Tom Rath Quotations

I would absolutely recommend against excessive positivity and optimism. Any positive emotion that you're infusing into a workplace needs to be grounded in reality. If it's not realistic, sincere, meaningful, and individualized, it won't do much good.

Half an hour of exercise in the morning makes for better interactions all day. Then a sound night of sleep gives me energy to tackle the next day. I am a more active parent, a better spouse, and more engaged in my work when I eat, move, and sleep well.

Ignoring negative things that need to be changed is destructive and does nothing to alleviate negativity. Instead, we should focus on the way we're treating other people in our brief interactions with them.

Making better choices takes work. There is a daily give and take, but it is worth the effort.

On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.

I think trust is primarily built through relationships, and it's important because it's the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers.

I've seen people be effective, even among local teams, by offering something that improves wellbeing in a small way - people who get passionate about smart investment strategies and managing finances for retirement, for example.

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.

We engineered activity out of our lives in the name of convenience. We created foods that put fried, fatty, sweet, and salty ahead of fresh, natural, and healthy. We quickly sacrifice sleep to work longer hours in pursuit of the American Dream. Even when we do these things with good intentions, they have life-threatening consequences.

When your boss and colleagues care enough to invest in your health, it is good for you and the business.

Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.

Followers need to see how things will get better and what that future might look like. Leaders need to build that foundation of stability, and hope sits on top of that.

When we asked people if they would rather have a best friend at work or a 10% pay raise, having a friend clearly won.

Clearly, there aren't enough positive moments or interactions happening in the workplace. As a result, our economy suffers, companies suffer, and individual relationships suffer.

Wanting a more positive environment isn't enough. You need to do something, and it doesn't require a great deal of effort or some huge change in the way you approach things at work.

People who say they have a best friend at work are seven times as likely to be engaged in what they're doing. And if they don't have a best friend at work, the odds of being engaged are just 1 in 12.

Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They're just more engaged at work.

I've seen the same thing emerge in the research around the interaction of sleeping and moving and eating: if you get a good night's sleep, you are significantly more likely to make the right choices about what you eat the next morning, you're more likely to work out, you're more likely to get a better night's sleep the next night.

What we've learned is that if you can make the right decision in the supermarket aisle, it's a heck of a lot easier to make a good decision when you reach in your cupboard when you're craving a snack at eight o'clock at night.

When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you're doing when you wake up each day.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

You need a lot of effort and talent to produce greatness.

Our relationships with people are formed by small moments - and relationships are crucial in business.

When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.

The quickest way to be a little bit happier and more engaged in your job is to spend some time thinking about developing closer friendships.

Figure out what you really love doing and use your strengths on a daily basis.

Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.

Executives must place a priority on wellbeing if they want to attract the right people, keep their best people, and drive their company's financial performance.

If a school makes an effort to provide kids the right foods and help them to be more active, this benefits the student and the family's health. If you embark on a program to improve your health with a church or community group, you are more likely to stick with it over time.

Don’t worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.

Positive defaults protect you from yourself - and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.

The real energy occurs in each connection between two people, which can bring about exponential returns.

I act as if my life depends on each decision. Because it does.

It's unrealistic to expect the person you go to for sage advice also to be the person you go out and have a good time with. And it's unlikely that he or she will be the same person who's pushing you and motivating you to do more every day, like a coach or manager does.

The most important thing executives can do is send a very clear message to their employees that they care about each person's overall wellbeing and that they want to be a part of helping it improve over time.

The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician.

No matter how healthy you are today, you can take specific actions to have more energy and live longer.

The right choices over time greatly improve your odds of a long and healthy life.

At a very basic level, people need to know that there is constancy in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed.

Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they're doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization.

While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not.

When top scientists and psychologists talk about what's important to our overall wellbeing and how satisfied we are with our lives, the only thing that they all agree on is that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our overall happiness.

The vast knowledge we have to prevent cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses is staggering.

Regardless of your age, you can make better choices in the moment. Small decisions - about how you eat, move, and sleep each day - count more than you think. As I have learned from personal experience, these choices shape your life.

There is certainly some predisposition to wellbeing, based on the research I've looked at. There are people who have a lot more natural discipline. But for most of us, it takes a lot more in terms of social expectations, where, say, we tell people we're going to run a 5K.

I think the term 'friend' itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term 'good friend' is overused. Adding the word 'vital' provides a clear definition of what we mean.

I've seen so many people - loved ones and colleagues - who jump from one diet to the next, one exercise regimen to the next . I was trying to figure out what were some of the basic things that each of us can build into a lifestyle for good, instead of bouncing from one thing to the next.

There's a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn't seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I've spoken with have said to me.

When you ask people about what they enjoy doing, time spent with the boss is even worse than time spent cleaning the house. So this suggests that there are a lot of leaders out there who are not doing an adequate job.

Every day, I read about new ideas and research that could help someone I care about live a longer and healthier life.

It's tempting to work more than 60 hours a week and sacrifice sleep, not move, and eat bad foods as they are convenient. But this comes with a cost.

Most people perceive their occupation as being a detriment to their overall wellbeing.

Washington is not a city that takes great pride in being a healthy place, necessarily. Now, I have no data. That's just my own observation.

We don't have any measures in most cases of the health of our social relationships, of what we're giving to the community.

When you ask people what affects their wellbeing most, they think of health and wealth.

Even if people just change two or three things that they are able to sustain over time, it makes quite a difference eventually.

Exercise is not enough. Working out three times a week is not enough. Being active throughout the day is what keeps you healthy.

What works for one persons needs is almost always very different from the next.

When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.

You can intentionally choose to spend more time with the people you enjoy most and engage your strengths as much as possible.

People with high levels of wellbeing have been careful to work out early in the morning and not to have heavy meals throughout the day because you kind of fall off a cliff in terms of your energy by 2 or 3:00 if you have a lunch with a lot of heavy foods.

Team members care about one another, listen, share secrets, talk about the latest news, have heated arguments, are sometimes jealous of each other, and even cry together.

I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas,

I'm a researcher, so I'm realistic that there's nothing I'm doing that's going to prevent me from getting cancer in the future. But I can slow it down.

I've spoken with a few employers who have moved away from what has to be some of the least attractive language you could use about health risk to start talking about wellbeing.

Make it easier to do things that increase your wellbeing before you have to make a choice because a lot of our choices, though they seem small in the moment, have a big effect.

For wellbeing to take hold, it's got to be something that individual team members are getting excited about in their own lives. It can't be something that a company is forcing top-down through hierarchical structures.

Having fewer unhealthy days and, in turn, more days when you have the energy to get things done is probably the global constant through which businesses and individuals can think about the quantifiable upside of increasing wellbeing.

I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn't much they could do with some of those people.

You would think that when someone accepts a position with a company, they would assume that their life will be better off because they have that job rather than a different one.

When you tell people at a convention that you're from New Hampshire, they tend to hold on to your hand a little longer and look into your eyes a little deeper, ... But beyond that, there was no overt, 'Are you with me if I go?'

We know how to do this... there's kind of an elegant dance, as they say.

We've seen the enemy, and he is us. We have to get back to the basics. Let's talk about small government and reduced spending, and don't let the Democrats take those issues.

We've seen the enemy, and he is us.

Simply try to turn your next conversation with someone who is negative into a more positive moment. See what happens. In most cases, they will turn around and be more positive in their next interaction.

Occasionally their New England roots make them a little embarrassed and awkward about showing that side of themselves.

Never underestimate the long-term influence of filling others' buckets.

With McCain, you had to create negatives. But with Gore, you merely have to reinforce them.

His reach within both the party mechanism and the policy structures of the government is so deep that I believe that it is possible to find somebody who would provide the technical and intellectual support that Libby did, even if he doesn't have the same personal relationship that he had with Libby. That's very hard to duplicate.

I talk about an enthusiasm deficit, and I think we have a little bit of that. They say we need to get our act together. They still love this president. But they want to see movement on the things that brought us to power. We took the government over and promised to fix things.

I think some of what you are hearing now is an attempt on his part to re-establish his bona fides with that group,

We need to adjust to reflect the difficulties in raising money in the wake of Bush mania. Until that subsides, and it may subside when (Texas Gov. George W. Bush) gets out on the campaign trail and we see what kind of candidate he can be, we need to do things to stay viable.

We'd kind of like us to get our act together a little bit, instead of standing in a circle shooting inward.

When you are caring for someone who is in hospice you learn all these skills that you never think you will need again. Well I had them, and I thought, why not use them? I am fortunate to be in the situation I am in right now and I have a desire to give something of myself.

We had some people in that delegation who were very close to -- and great fans of -- Senator McCain. And they were front and center when he came, and I think that that was totally appropriate after his run four years ago.

Each treats the other with a great deal of respect. The relationships between the offices have been very professional and looking at both sides.

During the second quarter, there was a real focus on the new 'nifty fifty.' The biggest cap growth stocks performed the best in the quarter. Small stocks didn't do so well and IPO's were tough,

I've seen it both ways, top down and bottom up and this one is not being dictated by Austin or anywhere,

'StrengthsFinder 2.0' is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers - it was oriented more toward managers - or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.

There's a lot of frustration here ? we've had a run of real bad luck. You've got such longevity in that White House team that they are tired. They need a break. They need a big piece of good luck. I don't know what it is.

This is very much going to divert the agenda,

It required each of them getting comfortable with the other, ... My sense was that the political problem was perceived more from the outside of the relationship than from the inside.

It's the old cliche. You go into the group looking for a way of processing the grief you are dealing with. And then you end up helping others with their pain and helping yourself. The power of the shared experience in those meetings is amazing.

It's March, and there are congressional elections in November, and at some point it's every person for himself.

It's certainly emboldened those who would be president to come up here a little earlier and show a little leg. As they do that, as folks come through, they talk more about their take on issues, and they're less likely to toe the White House line on everything.

It took each of them a little while to get used to the other and in the end this was inevitable. I don't think the governor was taken by the pressure one way or the other. I think the governor was not going to be rushed. He was going to do this on his own time.

The message that gets circulated from the White House is that this president shouldn't be made a lame duck before his time.

In the case of Tropicana, it is something more readily valued. It's in a business that's more of a consumer staple. People are more comfortable assigning a value to it,

The hurricane and its aftermath will overarch all other agenda items for the rest of this year and maybe beyond,

Buying experience such as going out to dinner or taking a vacation increases our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. Experiences last while material purchases fade.