Examining “The Happy Secret to Better Work”
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If you are always looking for technology, marketing, and business advice, you really should explore the amazing world of Ted Talks. All of these videos are available for free on the Ted Talk YouTube Channel. You will be amazed at some of the gems and best advice you will find from intelligent and innovative experts from all over the world right at your fingertips. One of the best Ted Talk videos I have watched is called “The Happy Secret to Better Work” which is just a little over 12 minutes of amazing insightfulness from Shawn Achor.
The Happiness Advantage
Shawn Achor is as funny and entertaining as he is wise about the topic of positive psychology. His presentation is entitled: The Happiness Advantage: Research Linking Happiness and Success. How do we escape the “cult” of average? Most studies aim to find the average. However, Achor explains that if we instead look at improving the average or studying why people are above average or outliers in a study that you can find the answers you seek. It is not necessarily the reality that shapes us but it is the lens to which your brain views the world that shapes your reality and if we can change the lens, not only can you change your happiness, but you can change every educational and business outcome at the same time.
Researching Happiness
Shawn uses his time at Harvard to explain how he learned this. He was so happy to be accepted to Harvard and attain a scholarship that allowed him to attend he was surprised when he found that so many students weren’t happy to be there after just two weeks. They no longer saw it as a privilege or exciting. After graduating, he studied the students as a psychologist to try to uncover the phenomenon. He realized that the students were so focused on the competition, the stress, the workload, and everything that they were no longer happy to be there, no matter how happy they were initially. He said people always would ask, “What would a Harvard student have to be unhappy about?”
Predicting Happiness
He discovered after research that the answer to the puzzle was actually embedded in that question. This is because that question inherently assumes that we can predict someone’s happiness by their external world. He learned that this is not correct at all. Our external world is not predictive of our happiness levels. Instead, happiness is predicted by the way that your brain processes your external world. Amazingly, 90% of your long term happiness is determined by the way your brain processes the world around you. If we change our formula for happiness and success, then we change the way that we can affect reality. Only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, but 75% of job successes are predicted by optimism levels, social support, and the ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat. One must learn not outline all the negative without highlighting the positive. The absence of disease is not health.
We’ve Been Doing it Wrong!
Most of the world teaches that if we work harder, we will be more successful and thus, happier. This is in management styles, parenting styles, and teaching styles worldwide. This is a backwards and broken way of doing things. Why? Because when we have a success, our brain changes the metric for what that success is. When happiness is on the other side of success, we never get there. The problem is that we think if we are successful, we will be happy. Instead, Achor explains that we need to learn ‘The Happiness Advantage’. This means reversing the formula and becoming positive in the present. There is a medical basis for this and it has to do with the chemical reaction in your brain. When you raise positivity in the present, your creativity rises, intelligence increases, productivity rises. If we can find a way to become positive in the present, we can see what our brains are capable of. When dopamine floods into your system it makes you happier and turns on all the learning centers in your brain. This allows you to adapt to the world in a different way.
How Can You Make This Positive Change for Yourself?
Achor gives these simple daily exercises to help you turn this around for you. Your brain can be more successful when you create a lasting and positive change. This creates ripples of positivity that leads to a real revolution of positivity. When you spend two minutes a day on each of these exercises for 21 days in a row, you can rewire your brain to work more optimistically and more successfully with the following 5 exercises:
- Write down three things you are thankful for. Your brain retains a pattern for positivity.
- Journal about a positive experience. Your brain relives the experience as you are writing it down.
- Exercise, because it teaches your brain your behavior matters.
- Meditation allows your brain to focus at the task at hand.
- Random Acts of Kindness. Write one positive email to your social support network.
Richard Larson is Brand Manager for GoPromotional.co,uk. For more marketing and business tips, visit our blog.
Source: http://www.smarttechtoday.com/examining-the-happy-secret-to-better-work/9873/
