The Happy Secret to Better Work

 

I found this Tedx video of Shawn Achor, and it struck a very real and genuine chord for me.  Shawn is a positive Psychology expert who spent over a decade working at Harvard University.  Shawn’s basic premise is about trying to train people to be positive in the present, not some distant “happiness” over the horizon, and to use that happiness to boost performance by at least 30%.

My notes and nuggets (in itallics) from his TEDx talk:

• We need to escape the cult of the average 
•  We spend all of our time gathering data to find the “average” and then building programs and supports suitable to that average.  
•  He challenges us to move the entire average up.  This was pretty intriguing to me, because I have always struggled with averages because of the outliers that averages create.  The idea to set a standard, and then work to raise that standard for everyone is great.  I will definitely put some more thought into ways to implement this in my practice. 
•  He questions our sensory inputs for news and events, and asks “what is the accurate ratio of negative to positive?”  Does the news accurately portray the world or sensationalize the negative events happening?  Like Shawn, I go through phases of watching the news and ignoring it.  I watch to keep informed, but then disengage when it seems to be negative.  And, I disengage a lot.  It is interesting that Shawn looks at the ratio of negative input to positive input—especially if our brain shapes it’s own reality by what it sees (see point below). 
• Changing the lens
•  Does reality shape us, or does the lens that our brain views the world shape the reality [that we see]?  See my notes above...
•  If we change the lens, we can change the outlook.  This reminds me of a condition that a brain scientist referred to once during a keynote presentation.  Rectaloctyosis:  A crappy outlook on life.  But I digress.  I knew a man who got a phone call from the hospital to pick up his daughter.  “Oh my gosh!, he said, “was she in an accident?”  “No sir, she had a baby.”  The man didn’t know that she was pregnant.  Now you can take what you want from this guy, but I can tell you—oblivious or not—he only saw the happy things in his life and they were the things that he wanted to see.  As a result, he was always (always) happy.  I think that sometimes, many of us look at life with a far too critical eye, and have had many moments wondering if this guy was onto (not just on) something.  He certainly spent a lot of energy crafting what his brain was given...
•  Does reality shape us, or does the lens that our brain views the world shape the reality [that we see]?  See my notes above...
• Shawn gave us an example of his acceptance into Harvard being a very positive one for him but not for every other entrant
•  2 weeks after acceptance, the original success many first year students experience by getting in was replaced by feelings of competition, workload, hassles, stresses and complaints.  Wow, does this ring true and I will share a sports analogy that I use with kids all the time.  How come, when someone scores a goal in youth soccer—say on a penalty kick—they are “supposed” to run back to centre and “get ready” for the kick off?  Why are we called show offs for celebrating our own success?  The flip side, of course, is that if they miss the penalty kick, feel bad, kick the ground a few times, shrug off the “that’s okay” from their team mates, and then they relive it in their memory over and over and over.  This often affects their play and we try to coach them to “put it behind” them.  This has always been backwards to me.  If we are supposed to visualize our successes before they happen, why are we not then allowed to celebrate them, heck, revel in them?  We should live in the past, and never forget our great accomplishments, and then be able to simply forget our mistakes and “move on”.
•  There is an assumption that the external world is predictive of our happiness levels.  He says that this assumption is backwards.
•  90% of happiness is determined by how your brain processes the world.  So, what if we can train our brain to process things differently?
•  If we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we then affect reality.  
•  75% of job successes are predicted by optimism levels, social support and your ability to see stresses as a challenge instead of as a threat.  So, then it seems to me that the bulk of our energy at work should be devoted to improving optimism levels and social supports (peer networks), and in stress management training.
•  Example of a wellness week at a boarding school
•  Monday – Adolescent depression
•  Tuesday – School violence and bullying
•  Wednesday – Eating disorders
•  Thursday – Illicit drug use
•   Friday – Risky sex vs. happiness (undecided)
•  My ideas on this are that this list reminds me of some many wellness workshops that I have attended, where we focus on the potential bad in work situations.  I call these the Chicken Little sessions because the focus seems to be more about identifying all of the things going wrong instead of ways to keep the path ahead a positive one.   
•  ***The absence of disease is not health.  This is a very powerful statement:  the absence of disease is not health.  I can be inserviced until the end of time, however, making me aware of everything that could go wrong doesn’t mean that it won’t.  It also won’t ensure that I have balance or wellness in my life.
• We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success:
•  Working harder ≠ more success
• More success ≠ more happiness
• Every time the brain achieves success, we change the goal posts for what success looks like
•  Good grades lead to a need for even better grades
•  Going to a good school leads to the need for going to an even better school
•  Getting a good job is a stepping stone to getting a better job
•  If we hit our quarterly sales target, we change the sales target 
•  If happiness is on the other side of success, your brain never gets there.  If we never stop to celebrate our achievements, never smell the roses, we will never give our brain a chance to feel success.  I think that this is what I feel during the “more stuff piled on” phases of my work year;  I always feel so run-down and over-worked when I seem to be just out of grasp of some sort of success.
•  If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what he calls a “happiness advantage”
•  Your brain, positive, performs 31% better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed
•  Intelligence rises, creativity rises, energy levels rise, every business outcome improves
• Dopamine
•  Makes you happier
• Turns on all of the learning centres in your brain
•  We need to bring more dopamine into the workplace!
• You can train your brain to be positive in the present by doing 5 things every day for 21 days:
•  3 Gratitudes (to take a moment to celebrate 3 small successes each day—to train your brain to scan for positive in your day)   
• Journaling (to reflect on things and relive them)
• Exercise (to teach our brain that your behaviour matters)
• Mediation (to combat our culture of ADHD and too many things to stay on top of—to train your brain to focus on the task at hand)
•  Random acts of kindness  (spreading the wealth)