“If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise”
Shawn Achor, as per Wiki, is ‘an American happiness researcher, author, and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He authored The Happiness Advantage and founded GoodThink, Inc’
He is also an enormously gifted orator and a hilarious one at that.
His TEDx speech is rated one of the most popular at 17M + views. I found myself constantly beaming at his acerbic wit. He is the kind of person one would love to be friends with.
Here is a quick summary of what I learnt from his 12 minute TEDx talk on The Happy Secret to Better Work
I remember our toastmaster sessions where the mentor insisted that if there is one thing I ought to pay attention to, it is the ‘Introduction’ to the speech.
This is a section that Shawn gets unerringly accurate. He starts with a story that invokes nostalgia. Childhood. And Siblings.
On defining ‘normal’ from averages
The speaker refers to how we see outliers – in statistics and in life. As measurement errors that is messing up our data which ought to be corrected. We are focused on eliminating the weirdos to find the line of the best fit. “If I asked a question like, ‘How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?’, scientists change the answer to ‘How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?’ and we tailor the class towards the average.” But normal is merely average. That resonates. A lot.
About Positive Psychology
“Positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one. Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you.” What does this result in? – Potentially moving up our averages on the whole.
What is my reality to yours?
A very long time ago when I was in college, I took up this course called Semiotics. If the subject was a person, we’d probably stand on two extreme ends of a football field. For the left-brained, analytical engineer that I was, this was another reason I often questioned myself about why I landed up in a B school that had largely ‘creative’ folks. It is a different thing that those two years transformed me beyond what I ever imagined. What this long-winded tale is about is a pipe. I remember the professor showing us an image of a pipe, titled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, French for “This is not a pipe.”
The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message conveyed by paralanguage. Compare with Korzybski’s “The word is not the thing” and “The map is not the territory” [Wiki Link].
How is this related to the speech? I recalled this when the speaker spoke about how ‘it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality’ . Think about how powerful that is for a moment.
Understanding the science of Happiness
The usual assumption is that our external world is a predictor of our happiness, “when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world”. We focus our efforts on ‘being successful’ in an attempt to find happiness at the other end of the rainbow. But what if we have been looking at this wrong all along.
The Myth of the formula for success
“If I work harder, I will be more successful”. I often have this existential questions as to towards what end I am really do what I am doing. The statement is the basis of most of what we do at work and personally. In the way we parent or pursue success. The speaker talks about how that is fallacious since every time we reach our goal post, it moves farther away. We are in fact chasing a unicorn.
The happiness advantage
The speaker concludes that our brains, in fact work in the opposite order. “If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we’ve found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed “
How do we reverse the formula
“If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you’re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way”
I get all of this. How do I change myself?
The speaker suggests a set of exercises which when done consistently for 21 days or more, can rewire the brain. And by doing this we are training our mind, much like training our bodies to be stronger. And to endure.
The 21 day Challenge – 5 Exercises to create Positive Change
- Gratitudes (emmons and mccullough, 2003)
- Journaling (slatcher and pennebaker, 2006)
- Exercise (babyak et all, 2000)
- Meditation (Dweck, 2007)
- Random Acts of Kindness (Lyubomirsky,2005)
Ciao!
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see”