Information Overload in Property Management, Part IV
A positive attitude is contagious.
It’s time for our final post on how to deal with information overload within your property management company. In our last few posts, we’ve covered the problem itself, how to handle information in a way that makes it easier to manage, and how to keep your brain best able to manage. Today, we’re covering the final piece of the puzzle: attitude.
Attitude is at the root of 100% of our ability ‘to even’. And while your attitude is obviously affected by things outside of your own control (it’s hard to be positive when you’re in constant wracking pain, for example), it’s only determined by one factor — you.
The #1 Most Important Thing You Can Do to Handle Information Overload, Period, is…
Be happy.
Cutting-edge psychology shows that, contrary to at least American culture’s beliefs from the past 100 or so years, happiness does not come from success. Instead, success comes from happiness.
It’s been proven over and over again in environments ranging from Harvard to poverty-stricken rural Africa to Detroit middle schools to Japanese corporate boardrooms: people who are happy are universally more productive than people who are emotionally neutral — and of course neutral people perform better than people who are unhappy.
This is because the two most plentiful chemicals that are released into the brain when we are happy are serotonin and dopamine. Those are the same exact chemicals that our brain uses to ‘thread’ together the dendrites of neurons, which is brain’s primary method of learning. That’s right — happy people learn quicker, retain information better, and solve problems more effectively, full stop. No exceptions.
But What is “Happiness,” Anyway?
Happiness isn’t a single emotion. In order to feel long-term, high-yield happiness, a person has to have (and spend time thinking about!) at least one source of each of the following emotions on a daily basis:
- Celebrate something, no matter small, every single day.
- Take the time to note a few simple things you are grateful for.
- Pause, calm down, take a few breaths, and relax.
- Learn something new and interesting.
- Think about all the ways you could reach your loftiest goals.
- Review your recent successes, or your more distant but biggest ones.
- Enjoy play, and stop taking yourself seriously for a while.
- Read something that makes you feel like you can do it (whatever ‘it’ is.)
- Experience something that makes you amazed at how incredible the world is.
- Dwell for a moment on the thought of someone you love.
The better of an emotional environment you have inside, the better your ability to deal with information overload — and everything else — will shine through on the outside. It might sound silly to try to ‘plan out’ your emotions ahead of time, but learning to deliberately access those emotions is one of the absolutely core secrets to success in any field.
Attitudes Are Contagious
The most incredible advantage to being a happy person in a property management company (or any other work environment, for that matter) is that attitudes are contagious. This means that you can bring your happiness with you and spread it — and you’ll spread success with it. You don’t even have to do anything in particular to spread that attitude except show everyone that you’re happy. Just by being there and being happy, you’ll bring everyone around you up, and improve everyone’s ability to deal.
On the other hand, it also means that you have to protect your happiness from the negative influences of unhappy people at your company. This can be especially difficult if the unhappy person is your boss, because fear is the fastest killer of happiness (and thus productivity!) That, however, is an entirely separate discussion that we don’t have space for here. Maybe next month.
So let your happiness shine through — at which point you can become the ‘patient zero’ of a happiness contagion that will improve everyone’s ability to handle all of the demands of property management, including information overload. 🙂