Gretchen Rubin: How Fun Is Your Workplace? (And Why It Matters)

Gretchen Rubin: How Fun Is Your Workplace? (And Why It Matters)

In The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up, Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher make an interesting argument that "levity" is an extremely effective tool for helping people to work better. An atmosphere of light-heartedness, it turns out, helps people pay attention, eases tensions and enhances a feeling of connection.

When I read this, I thought, "Well, levity would be tough for me -- I'm not particularly funny, and I'm not particularly outgoing."

But what the authors mean by "levity" is really a sense of lightness. It's less about being funny and more about being able to have fun and see the humorous side of everyday situations -- especially difficult situations.

Ah, I thought, I'm trying! The ninth of my "12 commandments" is "Lighten up." When I posted sticky notes with key phrases all around my office and apartment, the one I put in the master bathroom read, "Tender and light-hearted."

Gostick and Christopher include a quiz about workplace levity. Looking at it, I realized that most of my workplaces included these elements, which I'm sure contributed to the positive experience I had everywhere (except for the summer I worked as a waitress at Dos Hombres Mexican restaurant, and zoikes, I did not like that job).

For example, I'd assumed that the atmosphere around the Supreme Court would be serious, thoughtful and grand. And it was. But in her chambers, Justice O'Connor incorporated several goofy aspects that made it a lot of fun, too. Each Halloween, she required her clerks to decorate elaborate pumpkins, and birthday celebrations were always a big deal, and she took the clerks on a yearly outing (we went fishing). And that sort of thing really did make a difference.

How does your workplace measure up? Take Gostick and Christopher's quiz:

New employees are made to feel welcome.
Meetings are positive and light.
We have fun activities at least once a month.
It's common to hear people laughing around here.
I can be myself at work.
We have a lot of celebrations for special events.
When brainstorming, we like to have fun.
My boss is usually optimistic and smiling.
Customers would call us fun to do business with.
I have a friend at work who makes me laugh.
We have a good time together.

Does your workplace have "levity," according to this quiz? Do you think it matters?

This is a great list for home, too. For my next book, Happier at Home, I tried several resolutions that were meant to try to bring more levity into my apartment. For instance, I tried to under-react to problems, and it really did help.

How about you? Have you found that an atmosphere of levity and good humor makes a difference to your workplace or home? Have you found any good strategies to keep things fun and light?

* It's fun to look around Laughing Squid, which "features interesting art, culture, and technology from around the web."

* Valentine's Day is next week. Give the gift of happiness! Well, you can't do that, but you can give The Happiness Project (can't resist mentioning: #1 New York Times bestseller). Buy it for yourself, for your sweetheart, or for anyone who needs a good book to read.

Order your copy.

Read sample chapters.

For more by Gretchen Rubin, click here.

For more on happiness, click here.

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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Leda Natkin Nelis: My Asperger's Son And His Superhuman Memory

Leda Natkin Nelis: My Asperger's Son And His Superhuman Memory

My fifteen year old Asperger's Syndrome son has an astonishing audiographic and photographic memory. He's able, after watching a film only two or three times, to recite the dialogue verbatim. We discovered this years ago, when our then-nine year old announced one evening before bedtime that he had learned the movie "Troy" which he had watched twice earlier that week. My skeptical husband insisted on verifying our son's claim, popping the DVD into our player for a Brad Pitt-Willem Nelis stand off. Sure enough, even as we fast forwarded the film several times to assure that it wasn't only the opening scene ("Good day for the crows...") that had been cognitively sampled and thoroughly digested, we were stunned to watch our son recite, word for word, the film's dialogue (could he not have chosen a better written screenplay for the debut of his neurological party trick? "Citizen Kane", for example?)

Our son's uncanny memory skills surfaced again earlier this week. Sadly, my mother in law passed away and the family flew to Amsterdam for her memorial. Willem insisted on giving a speech at the gathering, which he hurriedly dictated to me earlier that morning on board our cramped British Airways flight. His words were poignant, powerful, and sophisticated, and I was stunned at how effortlessly he was able to put his thoughts into carefully-crafted prose. As Willem read his speech before a crowd of elderly relatives and close cousins, I basked in the warm glow of maternal pride. Later, on the return flight to Heathrow, my son acknowledged my effusive praise with a polite, business-like nod. "Most of the speech comes from 'Iron Man 2'," he explained in a matter-of-fact tone.

Willem had effortlessly retained, retrieved, and reconfigured chunks of language from a film that he had seen a year or two ago.

Language appropriation is clearly one of the challenges that we need to confront as our brilliant but fragile son makes his way through his secondary school years. What do you do with a child who has such powerful memory skills? How can we help him to avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism? It was fascinating a few months back to watch Willem prepare for a practice exam on the Treaty of Versailles. The entirety of pages thirty through thirty nine of his "Making of the Modern World" history text book were hovering right there in his head, as distracting as a busy swarm of gnats on a hot summer's evening. Willem, as he wrote his exam essay, made a careful effort to change every adjective and adverb from these sentences of his textbook that were stuck in his head; still, the basic syntax of many of his sentences bore a close resemblance to those in the textbook.

Our son is a great thinker as well as a great retainer of facts, and is capable of making uncanny parallels, analyses, and inferences that go way beyond his quirky ability to retain and regurgitate data. Still, I realize that his gift comes with its own high price, and Willem will need to recraft the texts that sometimes sit there inside of him like a heavy meal. I hope that as he makes his way through secondary school and later University that he can free himself from the shackles of his uncanny memory so that he can revel in the wonders of creative literary freedom.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

H1N1 'Swine' Flu Makes a Comeback in Mexico

H1N1 'Swine' Flu Makes a Comeback in Mexico
FRIDAY, Feb. 10 (HealthDay News) -- It was just about three years ago that a strange new strain of flu first appeared in Mexico, then spread across the border to the United States and eventually much of the globe.
Source: news.yahoo.com