Application: Workplace Satisfaction
Description: Engineering Joy, with Attitude!
Author:  Dr. Deborah Fisher
July 31, 2007
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Last month I read a book published by a dear friend of mine.  The book has an ostensibly small niche readership – military spouses – yet it is on its second edition and has been presented worldwide for all five branches of the military.  It presents specific steps for the reader to craft a life of joy while constantly moving all over the world, often left alone by a spouse deployed elsewhere. 

This is a difficult scenario in which to engineer a joyous life!  Yet many of us face similar circumstances.  We are a mobile society, often moved by conditions beyond our control.  We relocate readily - for a job, a spouse, a parent, a community, or the economy.  Then, many of us feel “stuck” in a less than desirable situation. The simple steps in my friend’s book could apply to all of us.  And, her philosophy closely overlaps the book I am co-authoring, currently entitled Like Your Work, due on shelves in January 2008. 

What are the steps to joy and how do they relate? 

My friend’s research into happiness indicated that 50% is due to genetics (we can’t do much about that), 8% is due to circumstances (those who are stuck can’t change that, either), and 42% is due to attitude.  Attitude, and a changed approach, is what our up-coming book – Like Your Work – is about. In our language, “a new perspective leads to a new idea, which leads to a new action, which leads to a new result, which leads to a different perspective.”  This spirals one’s attitude upward and can ultimately change one’s circumstances as well.

How can we “engineer attitude” to lead to joy?  My friend’s book presents five basic steps:

• Discovering simple joys

• Seeking out friends and support

• Knowing what you want and taking action to achieve it

• Working from your strengths for a greater good

• Cultivating deeper and higher level relationships

Her book moves from tangible tools, such as networking, physical exercise, career choice, and goal setting, to the intangible world of relating to others and even to a higher power. The combination of these two arenas is important for a readership whose families are facing wartime life and death.

Our book is for a more general audience, but many of our concepts are closely related.  While both books work to “engineer attitude,” ours is not for military spouses, but for those of us fortunate enough to live in the daily “workaday murk.”  It is for the rest of us who are trying to see our way to joy.  Like Your Work provides a bridge between the tangible and intangible worlds of my friend’s book.  It borrows from the body of knowledge in psychology and leads the reader through workplace-specific steps, including

• Understanding and using human behavior

• Understanding and using motivation

• Understanding and using task balance

• Perceiving emotional intelligence

These tools are used first to understand oneself, and then other people.  The reader discovers what he or she wants, not in a purely tangible sense, and not in a purely relational sense, but in a semi-tangible situational sense.  "What can I do to improve my situation, my career, and my relationships right now?"  That is why at Group Harmonics we like to use the term “soft skills.”  The tools in Like Your Work lie between the black and white worlds of the tangible and the relational. 

*Hightower, Kathie and Holly Scherer, Help! I'm a Military Spouse, Second Edition, Potomac Books, Inc., 2007

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