In all of my life, from a child until now, I have always noticed that there are two types of successful people. There are those people who get successful to the success of everyone around them, and those that get successful to the detriment of everyone around them. The question therein lies, do you climb over the bodies to get to where you want to go, or do you try and build everyone up around you and hope that someone notices…

I believe strongly in the latter – in my opinion, what’s the point of being successful if you don’t get to share it with anyone. You need people to high five on the way up because they’re the people that will help you when things aren’t going so well. When you’ve climbed over bodies to get to the top, the way down is usually not so friendly – people will welcome your demise.

The fact of the matter is, if you do something great and don’t tell people, quite often someone else will take credit for it. If credit is available, it will get taken. This is how people can get up to the detriment of those around them. I am very vocal about my wins, and I am very vocal about the wins of the people in my team. It gives me as much satisfaction to brag about a colleague’s success as it does to brag about my own. That’s the whole idea of a team, isn’t it?

I guess the point of this entry was that you should always celebrate successes, and create a culture of celebrating them. This should help stir on more wins. People who climb over the bodies on the path to success are often known for it within an organisation or a university – I reckon this is where the saying ‘it gets pretty lonely at the top’ must come from. When I get to the top I want all of my colleagues there with me… Then we can have an awesome party!

Are you a glass half full person, or maybe half empty… Do you realize that all of your actions are constantly impacting other people? Do you yearn for happiness in life or just enough money to buy things that will make you happy?

I believe that positivity is the single most productive trait in the world. Positive people get promotions, Positive people top the sales figures, positive people get the girl, positive people start their own businesses. Positive people impact other people positively and create a better environment… So what are the negatives? Well that’s easy… there are none.

Positivity breeds positivity, just like negativity breeds negativity. To bring this into a work related context, people always talk about ‘culture’ at work. Culture is a broad topic and can cover many elements that I won’t go into now, but one of the most common references re: culture is ‘staff happiness’ and ‘morale’. These characteristics can be very heavily impacted by positive people. Company’s often speak about having the perfect culture – ‘we could have the Google culture…’ The truth is that culture starts with you. If you are a positive, energetic person, you will positively impact people who then may positively impact other people and so on so forth down the line – this is culture in action – people impacting other people. It’s not necessarily top down, its everyone impacting everyone.

If you are not content with the culture in your organization, here is your challenge for the week:
Start changing it!

• Say ‘hello’ to a few more people of a morning.
• Intentionally try to brighten someone’s day…
• Smile at people.
• Randomly high-five people you pass in the workplace (I call this the ‘high-five’ culture).
• Tell someone they are ridiculously good looking (I call this the ‘good looking’ culture).

As the culture begins to spread, you can then watch this boomerang return home and someone you work with might brighten your day. Positivity breeds positivity.

Please share your stories in the comments section below. I’d love to hear how you went. If I work with you, I expect some comments regarding my handsome looks on Wednesday. Why don’t you begin by forwarding this to anyone you think could do with a dose of positivity?

I’ll leave you with these two quotes.

‘Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.’ – Earl Nightingale

Or in the words of my generation:

‘Cheer up Emo Kid’