The 7 Principles that fuel Success & Performance at work from the book “Happiness Advantage” by “Shawn Achor”
The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost
In a world where success is often pursued as a means to happiness, what if we flipped the script? What if happiness itself was the key to unlocking our true potential and achieving lasting success? In his groundbreaking book, “The Happiness Advantage,” author Shawn Achor challenges conventional wisdom and presents a compelling case for why happiness should be our starting point, not the finish line.
Principle 1: The Happiness Advantage
Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. By cultivating a positive mindset and focusing on happiness, individuals can enhance their performance and productivity.
How to Improve Your Mood and Raise Your Happiness Throughout the Day
1. Meditate
- Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy.
- Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And, research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness, lower stress, even improve immune function. (Click here to read about Meditation techniques)
2. Find Something to Look Forward To
- One study found people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.
- Anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centers in your brain much as the actual reward will.
3. Commit Conscious Acts of Kindness
- A long line of empirical research, including one study of over 2,000 people, has shown that acts of altruism—giving to friends and strangers alike—decrease stress and strongly contribute to enhanced mental health.
- Pick one day a week and make a point of committing five acts of kindness.
4. Infuse Positivity Into Your Surroundings
- Our physical environment can have an enormous impact on our mindset and sense of well-being.
- Studies have shown that the less negative TV we watch, specifically violent media, the happier we are.
5. Exercise
- Physical activity can boost mood and enhance our work performance in a number of other ways as well, by improving motivation and feelings of mastery, reducing stress and anxiety, and helping us get into flow—that “locked in” feeling of total engagement that we usually get when we’re at our most productive.
6. Spend Money (but Not on Stuff)
- In his book Luxury Fever, Robert Frank explains that while the positive feelings we get from material objects are frustratingly fleeting, spending money on experiences, especially ones with other people, produces positive emotions that are both more meaningful and more lasting.
- Spending money on other people is called ‘prosocial spending,’ and also boosts happiness.
- Draw two columns on a piece of paper (or take ten minutes at work to create a nifty spreadsheet) and track your purchases over the next month. Are you spending more on things or on experiences? At the end of the month, look back over each column and think about the pleasure each purchase brought you, and for how long.
7. Exercise a Signature Strength
- Everyone is good at something. Each time we use a skill, whatever it is, we experience a burst of positivity. If you find yourself in need of a happiness booster, revisit a talent you haven’t used in a while.
- Even more fulfilling than using a skill, though, is exercising a strength of character, a trait that is deeply embedded in who we are.
- Studies have shown that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier you become.
8. The Lasoda Line: also known as the Losada Ratio or the Losada Zone, is a concept derived from the research of psychologist Marcial Losada. According to Losada’s research, in order for a system (such as a team, a relationship, or a group) to thrive and perform at its best, the ratio of positive to negative interactions needs to be at least 3:1. In other words, for every negative interaction, there should be at least three positive interactions.
Principle 2: The Fulcrum and the Lever
Happiness is not about lying to ourselves or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brains so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances.
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world
Archimedes
Our power to maximize our potential is also based on two important things:
(1) the length of our lever—how much potential power and possibility we believe we have.
(2) the position of our fulcrum—the mindset with which we generate the power to change.
By changing the fulcrum of our mindset and lengthening our lever of possibility, we change what is possible.
So how exactly is it that our relative perception of what is happening, or what we think will happen, can actually affect what does happen?
One answer is that the brain is organized to act on what we predict will happen next, something psychologists call ‘Expectancy Theory.’
The expectation of an event causes the same complex set of neurons to fire as though the event were actually taking place, triggering a cascade of events in the nervous system that leads to a whole host of real physical consequences.
When we reconnect ourselves with the pleasure of the ‘means,’ as opposed to only focusing on the ‘ends,’ we adopt a mindset more conducive not only to enjoyment but to better results.”
When faced with a difficult task or challenge, give yourself an immediate competitive advantage by
a) focusing on all the reasons you will succeed, rather than fail.
b) Remind yourself of the relevant skills you have, rather than those you lack.
c) Think of a time you have been in a similar circumstance in the past and performed well.
d) When we believe there will be a positive payoff for our effort, we work harder instead of succumbing to helplessness.
By changing the way we perceive ourselves and our work, we can dramatically improve our results.
After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, Amy Wrzesniewski has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling.
- People with a ‘Job’ see work as a chore and their paycheck as the reward. They work because they have to and constantly look forward to the time they can spend away from their job.
- By contrast, people who view their work as a ‘Career‘ work not only out of necessity but also to advance and succeed. They are invested in their work and want to do well.
- People with a ‘Calling’ view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose. And as a result, these are the people who work harder and longer and are generally more likely to get ahead.”
Wrzesniewski’s most interesting finding is not just that people see their work in one of these three ways, but that it fundamentally doesn’t matter what type of job one has. A calling orientation can have just as much to do with mindset as it does with the actual work being done. Unhappy employees can find ways to improve their work-life that doesn’t involve quitting, changing jobs or careers, or going off to find themselves. Organizational psychologists call this ‘job crafting,’ but in essence, it involves simply adjusting one’s mindset.”
Researchers have found that even the smallest tasks can be imbued with greater meaning when they are connected to personal goals and values.
“You can have the best job in the world, but if you can’t find the meaning in it, you won’t enjoy it, whether you are a movie maker or an NFL playmaker.”
By changing our mindset and shifting our perspective, we can change the outcome. A small shift in mindset can have a significant impact on our ability to overcome challenges and achieve success.
Principle 3: The Tetris Effect
Our brains have a tendency to spot patterns based on what we focus on. Just as people who play Tetris for extended periods start to see falling Tetriminos in their minds, our brains can become wired to constantly look for and focus on negative or stressful events, even when they are not present.
The Tetris Effect described in the book emphasizes the power of our mindset and the way we train our brains to perceive the world around us. Achor suggests that by consciously training our minds to focus on positive aspects, gratitude, and opportunities, we can shift our attention away from negative patterns and improve our overall well-being and happiness.
Inattentional blindness”: our frequent inability to see what is often right in front of us if we’re not focusing directly on it. We tend to miss what we’re not looking for.
When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.
Action Task: Start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life. When you write down a list of ‘three good things’ that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future.
Principle 4: Falling Up:
Adversity and failure can serve as stepping stones to growth and resilience. Embracing failure, learning from it, and using it as a springboard for improvement is crucial for long-term success.
When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often ‘overlearn’ the lesson and apply it to other situations. They become convinced that one dead-end path must be proof that all possible paths are dead ends. However, by scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.
The people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened. Things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.
—Tal Ben-Shahar
A counterfact is an alternate scenario our brains create to help us evaluate and make sense of what really happened. For instance, Imagine for a moment that you walk into a bank. There are 50 other people in the bank. A robber walks in and fires his weapon once, You are shot in the right arm. While narating this incident to your friends, do you describe it as lucky or unlucky?
The people who saw the outcome as unlucky imagined an alternate scenario of not having been shot at all; But the other group, invented a very different alternate scenario, that they could have gotten shot in the head and died or that many other people could have been hurt. However, both the couterfacts are completely hypothetical
Because counterfacts are invented, we actually have the power in any given situation to consciously select a counterfact that makes us feel fortunate rather than helpless. And choosing a positive counterfact, besides simply making us feel better, sets ourselves up for the whole host of benefits to motivation and performance we now know accompanies a positive mindset. On the other hand, choosing a counterfact that makes us more fearful of the adversity actually makes it loom larger than it really is.
Decades of subsequent study have since shown that explanatory style—how we choose to explain the nature of past events—has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success.
People with an optimistic explanatory style interpret adversity as being local and temporary (i.e., ‘It’s not that bad, and it will get better.’) while those with a pessimistic explanatory style see these events as more global and permanent (i.e., ‘It’s really bad, and it’s never going to change.’). Virtually all avenues of success, we now know, are dictated by explanatory style.
One way to help ourselves see the path from adversity to opportunity is to practice the ABCD model of interpretation: Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation.
Adversity is an event we can’t change; it is what it is. Belief is our reaction to the event; why we thought it happened and what we think it means for the future. If we believe that the adversity as short-term or as an opportunity for growth or appropriately confined to only part of our life—then we maximize the chance of a positive Consequence. But if the Belief has led us down a more pessimistic path, helplessness and inaction can bring negative Consequences. That’s when it’s time to put the D to work.
Disputation involves first telling ourselves that our belief is just that—a belief, not fact—and then challenging (or disputing) it like we’re actually arguing with another person.
And finally if the adversity truly is bad, is it as bad as we first thought? This particular method is called decatastrophizing: taking time to show ourselves that while the adversity is real, it is perhaps not as catastrophic as we may have made it out to be.
When faced with a terrible prospect—for example, the end of a love affair or of a job—we overestimate how unhappy it will make us and for how long. We fall victim to ‘immune neglect,’ which means we consistently forget how good our psychological immune system is at helping us get over adversity. Human Psyche is so much more resilient than we even realize.
Adversities, no matter what they are, simply don’t hit us as hard as we think they will. Just knowing this quirk of human psychology- that our fear of consequences is always worse than the consequences themselves- can help us move toward a more optimistic interpretation of the downs we will inevitably face.
Principle 5: The Zorro Circle:
Breaking down big goals into smaller, manageable steps allows us to regain a sense of control and build confidence. By focusing on small victories, we can gradually expand our circle of competence and accomplish larger goals.
The most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control,’ the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes. People with an external locus, on the other hand, are more likely to see daily events as dictated by external forces.
By tackling one small challenge at a time—a narrow circle that slowly expands outward—we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes, and that we are largely the masters of our own fates. Small successes can add up to major achievements. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.
Principle 6: The 20-Second Rule:
We are mere Bundles of Habits. Making positive habits easier to start and negative habits harder to indulge in can greatly influence our behavior. By reducing the barriers to positive actions and increasing the obstacles for negative ones, we can establish and sustain beneficial habits.
William James called creating good habits “daily strokes of effort.”
The reason so many of us have trouble sustaining change is that we try to rely on willpower. The problem is, the more we use our willpower, the more worn-out it gets. The invisible pull toward the path of least resistance can dictate more of our lives than we realize, creating an impassible barrier to change and positive growth.
Studies show that Passive Leisure like watching TV and trolling around on Instagram are enjoyable and engaging for only about 30 minutes, then they start sapping our energy, creating what psychologists call “psychic entropy”—that listless, apathetic feeling one experiences. On the other hand, Active Leisure like hobbies, sports enhance our concentration, engagement, motivation, and sense of enjoyment, however, it requires more initial effort. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “Activation Energy”.
In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyze a reaction. The same energy, both physical and mental, is needed of people to overcome inertia and kick-start positive habits. Otherwise, human nature takes us down the path of least resistance time and time again.
It’s not the sheer number and volume of distractions that get us into trouble; it’s the ease of access to them. Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.
To apply the 20-Second Rule, the idea is to decrease the activation energy below 20 seconds for desirable behaviors and increase it beyond 20 seconds for undesirable ones.
For example, if you want to read more books, you could place a book on your nightstand or create a designated reading corner to make it more convenient and inviting. On the other hand, if you want to reduce mindless social media scrolling, you might remove social media apps from your phone or place them in a folder that requires extra steps to access.
Example of the 20-Second Rule:
Author wanted to develop a habit of playing the guitar every day. He found that even though he loved playing, he often didn’t do it because it took too much effort to get the guitar out of the closet. To overcome this, he decided to make it easier by reducing the activation energy needed to start playing. He moved his guitar out of the closet and placed it on a stand in the middle of his living room. By reducing the effort required to start playing by those 20 seconds, he found it much easier to pick up the guitar and play every day.
Conversely, Achor wanted to cut down on the amount of time he spent watching TV. To make this habit harder to maintain, he took the batteries out of the remote control and moved them to a drawer in another room. The added 20 seconds of effort to retrieve the batteries made it less likely that he would mindlessly turn on the TV.
By implementing this rule, we effectively rearrange our environment and create cues that make it easier to engage in positive habits and more difficult to engage in negative ones.
Principle 7: Social Investment:
The more social support you have, the happier you are.
When over a thousand highly successful professional men and women were interviewed as they approached retirement and asked what had motivated them the most, throughout their careers, overwhelmingly they placed work friendships above both financial gain and individual status.”
The correlation between social support and happiness comes out to be 0.7 which is huge as per researchers.
Shelly Gable, a leading psychologist at the University of California, has found that there are four different types of responses we can give to someone’s good news, and only one of them contributes positively to the relationship. The winning response is both active and constructive; it offers enthusiastic support, as well as specific comments and follow-up questions.
Interestingly, her research shows passive responses to good news (‘That’s nice.’) can be just as harmful to the relationship as blatantly negative ones (‘You got the promotion? I’m surprised they didn’t give it to Sally, she seems more suited to the job.’).
Gable’s studies have shown that active-constructive responding enhances relationship commitment and satisfaction, and fuels the degree to which people feel understood, validated, and cared for during a discussion—all of which contribute to the Happiness Advantage.”
These seven principles, as outlined in “The Happiness Advantage,” offer valuable insights and strategies to fuel success and performance in the workplace while promoting a positive and fulfilling life.
Do Read this complete book to know more about happiness and how to have more meaningful and fulfilling life. Click here to check out the book
To get the free ebook, you can drop your request in the comment section.
Stay blessed and Happy Reading!
