Feb 5
The Happiness Advantage
Did you know your brain is more creative when you are in a good mood? Shawn Achor’s Ted Talk on “The Happy Secret To Better Work” will show you why the “work hard to be successful and happy” formula is wrong. Shawn’s decade of research at Harvard proves you will be more successful when you train your brain to be positive at work first.
Too many of us believe we will be happy when we get the next promotion, buy a new house, take a vacation or (you fill in the blank). The problem is the score for happiness keep changing. That is why you need to reverse the order, create the ability to be happy first, and success will follow.
So how can you start pursing happiness? Training your brain to be more positive is just like training your body. In his 2011 Huffington Post article Happiness Leads To Success, Shawn reviews the five ways to turn happiness into an advantage.
Here are Shawn’s five practices:
- Write down three things you are grateful for each day.
- Writefor two minutes a day describing one positive experience you had over the past 24 hours. This is a strategy to help transform you from a task-based thinker, to a meaning based thinker who scans the world for meaning instead of endless to-dos.
- Exercise for 10 minutes a day. This trains your brain to believe your behavior matters, which causes a cascade of success throughout the rest of the day.
- Meditate for two minutes, focusing on your breath going in and out. This will help you undo the negative effects of multitasking. Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time.
- Write one, quick email first thing in the morning thanking or praising a member on your team.
Watch it work for you!
