Top 45 Tom Rath Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

‘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.