077: Positive Responses for Positive Results with Maura Sweeney

Pete Mockaitis
Maura, thanks so much for being here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Maura Sweeney
Pete, thank you so much.  I’m thrilled to be with you, and thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m thrilled to have you, and I think there are so many fun directions we can go with this.  And it’s funny, it seems like you’ve raised a very successful daughter, and I’m getting married shortly, so it’s funny – I’m interested in all sorts of even bigger content now than I was a year ago.

Maura Sweeney
You did do your homework checking into my background. You knew that I home-schooled my daughter and one of the things I brought her up to do is to really find what made her happy and to pursue what made her happy. Very interesting, thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah, that’s good. That’s good. So, I want to know – you’ve done a lot of studying when it comes to happiness, with conducting a happiness survey for a number of years. I’d love to hear some of maybe the most striking or surprising or compelling insights that have emerged from those data.

Maura Sweeney
Well, it’s so interesting. There are people that have done big, big studies, like Shawn Achor, who wrote The Happiness Advantage; he’s been spending years at Harvard University pointing to the fact that if we pursue our happiness we tend to be more successful. Mine, this pursuit of happiness for me has really been a lifetime pursuit, and I have a lot of things I had developed – knowledge, let’s say, about how we can live a happy and successful life, but then later on I thought, “Well, you know what?  I know what I think and I know what I’ve experienced.  Let me go out and see what others feel about this.”
So I actually have been conducting over the past few years a happiness survey. I’ve conducted it with people from 28 states here in the United States and currently up to 24 countries. They’re as young as 18, they’re as old as over 90, they come from every economic background, some are single, some are divorced, people from every economic background and also educational background.
So all that said and done, I asked them to give me their definition of happiness, and I came up with five of the most common themes, and here they are.  Number 1 – healthy relationships, meaning a life without the drama. Number 2 – peace of mind.  Number 3 – a sense of freedom.  4 – purpose and fulfillment. And number 5 – personal confidence.

So all of those things are the basic elements of what people use when they consider that whole concept of, “What is it that makes me happy?  I want healthy relationships, I want to feel peace of mind, a sense of freedom, feeling like my life is both purposed and has some sense of fulfillment, and that I feel personally confident.”  And when you think about all those elements, you already feel better just with the thought of them, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I want them all. And lots of it! Now!

Maura Sweeney
Right.  So think about what that does for all of us in life. As we know that those are the most important things to us, why not then create a life experience around those kinds of values? When we know what they are, it becomes easier to create a better life, in or out of work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well, that sounds excellent. And so, within the work area, I guess and out of work at the same time, I want to touch base on a couple of your podcast episodes. One was about being “addicted to stress” and the other about taking a “mental vacation”, and they seem like those are like a yin and yang, or one could be a solution to the other. Can you unpack a little bit of your content there – what is a stress addiction? Is it real, and how is it affecting us, and what are some solutions?

Maura Sweeney
Yeah, imagine that – addicted to stress. Funny you would’ve picked those two out, because they had been shared quite a bit of times and people had referenced them several times as well. Addicted to stress. I gave in that podcast some of my own personal backstory – that I was always stressed out, I was always worried but I didn’t even realize it because it was so familiar to me.
And then I checked it in a larger framework, and I asked the listeners how many ways they have gotten caught up in a stressful cycle.  Sometimes when we are in an environment that is so familiar to us that we don’t step out of it, we tend to think that whatever we are is normal.  And it’s not until we take a moment and step away from it, or even feel what we’re feeling in that moment, that we say, “Wait a minute, I want to get a little control over this.”
And it is so common that when we get into a stress mode, we almost use it to fuel ourselves for higher levels of stress.  And I don’t know about you, Pete, but a lot of times if I’m stressed, I end up being far less productive, far less creative, far less inspired, and I find myself really feeling like I’m reduced rather than increased.  So that was one of the things I talked about.  So addicted to stress was one; mental vacations were the other.
Both of them surprisingly did get a lot of shares and a lot of comments. Addicted to stress and mental vacations have everything to do with the theater of the mind. A lot of us don’t even realize where we’re living in our own mind and in our own lives because we don’t have the emotional intelligence to step back, look and feel where we are, and say, “Wait a minute. What am I doing? Am I in the middle of something I don’t want to be a part of?” and, “How can I recreate my life so that I feel less stressed and more like I am on a mental vacation?” It’s kind of like changing the cause and effect of our lives.
First of all, the biggest thing with stress is that it is so common in our lives and very, very frequently at work. If we’re in any kind of a corporate job, no matter where we’ve been, our corporations are going to ask more out of us, our customers are going to want more out of us, and we tend to find ourselves in a situation where we’re always upping the ante on stress.
When we’re overly stressed, we either can’t think, we’re uninspired, we lose our energy, and we find ourselves far less productive than we would be otherwise. That was why I ended up doing another podcast on mental vacations.
If we can identify, sometimes, what those triggers are that give us stress or make us nervous and step away from them and rethink where we are, catch our breath, and even think about something that makes us happy, like a favorite place, a wonderful song that really uplifts us, a great memory, it could have been a party or just time with friends, and we replace our stress with that positive thought or that wonderful image or the great sounding song that we remember, any of those things, we end up repositioning our mind and our emotions.
And then suddenly, instead of feeling like we’re constricted, afraid, reduced, disempowered, we end up feeling far freer, far more uplifted, and then so much better work comes out of us along with obviously a feeling of wellbeing that translates to other people that happen to be in our room or in our realm.
It happens all the time that we end up without thinking about it, becoming victims of stress, rather than creators of mental phases that help us live a better, a happier, and a freer life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you maybe give us some examples, then, about what this sort of stress-increase, vicious cycle might look like as an example in practice? As well as an example of how I might construct a mental vacation?

Maura Sweeney
I don’t know why, even as you’re asking me this question, I could remember last summer, I was walking around Lower Manhattan in the Financial District. Oh, I could feel the environment. It was late in the afternoon, and I was right around Wall Street. There were tons of people all dressed in their black or navy blue suits. Every single one of them was smoking. I wondered how many of them were maybe on crack or something else, and I could literally feel the stress!
Anybody who knows anything about Wall Street will know people work their brains out there. It is just a high, high stress environment. And there I was right in the middle of the stress circle, probably one of the top stress circles in the world.
I thought, “Oh my gosh, these poor people.” So many of them get caught in it, and it’s because it’s their peer group around them that they end up just picking up on stress and then giving it back out again, and the antes are always being uplifted.
Here’s what I used in my podcast on a mental vacation.
One of the things I’ve done for years is I would always get up extra early in the morning. I take time for myself. I usually have a notebook nearby, maybe a book that would have some great quotes or something inspiring for me to read, and I would literally take time for my own space, to create my own space.
Sometimes I will even do it on long car rides back on my way to work. What I would do is to put myself in frame of mind where I could think about something that was empowering.
What does that mean? Sometimes, it is a great quote. Sometimes, it’s something maybe that you wrote down in your journal that was just so picking up on a wonderful moment when all the elements in life were working together. By putting myself right back there, looking at what I wrote in my journal, my emotions, my mindset, and even my body would just get into a much more relaxed mode.
Nobody could do that for us, Pete. We have to be the cause of the way we feel in life and what we give out. We can’t always be a receiver of every crazy thought that comes our way. Sometimes, we have to take control and be the creator of our thought life, the creator of how we think and how we comport ourselves.
There’s something I always think about. You know the word abdication? We always think about, “Oh, maybe a king or a queen abdicated their throne.” I always think about this. We have a throne of authority within us, and oftentimes, nobody tells us. That throne is “Where am I going to live? Where do I choose to live? Is it going to be a happy space that’s always thinking about good things? Or am I going to put myself in a land of chaos where I’m always contemplating the worst thing that could happen or the next risk ahead of you or something I’m afraid of losing?”
By controlling our thoughts, we’re literally not only taking a mental vacation, but sometimes, returning to that place at the very moment of the day when we’re at risk of doing or saying something really ridiculous at work and throwing a day off.
Did that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. You’re saying the actual practice, then, is to just sort of conscientiously establish what those thoughts are going to be, and you could be aided by a journal or any other sort of resources or tools to get there?

Maura Sweeney
Right, it could be a journal. How about this music? How many people could be at work during the day and they’re doing some work, but they could also tune into music that really makes them feel good, whatever that happens to be? That’s just a really easy way of doing it.
The other thing is it’s to step out of toxic environments or toxic relationships, very slowly, very carefully. But I would attribute all of that to being mindful of where you are, where you feel your best, and where you don’t, and take incremental positive adjustments to change all the way you feel and all the expressions you’ve got into something that’s more amenable for you to feel like you’re happier, freer, and had a better sense of wellbeing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I guess I’m curious to hear that—it seems like a great practice and one that I’ve done a bit myself and I’d like to use some more of—I think that there are times and maybe in an environment where there is an extra dose of competition, talking about Wall Street, or where there is sort of a lot of urgency or time-sensitive pressure that shows up, that can really kind of put fuel to the fire when it comes to stress. Do you have any perspectives on keeping that sort of calm and positivity going when you’ve got the tension around you there?

Maura Sweeney
I do. Can I offer us a quote that I love from Eleanor Roosevelt? Because I think it’ll give people a very good sense of self. This is what she said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Think about this in highly competitive environments or stressful environments, “How often do we put ourselves down or allow others to put ourselves down or start trash talking?”
That word “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” is just such a great word because it, again, goes back to that sense of “Who am I? Am I going to abdicate my own sense of authority and freedom and sense of wellbeing to what somebody else is saying or what the atmosphere is dictating to me? Or am I going to remember I do respect myself and I will take good care of myself both inside and out?”
Did you ask like more questions about how do we deal with competition? Is that where you wanted to go?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I guess part of that is the mindset, that firmness and “I’m not going to give my consent to this.” I think that makes great sense as one tool for staying afloat on that kind of environment. If got anything else, I’ll take that too, yeah.

Maura Sweeney
I do. This is what I love. Do you know how often—again, we can either be the effect of our environment or we can be the cause of our environment. We can actually be a positive influence wherever we are. I always think about “All right. How can I be an example to others wherever I am?” There’s an expression from Gandhi. He said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Let’s say you’re in an environment that is highly competitive. For 10 years, I was in the telecom industry, which at the time was probably the second more highly competitive industry in the country. There was a lot of need to bring in more sales. I remember, oftentimes, both in sales and in management in that field, I don’t really think through new ways to do things.
I had a manager who always said to me, “Maura, you always see opportunity in challenges.” She said, “Everywhere else, people look at the lemons. But somehow, you will always find a way to make lemonade.”
And so what do you do? You look at where you are and say, “All right. I can either choose to see what I can’t do or what’s working against me or I can use this opportunity as a way of saying, ‘All right, what new thoughts can I have? What new perspectives or angles did I never look at before?’”
We’re frequently challenged in negative environments to give barbs back, to lower ourselves, to lower our standards, to start backbiting other people, but what if we choose the reverse? I know these are things that I did for many years. What if you stop the negative or anti-talk against everybody else? What if you stop badmouthing the competition? What if you stop with your lies or trying to give negative responses to everything around you and instead be an example of positive values?
How about if you change and you start recognizing and acknowledging other people around you for great things they’re doing, wonderful ways they’re working, fun things they just said, and literally turn that atmosphere around? What if you start offering encouragement and support and praise positively or openly as well as privately to other people around you?
Believe it or not, I saw over 10 years period of time, those kinds of techniques having such a great impact on the environment that I worked in but also in our overall productivity and success. People love being in environments where they feel free to be themselves, where they’re acknowledged and approved and even maybe promoted for good skills they have.
Sometimes, even just to tell people what a great sense of humor they have makes them feel better and then uplifts the entire environment. Little things like that end up, rather than taking something like negative competition and making it worse, to turn things around into something that’s uplifting and freeing and inspiring and beneficial for the group. When people see that and feel it, Pete, they end up rising up into it and becoming a part of a different kind of a paradigm.
I have to tell you this. In my own experience, I was a branch manager (this was years ago), and we had the top branch in the United States, even though we had the worst rates we were offering to our customers, and we really didn’t even have a strong marketing angle, we ended up having such a positively charged office that not only do we have the top office in the country, but we have the top sales people in the country. We had the top sales manager in the country.
We just had a great working environment, and it was because we worked at being positive rather than negative, working together collaboratively rather than finding ways to cut one another down, including our competition.

Pete Mockaitis
And so do you have any sort of mechanisms or approaches? I think it can be a little tricky to call out behavior of someone else that is not appropriate for the culture you’re trying to establish, but I imagine it’s kind of also necessary to reinforce that. How does that play out?

Maura Sweeney
That’s a very good question. When you say “call out behavior,” think about what we normally do if we don’t like somebody else’s behavior. We usually attack the person. We make it a personal thing.
For whatever reason, I learned how to be an advocate for other people such as this, “I know that you’re really trying to do a great job here, but some of this behavior is actually working to your detriment.” You become an advocate for the individual, but you end up addressing the behavior as something you know that they want to improve upon because improving upon it or addressing it will help them be even more successful than what they’ve been previously. It’s a different way of addressing what could be sometimes a really challenging issue.
I know I’d run into that whether it was with people I worked with or managers who are above me or even others in other departments, because people tend to get very defensive when they are misbehaving. They know they did something wrong or they feel they did something wrong, and you’re calling them out on it.
I have one thing that came to mind if you want me to share it that I thought it was epic for me. This was, again, back in my corporate days. I had, I would say he was, a compatriot working in another department at a branch that was far away from our corporate headquarters. He submitted an anonymous letter to our senior vice president of sales about something going on in my office.
There was nothing going on in my office, but the vice president called me one day, furious, cursing at me, “What the heck is going on down there?” It so caught me by surprise, and I had no idea who it could’ve been that would’ve written this so called anonymous letter.
First of all, I was very kind and I held my ground with the vice president, and I said, “Whoa, this is a surprise.” I said, “Thank you for calling me.” I said, “Please, if you would like, come fly down to Tampa.” I think he was up in Chicago. I said, “I will leave the office.” I said, “Please feel free to interview any one of my employees,” I said, “Because obviously there’s something I’m missing here that I’m unaware of.” I said, “That will give the employees freedom to speak with you openly.” I said, “Whatever you do find, please let me know because I would like to know what it is that I’m obviously doing wrong that I don’t see.” That was one form of response that I took.
When I figured out who the sabotaging compatriot was in another department, I ended up speaking with him one night. He had no idea that I had figured out it was he who wrote the letter. This is how I approached him. I think his name was Bob. I said, “Bob, I realized that you’re very concerned for whatever you felt was going on in my office and that you had written a note to our vice president.” I said, “But I guess I need to apologize to you. Was there some form of behavior I had that would have made you uncomfortable enough not to bring those concerns directly to me?”
Now here’s the crazy thing, Pete! First of all, if you could’ve seen his face! His mouth just dropped. I totally disarmed him because I put myself on his side. He couldn’t deny because it was obvious that he was the one who had done it. But after I got finished speaking with him—and really, all it was on his part—he was bored and he just liked playing mind games with other people. I finally said to him—

Pete Mockaitis
Oh man!

Maura Sweeney
Isn’t that amazing? But do you see I disarmed him, and then at the end of the conversation, I said, “Bob, do I have a fair agreement that in the future, if you see anything that you think that I’m doing that maybe is harming the company, that you please come to me and point it out?” I said, “Because nothing is more important to me while I’m here at the office than that I am doing the best job I possibly can for a company.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. It’s so funny because I’m thinking of some people who have some colleagues that they’d like to be taken down and how they might react if someone did try to nuke me or have coup, and it wouldn’t be the way you reacted most likely!

Maura Sweeney
Well, I got a completely different response. He knew that anything he did was going to be exposed, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure how I knew what I knew. I actually created an environment where I could service his advocate. My goal in it was to bring him up to a higher level of behavior without even saying so.

You know what? There could have been such bad blood between the two of us. I was on the sales side. He was on the operations side. Could you imagine if I took that situation and made him my arch enemy? He could have done all kinds of things to further sabotage me.

That’s one of the things I do when I say I deal with the theater of the mind and emotional intelligence. We so often want to react emotionally when somebody has hurt us or looked to harm us or even when we think they might have attacked us. To be able to take a little bit of time to regain our thoughts and to reframe what we’re doing can really change our overall outcomes.

I never had another problem with that man again.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. That’s so good. I want to expanded a little bit in the realm of emotional intelligence or soft skills. I know you are a big advocate for folks learning these. They need to.
It’s so funny. I’ve done a series of workshops called Enhanced Thinking and Collaboration with engineers. A good half of it is about critical thinking and analysis, and the engineers kept calling it the soft skills training, and it just gets us all about like technology. It’s like it’s not super soft. I think it’s like a medium in terms of the hardness of the skills.
You shared with us, that was a beautiful example and story of using a skill to improve the environment. Are there some other sort of key skills or best practices we should emulate in order to get more awesome at our jobs?

Maura Sweeney
In thinking about this in relation to the goal of your podcast, there were several things that came to mind, and I kept getting this picture of people sitting in an office, maybe let’s say of a prospective employer or how about a new department that maybe they’re interviewing for.
Generally, we can think about positions we want or jobs we think we want, and we will put our mind on just what the job title might be or maybe what we think the salary might be. Maybe it sounds like a promotion or let’s say even a name on the door of the company! In so doing, we are not paying attention to some of those other clues that may be telling us whether or not this is a great situation or not.
Here’s what I think of. How many times have we been in environments and we’ve overlooked the feeling we get when we’re in there?
Remember I said the sign on the door? Maybe the sign on the door sounds great. It sounds like the happy place. And yet when you’re sitting in an office, if you take a few minutes and you listen to the boss, how is the boss perceived or treated by their employees? How does the boss treat their employees? How do employees treat one another? Are they friendly? Are they at ease with one another? Are they uptight? Are they cutting one another down? Those kinds of things, those awarenesses, oftentimes, we don’t pay attention to because we’re so focused in on the things that we think are important.
Some other things would be sitting in an office and chatting with other people and always being aware of what we don’t have or being mindful of maybe mistakes we’ve made rather than those other talents and abilities that we have that we can bring to the table in any job, in any environment that really give us an up or let’s say an advantage over others.
We oftentimes look at things so, I would say, concretely that we forget about those soft things about how do we feel? What kind of an environment is this? “Oh, I’m getting offered a promotion, but does this also mean I have to work 14 hours a day instead of the current 12 I’m working? Is the offset something I really want?” Or, “Gee, they’re going to be relocating me to another city. Do I even want to live in that city?” Those are some of the soft skills I think about when I consider life on the job.
If we try to turn a job into something that is just a structure without realizing or thinking about how we’re going to feel or operate within that structure and who some of those people are and what some of those influences are, we can actually sound like we’re in a good place and feel like we’re in a terrible place.
The other thought that just comes to mind is this: I interview and I’m around people of every age, every background constantly. I travel a lot, interview a lot and whatever. Not too long ago, I was with a guy who was an engineer, very successful in his own right. He was traveling the country making an awful lot of money. You know what happened to him? He had three heart attacks. He finally said to himself, “This job is killing me. I might be making money, but I’m obviously not feeling a sense of wellbeing. If I want to have a long and happy and otherwise prosperous life, I need to rethink.”
Those kinds of soft skills go right back to the very beginning of this interview, which is “What is it that I’m looking for? Do I have a sense of wellbeing? Do I feel a sense of purpose? How do I find my sense of being in the environment that I am?”
Those are the things that, really, when we are mindful of them and when we look for opportunities to express ourselves in positive ways or create better environments for ourselves, we end up with a better feel at work. We feel like we’re getting more out of it. We’re giving more to it. We have more energy. We’re happier. That energy that we have within ourselves, we end up sharing it with other people, and they just pick it up as well. As a result, you’ve got an environment that you’ve kind of moved upward in terms of, I would say, just general uplift and happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds very pleasant and a nice, little virtuous cycle there. I’d also like to hear—we talked about uplift and influence in terms of how one sort of grows in their influence power and capacity to be persuasive with others. I’m sure the positive uplift, feeling good thing goes a long way—what else would you like to add on top of that?

Maura Sweeney
All right. First, I want to offer this great quote from John C. Maxwell who’s an expert in leadership. Don’t we oftentimes think about leadership, about the title that we have, “We’re the boss and you’re not”? He says, “Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It’s about one life influencing another.” Think about this: how can you, in your own job—you go in, you probably work in a cubicle, you’re one of several people in cubicles—how do you make a difference? This is where I think that we really can be a leader.
We can be the person that comes in in the morning, and rather than coming in with a complaint like “Oh my gosh, I had so much traffic on the way to work” or “Oh my gosh, if I get another phone call from this complaining customer, I’m going to pull my hair out” to “What can I offer today that’s a fun story, a positive remark to make? How can I help somebody? How can I support somebody? How can I maybe overhear what somebody just did and say, ‘Hey! Way to go! I really liked the way you handled that’?” Those kinds of things can help us step up our game even as we’re one of 100 people in the mix.
Suddenly, we are showing up as someone who’s a little bit of a light of others around us. We’re somebody who promotes the good things we see in others. We’re somebody, maybe, who collaborates or helps somebody else solve a problem.
I remember doing this so often in the branch offices that I was in and managing. We became very collaborative and very solution-oriented. If one person was lacking a skill that somebody else had, we bring that other person in to help.
You don’t have to be the main person or the so-called boss or leader or titled individual to make positive incremental, influential changes in your environment. Sometimes, I would even think that you could be a person on staff, and you could end up doing it the right way and teaching by example, maybe let’s say a so-so or an average boss, how better to manage others.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Sounds nice. Sometimes, we’re all learning and growing our respective ways. Sometimes, a boss needs to learn some of those things, and they can learn it from the unlikeliest of sources.

Maura Sweeney
Sort of by observation.
Here’s another thing. People have egos no matter who they are, and some people when they feel less than confident, have very delicate egos. How about if you’re in your office and there are some change you want but you don’t want to be so direct with it? “I was thinking about this”? Imagine coming in one day and saying, “You know, I read about something,” or, “I heard about something really interesting,” and you tell a story, real or fictitious, about an environment that’s doing better than yours. It becomes a story.
The story has a positive outcome, and maybe other team people, maybe a team leader hears it, maybe a manager hears it and adopts it as if it’s his or her own idea. You become an influencer rather than one who is always being influenced – sometimes negatively by others around you. Those are great ways to establish yourself quietly, incrementally, and positively as a leader without ever threatening those around you. The key to it is being an advocate for other people, seeing what’s better for them.

I’ll give you one other example of something that came to mind in advance of this interview.
Several years ago, I was seated around a large table with other managers of my level. We were all sitting at the same table with our vice president of sales who makes this announcement that he’s decided he’s going to, for the next year, cut sales people’s upper limit on earnings. In other words, he said to everybody around the table, “You know, we realized that most sales people would rather just get a trophy and a nice letter of commendation for doing their good work, and we don’t really have to give them as much money as we were in the past.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, they realize that, don’t they?

Maura Sweeney
Well, wait a minute. Everybody around the table, all these other managers, they were my contemporaries, are sitting at the table and they are agreeing with the vice president of sales. One person said a word. I’m there thinking, “Oh my gosh! If I have to go back to my office and tell my top producers, who I’m so thrilled for, that they’re going to make maybe 80% next year of what they made this year, how could I do it?” This is what I suggested.
I was directly across from our VP, and I said, “You know, I’m hearing what you’re telling me,” and I said, “Maybe I’m alone in this.” I said, “I’m not sure if this is a corporate decision where we need to find extra funds or increase profits.” I said, “But can I just speak for myself in saying this? I have a feeling that some of our top reps in our office maybe inclined to leave.” I said, “I know them quite well. I know that these are people that are willing to take a high-risk job because there are high rewards on the other side.” I said, “If that’s a corporate decision that we need to go with,” I said, “I will absolutely support you on it.”
I said, “But would you please give it some additional thought to ask yourself what the downside of it will be if we end up losing some of our top producers?” You could have heard the rest of the table breathe a collective sigh of relief! And then people were like, “Yeah, that might happen in my office too.”
I put myself in a position as if I were that vice president or maybe he was in a vice, but I gave him something else to think about rather than taking offense to what he was saying. That was why I always use the word “advocate.”
If people know we’re advocating for their best interests, if we’re seeing things from their perspective but we’re always trying to bring them up to a higher level, the resistance goes down.
Did you know there was never another word ever spoken about reducing the reps income? It was like it was gone and it never happened.
There I was, one of the so-called underlings, but I phrased my position in a way that was never threatening to the senior VP.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s also fascinating about that story is that everyone else just sort of nodded their heads and played along even though they were thinking, “That’s nuts!”

Maura Sweeney
Right! And doesn’t that contribute to office stress? Think about stress, where we started this interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Maura Sweeney
We don’t really speak up, but we probably don’t even have the soft skills to do it with. That was it. It was to speak up but in a manner that was advocating for the person I was addressing. Meaning, “Let’s come up with our best outcome for this.” It was giving my support, but it was also expressing some of the implications of going forth with that kind of a decision – showing understanding, showing empathy.
I remember sitting at that table thinking, “There’s a ton other people here. How come nobody’s saying anything?” They were agreeing by nodding their heads with the vice president! I’m thinking, “Oh! If I have to go back and announce this as if it’s good news, this is really going to be tough for me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, and that’s just so good. I think that really highlights the need for soft skills right then, right there. It’s like when someone says something that you think is just plain nuts, do you have the wherewithal to highlight the potential facts, consequences, implications that suggest their conclusion should be rethought? I’m practicing right now.
Or are you like the vast majority I imagine the vast majority of folks tend to agree or convey that they agree subtly or not so subtly even when they don’t, because it takes a little extra measure of risk, or boldness is required to disagree with the head honcho.

Maura Sweeney
Right, exactly. Imagine the stress level. And then how about this? Talking behind the vice president’s back. You don’t think there’ll be calls going back and forth or thinking ill of the VP who really wasn’t thinking through this. And so I really tried to create more of a team atmosphere, “We’re all in this together.”
As I said, if there was no other way to do it, if the corporation was being pressed for profits, I would do my best to convey and communicate it to my staff. I said, “But if we have other ways of looking at this,” I said, “Can we also consider the implications that we may be losing some of our top talent and therefore losing some of the sales that we hope to consider as part of future revenues.” So it was done as if we were all part of a team, and I was advocating for the best possible outcome for our corporation.
But think about this, that’s where I probably was setting myself across: as some kind of a leader among my own peers, but I didn’t do it in a way that was harmful to the dignity and the personhood of the vice president. That vice president could be anybody. He could be your team leader. It doesn’t matter. He could be somebody else on your team.
To always value the individual while addressing a decision or a behavior pattern that may be working in a fashion that is less than beneficial.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful and very helpful. I think in some ways, it seems like the challenge is just figuring out how you’re going to say what you need to say.

Maura Sweeney
Exactly, and most of us don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Instead, we just sort of “Well you know, they’re crazy. They’re mean. They don’t care. Insert judgment or evaluation of any sort in terms of why someone’s behaving the way they’re behaving.” Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but I think most people are not sociopaths as a general rule of thumb.

Maura Sweeney
I agree with you. I think most people at their heart really want to be good and really want to do what’s right and really do want to be happy and do want to succeed.
When we develop some of those soft skills—yes, does it take some courage? Absolutely. Does it take a little bit of stepping outside the box that everybody else is living in? Yes. But it also goes back to “Who am I? Do I see my value? Am I able to see through? Can I see a benefit coming out of this? Can I offer a solution? Or am I just going to go into a little box and agree with what I’m being told even when I know it’s harmful, whether it’s to myself, my customers, the atmosphere that I’m in, etc.?”
It works on an interdependent level. It could be the person who’s sitting right next to us or it could be someone with a titled position about us, or it could be like I had earlier, the guy in the next department who was just looking to sabotage me. How we address people makes a big difference.
When people really come to learn that we’re in their core and we do want to see what’s best for them and we want to see them succeed, oftentimes, people like that tend to respect us more. They will support us more. They will trust us more, and they won’t compete in negative ways with us as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect.

Maura Sweeney
I have found these things by experience more so than by, as I said earlier, some empirical studies like they’re doing at Harvard. When we are truly creating a happy environment, we all do better.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. Well, is there anything else you want to make sure that you convey before we shift gears and hear about your fast faves?

Maura Sweeney
I would just love for people to do this, to be an example to others, to know what their values and their skills are, to know their own personal value and worth and to share it and to be that thing wherever they are because they will become a form or an example that will really help others to very silently pick up on those cues and become that kind of a person themselves, and they can literally, one after another, kind of transform an environment.
If we’re all here to be working but also to enjoy what we do and to feel successful at we do, those kinds of soft skills are really helpful in paving the way.
That’s it. I’m ready for those other questions you have for me, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. This is so good. Could you share with us a favorite quote or maybe you’ve already shared it?

Maura Sweeney
Let me give you another Eleanor Roosevelt quote. I gave you one at the beginning, but how about this. I love this. “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” I would say be one of those great minds that discusses great ideas. If you do, you will bring a lot of people along with you, and you’ll help other people to find out just how great their minds are too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Maura Sweeney
Let’s see. The study… As I mentioned to you, I am more experientially driven. I have been this woman who, for through various experiences in life, will find ways to work happily and successfully. But I want to give you this, and I’m sure your readers have heard of him, Shawn Achor. He wrote The Happiness Advantage, and this is results that came from all of his studies at Harvard University.
What he found out throughout all of his studies, his empirical studies, is that when people are happy – it doesn’t matter if you’re four-years old doing puzzles or if you’re 40 and you are doing brain surgery – when you are happy engaging in any activity, when you’re happy engaging in an activity, you will actually perform up to 50% better.
Think about this, if you want to take a look at your life and you want to be more successful, think about ways in which you can be more happy in doing whatever it is you’re doing, and your success will follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that’s helpful in you doing all you do?

Maura Sweeney
It’s such a basic one. I’m going to just narrow it down to my iPhone. I use it for notes. I record many of my podcasts on it. I also create my own videos through their iMovie format. I end up putting the whole thing together, uploading it to YouTube. It’s this really small common device, but it does so much. That’s my thing, iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that’s been super helpful?

Maura Sweeney
I would say it’s what I referenced earlier. It is taking time for yourself every single morning, whether it means getting up early, extra early, or taking time when you’re in your car, to center yourself, become a little mindful, put yourself on your own throne and say, “What are my values? What am I looking for in life? What things do I need to be keeping at the forefront of my mind so that my life is centered and I’ve created space for joy and a sense of wellbeing so that everything else in my day will go a little bit better and a little happier.”

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite nugget or piece that you share that seems to get a lot of traction and resonance with folks who are very much wholeheartedly nodding in agreement with it?

Maura Sweeney
On occasion, I love to send out framed quotes. I do some doodling, and so I have these pretty frames I’ve created that look a little bit vintage. I’ll take great quotes that I like that talk about integrity, leadership, what it is that makes them happy. Those get re-twitted and repeated.
I also have a free book that I created which is called my Favorite Happiness Quotes. It’s some of those quotes, 25 of them I believe, but then after the quote, it’s my reflections on why that quote about happiness is so important to us, and then there’s a little call to action. I would say that.
The third thing would be my self-help course, which is Foundations of Happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Where might we find these things or get in touch with you if folks want to learn more?

Maura Sweeney
Well, an easy place, if you’ve got an listening audience, if they’re on iTunes or on Stitcher and I think even on Google Play and elsewhere, I’m Maura Sweeney: Living Happy Inside Out, and I’ve got great, little 10-minute-and-under podcasts that’ll give you some mindful thoughts and calls to action that you could listen to in the morning on your way to work to give you ways to think happy from the inside out.
The other and easiest way to reach me is by going to my website. It’s my name, Maura4U.com because I’m always for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Maura4U makes me think of Nathan for You. I don’t know if you’ve seen that ridiculous TV show, but it cracks me up.

Maura Sweeney
No!

Pete Mockaitis
You might enjoy an episode. It’s a unique flavor of comedy, but I think it’s just genius. Nathan for You, Maura4U, very different concepts but both enriching.

Maura Sweeney
I will have to check it out. My husband actually gave me the name Maura4U. He said to me, “Maura! I have never seen anybody else like you.” He said, “You are the most even-minded personality.” He said, “You are for everybody, even your worst enemy.” And it’s so true! I really want to see everybody succeed and live their best and happiest life from the inside-out. That’s my idea of being Maura4U. But I will definitely have to check out Nathan for You too.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me what you think. And you have a favorite challenge or call to action you’ll leave folks with who are seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Maura Sweeney
Oh, you know what I would say to everyone who’s listening today? I got this advice from my first manager. I was in sales. He promoted me to management. I didn’t even want the job. I felt like, “Oh my gosh, those are such big shoes. I can’t fill them.” You know what he said to me? He said, “Maura, never try to be me.” He said, “Be yourself.” I remember feeling so… It was the best advice anybody could have ever given me.
What I would say to anybody listening today, it’s be your best self. Don’t try being an inferior copy of someone else. There’s only one Elvis. So be your best self. You’re best in certain ways that nobody else could ever approximate. If you could see yourself through the lens of all the good qualities, attributes, skills, and other things you bring to the world, you will never be unhappy on a bad day. You’ll always find your reason to be glad.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Maura, thanks. This has been so much fun. I wish you tons of luck and keep on doing what you’re doing.

Maura Sweeney
Pete, thank you so much for having me! To everyone who’s been listening today, I hope you have a great and happy day wherever you’re working.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.