to start by this date, and we're going to take our first measure on this date. Create rewards, whether it's for yourself or for your team. There has to be rewards for accomplishing each step along the way to your goal. Learn why, not just what and how. So if you're changing a personal behavior, know what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, but also why you want to do it, because that helps increase motivation. The same thing is true if you're managing a team. You can tell them what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, but if they don't see the why, like in the example of me wanting my team to get their progress notes in at the end of every single day. Why is that important? It used to be at the end of the week by close of business on Friday. What was the change? Why is it now important to get that billing in by the end of the day? And that will help staff, even if it doesn't increase their motivation so much, it will still help them understand the reasoning behind it. So it's not just a willy-nilly change that's adding stress to their life. Create happiness in the workplace. This isn't that hard. Do silly things, have events, have monthly staff get-togethers. Put sticky notes on people's computer, just giving them an ad-a-boy or an ad-a-girl, or telling them to have a good day. It's not that hard to create happiness. Create happiness in your own life, too, to serve as a model for your staff. I would periodically bring in pictures of my animals and put them on my desk or have them available because my animals made me happy. But I tried to model as much as I could for my staff that it's important to be happy in order to be motivated and productive at work. So how can we create happiness and create competition and rewards? Now, I don't want it to be cut-throat competition, but people tend to do better if there's rewards and recognition for their activities. So encourage people to work towards a mutual goal. So whoever at the end of the month has the most positive client satisfaction surveys will get some sort of reward. Whoever at the end of the month has turned in their notes on time the most will receive some sort of a reward and make it a reward that they're really kind of excited to get. You can't necessarily give them a day off, but you can give them, for example, priority in choosing holiday vacation days or something. That gives you an idea of some different things you can do to improve performance in yourself and in your staff. So if you like this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app or you can join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com slash Facebook or find additional resources on our community at docsnipes.com. Thanks for tuning in to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. Our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life affordable and accessible to everyone. We record the podcast during a Facebook Live broadcast each week. Join us free at docsnipes.com slash Facebook or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast player. 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