Save your praise

Today I’m making a quick plea for you to save positive feedback, “wins”, and thanks from your interactions at work.

I’ll call it a win sheet. You may have heard something similar recommended as a categorized excel sheet of accomplishments that helps you juice your resume and tell impressive stories in interviews, but that’s not at all why (or how) I do it.

My version of a win sheet is much simpler: It’s a list of things I know I did well, and nice things people have said to me.

This collection of positive things shows its value on days you…

1. doubt your own capabilities

2. doubt the goodness of others

3. need a reminder of the power of your own words

Doubting your capabilities from time to time, or really centering on “constructive” feedback, is only natural. The well-documented negativity bias can be at least partly blamed. As the folks at The Decision Lab summarize, “The negativity bias is a cognitive bias that results in adverse events having a more significant impact on our psychological state than positive events. Negativity bias occurs even when adverse events and positive events are of the same magnitude, meaning we feel negative events more intensely.” Scrolling back through a list of specific, real, positive events and accomplishments helps combat that bias and provides tangible evidence backing the positive perspective.

Doubting the goodness of others. When you start to believe someone is treating you poorly, is a bad person, or is not very smart, confirmation bias is at the ready to highlight observations or interactions that reinforce those pre-existing beliefs. This is why I make a particular effort to save kind words from folks I don’t (yet) have the highest opinion of: It’s a way to contradict, with evidence, the assumption that he doesn’t like me, or she never says thank you. This can slowly help shift my perspective on someone, which is particularly helpful when I’ll be working with them for the long haul.

Reminding yourself the power of your own words. It hits me almost every time as I’m scrolling through my own Google doc, reading praise and thanks: Holy shit, there’s no way half these people remember saying these things, but I’ve got it saved to look back at two years later and it still warms my heart! Your words are powerful. And if you’re in a position of formal power (i.e., you manage people or have a big title), they’re almost certainly more powerful than you think. This doc can serve as a reminder to use that power for good — to write a note to the teammate who’s been putting in extra hours lately, to compliment a teammate on how they ran a meeting. Even the small moments can make someone’s day.

Ready to give it a shot? Here’s how I maintain my win sheet:

The simpler the better. I take screenshots of Slack messages or emails, or quick notes on live conversations, and paste them a bit willy-nilly into a (private) Google doc. If I’m really feeling organized I’ll include the date or some context. Once a quarter or so, I’ll add in a few bullet points on what I’ve accomplished lately.

The Google doc is saved on my bookmarks bar for easy access, because I know if I don’t capture something in the moment I won’t dig back through old messages to find it. Not the sleekest system, for sure, but the point is: It’s easy, it’s accessible, the barrier to adding to it is extremely low.

Then when I’m feeling down, or frustrated with a colleague, I’ll take a scroll through the doc. Inevitably I remember that I am capable, people are decent, and words are powerful.