Episode Transcript
So you’ve probably heard the phrase, when it rains, it pours usually to describe how a series of bad things seem to pile on top of each other. But here’s what I’ve noticed. Not only can it go the other way toward the positive, right, but we have a ton of control over choosing to see the positive. By the way, this isn’t about painting rosy pictures and embracing the only think positive mindset, which I’m not a fan of because it’s my personal belief that dismissing reality in this way is not the way to grow.
So think of this more like a healthy counterweight to the negativity bias that is hardwired into most of our brains. A small win, even a super small win, can create the conditions for another one and then another until something that started almost imperceptibly has become real momentum. The trouble is we often miss it..
Many of us are so conditioned to notice what’s going wrong, that we dismiss what’s going right as too small to count, or we see things going right as neutral, and with that belief, it’s sort of hard to build momentum when everything actually great is just neutral. I first learned about noticing the magnificence of small things from the poet Samuel Green, who used the phrase small noticings.
It’s this idea that the ordinary moments of a day if we actually attend to them, are full of meaning and often beauty. It was a poetic idea and it actually shaped some of the books I wrote. But years later in my corporate life, I stumbled on research that allowed me to leverage the idea for my professional growth as well.
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer basically spent years studying what actually makes people thrive at work. They analyzed something like 12,000 diary entries from 200 something employees across seven companies, and what they found surprised a lot of people. It wasn’t big bonuses or dramatic recognition or even meaningful relationships that most consistently drove what they called a good inner work life.
Although those things mattered, it was progress. Small forward movement on work that mattered. They called it the progress principle, wrote a book about it, and their finding was that even minor wins if recognized, could meaningfully improve how people felt, how motivated they were, how they perceived the, the people, the culture, the organization, et cetera.
The inverse was also true. Small setbacks, again, even minor ones had kind of a outsized negative effect on inner work life, which is why, again, if we’re not paying attention, we’re kind of wired to default to noticing the rain and how it’s pouring. So putting all of this together, what does it mean for you?
It means often that the small wins are already happening, a conversation that went better than expected. A bed that you made, a workout you completed, a doctor’s appointment that was uneventful, a task completed that had been sitting there for days. Piece of feedback you actually used. The question isn’t whether the wins are there.
It’s whether you’re registering them as wins at all, or glossing over them in pursuit of something bigger. Samuel Green would call it a small noticing. Amabile would call it progress. I think there’s an interesting, powerful and positive one two punch between the two. So this week, try keeping a small wins list, not a gratitude journal, not an achievement log, not some big thing that adds another item on your to-do list.
Just a simple running note of things that moved forward, however, slightly three days of that practice, just 60 seconds before bed even might change how you end the one day and start the next. See you next week.
Show Notes
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