Holidays Have You Happy Or Horrified? A Mindset Shift May Help You And Your Team

Jarret Jackson
7 min readApr 29, 2022
Our perspective shapes how we interact with the world. | Photo by Michael Dziedzic for Unsplash

The holiday season is upon us! Winter is coming. For some, any celebration is great news, but for others, the combination of the omicron variant, holiday stress, and less sunshine may be impacting more than how they feel. It might also be impacting how they think.

Worries Getting In The Way?

A new study, conducted by Boston University emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry David Barlow and colleagues and written about on PsychologyToday.com, suggests that neurotic thinking patterns (the negative-thinking traps that are generally associated with anger, anxiety, depression, irritability, and self‐consciousness, for example), may be getting in the way of your team’s mental health and their success. Individuals that are high on neuroticism may feel a lack of control over their work or environment and experience more distress than others in the face of most work and life stressors.

That’s helpful insight for leaders and managers whose teams may feel like they are falling apart under the strain and stress of the past two years: It’s not time for another pep-talk. It’s time to challenge ourselves and each other to change the way we think; to re-write the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about the difficulties we’ve been facing and…

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Jarret Jackson
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I write about strategy, adaptive leadership and managerial psychology.