Set priorities with a dose of confidence and resilience
BlackBerrys and brown-bag seminars, flextime and fitness centers. We have amassed loads of ammunition in our battle to gain the elusive notion of balance. Yet many people still feel overwhelmed and demoralized by their seeming inability to keep up with relentless change, information floods, and the need to hurry, hurry, hurry.
Why? We're drowning in an abundance of choices, trivialities, and efficiencies and suffering from a scarcity of ways to see through it all. We need to cut out the unimportant, the distractions, the static of life. But how? Like explorers of a strange land, we must map out the landscape before we can decide how and where to till the soil.
For clues to becoming a better mapmaker, I talked to two experts in areas not normally seen as integral to work life. Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter's recent book, ''Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin & End," explores this crucial ingredient of success. University of Pennsylvania researcher Karen Reivich studies how resilience buoys us during everyday stress and extreme traumas.
Just as meditation -- the subject of my last column -- can help us calmly focus and clarify, so can the complementary strengths of confidence and resilience promote prioritizing and perspective-making -- essential qualities in the digital age. Consider them our ''lasers and razors," the tools that can help us slice through the often-overwhelming fog of work and life today.
Confidence is the expectation of a positive outcome. That's how Kanter defines this intangible trait. Put simply, if you believe that your efforts will pay off, success will likely follow, says Kanter, an avid sports fan who studied the winning and losing streaks of sports teams, businesses, schools, and other groups to dissect the anatomy of confidence.
How can her findings help us juggle day-to-day? Kanter, now best known for her work on management and leadership issues, is revered in work-family circles for helping broaden the field from an early narrow emphasis on working mothers to a deeper understanding of how work and family intersect. She still takes a keen interest in the issue.
Trying to adhere to impossibly high standards at work and at home undermines our confidence, explains Kanter. When her now-grown son was small, Kanter made his dinner most, if not all, nights and ate with him as often as possible.
That was crucial bonding time, she decided, while other parts of being a supermom, such as constant chauffeuring, weren't her priority.
''To some extent, confidence means that you're operating to your own standards, not to other people's standards," says Kanter, who bolsters herself during tough times by taking long walks, plugging into support networks, and revisiting past successes.
As well, nurture your confidence in the long term by making sure you routinely reap small, short-term wins.
''That's what makes you feel really successful," says Kanter, who sometimes comforts herself with one of her own adages: anything can look like a failure when you're in the middle of it.
You improve your chances of achieving those reassuring wins and an optimistic outlook on life if you focus on what you can control, not what you can't, says Reivich, whose research on resilience grew out of her early work with University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, father of the field of positive psychology.
''A clear-cut antidote to anxiety is purposeful action," says Reivich, a research associate at UPenn who has worked for a decade helping Philadelphia-area school children strengthen their resilience.
In one unpublished study coauthored by Reivich and involving 700 middle-schoolers, those who received 12 weeks of resilience training on average showed significantly fewer symptoms of depression up to 30 months later, compared with those untrained.
Andrew Shatte, coauthor with Reivich of ''The Resilience Factor," uses similar methods to boost productivity and lessen work-life conflict in workplaces.
Reminding yourself of your strengths is another stress-busting ingredient of resilience, says Reivich, who is so briskly practical yet warmly patient that I feel more resilient just speaking with her by telephone. She brims with techniques, including keeping your ''internal radio station" tuned to positive thoughts and being open to accepting help.
Reivich and Kanter are candid -- building confidence and resilience takes effort and practice. Yet it's clear that both traits can help you navigate a complex world. Half-jokingly, Reivich describes herself as a ''recovering pessimist," who has learned to keep her anxieties from interfering with her goals.
Reivich routinely jots little notes down in her engagement calendar on the good times that she shares with her children: 8-year-old twin boys, a 6-year-old boy, and a 2-year-old girl. When she's feeling guilty or torn between work and home, she revisits these memories.
''That's just a little way to remember the big picture," she says. ''That's a reminder that, 'Hey Karen, cut yourself some slack.' "
Maggie Jackson's Balancing Acts column appears every other week. She can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net. 