Trying to be a Positive Deviant

We were presented with a challenge this week: using Atul Gawande’s suggestions for becoming positive deviants. The five options were, don’t complain, write something, count something, change, and ask an unscripted question. I chose to avoid complaining. Complaining is something I’ve always done that I don’t like, so I thought this would be good practice for me.

My hypothesis is giving up complaining will help me have a more positive outlook, and I will go into things expecting better endings. I’m excited to try this and see if it helps me become more positive.

I decided to try to make a tally every time I complained this week. At the end of each day, I noticed the total and reflected on how I had felt all day. I decided to measure the effects of giving up complaining this way because I thought it would be easy. It didn’t turn out to be as easy as I had thought though. I definitely forgot to mark some of the times I complained, and when I was at work, I had no way to mark my complaints. Those two constraints skewed my data, so my numbers are not completely accurate.

Day	Number of Complaints	How I Felt at the End of the Day
Tuesday	3	Happy
Wednesday	2	Happy
Thursday	5	Happy
Friday	15	Stressed/Annoyed
Saturday	21	Stressed/content

At the beginning of this experiment, everything was going well. I was paying attention to my words, and when I felt like complaining I was able to stop myself in most cases. As it went on, however, I lost control of myself. I believe a large reason I complained more over the weekend was because I was around people who were also complaining, and I just joined in.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was on a short trip to St. Louis, so I didn’t really have anything to complain about except the long drive. Since I was with friends having fun, I was able to control myself and stop myself from complaining. On Thursday I was very tired from traveling back home (we got home at 4:30am), which made me a little bit more irritable, but I was still able to stay in control, and it kept me happy. Friday started out well, but everything went downhill when I got to work. As a manager, I have to deal with all the problems from customers and employees. We were understaffed and it put a lot of pressure on me. My boss came over and complained to me about a couple things, and I noticed myself joining her. Later that night our printer broke, and I complained about that as well. I ended up in a terrible mood at the end of the day, and I’m not sure if my mood was caused by the complaining or the stress at work. Saturday was much worse than Friday. My shift started with two employees not showing up and angry customers because their food wasn’t arriving on time. When you work in a pizza restaurant that emphasizes deliveries, getting orders to customers on time is a huge priority. We only had four drivers and three crew members, and we were much busier than Friday night. We were all under a lot of pressure and that made everyone complain (at this point I gave up on my goal of not complaining). I was at work cleaning until 2:00am, but I was actually in a better mood at that point. A friend of mine who works with me agreed to come in and help me and the closing driver clean the store. He put me in a much better mood and made cleaning up kind of fun. Although I was stressed out, I wasn’t in a bad mood when I went to bed that night.

This experiment didn’t yield the results I was expecting. I think that is just because I didn’t try hard enough, and I gave up on the last day. If I had done this longer, the results would be easier to see. I think I’m going to try this experiment again at a later time and give myself more time. It was a fun challenge, but I don’t see any definite correlations between how much I complain and how my mood is. It makes sense to me that if I complain less, I’ll be happier, but this test was inconclusive.