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Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes PM podcast. I want to share with you some of my recent readings. Of course, you know, I'm an engineer, but recently I'm studying a little bit more about mindfulness and positive psychology. And you may ask me why I'm stood in this, right? It's not related to project manager and project management, and sorry, It's yes, it is related. It's deeply related because, let me tell you, your psychological behavior affects your team and affects the results of your project, and of course, affects your self, your happiness in your life. So recently I'm talking and studying about that.
Ricardo (44s): And if you go to the traditional Psychology, you see that most of the psychological treatment, it's seen like how I can sort out a disease. Someone is depressed. Someone has any kind of neurosis and I want to clinically or a true medicine to get this person up to the normal level. What is Positive Psychology is about? It's how I can take a normal behavior and move it to a happier behavior. And its the reinforcement on what is right with you, increasing your wellbeing and your self-awareness. Most of my time, I spent in very stressful conditions.
Ricardo (1m 26s): I always remember what I said a couple of years ago about project management and working as a project manager. Project management is a process of buying and selling stress. So someone pays you to be the project manager because this person wants to pay you to get the stress of getting the things done. And it's very stressful because it's a challenge. You don't know the result of you don't know if it to be okay or not okay. So it's always in the borderline on what is possible. So this brings you a quite a negative Understanding on that. You will always feel that something will happen, and my project will fail.
Ricardo (2m 7s): So what is important? There is a concept that Tal Ben Shahar that, is a former professor of Harvard on this topic, and other authors always talk is about the concept of flow, flow is the midpoint between boredom, to be bored, and anxiety. It's the mid-level. So if you are too much anxious, you get stressed, your body gets sick. If you have a lot of boredom, you find your life meaningless. So what is the flow? It's when you have a channel where you move the challenges to improve your self-awareness, your rewards, for example, let's suppose you have in your project, a meeting with a very challenging supplier or a very challenging stakeholder at the end, you feel dragon, you feel bad.
Ricardo (2m 60s): So what about if you leave and think, look what I can learn from this experience to make myself better, do enjoy the moment of understanding more my weakness and my good points. And this self-awareness is what really, really drives the success. And of course, look, this is not a self-help Podcast, please. What I want is that it would be great. If us, as a project manager, we enjoyed the work that we are doing and we deliver what is expected this is a really meaningful life. And this is exactly what flow.
Ricardo (3m 40s): Is about is how you can get most of your experience, even facing challenges. I'm not saying that you should be blindfold and saying, Oh, there is no challenge. Everything is perfect because life is, is not like that. Just watching the news, see a TV and you will see on the news that things are very, very challenging. But for some reason, psychologically, all the challenges they have like a very strong glue to ourselves. So we are so attached to the bad things that sometimes we don't see the great things. When we finish a project, we don't have even time to celebrate what we did because there is another pile of challenges upfront.
Ricardo (4m 21s): So how you can do that. And there is a super cool video that I suggest you to watch is from Tal Ben Shahar on the Positive Psychology. It's called the hamburger archetype, and it's a two by two matrix. One site is present and future. The other side is detriment and benefit, and he draws four different burgers, and he had called, there is one Burger that produced detriment in the present and detriment in the future. This is what we call nihilism. So nihilism is, is when you will have a tasteless and junk burger.
Ricardo (5m 2s): So there is no pleasure now, there's no future benefit. You don't enjoy the moment and the future, you know, it's like that project that you hate doing, and you see no perspective. So this is the worst possible situation because every single project, we need to try to move it to a different arena. And how we can move? The first way of moving that we know, and for me, it's something that I usually move quite well, it's moving from the nihilism to hedonism. And what is hedonism? It is a tasty burger, it's a junk tasty burger. You have a great pleasure in the present, and you avoid pain you avoid being hurt on that time.
Ricardo (5m 48s): But maybe in the future, you will pay a heavy price. So, for example, this is something I'm trying to move on myself because I'm very hedonist. For example, I love too much, sometimes the work I'm doing that. I have no balance with my health and this. So this is great for the present, but not so great for the future. The other one and I have several project managers that have this approach is called rat race means You have a very bad detrimental present means. You have a tasteless Burger, but it will make you so healthy that 10 years from now, it will be great.
Ricardo (6m 29s): So means no pleasure now, but future benefits, its the one that is always having a nightmare to build a better future, but this group of people they forget that life is lived by the president and not by the future because the future is just an assumption It will happen. And of course, the gold spot, that's what we call the happiness burger, is a tasty and healthy burger that has healthy and future benefits. And this is the desire of all of us. So how I can have fun pleasure on the challenges of today while building super nice career for me in a super nice benefit for the organization I work for This is really the sweet spot.
Ricardo (7m 15s): So you need to identify which of these spots you are now. And which kind of actions can you make to move it to this happiness? Watch this video is a super cool. And why I'm telling you this because most of us we are from an engineering background, and we think that Psychology and this all this human side, it's I just pointless. It's much more important to do earned at value analysis. And we forget to understand that we are surrounded by people with different interests, different motivations, and different backgrounds. And if, we are not able to get them together It's a lose, lose, lose, you lose your organization loses, the society loses.
Ricardo (7m 60s): And this is what we aim with Positive Psychology. Take a look an that it's very worth reading and watching some of these videos. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Next week another five minute PM podcast with some other information about the area. Take care.
