A large majority of us keep a list of things that needs to be accomplished during a work day. At certain days, our to-do lists grow longer and longer almost as if tasks won’t stop piling up. When other projects linger unfinished for quite some time, we can’t help but feel ashamed of the accumulating stockpile of work in our desk.

We often feel guilt and its close relative shame when we’ve done something wrong. Guilt is an internal feeling we have on something that we committed, while shame involves feeling like a bad guy, in the context of what the public views as bad behavior.

It’s a common scenario found in different industries but the main question is, are both feelings helpful?

It depends. For us to know how the aforementioned emotions affect an individual’s work behavior, it’s important that we truly understand its nature – its root causes as well as its differences.

Despite of its perceived similarity, guilt and shame arise from different attributions and elicits different responses. Shame arises when an individual regards the root cause of their failures to something unchangeable. All the while, guilt is what comes when an individual regards the reason for their failure as something changeable.

Both emotions relate to different aspects of agency and control. When we experience guilt, we resort to focusing on what we could’ve done differently or what we could do to be better in the future but when we feel shame, we direct our attention to how finer things would be if we were a different person. Say for example, a freelancer overlooked a deadline and fails to submit the collaterals he/she has been making for a client on time. If the freelancer correlates this misdeed to his/her behavior, she is likely to experience guilt but if the person attributes it to something core in themselves, he/she would feel shame – a much more devastating emotional experience than guilt for it promotes constructive responses to our mistakes.

Both emotions have its pros and cons. For example, guilt can be motivating. It has the power to increase one’s propensity to cooperate. In most cases, it will drive employees to work on tasks that have been stalled for quite a while. At its lowest, it doesn’t create much interference in completing projects but the guilt produced by the inability to work under conditions that are beyond one’s control can be painful.

Shame, on the other hand, relays a different story. It can be problematic in a sense that it prompts individuals to engross in habits that minimize contriteness and are unproductive to the organization. In fact, there are studies providing evidence that people will explicitly procrastinate to avoid shame. Realistically speaking, it’s almost never helpful.

Carrying the same amount of advantages and disadvantages, both can either be a liability or an asset.

So how do we avoid the negative effects of guilt and shame? We need to put a stop to rumination – the process of having repetitive thoughts about something anxiety-provoking – so that it would be less painful for us.

Being kind to oneself helps alleviate the negative effects of guilt and shame. We must be willing to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we’ve made. A large majority of us would tell our friends who are in the same situation to “give themselves a break”, so we must be able to give ourselves the same advice.

According Gabriele Oettingen’s Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation, focusing on the space between what you have accomplished and what you want to achieve leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Admittedly, that same energy can motivate an individual to act but when they are unable to do so, focusing on what you have achieved can give you a sense of pride.

One of the many outcomes of mindfulness technique is acceptance of one’s situation. This perspective is also useful when we are trying to overcome feelings of guilt. During these moments, it’s important for us to remember that no matter how bad we feel, it won’t help get rid some of the work that needs to be done.

With the innate tradition of needing to look “busy” to be labeled as “productive”, feeling guilty is simply unavoidable.

This type of culture greatly contributed to our anxious tendencies and the longer it stays, the harder it is for us to diminish this toxic habit. Luckily, today’s young professionals are implementing progressive changes in the hope of relieving their peers by starting in the root of it all – the workplace.

With the help of shared offices like coworking spaces that encourages well deserved breaks and reflective downtimes, freelancers and budding entrepreneurs are welcomed to a fresh culture – one that doesn’t berate you for being ‘unproductive’. Its supportive community of like-minded individuals are constantly reminding us that it’s okay to have some slow Mondays, the greater audience agreeing in unison.

If you’ve been feeling down lately, hit us up and maybe we can cheer you up!

Over the recent years, the need for creativity in several jobs have increased. No matter the industry or task – whether you are trying to pacify conflicting stakeholder priorities, looking for solutions to a client’s complaints, or launching a new product, your answers won’t probably be found in textbooks or academic papers.

But the thing is, it’s not easy to generate diverse ideas day by day. Chances are, creative blocks come in the way or worse, we actually run out of them. So what do we do once this happens? How do we move forward when our mind have seemingly hit a wall?

Mindfulness meditation have become an increasingly popular solution to curing mental blocks. Not only are researchers advertising its benefit but even leading firms such as Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronic are introducing this method of contemplation, as well as other mindfulness practices to their employees. Their executives and those from other organizations are saying that not only is it useful for stress-reduction, but it can also enhance creativity, opening a door in the wall blocking us from going forward.

But encouraging such acts would take a lot of convincing. These unorthodox ways of increasing productivity is often frowned upon, so in order to open up one’s mind to this approach, it’s important to gain a deeper understanding of its affectivity.

Administrators who gave contemplation a try, said that it actually helps them switch gears when things are becoming too stressful. In addition to this, there’s a large number of existing literature on the other benefits that it brings to the workplace. If one is to do it regularly, it can boost their resilience – allowing them to mitigate stress, regulate emotions, and develop a much more positive outlook. Moreover, it helps them switch off their innate reactive fight-or-flight response and engage in a more thoughtful mode needed in making balanced decisions.

Danny Penman argues in his book, Mindfulness for Creativity, that meditation and other similar practices amplify three essential skills for creative problem solving. First, mindfulness that switches on divergent thinking, opening our minds to new ideas. Second, it improves attention and makes registering ideas much easier. Lastly, it nurtures courage and pliancy against skepticism and other setbacks – a quality much needed for various innovation processes.

To further strengthen the claims that creativity is one of its first benefits, an experiment was conducted at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Netherlands. One hundred twenty-nine students participated in the test to see whether a minimum of ten minute meditation would be sufficient to boost creativity. The results showed that the short contemplation activities given to them rendered the participants in a more positive and relaxed frame of mind. Moreover, it decreased the participants’ feelings of restlessness by at least twenty-three percent, nervousness by seventeen percent, and irritation by twenty-four percent. Google’s Mindfulness Program Advisor, Mirabai Bush, said in a conference that the activity will make your life work better and your work life better – a win-win situation.

At the end of the day, the only way you’ll find out whether or not meditation and contemplation works for you, is for you to actually try it yourself. You can download apps such as Headspace, Calm, or Buddhify. You can also try following instructions from short courses that can be found online.

And for us to actually experience it to the fullest, it’s important that our work environments would provide us with enough freedom to do it. Traditional offices would usually disapprove of such activities but the growing presence of coworking spaces are giving today’s professionals room for mindfulness activities. The global phenomenon of shared spaces allows its members full autonomy of their workday and provides them with a wide variety of work areas that they can use any time they please. So in case you want to give ten minute meditations a try, you can easily pick a quiet area for a quick break.

Better ideas and a better mood can easily be achieved in approximately just about the same time that it takes for you to enjoy a cup of coffee. And if you want to give it a try, we can introduce you to a working environment that encourages mindfulness.

At some point in our career, we meet individuals – sometimes, even groups of people – who lost motivation towards their work. Though we understand the struggle of losing interest, we can’t help but feel frustrated. We find it hard to sympathize with coworkers who become unproductive due to how disengaged they are. We tend to forget what it felt like when we were there and we would often end up being unkind to them, wishing they would just suck it up and snap out of it.

Leaders are prone to falling into this mindset. But what most managers don’t know is that these kinds of approach are usually counterproductive. It’s a band aid solution that ignores the underlying reasons as to why people lose passion for what they do.

The reality is, in order for managements to find the root of the problem, they have to know that it’s crucial to understand the need of humans to feel motivated and to find meaning in the things that they do. It’s simply part of our biology. As a matter of fact, there’s a certain part of our brain commonly known as the seeking system. This specific section creates natural impulses to learn new things and to take challenging yet very meaningful tasks. And whenever this urge is satisfied, we receive a jolt of dopamine – the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation and pleasure – making us want more engagement to these kinds of activities. And, whenever our seeking systems are stimulated, we become more motivated and feel purposeful as well as zestful. We feel even more alive.

In an ideal circumstance, we should be able to freely explore, experiment, and learn – this should be our way of living and working. But the harsh reality is that a majority of us are members of organizations who each have their respective restrictions that prevents us from doing so.

When we’re left in a box with no room for growth and learning, we tend to shut down – a reaction we are engineered to have. It’s our body’s way of saying “we’re meant for better things”. Our brains are basically telling us that we’re wasting our potential.

Activating your employee’s seeking system is one of the biggest keys in bringing back their motivation. The question now is how should managers do it? Surely there are road blocks in the way – many of which are beyond control. Admittedly, it’s almost impossible to ignore these metrics and other bureaucratic red tapes but despite of this, there are ways in which we can stimulate the aforementioned structure without creating too much of a change in the organization.

With three small but significant steps to triggering employee’s seeking systems: encouraging them to play around their strengths, creating opportunities for experiments, and helping them personalize the purpose of their work.

Philosophers through the decades have emphasized the human mind’s innate drive to showcase their true selves to those around them. Yet despite of this notion, the working industry have ignored our desire for self-expression.

Regardless of the progress we’ve made in our way of working – the rise of remote workers, the growing population of coworking spaces and how the industry is now lauding creativity and innovations – there’s still administrative positions, inflexible roles and standard evaluation systems that creates anxiety instead of excitement.

Allowing talents to think for themselves and utilize their respective unique skills, their seeking systems are activated. They feel more alive when they feel that they have a larger role to play in the company.

Another way of activating the aforementioned system is creating “safe zones” wherein they can experiment, play, and have supportive social bonding.

Not only to these zones elicit positive emotions, it also creates intrinsic motivations that can unleash creativity. Organizations become more agile when they encourage employees to look for new approaches and allow them to test it out as well as letting them learn through feedback sharing.

Research have said that framing change and innovation as an opportunity for experimentation and learning instead of viewing it as a performance situation is actually better.

The sense of a greater purpose doesn’t just revolve around solving global problems like curing epidemics or changing the world. It can also start with seeing how our input contributes something greater. We find our jobs purposeful when we learn how we affect the team’s progress.