16 Ways to Create Your Own Happiness at Work

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Let’s face it, happiness and work do not tend to go hand in hand. A 2013 Gallup study, which reported data from more than 180 million people, found that just 13% of us consider ourselves to be “happily engaged at work.”Those who do rate themselves as happy are 36% more motivated, six times more energized, and twice as productive as their unhappy counterparts.The good news is that just 50% of happiness is influenced by genetics—the rest is up to you.  When it comes to making yourself happy, you need to learn what works for you. Once you discover this, everything else tends to fall into place. And making yourself happy doesn’t just improve your performance; it’s also good for your health.A critical skill set that happy people tend to have in common is emotional intelligence (EQ). At TalentSmart, we’ve tested the EQs of more than a million people and know what makes high EQ people tick. So, we went digging until we found 16 great ways that emotionally intelligent people create their own happiness at work.

1. Remember That You Are In Charge of Your Own Happiness
You have two choices in any dead-end job: find another one or make the most of the one you’re stuck with. Either way, your happiness is up to you and no one else. Remind yourself of this anytime you’re feeling stuck.

2. Don’t Obsess over Things You Can’t Control
It’s good to know how Greece’s economic troubles might affect US markets or that your company could merge with its largest competitor, but there’s a big difference between understanding these larger forces and worrying about them. Happy people are ready and informed, but they don’t allow themselves to fret over things that are beyond their pay grades.

3. Don’t Compare Yourself to Other People
When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When you feel good about something that you’ve done, don’t allow anyone’s opinions or accomplishments take that away from you.

While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within. Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain—you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.

4. Reward Yourself
Working hard is important, but never allowing yourself to take a break is detrimental to your happiness. A study of radiologists found that they made more accurate diagnoses when they received small rewards prior to reviewing patients’ charts. A Cornell study found that small rewards make people more generous, friendly, and happy. These small “thrills” also made people more productive and accurate in their work. Rewards activate the pleasure pathway in your brain, even if they are self-induced. Effective rewards can be small things such as taking a walk down the hall or eating a snack.

5. Exercise During the Work Week
Getting your body moving for as little as 10 minutes releases GABA, a soothing neurotransmitter that also limits impulsivity. A University of Bristol study showed that people who exercised on workdays reported improvements in time management, mood, and performance. The benefits of exercise always outweigh the time lost in its pursuit.

6. Don’t Judge and Gossip
Judging other people and speaking poorly of them is a lot like over-indulging in a decadent dessert; it feels good while you’re doing it, but afterwards, you feel guilty and sick. When you’re tempted to speak of someone else in a way that might be negative, just ask yourself if you’d want someone saying the same about you.

7. Choose Your Battles Wisely
Emotionally intelligent people know how important it is to live to fight another day. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged and unhappy for some time to come. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

8. Stay True to Yourself
Crossing moral boundaries in the name of success is a sure-fire path to unhappiness. Violating your personal standards creates feelings of regret, dissatisfaction, and deactivation. Know when to stand your ground and express dissent when someone wants you to do something that you know you shouldn’t. When you’re feeling confused, take some time to review your values and write them down. This will help you to locate your moral compass.

9. Clear the Clutter
I don’t need to remind you of how much time you spend at work. Take a good look at your workspace. You should create a space that’s soothing and uplifting. Whether it’s a picture of your family, a plant, or an award that you’re proud of, display them prominently to keep them on your mind. Get rid of the junk and clutter that hold no significance and do nothing positive for your mental state.

10. Give Someone A Hand
Taking the time to help your colleagues not only makes them happy, but it also makes you happy. Helping other people gives you a surge of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine, all of which create good feelings. In a Harvard study, employees who helped others were 10 times more likely to be focused at work and 40% more likely to get a promotion. The same study showed that people who consistently provided social support were the most likely to be happy during times of high stress. As long as you make certain that you aren’t overcommitting yourself, helping others is sure to have a positive influence on your happiness.

11. Let Your Strengths Flow
A University of Chicago study of peak performance found that people who were able to reach an intense state of focus, called flow, reaped massive benefits. Flow is the state of mind in which you find yourself completely engrossed in a project or task, and you lose awareness of the passage of time and other external distractions. Flow is often described as an exhilarating state in which you feel euphoria and mastery simultaneously. The result is not just happiness and productivity but also the development of new skills through a heightened state of learning. The key to reaching flow lies in organizing your tasks such that you have immediate and clear goals to pursue that play to your strengths. As you begin working on these tasks, your focus increases along with your feelings of adequacy. In time, you reach a flow state, in which productivity and happiness flourish. Set clear goals each day and experiment with task order until you find the secret formula that gets you flowing.

12. Smile and Laugh More
A study at Mannheim University in Germany demonstrated that we can actually manipulate our emotions by changing our facial expressions. One group of participants held a pen in their mouth horizontally, which forces a smile. When asked to rate how funny a cartoon was, the participants holding pens in their mouths found the cartoons much funnier than participants without pens.

As the study shows, it doesn’t matter if your smile is genuine because your facial expression can precede the feeling. If you find yourself in a negative spiral at work, slow down and smile or watch a funny video on YouTube. This mood boost can turn your day around.

13. Stay Away From Negative People
Complainers and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. People often feel pressure to listen to complainers because they don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their negative emotional spirals. You can avoid getting drawn in only by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary. Think of it this way: If a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with negative people. A great way to set limits is to ask them how they intend to fix their problems. The complainer will then either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive direction.

14. Laugh at Yourself
When you take yourself too seriously at work your happiness and performance suffer. Don’t be afraid to show a little vulnerability. Something as simple as laughing at yourself draws people to you because it shows them that you’re humble and grounded (it also keeps them from laughing behind your back). Happy people balance their self-confidence with a good sense of humor and humility.

15. Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude
It’s all too easy to get caught up in things that could have been different or didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to. Sometimes the best way to pull your mind away from negativity is to step back and contemplate what you’re grateful for. Taking time to reflect on the good in your life improves your mood because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical wellbeing

16. Believe the Best Is Yet to Come
Don’t just tell yourself that the best is yet to come—believe it. Having a positive, optimistic outlook on the future doesn’t just make you happier; it also improves your performance by increasing your sense of self-efficacy. The mind has a tendency to magnify past pleasure to such a great degree that the present pales in comparison. This phenomenon can make you lose faith in the power of the future to outdo what you’ve already experienced. Don’t be fooled. Believe in the great things the future has in store.

Bringing It All Together
Applying these strategies won’t just improve your happiness at work; most of them will also improve your emotional intelligence. Pick those that resonate with you and have fun with them.
A version of this article first appeared on TalentSmart.com.
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“The Barcode Lady”

Put simply, a barcode is a machine-readable representation of data, either in one-dimension or two-dimension format. The benefits of barcoding are speed of data entry and accuracy. Black and white bars or matrix patterns are used to create the barcode, and depending on whether it is 1-D or 2-D. A 1-D barcode appears as vertical black and white lines, commonly seen on the products on our grocery and retail stores. A 2-D barcode will look like little black and white squares stacked on each other. The most common and public usage of 2-D barcode is by FedEx. They use 2-D PDF 417 barcode to track every package they ship.

The first bar code patent was issued in 1952 to Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, using what looked like a bulls-eye symbol that was made of concentric circles. Bar codes were used as far back as 1932 when a group of students who did a project where they required customers to select their merchandise by removing the correct punch cards from the catalog that corresponded with the items that they wanted. In 1970, the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council and McKinsey & Co. created a numeric format for product identification in bar codes. In 1973, George J. Laurer invented the UPC (Universal Product Code) that we know today. Commercial bar codes were not used until the mid to late 1960s, and the initial application was for industrial use. Some of the early adopters of barcode technology were the railroads and the US Postal Service.

In 1967,bar codes were used on the American Railroad, known as KarTrak. It took almost 7 years before there was 95% coverage of the fleet, but the project was ultimately abandoned in 1975 because of the technical difficulties in reading the barcodes. At that time, a similar technology call RFID (radio frequency identification) became available but was considered far too expensive, so it was not used. However by 1991 RFID technology had improved and become less expensive and it became mandatory for all rail cars to be identified with an RFID tag.

The US Post started studying applications and uses for barcodes in mail delivery during the early 1970’s and by 1982 the US Postal Service implemented the POSTNET code for tracking mail delivery across the United States. Within five years the US Post had installed barcoding systems in most every major city in the US.

The actual first invention of the barcode was done by the Irish, and likely based on the Irish alphabet from the first centuries AD, which looks like a form of bar code itself. Today, barcodes have a variety of applications, including identifying retail products, mail sorting, warehouse use, and even for patient identification and tracking in hospitals.

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Today it looks and feels like spring. What does that mean to all my retail and manufacturing customers?  It means an increase in business.  People are receiving their tax checks, school will be out soon,
everyone needs to buy stuff… not only the essentials but our stuff.  They need things to get the kids off to summer camp.  They are packing up for the family vacation.  It’s time to take care of those projects
around the house.

Now is the hard part. With internet sales increasing and big box companies trying to make us extinct we need to set ourselves apart and remind our customers why they buy from us.
Service, product expertise, wide selections you can touch and feel.   With the economy in,  let’s just say not like it was 5 years ago we need to fight for every sale.

When customers are searching the internet they are mainly price driven.  One of my favorite retail pet shop owners was telling me a customer went down the street to a pet chain store.  He purchased
a fish tank with all the accessories.  He then brought the whole purchase still in the box to him for help with the set up.  There you go.  The big stores have minimum wage workers with no product knowledge
who sell what they  have on the floor and saves the customer a few dollars, maybe.  There is no special ordering, no product knowledge, no help with set up nothing.    “The nerve of that guy to buy down the street and expect me to help him.”

What do I do now?  Do I help him and hope he buys from me in the future?  Do I tell him to go back to the box store and try to get help when I know they aren’t going to help him?  My suggestion was to have a sign
posted in the store.  Fish tank set up $200.00 – free with system purchase.  My friend did not feel comfortable with posting the sign and was afraid that he might offend potential customers.

What do you think?  Please share your success story.