In a recent workshop, I asked all the leaders to spend some time getting to know people during their work week. When they came back to the follow-up session, they all reported that their staff looked suspicious and confused when they simply asked how they were and tried to have a normal conversation.

If you are a manager, here’s one of the most nerve-racking things you can do to your staff. Just walk up to them and say ‘How are you going?’

It seems innocuous enough. You might even be genuinely interested in their weekend or their wellbeing. But the reality is that the vast majority of employees think that if you are talking to them, then there’s a problem.

I have dealt with so many organisations, whose staff believe that the only reason management talks to them is when something is wrong. Is this the truth? I am sure it isn’t – I am sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle of what management thinks and what the staff think. Whether this is actually true or not, though, is inconsequential. Their perception is their reality.

The vast majority of staff think: ‘no news is good news’. If no-one’s talking to you, then things must be ok.

Why does this happen?

There are two reasons:

Firstly, leaders in general, don’t talk to their staff enough. And the staff are actually right – they hear more about the bad than the good. If they do a good job, they are doing their job, right? No need for praise when someone just ‘does their job’. But, if they do a bad job, there is a flurry of activity. Now, even if you don’t actually get angry at the team member, there is a still a flurry of activity trying to rectify the situation. Therefore the bad gets more attention than the good.

Secondly, humans are hard-wired to be more sensitive to negatives than positives. This is a throwback to our evolution. As a survival machine, I couldn’t afford to miss a threat – like a predator – but I didn’t see an apple tree, it wasn’t going to kill me. So we learnt to become hypersensitive to negatives.

So, here’s what you need to do:

1) Just talk

This seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but you would be surprised at how much you find out by just having a normal conversation with someone. They might bring up work or problems they are facing, and that’s ok, but that shouldn’t be your agenda. Your agenda should be learning about your people, and in particular what they like and what motivates them. It’s a chance to build rapport – and we tend to trust people with whom we have a good rappport.

2) Praise the good – a lot

To combat our natural tendency to remember negatives and not positives, we need to make sure that positive feedback outweighs negative. Make a set time each week to go through the team’s accomplishments and give them a verbal pat on the back. Do this without any negatives at all. Save them for another time.

3) Analyse the negatives

When there is some negative feedback to deliver, force your staff to analyse. When we wwitch on the analytical brain, it dulls the noise from our emotional centre. Ask ‘how’ questions – these make us analyse. Avoid ‘why’ questions, because this analysis actually switches the emotional brain on and makes us ruminate.

These are three simple things that you can do to help your people see that management isn’t all about dealing out punishment and bad news. Next time you ask ‘How are you going?’ you might be greeted with a smile rather than fear.

The worst thing you can do when you are experiencing high level negative emotions is to try to suppress them. High-level emotion prevents us from thinking clearly, but so does trying to stop them, as our ‘emotional handbrake’ competes directly for resources with our rational brain. Research shows that the most immediate way to neutralise negative emotion is to write down succinctly what you are feeling. Describe it in three words or less and then get on with your day.

High-level emotions stop us from doing our best work. Our emotional centre, when switched on, actually causes our rational brain (the prefrontal cortex) to switch off. For some reason, we are hardwired so that these two regions cannot function at the same time. And usually it is the emotional area that gets the attention in these situations.

But the opposite is also true. When we switch on the rational brain, the emotional area starts to dampen down and this is something that most people don’t take full advantage of. Finding a succinct label for the emotion and writing it down seems to switch on the prefrontal area in such a way that it helps to switch off the emotional region.

Students with high levels of performance anxiety performed thirty percent better on exams when they were asked to succinctly describe their emotions (in written form) just prior to sitting the test.

If you feel you�re spinning your wheels and not getting closer to the things you really want, then you need to step back and be clear about the future. When we get real clarity around the outcomes we want, whether that is work or our life outside of work, we make better decisions about the behaviours we choose on a daily basis. In fact, research shows that when we are unclear about our �future selves� we operate with a brain region reserved for thinking about other people instead of ourselves.

A simple research experiment measured people who were disciplined at keeping financial goals (savings targets) with people who were not. The one difference they found was that those who could achieve these long term goals had a clear picture of their �future self�. Accordingly when they thought of themselves in the future, they used a brain region corresponding to self-thought.

By contrast, when the researchers looked at those who couldn�t achieve the long term goal, they found the pictured their �future self� with a slightly different brain region � one that is reserved for thinking about other people.

When we are unclear about our future, we don�t even treat our future self as being us. This has incredible impacts on the decisions we make. If it�s not us in the future, we don�t seem to be as accountable for the decisions we make.

People often ask me if we can build up a tolerance to stress. They reason that if we can subject ourselves to high levels of stress as much as possible, then we should be able to perform better under high stress situations because we become immune to it. The answer is no. But here are three things that can at least make it better.

If we are talking about extreme levels of stress – situations that are high intensity, long duration, and uncontrollable – then unfortunately we don’t become immune. In fact the opposite can actually happen and we become hyper-sensitive.

When we are repeatedly subject to a situation or stimulus, we find that generally there are two physiological options: the reaction either becomes desensitized to the stimulus or it becomes habituated.

If you go and live in a warm climate for a number of months, then usually what you find is that you desensitize to the temperature. What felt hot when you arrived three months ago doesn’t actually feel that bad now.

Habituation works the opposite way. If you took a job in a call centre, and every time the phone rang you had to push two buttons to take the call, after a year, we would find that this response hadn’t dulled, but in fact would have become more automatic. You might even find that if you are sitting at home and the phone rings you have this automatic response to to push the two buttons. The reaction has habituated.

In many cases the response to prolonged, high intensity, uncontrollable stress does exactly that – it habituates. The stress response becomes so ingrained and so well trained that it becomes triggered by even the smallest resemblance of a stressful situation. Just like the ringing of the phone puts the ‘push a button’ response into action, the slightest hint of stress can put the stress response into action.

The most famous example of this is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in soldiers who have returned from duty. The unpredictable, high intensity, long duration of stress on the battlefield has so well trained their stress response that it only takes a car backfiring or a bad dream to put that stress reaction into full action.

The equivalent in the workplace is that people under intense stress for a long period of time cannot perform. Like the PTSD soldier, they make mistakes, they become incredibly risk-averse and they resort to ‘survival’ behaviours. We also put thru health at extreme risk if stress related illness, they lose focus and become de-motivated and possibly depressed.

If you are managing your people through a period of uncertainty and high stress (lets face it, who isnt?) Then here are some things to remember:

Controllable stress is not the same as controllable stress

Even though there are things that people have no control over at all, the main thing to realize is that it’s perception of control that really matters. Make sure that people have clear plans for how to succeed in the current environment – plans give us a great sense of control. Also give people autonomy where possible – even autonomy over small things makes a difference.

Social Support is critical

It may sound like whining, but people do need an outlier to talk about hoe frustrated they are and sometimes how hard it is. Create bonds within your team and allow the team to vent every now and then. Follow this up with some action planning to show people that there are things they can be doing to make it better.

Consistency combats insecurity

Try to find things that you can consistently do or focus on. In uncertain times, people look for consistency wherever they can get it. Keep your goals consistent and make some actions and behaviours consistent as well.

Discipline. It�s a trait that might make us more successful at anything we do. Whether you are aprofessional athlete needing to put 100% into every training session, or a working mum needing to keep your cool with your kids (and husband) after a taxing day at work, or a staff member who has to get a monthly report in on time, discipline will undoubtedly help you in everything you do.

In fact, there are some famous experiments by Walter Mischel called the �Marshmallow Experiments� that highlight the necessity of this trait. Simply, the research involved children sitting in a room with a marshmallows in front of them. The researcher told them that he had to leave for a while and that they could have one marshmallow only, but if they waited for him to return before eating any marshmallows, then they could have two. The particular results of the experiment weren�t terribly astonishing � some children were able to hold out, while others weren�t (there�s a good article in the New Yorker).

But the surprising results came years later when the subjects were followed up during their schooling. The data showed, without a doubt, that those who were able to hold out for the second marshmallow were the exact same people who showed the greatest academic success. This discipline wasn�t just useful for resisting lollies � it was useful for academic performance as well.

This has been shown time and time again, most notably by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book, Outliers.

So, are we born with discipline and self-control or can it be trained? Let�s look at one of the most brutal forms of discipline to find out.

Meditation is hard. It involves shutting out all distractions and thinking about nothing. In some ways, thinking about nothing seems easy, but paradoxically, keeping our neurons and cells completely at rest requires a tremendous amount of energy. Doing and thinking nothing is one of the hardest things to do. It�s easier to day dream (in terms of energy expenditure) than it is to do nothing.

But we know that we can train meditation ability. The ability to hold our full attention on being completely still mentally and physically. Even small amounts of practice greatly increase people�s ability to pay attention and physically increase the size of the brain region devoted to controlling emotions and attention. So it�s possible.

But beyond meditation, what are the things that help build self-control and discipline?

Well, like it or not you do this every day � or you don�t. Every day, most likely hourly, we train ourselves for either self-control or to give in to our whims. Here are some examples:

• You procrastinate instead of doing something productive
• You commit to something like getting up to go to the gym, or to hand in a project by a certain date and then you skip it
• You only do 90% of something that you could complete right now
• You use the last 15 minutes of your day to do mundane things to kill the time rather than start a really important piece of work

When you do each of these things, you condition yourself to do the easier thing. It becomes self-reinforcing because the immediate good feeling you get (staying in bed, letting yourself �off the hook�, doing easy things) produces a dopamine response (signaling reward), which reinforces the behaviour.

So, can we train discipline? Absolutely. We do it every day even when we don�t realize it. The more often we practice the better we get � don�t wait only for the big moments to practice self-control, do it every hour of every day.

More than merely annoying, rude behaviour is a catalyst for aggression and decreased productivity. When an employee is getting on everyone�s nerves, too many managers are too quick to say �oh, that�s just him�…. especially when it�s a star performer.

Addressing behaviour is one of the hardest things that leaders have to do. We don�t like calling out behaviours – generally because it can be pretty subjective and the �rules� are a little ambiguous. But some new research might make you think again about accepting a team member�s rudeness.

Professor Ido Erev, a specialist in behaviour explored the effect of rudeness. Simply, he asked students to turn up to an office to take a test. Outside the door of the office, obscured by a million post it notes, was a small sign that said �test moved to another location�. Most students, unable to locate or read the sign, walked into the office anyway, interrupting a lecturer. The lecturer did one of two things: they either turned on the student saying things like �are you stupid? Can�t you read?� or else they pleasantly told the student of their mistake, and pointed them in the right direction.

Down the hall, in the new location, the students took a problem solving test (this is what they thought the experiment was about). The results were astonishing: the students who were treated rudely scored significantly worse in the test than those who were treated pleasantly.

But here�s another impact. The students also did a classic creativity test – in two minutes, they had to think of as many uses as possible for a brick. Those who were treated rudely concocted far more aggressive uses for the brick than those who weren�t, including smashing windows, using it as a weapon, and weighing down a dead body in a river!!

So next time you hear complaints about rude or unfair behaviour amongst your team, think twice about looking the other way. You just never know how big the impact is to those around you. You might even find yourself on the wrong end of a brick.