As you know, I am fascinated by the impact of positivity on performance, productivity, employee loyalty and health. But now I want to transition from doing personal experiments to doing group experiments.

I have only been at my current job for just over 3 weeks, but I knew even before I joined that this was ‘fertile soil’. There is enormous potential in the people, the mindset and culture of the company, we will thrive continuously and as we go along, we will learn and form new ways of optimising.

Last Friday, I asked if they would be up for doing a little experiment. That one question grew into agreeing to do a company wide presentation on positive psychology, that same day in the afternoon.

As opportunities arise, you grab them, so that is what I did. Having no time to prepare, did make me slightly anxious, as I wasn’t sure on what approach to take, but 10 minutes of clearing my head made me realise I don’t need preparation, I know what, the how we will define together and most important, I knew WHY.

If you are familiar with leadership analysis, you know that ‘why’ is most important question, because people relate to the way, people get motivated by the why, not by the how or what. It’s the passion that speaks.

So I gave one of the most honest and open presentations, just me and a white board. I used mind mapping to create the flow and make sure I extracted everything I wanted to say. I showed them the why from a ‘professional’ point of view, leading to the conclusion that happiness = professional, happiness = a crucial part of economic progress. And then, with the help of a timeline with a drawing of me as a kid (little stick figure in a dress with ponytails) a few jokes and lots of interactivity, I explained why it was so important to me as a person.

Throughout every ones life there are challenges, of different magnitudes. You reach crossroads of decisions where you need to choose between finding solutions and carrying on or giving up. Positivity leads to thriving, leads to potential, leads to happiness, flow and growth. Negativity leads to exhaustion, giving away control, a dead end. My story just illustrated some of those crossroads and how strong I felt about staying in control of my choices in a world of change and unexpected challenges.

That is ultimately what it is about, if you choose positivity, you choose ownership of your destiny, if you choose negativity, you give up.

The outcome was great, after that presentation, people came up to me to express how much they loved it and how they really want to get involved. There is no better feeling than that, seeing that spark, that energy, that force!

So, how will we do it? We are working on the how of the project, but we know the framework. We will use scrum to finish this positivity product. Next week, we will start sprint 0, in which we will define the end goal and start building our product backlog, our definitions of done, team contracts,… so… stay tuned.

Yours truly,
Brigitte