Happiness At Work #43

This week we feature a set of stories that look at Happiness & The City

In Building the Human City – the origins and future potential of the Human City Institute (1995 – 2002) David Clark writes:

The world, of which the city is now an essential and integral part, is one that faces a crucial choice between community and chaos. It is a choice that must be made in the context of a world which enters a new millennium facing the age-old problems of poverty, homelessness and disease…Most challenging of all, our small and fragile planet is now faced with an exploding world population and the ultimate destruction of a life- sustaining environment…

[But these] problems mask a deeper challenge. Fundamentally, it is not the problems outlined above which threaten humankind most profoundly, but our inability to transform our fragmented world into a world order in which we can affirm our common humanity and ensure the future well-being of our planet…

If  civilisation is to fulfil its immense human potential, and thereby avoid the chaos which otherwise looms large, cities across the globe, from Birmingham to Baghdad, from Dallas to Delhi, from Manchester to Mexico, from London to Lahore, will need to address the task of how to become human cities. If our planet is to become the home of ‘a world community’ then the power of community to promote what is truly human has to move to the very top of the agenda. ‘This is the dichotomy of the city: its potential to brutalise and its potential to civilise’, writes Richard Rogers.  It is also the dichotomy facing our world.  

The choice is ours.

What should local authorities do about the happiness debate?

Councils can sustain hope within communities during difficult times

The Human City Institute’s Signs of a human city study is opposed pessimism, and includes the call for “a place alive with the energy of hope, which enables imagination and creativity to flourish and looks for the revitalization of every aspect of its corporate life.“

Although wealthy places retain such aspirations, it might seem hard to believe that many others can join them. Even incremental progress could be thought too hard to achieve, not least because the practical steps towards such a goal are hard to discern. Some useful insights are found in research on psychology.

In his 2011 book Flourish, Martin Seligman emphasises that strong and lasting wellbeing for individuals goes beyond a temporary upbeat mood. It requires positive social relationships, a sense of meaning to life, a sense of accomplishment, and the ability to engage deeply with tasks. In other words, wellbeing is not a luxury; nor is hope.

The key question is whether local authorities have any ways to bolster those attributes among their populations. My answer (on the basis of various innovations that have been tried out in the UK and elsewhere over the past decade) would be yes, though there is not one simple route to success.

The pursuit of happiness: contentment should be a government priority

An index exploring wellbeing across local authorities raises the question of happiness, but how should the results guide policy?

Ironically enough, Chancellor George Osborne delivered his budget on the UN-designated International Day of Happiness. Despite 1p off beer duty, there was little to cheer for those of us who want to create a society where happiness, or subjective wellbeing as economists prefer to label it, is at the centre of policy making.

Measurement of happiness and wellbeing, what underpins them, and how they change over time are core elements of the Human City Institute (HCI) thinktank research programme. We aim to publish an updatable “human city index” for all local authorities in England by May 2013 to inform the happiness debate.

As a starting point to understanding what constitute more “human” cities, HCI has chronicled a growing body of evidence about the importance of happiness and wellbeing to social and economic policy.

The government has also shown an interest in what factors influence happiness in our society; the previous administration set up the Whitehall Wellbeing Group, while the coalition has established the General WellBeing survey to sit alongside GDP as an indicator of success.

While much of the debate around happiness and wellbeing is novel, interest in these concepts goes back much further. Eudaimonic happiness originates from ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and focuses on the concept of a “life well lived”. The US was, of course, the first country to codify the pursuit of happiness in its constitution.

Studies comparing richer countries point to the importance of inequality of wealth and income in determining happiness and wellbeing. Countries with relatively narrow inequalities, such as Sweden, tend to express higher levels of happiness than those with relatively high inequalities. In contrast, politicians put more emphasis on personal relationships, volunteering, community life and psychological interventions to enhance happiness and wellbeing.

Green spaces boosts wellbeing of urban dwellers – study

Parks, gardens and green space in urban areas can improve the wellbeing and quality of life of people living there, says a University of Exeter study.

Dr Mathew White and colleagues at the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health found that individuals reported less mental distress and higher life satisfaction when they were living in greener areas.

This was true even after the researchers accounted for changes over time in participants’ income, employment, marital status, physical health and housing type.

Beth Murphy, information manager at the mental health charity Mind, said: “For people living busy lifestyles in densely populated areas, being able to get outdoors and access green space is a great way to escape the stresses of day-to-day life.

“Our research has shown that 94% of people who took part in outdoors ‘green exercise’ said it benefited their mental health and can have huge impacts on physical health.

Parks Pay Off: Green Cities Boost Happiness

Avoid the concrete jungle: A new study finds that people who live in cities with more green space feel better than those surrounded by stone and steel.

In fact, the well-being boost associated with green space is equivalent to one-third the jump in well-being people get from being married and to one-tenth of the extra life satisfaction derived from being employed versus jobless, according to a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science…

A Design Revolution That Could Lift Humanity

Studies show that fractals mimicking natural forms can improve our health and wealth.  These findings have major implications for how we design our spaces, Lance Hosey writes in his new book The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design.

In iconic nature scenes, one shape is ubiquitous: the tree. Based on evolutionary biology’s findings about innate human preferences for savanna-like environments, Judith Heerwagen and other psychologists have focused on tree images as signals of refuge that offer the potential for shelter, shade, and nourishment. Trees and other vegetation have inspired the art and architecture of every culture throughout history, which suggests their universal appeal. One species in particular, the Acacia tortilis, dominates the African savannah, where its silhouette emblazoned on the human retina for thousands of millennia, and research verifies that people are drawn to its shape–broad, spreading canopies and branches close to the ground. In a study by Richard Coss and his colleagues, a diverse group of preschool children, regardless of nationality, background, or experience, consistently chose acacia-like trees as the most inviting, offering the greatest feelings of security. In a 2000 experiment conducted by Heerwagen and others for furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, people sitting at desks decorated with acacia images scored better in memory and problem-solving tests. So the acacia isn’t just visually pleasing–it actually elicits a physiological response. What’s so magical about this tree?

Stressed At Work? Add a Daily Dose of Green

Is your office bad for your health and well-being? Unfortunately, a growing body of scientific evidence says yes.

The modern workday pose — fingers on keyboard, slight slouch, glassy eyes fixed on glowing screen, bathed in unnatural light – can drain vitality, happiness and creativity. Designed to maximize efficiency, this sterile setup actually reduces productivity and job satisfaction.

In fact, modern workplaces are the main reason adults now spend about 9.3 hours a day sitting. Medical journal The Lancet estimates this unprecedented level of inactivity is causing 5.3 million deaths a year worldwide, similar to smoking – prompting the Harvard Business Review to suggest “Sitting is the smoking of our generation.”

The good news is that researchers have built an increasingly persuasive case for what most of us know intuitively: nature is good for us. Being regularly immersed in a natural setting can reduce stress while boosting immunity, ingenuity and energy.

As neuroscientist Marc Berman explains, adding a daily dose of green to your routine may be the best prescription for dealing with workday stress. His research shows that even simple, brief interactions with nature can improve cognitive control and mood…

Artistry

Treat yourself and take a break to luxuriate in the visual richness of Steve McCurry’s latest photo collection:

Back To Burma

I am not thesis
I am not antithesis
I am dialectic
Just a contradiction
Patched up in palimpsest.
                                 - Portion of poem by Zeyar Lynn, Burma
Translated by Ko Ko Thett

Resilience

African Refugees Turn Trauma Into Theatre

A group of African refugees in the north-western Sydney suburb of Baulkham Hills is turning their experiences of the horrors of war into an entertaining story of resilience.

The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe brings together women from different parts of Africa who have ho have survived abuse, kidnappings and war.

They are now using song, dance, rap and drumming to share their stories in the hope that it will help other women deal with their trauma.

Achieving Happiness: 10 Tips for Building Resilience

It’s hard to be a human being. We’re constantly confronted by negative events, to which our brains are biologically programmed to automatically react with fear, anger, and a desire to get as far away from the problem as possible.

There are trials in our personal lives: our kids get into trouble, our parents decline into infirmity, our spending exceeds our income — the list is endless. And it’s just as bad at work where feeling overloaded is commonplace, conflict with a coworker is always looming, and our boss seems oblivious to what we need to be successful in getting our job done.

What is amazing is that, in spite of all of these challenges, some people find ways to be successful and satisfied with their lives. Positive psychologists have been studying how to survive the stress and go on to thrive in our lives. The American Psychological Association has assembled information from topnotch experts and developed 10 tips for building resilience…

Happiness At Work

“Happiness Becomes More and More About Being Content In Our Current Circumstances.”

Motivation is an issue that comes up frequently when you’re trying to make your life happier. How do you stick to the resolutions that you’ve decided to make?

Gretchen Rubin puts her great questions about happiness to Heidi Grant Halvorson, expert in the science of motivation and author of a new book: Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence:

I think that there are so many of us who are hard on ourselves, who don’t understand why they are good at some things but not others, who are convinced that they can’t improve, and who wonder why the things that motivate other people don’t seem to work for them.   A big part of why I wanted to write Focus was to help people understand that we don’t in fact all “tick” the same way.

There are reasons why some things come more easily to you than others, reasons why being optimistic and upbeat doesn’t “work” for everyone, reasons why some of us are creative and risk-taking, and others are thorough and reliable, but it’s very hard to be both… being able to identify our own dominant motivation, helps us to not only be more effective and happy, but to be more understanding of both ourselves and others…

When Did Work Become A Bad Word?

Have you ever noticed how when someone tells us how they’ve been really busy with work, we automatically interpret this as being a bad thing? Certainly, no one associates having a lot of work to do with sunshine, love, happiness or any other positive experience.

In many ways, this is a natural product of both our schooling and work experiences, where we’re not guided and supported to use our genius, creativity, and talents in order to do the work we should do. Rather, what is the more common experience is being funnelled through a system that puts us into neat slots like gears in a complex piece of machinery.

When it comes to work, we’ve come to accept the concept of ‘no pain, no gain’ as being the proper route to success and prosperity. That we need to tough it out in the hopes that – someday – we might finally be able to do what we want to do because we’ve ‘paid our dues’…

While the growing levels of anxiety, fear and stress we see in today’s workplaces are partly due to the prevailing uncertainties surrounding the global economy, it is also a manifestation of that disconnect between what we do and why we do it.

And it’s becoming clear as we move further into this century that this approach to our careers and lives is no longer sustainable; that we’ve reached a tipping point where people can no longer be expected to feel happy or fulfilled by working to live. Instead, we need to shift the paradigm to one where people live to work…

All that’s required is our willingness to no longer play it safe or waiting until later to commit our creativity, our passions and our dreams to that which not only creates meaning for others, but which also instills a sense of purpose and fulfilment within ourselves…

4 Conscious Choices to Stay Balanced and Happy When You’re Busy

I’m now in the process of adjusting to my decision to do new things, and I’ve realized it requires four conscious choices:

• Recognizing my non-negotiable needs and prioritizing them
• Setting realistic expectations about what I can do and what I can’t
• Regularly checking in with myself to ensure my choices support my intentions
• Learning from my emotions instead of reacting to them

If you’re also adjusting to a busier lifestyle—whether you’re working toward a dream or taking on new responsibilities at work or at home—these tips may help…

Leadership

Busy is Killing Leadership

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker

What is busyness? Simply put, busyness is a when we have a lot of work. It’s the drug of the 21st century. Busyness happens when we react to what’s in front of us, without stopping to consider if it matters or not. We get caught up in the urgency of the moment, soon it becomes a habit and before we know it we end up busy. We become trapped in the urgent. Leaders fall into the busyness habit when they allow weeks and months drift by, attending numerous meetings and drifting from activity to activity without stopping to consider if what they’re doing is making any difference.

One of the best ways to identify busyness is to look for instances where there is a lot of effort or activity and limited results. It’s in these areas that attention is required to manage more effectively.

• Are you in a busyness trap?
• What are the few major areas that define your great work?
• What do you need to stop doing so you can give more attention to the your great work?

Women In Leadership: Breaking Free of Stereotypes

Stereotypes are, by their nature, simplistic, yet a number of labels are still attached to women in leadership. When high-powered women were asked to single out the stereotypes they most disliked, the following came up: Ice Queen; Single and Lonely; Tough; Weak; Masculine; Conniving; Emotional; Angry. The media dubbed city hedge fund boss Nicola Horlick “Superwoman,” because she successfully juggled career and a large family. The late Margaret Thatcher was often accused of being too masculine — MP Barbara Castle called her “the best man among them” (while adding she would “have enormous advantages in being a woman too”).

Sticks and stones? It depends. Media gibes may be easy to brush off, but stereotypes are harder to ignore if they create systemic bias…

Shifting stereotypes out of organizational systems is a tougher task. It will come, in part, from simply recognizing the value of traditionally feminine traits — being able to engage people, bring them along, communicate and collaborate well, and build vision while still seeing the details. Old “post-macho” models of leadership, which rely on hierarchy and control, are giving way to an approach that creates workplaces “fit for human beings,” as Gary Hamel puts it…

Mindfulness

The Original Mindfulness Meditation

A Zen Buddhist monk guides us through the brief mindfulness meditation “Pebble for your Pocket,” based on the teachings of the famous Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, poet, and human rights activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

A counter-balance to too much busyness.  This video is very accessible even if you’ve never encountered mindfulness exercises before.

Creativity

A 70 year old Creativity Technique that is still relevant today

What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced.  James Webb Young

The first principle is the notion that an idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements. In other words, ideas are just remixes and combinations of old stuff.

The second principle is about what helps make new connections between old elements.  What fosters new connections is being able to see relationships between seemingly unrelated things.  To some, seeing connections may come naturally and others may have to work at training it.

Here are techniques for doing just that…

Happiness & Wellbeing

The Peaceful Mind: 5 Step Guide to Feeling Relaxed Fast

How to fight a psychological scourge of the modern world.

We worry about work, money, our health, our partners, children…the list goes on.

And let’s face it, there are plenty of things to worry about, and that’s even before you’ve turned on the news. This means that when the mind is given an idle moment, often what it seems to fill it with is worrying.

Worry can be useful if it’s aimed at solving problems but less useful when it’s just making us unhappy or interfering with our daily lives.

The standard psychological methods for dealing with everyday worry are pretty simple. But just because they’re simple and relatively well-known doesn’t mean we don’t need reminding to use them from time-to-time.  So here is a five-step plan called “The Peaceful Mind” that was actually developed by psychologists specifically for people with dementia..

If You Want To Be Happy, Stop Comparing Yourself To Others

Our culture has made it increasingly easy for us to compare ourselves to others — through Facebook, Instagram, and hundreds of other technology platforms.

In a study, “Hedonic consequences of social comparison,” Sonia Lyubomirsky and her co-author Lee Ross from Stanford University looked at how happy and unhappy people respond differently to feedback, both positive and negative.

While modest comparison to other people makes for healthy competition, those who are consumed by peer comparison are simply choosing to live an unhappier life. ..

The Confidence Question

A generation after the feminist revolution, are women still, on average, less confident than men?

For decades, surveys indicated men had a higher self-esteem than women. But there is some evidence that the gap has narrowed or vanished. A 2011 study from the University of Basel based on surveys of 7,100 young adults found that young women had as much self-esteem as young men.

But I’m not sure that this classroom assertiveness carries out into the world of work, or today’s family and friendship roles. And I’m not sure we’ve achieved parity when it comes to elemental confidence. When you read diaries of women born a century or centuries ago, you sometimes see them harboring doubts about their own essential importance, assumptions that they are to play a secondary role on earth, and feelings that their identity is dependent on someone else. How much does that mind-set linger?

And…do we undervalue the talent for self-criticism the women display…?

Obviously, you want people to be assertive enough to leap forward, but you also want them to be self-aware enough to honestly evaluate themselves.  We have piles of evidence to show that people overtrust their judgment and overestimate their goodness. Also, there is no easy correlation between self-esteem and actual performance.

Maybe the self-criticism that women display is a rare skill to be harnessed and valued, at least to a degree. Maybe the self-observation talents that lead to bad feelings because we are imperfect also lead to better decision-making and better behavior for those capable of being acutely aware of their imperfections…

Here are some of the highlights you will find in

Happiness At Work #44

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

We know spending on the arts makes big money for Britain. So why cut it?

Whingeing luvvies are easily mocked but it just doesn’t make sense to give way to this purblind, anti-cultural bias, writes Polly Toynbee in The Guardian

A reason to be cheerful: Britain is exceptionally good at some things. With a dead economy, a million young people kicking their heels, exports anaemic and worse cuts to come, hope itself can look hopeless. So what would you do? Analyse what we do best and invest in our talents to the hilt. In that great broad envelope labelled “arts and culture”, we are among the world’s engines of invention.

That’s why a cultural Olympiad ran alongside all the running, jumping and cycling. In sport, state investment paid off in medals. In the arts, state investment can be counted out in gold too: better still, it infuses everything that brings pleasure. Only life under the Taliban is untouched by music, storytelling and eye-opening imagery, broadcast or live, designed into everything around us. Culture is not something apart but breathed into all of civilisation. When we are all dead and gone, culture is all that will be left – as a visit to the British Museum will confirm.

This week saw the deadline for ministers to make their final pitch before the axe falls in June’s comprehensive spending review. By rule of thumb, each department can expect a 5.2% cut, (except the NHS, schools and aid). That is a mighty crunch for any ministry, but the one with the smallest budget would be struck hardest. Of the £700bn the government spends, the Department for Media, Culture & Sport‘s budget is a minuscule £2.2bn, and already suffering a 43% cut.  Deep scars will be left by this government’s anti-culture bias. The sums are so paltry that the animus seems deliberate. But luvvies whingeing are easily mocked when dementia patients are neglected, so how can the case be best made?

On Saturday the Brighton festival opens – three weeks of eclectic theatre, music, dance, comedy, literature and visual arts…We can show how the festival brings in at least £20m to Brighton, but no one can compute its true value to its reputation or the pleasure it gives. So there’s a reason to be cheerful – for now.

As for the future, what might persuade this government of the value of the arts – financial and spiritual – is a loud public demand that our cultural assets, live and broadcast, are not squandered…

Happiness At Work

Don’t Worry, Be Happy – At Work

A recent joint job happiness survey from Yahoo Finance and PARADE magazine finds that almost 60 percent of 26,000 workers in the United States were so unhappy with their current jobs that they would prefer to choose a new career.

This dissatisfaction is causing a voluntary exodus of employees from a tight job market, where you’d expect the opposite. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 2 million Americans each month are flying the coop—leaving their positions—despite the high unemployment rate. And the number is continuing to increase.

To help get to the bottom of your office malaise, consider these strategies to become happier at work:

• Avoid the negative ~ There’s nothing more demoralizing than negative talk at the office, so avoid it as much as you can…
• Seek perks ~ there is a reason why companies that offer additional incentives like flexible, relaxed work environments face fewer employee complaints than companies that don’t—their employees are happier…
• Confront the slackers ~ 93% people work with someone who is not carrying their weight, but only 10% confront that person.  Suspend judgement and get curious, enter into conversations to find out more…
• Examine your drives ~ three common needs are for accomplishment, autonomy and good relationships.  Evaluate what you need and find what you can do to get it…
• And if none of this works – go solo ~ entrepreneurs tend to feel better about their career than office workers because if you’re doing what you love, it doesn’t feel like work…

How To Be Happy At Work

A month ago, I started really focusing on people who are happy at work.  Everywhere I go, I pay attention to who is around me.  And, I am documenting those who appear to be happy in their workplace.

How can we – and any of us – achieve happiness at work?

We can begin by believing that it is possible.  In fact, we can begin by believing it IS (a fact, a truth, ‘reality’).  As long as we believe that our reality is that we have the kind of job at which happiness is an illusion, we’ll continue to create that experience for ourselves.  We’ll be oblivious to the opportunity for happiness that is present around us every day…

11 Characteristics of Meaningful Work

For work to be meaningful, it is the employee who must label it so.

Meaningful work is employees’ perceived positive value of what they are doing. It’s a source of joy in their overall life. In the words of Max Depree, “[it’s] maturing, enriching, and fulfilling, healing, and joyful.”

Here is our adaptation of these 11 essentials that go toward making our work feel meaningful:

Happiness At Work Edition 45 of 10th May 2013

This collection features a number of stories about smiling and laughter – why it’s good for us, how we can smile more, and looking through Steve McCurry’s latest pictures featuring people smiling we think is guaranteed to bring your own smiles out:

Steve McCurry’s Blog: The Universal Language

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but
sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

Just see how many of these of his pictures you can look at without smiling yourself…

Insights from Brené Brown, Cal Newport, Gretchen Rubin & more at the 2013 99U Conference

Embrace vulnerability.  Stop chasing a passion.  Cultivate a “get better” (rather than a “be good”) mindset.  That’s just a taste of the counter-intuitive insights on idea execution that were shared last week at the 2013 99U Conference, presented by GE.

Researcher and writer Brené Brown dug into the vulnerability inherent in the creative process by sharing a bit of personal experience. After her TED talk went viral, the negative comments started to affect her process until a Theodore Roosevelt quote changed her entire perspective: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” …

When everyone else heard Steve Jobs’ now-legendary commencement address at Stanford in 2005, the common takeaway was that we should “follow our passion.” But writer, computer scientist, and professor Cal Newport argues that following your passion isn’t actually the path to happiness…

Tony Schwartz began with the question, “How do we solve what feel like are impossible problems?” (e.g. world hunger, climate change, poverty). He believes that these big, nagging problems will never be solved by a single approach; instead, we must embrace a more holistic way of viewing the world and the creative process. On a practical level this means training ourselves to strategically switch between right-brain and left-brain thinking when problem solving…

Whether it’s going to the gym, making time for passion projects, or quitting your email addiction, we’re always trying to make and break new habits. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, explains that determination alone won’t get the job done — the key to success is having insight into your own nature before going after a goal…

For Tina Seelig, bringing ideas to life is all about reframing perspective. As executive director for the Standford Technology Ventures Program and author ofinGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, she helps entrepreneurs challenge assumptions and use an “Innovation Engine” to reframe a problem and boost imagination…

Upon reading story after story about geniuses, prodigies, and other successful people, Heidi Grant Halvorson found herself noticing that people in the U.S. tend to attribute failure and success not to controllable factors such as work ethic, but rather to innate ability or talent. She walked attendees through a series of studies and experiments that show how powerful your perspective can be in pushing toward success…

Happiness Is Up To You, Authors Say

Tal Ben-Shahar, a well-known author and professor, was one of the influential figures who brought the concept of embracing optimism into the mainstream. His class on positive psychology at Harvard University has been wildly popular, attracting national attention.

But even Ben-Shahar, who has a doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard, hit a wall recently. Demands for his happiness seminars had skyrocketed over the last 10 years as the economy tanked and more clients ended up in crisis. After what he termed an exhausting year, the sage of happy described himself as worn out, burned out and unhappy.

So, the man who had written “Happier” and other popular books decided to write yet another book.

This time, he went beyond concepts of positive psychology, giving readers of his new book an easy-to-follow road map to a life of contentment. He based his latest writing on the idea that the small choices we make day in and day out have a big impact on our overall happiness…

Kahneman and Bentham’s Bucket of Happiness

Daniel Kahneman, who has plausibly been called the “most important psychologist alive today,” has spent a decade experimenting with “hedonimetrics,” which analyzes “single happiness values” assigned to each moments felt pleasure or pain. Commendably candid, he concludes: “we have learned many new facts about happiness. But we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled.” Despite eons of thinking, happiness has become a low-resolution word, unhelpful in seeing useful distinctions.

It’s time we pulled happiness out of Bentham’s befuddling bucket, which seems of dubious utility. Biological realities require restraining the maximization of pleasure within healthy limits. We’d feel better if our sovereign minds pursued healthier happiness rather than the heedlessly hedonistic sort.

Rick Hanson on the Neuroscience of Happiness (podcast)

The best-selling author and psychologist discusses how we can literally re-wire our brains to cultivate positive emotions, inner peace, and lasting happiness…

Mindfulness

10 Reasons Why Meditation Is America’s New Push-Up for the Brain

The push-up is an incredible tool to help you get in great physical shape; that’s why it’s used in almost every gym in America. With all the scientific evidence pointing to mindfulness meditation, the practice is literally becoming America’s next push-up for the brain.

Here are 10 reasons why you should do the practice…

3 Simple Ways to Enter the Present

The calm of the present moment is always available and getting to it is deceptively simple.

In fact, it is more complicated to escape the present moment than to be in it.

The problem is, we are naturally complicated!

We learn early in life to avoid the simplicity of the moment and live inside an entangled mind-mess.

So, back to basics!  Listen.  See.  Feel.

We connect to the present moment through our five senses. In this article, we’ll review simple ways to use three of your senses to sweep away the mind-mess and just be present. No drama. Just present.

The trick is to avoid making meaning. When you make meaning, you must go inside your mind. It is so easy at that point to make meaning that is emotionally upsetting.

All of us need a break from the internal commotion…

Resilience

Career Advice: Give

Givers focus on others, takers on themselves, and matchers care most about fairness. Studies show that most professional success, not just satisfaction, goes to givers.

Only 8% of people describe themselves as givers at work. That’s because most people think it’s safer to operate like a taker or matcher at work; givers, they think, are chumps who will fall behind in the game of life.

Adam Grant explodes that myth in his book, Give and Take, showing that givers are among the most successful people in business. They may also be the happiest. “There is powerful evidence,” Grant tells me “that givers experience more meaning in their work than takers or matchers.”

This is important considering that Americans spend most of their waking hours — most of their lives — at work. The average American man works 8.4 hours per day and the average American woman works 7.7 hours a day. How they feel in those hours is a major determinant of their well-being. But, according to the American Psychological Association, nearly 70 percent of Americans cite work as a major source of stress in their lives and four out of ten say that they experience stress at work on a daily basis. One report indicates that over half of working Americans are unsatisfied and unhappy with their jobs. The top person people don’t like being around is, according to the National Time Use survey, their boss. Bosses and work seem to be significant sources of unhappiness for many people.

When people are stressed out, their first instinct is to protect themselves — or to retreat into a taker mentality. But operating like a giver may actually be more effective in buffering against stress and enhancing well-being. On its face, this is counter-intuitive. Time is a scarce resource, especially for people who are stressed. Being a giver involves taking time away from yourself to help someone else. This could seemingly aggravate stress levels, but it actually alleviates them…

7 Tips for making Other People Feel Smart and Insightful

We all want to get along well with other people, and one way to do this is to help people feel good about themselves. If you make a person feel smart and insightful, that person will enjoy your company. The point is not to be manipulative, but to help other people feel good about their contributions to a conversation.

Here are some suggestions…

Social Connections Drive the ‘Upward Spiral’ of Positive Emotions and Health

People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research, led by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences also found it is possible for a person to self-generate positive emotions in ways that make him or her physically healthier.

“People tend to liken their emotions to the weather, viewing them as uncontrollable,” says Fredrickson. “This research shows not only that our emotions are controllable, but also that we can take the reins of our daily emotions and steer ourselves toward better physical health.”

Happiness At Work

Secret to happiness: “I want this job for a week”

How can we be fulfilled at work? A British theorist argues that we should experiment, not specialise

Krznaric’s book “How to Find Fulfilling Work” is an entry in the School of Life, Alain de Botton’s series of self-help books for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the self-help section. In it, Krznaric argues that the way we’ve been trained to find our life’s work is completely wrong. He takes issue in particular with the personality tests administered by career counselors to judge one’s strengths and interests. They’re complete bunk, Krznaric argues, pointing out that you’ve got a 50 percent chance of being placed in a different personality category if you retake the test.

Instead of pondering your ideal occupation long and hard, Krznaric says, just pick something. Nearly anything will do. “We need to act first and think afterwards,” he said. Once you’ve tried something, you’re in a much better position to decide whether you like it or not.

At its root, Krznaric wants to flip our idea of what success looks like. Instead of aspiring to become “high achievers,” he argues, many of us would be more happy as “wide achievers” — dabbling in many fields rather than becoming an expert in one. And with the disappearance of stable jobs in almost every field, cultivating skills across a range of occupations could be a smart move.

According to Krznaric, the only career advice you really need comes from Aristotle: “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.” Finding those talents — well, that’s up to you…

Getting Closer To Work~Life Balance

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of

balance, order, rhythm and harmony. 

Thomas Merton

The good news is that you can have better in both worlds. You can work hard and still find time to enjoy your family and friends, and your life. You must take the initiative and  decide that you need to create a better balance for yourself.

How?

You will need to adopt a few essential strategies. And, no, it is not always simple, especially in the beginning. Work-life balance is about finding new ways to balance the demands of your work with the demands of your personal life. You actually can be successful and happy doing both; or at least happier…

Bored With Your Job? How To Get the Spark Back

If you’re finding it hard to drag yourself to work, maybe you need a new job – but maybe you just need to adjust your attitude.

After the initial “honeymoon phase” of a new job wanes, it’s easy for the day-to-day grind, or a difficult boss, to take a toll on your job satisfaction, leaving you with a negative attitude.

“Workplace happiness is finding the right job, the right culture and the right boss,” said Brandon Smith, a workplace coach and founder of theworkplacetherapist.com, which is based in Atlanta. “The challenge is that when one of those is out of line, you have to find ways to manage that.“

Some people, in fact, are more prone to negative thinking, which can make them even more unhappy at work than others in the same situation.

One type of therapy, called cognitive behavioral therapy, is based on the theory that you can improve your mental health, or in this case your level of happiness at work, by reframing the way you think about things and taking steps to improve how you cope. It helps you change your thinking to make it more accurate and less tinged with emotion.

Here are some common “mindset traps” that can sabotage your level of happiness at work, and tips on how to reframe your thinking about the situations…

Honoring Happiness: What Bhutan, a Cowboy Hat, & the Economy Have in Common

“What does happiness have to do with sustainability?”

The short answer is, everything. As Lovins delved deeper into ecological economics, it became apparent that happiness was a serious topic and that the meaning of happiness was being refined. The kind of happiness that Lovins was presenting was not just a fleeting feeling, but rather it was the notion of happiness as currency

Happiness needs to become part of the business dialogue. It needs to become a part of our national debate. However, the world cannot wait for corporations and governments to adopt GNH. In the spirit of Hunter Lovins, I remind you that the power is in your hands. What can you do to increase your happiness and how can you incorporate the nine happiness principles into your organization?

Happiness At Work: Applied Happiness

Zappos.com built a  hugely successful brand and company through outstanding customer service and an unusual company culture, but even more inspiring is the fact that they succeeded in doing this by using happiness as a business model. Drawn by the notion that anyone can apply the science of happiness to work, communities and our everyday lives, happiness has become the organizing principle behind a new business and now, a movement.  Watch her fascinating TED talk and decide for yourself if she is worth listening to.

Six Ways To Stop Worrying and Find The Work You Love

Most of us spend the majority of our day at work so it is crucially important that the work that we do makes us feel happy and fullfilled.  This article by Roman Krznaric from Yes magazine, which was originally published in The Huffington Post, looks at 6 ways to stop worrying about what to do to find a fulfilling job and some simple steps we can take to improve our sense of fulfillment at work.  Romans has also written a book on the subject entitled How to Find Fulfilling Work if you would like to read about this topic more.

Looking For Happiness At Work? Consider these three things

We spend 35% of our waking hours at work. That’s a lot, right?  If finding happiness at work seems as elusive as chasing down the holy grail, here are three thoughts that may help you..

Here are some suggestions to keep up the Motivation and Happiness…

It’s no surprise that happy workers bring good results. They are more motivated and driven in anything they do. However, with the high amount of concerns and uncertainties in the workplace today such as increasing work pressure, under-staffed teams, and boundary less career; it’s hard to keep the vibe up all the time.

The Institute of Leadership & Management published a study recently on the social behaviour of employees within an organisation. Results have shown that employees are most satisfied and happy within the first 2 years of their current employment where they find it being most exciting, challenging and enthusiastic. This level of motivation drops significantly after 2 years on average with employees finding their duties repetitive.

Employee Happiness Should Not Be An Impossible Task

Fortunately or unfortunately, employee engagement is a hot topic.

Don’t get me wrong, engagement is important. There’s a proven link between engagement, productivity and profits. Companies should want to have engaged employees.

It’s virtually impossible to have an engaged employee who isn’t happy. So step one in the engagement formula should be creating happiness at work. This doesn’t mean that everyone will be 100% happy 100% of the time. That’s not realistic. But it’s not unreasonable to strive for more happy days than not happy days.

As an employee, I should be able to tell my employer “With rare exception, I’m happy coming to work.”

When was the last time someone asked “What makes you happy at work?”

Do you know the answer?

Self Mastery

What On Earth is the Power of You?

With courses abounding to ‘be yourself’, and attendance numbers sky rocketing, why do so many of us remain poor communicators, continuing at the same time to be both terrified and dull? Well, perhaps quite simply, because many of us, no matter what course we’ve done have not actually discovered authenticity!

‘Being you’ won’t be easy, our work, society and sometimes even our families encourage us to fulfil prescribed roles. And it requires contemplation and consideration. Don’t be driven by corporate gain, it’s merely a valuable by-product. Be driven by the simple fact that, unless you have some need to hide your identity, like you’re under police protection or a spy, not being yourself is plain bloody ludicrous…

3 Tips to Connect With Your Authentic Self for a Happier Life

Selflessness is disconnecting from ego and connecting with your essential self. It’s being in your element, without trying to be something other than what you are.

And the good news is you can learn how to be selfless by simply observing nature. If you can, take a few minutes and walk outside.

Notice how every flower, every plant, and every tree is an exquisite expression of itself. Each one is what it is. A rose is a rose. A tree is a tree. They aren’t trying or struggling to be anything other than what they are. And that’s what makes them beautiful.

Animals also are magnificent manifestations of themselves. They don’t fight against their true nature. They are what they are. And that’s why we love animals.

So too, we are who we are. Yet, unlike nature and animals, our ego gets in the way and prevents us from being ourselves. It wants us to believe that we are someone we are not. When I craved acceptance and approval from others. I wanted to fit in and be liked by everyone I met. I put on an act to impress, while trying to camouflage awkward feelings of inadequacy.  To avoid this from happening to you, you need to connect with who you really are.

Here are 3 steps that will help you connect with your authentic self…

3 Tips To Win the Battle Against Your Inner Perfectionism

Think every project you work on has wrapped up perfectly in a neat little bow? Think again! Sure, you’re a professional and you can obviously produce stellar results, but you’re also human. If you’re constantly battling your inner perfectionist, you’re killing your productivity. Follow these three tips to win the battle against your “perfect” mindset and make your business more productive and profitable…

Explore: Genius Is… (poster)

5 Core Skills Your Life Depends Upon

Each moment, each situation, each turn of events presents you with an opportunity to build the self you are capable of being.  It’s just a matter of accepting opportunities, implementing ideas, taking action, and actively expressing the purpose that is uniquely YOU.

You are stronger than any barrier standing in your way, because you have a purpose that cannot be denied.  You can be adaptable, innovative, hard working and tenacious.  You can imagine the possibilities and then work to make them real.

Here are five life skills that will help you do just that – the real fundamentals of being an empowered, self-directed human being:

1. Curiosity
2. Creativity
3. Resilience
4. Patience
5. Self Reliance

Creativity

Innovation Excellence: Cultivate Mental Confusion

When it comes to our daily job, we also become very proficient at it over time. Our brains develop routines and we stick to them because they work. That said, by not challenging the way we do things we invariably plateau and reach a state of pleasant comfort, sometime without even realizing it. However, there is nothing more dangerous in life than comfort because it can quietly kill your creativity, desire to innovate and aspiration for a better tomorrow.

If you have reached that dangerous level of comfort or don’t want to get even near it, let me offer a solution: Mental Confusion.

7 Japanese Aesthetic Principles to Change Your Thinking

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. “Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception,” says de Bono. Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives.

 The principles are interconnected and overlap; it’s not possible to simply put the ideas in separate boxes. Thankfully, Patrick Lennox Tierney (a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007) has a few short essays elaborating on the concepts. Below are just seven design-related principles (there are more) that govern the aesthetics of the Japanese garden and other art forms in Japan. Perhaps they will stimulate your creativity or get you thinking in a new way about your own design-related challenges…

Leadership

Few Executives Are Self-Aware, But Women Have The Edge

The single area where both female and male managers need to improve is in self-awareness. While women did outperform men on that metric, notice how low the rates for both genders are — under 20%. “If you think about most people in our day-to-day lives we tend to run on auto-pilot,” says Malloy. “We often are not mindful about our impact on others or how and where we spend our time. We can easily get caught up in the task or the day-to-day distractions” and pay less attention to ourselves and effect we may have on others.

“Improving self-awareness requires getting some source of credible feedback, and being open to that feedback,” she advises. “Find a trusted colleague or someone from your personal life who can give you constructive feedback in real-time.”

Malloy continues, “Developing self-awareness also requires reflection… Schedule time every week on your calendar to reflect on what went well, what did not, and how could you react differently in the future.”

Self-awareness is essential to effective leadership. A leader must know herself — her abilities, her shortcomings, and her opportunities for growth in order to be able to provide direction, guidance and inspiration to others.

Leadership demands strong interpersonal skills. And while research may show that women leaders have the edge in certain areas, the lesson I take from this study is that both men and women have work to do in order to become the leaders their followers need…

A Gen Y Definition of Leadership

Gen Y is the next generation of leaders, and we bring with us a fresh outlook on leadership.

If you read this and scoffed, then I wish you luck as you descend into irrelevance. If, however, you’re reading this, wondering how it will affect your organisation, you may want to consider the following:

• How do my company’s programmes support Gen Y in leadership roles?
• What is likely to become redundant or obsolete?
• What frustrations might Gen Y leaders face, and can anything be done to alleviate them?
• What are the implications of changing nothing?
• How will newer leadership styles mesh with more traditional styles? What might be the impact on employees transitioning from a traditional-style manager to a Gen Y?

Dealing With A Change That’s Hard To Swallow

If you’re struggling with a change on your team, start by asking what it would look like if you did believe in the change.  How can you increase the likelihood this will work instead of increasingly the likelihood that it will fail? Then don’t wait until you believe it, just start behaving it.  And in one of the most fascinating examples of the complexity of our human brains, once you are doing it, you will start to believe in it.

The Ripple Effect You Create As A Manager

Each one of us holds a set of beliefs and attitudes — a mindset — that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. That mindset shapes how we interact with others, and therefore it also affects the people we work with — in ways both subtle and profound. A person with a distrustful mindset, for example, views situations at work as competitive and acts to advance his own interest at others’ expense by politicking: shifting allegiances, taking credit, assigning blame, withholding or distorting information. These behaviors drive up stress and burnout in others, and undermine organizational effectiveness.

On the other hand, a mindset of openness, trust, and generosity promotes behaviors that have beneficial effects on others. In his new book Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant marshals an impressive body of scientific evidence to show how a mindset of generosity radiates to yield broad gains.

Here’s one powerful research example: a 20-year longitudinal study of healthy employees found that people with social support from coworkers were two and a half times less likely to die prematurely than those without. So it’s not an exaggeration to say that by being supportive of people at work, you’re not just brightening their day — you’re literally helping to save lives…

Here are some of our top stories and ideas from this week’s latest Happiness At Work #46

10 Keys To Happiness (infographic)

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art.

I’m serious.

Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art.

Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

So About This Happiness Thing Everyone’s Talking About

Happiness is to everyday humans what dark matter is to physicists. You know it’s out there, you know it’s important, but you can’t put your finger on how to get to it or what it even is.

We tend to perceive happiness as a binary existence—either it’s true or false; it’s either 100% or 0%. 

Well, happiness has a language problem.

If you know Spanish, it’s like the difference between the verbs Estar and Ser. They both mean “to be” but not in the same way. One is a temporary state; the other is an identity. You can be both hungry and tall, but only one changes by the minute.

So, feeling happy and being happy are two colossally different things. One is happiness; the other is Happiness.

Mistaking happiness for Happiness is like trying to get one side of a Rubix cube done but neglecting the rest. It’s not that the one side is worthless, it’s just that there is more to the puzzle.

happiness vs. Happiness

happiness is the big smiles
Happiness is the little things

happiness is your outward mood
Happiness is your silent disposition

happiness is the raise you get
Happiness is the impact you have

happiness is an on/off switch
Happiness is on a dimmer switch

happiness is the found acorn the squirrel eats in the fall
Happiness is the stored acorn the squirrel eats in the winter

happiness is the nice things people say about you to your face
Happiness is the nice things people say about you when you’re not there

happiness is when you get what you expect
Happiness is when you get respect

happiness is what takes your breath away
Happiness is what no one can ever take away from you

happiness is the moment
Happiness is the story

You don’t need to feel happy to be Happy.
You don’t need to be Happy to feel happy.

Tips for Achieving Greater Happiness

It makes us glad to be alive and scientists say it has the power to heal and extend life. But it’s elusive.

“Happiness is as invisible as electricity and just as powerful,” says Lois Blyth, author of The Secrets Of Happiness: How To Love Life, Laugh More, And Live Longer (Cico books).

“The difficult bit for some people is choosing to step away from unhappiness and deciding wholeheartedly, and with total commitment, that happiness is something that they really do want — and that they deserve. The challenge for others is choosing to step out of the place of comfort and familiarity, and to start experiencing new challenges that inspire them to live their life in a different and vibrant way.”

Her guidelines include:

• Sensing Happiness…
• Think Like a Lottery Winner…
• Face the Fear…
• Healing Hugs…
• Reset your Grumble Reflex…
• and Don’t Delay…

Are You An Input Junkie?

As of 2012 the average attention span in 2012 was 8 seconds according to the Associated Press.  That is 3 seconds less than reported in 2000 – a 25% decline.

It is now official that our attention span is LESS than the attention span of a goldfish!

I heard this statistic while listening to Sally Hogsheadtalk about the subject of Fascination and how we can capture that limited attention span.  While as a business owner I continue to work hard to learn how to capture people’s attention so I have the opportunity to actually make a difference with them, I couldn’t help but think about the implications of this alarming statistic for my life.

We are bombarded daily with a staggering amount of information.  If I printed my daily e-mails for a month I would probably be classified as a hoarder. Sure there are the spammers, but most of that information I have invited into my inbox in one way or another. There is literally a stack of books on my nightstand (and in my Kindle reader) that seems to grow much faster than it shrinks.

Truth be told I love all that input, including my beloved social media streams, most especially twitter.

 But is it really a problem?

Said more personally, do I have a problem?

Trying To Be Happier Works When Listening To Upbeat Music

The song, “Get Happy,” famously performed by Judy Garland, has encouraged people to improve their mood for decades. Recent research at the University of Missouri discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process. This research points to ways that people can actively improve their moods and corroborates earlier MU research.

“Our work provides support for what many people already do – listen to music to improve their moods,” said lead author Yuna Ferguson, who performed the study while she was an MU doctoral student in psychological science. “Although pursuing personal happiness may be thought of as a self-centered venture, research suggests that happiness relates to a higher probability of socially beneficial behavior, better physical health, higher income and greater relationship satisfaction.”

Sad Music Can Help Mend A Broken Heart

New research suggest an aesthetic experience that reflects a person’s mood can help calm emotional turmoil. Thus, sad music or books may help someone get through heartbreak.

“Emotional experiences of aesthetic products are important to our happiness and well-being. Music, movies, paintings, or novels that are compatible with our current mood and feelings, akin to an empathic friend, are more appreciated when we experience broken or failing relationships,” write the study authors.

Prior research has reported that individuals in a negative mood prefer pleasant, positive aesthetic experiences (cheerful music, or comedies) to counter their negative feelings.

However, under certain circumstances, consumers in negative moods might choose aesthetic experiences consistent with their mood (sad music, or tear-jerking dramas) even when more pleasant alternatives are also available.

Little Joy To Be Had Chasing Happiness

Hugh Mackay’s bestselling book, The Good Life: What Makes a Life Worth Living?, was prompted by his concern at the trend towards people believing they are entitled to happiness.

”We have been through gender revolution, IT revolution, cultural revolution, threat of global warming and the threat of international terrorism.

”When we feel as though everything is changing too fast we look for stuff we can control and that leads us to think ‘I am going to have the best life I can’.

”But the pursuit of happiness does more harm than good – it sells us a rather shallow and hollow idea, that if we work hard enough at it we can feel happy.”

The Good Life is all about engagement, and the idea that as social creatures we do better when we think of ourselves being socially engaged, rather than obsessing about ourselves and what emotional state we happen to be in.

Community and Wellbeing Away From Home

They say it takes a village. This well-worn expression comes up again and again and its message is straightforward: our social connections and communities matter. They make us feel grounded and supported and, quite frankly, they make life both easier and better. Anyone who has moved somewhere new and has had to move a mattress up three flights of stairs without knowing anyone to call for help, knows how true this is. In other words, social connections make for a better life.

American author and explorer Dan Buettner studies what he calls “blue zones”. He coined the term to refer to regions in the world where people live the longest. Immortality, or at least longevity, has always been both an object of fascination and a popular objective. How to live longer? What to eat? What not to eat? Ikaria, a Greek island, is a blue zone. Buettner has closely studied the island’s population of nearly centenarians, what they eat, how much they drink and sleep and socialize. His findings further support the notion that community and social structure matter.

None of these blue zones have discovered the fountain of youth; instead, they demonstrate the importance of having both a raison d’être and a community. In Ikaria, Buettner says,   even if someone is antisocial, they will never be alone. That person’s neighbors will always give a light push to get that neighbor out and to the local festival to get a share of the feast.

Tiny Bhutan Redefines Progress as the Level of Happiness

In July 2011, Bhutan introduced the only resolution it has ever presented at the United Nations. Resolution 65/309 was called “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development.” The country’s position was “that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal” and “that the gross domestic product…does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people.” The General Assembly passed the resolution unanimously. It was “intended as a landmark step towards adoption of a new global sustainability-based economic paradigm for human happiness and well-being of all life forms to replace the current dysfunctional system that is based on the unsustainable premise of limitless growth on a finite planet.”

The Bhutanese understand that well-being and happiness depend on a healthy environment. They vow to protect 60% of forest cover in their country, are already carbon-neutral (they generate electricity from hydro) and have vowed to make their entire agriculture sector organic. They have snow leopards, elephants, rhinos, tigers and valleys of tree-sized rhododendrons — and know their happiness depends on protecting them.

The people of this tiny nation see that money and hyper-consumption aren’t what contribute to happiness and wellbeing.

Leadership

The Duality of Leadership

Lolly Daskal, Lead From Within writes:

In life and in leadership, we are constantly dealing with duality.

In the OLD way of thinking, we based our leadership on a set of shared values and principles aimed at achieving moral perfection while maintaining social order and well being.

What got left behind in the old approach are the things that we are coming to value and seek out in the NEW: authenticity, vulnerability, unity.

The old approach was built on the duality of contradictory opposites. In or out. Black or white. Right or wrong. We divided things, labeled them, decided their value.

In the new ethics of leadership opposites are about reconciling.

The foundation is a concept of opposites that are contrary but not contradictory, that exist as points on a spectrum—not black and white, but darkness AND light.

Instead of choosing one and rejecting the other, we accept both, we live with both, we seek to know both…

The Mongrel Discipline of Management

 This theme also runs through David K. Hurst’s post in the Harvard Business Review Network Blog:

Humans engage with their world in two reciprocal ways: firstly as passionate participants and secondly as detached observers. As managers we cycle between these modes constantly. It’s the mark of a great manager to be able to judge, in a complex situation, when and how to use each of them.

The reality of organizations is that they are both social and technical systems, comprising both people and things. And they have twin tasks to attend to — the pursuit of “today’s business” and the creation of “tomorrow’s business”. The first task is usually more technical and the second is more social, but it’s always “both…and” and never “either/or”. The key to good management, then, is never to forget this duality; it is using both modes of engagement in dynamic situations, where our means are always threatening to run away with our ends.

One frequently finds complex human systems lumped together with inanimate ones (like the weather!) and the position of the detached observer is still privileged. This violates one of the few certainties in managing human organizations: that the blurring of task and person marks the road to ruin. The two must be kept distinct, yet joined. The role of the passionate participant must always embrace that of the intellectual spectator. The “who” and “why” of our concerns should constantly enfold the “what” and “how” of our methods. We must seek explanations, but only in the perpetual pursuit of meaning.

With maturity, a person gains the ability to detach from passionate participation in a system and rigorously observe its overall shape and workings. But the most detached observers do not make the best managers; the wise ones know that after all the analysis is done, they still have to throw themselves back into the mix. We need a hybrid vigor for our mongrel discipline of management: one that draws its energy from both the ways we engage with our complex world.

Resilience

From White Knuckling It to Letting Go: My 5 Tips for Alleviating Anxiety

How to Live in the Present Moment

We can think of our anxious thoughts as if our mind were running on a hamster wheel. Round and round it goes, and the harder we try to fight the thoughts, the faster our mind races. Every time we try to stop our anxiety, we draw attention to it and spin the wheel faster and faster. If you’re experiencing a panic attack, trying to stop it will often make it seem that much worse. How do you get off the wheel? You stop running.

Matt Rosenman gives his top five ways that he has found work to help you live in the present moment and stop worrying…

Depression Part 2

Artist Allie Brosh is back with the second installment in her poignant illustrated account of what depression actually feels like:

As I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren’t the same.

I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse’s Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled.  I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything…

How Gratitude Can Help You Through the Bad Times

Being grateful is a choice, a prevailing attitude that endures and is relatively immune to the gains and losses that flow in and out of our lives. When disaster strikes, gratitude provides a perspective from which we can view life in its entirety and not be overwhelmed by temporary circumstances. Yes, this perspective is hard to achieve—but my research says it is worth the effort.

Artistry

Steve McCurry’s Blog: Grief, Grind & Glory of Work

Sensational photos as always from Steve McCurry telling different stories of work, too many of them more of intense unhappiness than joy…

Whether it is men fishing,  nuns washing dishes, miners digging beneath the earth, or working in the heat of a steel mill, work is universal, yet intensely personal. Millions work in order to survive, and for them, there is no debate about how to achieve a life/work balance.  

Working for long periods under extreme stressful work conditions can lead to
sudden death, a phenomenon the Japanese call karoshi. The word in China is guolaosi.

Many find their identity in the work they do. Some enjoy intense satisfaction in their work.
For others, the line between work and play is hard to find.

All happiness depends on courage and work.  

Honore de Balzac

10 of the Best Hand~Drawn Maps – in pictures

Hand-drawn maps are enjoying a renaissance as contemporary artists use their imagination, creativity and humour to breathe new life into the traditional craft of cartography. Here are 10 of the best…

Why Hand-Drawn Maps Are Back in The Picture

“Maps and memories are bound together; a little as songs and love affairs are,” writes Adam Gopnik in the preface to newly-released picture book Mapping Manhattan. “The map is a stronger version of the trip than a video might be; it is almost a stronger version of the trip than the trip is. I look at the subway map of New York, see the dull line of numbers – 33, 42, 51, 59 – and they fill you at once with memory. Maps, especially schematic ones, are places where memories go not to die, or be pinned, but to live forever.“

Argument With Myself

Mike Jay reviews Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World by Suzanne Corkin

A long but fascinating story about the nature of memory based on neuroscientist Corkin years of study of as lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’ of famous amnesia patient, Henry Gustave Molaison…

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Henry had occasional episodes of frustration, anger or panic, but was usually good-natured and accepting of the scene around him. In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time’...

Happiness At Work #47 highlights ideas and stories linked to creativity.

We see creativity as central to our learning, our resilience and our happiness and a vital aspect of flourishing.

When we worked as Creative Agents with teachers and students in a variety of London schools, we regularly found two things to be live and relevant for whoever we were working with: firstly, the subject of creativity itself – what it means and how to tap into it in our day-to-day lives; and secondly, that almost every one us believes we are not as creative as we would like to be.

Why We Have Our Best Ideas In The Shower

In this article Leo Widrich writes up the results of his research into the science of creativity and offers some top tips for maximising our own creativity:

“A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful (or influential) in a particular social setting.” – Alice Flaherty

This applies to every field, Flaherty explains, including programming, business, mathematics together with the more traditional “creative” fields, such as music or drawing…

In organisations, too, creativity is often a central spine of the the learning and development programmes we make, whether in relation to imagining and developing a way to reach a better future, or finding ways to collaborate and work more effectively as a team, or discovering and crafting ways to be more productive, effective and fulfilled at work, or to unblock and free an individual’s energy, voice and presence in order to be able to communicate and lead with greater impact, authority and influence.

This week, with Maria Ana Neves, we co-hosted a creative thinking dinner with a group of dynamic people who gathered around a table of wonderful food to dream up ideas together for the next Thinking Hotel, due to open for just 72 hours this summer as a space for people to check into to imagine a better future ~ whatever that would mean to you ~ and  recalibrate yourself into a better more balanced you ~ whatever that would mean to you.

Before we hit these times of greater financial constraint and difficulty, the vitality and necessity of creativity for successful work and learning was understood and accepted.  These days, it seems, creativity has been shoved into luxuries pile – ‘lovely but To Do only if time and resource’.  It is again being treated with an old fashioned wariness, stripped of legitimacy and urgency in a business agenda that it is being prioritised instead with cost reductions, doing more with less, tightening belts, centralising, streamlining, tightening efficiencies still further, and crunching performances against less and less ambiguous indicators.

As if creativity cannot help to make any and all of these outcomes better, never mind a more proactive strategic longer range view that seeks to grow and adapt and learn and reinvent and expand and change…

The Business of Creativity

A really good article in MBA Warrior Blog outlines a number of compelling reasons that add to the business case for creativity in 21st century organisations:

The day-to-day operations of any business can become mundane at times, which can lead to complacency and mediocrity among employees. Creativity is just as important as the other more technical skills required to operate a business and business leaders should manage and promote creativity just as they would any other asset.

“In the past decade business has grown more rigid as headcount has been reduced and we are asked to do more with less,” said Clark Finnical, a Florida resident who was employed by Avaya for 24 years. He received his MBA in Marketing and Finance from American University in 1989. “As work is more and more challenging, the need for creativity is greater than ever. Individuals who can develop creative solutions will stand out and be more likely to weather the next round of layoffs or even get promoted.”

“What we learn from each other will enable us to be more creative,” Finnical said. “By honoring and respecting the differences among those we work with, we create a workplace characterized by mutual respect and acceptance. This does wonders for working relationships.”

Creativity also lends itself to such skills as problem-solving and leadership, which are critical in the business environment. Self-motivated individuals breed creativity because they are always looking for fresh ideas or innovative ways to tackle problems.

Harvard Business School professor and coauthor of The Progress Principle  Teresa Amabile created the MBA course Managing for Creativity because “managers cannot be effective in contemporary business unless they can understand and support creativity — the production of new, useful ideas.”

“Rapidly-changing challenges and opportunities facing for-profit and not-for-profit organizations demand a continuous search for novel approaches that will work in a given context,”  she says. “This means that everyone inside organizations, from top-level leaders down to people working in the trenches, must constantly think creatively.”

Edie Raether, international speaker and corporate trainer on innovation and creativity, shared some tips to encourage creativity:

• Keep a journal. Make it a habit to keep on the lookout for new and interesting ideas. Write them down in your journal. Your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.
• Don’t be afraid to get a little crazy. Genius has tolerance for the unpredictable. Ask yourself, is it crazy enough to be correct? Logic hides in the illogic. You must be willing to get out of your comfort zone and take a risk.
• Allow for some right-brain thinking. Screen, filter, and get rid of negative thoughts such as fear, doubt, and worry that result from the fight-or-flight response of the instinctual brain. Numb the critical, left brain so the right brain can get into the flow.
• Give technology a break. Excessive use of technology ‘dumbs’ us by 10%, twice the negative effect of smoking marijuana. Get back to cursive writing which stimulates the creativity centers of the brain.
• Brainstorm strategically. Brainstorming is effective when done sequentially. For example, you don’t want left-brain critical thinkers interrupting the flow of the right-brain people. You can also try solo brainstorming in which people can reflect and then come together to pool their ideas and diverse thinking styles.
• Ask questions. Questions ignite creative thought processes. Ask yourself continually ‘what can I do to make it better? How can I alter, adapt, magnify, add or eliminate? How can I rearrange and reverse it?’
• Do mirror writing. Leonardo da Vinci would write from right to left to make the brain see opposite directions, thus breaking old thought patterns that limit and stifle new thoughts. Patterns are efficient and convenient, but make us robots. Think about how to get the water rather than making the water come to us.
• Know your true talent. Get in sync with your instincts and then think BIG. Dare to dream and be bold.

Matt Monge writes a two-part article in his Mojo Company blog, the first part exploring the subject from an individual’s perspective, and then the second part from the organisational perspective:

5 Things You Need To Build A Creative Culture as an individual

…these are the things we should be engaging in for ourselves, encouraging in others, and ultimately making sure our organizations are facilitating as well…

1. Curiosity…
2. Imagination…
3. Knowledge…
4. Motivated Attitude…
5. Community…

Who cares? You should. Don’t fall prey to the myth that only some people are creative and you’re not one of the chosen few. You are creative; it’s just a matter of figuring out in what way. So find things you’re curious about and that are interesting to you, use your imagination a little (even when the ideas sound silly), utilize all that knowledge you have locked away in that brain of yours, stay motivated and work at it, and surround yourself with others who are doing the same.

and 6 Considerations for a Creative Culture

…zooming out and looking at it from a broader, organizational level, here are some practical considerations if we really and truly want our teams to be creative:

It’s not as simple as telling them to be more creative, or nodding and smiling when someone mentions creativity or innovation. There has to be an intentional focus on it, or it will become an afterthought.  You’ll have little bursts of creativity here and there from individuals, but nothing on the level of organizational creativity.

Here are some things you could take a look at:

1. Workspace…
2. Interaction with others who think differently…
3. Rules…
4. Resources…
5. Hiring…
6. Leadership…

Creativity: The Shameful Truth

In this article Shane Burroughs explores how some of the world’s greatest innovators embrace their failures in order to acquire such greatness.

How ready are you to fail for the sake of your success?

Edison, Picasso, Disney, Cadbury, and Facebook learned that to be creative we have to venture new ground at the of risk failure, because always knowing what you are doing and always doing what you know is not a recipe for creativity: it’s the fast track to irrelevance.

Today, the most ambitious companies know that they have just two options; they can “fail to succeed” or they can “fail, to succeed.”

What would you do if you weren’t afraid to fail?

Our God of Imagination

Of course not everyone is convinced about the essential virtues of creativity.

Launching a critique of the rhetoric and glorification of creativity in his latest “Easy Chair” column, Harper’s Magazine contributor Thomas Frank sarcastically eviscerates the business class’ most prized literary genre: creativity.

Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well. What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.

Of course we don’t agree with these sentiments.  But we do endorse wholeheartedly any notion of creativity for creativity’s sake is a vacuous and saccharine pursuit.  Our definition of creativity is always situational:  just like any other tool it’s point and purpose is to either make something or to fix something.  That we often feel good while being creative is a happy by-product.

Artistry is different.  Artistry can lend itself to creativity, but art exists to help us to see and feel and understand differently, and its prime objective we would say is to communicate, often leaving it open to its audience to choose what they do or do not do as a consequence.

That said, there is a great deal we can learn about creativity from artists.  Here are some of their voices in this week’s collection:

Creative Integrity from Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson

by Maria Popova

“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”

Watterson speaks to the importance of work ethic and grit — but, like Freud, he places playfulness at the epicenter of creativity:

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood.  I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories.  To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

 Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun.  If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

Watterson stresses the vital difference between “having an enviable career” and “being a happy person,” admonishing about the “hedonic treadmill” of achievement:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.  Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success.  Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake.  A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing.  There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

He concludes by echoing Rilke:

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of creativity – we believe even its defining characteristic – is its application for solving problems.  This is one of the points made by Arthur Miller in this video of a British Library seminar held in partnership with University College London Neuroscience on 18th April 2013.

Inspiring Science 2013: Your Creative Brain

This is a long (nearly 2 hour) watch, worth enjoying if you can make the time, but here are some chapter headings and their timing markers as a guide:

1’37″   Professor Vincent Walsh, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL sets some quick creative tests to try, and then goes on to talk about the merits and limitations of MRI scanning for our understanding about creative brain activity.

5’46″   The Table, Blind Summit Theatre – an improvised performance made by a 3-person operated cardboard puppet illustrates a dazzling array of the creative complexities, synchronicity  and artistry we are capable of achieving and a real delight to watch.

30’11″   Arthur Miller, Emeritus Professor of History & Philosophy of Science, UCL and author of Einstein and Picasso talks about Creativity in Art and Creativity in Science:

‘We all have the capacity to be creative but what is it?  It can be defined quite easily as “to produce new knowledge from already existing knowledge”.  Creativity is essentially problem solving…it couldn’t be anything else…improved creativity helps us to solve problems better…’

57’09″   Chiara Ambrosio, Lecturer in History of Art & Science, UCL talks about Creativity and Constraint: How Do You Break Out Of Tradition? and illustrates her ideas with examples of how artists have redefined science in order to represent anatomy:

‘Sometimes creativity comes from frustration about wanting to do something else…’

1:10’23″  Milton Mermikides, Lecturer in Music, University of Surrey & Professor of Guitar, Royal Academy of Music, composer talks about creativity and music in his talk, The Myth of the Muse, illustrating his ideas with formulaic approaches to composing great music such as cryptograms, using the letters of a name (Bach) or a line drawing of the New York skyline (Villa-Lobos):

‘One of my favourite Stravinsky quotes is when he was asked how he composes, and he said “Well I go to the piano at 10am and I work til 1pm and then I go back from 2pm til 8pm and that’s my daily routine.”  ”But maestro what if the muse doesn’t visit?”  ”Well at least I kept my appointment.”  

‘The real-world muses are deadlines, money/non-poverty, promotion for better circumstance, and constraint – the limiting of those huge ideas…  

Creativity and inspiration are the result of a hard earned skill placed in the right circumstance…creativity requires training and enough obstacles.’

Uncommon Genius: Stephen Jay Gould On Why Connections Are The Key to Creativity

The importance of routine and sheer hard work is reiterated in a 1991 book, Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born, rediscovered by   Maria Popova in her Brain Pickings.  This book is a synthesis of insights on creativity from conversations with 40 winners of the MacArthur “genius” grant — artists, writers, scientists, inventors, cultural critic.  It’s author, Denise Shekerjian writes in it:

There’s no use trying to deny it: a conscious application of raw talent, far more than luck or accident, is at the core of every creative moment. … The cultivation of aptitude, far more than coincidence or inspiration, is responsible for most creative breakthroughs…

The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then to settle down to work with it for a good long time.  Everyone has an aptitude for something.  The trick is to recognize it, to honor it, to work with it.  This is where creativity starts.

One of the geniuses she features in this book is palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, about whom Shekerjian writes:

Gould’s special talent, that rare git for seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated things, zinged to the heart of the matter. Without meaning to, he had zeroed in on the most popular of the manifold definitions of creativity: the idea of connecting two unrelated things in an efficient way.  The surprise we experience at such a linkage brings us up short and causes us to think, ‘Now that’s creative’…

Stephen Jay Gould’s talent for forging vital connections happens to go to the heart of creativity, but, even so, it’s a talent that wouldn’t amount to much if he didn’t work at it.  Endurance counts for a lot in cultivating talent to the point of being able to do creative things with it — endurance and a concentration of effort to a specific sphere of activity. As D. N. Perkins, another researcher in the field of creativity, put it:

Be creative in a context, for to try to be original everywhere, all at once, all the the time, is an exhausting proposition.

The importance of hard work and working hard is emphasised again in another Brain Pickings article, this time underscoring the need for routine and being able to ritualise some aspects of our process.

The Pace of Productivity and How to Master Your Creative Routine

by Maria Popova

“When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.”

…there is something to be said for the value of a well-engineered daily routine to anchor the creative process. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind, edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity.

In the foreword to the book, Behance founder Scott Belsky, author of the indispensable Making Ideas Happen, points to “reactionary workflow” — our tendency to respond to requests and other stimuli rather than create meaningful work — as today’s biggest problem and propounds a call to arms:

‘Only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact in what matters most to you.  I urge you to build a better routine by stepping outside of it, find your focus by rising above the constant cacophony, and sharpen your creative prowess by analyzing what really matters most when it comes to making your ideas happen.’

And in this next article, B. Jeffrey Madoff offers similar advice about the importance of perseverance.  :

Creativity: Making a Living With Your Ideas

Anyone pursuing a creative career should realize it’s a job.  A fun job.  However, discipline is essential and like an athlete, dancer, film maker or musician, practice and challenge yourself constantly to get better.  Although I make my living as a film maker, I teach a class I developed about entrepreneurship called “Creativity: Making a Living With Your Ideas” at Parsons School for Design in New York City.

Making a living with your creativity is a tough, but it’s tougher going through life doing something you don’t like.  Passion is the fuel that propels talent, but you need the perseverance to deal with the hustle & the rejection.  Creativity is the passion to affect change.  Passion is internal.  Follow your passion.

We, too, fully recognise the importance of perseverance in our creativity training work.

It is part of a set of skills linked to being Persistent, which is one of our adapted set of 5 Essential Essential Capbilities for Creativity that we have recently updated taking a lead from the the prototype of 5 Dispositions for Creativity being developed by the OECD for assessing creativity in schools.

Here is our adapted full set of 5 Essential Essential Capbilities for Creativity:

being Imaginative 

~ asking “What if…?”

• divergent thinking & playing with possibilities
• making connections
• using intuition & instinct
• using unconscious thinking, day dreaming
• embodying: showing rather than telling

 being Curious 

~ asking “What else…?”

• wondering & questioning
• exploring & investigating, generating multiple possibilities
• challenging assumptions
• shifting perspective & looking for the unexpected
• experimenting & taking risks

being Persistent

~ asking “Why is this necessary…?”

• resilience, passion & determination
• tolerating uncertainty
• perseverance & sticking with difficulty
• original thinking & daring to be different
• facing fears and taking action

being Collaborative

~ asking “Who can I work with…?”

• empathy, listening & noticing deeply
• enjoying complexity, seeking difference & diversity
• making a shared vision
• collectively growing ideas & possibilities
• dialogue, problem solving & sharing ‘not knowing’

being Disciplined

~ asking “How can I make this better…?”

• reflecting critically
• learning, practicing, developing techniques & expertise
• crafting & improving
• improvising
• keeping balanced

Creativity & Self-Mastery

Remembering that creativity is a skill, and, so its various theories and ideas are only helpful to us up to a point, we have also collected a number of articles with real down-to-earth practical guidelines.

Phil McKinney offers these practical tips:

8 Simple Steps To Be More Creative

So you want to be more creative?

It may not be as hard as it sounds. Like so many other things in life, there are steps you take to train your creative muscle.

1. Want it.  Teach yourself to be original, rather than continuing in any kind of “same old” routine…
2. Motivate yourself.  Take another look at the suggestions in Step #1, and follow those suggestions consistently and with some degree of self-discipline…
3. Stimulate your brain.  There are several ways to make this happen.  One way is to learn something new…
4. Rub shoulders with people who are creative.  You might learn some things about them that you can use yourself to become more creative…
5. Be part of a team.  You’ll get perspectives, feedback, and ideas you would never have conjured up on your own …
6. Have some self-confidence.  Remember, “can’t” is a four-letter word.  If you don’t believe in yourself, then it’s likely that you won’t ever be creative or successful…
7. Be happy.  Research shows that positive emotion enhances creativity.  This point might be difficult to follow if you are under a lot of pressure or emotional stress.  If that’s the case, then … strive to ensure that happy thoughts are predominant in your mind, rather than worrisome or sorrowful thoughts…
8. Down time.  There’s been a lot covered about diligence, perseverance, and commitment.  But it’s also important to remember to take some down time.  Sometimes, the brain just needs to step away from the problem before the light bulb goes off…

7 Ways To Spark Your Creativity Without Leaving the City

Matt Wilson suggests this list – see his article to find out what he means and why these suggestions increase our creativity:

1).  Get lost.  On purpose.

2).  Break your routine.

3).  Challenge your creativity.

4).  Remove boring people and boring things from your life.

5).  Bring awesome people together. 

6).  Collect people, not things.

7.) Get emotional. 

In this next article, Mary Borchers outlines some practical techniques for overcoming self-doubt…

When Your Inner Critic Stifles Your Creativity: 4 Helpful Truths

We live in an artistically enriched country.  The world is already full of all kinds of music, so much art, and so many books.  With the Internet, you can experience art’s many forms at the click of a mouse.

In my heart, I am an artist.  Ever since I was a young girl, I have loved creating artwork.  Writing stories, drawing illustrations, playing the piano, painting, sculpting…

The unfortunate thing is that I am paralyzed—not in the medical sense. I have working limbs, imagination, training, experience, and the resources to “actualize my potential” as an artist. The thing I lack is confidence.

I am crippled by my own self-doubt…

And Drake Baer suggests some ways to learn and practice patience and how this can fire our creativity:

Hone ‘Strategic Patience,’ Watch Your Creativity Spike

Look at this picture for as long as you can – what more do you see in this it the longer you look?

John Singleton Copley: Boy with a Squirrel

An Art History Professor makes her students sit in front of a painting for three hours.  

P&G invents the Swiffer.  

Those events are more alike than you think….

Deep patience. Close attention. These are not virtues often associated with college students (or some tech workers, for that matter). But as Harvard art history professor Jennifer L. Roberts recently explained, the skills for finding the “details, relationships, and orders that take time to see” can be introduced.

She calls it “decelerating education,” like when, for an intense research paper about a single work of art, she prompted her pupils to plop down in front of a painting for three hours, giving them a stillness they don’t usually get in a multi-tabbed way of life.

“(It’s) designed to seem excessive,” she says, but students end up “astonished by what they have been able to see.”

…acute, focused observation births creativity.  And innovation often begins with observation…

Patience, then, is a kind of appreciation:  In the same way that a gourmet can savor the flavors of a dish and reverse-engineer its preparation, the patience-practicing, insight-seeking observer becomes familiar with the subject of her study, whether canvases or customers – and, in so doing, can begin to know their needs.

All I Need To Know About Creativity I Learned From Washing Dishes

Heather Caliri, writer and blogger at A Little Yes provides a very practical everyday life application of creativity and challenges us to see its wider possibilities:

Doubt that dishwashing has much to teach about handicrafts, starting a small business, or using your imagination?  Think again.

The truth is, the more we rescue “creativity” from the clouds and make it an everyday habit, the more creative we are.  Like any other skill, creative projects take practice, perseverance, and a big helping of grit.

We often look on creativity as a nice add-on for some people: perhaps a profession if you’re specially gifted, or an enviable hobby if you’re above-average.  But the truth is we’ve all been given a creative drive, and we’re all called to use it.  Making a daily practice of the things that give you joy will make your whole life sparkle.

Here’s what time at the sink has taught me about creativity…

Creativity & Resilience

Phil Hansen: Embrace the Shake TedTalk

Phil Hansen: Embrace the Shake (TedTalk)

Inspirational and relevant, Phil Hansen shares some of the ways he has responded to his own limitations and uses these constraints to fuel his artistry…

In art school, Phil Hansen developed an unruly tremor in his hand that kept him from creating the pointillist drawings he loved. Hansen was devastated, floating without a sense of purpose.  Until a neurologist made a simple suggestion: embrace this limitation … and transcend it.

Taking a cue from his own artistic journey, Phil Hansen challenges us to spark our creativity by thinking inside the box…

‘After having gone from a single approach to art I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons – embracing my limitations could actually drive creativity…  We need to first become limited in order to become limitless…

“Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves, and, collectively, transform our world…’

The power of the arts and creativity to transform our lives and our world is so clear to those of us who already believe in it.  But if you are not yet convinced, here is still more evidence for why the arts matter:

Oklahoma’s lessons for teaching creativity. Hint: don’t kill the arts

Erin Millar writes:

For a long time, Susan McCalmont has worried about the marginalization of the arts in schools. As she saw it, music and fine arts were shoved aside as a result of prioritizing science and math. The focus on outcomes as defined by standardized tests only made the problem worse.

“What happens in the future if our children only become compliant test takers?” she wondered. “What if they go through school told to get the highest GPA and go to college, but not to imagine, to think, to have ideas?”

…Ms. McCalmont and a group of like-minded leaders launched Creative Oklahoma in 2007, a non-profit dedicated to increasing creativity in Oklahoma. In consultation with Sir Ken Robinson, the group began organizing initiatives and conferences aimed at bringing leaders from education, cultural and business together to boost the creative economy and innovation in general in the region.

“The end goal,” explains Ms. McCalmont, “is economic prosperity in the state and more jobs and startups, as well as helping existing businesses to improve the quality of their products. But fundamentally, it’s to improve our quality of life.”

Artistry

Artists as much as the rest of us use creativity to solve problems and express their solutions.  Some of the examples you will find in his week’s collection include:

Steve McCurry’s Blog: Just A Moment

Any time you feel the stress mounting or the fatigue seeping through you, we can think of no better antidote than to go to Steve McCurry’s site and get a lift from what you will find there.  This week Steve McCurry celebrates and draws us in to contemplate the importance of the here-and-now moment, and, as he always does, makes poetry with his photographs:

Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments.
- Sarah Breathnach

Wellbeing

This week’s top happiness story comes from new research with 1,000 families that shows having relaxed time to enjoy being with our loved ones is more important to our happiness than any luxury product or material possession:

Parenting News: Quality Family Time beats Money and Career in Quest for Happiness

A family day out was rated one of life’s biggest luxuries, followed by dining out with the family, and spending quality time together.

For deeper and further exploration into the wonders and workings of creativity, here is a handy book list:

10 Books We Love on Art and Creativity

by Mark Trezona

(This was a guest post originally written for Shaking Out ~ the Shaky Isles Theatre Company Blog. which publishes a new piece by a guest every artist every Tuesday)

Colin McCahon’s ‘This Is The Promised Land’ + South London

Have you ever done that thing in London where you go outside – especially in the smallest hours of the morning – and just listen in to as many sounds of the city as you can hear?

‘…that indefinable boom of distant but ever-present sound which tells that London is up and doing, and which will swell into a deafening roar as the day grows older [and] now rises faintly but continuously upon the ear’.  (Charles Manby Smith, 1857) 

The ‘roar’ here suggests the presence of some great beast, but more significant is this sense of continuous, distant sound as if it were a form of meditation or self-communing…

London has always been characterised by the noise that is an aspect of its noisomeness.  It is part of its unnaturalness, too, like the roaring of some monstrous creature.  But it is also a token of its energy and power.  

Its noise is ancient but always renewed,  a perpetual sound that’s variously compared to Niagara, in its persistence and remorselessness, and to the beating of a human heart.  It is intimate and yet impersonal, like the noise of life itself…

A celebrated American of the nineteenth century, James Russell Lowell,  has written: ‘One other thing about London impresses me beyond any other sound I have ever heard and that is the low, unceasing roar one hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human will, and impulse, and conscious movement; and I confess that when I hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of time.’  (Peter Ackroyd, London The Biography, pp.71, 75, 76)

Tuning in acutely to these sounds and feeling a connection to this vibrating chorus of so many different lives and possibilities and relationships and stories happening –  and heading towards happening – gives me a rush so strong that I always want to hug myself and shout out how fucking lucky I feel to be living here and calling this great over-sized mess of a city my home.

This same rush of euphoria pulses through every cell of me if I stop myself walking midway across any of London’s bridges and ‘take time to stand and stare‘. In these moments the sights of the city overwhelm its sounds, and I hear, instead, myself, sounding out again: This is my city.  This is where I live.  This is my home.  This is the feeling that I felt the first day I arrived here and I feel it still just as strongly 27 years later.

And, even if it’s the middle of the day and London is glistening and prickling in its busyness, the feeling I get is of a moment locked into its own steel blue circular intensity that unstoppably re-conjures whatever echoes I can remember that moment from William Wordsworth’s enduring poem:

Upon Westminster Bridge

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

All this powerful presence.

All this history and all this yet to be.

All this that I live in and amongst and call my own.

This is London, my home.

Yeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!

It is the feeling I recognised instantly when I read  the start of Katherine Mansfield’s 1918 short story, Bliss:

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply…

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?

Oh is there no way you can express it without being “drunk and disorderly”?  How idiotic civilisation is!  Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

These lines are used by Matthieu Ricard to start the first chapter of his book, The Art of Happiness: A Guide to Nurturing Life’s Most Important Skill.  I am reading Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk, photographer and author, and a man whose happiness has been widely studied and is considered to be the happiest man on the planet as part of my ongoing exploration through the subject of happiness and human flourishing.  (Check out Happiness Is A Skill, and his TEDTalk The Habits of Happiness for an introduction to his gentle wisdom.)

It pleases me very much to find the words of one of our New Zealand writers helping to elucidate wisdom from the happiest man in the known universe.  Just as it pleased me to discover that Katherine Mansfield is the only writer Virginia Woolf ever felt jealous of.  It makes me feel plumped up about being a New Zealander.

But back to the blissed out Bertha Young, home now in her London house of 100 years ago:

…in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place – that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable.  She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply.  She hardly dared look into the cold mirror – but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something…divine to happen…that she knew must happen…infallibly.

And here is the second dimension of what living in London feels like to me – that sense of possibility, that at any moment at any time in any part of the city you could meet someone extraordinary and make a connection and something intense and special could happen, maybe just for the shortest moment, maybe for much longer, maybe even for the rest of your life.  And that, if it didn’t happen today, this week, it will happen, and happen again many times more.  This city is too rich and magnificent and full of people with all of their experiences and expectations and dreams and demands and eccentricities and impossible certainties and jangling anxieties for you not to bang into someone, something, that feels… what?  meant?  important?  uniquely personal?  only possible here?

It happens for Bertha with a woman she has newly met and invited to a dinner party in her London home:

…the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering pear tree.  Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to a point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed – almost to touch the rim of the round silver moon.

How long did they stand there?  Both, as it were, caught in the circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?

For ever – for a moment?  And did Miss Fulton murmur: “Yes. Just that.”  Or did Bertha dream it?

This is what living in London is for me.  An ever-present effervescence of possibility, where any time could bring surprise and discovery, where there is still more potential and life to be uncovered than any living yet done could use up.  And where you can be whoever you decide to be today – so far as you yourself will allow – and walk out into the city and the city will absorb and make a perfect fit of the you you’ve made – or are imagining – yourself to be.

You can be.

Just that.

All that.

And yet, and yet…

Alongside the heady hearty noisy rush of my claim to this city, there is always a parallel track of feelings of alienation, foreignness, displacement, nostalgia and longing for people, places, smells, tastes and sounds from another country.

I am not from here, of here.  I am like the other 3 million of London’s 8.5 million residents, the 37% of Londoners who were not born in the UK, and, for as long as I live here I will always be living ‘away from home’.  For us, as much as this place is about the thrill and possibility of its noise, the full quality of our presence here is as ambiguous and hard to discern as London’s silence, sensed only sometimes and partially as

…an absence of being…a negative force…

There is almost a theatrical aspect to this silence, as if it had been tainted by the artificiality of London.  It is not a natural silence but a ‘play’, one of a series of violent contrasts which the inhabitants of London must endure.  It is in that sense wholly ambiguous; it may provoke peaceful contemplation, or it may arouse anxiety. (London, p.81, 82)

No New Zealand Londoner I know makes their home here for a quiet life.  That is what New Zealand is for, what pulls many New Zealanders back, and what those of us who stay here never quite stop romanticising up and longing after: that little piece of our own wide and spacious  utterly natural and wildly beautiful New Zealand serenity.  The Sounds.  The Huka Falls.  A Northland Beach.  South Island’s West Coast. An art deco boutique hotel in Napier.  Walking any one of our National Parks.  The Coromandel.  Substitute your own place of choice: even if you’re not a New Zealander, if you’ve been to New Zealand, you’ll have one.

We New Zealanders know why those of you who go there tell us it is such a special place.  When we are ‘back home’ we expat New Zealanders are always re-amazed at the number and brightness of stars in our southern sky.  We hold our homeland dear and remain constant and true to its natural wonderfulness, something we never expect London to begin to compete with.  This is the universal call of our homeland: its promise of perfect uncontaminated astoundingly beautiful wide open silence.

(In fact, when I was last in Auckland I was shocked at how shouty and loud and noisy our city dwelling native birds are – until I got to Sydney, where the birds are even louder still.)

But in London the birds sing all night.  London is never silent.  London’s silence has to be heard and felt in the contrasting relative quiet of our bedrooms (we hope), and in the moments when we are stopped in our lives just long enough to feel its echo, and in the delay we still hear across our telephone and skype calls to friends and family ‘back home,’ and in the felt absence of a newsy email update sometimes, (or, much more likely in my case, in the guilt of still not yet having written one), and in the marking of big moments happening across the world in another time zone without us being able to be there, in ‘being there in spirit’, in missing the lives we are forced to live apart from.

This longing back to New Zealand is part of being a New Zealander.  Katherine Mansfield very deliberately chose to live most of her life in Europe, but in March 1922, ill with the TB that she would die from less than a year later, she wrote ‘home’ to her father:

“ …the longer I live, the more I return to New Zealand.  A young country is a real heritage, though it takes one time to remember it.  But New Zealand is in my very bones.”

Our silence is felt in a kind of constant sense of loss, that, like the bereaved’s grief, after a certain period of time, becomes too shameful, illegitimate, not really allowable to be voiced in public or even to ourselves, because, of course we know this, there are noisier more important life-must-go-on and we-really-do-feel-lucky-for-what-we-have moments of living to be had and cheered and enjoyed and – well lived.

 The noise of living will always drown out the sounds of silence.

The silence of the living-away-from-home blissfully-at-home-here-in-London is mostly just that: silent.

And silence, just as is the case with listening, is mostly unappreciated, a passive not real thing, an un-action, a not-happening, an absence of dynamic, merely a pause in things before play is resumed.

Silence is the sound of not working, not making money. 

This is not the silence of the countryside, where repose seems natural and unforced.  The silence of London is an active element; it is filled with an obvious absence (of people, of business) and is therefore filled with presence.  It is a teeming silence.  (London, p.83)

For us Shaky Isles folk the noisy silence we hear lying in the depths of this city, never quiet if mostly out of sight, is the creature we call our Taniwha:

It is the pull of this dirty and excessive city when you yearn for another home.  It is that feeling … of knowing that someone – something – is just … over … there.   (Taniwha Thames)

I have grown to love this unquiet silence just as fervently as I love the noises of this city.  I know I will always have New Zealand, my motherland, in my veins and I love the pride this difference gives me as truly as I love the special pride I have for the courage and risk and expectation my nineteenth century ancestors must have had when they left England on their long uncertain voyage to make a better life for themselves and their families in New Zealand.

Being not from here, in fact, helps me to feel more of a true Londoner, for London is, and always has been, a city of outsiders.  London is one of those cities where you can wear your outsideness loud and proud as a badge of authenticity.  And this perhaps is the other dimension of what I love so much about London: its theatricality.

For Londoners, whether by birth or adoption, the theatricality of London is its single most important characteristic.  (London, p.152)

London does not offer uncontested peace and tranquility, because its silences are as full of ambiguous nuanced potent possibility as are its noises.  Strain your ears in to listen and hear the overrunning of its stories.  London is a permanently live performance.  London is a place and space of constantly amplified profound ambivalence, not just for its immigrants but for all of its inhabitants.

Ambivalence is, of course, the sense of having at least two – usually contrasting – feelings about the same thing… Being a theatre or performance audience or maker … can be an affirmative act of conversation and cosmopolitanism, an opportunity ambivalently to respect our differences and recognise what we share, to recognise the challenges we live with in our cities and to take up our cities’ opportunities.  (Jen Harvie, Theatre & the City, 2009 p.77)

The theatre we are engaged in making in Shaky Isles, and the ways in which are making it, are in many ways a microcosm of the complex messy fluctuations of noise and silence in which London works itself out as a city.

There are rules, but these will be broken when they do not fit the purpose of our lives.

There is intention and desired outcomes, but these are deliberately kept absorbent, porous, malleable, a living system of multiple intentions and  desires constantly infecting and being affected by each other as they rub into and through themselves.

There is apparent chaos, but it is really the forward fluidity of the flock that prevents stasis and keeps enough flow to be always in progressive movement, re-circling, re-firing, re-living, each iteration a bit different and a bit better than before.

These are the energies and rhythms we are learning to ride in Shaky Isles.  We are interested in what unfolds from bringing different voices together to tell a stories that are simultaneously intimate, personal and particular and, at the same time, recognisable, eternal and universal.  We use Open Space and Action Learning to uncover and discover our work together through and from and in our not-knowing.  We are practicing and slowly mastering the skills and qualities of trusting and sharing and questioning and experimenting and listening and saying and reworking and refining.  We are trying to get better at getting more of us in the room more often to do more of the work together.

And we know that the only way to make all of this work is to make it work together, as we go, as messy and as noisy and as ambivalent as this needs to be.

…the city is a model of dynamic relativism, a space where everything means more than one thing – a nondescript doorway, invisible for some, is for others the gateway to a magical garden… 

Because the tensions they have out there, the secrets they have out there, the journeys they go on, things they wish for or fear out there are the things you might well seek to amplify, uncover or remix on the stage.  Because what we might call the temporary community of the auditorium (negotiated each night, triangulated off the stage) reflects and refracts the temporary communities outside.

Because the city is a nexus of motorways, TV signals, Internets, dreams, global currents and trickle-downs, a place where our desires wash up, are fed, disrupted, chained, dodged or neutered by what people call late capitalism.

Because the city contains small beauties, zones of possibility…

Because it reflects the life you must reflect and must reflect on and the life already reflected in you.

Because the city can trap you, nurture you, teach you, unravel you, unspeak you.  Because you are just one among many here, and the dynamic of one in relation to many (conversation, dialogue, difference, the negotiation of public space) is what theatre emerges from and thrives on, what art must address and what cities must somehow contend with if they are to survive. (Tim Etchells, Foreword to Theatre & the City, p.xii, xiii-ix)

Katherine Mansfield did not survive her illness and died away from home aged 34.  The epitaph on her grave is one of her favourite quotations from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I which she had chosen for the title page of  Bliss and Other Stories:

“…but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck the flower, safety”

In her short story , Bliss, despite the intense emotional re-firing her heroine experiences, Bertha’s night does not end happily.  And yet…

…the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flowers and as still.

This week’s Happiness At Work collection #49 highlights stories about the power and effectiveness of what many would call the especially softest of the soft skills: listening, giving, empathy and quietness.

We’ve always been unhappy about the term ‘soft skills.’  Used as a catch-all for the skills that privilege human interaction over the more so-called ‘hard skills’ that are concentrated on results, efficiency, facts and figures, tasks and outcomes that, we argue, are a doddle compared to the much much ‘harder’ expertise needed to enact the highly complex demands of making high quality relationships, communications, feelings and experiences.

So here is a special selection of ideas, provocations, invitations and practical techniques for honing our soft skills into the strength, suppleness and resilience that our 21st century professional lives so deeply demand from us.  There are some really potent ideas here that challenge our default assumptions about what constitues ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leadership and question just how valuable and necessary being the archetypal inspirational leader really is for getting high quality outcomes in a complex fast-changing and unpredictable environment…

Julian Treasure: 5 Ways To Listen Better (TEDTalk)

We are losing our listening…

This is how Julian Treasure begins his deeply-felt talk, which includes, as his title promises, five practical techniques for practising better listening skills.  These are some of the ideas taken from this talk that ring out especially for us:

Listening means making meaning from sound.

We listen through a funnel of unconscious filters that all go towards creating the reality and meanings we form:

Culture

Language

Values

Beliefs

Attitudes

Expectations

Intentions

The premium of good listening is disappearing partly because of our recording capabilities, which makes the need for good listening seem less needed and so less looked after than ever.  In our headphone bubbles, we are living in a noisier, more impatient and desensitised world where it is becoming harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated…

We need to learn to listen as if for the very first time.  Here are five tools for improving our ability to do this:

1. Silence.  Just make 5 minutes a day of consciously observed silence – or as near to it as you can make.
2. The Mixer.  Listen to how many individual channels of sound you can hear and tune into in the air around you.
3. Savouring.  Enjoy mundane everyday sounds.  Discover how interesting and layered and dynamic and different sounds actually are.
4. Listening Positions.  Most important this one.  Shift and play with different positions to get conscious about different ways of listening.  These are some, but there are many more:

active ~ passive

reductive ~ expansive

critical ~ empathetic

1. RASA.  Sanskrit word meaning ‘juice’ and the acronym for Receive Appreciate Summarise (“So…) Ask questions.

I live to ask questions.  But I believe every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully connecting to the physical world around you and top each other.  In terms of spiritually connecting, every ritual path has listening at its heart.

We need to teach listening in our schools.

(And – we add emphatically – to our professionals and leaders across every different sector, organisation and enterprise.)

A world where we are not listening to each other is a very scary dangerous place.

Listening can help make connection, understanding, peace…

Below the Noise: Listening as a Lifeline: Virginia Prescott at TEDxPiscataquaRiver

In this talk broadcaster and sound artist Virginia Prescott invites us to think about how we can learn to appreciate and enjoy listening more as we go forward in an environment of social media and increasingly individualised technologies…

Broadcasting means to throw out seeds.  And we don’t always know where these seeds will land or what will grow from them…

A Story Sung: Why Fiction Writers Should Read Poetry

In this article the ideas that Lucas Hunt writes for writers has so much resonance that I have substituted a more universal pronoun to amplify his wisdom for us all…

Any [one] who desires to get at the truth of human experience should read poetry, because it contains a multitude of possibility. Poetry is the mud that grows the seed that becomes the forest. It is the clay that makes the brick that forms the building. It is the blood that moves the body that holds the spirit. Poetry has the essence of life in it.

Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. Much like fiction writers, poets struggle to remember how to make sense of existence. They share a passion for language, and a common, driving need: to imagine the world not just as it is, but how it ought to be.

Poetry tends toward silence…  Poetry aspires to be a song, more than a story, to be lyrically rich. It is also full of primal messages that, somehow, can express the inexpressible. There is more than meets the eye…

And if you enjoy this piece, you might also like to check out:

How To Enjoy Poetry by Maria Popova

“True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than coincidences, into a living entity,” Edward Hirsch advised in his directive on how to read a poem.

But how, exactly, does one cultivate such “true poetic practice”?…

The poet and novelist James Dickey, winner of the National Book Award for his poetry collection Buckdancer’s Choice, offers some timeless and breathtakingly articulated advice…Ultimately, James Dickey champions the enlivening potency of the learn-by-doing approach:

The more your encounter with poetry deepens, the more your experience of your own life will deepen, and you will begin to see things by means of words, and words by means of things.

You will come to understand the world as it interacts with words, as it can be re-created by words, by rhythms and by images.

You’ll understand that this condition is one charged with vital possibilities. You will pick up meaning more quickly — and you will create meaning, too, for yourself and others.

Connections between things will exist for you in ways that they never did before. They will shine with unexpectedness, wide-openness, and you will go toward them, on your own path. ‘Then,’ as Dante says, ‘will your feet be filled with good desire.’ You will know this is happening the first time you say, of something you never would have noticed before, ‘Well, would you look at that! Who’d ‘a thunk it?’ (Pause, full of new light.)

‘I thunk it!’

Not Any Old Pencil

Brazil born, US based artist Dalton Ghetti carves minute masterpieces on the tips of pencils.

Here is some wisdom we can all learn from him by attending to the five things a pencil should never forget:

1) Everything you do will always leave a mark.
2) You can always correct the mistakes you make.
3) What is important is what’s inside you.
4) In life, you will undergo painful sharpenings which will only make you better.
5) To be the best pencil, you must allow yourself to be held and guided by the hand that holds you.

Leading Quietly by Adam Grant

In this talk at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, occupational psychologist Adam Grant begins with a story of his experience building motivation in a call centre.  To improve things, he brings in two very different students who had benefited from the scholarships that these people were trying to raise money for to talk about how their bursary had changed their lives.  The first, Will, a student who was achieving meteoric success, came in and gave a dynamic high-imact presentation.  The average caller who heard Will increased the revenue they raised by 170%.  The second student, Emily, was painfully shy, and could barely get through her words.  But Emily’s effect was 2.5 times stronger than Will’s – leading to a 400% increase in revenue by the people who heard her.  Partly this is because of empathy, her audience really felt for her, but even more it was because of Emily’s authenticity:  her listeners knew she was telling the truth about how important her bursary was because it was clear that she was not speaking to them for any pleasure.

What stood out for me was they never once had to hear from a leader.  And this led me to thinking why do leaders think they have to be the ones who deliver the inspiring messages?  Why is this common sense but not common practice?

He then provides a quick self-assessment for Introversion and Extraversion which is not visible in this video, but most of us will already be familiar with our preferences across this scale.

This site  - Myers Briggs Test – is a helpful place to start to explore your  own preferences if you don’t know whether you are more of an Extravert, Introvert or Ambivert (half-and-half)

Grant tells us that Extraversion is how your neocortex processes stimulation, and helps govern willpower and self control.  Optimal arousal is that point when we are fully engaged, ‘in the zone,’ neither overloaded with too much stuff coming at us, but not getting so little stimulation that we are bored.  This is also the place where we are likely to be happy and flourishing.  A high Extravert preference wants lots of social interaction because that’s what brings stimulation for the neocortex, whereas people will an Introvert preference will be trying to get time to themselves in order to get their version of this same high level of optimal stimulation.

Even though Extraversion-Introversion preferences are cut right in the middle for the whole population, meaning that there are just as many Introverts as Extraverts, a piece of  research in 2009 found that 96% of American leaders score on the attention seeking Extravert side of this continuum, and only 4% below the mid point, and there is no reason to think that results in the UK would be significantly different.

If most leaders are the Extraverts, they feel they need to be the ones in the centre of attention…to be the ones who are delivering the inspiring messages…

When these figures are broken down further they reveal that 50% of supervisors are actually in the top 25% of high Extraversion scores, so are very extraverted, and  this has increased to 80% of top level executives who score at the high end of Extraversion.  For Adam Grant this leads to the question: ‘What are the consequences of this?  Is it good to be an extraverted leader?’

Extraverts, Grant suggests, are great for people who like to have a strong steer, but not at all for more proactive people who have a high degree of initiative and self-sufficiency.  These are the very people that we need most when the environment is turbulent and uncertain.  We know that it is impossible for leaders to recognise all of the problems that might be going on in these conditions.  And these people need Introverts to lead them, but in a more proactive and dynamic way than we might think.  This is not to say that all Introverts lead proactive self-starting people well, but, if they do, they get much better results.

And the evidence suggests that most Extraverts will be leading these people ineffectively.  Extraverted leaders tend to feel threatened by suggestions coming from below, and tend to ignore or reject what their people bring.  This in turn discourages these people and decreases the likelihood of them bringing more suggestions.  Grant’s research found a 28% lower output when people brought their suggestions to an Extravert rather than an Introverted leader.

So maybe there are some benefits to leading in a more Introverted and quiet way…

Grant owns up to being an Introvert.  He was once told that he was so nervous when he spoke that he caused his students to shake in their seats.  As a manager he felt he had to be constantly engaging and became completely exhausted. Introverts that operate at high rates of engagement all the time are at high risk of burnout and ill health.  But he goes on to wonder if ‘sometimes we get trapped into roles more than we meed to…’  Rather than quitting another job he was failing in, Grant did the job of his people were doing and became a salesman for a week, and, even though he was pretty rubbish at it and began by doing very badly, he ended up achieving a reasonable amount of revenue by going out to find new people that were not currently aware of their product.  This stimulated his thinking about whether he needed to be very extraverted in order to be an effective leader.

We can all act outside of our preferred style so long as we get a restorative retreat, a chance to return to the way of being that re-energises and refocuses us – quiet reflection for Introverts, social interaction for Extraverts.

Leading by doing, behavioural integrity, is one way of leading quietly.  When Grant spent time doing the job of the people he managed, he found his words took on far more meaning for people.

Our ‘first nature’ or signature strengths are those ways of being that just feel right, easy, natural for us.  But all of us develop a second nature, an out-of-character role, which we master because it helps us achieve something that we care about.  For Introverts, this is public speaking.  For Extraverts, it might be to do more stepping back, shutting up and listening and accepting others’ ideas and suggestions.

Grant gives us three practical ways forward in his call-to-action for leading more quietly:

1. Spend time actually doing the work of the people you lead.  One expert recommends 10% of your time actually doing the work your employees do.
2. Outsource inspiration.  Just as with the call centre, maybe the ideas about what is really valuable, and thus the inspiration and big ways of motivating people, are better brought by beneficiaries, clients, patients, customers, stakeholders, partners rather than you as the leader.  For example: Facebook engineers regularly get to hear invited users to talk about the actual differences that Facebook has made to their lives.
3. Think about the other 80:20 rule.  Do not talk more than 20% of the time and spend at least 80% of your time really listening to the people around you.  Grant says to remember that ‘I do not learn anything when I am talking’…
   

As an Extravert, myself, I have to say that this is only partially true, because, as an Extravert, talking and thinking are synonymous and I often literally do not know know what I think until I hear myself saying it.  I have great respect for the Introvert’s mystical ability to make fully formed fully considered conclusions without saying anything to anyone, but this is not easily in my gift, but rather something that I have had to develop as a consciously applied ‘second nature’ skill.  But back to Grant:

I’m not going to say that all Extraverts are narcissists but the correlation is positive…

So just as I’ve made myself feel better about my over-talkative style Grant points up the joy of talking for Extraverts, who tend to find listening to themselves talking exactly the happy learning experience I was just defending.  And research has found that the more Extraverts talk, the more they like the group they are with, even saying that the more they talk the more they learn about the other people in the group.  Ouch.

I do recognise wholeheartedly and without any reservation that I do not hear anything when I am talking and this matters.  And I would add to this that we cannot do exceptionally well more than one thing at a time, even if we are woman, so that if I am mostly concentrated on listening, this will be what gets my fullest energy and attention, whereas if I am thinking about what I want to say, it will not, and I will miss important and potentially vital things.

One more idea at the end of this talk caught my interest:  apparently Extraverts are more likely to be optimists and Introverts more pessimist.  But – crucially since realistic optimism is such a critical element of resilience – both optimism and pessimism are largely learned orientations, as we know from, for example, the exercise of spending 21 days writing down what you most appreciate that day which literally rewires the automatic circuitry in our brain and leads to long-lasting levels of increased optimism and positivity.

Susan Cain: Quiet – The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (The RSA)

Susan Cain is one of the people Adam Grant references in his talk about Leading Quietly.  In this talk Cain speaks passionately about the problems that come from the world that we have made that biases the preferences and needs of Extraverts over what Introverts need to be able to flourish:

We set up our workplaces and schools for maximum group interaction and we’re losing sight of the importance of solitude for creativity…  There is no correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas…

We are living in a world that has become so  overly extraverted, so lopsided in that direction, that even extraverts don’t feel they have permission to tap into that side o themselves.

In companies, it has been found that the most effective teams are those that combine Extraverts and Introverts.  The two types are really drawn to each other and need each other.

Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts (TEDTalks)

In her TEDTalk Cain outlines her thesis in more detail and here are some of the things she tells us:

The key to maximising our talents is to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.  And when it comes to creativity we need Introverts doing what they do best.

Introversion is not about being shy, which is fear of social judgement.  Introverts feel most alive and most switched on and most creative when they are in quieter environments.  Not all of the time.  None of these things are absolutes.  There is no such thing as pure Extravert or Introvert, and some of us, now called Ambiverts, actually fall right in the middle.

But now here’s where the bias comes in.  Our world’s most important places, our schools and our workplaces, are designed for extraverts, for stimulation.

And we’re told that creativity comes from an oddly gregarious place.  In schools students sit in pods, face-to-face, are encouraged to work in groups, and the ideal student is said to be outgoing, assertive, extravert, even though, according to research, Introverts get better grades and are more knowledgeable.  At work we are arranged in open plan offices, where we are subject to the constant gaze and noise of our co-workers.  And when it comes to leadership, Introverts are more likely to be passed over when it comes to promotion, even though Introverts are likely to be much more careful, much less likely to take outsized risks, and, as Adam Grant’s research has shown, much more likely to let proactive employees run with their ideas, whereas Extravert leaders are likely to get so excited about things that they end up always putting their own stamp on everything and other people’s ideas have less chance of being able to bubble up to the surface.

Culturally we need a much better yin and yang between these two types, especially when it comes to creativity ad productivity.  When psychologists look at the most creative people they find that these people are very good at exchanging ideas and working with others, but they also have serious strands of introversion in them.  And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient to creativity.  Darwin took long walks in the wood and turned down dinner party invitations.  Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone, and he said that he never would have had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.  And he needed Steve Jobs to get it out into the world.

For centuries we have known about the transcendent powers of solitude.  Only recently have we forgotten it.  Profound epiphanies tend to happen in solitude in the wilderness.

Groups famously follow the best talkers or most charismatic personalities in the room.  They may not have the best ideas.  None of this is to say that we don’t need social skills and teamwork.  In fact the problems we face in the world today are going to need armies of people to come together to solve.  But the more freedom we give Introverts to be themselves the more likely they are to come up with unique solutions to bring to some of these problems.

And here are Susan Cain’s three calls to action:

1. Stop the madness for constant calls to constant group work.  I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging chatty cafe-style spaces for the conversational interactions where people can come together and serendipitously get exchange of ideas that is great for Introverts and Extraverts.  But we need much more time for freedom, autonomy, solitude.
2. Go the wilderness.  Be like Buddha.  Have your own revelations.  Unplug and get inside our own heads more often.
3. Look at what is in your suitcase:  Extraverts – grace us with your joy; Introverts – guard what you have but know that the world needs what you carry with you and have the courage to speak softly.

Altruism & Happiness

Here are some ideas about the value and importance of giving taken from The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubormirsky

Acts of kindness

Altruism—including kindness, generosity, and compassion—are keys to the social connections that are so important to our happiness. Research finds that acts of kindness—especially spontaneous, out-of-the ordinary ones—can boost happiness in the person doing the good deed.

Reasons why acts of kindness make people happier:

• Being generous leads us to perceive others more compassionately; we typically find good qualities in people to whom we are kind
• Being kind promotes a sense of connection and community with others, which is one of the strongest factors in increasing happiness
• Being generous helps us appreciate and feel grateful for our own good fortune
• Being generous boosts our self-image; it helps us feel useful and gives us a way to use our strengths and talents in a meaningful way
• Being kind can start a chain reaction of positivity; being kind to others may lead them to be grateful and generous to others, who in turn are grateful and kind to others

Compassion fosters happiness, but being sacrificial reduces well-being

Being kind and compassionate is linked to greater happiness, greater levels of physical activity well into old age, and longevity. One important caveat: if people get overextended and overwhelmed by helping tasks, as can happen with people who are caregivers to family members, their health and quality of life can rapidly decline. It seems being generous from an abundance of time, money, and energy can promote well-being; but being sacrificial quickly lowers well-being. This seems to be a good argument for communities sharing the burden for everyone’s benefit.

Angela Maiers: People Know They Matter When…

Choose2Matter is a global movement that challenges people to solve problems that break their hearts.

In her article Angela Maiers lists the essential attributes that cause people to know that they matter, and they are all about being quiet, listening and empathetic.  She writes, people know they matter when:

You see them…

You listen earnestly…

You ask meaningful questions…

You believe they can…

You dwell in possibility…

You celebrate them…

You do small things with great love…

You show up…

What a Leader Needs Now: 7 ‘Feminine’ Qualities by Leah Buchanan

These traits, typically associated with women, make for great leaders – whether women or men, writes Leah Buchanan.  How close are these to the capabilities you are trying to develop and master, or, perhaps, to those you are trying to nurture in others?

Empathy: Being sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others.

Vulnerability: Owning up to one’s limitations and asking for help.

Humility: Seeking to serve others and to share credit.

Inclusiveness: Soliciting and listening to many voices.

Generosity: Being liberal with time, contacts, advice, and support.

Balance: Giving life, as well as work, its due.

Patience: Taking a long-term view.

Roman Krznaric – The Six Habits of Highly Empathic People (The RSA)

This theme is explored and continued in this talk about the new importance of nurturing excellence in empathy and how we might start to do this…

The 20th century was the age of introspection.  That was the age in which therapy and self-help told us that the best way to discover who we are and what we are was to look inside ourselves.  And combined with capitalist individualism, that pointed us towards pursuing the good life through self interest and luxury lifestyle.  And what we’ve discovered is that has not delivered the good life for most of us.

So the 21st century needs to be different.  Instead of the Age of  Introspection, we need to shift to the Age of  ’Outraspection’ – discovering who you are and what you are here for by stepping outside yourself, discovering the lives of other people, other civilisations.  And the ultimate artform for the Age of Outraspection is empathy…

In this talk, cultural historian Roman Krznaric sets out his ideas about how the art of empathy can not only enrich our own lives, but also bring about social change, in six habits to try and master:

Habit 1:  Nurture curiosity about strangers.  For example, George Orwell used to dress and live as a homeless person in order to discover and learn.  We have assumptions about people, especially those who seem least like us.  Finding out about what they care about increases not only our compassion, but also our capacity for empathy.

This reminds of Louise Bougeoise’s Instruction: Smile At A Stranger which you can see in Maria Popova’s summary of  Do It: The Coppenedium  by Hans Ulrich Obrist in her

Do It: 20 Years of Famous Artists’ Irreverent Instructions for Art Anyone Can Make

Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities.  Look for what you share rather than what divides us.  For example, white extremist C.P.Ellis co-chaired a group looking at racial problems in schools and discovered a shared sense of oppression from poverty in common with his co-chair, a black civil rights activist.  This resulted in him tearing up his Klu Klux Klan membership card and the two becoming friends for life.

Habit 3: Extreme sport of experiential empathy.  For example, US industrial designer Patricia Moore decided to dress up as an 80 tear old and visited 100 cities to come up with inventions for new products based on her experience.

Habit 4: Practice the art of conversation.  Listening to and sharing ourselves and emotions.  For example, the brass roots peace organisation, Parents Circle which brings together Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost a child for conversation, picnics, sharing stories.  Includes the “Hello Peace” freephone telephone line to be able to speak to someone from the opposite community.

Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change.For example, the anti-slave movement was built on empathy with exhibitions, writing and presentations about what it was like to be a slave by former slaves.

Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination.  Be more adventurous in who you think about and how.  For example, ‘those greedy bankers’ – think about their lives, values and have conversations that help to bridge divides.

Only through high levels of empathy can we start to create social change across time as well as space.  Failing to empathise through time with future generations will be extremely hazardous to all of our futures.

Socrates wrote: Know thyself.  This can also be achieved by stepping outside ourselves and discovering people least like us.

Simon Baron Cohen: Zero Degrees of Empathy (The RSA)

In this talk, psychiatry professor Simon Baron Cohen presents a new way of understanding what it is that leads individuals down negative paths, and challenges all of us to consider replacing the idea of evil with the idea of empathy-erosion. 

He provides a two-dimensional definition for empathy that combines:

Cognitive component – the drive to identify another person’s thoughts and feelings, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes; and

Affective component – the drive to respond with the appropriate emotion to another’s thoughts and feelings, the emotional reaction we bring.

Most of us are in the middle of the normal bell-curve distribution for empathy.  Females score slightly but statistically significantly higher in empathy than males.

Philosopher Martin Buber identified the point you start treating a person as an object is when you switch off empathy:  the “I”  ~  ”You” relationship is switched to “I” – “It.”

This is worth thinking about in our relationships – to what extent do we talk about you and what you feel, think want, need and to what extent do we only talk about the task, what needs to be achieved, the problem, the thing that needs doing…?

John Bowlby argued that early experience makes a major difference, and insecure attachment as child can lead to delinquency, because attachment is key to the formation of empathy.

Baron Cohen’s research is finding that the more testosterone in the womb the more different the empathy reading in the later 8 year old.  This links somewhat with the lower readings of empathy in males.

We know that there is not one part of the brain responsible for empathy, but rather Baron Cohen counts at least ten highly connected parts of the brain that are activated in a highly connected ‘empathy circuit’ when we are being empathetic.

If psychopaths are one example of having no empathy, he asks whether zero degrees of empathy is always bad, and answers “No.”  The condition of Autism tends to cause people who have it to be extremely moral rather than cruel, making them likely to avoid or withdraw from social situations rather than want to harm.  Zero positive means their unusual attention to detail often leads to giftedness.

Evolution suggests that empathy has been positively selected.  In the 1960s Masserman trained rhesus monkeys to learn that when they pulled a chain they would get food.  He then changed this so that, as well as getting food, they also saw another monkey getting an electric shock, and found that they soon stopped pulling the chain that gave them food but hurt another monkey.

Like language and memory, empathy is likely to be influenced by many different components including our culture and our society.

Empathy is the most valuable human resource because it has the power to resolve conflict, either between two individuals – or extended to two nations – empathy allows us to understand the other’s point of view.  Empathy is cheaper and more successful than either military or legal solutions.

Disruptive Happiness: Mario Chamorro at TEDxWilliamsburg

For a wonderful creative illustration of these ideas in action see Mario talking about his enterprise, The Happy Post Project, an initiative that in less than 2 years has reached millions of people in over 30 countries, and today continues to spread happiness all over the world.

Most recently, Mario founded Make it Happy, an organisation devoted to the generation and support of positive social change, by creating projects that spread and inspire happiness, while cultivating a grassroots network of social innovators.

Sunnie Toelle: The Happiness Tipping Point

In this article Toelle looks back over the rapid recent advances in the various disciplines that put happiness at their centre and wonders…

Some fascinating and potentially powerful happiness-related frameworks and initiatives exist on multiple levels and across geographic regions. Happiness matters for many reasons, but most of all, because business as usual is leading to a staggering increase in mental disorders, mental health costs and a massive loss of human potential. Arguably, it should therefore become a key agenda item in boardroom meetings and at policy roundtables. Yet, it remains to be seen who and what will hit off the tipping point.

And for some advice about creativity, making art and living the life you want, see these ideas in

Austin Kleon on 10 Things Every Creator Should Remember But We Often Forget by Maria Popova

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use — do the work you want to see done.

Here is a link to this week’s entire Happiness At Work which includes more ideas linked to these themes in my reflections about what made the Beyond Glorious Symposium so exceptional in my piece:

Beyond Glorious – what made this symposium so very special and extraordinary

Enjoy your week – especially its softer moments that we really hope you will be able to hold gently open…

Sheila Ghelani’s conversation starters: http://sheilaghelani.co.uk

Beyond Glorious: the radical in engaged artistic practices

Thursday 30 May to Sunday 2 June 2013, Birkbeck College and Artsadmin, London

What is the place of art in acts of social re-imagination and repair?
What languages can be found to articulate such practices?
Is it possible to break new ground within the realm of engaged artistic practices?

This symposium marked the end of Rajni Shah Projects’ Glorious.  It brought together people from different spheres of life to discuss and experience the meanings, methods and effects of art in relation to engaged and radical practices.  Using Glorious as a starting point, events explored the potential of engaged artistic practices, not in terms of a reductive understanding of the ‘efficacy’ of art in the world, but as a complicating, delicate, nuanced, uneasy journey towards new ways of thinking.

What to say to capture and keep for memory about an event that lived and breathed through its quiet gentle generous friendliness?

Not just this.  This makes it sound too much like a tea party.  Which it was.  Its tea-and-cakeness was a vital part of its spirit and its lightness.  But it was so very very much more as well.

One of the symposium’s central questions explicitly tried to open out this difficulty of expressing the intangible, articulated in the question What remains?

Elizabeth Lynch (independent producer and external evaluator for Glorious), Mary Paterson (writer, producer, creative documentation for Glorious), Sarah Spanton (Waymarking), and

Chloé Déchery (theatre-maker, writer, co- artistic director of ÉCLATS Festival) opened a series of conversations around questions about what and who matters, needs to be held up and out in testament to show the worth and value out of work that makes and finds its intrinsic liveness in quiet nearly invisible and usually disregarded moments of connection, relationship, insight, inhalation.

From this session I remember the word ‘traces’ being important – as something slight and nearly gone that remains after the rest of its bulk has disintegrated, and also as something that we might use as a guide to trace out a new form from what has been left for us to follow.  We talk about when something is ‘gone without a trace’ but in doing so somehow keep still a trace of what it was that has gone.  But these subtle nuances are badly unequal to these shout-y times of unquestioning demands and unambiguous agendas.

I remember, too, the question: who gets to decide the value and worth of what was done? and I remember thinking, and am thinking still, this must be the people we hoped to bring some value and worth to, to make something that they find valuable and worthwhile.  And worrying that too seldom we go to these people to ask and listen to to decide the worth of what we have done.

But these are big questions that took the concentration of this whole symposium, as well as the work of Glorious itself, as well – as I discovered through this event – as well as a great deal more work that is being made quietly and unchampioned out there in the world amongst its peoples.  These are questions too big for this piece to try and sensibly answer.

Start again.

What I am remembering still about this experience are moments of easy unexpected encounter that tumbled joyfully out from alert interest and invitation and into depths and diversity of conversation.

I remember the warm friendliness and easy friendly warmth that was begun and renewed each day by Rajni waiting at the gate, or the outside door, to greet and welcome people as they arrived.  When I joined her in this quiet ritual for the last brunch event I discovered for myself how personal, charged and engaged this made me feel.  A small act done with great love that I am convinced sent out a ripple of similar welcomings and greetings across the whole event.

I remember the repeated joy of surprise encounters.  Sometimes these came from extended conversations with the people I was working alongside to make the backroom support.  Sometimes this was a stranger asking me to join them for lunch and drawing me lightly into their conversation.  Sometimes it was the joyful ‘aha’ of hearing the wisdom of another’s experience or the sharp brightness of their questioning inside the sessions.  What made these encounters so exceptional was their unusualness – I seldom have this same experience at other events – and their frequency.  I don’t believe it was my Glorious team member’s badge that made the difference, but rather that a mood and expectation and curiosity and readiness for surprising encounters that was woven through the DNA of this whole event: in its themes and its processes and its design and in the behaviours and values if its makers.  You get what you go looking for and something was in the water we were all drinking at this symposium that made us all more heads up, eyes open, ears widened…

I remember too the luxury of space…

…the space of time from 2hour sessions and 2hour lunch breaks with local restauranteurs who greeted us like they knew us and made us feel this meal would be special.  This elongated time that allowed for an unfolding discovery of dialogue rather than the more usual forced smash of ideas through too little time, too tight an agenda, too squeezed a set of objectives and expectations;

…the space and spaces made by questions that created openings and extensions rather than the more usual objectives that push for reductive thinking and positioning, driving and herding us into conclusions and certainties (as if there could be any, but how often are we asked, anyway, to just let go of our intelligent beliefs that our situations and ambitions are way too complex to carry the heavyweight load of certainty?);

…the physical space of being able to inhabit different spaces, to choose a session that involved walking after lunch each day, to, at any time, come into the coffee-always-ready-and-several-varieties-of-tea-room to sit, take time out, chill, or make your own conversations.

I remember, too, and maybe this above all else, how all the espoused values we, as the company, and we, as this makeshift community, were championing, advocating, advancing were every bit in evidence in the practice and experience of this event:  qualities of generosity and friendliness and inclusion and welcome and giving and gifts and relationship and exceptional experience at every moment and being fully present in every moment…  all these qualities were alive and active.  This is rare, and, sadly, it is a kind of truism that whatever is held to be most important for the people we work to benefit, we are least likely to be doing well for ourselves.

There is something more to say about this symposium, and this about the depth and range and interrogation of the inquiries that were the thread and weave of this symposium.  I have so far, perhaps, made it seem like a collusive gathering of the smug and complacent.  But its questions and the responses people bought were challenging and original.  And the provocations that started each day were provoking, not in a way that antagonised or tore at us, but rather they invited a kind of positive disruption, nudging us to think bigger, better, wider, more keenly.

One of the symposium’s most difficult acts to pull off – and that it did is further testament to its great success – was that many of its participants came without any prior knowledge or experience of  Glorious, the project on which it was built, and yet in conversation after conversation there seemed to me an equal sense of ownership and involvement and engagement and trust and uncertainty in the material, irrespective of how much immersion in Glorious you came with.

So my learning to take away in a memo to ourselves:

…continue, when preparing events, to devote time and creativity and care and minute attention to what will help to make a great experience for the people who will come.  Because, just as we have always believed, this matters immensely, and, because we might just dip into believing that we are already doing this enough.  And this experience has shown me that there is much more that is simple and wonderful that we could be doing.

A note: lest I seem to be bragging intolerably about this event I should say that I take no credit for its many successes.  I was there and helped to make it work, yes, but the things that it made it so very special and exceptional belong to a whole team who made it and especially the people who imagined and led it.  And, yes, to Rajni herself for the light gifted way she held it and us so potently open.

A beautiful bespoke publication that contains Mary Patterson’s  exquisite reveries about Glorious, and Elizabeth Lynch’s storytelling consideration of what Glorious achieved for the people who inhabited it, as well as two films made in response to Glorious - Becky Edmunds‘ collaged palimpsest made from different shows, and Lucy Cash’s Six Actions:

Dear Stranger, I love you

the ethics of community in Rajni Shah Projects’ Glorious

Andrew McAfee: What Will Future Jobs Look Like (TEDTalk)

It’s tough to make predictions – especially about the future… Yogi Berra

Growing up in the 1960′s and 1970′s, when computers first began to be used in businesses, I can remember being told that the biggest challenge our generation would face would be what to do with all of our leisure time.  Because automation was going to free from us from so many things, we would have a ridiculous surfeit of our own time to do whatever we liked with.  Well, until now, I and the millions of others  who have been unsuccessfully trying to chase down an ever-increasing To Do List and get back any pretence of being even slightly in control as much as I have thought “well ha bloody ha!”

But could it be this prophecy at last be within reach of becoming true?

This is exactly what economist Andrew McAfee is claiming that this TEDTalk.

In the world that we are creating very quickly, we are going to see more and more things that look like science fiction and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs.

He admits that people have been wrongly warning of technology-induced unemployment since the Luddites smasked the looms 200 years ago, but says that what is different about now is that our machines have just started doing things they have never ever done before:

…understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing.  And they are still acquiring new skills…and the day is not too far off when we are going to have androids doing a lot of the jobs that we are doing now.

The world that we’re creating is going to involve more and more technology and less and less jobs, but this is great news he tells us.

…the best economic news that we have these days is that the New Machine Age will free us from drudgery and toil…

Just what we were told 35 years ago.  But maybe, just maybe the future is actually here this time…

This is a time of great flourishing for inventors, innovators and artists who are able to do things with less constraints than ever before…  we are in an astonishing time…

McFee is not concerned about dystopian fears that our machines will rise up to overwhelm and enslave us.  Or, at least, not ‘until my computer becomes aware of my printer…’

The societal challenge he thinks we do need to be thinking about is that, since the computerisation began in our work in the 1960′s, the gap has steadily widened between what work provides for people with college education, so-called white collar workers, and the life that non-college educated so-called blue-collar or low skill workers can make.  And these trends are now becoming so severe that they show signs of overwhelming any of last century’s civil rights achievements:

We have to do better than this.

We see some green shoots that things are getting better.  We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones.  We see business leaders telling us we need to rethink some of things that we have been holding dear for a while.  And we see very serious and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have…  But I don’t want to pretend for a moment that what we have will be enough…

My biggest anxiety is that we are going to have brilliant technologies embedded in a kind of shabby society and supported by an economy that supports inequalities instead of opportunity…

But I don’t believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or become too hard-headed or apathetic to even try…

If we are going to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance it can only be by the tireless improvement of all or our means of technical production.

Winston Churchill

Yet, the fundamental tasks at which computers and human brains excel, the vastly different design underlying each, and the brain’s remarkable ability to learn and adapt has always set them poles apart — until now.

By bringing together the recent advances in neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology, we’re at the beginning stages of creating cognitive machines: inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the organic brain.

This week I  have been questioning how much these days, if in fact at all, we are mindful to try and learn from the past.

I recognise the superabundance of history that we get – our television has perhaps never been so rich with re-creations, re-imaginations, re-enactments, re-stagings and other styles of historical re-tellings.  But I have been wondering how much this exists as a kind of wonderful-story product, something to know and enjoy as a distant and effectively fictionalised aspect of ourselves with little relevance or practical application to our fabulously enlightened and self-actualised lives today.

The childhood, adolescence and early adulthood I remember growing up was laden with ominous lessons from recent and more distant history.  We were taught to be vigilant against the horrors and oppressions of war and tyranny and to distrust any form didacticism, whether political or religious.  And we grew up in a tense spreadeagled balance between our fear of nuclear catastrophe along one dimension, and in the other, fiercely determined in the headstrong battles we fought to force out a kinder more equal world: feminism, black and ethnic minority rights and gay, lesbian and transgender activism.

And in a great many of these ambitions we have been successful and the world we wanted is the world we now have.

So what can history teach us now?  Do we believe that we have now transcended anything that we could ever need or expect to learn from our past.  Are we so arrogant to think that our world and lives now are so far removed and evolved from any of our previous iterations, that from here on in we are walking blind and will just have to make it up as we go along?  If so, why then do we seem to be doggedly and dogmatically banging down our old solutions that seem to me to have been conceived and designed for a previous time for a now outmoded set of circumstances?

George Papandreou: Imagine A European Democracy Without Borders (TEDTalk)

I am not the only one with an interest in looking back as a way of looking optimistically forward.  In this TEDTalk George Papandreou, the former Greek Prime Minister, invites us to remember the conditions and aspirations of the original democracy of Ancient Greece…

He talks about how mastery over our own fates was a discovery, a revelation to the Ancient Greeks and how this liberated us from the fear of being always subject to the whims of the gods or despots.  This was also the time that many of our modern ideas about happiness were invented, where we chose to see happiness as eudaimonia, wellbeing, more about the rewards of living a good life, living well and less down to happenstance, luck, whatever the gods chucked at us.

Bringing some of the insights that he has found though his reflections since leaving office, his story of what has happened in recent years, not just in Greece but across the whole of Europe and even across the globe, points up some of the deeper problems and complexities that we are all facing but not yet approaching with 21st century intelligence, collaboration and creativity.  Our problems, he tells us, are not so much of economics as they are of democracy itself.  We are, he suggests, responding with too much of a knee-jerk reactionary panic to an overbearing sense of subserviance to the market’s power and, as a consequence, destroying people’s belief and trust in democracy, just as happened centuries ago in Ancient Greece:

Democracies are once again facing a moment of truth…

Greece is only a symptom in the wider vulnerabilities of the system, vulnerabilities of our democracies.

Our democracies are trapped by systems to big to fail.  Or, more accurately, too big to control.

Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, that evade taxes, evade environmental or labour standards.

Our democracies are undermined and constrained by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth, lobbies, corruption, the speed of the markets, or simply the fear of  an impending disaster.  And this has constrained the capacity to imagine and use the potential of  the collective for finding solution.

Greece was only a preview of what is in store…

He talks about how the group of leaders who met to solve the crisis in Greece shared a common ignorance of never having had to deal with these circumstances before, but that this ignorance led to fear and panic-led decisions and actions rather than anything like the creativity and innovation that can be born when the people around the table acknowledge their not-knowing and use this energy and honesty to forge brand new ideas and possibilities for action.

They used dogma and determinism when they would have been better to orient themselves with the sense and capabilities of creativity and learning and dialogue –  to look for and find meaning through conversation rather than defend an existing position, what Papandreous calls

…the blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity.  Instead of reaching out to the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing.

And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn’t bring an end to the crisis…

But this could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex cross-border problems, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s migration, whether it’s the financial system.  This is abandoning our collective power to imagine, falling victim to our fears, our stereotypes, our dogmas.  Taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens…

It’s no wonder that our political leaders, and I don’t excuse myself, have lost the trust of our people…

He says the reason he called for a referendum was because, before trust and confidence in the markets could be restored, it was necessary to restore trust and confidence in our people:

If politics is the power to re-imagine our problems, then 60% youth unemployment in Greece, and across other countries in Europe, is certainly a lack of imagination, as well as compassion.

His call-to-action is to:

…see how we can throw democracy at the problem.  The Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd.  ’In people we trust.’  Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating and debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs.

Average citizens were often chosen for citizen juries who decide on critical matters of the day.

Science, theatre, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body – these were a daily exercise.  Actually they were an education for participation, for growing the potential of our citizens…

The term ‘idiot‘ originated in Ancient Greece, coming from the term ‘idio‘ meaning self, a person excluded, self-centred, someone who doesn’t participate or even examine public affairs…

Today we have globalised our markets but we have not globalised our democratic institutions…

How do we secure the demos, the space, the platform of values so that we can tap into all of your potential?

Citing Europe as already the most successful peace experiment ever achieved, he then makes the challenge that Europe might also be an equally successful new pan-nation experiment of global democracy, offering and even greater citizenship across its regions where they can come up with creative solutions, where our common identity is democracy and our common value is participation.

Today I will talk to you about the failure of leadership in our western democracies.  And I will not provide any feel-good ready-made solutions.  But I will in the end urge you to re-think, take risks and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy.  Because I believe the failure of democracy is that we have taken you out of the process…

At the end of this talk he tells us:

I have been, and am, part of Europe’s political system.  And believe me, I know: things must change.

We must revive politics as the power to re-imagine and re-design for a better world.

But I also know that this disruptive change won’t be driven by the politics of today.  The revival of democratic politics will come from you.  And I mean all of you. Everyone who stands up…

See also these articles about the links between resilience and the collective…

Governments shirk their responsibilities in the name of ‘resilience’

Those with power and resources may be able to engage with and influence resilience agendas. Vulnerable people and communities may find themselves significantly affected by the retreat of the state and the steady erosion of the services they once provided.

In an age of uncertainty where the complexity and global reach of our social, economic and environmental systems can deliver what are claimed to be unavoidable shocks, the idea of self-made resilience has found a welcoming political home.  The impact of this widespread acceptance needs to be very carefully considered however.  Bouncing back or adapting is not better than avoiding risk in the first place.

Prevention is better than cure.

Resilience in trying times — a result of positive actions

Communities that stick together and do good for others cope better with crises and are happier for it, according to a new study by John Helliwell, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and colleagues. Their work suggests that part of the reason for this greater resilience is the fact that humans are more than simply social beings, they are so-called ‘pro-social’ beings. In other words, they get happiness not just from doing things with others, but from doing things both with and for others…

Artistry: 

U3: The 7th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia. Resilience

20 June–29 September 2013

In recent years the concept of resilience has grown out of the global trend of developing sustainability in the societies of the global North.

In natural sciences or physics, a resilient body is described as flexible, durable, and capable of springing back to its original form and transforming the energy received into its own reconstruction (a good example of this is the sponge).

In psychology, resilience refers to the subject’s ability to recover their original state relatively quickly after some significant stress or shock and continuing with the processes of self-realization without a major setback.

Resilience is more than just the ability to adapt, promoted by the concept of the flexible subject over the past two decades, which was adopted by corporate capitalism and triggered the precarious mass movement of labourers.

Resilience encompasses exploring reciprocal codependence and finding one’s political and socio-ecological place in a world that is out of balance and creates increasingly disadvantageous living conditions. Rather than trying to find global solutions for some indefinite future or projecting a possible perfect balance, resilient thinking focuses on the diversity of practical solutions for the here and now, and on the cooperation and creativity of everyone involved in a community or society.

The 7th Triennial of Contemporary Art in Slovenia gives prominence to practices that can be seen as analogous to the concept of resilience, i.e. community-oriented, site-specific, participatory, performative, architectural, social, civic and other discursive practices exploring new (or revived) community principles, such as the “do-it-together,” urban gardening, and co-working, as well as the fundamental social question of how we coexist. Blending work and everyday life forms the basis of new economic, ethical, and production principles that the younger generation of artists uses to transform the role of the creative subject in contemporary Slovenian society…

This week we have also discovered the artist: Suli Breaks.  Highly recommended:  We think his spoken word videos are truly exceptional and really reward tuning into…

I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate||Spoken Word

Hear his articulate urgent voice about the world we have made and its consequences.  This is the video that is getting a lot of online attention.

The American’T Dream (The Purse Suit Of Happyness)||Spoken Word

For a more gentle and perhaps more optimistic here is his potent relevant vital Spoken Word video about living the life you care about.

Engaging Kids Today

Dan Haesler, a teacher, writer, speaker and consultant who’s worked with governments on education initiatives, says that teachers and parents need to be clear about what they mean by the term ‘engagement’.

According to Haesler, too many adults understand ‘engaged’ to mean occupying “the attention or efforts of a person”. This may be correct but it’s far too limiting. Yes, kids today are definitely occupied. There’s even the phenomenon now of the ‘hurried child’ whose calendar is filled with back-to-back commitments. Haesler wonders though if this is the best we can do. His much-preferred definition of ‘engaged’ is to “genuinely attract and hold the attention of our kids”.

This is the definition he wants us all to consider, “the sense of living a life high in interest, curiosity, and absorption. Engaged individuals pursue goals with determination and vitality,” he says…

Daniel Suarez: The Kill Decision Shouldn’t Belong To A Robot (TEDTalk)

‘No Robot should be allowed expectations of privacy in a public space…’

Science-fiction writer, Daniel Suarez – insisting that he is not talking fiction but facts here – says that we already have fully autonomous combat drones that can make lethal decisions about humans ‘all on their own‘ – having a human being in the loop is a choice not a requirement.  How might this change our social landscape he asks, and provides a brief tour of war history from the knights in armour through to the canon and on to the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that we have been living with for more than a century now.  70 nations are now preparing their autonomous combat robots, and he argues we must develop global agreements that build our immunity to these machines rather escalate conflicts before it is too late and we are already in the maze…

From fitness to wellness: OMsignal’s smart shirts measure your motion … and emotion

A host of fitness tracking tech is currently on the market allowing users to measure and monitor their daily activities, heart rate, exercise intensity and even how much they sweat.

 But what about your emotional state? Montreal-based smart apparel company OMsignal has developed a T-shirt and a bra that not only tracks your daily steps, calorie burn and heart rate, but it also measures your breathing and emotional well-being using your heart rate variability, or HRV.

OMsignal started to work on a wellness wearable in 2011 after the team members initially designed a fitness bracelet in 2008. The goal was to access a greater body footprint — to get deeper data — and then to extract more meaningful signals and generate more meaningful insights.

Those insights have a lot to do with stress. CEO Marceau — who’s a high-energy, passionate, excitable person — has been practicing mindful breathing for a long time. With an active, busy lifestyle plus the stresses of a startup, he needs the chill factor, and needs the health benefits.

Especially the benefits of mindful breathing — even when you’re not exercising.

“With breathing, you control your stress,” says OMsignal’s chief medical officer, Stéphane Borreman — who is not only an emergency room physician but also a mechanical engineer. “Good breathing can make overall better balance in terms of the nervous system.”

All of which means that OMsignal’s apparel doesn’t just count your calories or tally up your steps for the day. It helps you understand how you are feeling, and why … it measures your emotional state.

Happiness At Work #50 – this week’s new collection

See this week’s full collection for these and many more stories, not just under this Future Is Now heading, but also across our usual spread of stories about happiness & personal flourishing, resilience & wellbeing, creativity & artistry, learning & leadership…

Our lead story this week is Judy Martin’s compelling Work, Stress, Bliss Manifesto and The Third Metric, a rousing urgent call to action to remedy our ailing organisations and the world we are making for ourselves before it is too late.  We really recommend you read her superb article in full, but here are some extracts we have taken from it…

Work, Stress, Bliss Manifesto and The Third Metric

Employee Happiness as a Business Tool [infographic]

…employee happiness affects the productivity of the workplace, and the overall feelings that employees have about their work. Fixing issues that make employees unhappy can turn the productivity of a workplace around, and can ultimately save a doomed business. When looking for jobs, I will definitely look at the environment of my future employers to see if it is a place that I will feel happy in…

This is your brain on happy: Machine can read your emotions

Maggie Fox, NBC News

Carnegie Mellon University Brain scans show a person who is happy, left, and sad. Researchers used fMRI to image emotional states of the brains of 10 volunteers.

Researchers have figured out how to read your mind and tell whether you are feeling sad, angry or disgusted – all by looking at a brain scan.

The experiment, using 10 acting students, showed people have remarkably similar brain activity when experiencing the same emotions. And a computer could predict how someone was feeling just by looking at the scan…

You are what you think

By Bob Bailly

To put it simply, neurons that fire together wire together and survive. Our brains are being wired moment by moment and then pruned according to use. We become what we do and think.

This ability to wire our brains has been called neuroplasticity. Think of it as use it or lose it. Alexander Luria, a famous Russian psychologist who studied fundamental systems of the brain, discovered in the early part of the 20th century that damaged brains can be retrained through repetition. In a sense you grow your brain through exercise, both mental and physical, with results similar to exercising. By stressing your muscles, they strengthen and grow; by stressing your brain it too will grow in response to the stress…

I would argue that the incredible number of hours spent by many kids today with new technology is also having an effect on their brain development. I’m just not sure whether it is positive or negative. Assuming the mind can control the brain, we need to be careful what we think and do…

How is your emotional intelligence doing? Interview from Época Negócios

For over 15 years, American-born expert Joshua Freedman has been dedicated to putting the concept of emotional intelligence into practice. He is one of the professionals responsible for the Six Seconds EQ Certification Training, which bridges the gap between the concept of emotional intelligence and the real life of people and businesses.  The concept of emotional intelligence was first popularized by the American psychologist Daniel Goleman, in the 90s…

In the following decade, the 2000s, was the time to try and figure out how it works. Now, in the third decade, we are applying the concept. There are many projects and people finding different ways to take advantage of emotional intelligence. Our ambition is that by the year 2039, one billion people will be practicing the techniques of emotional intelligence.

There are several approaches to emotional intelligence. In the Six Seconds method, the primary practice consists of three steps:

1. Become more aware of what you feel and your reactions in the present moment.

2. Enjoy the opportunity to decide, consciously, how you will respond to situations rather than react impulsively.

3. Take into account your major goals and ensure that your answers are in alignment with those goals.

In summary, the three steps are: feelings, options, goals. If people practice this process they will be using their emotional intelligence to create better results. At each meeting, in negotiations, decision making, on a daily basis…

Creative freelancers: who’s sitting round your table?

Just because you don’t work in an office doesn’t mean you don’t have colleagues. Gather your network, says Juliet Simmons

“Are you leaning in?” Thanks to Sheryl Sandberg, today’s working women are mulling over a question that often seems to focus on the need to work harder and faster. But if you just step back or dig a little deeper, you’ll find that it’s not all about the hours that you put in – it’s also about taking advantages of the people and opportunities that come your way…

As Jonathan Saffran Foer recently wrote in the New York Times: “Everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.”

At the heart of The Table and its success and growth is a realisation that in this technology-filled world, it’s human face-to-face contact and connections that help you in life. The Table is about connecting with smart creative people, realising that there’s a bit of smart and creative in all of us, and that we need others to fulfil that potential…

Community Bonding Protects Your Happiness in Times of Stress

Emerging research suggests that social cohesion across communities can help others cope better with crises, and improve happiness among individuals.

Economist Dr. John Helliwell and colleagues from the University of British Columbia in Canada believe this shows that part of the reason for this greater resilience is the fact that humans are more than simply social beings, they are so-called “pro-social” beings.

In other words, they get happiness not just from doing things with others, but from doing things both with and for others…

In the study, researchers reviewed the relative roles of social capital and income as determinants of happiness.

They discovered that countries in economic transition show the power of social trust, i.e., the belief that generally speaking, most people can be trusted. Social trust is an indicator of the quality of a country’s social capital, which increases happiness directly but also permits a softer landing in the face of external economic shocks.

The authors wrap up the paper with a look at the power of human nature and the suggestion that the core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans…

Are we caught in a happy trap?

by Jill Stark

Happy ever after: We want it for ourselves, we want it for our kids, and we want it now. But what if everything we know about happiness is a lie? What if the relentless pursuit of pleasure is in fact making us miserable?

A growing number of psychologists and social researchers now believe that the ”feel-good, think positive” mindset of the modern self-help industry has backfired, creating a culture where uncomfortable emotions are seen as abnormal. And they warn that the concurrent rise of the self-esteem movement – encouraging parents to shower their children with praise – may be creating a generation of emotionally fragile narcissists.

Some therapists believe this positivity obsession is partly to blame for rising rates of binge drinking, drug use and obesity. The more that genuine contentment eludes us, the more we seek to fill the gap with manufactured highs. But as we try to anaesthetise feelings of sadness, failure and disappointment, our rates of depression and anxiety continue to climb.

“So many people now think, ‘If I’m not happy, there’s something wrong with me.’ We seem to have forgotten that feelings are like the weather – changing all the time; it’s as normal to feel unhappy as it is to have rainy days,” said Russ Harris, a British-born Australian doctor and author of The Happiness Trap, in which he argues popular wisdom on happiness is misleading and destined to make you miserable. “Increasingly people are developing anxiety about their anxiety and dissatisfaction about their dissatisfaction. Painful emotions are increasingly seen as unnatural and abnormal and we refuse to accept that we can’t always get what we want. This sets you up for a struggle with reality, because the things that make life rich and full – developing a meaningful career, or building an intimate relationship, or raising children – do not just give you good feelings, they also give you plenty of pain.”

Carol Dweck urges parents to talk to their children not just about their victories but their struggles. Like Harris, she maintains that accepting setbacks and unpleasant emotions, rather than trying to block them out, is the key to building resilience. “Research has shown the great successes are people who are able to endure long periods of tedious work to accomplish what they want. If we’re taught things should be effortless – we should be happy all the time, everything should be exciting and interesting – we’re at a great disadvantage. Struggle should be something that’s valued, not something that we view as being just for incompetent people” …

“We have to nurture our relationships, our engagements with other people, our responsibility for other people’s wellbeing – that’s what nurtures community, and we are sustained by those communities. If we’re just going for the easy emotional stuff or the materialist stuff this is actually bad for the life of our community because it nurtures self indulgence, self-centredness and competitiveness,” says Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay. “If we focus only on happiness we’re neglecting the richness of the full emotional spectrum and we’re overlooking the fact that you couldn’t make sense of happiness if you didn’t know sadness.”

New Zealand psychologist Chris Skellett knows this only too well. His book, When Happiness Is Not Enough, explores how a fulfilling life can only be achieved by balancing being happy in the moment, with a drive towards longer term goals.

He speaks from a position of tragic, lived experience. Last month, his 21-year-old son Henry died suddenly and unexpectedly. Whilst coping with overwhelming grief, his understanding of the importance of the full range of human emotions has never been greater…

Clinical Psychologist Chris Skellett talks about his book When Happiness Is Not Enough -
Balancing pleasure and achievement in your life.

Four top tips for better sleep and improved workplace performance

In his book, Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired, Professor Till Roenneberg discusses the research he’s done into sleep patterns and the impact they have on personal performance.

Social jet lag, as Roenneberg refers to it, occurs when the body clock is out of synch with the rhythms we’re being asked to comply with, whether they be family routines, school or office life. This doesn’t only make peak performance challenging, it can also have a negative impact on how we eat, how we exercise and even how we are able to make changes in our lives – the ability to give up smoking is one surprising example he cites – so it’s something we should all make an effort to take account of, both for ourselves and to help those we live and work with.

So what can you do if you’re at risk from social jet-lag? Here are some tips that we’ve found can make a positive difference…

Study: Reading novels makes us better thinkers

New research says reading literary fiction helps people embrace ambiguous ideas and avoid snap judgments

BY TOM JACOBS

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”…

“The thinking a person engages in while reading fiction does not necessarily lead him or her to a decision,” they note. This, they observe, decreases the reader’s need to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Furthermore,” they add, “while reading, the reader can stimulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release—of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own—may produce effects of opening the mind.”

The researchers have no idea how long this effect might last. But their discovery that it is stronger in frequent readers suggests such people may gradually become programmed to respond in this way. “It is likely that only when experiences of this kind accumulate to reach some critical mass would they lead to long-term changes of meta-cognitive habits,” they write.

Their results should give people “pause to think about the effect of current cutbacks of education in the arts and humanities,” Djikic and her colleagues add. After all, they note, while success in most fields demands the sort of knowledge gained by reading non-fiction, it also “requires people to become insightful about others and their perspectives.”

If their conclusions are correct, that all-important knowledge can be gained by immersing yourself in a work of literature. There’s no antidote to black-or-white thinking like reading “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

How Do Artists Differ From Bank Officers?

By Scott Barry Kaufman

…the more research I conduct on this topic, the more I become convinced there really are a particular set of personal characteristics that distinguish people in creative professions, as well as people who are making innovative and valuable contributions in their respective fields (whatever the field)…

Consider a hot off the press study just published in Creativity Research Journal. Edward Necka and Teresa Hlawacz recruited 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers in Poland, and administered a variety of tests of temperament and divergent thinking (one component of creativity requiring the ability to generate many different possibilities). How did the artists differ from the bank officers? …

Socrates Teaching The Humanities

Why Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering Freshmen

By John Horgan

The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day.

But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves. They also tell us that every single human is unique, different than every other human, and each of us keeps changing in unpredictable ways. The societies we live in also keep changing–in part because of science and technology! So in certain important ways, humans resist the kind of explanations that science gives us.

The humanities are more about questions than answers, and we’re going to wrestle with some ridiculously big questions in this class. Like, What is truth anyway? How do we know something is true? Or rather, why do we believe certain things are true and other things aren’t? Also, how do we decide whether something is wrong or right to do, for us personally or for society as a whole?

Also, what is the meaning of life? What is the point of life? Should happiness be our goal? Well, what the hell is happiness? And should happiness be an end in itself or just a side effect of some other more important goal? Like gaining knowledge, or reducing suffering?

Each of you has to find your own answer to these questions. Socrates, one of the philosophers we’re going to read, said wisdom means knowing how little you know. Socrates was a pompous ass, but there is wisdom in what he says about wisdom…

12 Ways to Spark Your Creativity

The Creative You

Everyone is born creative.

The boxes of crayons in kindergarten were not limited to those who possessed potential; because the truth is, everybody has potential.

People appear to have the delusion that only a few are capable of creative genius. This is one of life’s biggest myths.

The truth is, creativity is very much like a muscle; everyone has the ability, but some people don’t practice it because they don’t believe they are capable.

You know this isn’t true.

If you’ve tried to create something in the past and it didn’t work out, maybe it’s because you were trying too hard.

Creativity is a matter of doing, not a process of thinking. Learn to be spontaneous to be able to bring ideas to fruition, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Here are some ways you can unleash the creativity within yourself…

How That Cup Of Coffee Could Be Inhibiting Your Creativity

Annie Murphy Paul: The Brilliant Blog

We often think of artists and writers as fueling their creative process with endless cups of coffee (as well as other substances). But, writes Maria Konnikova on the New Yorker‘s “Elements” blog, all that caffeine may actually inhibit creativity…

“While caffeine has numerous benefits, it appears that the drug may undermine creativity more than it stimulates it…

According to a recent review of some hundred studies, caffeine has a number of distinct benefits. Chief among them are that it boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration.

But all of that comes at a cost. Science is only beginning to unravel the full complexity behind different forms of creative accomplishment; creativity is notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting, and the choice of one approach over another limits the way that creativity can be measured. Still, we do know that much of what we associate with creativity—whether writing a sonnet or a mathematical proof—has to do with the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways. This ability depends in part on the very thing that caffeine seeks to prevent: a wandering, unfocussed mind…

Dimming the lights can increase your creativity by making you feel ‘free from constraints’

• People in dim light are better at solving creative insight problems

• Those in normal light are no more creative than those in bright light

• And we can become more creative just by thinking about being in dim light

German researchers found that people sitting in dim light are significantly better able to solve creative insight problems than those working under normal or bright lights.

However, people working under normal lights are no more creative than those in very bright light.

They also discovered that people who work under dim lights feel ‘free from constraints’.

The researchers, at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Hohenheim, believe that this perceived increase in freedom improves people’s creative performance.

Medical Daily reports that a person can actually increase their creativity just by describing sitting in the dark because of a psychological effect known as priming – this occurs when a person moves an idea to the forefront of their brain by recalling it…

This near darkness, near silence

Author: Tim Etchells

I am still sitting in the auditorium. Looking forwards. I can’t see so much at all. The backs of people’s heads maybe. And the volume of the stage space hardly looms in the quiet and the darkness. All the lights are off. Did I mention that already? I don’t think so.

It’s the first space of imagining, isn’t it? This near darkness, near silence. Something foundational about it – at least from the Christian creation story of course. First darkness, then light. But without the exit signs. And in our own lives, the experience of darkness must be pretty much foundational…

Darkness as a space of social isolation. Lying there you’re aware of your own isolation. Hearing the rest of the house or the apartment continue as you lie there. Remember there is no silence – sleep as the state that wills silence into being, demands or imposes silence…

In the Forced Entertainment performance Bloody Mess John Rowley bids the audience “Close your eyes”. He is trying to explain to the darkness at the beginning of the world. Close your eyes.

The other space of imagining – close your eyes.

“Close your eyes”.

Because for some reason story state, story place, is close to the state or place of sleep. The habit of reading to children at bed time. Speaking them out of this world and into another one. Mimicking the transaction that will soon come from the waking state to the state of sleep.

Maybe. Yes. But.

CLOSE YOUR EYES

Connected deeply to the act of imagining. Because, in its pure form imaging is best done without present distraction. We need to put our attention elsewhere. To bring a picture in the mind it’s best to have none in front of us. Z, I say as I am reading to him. Please do not whisper to yourself, or please do not play with that as we’re reading.

We’re busy working in here. In the head. We don’t need anything getting in the way of that. Like now, for example.

And here is BridgeBuilders Martyn Duffy’s piece about listening and the sounds around us that he wrote this week for Shaky Isles Theatre company

Your noise, my music

Listening in and out of context –  daydreaming on the sound-making process

BY MARTYN DUFFY

Music is continuous, but listening is intermittent.

John Cage

…I have come to think of sound as something that is all around me that I am exploring and finding my way through.  Swimming through the sound waves.

This has led to a new awareness of the ordinary sounds and noises that are present in every aspect of my day.  Some call this noise.  To me it is a kind of music. It does not matter whether it is indoors or out, in the city or in the countryside.  The world is a very noisy place.  And our process of how we listen is what helps us make sense of it all – order out of chaos if you like.  I don’t believe there is ever such a thing as true silence.  Silence is not the absence of sound but a field of possibilities…

A sound is all the possible ways there are to hear it.

Listen for a moment.

What do you hear?

 

http://bwaw12.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/starting-coffee-shop.html

Turn It Up: How the Right Amount of Ambient Noise Increases Creativity

by David Burkus

For most creatives there is a “Goldilocks” zone of just the right amount of noise, but not too much.

Perhaps this is why so many creatives often retreat to public spaces like coffee shops. They’ve become a virtual second office to so many. Specifically, settings like coffee shops contain the right level of ambient noise that just happens to trigger our minds to think more creatively. A paper published late last year in the Journal of Consumer Research, argues that the ideal work environment for creative projects should contain a little bit of background noise.

But what if you aren’t free to roam to coffee shops and hotel lobbies in search of distracted focus? What if you need to re-create the coffee shop environment inside your cubicle or office? Luckily there are several virtual options available…

Night Noise: What a Sleeping Brain Hears

By Dorian Rolston

Earlier this year, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary film called “In Pursuit of Silence” raised $35,371, exceeding its goal in just a few weeks… By “exploring the value of silence, our relationship with sound, and the implications of living in a noisy world,” promised Patrick Shen, the documentary’s director, viewers could indulge in 80 minutes of quiescence. And, for over 35 million Americans suffering from hearing loss, toiling in urban cacophonies roughly 1 decibel louder every year, perhaps that was worth the price of admission.In a 2011 publication, “Burden of disease from environmental noise,” a WHO-led research team analyzed data from numerous large-scale epidemiological studies of environmental noise in Western European countries within the past 10 years. The studies looked closely at planes grumbling, trains whooshing and whistling, and automobiles bleeping, and then traced links to cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment in children, sleep disturbance, tinnitus, and relentless annoyance. Poring over these data, the WHO team calculated the disability-adjusted life-years or DALYs—in essence, healthy years of life—lost to “unwanted,” human-induced dissonance. The toll: not counting industrial workplaces, at least one million DALYs each year. “There is overwhelming evidence,” they conclude, “that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population.” …

European countries, included in the WHO publication, attributed to noise nearly 1 in 50 heart attacks across Western Europe. The panel ultimately ranked traffic noise second among environmental threats to public health, just behind air pollution, and affirmed the threat to be, unlike that from exposure to second-hand smoke, dioxins, or benzene, rising inexorably. Noise pollution “is considered not only an environmental nuisance,” WHO has warned correctively, “but also a threat to public health.” All of which raises the question: If the world is so much noisier, then why is no one listening?

The insidiousness of noise is not only that it kills, but that it does so quietly. According to the WHO publication, the majority of lost DALYs can be traced to noise we aren’t even aware of hearing. The real danger, it appears, is from whatever drifts into our ears undetected—during sleep….

As we nod off, our perceptual faculties become attuned to the environment in such a way that, unlike during the day, can’t be consciously managed. The mind is rendered vulnerable to whatever stimuli happens to filter through, and, since the eyes can be shut, that happens to be through the ears. This receptivity was undoubtedly adaptive for our ancestors, alerting them to predators lurking in the darkness.

But for us today, the WHO reports, it “constitutes a health issue.”…

Shen, for his part, remains ever in pursuit of them. “There’s a quality of sound we’re looking for when we say we’re seeking silence,” he says. “The sound of birds chirping, research shows, is very calming and soothing to us. If you think about our evolutionary past, that sound would be a signal of safety, indicating that the danger is gone and we are now safe to leave our caves.” If the night noise that invades our sleep is any indication, abiding in our caves—or, as Shen intends, donning the cavernous protection of noisecancelling headphones—sounds more or less right…

Radio Silence Is Not a Leadership Strategy

by Alli Polin

Globally, we’re living at a time that the call to action is more, better, faster, NOW!  Leaders are overwhelmed with emails, meetings, conference calls and technology that keeps them connected 24/7 all demanding immediate response and resolution.  Despite the fact that we realize that we want thoughtful solutions, we also want immediate attention and action from leaders.  When there is a pause between our super important message and the leader’s response, we frequently make up stories to fill the void.

Some stories we tell ourselves are:
- My idea was terrible.
- They just don’t care.
- I guess I’m on my own.
- The leader stinks.

In contrast with the stories, here’s a glimpse into the reality of many leaders:
- Sincerely want to support their team and be responsive to customer requests.
- Buried daily under an avalanche of meetings and messages that takes away critical time from working with the team.
- Truly want to take the time to process and think before replying on gut alone.
- Next steps are unclear and they need time to connect with others to figure it out.

How can the gap between the leader’s reality and the desire for constant contact be bridged? …

You Write Like a Girl! 5 Ways Women Sell Themselves Short When Writing

Linguist Deborah Tannen has been studying gender differences in communication for nearly 40 years. In her bestselling book, Talking From 9 to 5: women and Men in the Workplace, Tannen outlines how women are socialized to use language in ways that hurt them in the workplace.

She explains that even young boys are conscious of their public image, rarely discussing their weaknesses. Girls, on the other hand, “…are expected to be ‘humble’—not try to take the spotlight, emphasize the ways they are just like everyone else, and de-emphasize ways they are special.”

Here are five questions to help you determine whether you’re giving yourself the credit you deserve:

1. Do You Emphasize Process or Results?

2. How Specific Are Your Verbs?

3. Are Your Individual Contributions Clear?

4. Are You Speaking Directly, or Through a Filter?

5. Do Your Adjectives Describe Emotion, or Action?

Living in a Brainwashed Culture of Urgency

By ELISHA GOLDSTEIN, PH.D.

Everything is urgent and important. 

Or so it seems.

How do we better understand that this is all an illusion that is occurring in this very era we’re living in?

The way I see it, gaining freedom from false urgency is the most important practice of our time, or so we’ll come to understand in the years to come.

Now, this may seem simple, but it’s not easy, because our brains have been conditioned for years now to believe that all these forms of media are urgent and important. That means it’s now become a default, meaning it’s what happens when there’s no awareness.

In this moment right now, you have the ability to break free from the illusion of urgency and step back into your life. All it takes is recognizing the reality of the illusion and being on the lookout for it.

As an initial practice to play with, take today to be on the lookout for the illusion of urgency and see what you notice. Is there a space to step into greater freedom? …

Defining Leadership

What is your definition of leadership? Only few people have a solid answer to this question. Few have a clear definition of what leadership means for them personally.

Therefore it’s useful to explore the different definitions, perspective and viewpoints on leadership….

Our favourite thinkers about resilience are Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney.  It is their model of 10 Essential Elements for Resilience that we use in our training.  And it is their model that Ingrid Wickelgren refers to in her article about the importance of facing our fears and stepping up to challenges:

How to Become More Resilient

Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney confirm that one of the best ways to build resilience is to make an effort to take on increasingly difficult, but manageable challenges (see “Enhance Your Resilience”). Doing so will help you handle higher levels of stress. (For more on why, see “When Is Stress Good for You? [Video].”) Other strategies for building resilience include getting physical exercise, learning to regulate your emotions, solidifying your personal relationships and looking for resilient role models. Resilience is apparently not just something that comes about by accident. You can train yourself to bounce back from adversity…

Steve McCurry’s Blog: Life Breath of Half the World

Life Breath of Half the World

Steve McCurry’s pictures this week are all of people in Monsoon water.  But this does not mean that these are pictures of disaster…

India’s  monsoon rains have covered the entire country a month ahead of schedule, brightening the prospects for a bumper output of summer-sown crops such as rice, oilseeds and cotton in one of the world’s leading producers.

ENTER GREATIST’S FIRST-EVER WRITING CONTEST! “HOW I FIND HAPPINESS”

There are as many ways to find happiness as there are people walking around on this planet. But even though happiness can mean so many things, it’s important to understand the role it plays in our individual lives. Owning our happiness can motivate us to pursue our goals, inspire us to make changes in our lives, and make it that much easier for us to spread kindness and smiles around the world.

At Greatist, we’re big on happiness. So we want to know: What makes you happy?How do you cultivate happiness in your own life? How do you find happiness?

We’re announcing the launch of Greatist’s first-ever Writing Contest: “How I Find Happiness.” The top three stories (as determined by Greatist’s editorial team) will be featured right here on Greatist.com.

The Details

• Submissions will be accepted from now until 11:59 pm EST onJuly 1, 2013.
• Stories can be up to 1,500 words but cannot have been published elsewhere (including personal blogs).
• Multimedia is encouraged, but not required.
• Unfortunately, Greatist ambassadors are unable to apply. But we still love you!
• All submissions should be emailed to myhappyis@greatist.com. Be sure to include your name and contact information. It would also be great if you told us how you learned about Greatist (but this won’t affect the judging one iota).
• Any questions can be sent to the same email address (above).

You can find all of these stories – and many more – in this week’s new collection:

 Happiness At Work Edition #51 

And here is a poem by CultFit that we like very much and hope you will enjoy too…

And For No Reason

And

For no reason

I start skipping like a child.

And

For no reason

I turn into a leaf

That is carried so high

I kiss the Sun’s mouth

And dissolve.

And

For no reason

A thousand birds

Choose my head for a conference table,

Start passing their

Cups of wine

And their wild songbooks all around.

And

For every reason in existence

I begin to eternally,

To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf

And start dancing,

I run to kiss our beautiful Friend

And I dissolve in the Truth

That I Am.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Vivienne Harris

Here are just some of the stories that you can find in this week’s collection:

Two Degrees: Imagine The Great Transition

Artsadmin and LIFT in association with nef, as part of the Imagine 2020 Network.

Are we trapped in business-as-usual?

Could the ‘less’ make us happier than the ‘more’?

What do we really value?

Can it still turn out right?

 A series of artist films that respond to these questions…

George Lucas, John Lithgow, and Other Luminaries on How the Humanities Make Us Human

by Maria Popova

In her superb 2013 McGill commencement address, philosopher Judith Butler championed the value of the humanities as a tool of tolerance. And yet the humanities have slipped into endangered academic species status — so says a major new plea of a report titled to Congress from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, titled The Heart of the Matter, which opens with a sense of unequivocal urgency:

“As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic — a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support.”

Accompanying the report is this beautiful short film, a collection of luminaries’ testimonials for the value and immeasurable impact of the humanities both in our individual journey toward understanding the meaning of life and our collective odyssey toward better understanding one another and our place in the universe. Selected highlights here…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

How To Be A Successful Optimist

by Mark Stevenson

It’s easy to accept the standard story of the future: that it’s all going to be rubbish, that vested interests will always win out and the best you can do is get your head down, try and beat the prevailing trend and do what you can for you and yours (even if it’s at the expense of your fellow man and the environment).

Luckily there are enough human beings out there who don’t accept this story, who believe things can change for the better and crucially do something about it. Without their input down the ages we’d all still be sitting in caves. Throughout history these, often maligned, men and women have consistently come up trumps for the rest of us. These people are called “optimists.”

Optimism is a bit of a dirty word at the moment, and of course blind optimism (that dangerous cocktail of denial and hope) deserves our disdain. But pragmatic optimists, who admit the scale of the challenges ahead of us but resolve to do something about them anyway, should have more of our support.

It’s not always easy to keep optimistic…

How To Be A Successful Optimist: Principle No. 2

…A recurring question philosopher Daniel Dennett (and probably most philosophers) get confronted with is, “What’s the definition of happiness?”

Luckily he has an answer and it’s a good one: “Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it”.

This then is Principle Two for the successful optimist. All successful optimists have a project that is bigger than they are. By contrast, people who have a project that is the same size as themselves are invariably miserable and tedious company. Once you’ve got a bigger car/ nicer house/ television bigger than God what’s left? As so many find out, eventually the answer is a nagging emptiness accompanied by the thought, “Surely there must be more to life than this?”

Those with something bigger than themselves generally derive a deep-in-the-core happiness from whatever that is. It’s a happiness that comes from a feeling you have a place in the world. A ‘bigger than me’ project can be your family, your religion, military service or a scientific calling…

Mark Stevenson is the author of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future (Profile Books, 2012). Check out the School of Life course, The Future is Up for Grabs with Mark Stevenson on 17th Septemeber 2013.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure

Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson,Will Self and Lionel Shriver reflect on their own disappointments in life, love and work…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

Self-Discipline Can Lead to Happiness, Study Reports

CHERI CHENG

The study found a correlation between self-restraint and control and overall happiness. It concluded that self-control should not be considered self-deprivation but rather, time management of goals and tasks…

“People who have good self-control do a number of things that bring them happiness – namely, they avoid problematic desires and conflict”…

Do You Really Know What Makes You Happy?

By Gretchen Rubin

Research shows that many people are miserable at their jobs. Given how much of your life is spent working, finding happiness at work is key. But how do you get started? Gretchen Rubin, who wrote the book on happiness — literally and is AOL Jobs newest contributor, addresses that topic here. 

One key to a happy life is self-knowledge. I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature. I’ve found that the more my life reflects my real interests, values, and temperament, the happier I become.

But it’s very hard to know ourselves; it’s easy to be distracted by the way we wish we were, or think we ought to be, or what others think we should be, until we lose sight of what’s actually true…

Here is a list of 20 questions meant to help you think about yourself, your daily habits, your nature, and your interests. There are no right or wrong answers; they’re fodder for reflection…

What is the Best Predictor of Unhappiness?

by Alex Mayyasi

Psychologists armed with statistically significant survey data have a lot of advice on how to be happy, but we don’t seem to be very good at following it.

Interesting that a major contributor to being unhappy is a long commute!  What about money?  What about being married??  This article answers them all…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

The 5 Ps of professional happiness

by Jay Shepherd

In this short talk (just six minutes) at the LexThink Conference in Chicago, I explain why unhappiness abounds in the legal world. Then I give five simple steps for fixing it. And this advice doesn’t just apply to lawyers; any professional or creative person can use them to find happiness at work. So take six minutes and watch.  See if it can help you find your own professional happiness…

Career Change Advice – How To Be Happy At Work

By Aaron

The reasons of discontent at work are many and unique as you change careers. Change is the only solution to such discontent. The following points should be of great benefit to you and guide you through this process.

• Change your perspective…

• Change your environment…

• Change your career…

• Change your influence circle…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

Why Grumpy People Can Be Super Productive

BY: DRAKE BAER

If you’re waiting for the “right mood” to strike before you attack that stack of work, you might be waiting a looooooooonnnnnnng time.

When we say that we’re “waiting for the right time” to start on something, we tend to mean that we want to feel good about what we’re doing–but new research suggests that a pinch of negativity can actually be a creative spark.

How so? Creativity, as we know, is both an emotional and intellectual process: Psychologists have found that positive emotions open up your inventory of possible actions–one of the many reasons that it’s good to feel good. But, as new research in the Academy of Management Journal suggests, it’s good to feel bad, too–depending on how you roll through the day…

Time to think differently

More diverse leadership is business critical in a complex environment, says Lubna Haq, director at Hay Group.

The current era of globalisation, slow growth, e-commerce, social media, big data and an ageing workforce requires new ways of working: ways that are more flexible, open, inclusive, collaborative and innovative than ever before.

In response, many organisations are dismantling their old, command-and-control leadership structures in favour of new, matrix-style roles. These carry much more accountability, but benefit from far less formal authority.

Leaders are therefore being forced to operate in a vast white space with just a handful of direct reports. To succeed in this context they need to be adept at collaborating with, influencing and quickly gaining the trust of their teams and peers.

This new environment calls for both a more sophisticated and a more subtle approach to leadership: one which Hay Group data suggests women may be better able to adopt.

Hay Group’s research over many years has found that great female leaders employ a wider range of leadership styles than their male counterparts, enabling them to be more effective at motivating and engaging people to perform.

They are also more skilled at knowing how and when to use which style…

How managers can improve the quality of feedback they offer

by Jill Geisler

New research about happinessunderscores the point. In an experiment, employees at a number of Fortune 500 companies were sent a daily email inquiring about their level of happiness. Some received the question worded this way: “How happy were you today?” Others got this version: “Did you do your best to be happy today?” Over time, the latter group reported a significantly higher level of happiness, because they came to see it as a goal for which they were personally responsible.

What would happen if you ask yourself each day: “Did I make a point to give and receive some valuable feedback today?” You’d be upgrading all three facets of high impact feedback — the source, the content and the recipient…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

 

How Can We Solve The Employee Disengagement Problem?

IT’S TIME TO LOOK AT THE CAUSES, NOT THE SYMPTOMS…

BY: MICHAEL M. CHAYES

“Aren’t people curious about how you manage to create tens of millions of disaffected employees?  That’s not a trivial accomplishment.”

Recently, Mark Crowley reported on the results of the Gallup organization’s annual employee engagement survey. He painted a humorous, but compelling picture of the results, “… imagine a crew team out on the Potomac River where three people are rowing their hearts out, five are taking in the scenery, and two are trying to sink the boat.”…

Taylor’s philosophy made the manager responsible for all problem-solving. It sounds very much like our contemporary mindset, where for every organizational problem the answer is generally a new management task. With the best of intentions, solutions offered for employee disengagement depend on the manager “doing” for the employee. Without intending to, we may keep reinforcing a system that deprives employees of proper credit for their own capacity for self-management and independent problem-solving. Equally, we make unfair demands on managers who have been, more than likely, trained to play leadership roles, but were not developed to be leaders.

The better model would be one in which the responsibility for making work feel vital, motivating, and personally important is a task equally shared by everyone no matter what their title.

When so much management advice seems to come down to “treat employees like adult human beings” you have to wonder. Why do people need to be told that? If they’re not doing that, what are they doing? The fact that managers even need that advice and advice-givers seem to think it’s necessary to give may provide us with some additional insight into the origins of disengagement…

Vivian Giang, Business Insider

It’s the entrepreneurial age and everyone wants to work for themselves. By 2025, Gen Y is going to make up 75% of the global workforce, and these millennials’ independent-thinking and entrepreneurial mindset is going to change everything about the way companies are run…

Gen Y has a need to “solve the world’s problems” and if companies want to keep talent in their organizations, they need to clearly communicate long-term company goals with their hardworking and inspired workers…

Companies that employ a decent number of young people should support this independent thinking ability by developing entrepreneurial programs. Allowing workers to do this also increases loyalty, because employees know you care about their happiness and well-being. In the end, they will work harder for you, because you’ve allowed them time to work on something they care about.

In short, the typical 9-to-5 grind is on its way out and …“it’s going to be less about who you work for, but who you’re working with.”

Why 20% Time is Good for Schools

A.J. JULIANI’S BLOG

 20% time allows students to pick their own project and learning outcomes, while still hitting all the standards and skills for their grade level. In fact, these students often go “above and beyond” their standards by reaching for a greater depth of knowledge than most curriculum tends to allow. The idea for 20% time in schools comes from Google’s own 20% policy, where employees are given twenty percent of their time to work and innovate on something else besides their current project. It’s been very successful in business practice, and now we can say that it has been wildly successful in education practice.

With 20% time, we can solve one society’s biggest problems by giving students a purpose for learning and a conduit for their passions and interests. If you listen to Sir Ken Robinson or Daniel Pink talk, you’ll discover this is an issue that starts with schooling. We spend 14,256 hours in school between kindergarten and graduation. If we can’t find a time for students to have some choice in their learning, then what are we doing with all those hours? …

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

Steve McCurry’s Blog: When Things Come Alive

Night
when words fade and things come alive.
When the destructive analysis of day is done, and
all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again.
When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

More stunning photos from this master artist showing us into a new range of impressions of the human life force…

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013

Designed by Sou Fujimoto

Until 20 October 2013

Describing his design concept, Sou Fujimoto said:

“For the 2013 Pavilion I propose an architectural landscape: a transparent terrain that encourages people to interact with and explore the site in diverse ways. Within the pastoral context of Kensington Gardens, I envisage the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life woven together with a constructed geometry. A new form of environment will be created, where the natural and the man-made merge; not solely architectural nor solely natural, but a unique meeting of the two…

The delicate quality of the structure, enhanced by its semi-transparency, will create a geometric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist rising from the undulations of the park. From certain vantage points, the Pavilion will appear to merge with the classical structure of the Serpentine Gallery, with visitors suspended in space.” …

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013
Designed by Sou Fujimoto
Photo by: Mark Trezona

For more stories see this week’s full collection:

Happiness At Work #52

Enjoy…

Here, by way of a reflection back over the last year of happiness & wellbeing stories is just one story from each of the first 3 months of these collections.

And each of the Happiness At Work Edition headings provide a link to that particular collection if you are interested in looking back further…

Happiness At Work Edition #1 – 6th July 2012

7 Must-Read Books on the Art and Science of Happiness

by Maria Popova

From Plato to Buddha, or what imperfection has to do with the neuroscience of the good life.

If you, like us, are fascinated by the human quest to understand the underpinnings of happiness but break out in hives at the mere mention of self-help books, you’re in luck: We’ve sifted through our personal library, a decade’s worth of obsessive reading, to bring you seven essential books on the art and science of happiness, rooted in solid science, contemporary philosophy and cross-disciplinary insight. From psychology and neuroscience to sociology and cultural anthropology to behavioural economics, these must-reads illuminate the most fundamental aspiration of all human existence: How to avoid suffering and foster lasting well-being…

Happiness At Work Edition #2 – 13th July 2012

Guys, be happy! Do the housework. Really.

Linda Carroll, July 5, 2012

An intriguing new study suggests that men are happier and less stressed when they do more of the housework…

Though there were no data to explain why men were happier and less stressed when doing more housework, the researchers have their theories. “Men who leave the chores to women may be subject to more complaints than men who do their share of home chores,” the researchers suggested. “It is also plausible that some men want a more equitable role in the home and their well-being is reduced when the pressure of their jobs gets in the way.”

Scott and Plagnol suspect that men might be more willing to share housework equally if they knew there were benefits to the arrangement.

“Our study points to wider benefits for men who do their fair share of the housework,” they wrote. “Men today play a far greater role in home and child care than their fathers or grandfathers. It might help change move faster if the benefits of a more equitable divide became more widely known.” …

Happiness At Work Edition #3 – 20th July 2012

Austerity? Stimulus? Or Happiness?

Curtis Roosevelt, 10th July 2012

Capitalism needs profit, of course. It will fail without the entrepreneurship that seeks profit. But at the extremity of private enterprise is greed, an appetite that runs amok when given the chance. Without regulations, without restraints backed up by law, the appetite for power — money and position — is uncontrollable. This human weakness, a lust which is quite basic in our nature, is behind all our economic recessions. Irresponsibility – buccaneering – is inevitable when entrepreneurs are left to themselves. Greed will win out!

What the business and financial people driving the economy have forgotten is that the gains they derive from profits produced by enterprise must be shared if our society is to function with any cohesion. We are one people, one nation. But is this today’s reality? Income inequality is now a major issue in the United States. In his time Franklin Roosevelt talked plainly about this problem. He brought it out into the light and made it a cornerstone of the New Deal. What do we hear from our leaders today?

And what of happiness? That’s the word Laura Musikanski used when reporting on a United Nations conference convened last April: “The UN Embraces the Economics of Happiness.” Don’t turn away thinking some well-meaning NGOs have gone off the deep end again with some half-baked notions of pie in the sky. The conference was a serious affair attended by 650 luminaries and addressed by senior diplomats from many countries. On this occasion, the UN’s Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, proclaimed that “social, economic and environmental well-being are indivisible.” Well-known experts from academia also spoke. Lord Richard Layard, John Helliwell and Jeffrey Sachs introduced the unfortunately titled “World Happiness Report.”

Despite its name, the report is neither frivolous nor reckless. It seeks to introduce a new economic paradigm that shifts us away from looking at economic growth and recession as strictly financial matters, as if they were divorced from social consequences. It points to the current global order’s failure, even inability, to implement the drastic changes required for realistic, sustainable societies. Implicitly indicted are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their previous conditions for loans we now see were often destructive to economies in the Third World instead of helpful. And yet we continue now on the same destructive path with the European Union’s strict policies when loaning money to Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

I found the U.N. report useful. It helps to reinforce the basic thrust of this column. Government policies today, whether they emphasize austerity or stimulus, fail to recognize and correct the fact that the overall well-being of citizens continues to be outweighed by the protection of a single sector of our society, the financial one. No matter how important the financial sector may be, this state of affairs is unconscionable. Economic thinking that ignores the social element is not good economics.

So here’s the million-dollar question: When will policymakers start to take happiness seriously? …

Happiness At Work Edition #4 – 27th July 2012

Wellbeing index points way to bliss: live on a remote island, and don’t work

Lizzy Davies and Simon Rogers, The Guardian, Wednesday 25 July 2012

First annual results of Measuring National Wellbeing Programme show teenagers and pensioners have key to happiness.

As part of the government’s attempts to develop an alternative measure of national performance to GDP, the Office for National Statistics has published its first tranche of detailed subjective data exploring how happiness and anxiety levels vary according to factors including sex and ethnic group.

Responses by 165,000 people in the annual population survey reveal the average rating of “life satisfaction” in Britain is 7.4 out of 10 and 80% of people gave a rating of seven or more when asked whether the things they did in their lives were “worthwhile”…

Relationships also play a big part, with 82% of people in marriages or civil partnerships giving high or medium life satisfaction ratings, followed by cohabiting couples on 79%, single people on 71% and divorced people on 60%. Women also rated slightly higher on both the “life satisfaction” and the “worthwhile” question, but reported an average level of 3.3 for anxiety, compared with men’s three…

Far more significant, however, appears to be the impact of work: not only not having it – which leads twice as many unemployed people to rate their satisfaction levels as low or very low as those in a job – but also what kind of work you do. The highest average life satisfaction was reported by those in professional occupations such as teaching, medicine or law and was lowest among “process, plant and machine operatives”…

But work is significant. Higher scores were given by groups of employees “with more responsibility and control over their work, as well as higher incomes”.

Happiness At Work Edition #5 – 3rd August 2012

The Benefits of Being Awestruck

July 31st, 2012

We’re losing our sense of awe at our own peril, however. The title of a new Stanford study tells you all you need to know: Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being. Apparently, watching awe-inspiring vidoes makes you less impatient, more willing to volunteer time to help others, more likely to prefer experiences over material products, more present in the here and now, and happier overall…

Happiness At Work Edition #6 – 10th August 2012

Angela Mollard: When happy is hard

ANGELA MOLLARD, AUGUST 05, 2012

REMEMBER when ‘happy’ was just something you were? Or weren’t. Good days, bad days, happy days, sad days – all jumbled in a life you lived rather than thought about too much.

Today happiness is a commodity; a ‘goal’, a ‘revolution’, a ‘project’. It’s what we want for ourselves and our children. “Yes, please,” we’d say to the doctor if she could vaccinate against sadness, along with the usual measles and mumps. Anything to immunise ourselves against pain and unease.

I write this because I’ve had an awful week – made somewhat worse by the book I’m reading (for work, not pleasure) called The Happiness Project. Ironically, as my world filled with woes, I read chapter after chapter about one woman’s attempt to “lighten up”, “be serious about play” and “keep a contented heart”. “I am happy,” writes Gretchen Rubin in her mega-selling memoir, “but I’m not as happy as I should be.”

More helpful, I think, than having an articulate and much-blessed woman tell you how to find happiness, is having a flawed and down-in-the dumps columnist recount the details of her weekus horribilis. (Shall we start with my appalling Latin?)

I may be guilty of over-sharing, but my argument is this: we live in a culture that propagates the notion that happiness should be a constant state of mind and perfection our universal aim. To that end, most weeks I write jaunty, optimistic and ‘wise’ missives underneath a photo that makes me look 10 times prettier than I really am. “Great life, lucky cow,” you probably say to yourself and, yes, sometimes it is and sometimes I am.

But if I neglect to tell you the bad stuff – the hard, horrible, trying times – then I’m as guilty of perpetuating perfect images as those ads where mums are always smiling…

There’s lots of sound good sense in Rubin’s project, but I’m concerned we’re trying to anaesthetise anguish from our lives. Psychologists are observing a new generation suffering “a discomfort with discomfort”.

“Please let them be devastated at age six,” implores Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. I hear her. Last year, my eldest didn’t practice for a music exam and received a correspondingly poor result. It’s been the best lesson in her charmed life…

Happiness At Work Edition #7 – 17th August 2012

London Olympics: a “feel good” fix, or will they bring lasting happiness?

AUGUST 14, 2012 // BY: JULIET MICHAELSON

A poll conducted for the BBC, published today, shows that 56% of us say the Games have had a positive effect on us personally, and a whopping 83% say they’ve had a positive effect on the UK as a whole. Another poll by the consumer group Which? also showed an Olympic bounce – an increase in the proportion of people who felt satisfied with their lives during the first week of the Games.

To find out why the Olympics have made us feel so good we can turn to the findings of well-being science. We know that experiencing a sense of belonging is a crucial component of feeling good about our lives – and the Olympics have certainly made us feel part of the nationwide ‘Team GB’. And more than that, they’ve demonstrated a sense of people pulling together to work towards a shared goal – from the ‘Gamesmaker’ volunteers and medal-winning athletes to the cheering crowds – another thing the research shows is a route to happiness. In fact, it is possible to see how each of our evidence-based Five Ways to Well-being – Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give – have been encouraged in some way by the Olympics.

The positive feelings that have been generated need no further justification – of course we are happy to be happy. But in fact, research has shown that experiencing positive emotions does have practical benefits. For example, psychologists have found that experiencing positive emotions broadens people’s horizons – encouraging creativity. So this could be a good moment for businesses to experiment with new ways of doing things – although there is a substantial body of evidence suggesting the long-termeconomic impact of major sporting events is negligible.

And will the feel good factor last? In the BBC poll over half of respondents said the effects for the UK will be short-lived. I suspect they may be right. Good feelings are, after all, a response to what is happening in our lives, and pretty soon both the Olympics and Paralympics will be over. If they succeed in bringing about the much-discussed ‘legacy’ and new sports-based habits form, it is quite possible that some of the good feelings associated with the Olympics could remain too.

But forming new habits is a notoriously difficult nut to crack…

Happiness At Work Edition #8 – 24th August 2012

Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

August 22nd, 2012

“The implication both of the Baboon research and the Whitehall Study of British Civil Servants is how can we create a society that has the conditions that allow people to flourish?

“Control is intimately related to where you are in the occupational hierarchy…When people report they have more control in their work, they’re being treated more fairly, there’s more justice…the amount of illness goes down…

“Give people more involvement in their work, give them more say in what they’re doing, give them more reward for the amount of effort they put out and it might be that you not only have a healthier workforce but a more productive workplace as well.”

Michael Marmoot, The Whitehall Study, University College Medical School, London

Intelligence comes at a price. The human species, despite its talent for solving problems, has managed over the millennia to turn one of its most basic survival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essentially,” says Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.”

In the 2008 National Geographic documentary Stress: Portrait of a Killer, Sapolsky and fellow scientists explain the deadly consequences of prolonged stress…

Chronic stress has also been shown in scientific studies to diminish brain cells needed for memory and learning, and to adversely affect the way fat is distributed in the body. It has even been shown to measurably accelerate the aging process in chromosomes, a result that confirms our intuitive sense that people who live stressful lives grow old faster.

By studying baboon populations in East Africa, Sapolsky has found that individuals lower down in the social hierarchy suffer more stress, and consequently more stress-related health problems, than dominant individuals. The same trend in human populations was discovered in the British Whitehall Study. People with more control in work environments have lower stress, and better health, than subordinates.

Stress: Portrait of a Killer is a fascinating and important documentary–well worth the 52 minutes it takes to watch…

Photo: Sue Ridge
http://www.sueridge.com

In this week’s headlines, several articles report new findings that show the importance of continuous learning at every stage of our lives to keep our brains fit and healthy, especially in our older years…

Reading, writing may help preserve memory in older age

By MICHELLE CASTILLO

A study published on July 3 in Neurology revealed that reading, writing and doing other mentally-stimulating activities at every age helped stave off memory problems.

“Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person’s lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age,” study author Robert S. Wilson, senior neuropsychologist of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said in a press release…

Top 14 ways to increase your IQ

14 ways to increase your IQ and improve the way in which your brain functions.

1. Walk Around the Block…

2. Take Deep Breaths...

3. Keep a Journal…

4.  Explore New Things…

5. Take Frequent Short Breaks…

6. Improve Your Memory…One of the best ways to remember information is by using acronyms…

7. Eat breakfast...

8. Use Your Body to Help You Learn. Movement is a key part of the process of development and learning… Brain Gym exercises can help with things such as:

• Comprehension
• Concentration
• Abstract Thinking
• Memory
• Mental Fatigue
• Completing tasks…

9. Meditate…

10. Stay Away From Sugar…

11. Cultivate Your Emotional Intelligence…

12. Use Downtime…

13. Engage All of Your Senses.  Researchers have found that the human brain learns best through multi-sensory association…

14. Load Up on Antioxidants…

Not The Same Old Garden Path – How We Can Literally Think Differently

BY: ANNE HART

Researchers found that the stress induced by running prevents the activation of new neurons in response to stress, at least in sedentary mice. Can exercise make you stronger in your ability to handle stress –less sensitive to the stresses of daily life? …

A research team based at Princeton University has found that physical activity reorganizes the brain so that its response to stress is reduced and anxiety is less likely to interfere with normal brain function…

Why Neuroscience Matters To You

Rebel Brown writes:

The reality is that we are humans, period. If we think we can separate our humanity from our career – we’re only fooling ourselves. We bring all of our humanity to bear on behaviors and decisions in our lives, careers and families. So why not learn what makes us humans “tick” so that we can be better at everything we do? That makes more sense to me than trying to shut down our humanity – which we can’t do anyway.

Since I started studying practices such as neural linguistic programming, quantum biology, quantum mechanics and more, I’ve learned so much about how and why we think and behave as we do – especially the seemingly irrational decisions

and behaviors. For example, did you know that:

• Our unconscious mind directs ~ 95% of our behaviors and decisions…

• We’re programmed to hang onto the status quo until we see that the status quo as being unsafe…

• We also have a program called the herd instinct…

There are many other programs that drive our lives. Finally, we know the truth. Life really is all in our minds!

Here are three steps to begin to upgrade your mindware. Try them for a month and you will see a change!

• Ask questions instead of making statements...
• Make the status quo unsafe. ..
• Step away from the herd…

What if you could upgrade every program that bounds your perceptions and your potential? What if you could see new and exciting choices about everything in your life? What would you rewrite? …

10 Ways to Find Your Own Personal Strengths

BY HANNAH BRAIME

Our personal strengths are part of what makes us unique as individuals, and part of the value we offer to the world around us. If we’re not aware of our personal strengths, however, we don’t always utilize them as fully as we could, and we potentially miss out on true fulfilment in our lives and careers.

In this post, you’ll discover 10 ways to find your personal strengths. You might find that some of the methods below are more effective for you than others, so cherry-pick the techniques that resonate…

5 ways to boost your career with happiness

In this hilarious and insightful speech, Rowan Manahan explains that happiness at work (in Danish: arbejdsglaede) is not a pipe dream but the best way to get your dream job, boost your career and become more successful.

Why don’t people pay a little more attention (and a whole lot more respect!) to their own happiness — and what happens when they do?

Rowan argues that this is the next evolutionary leap that mankind will make and has some simple, practical, and actionable steps that you can take to come out of the Dark Ages in your working life and into the Age of Enlightenment…

The global happiness research aiming to make the world smile (and live longer)

Psychologist Ed Diener is considered to be the foremost expert on the science of happiness. The Smiley Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois (named after Joseph R Smiley, not the expression), Professor Diener studies happiness on a global scale as a senior scientist with the Gallup Organisation.

Gallup’s World Poll investigates international levels of happiness through a huge worldwide study, which Professor Diener describes as ‘the first representative sample of humanity’.

The survey encompasses over a million people from 160 countries (unfortunately the Vatican and North Korea didn’t make the cut).

‘We’ve learned a great deal about the universals,’ Professor Diener says. ‘We find for example that basic needs like having enough food are important across the world—that’s not surprising. But we also find social things [are important] like being respected and being able to trust other people.’ …

His happiness research over the years has uncovered some interesting trends, including work he’s done with the father of positive psychology Martin Seligman on what it takes to be extremely happy.

‘We looked at like the top 5%, the really, really happy people.  And we found one universal that applied to all of them and that is they all had close, supportive relationships, people who would really step up and help them and go to bat for them.’ …

‘Happy people are healthier, they have more friends and better social relationships, they are better citizens and they are even more productive at work. We know this by doing lots of kind of studies—one is we get happiness ratings from young people in young adulthood and we follow them over time and we find out that years later the happy people live longer, the happy people get sick less.’

‘Their immune system is stronger; we see that certain cardiovascular parameters are healthier.  So we know both from experimental studies and from longitudinal studies that it’s causal that happiness is making people better off.’

Professor Deiner believes that while some are born happier than others, everyone can alter their level of happiness…

The Latest Findings on Workplace Happiness

by Dan Bowling

This past weekend some of the top social scientists in the world gathered to present the latest research on human flourishing and well-being. More than a thousand people packed an L.A. hotel to listen to luminaries such as Martin Seligman and Barbara Fredrickson dissect empirical findings on what it means to be happy. Literally hundreds of papers were presented in a variety of forums, and my goal was to sift through them and bring you a few nuggets on work and happiness

…looking to find places where positive psychology produces business results is not easy. In more than five years of studying and writing about happiness and work, I have yet to come across the randomized, controlled, large-scale study that establishes once and for all the causal connection between workplace happiness and shareholder value. It is like diversity or engagement – we know it helps, but it is tough to prove. That said, here are a few things I learned in L.A…

• Organizations with strong values perform the best. Kim Cameron of the University of Michigan’s school of Positive Organizational Scholarship presented data from 40 financial services firms …Comparing the top performers against the bottom, he found that almost half the variance could be explained by “virtuous” HR practices at the top companies, such as encouraging teamwork and focusing on employee strengths. Things that make us happy at work…
• A daily vacation improves your performance and happiness. Take a vacation every day, at least mentally. …German researcher Sabine Sonnentag presented data showing that deplugging psychologically from work needs to be daily to improve well-being and your overall attitude about your job. Turn off the smartphone and the computer at home – at least when you are finished reading this blog.
• Character strengths predict performance, but in different areas. …using your strengths of character at work are good predictors of performance and overall well-being. Claudia Harzer, a postdoctoral student at the University of South Carolina, is more specific. At the conference, she showed how different strengths predict performance in different areas. High levels of self-regulation means you are good at task performance, for example, and are well-suited for task-oriented assignments. If your strengths are more in the emotional intelligence arena, relationship and team-based activities get you going…
• Finding meaning and purpose in your job is essential. Happiness at work requires that you draw some link between what you are doing and something larger, according to numerous presenters at the conference…Maybe it is a sense you are paying off your student loans and meeting new people. Maybe it is the satisfaction of mastering a new skill. Maybe it is knowing that people depend on you. Keep it simple, but look for some meaning…The truth is that you aren’t going to be happy if you see absolutely no reason or purpose for what you do.
• Tweet nice to live longer. Or write nicer emails if you don’t tweet, says researcher Margaret Kern. A big data review of the language used by more than 70,000 social media users indicated that negativity and aggressiveness are bad for your health…

4 Secrets To Being Happy At Work

Kevin Kruse

What truly makes someone happy at work?

Think back to the best job you ever had. What made it so great? Often people will answer that it was when they had a great boss, but when pressed further they’ll say things like, “the work was fun and challenging.” Or, “we were really making a difference.”

In my book, Employee Engagement for Everyone: 4 Keys to Happiness and Fulfillment At Work, I detail the drivers of happiness and engagement based not just on my own experience as a Best Place to Work winner, but also on surveys of more than 10 million workers in 150 countries.

Although there are many different factors, and each individual has unique needs, the vast majority of engagement—how you feel about your job and your work—comes primarily from four things:

1. Communication
Is there consistent two-way communication? Do your ideas count? Does your manager provide the information you need to do your job well? Is she transparent?

2. Growth
Do you believe that you are learning new things? Are you advancing in your career? Is your work challenging?

3. Recognition
Do you feel appreciated? Do your manager and peers recognize extraordinary effort? Do they recognize extraordinary results?

4. Trust
Do you trust your leadership to get the company to a brighter future? Do you have confidence that they can navigate the storms of today, to reach the ultimate destination? Do you know what the destination is?

Life is too short to be unhappy at work.  Think about what is most important to you, and how your current job compares in these areas…

For Real Influence, Listen Past Your Blind Spots

by Mark Goulston and John Ullmen

More than ever before, people see through the self-serving tactics and techniques that others use to persuade them. They don’t like being pushed, played or nudged to comply, and they resist and resent agenda-driven influencers.

The alternative is to use real influence to inspire buy-in and commitment. To learn how the best-of-the-best do it, we conducted over 100 extensive interviews with highly respected influencers from all walks of life for our recent book.

We found that great influencers follow a pattern of four steps that we can use too. An earlier post covered Step 1: Go for great outcomes. Later we’ll cover Step 3: Engage them in “their there;” and Step 4: When you’ve done enough… do more.

Here we cover Step 2: Listen past your blind spots. Including…

• Level One: Avoidance Listening = Listening Over
• Level Two: Defensive Listening = Listening At
• Level Three: Problem-Solving Listening = Listening To
• Level Four: Connective Listening = Listening Into …

Why Empathy Can Sometimes Help More Than Advice

By James Gleason

Even though I did not know it at the time my mother’s simple empathy and acknowledgement of the difficult situation was the thing I needed. 

I wanted a magical solution but it didn’t exist. Her empathy and acknowledgement of the challenge was all I needed. Like most advice, we seldom know we need it when we receive it. If it’s truly useful we absorb it and use it without thinking about it…

Remember, when someone calls for personal advice the most valuable thing we can do is acknowledge the situation without judgment and remind them that we care deeply…

…most people do not want the instructions on “what to” or “how to” fix their problems, but rather to be reminded we care, are willing to listen and understand that sometimes life’s problems are not easy to solve.

Employee Engagement Does More than Boost Productivity

by John Baldoni

While people define engagement in various ways, I prefer a plain and simple definition: People want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization.

Jim Harter Ph.D., a chief scientist at Gallup Research explained what engaged employees do differently in an email interview: “Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise, because they personally ‘own’ the result of their work and that of the organization.” …

Considering the benefits, why do companies still struggle to foster engagement? Harter writes, “Many organizations measure either the wrong things, or too many things, or don’t make the data intuitively actionable. Many don’t make engagement a part of their overall strategy, or clarify why employee engagement is important, or provide quality education to help managers know what to do with the results, and in what order.”

So where do you begin if you’re committed to improving engagement — but feel intimidated by that laundry list of pitfalls? One way to simplify it is to focus on purpose. Communicate the purpose of the organization, and how employees’ individual purposes fit into that purpose…

10 Ways to Reduce Stress at Work That Could Save Your Life

Some practical suggestions by Enrique Stone.

Rather than waking up every morning and feeling the wave of stress and tension flow over you here are 10 easy ways to reduce your stress level that you can start using today…

• Accept criticism
• Stop comparing yourself to others
• Communicate with others
• Use lists to your advantage
• Cut the caffeine
• Exercise
• Designate a block of ‘tech-free’ time
• Give yourself a massage
• Unwind by laughing
• Change …

10 Ways to Be Productive in the Summer

Les McKeown

…Most of us become accustomed to the inevitable summer slow-down. Key people aren’t available (holidays); projects stall, waiting for Fall to roll around, and a general sense of lassitude begins to creep in.

Summer doesn’t need to be a write-off however. Here are 10 ways you can use those months to get ahead of the game…

Happiness Means Creativity: One Company’s Bet On Positive Psychology

BY: MEG CARTER

Rather than just fix what’s ailing you, positive psychology looks to actively improve individual and organizational well-being. Here’s how Havas Worldwide is working to build a happier, more resilient–and ultimately more creative–workforce…

The impact of noise on creativity

by Adi

A new site is based around the idea that we need a bit of background noise in order to work well.  The site, called Coffitivity aims to replicate the noise we experience in our favourite coffee shops from the comfort of our desks. The site was inspired by research showing that the noise made by coffee machines and so on is actually just the right amount of background noise to stimulate our creative juices…

Why Should Children Study the Arts?

By Thalia Goldstein

We look to cognitive, social, creative, emotional and brain-based outcomes as a result of visual arts, theatre, dance, music and creative writing classes.  A comprehensive and thorough look at the evidence and reasons why art is important for its own unique benefits as well as possible transfer effects to other areas, this book will be of interest to artists, educators, policy makers and academics…
However, we argue firmly that arts education should not need to be justified in terms of its effect on non-arts skills. The arts are important in their own right, for all students to learn, which is why we called our book Art for Art’s Sake…

A treat for literature lovers:

Walt Whitman Reads “America”: The Only Surviving Recording of the Beloved Poet’s Voice

by Maria Popova

36 seconds of timeliness from a rare wax-cylinder capsule of timelessness…

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Did You Know A Woman’s Right To Vote Was Sparked By Two Brave Women On July 4, 1876?

Author: Lorraine Devon Wilke

It’s well understood that the point of celebrating the 4th of July is its significance to the history of America. Once the Continental Congress approved the resolution on July 2, 1776 that declared the United States separate from England, all attention turned to the Declaration of Independence, the written statement outlining and defining that decision. After two days of writing, editing, debating and tweaking by the Committee of Five led by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration was penned to completion and approved on July 4th; hence, our many and mighty celebrations on that day.

But a lesser known fact of history is that it took another 100 years for women – a demographic so underrepresented in American government at the time – to create, approve and disseminate their own Declaration of Rights, but it did happen… exactly 100 years later, on July 4, 1876, and it became as crucial to the growing feminist movement as the first Declaration had been to the country at large…

Wearing my writer’s dress of entitlement

BY MARY PRICE-O’CONNOR

…all I’m saying is why not wear it, wear your entitlement to be your creative self, to be expressive, and fulfilling your creative life. It may be a real thing you put on, it may be an image of a thing or it may only be a feeling, or a choice. There is a whole wardrobe out there full of your creative potential, try something on! …

All of these stories – and others – can be found in this week’s collection:

Happiness At Work #53

Filed under: Happiness & Wellbeing At Work, Leadership, Poetry Tagged: Conversation, creativity, happiness, Happiness At Work, leadership, listening, self-mastery, women leaders

We are noticing more and more noise about the necessity of what is being termed ‘employee engagement’ – why it is so necessary, what it makes it so hard to achieve, and what is likely to help and hinder it happening.

Of course we whole-heartedly applaud this emphasis on the human dimension of organisational life.  But at the same time, we wonder why ‘employee engagement’ is perhaps being credited with a higher, harder-edged validity than happiness at work.  Are they the same?  Is one an aspect of the other?  Are the two symbiotically dependent upon each other?  Should we be concerned about the use of the more distanced, abstracted and objective-sounding ‘employee engagement’ in preference to the more straightforward-sounding everyday recognisable un-jargoned idea of happiness at work?

This post won’t necessarily answer these questions, but rather, deliberately leave them hanging, suspending them above a series of new articles from this week’s latest Happiness At Work Edition #54, in the hope of encouraging more conversation about what we really want and what really matters to us in our work.

photo credit: Theophilos via photopin cc

This week’s HRZone publishes a new toolkit of ideas to help organisations to build engagement amongst their people, which they title: Employee Engagement Is the Secret Sauce of Business Success…have you got the bottle for it? and from which we have drawn heavily in this post.  In it in his conclusion to his chapter, Professor Cliff Oswick makes a call for a radically new ‘Art of Non-Leadership’, writing:

Better decisions are made by groups than individuals. All the research tells us that. So why not allow the ecosystem of employees to be decision makers? Leaders of a truly engaged workforce create the conditions where people feel they have a voice and a stake, where organisations have forms of internal crowdsourcing, and where the leader facilitates employee-instigated behaviour rather than delegates responsibility.

In truly engaged organisations, employees take decisions and implement solutions for themselves. It’s the route to a more successful organisation.

And it’s still leadership. But not as we know it.

Employee Engagement is the Secret Sauce of Business Success… have you got the bottle for it? 

The link attached to the above heading will give you the HRZone’s free download guide -

an employee engagement toolkit with insight from leading academics, it’s a practical roadmap for organisations looking to engage their staff…

There is much valuable resource in this and here are some of the highlights that stood out for us.

In the introduction, Tom O’Bryrne, CEO of Great Place To Work writes:

…The truth is that it’s actually quite hard to do. Although there are a number of approaches to engagement there are no guarantees of success. For every organisation that creates a workplace of motivated, engaged people improving business performance, there are many others who struggle and fail. Many businesses today are too busy focusing on the short term – the order books, the bills – to have the time or resource to focus on engagement. The irony is of course that focusing on the people side of the business will ultimately help drive the business outcomes in the long term…

Employee engagement, as much as happiness at work, is situational, and what will be right and relevant in one place and time is likely to be very different than any other specific place, time and people.  In their opening chapter, Engagement Across The Globe – The Importance of Local Context, the authors summarise the findings from their recent study to show that even though engagement matters in every conext, what helps of hinders engagement changes according to the situation:

…As one director remarked, employee engagement is much easier in times of growth, when the aims of the company can be easily aligned with those of the employee, since both parties can benefit from growth. However, one of the MNCs in the study had had to reduce its workforce by 20% following the financial crisis, and in a period of such significant downsizing the drivers of employee engagement became very different. Managers felt that they needed to direct their energies towards maintaining and/or rebuilding trusting relationships with the workforce and the trade union representing them…

One of our favourite Happiness At Work experts in Jessica Pryce-Jones, and we notice a very strong correlation with the research conclusions of the top factors that affect people’s happiness at work that she outlines in her excellent book, Happiness at Work: Maximising Your Psychological Capital for Success:

Pryce-Jones defines happiness as “a mindset which allows you to maximise performance and achieve your potential. You do this by being mindful of the highs and lows when working alone or with others.”

Happiness at work has five major components, called the 5Cs:

1. Contribution: what a person does in the workplace and her view of it.
2. Conviction: a person’s ability to stay motivated.
3. Culture: how well a person fits within the ethos and dynamic of the workplace.
4. Commitment: a person’s general level of engagement with his work.
5. Confidence: a person’s level of self-belief and how well she identifies with her job.

The 5Cs are accompanied by three supporting themes: Pride, Trust, and Recognition.

Notice the similarity to the list of the most important factors for success in being a highly engaging manager, as identified by Katie Truss, Professor of Human Resource Management, Kent Business School, in the second chapter of the HRZone report, What Can Line Managers Do To Raise Engagement Levels?…

Research suggests that these cluster around five core interconnected domains:

1. the design of work,
2. trust,
3. meaningfulness,
4. interpersonal respect, and
5. voice. 

It is really interesting to see the word ‘voice‘ being used in this list of essential factors for employees.  During our work with schools we came to understand the immense importance and difficulty of encouraging and really listening to student voices talking about what they needed to flourish and learn at the best.  At the moment we working again with the wonderful Hackney Museum to help make a series of arts-based learning events with local community members, and again we are discovering the complexities of keeping an alert curiosity and interest in what the people in the room want and think and believe and feel about their own lives and aspirations, especially when our own ideas are trying to get out and into the room.

photo credit: Paolo Margari via photopin cc

This idea is well illustrated in the American case study written up by David Sherwin in his story:

Want To Help Kids Solve Problems? Have Them Design Their Own Solutions

… Their journey began with a simple question: What change do you want to see in your community? It ended with their answer, which they created collectively over 12 class periods as part of their marketing class…

It aimed to help them learn the 4Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity…

The idea of recognising employee voice made in this Employee Engagement  guide remind us of the necessity alongside the challenge of making time to ask into and listen closely to the people whose lives we seek to affect…

…Studies have shown that where employees feel they are able to express their views on work-related matters and know that these views will be listened to, then levels of engagement will be high. Some organisations are particularly good at encouraging employees to share ideas. One award-winning financial services firm has a scheme they call ‘Why on earths?’; if employees find themselves asking, ‘why on earth are we doing this?’ and bring this to the attention of managers, along with some proposals for improvement, then they are eligible to win a prize…

The aforementioned Jessica Pryce-Jones is emphatic about the distinction between engagement and happiness at work, as she writes in her introduction to her book, Happiness at Work: Maximising Your Psychological Capital for Success:

Myth 2: Happiness is Job Satisfaction or Engagement in Another Guise

Engagement in its purest sense refers to the relationship you have with your working environment and the strength of your connection to it.  Thought to be the opposite of burnout, it’s been broadly defined as “vigour, dedication and absorption” and has been widely used by organisations and consultants for improving retention…At its best engagement has been researched through using the concept of flow at work…

 But here’s the central issue:  in crunching through all our statistics – and we now have over 300,000 data points – we can see that engagement relates to 10% fewer items than happiness at work does…Although its something that matters – who doesn’t want to feel engaged at work? – it’s not as “large” a concept as happiness at work is…Engagement – and job satisfaction – are both things which happiness appears to encompass…

The starting point of happiness at work is that it is self-initiated:  we know that you want to make your working world better and enjoy contributing to it if you are given that opportunity…Being happy at work operates best from the ground-up because you know most about managing and affecting your world…

Be honest: would you rather be satisfied, engaged or happy at work?  You decide…

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Pryce-Jones’ contention that engagement is primarily concerned with getting the right environment appears to be corroborated by Amy Armstrong, Research Fellow, Ashridge Business School, in her chapter of the HRZone engagement guide, Overcoming The Barriers To Senior Leader Engagement, which begins by citing the MacLeod Report Engaging For Success…

Engaging leaders create work environments where employees are more committed, stay longer and give more to their organisations, which means that leaders are the ‘climate engineers’ by setting a culture and tone for engagement across the entire organisation. That said, UK engagement levels remain stubbornly low, therefore it is important to understand what prevents some leaders from taking responsibility for engagement. This was one of the objectives of a fascinating piece of research launched earlier this month by Ashridge Business School in partnership with Engage for Success, a Government-sponsored movement that is seeking to improve levels of engagement and well-being across the UK, and in which, it is suggested that it is the skills and capabilities of top management that is a key barrier to engagement.

The research, a year-long study which explored engagement through the eyes of 16 UK CEOs, suggests that for senior leadership, engagement is one of the most difficult parts of the leadership task, requiring them to possess specialist skills and attributes and often having to manage seemingly contradictory demands. The research also suggests that a new leadership model should be found given that the ‘command and control’ style of leading, with its emphasis on organisational hierarchy, has declining relevance in many organisations.

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The three main obstacles this research identified for leaders in their attempts to build engagement in their organisations…

…shortcomings in leadership capability, such as poor self-awareness on the part of leaders, facets of leaders’ personality and values that prevent them from being engaging leaders and the culture and system in which we operate, seen in some ways as antithetical to engagement…

1. Developing Leadership Capability
…Leading engagement can be characterised as walking a fine line. There may be a dichotomy in leading engagement whereby leaders feel an expectation to project confidence, while admitting that they do not have all the answers. Equally, they need to be decisive while giving voice to people across the organisation and they have to be resilient yet emotionally attuned.It is therefore important that we focus on developing leaders who are encouraged to experiment with new ways of leading to discover a personal style that is emotionally-attuned, contextually-relevant and is borne from self- insight…

2. Get To the Heart of Leadership

Engaging leaders also lead with authenticity and purpose and in a way that is aligned to their personal values. Leaders are not simply mouthpieces for their board of directors; rather they find ways of leading that are congruent with who they are and what they believe. However, leading in this way requires a level of personal self-disclosure, which some leaders find deeply uncomfortable. Some leaders may be inherently shy, or be more comfortable with ‘managing the numbers’ than with entering into conversations in which they reveal their own fallibilities…

Leaders need to be encouraged to enter into conversations at work where they are open about who they are and how they feel, since it takes a confident leader to disclose, empower and engage.

3. Change the System

In the UK, we have a task-oriented culture, valuing hard work and output above almost all else. In this kind of environment it is the tangible business outcomes that are valued, so the push on senior leaders is to get things done in a systematic way in order to drive business results. Consequently, it is easier for senior leaders to be judged on measurable outcomes, such as increasing turnover, as opposed to being judged on their ‘softer’ skills of engagement such as inquiry, conversation and interaction. These issues are further compounded within the current economic climate where some leaders have become pre- occupied with addressing questions of short-term viability and survival, as opposed to focusing on the long-term processes of engagement.

However, leaders should be encouraged to move the dial to the longer term to encourage a system in which the invisible processes of engagement are valued just as highly as the tangible outcomes of it.

4. Calling for New Ways of Leading

We have for a long time talked about the role of leader as though it were static, yet this is far from being true – generational shifts, social and demographic change and the impact of declining trust have all contributed to new and different demands being placed on those who lead. Tomorrow’s leaders may look very different, which is likely to have significant implications for how we identify and select leaders for the future.

In the past, individuals may have been promoted into senior leadership positions for possessing skills such as rationality, order, control and toughness, but these are skills that have declining relevance in many organisations. Future leadership models need to have engagement at their core, particularly given the differing expectations of a multi-generational workforce.

The absence of a single ‘right way’ to lead opens the path to more individual ways of leading. It is also time to try genuinely different approaches to leadership development and to encourage a new generation of leadership experimenters who have the courage and the attributes to play their part in defining leadership for the future.

Her conclusion is a clear call to action that chimes with the things that we, too, deeply care about…

By exploring what characterises engaging leaders and engaging leadership, leaders should be encouraged to experiment with new ways of leading to discover their own personal styles that are emotionally-attuned, contextually-relevant and borne from self-insight. Ultimately, through leading with engagement at its heart, there becomes a better way to work that releases the full capabilities and potential of people at work, while at the same time enabling organisational growth and ultimately economic growth for the UK. 

Photo by: KaliFire (Maroc)
kali.ma
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In his chapter, Developing Leadership Styles That Facilitate Employee Engagement, Professor Cliff Oswick identifies Engagement as the latest in a progression of E’s that begins in the 1970′s with Enrichment, which required leaders to help create work that was more meaningful;

and developed in the 1990′s into Empowerment, which meant leaders delegating work and responsibility within agreed boundaries, and proved more of a struggle and less often a success for most managers.

Which leads us to today and engagement, a process where employees feel a sense of commitment and an affinity to their organisation. Employees feel that they have stake in the organisation, feel part of it and care about it…

And here again is another voice making the call for a new style of leadership…

When you have high levels of employee engagement people self-instigate; they do things because they think it is right to do so, because they feel they have a responsibility. Not out of a sense of compliance. There is a more collegiate atmosphere and a greater sense of community. This feeds into a more innovative culture, and better performance.

Once again, with engagement, a change in management approach requires a change in leadership approach. Engagement is more about political engagement, people having a stake in their organisation, and in its decision-making, democratising the workplace. It requires a different style of leadership…

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Oswick’s paper goes on to discuss what he calls Bad Leadership, Good Leadership…

Certainly there are some popular and prevalent leadership styles which are a bad fit with engagement. One is the highly controlling and autocratic directive style, often dressed up in more acceptable language as strong leadership. Strong leadership is the polar opposite of what is required to create the conditions for employee engagement.

Equally bad, but different, is the highly charismatic leader. Charismatic leadership is often described in terms of vision and highly developed interpersonal skills. The leader has a vision, knows the direction everyone should head in, and persuades others to follow. Although different to the directive style, it is similar in the sense that employees are still following the direction set by the leader.

Perhaps surprisingly these two leadership styles are still common in organisations. The higher up you go in organisations the more you see these styles exhibited. Senior executives, for example, are often described as “strong leaders” with this being considered a positive attribute…

…if they want to engage their workforce leaders should avoid these leadership styles for much of the time. There are more effective ways to lead people to get high levels of engagement. They represent, to varying degrees, what I refer to as the art of non-leadership.

The ‘better forms of leadership’ he advises then include ‘distributed leadership,’ where the leadership role is shared and rotated with the situation; and ‘servant leadership,’ which emphasises what the followers need and makes it the leaders job to satisfy these.  But he is critical of both of these because they don’t go far enough.  And again we get the call to revolutionise leadership practice:

If we really want employee engagement to flourish, to get the very best from the workforce, we need leaders to be braver. A more radical approach is required.

The Art of Non-Leadership

Non-leadership is a form of leadership. It’s a form of leadership which involves deliberately not intervening. Non-leadership is the active non-engagement leadership approach – it’s not intervening and not imposing a direction or view. You don’t construct a problem and you don’t constrain the solution. As things arise you don’t step up and take responsibility.

How does it work in practice? …

Increasingly work in organisations is open and ambiguous, with many alternatives, rather than closed and predictable. So processes of organisational change, of innovation and creativity, matters relating to social responsibility, these are ambiguous and hazy. In the early stages of a project you may find yourself asking questions such as ‘how do we improve our processes of customer service?’ or ‘what new products and services should we be developing?’ These are divergent type thinking situations, where there are a number of possible answers. These cry out for a non-leadership approach.

Next, frame the problem or the situation in the broadest possible terms to create the best conditions for engagement. “How can we become more sustainable?” is a more broadly framed topic than “how can we reduce the amount of non-recyclable packaging on a particular product?” This allows people to be very creative and generative in their thinking around problem solving. It allows more people to get involved and to interact, so you get a ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect within the workplace.

With a non-leadership model, not only do you not constrain employees over identifying the problem and the solution, you don’t constrain them on the implementation, either…

When the team is busy devising problems and implementing solutions, what is the leader doing? Apart from the mundane resource-type decisions, leaders should be facilitating and accommodating employees in their problem-solving activities. It is more of a non-directive counselling role, available to provide resources and advice if required, and actively encouraging and supporting the creativity that people exhibit.

It takes courage to adopt a non-leadership approach, and to resist the temptation to step in and direct, to retain and exercise a degree of control. That is one reason why this style of leadership has taken so long to start to develop. Managers like to be in control. Psychologically, it feels far more secure…

Non-leadership may seem a radical approach, but the workforce is changing in radical ways. Employees want to be included in the decision- making process. They want the workplace to be more democratic in orientation and more inclusive. Traditional ‘leader knows best’ models do not work with the new generation of employees.

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This guide ends with the Editor of HRZone Jamie Lawrence’s 10 Thoughts To Take Away With You.  These are the ones that stand out especially for us…

2. For engagement to succeed, it must form part of an organisation’s DNA, owned by everybody, with the understanding that the benefits will be felt in the future.

3. Organisations looking to engage employees must consider what they are trying to achieve and where they are trying to achieve it – successful engagement depends on taking into account contextual economic, social, political and local factors

4. Across different national contexts and employment groups, effective communication and the critical role of line managers emerge as universal drivers of engagement

5. To become engaged, employees need to appreciate the connection between their own work and the overall aims of the organisation and, ultimately, society

9. Senior leaders will not become engaging leaders until they find ways of leading that are congruent with who they are and what they believe in

10. Ultimately, change is required at all levels of an organisation in order to foster the trust and behaviours necessary to build a long-term culture of engagement

5 Ways Leaders Build A Culture of Trust

JENNIFER MILLER offers these practical guidelines for developing greater trust…

Is your organization built on a culture of trust?

Look around you; there are plenty of clues as to whether trust abounds. How quickly are decisions made? How many people do you copy (or worse, bcc) on e-mails? Do executives check in on the “troops” even when on vacation?

Given that 82% of workers don’t trust their boss, trust is a scarce resource in many organizations.

When it comes to creating a trusting workplace culture, the best place to start is with you. As a leader, you either believe in someone’s trustworthiness or you don’t. Leaders who try to split the difference with “trust but verify” won’t build a culture of healthy organizational trust…

Trust is about creating space for people to thrive; excessive verifying diminishes that space. Use these five tips to reduce the amount of verifying happening in your company so that trust will flourish:

1. Assume positive intent, until proven otherwise…
2. Banish bureaucracy…
3. Look at your company’s written word…
4. Tell employees: “I trust you to make a good decision.”…
5. Eliminate “we” and “they” when describing other teams…

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Why So Many Leadership Programs Ultimately Fail

On the subject of leadership development, Peter Bregman, writing in Forbes magazine has this to say…

…There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what we do as leaders.

I have never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership. In fact, I can’t remember ever meeting a leader who didn’t know enough about leadership.

What makes leadership hard isn’t the theoretical, it’s the practical. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing it.

In other words, the critical challenge of leadership is, mostly, the challenge of emotional courage…

We’re teaching the wrong things in the wrong ways.

If the challenge of leadership is emotional courage, then emotional courage is what we need to teach. You can’t just learn about communication, you have to do it, in the heat of the moment, when the pressure is on, and your emotions are high…

The only way to teach courage is to require it of people. To offer them opportunities to draw from the courage they already have. To give them opportunities to step into real situations they find uncomfortable and truly take the time to connect with the sensations that come with that…

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Alongside their toolkit for engagement that I have extensively quoted from above, HRZone also publish a success story from the field:

Interview: Emma Pinker, General Manager, London Vision Clinic, on employee engagement

in this HRZone feature Emma Pinker says what this much-talked about idea of employee engagement means to their organisation…

…employees are passionate, enthusiastic and happy to work at our clinic.

Talking about how they achieve this so successfully – good enough in fact to be included in the latest  2013 Best Workplaces List, she cites their annual team building event as the most important thing they do…

…This was introduced in 2010 and involves a half-day clinic. The clinic departments will be placed in a mix of different teams prior to the day and they will immediately start with coming up with a team name and theme. Each team is given a set of 20 tasks and clues/riddles to solve together. A time frame is normally given and teams need to photograph evidence or perform various tasks to obtain points. The themes involve London landmarks and history so not only do they work as a team but also get to explore and learn about the city as well. The team with the most points win. Needless to say, there is a great level of competition, team building, laughs and many memories made on the day of this event and to date, I believe it bonds the team and brings them closer together…

Reading this makes us wonder whether, even though we are using to some new words to headline the development agenda these days, if perhaps some of the solutions we already know about continue to be worth investing in.  Over the years we have seen dozens of team building events give people time out and away from their day-to-day demands to refresh and revitalise themselves and their relationships and bring an extremely high return rate, and perhaps, now more than ever, people need these moments to re-fire and sustain their commitment to the hard work and hard work days of 21st century professional lives.

Improve Your Happiness At Work

Whereas Jessica Pryce-Jones sees engagement as a subset of happiness at work, Kevin Kruse sees it exactly the other way around.  What difference does this make?  In the end we notice more similarities than difference in what Kruse and Pryce-Jones are advocating.

Here are some thoughts extracted from Skip Pritchard’s interview with Kevin Kruse for his blog Leadership Insights…

Kevin Kruse is a New York Times bestselling author, former CEO, speaker, and a blogger.  His newest book is Employee Engagement for Everyone.

…”Engagement is similar to being happy at work, but it’s a little deeper. Engagement is the emotional commitment someone has to their organization and the organization’s objectives. When we care more, we give more discretionary effort. Whether we are in sales, service, manufacturing or leadership, we will give more, the more engaged we are. Not only is this good for a company’s bottom line, but when we are engaged at work, we also end up being a better spouse and parent, and we have improved health outcomes…”

“Communication is one of the top drivers of engagement. It is sort of the “backbone” that runs through the other primary drivers of Growth, Recognition and Trust….”

“The biggest impediment [to having an engaged culture] is the senior leaders themselves. Either they don’t truly get why engagement is important, or they think it’s important but think the answer lies in corporate-driven initiatives like casual Fridays or a summer picnic. Instead, they need to realize that most of engagement comes from one’s relationship with his or her boss. It has to be a grassroots effort driven at the front lines…”

“…People who are engaged use the word “we” a lot. In fact, that was the title of my first book on the subject of engagement….”

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Workplace Happiness

Dr Izzy Justice writes about the confusion between engagement and happiness in his latest blog post…

Last week, Gallup revealed troubling survey results in its 2013 State of the American Workplace Report on employee happiness and engagement. Both at dismal levels. 70% of employees are not inspired or engaged at work.

I have been writing about this trend since 2008 when workplace power shifted dramatically from the employee, who was just grateful to have a job during a paralyzing recession, to the employer. No point in rehashing the mistakes that were made in leadership across many organizations as I am pleased to note a renewed focus on happiness as a key element in workplace performance.  A happy worker, and engaged worker, is simply a more productive worker.  The Gallup Report gave many examples of creative programs that some companies are doing. Everything from game rooms, to nap rooms, to flexibility in schedule – all popular with employees. But I believe these are merely band-aid solutions to a much larger issue no one seems to want to discuss.

Why do we think that what is needed for a human being to be happy at work is somehow different than what is needed for happiness in general? Happy people generally tend to be those who have very healthy relationships with people in their lives. The quality of human relationships far outweighs the ping pong table, pool table, free lunch and whatever else employers are providing to engage their employees. Quality human relationships are almost entirely an emotional experience. There are no real set of quantitative metrics to check off to determine quality relationships. The American worker, leader, and workplace are mostly bone-dry of human emotions, many even discouraging emotions in the workplace. The level of emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, and emotional training/programs are dismal. I submit that as long as this is the case, then employee engagement levels will continue to drop. We have to have the courage to accept the powerful role of emotions in all we do – not just at work – and to embrace EQ as a foundational competency…

For more stories that connect with these ideas you might like to check out our weekly Happiness At Work  collection.  Here is this week’s latest edition, which includes all these stories:

Happiness At Work #54

Enjoy…

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Moon over South London
Photo: Mark Trezona

Happiness At Work Edition #54

Several of the stand-out stories we’ve collected highlight mindfulness in this week’s new collection.  This is partly because I am drawing together a selection of ideas for a post about mindfulness I hope to have written in time for a collection in the next week or so, but also it seems because this subject is featuring across the air waves just at the moment.  Michael Mosley has had a new Horizon programme that featured this practice, more and more organisations are starting to notice the prevalence of mindfulness practice in some of the most successful companies on our planet, and a new study has found that mindfulness has a great deal of benefit to offer students, especially during this time of year of stressful exam taking.

But we start with some good news for women in particular who face an end of their relationship…

Women Happier Than Men After Divorce, Study Finds

By: Theresa Boyle

Ongoing survey of 100,000 people found that women are significantly more content than usual for up to five years following the end of their marriages.

Despite the hellishness of divorce — emotional turmoil, disrupted living arrangements, and a shrinking income — there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, especially for women, a new study has found.

Research published in the journal Economica has found that women are much happier and satisfied with their lives following divorce…

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Personality Traits Of A Successful Woman Leader

Pam Johnson is an HR professional in the furniture industry, as well as an adjunct professor for her local community college .  She is constantly seeking out people with leadership qualities to fulfill management positions.

In a the male dominated world in which we live, it becomes increasingly important that strong women leaders take charge and make themselves known. They should use their strong personality traits to be a role model to other women and young girls. What, you ask, are the personality traits that tend to make a woman a good leader? Take a look at these personality traits and see if you, or someone you know possesses these traits. If you or someone else does possess these traits, encourage that person or challenge yourself to become an outward role model for other females.

• Confidence…
• Intelligence…
• Interpersonal skills…

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Your glass really can become half full: The documentary that shows how you can train your brain to become an OPTIMIST in seven weeks

By RACHEL REILLY

• Michael Mosley has investigated the science of personality and discovered that our outlook on life is not fixed and unchangeable
• By regularly practicing two mental exercises – mindfulness and cognitive-bias modification - and with no drugs or therapy he felt happier
• Cutting edge tests showed that within just seven weeks his brain activity became less characteristic of a pessimistic and anxious person
• Study has shown that on average, being optimistic can add more than seven years to a life – four years more than if a cure for cancer was found

If you’re a pessimist who thinks a leopard can’t change its spots, just read on.  For researchers claim you can teach yourself to be an optimist in as little as seven weeks.

And there are even more reasons to be positive: the training consists of two simple excercises. One involves looking at smiley and angry faces and the other is a 20 minute meditation exercise…

Moon Over South London
Photo: Mark Trezona

Enlightenment Engineers

BY NOAH SHACHTMAN

Meditation and mindfulness are the new rage in Silicon Valley. And it’s not just about inner peace—it’s about getting ahead.

More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in the meantime. Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful lunches,” conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions. Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts. Classes in meditation and mindfulness—paying close, nonjudgmental attention—have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies…

These companies are doing more than simply seizing on Buddhist practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valley’s goal-oriented, data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never mind nirvana. The technology community of Northern California wants return on its investment in meditation. “All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. “This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”

It can be tempting to dismiss the interest in these ancient practices as just another neo-spiritual fad from a part of the country that’s cycled through one New Age after another. But it’s worth noting that the prophets of this new gospel are in the tech companies that already underpin so much of our lives. And these firms are awfully good at turning niche ideas into things that hundreds of millions crave…

Moon Over South London
Photo: Mark Trezona

Mind over matter is the key to happiness in workplace

DONAL LYNCH

‘Contemplation is the new caffeine’ – thus ran the headline in a recent piece in Wired magazine in which the tech journal observed a growing trend amongst large US corporations for incorporating mindfulness, meditation and creative thought into their battle plan for tackling rising workplace stress.

Google has lead the charge recently with a series of ‘mindful lunches’ and other companies have followed suit. The co-founders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key components of their office cultures, holding regular in-office meditation sessions and arranging for work routines that maximise mindfulness…

So in some ways the timing could not be better for award-winning poet and psychotherapist Christina Reihill to launch her new initiative into the corporate market here in Ireland. ‘Soul Burgers’ won the prestigious Allianz/Tile Style Business To Arts Bursary Award and is the latest incarnation of a project that has already been adapted for musical performances, stage productions and urban art productions.

Reihill – the daughter of Tedcastles tycoon John Reihill who died earlier this year – describes it as “a one-hour mindfulness and well-being seminar to address issues of awareness, personal responsibility, anxiety and problems of addiction, in a unique, gentle and thought-provoking way”…

“Too many HR departments deal with people as products and then wonder why productivity, motivation, change and false expectations remain unresolved”, Reihill tells the Sunday Independent. These issues need a more subtle and soulful approach.

The latest research from America backs up the idea that mindfulness increases workplace happiness, productivity and emotional intelligence. And if Reihill and her team have anything to do with it, Dublin-based corporations will be right on trend.

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Mindfulness in the workplace on the rise

By Jane Kennedy, Geoff Cannon, Glenn Barndon

Workplace stress and general anxiety has become far more prevalent with the increase in technology, digital communication and a change in attitudes towards our work life.

…Large corporations such as Google, Apple, Nike and Target are encouraging its staff to practice mindfulness at work.

“Mindfulness is all about the reality of what’s happening here and now, so if we just pause to come back to our senses, back to reality, that’s all we really need to do,” Dr McKenzie explains.

Studies show that practicing mindfulness helps reduce stress, improve productivity and increase general happiness in the corporate world…

Mindfulness at Work by Dr Stephen McKenzie is out next week. And you can hear him speak more about mindfulness and stress with the ABC’s Glenn Barndon in a podcast inside this article…

How to Manage People Mindfully

Lisa Firestone

The new comedy The Internship pokes fun at the quirky, innovative, utopia-like work environment of Google headquarters. We have all heard stories about Google’s carefully designed “adult playground,” where brilliant minds are nurtured with a creative mix of work and play. The stimulating and seemingly self-sustaining “community” created by Google captivates imaginations with visions of the ideal workplace. And with the ideas that are born on site, it’s easy to see why.

Where we work has a heavy impact, not only on our personal well-being, but on our value to the company we work for. One of my favorite things about attending the fourth annual Wisdom 2.0, a conference that brought together CEOs and experts on mindfulness, was the overwhelming sense that people care. Too often in the world today, people use their power in destructive ways. At Wisdom 2.0, however, business and spiritual leaders from around the world collaborated to discuss the intersection between explosive technologies and personal well-being. Their mission for attendees was “to not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our own well-being, effective in our work, and useful to the world.”

What struck me about the gathering was that a group of driven and powerful figures from our society were there in hopes of learning how they can have an impact, how they can use their power for good. This spirit of community is one that would greatly benefit any business hoping to survive today’s economy. Mindfulness is a practice that can help individuals feel more integrated, both personally and interpersonally. By mindfully forging a sense of connectedness and camaraderie, employers not only enhance the well-being of their employees but of the business itself…

As managers, we can learn to be mindful in our decisions, policies and practices. The best way to start is by thinking about what our values are and choosing to live by them. If all of us were to do this in each of our interactions, we would find that our attitude is contagious. We will communicate more clearly, relate more personally and create a more integrated environment that benefits the businesses we work for and the lives of the people who surround us…

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Mindfulness Means Nothing: Lose the Word, Find a Habit

This is a really helpful introduction to mindfulness by Mark Bertin, M.D.

Mindfulness: A Dictionary Definition
Mindfulness According to Oxford:
The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something

Dr. Kabat-Zinn created his “mindfulness-based stress reduction” (MBSR) program to introduce centuries-old Buddhist concepts into the secular West. Mindfulness is not a spiritual practice unless you want it to be. Whether you’re an intense business leader, an inner-city kid from Baltimore or living on a mountaintop in Tibet, mindfulness builds skills and perspectives that cultivate a larger sense of equilibrium around basic facts of life such as everything is always changing, nothing stands still, and uncertainty rules.

The concept behind the entire MBSR program can be unintentionally misleading. Give us eight weeks and we can fix your stress problem. It can sound very… advertising driven. As any MBSR teacher would say, in reality stress is going to continue whatever we do. And even when your stress level does improve (as research suggests it may), MBSR does not immediately alter anything for some people or eliminate stress forever for anyone; it is not cure-all or a quick fix.

The eight-week program is an introduction to a lifelong training. Stick to it, even when practice is difficult and not much seems to happen, and your experience changes. Mindfulness is more analogous to long term physical fitness than anything more immediate such as knee surgery or a dose of antibiotics.

The Language of Mindfulness
Mindfulness According to Grandma:
Learning how to “be in the moment” and familiar with what you are experiencing so that you become more focused and less reactive in your behavior.

There’s often confusion about the relationship between various related concepts such as “mindfulness” and “mindfulness meditation” and “mindfulness-based stress reduction.” Are they all the same or different? Do they all depend on each other? If I take a mindfulness class do I have to sit quietly for hours on end and pretend to be happy about it?

First, what is meditation? Mindfulness meditation is a particular type of meditation that breaks a habit. We all live much of life distracted and not quite paying attention to what’s actually going on. We exist on autopilot, generally relying on habitual and often reactive behaviors. Through meditation we aim to build a capacity to attend fully to real life, as it is, for better or worse, without any escapism or striving for a totally still mind. Not only can you meditate if you have a busy mind, it’s expected that you’ll have one…

Mindfulness refers to the whole package, a particular set of cognitive skills we develop that help manage our lives. Mindfulness doesn’t require meditation, but it’s built through meditation. It does not require a particular program. You can practice mindfulness at any time through the day, bringing your full attention to whatever you’re doing, with a particular attitude of openness and acceptance (whatever that means)…

Mindfulness is more than attention training.

Mindfulness According to Siri:
The trait of staying aware
(of paying close attention) to your responsibilities.

Stress results when real life does not fit our idea of what should be. Which might mean something as huge as “I imagined I’d be in a happy marriage forever but now I’m getting divorced” or as simple as “I had my heart set on a cheeseburger but they are out of cheese.” Recently back from vacation we may feel particularly magnanimous, accept our disappointment, and move forward. After an awful night sleep and a fight with our boss the no-cheese experience causes a meltdown. A lot of the time, if not all the time, our perspective matters.

When we discuss paying full attention to our immediate experience, it means not only to external forces (no cheese today) but all our internal chatter…

Mindfulness may be a proactive version of the traditional serenity prayer, without the God reference. Being open and curious means acknowledging the reality of the moment, however we feel, without excessive wrestling. Equanimity, a sense of peace and ease, often follows. May I develop for myself the ability to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom always to see the difference.

Mindfulness is a skill set. 
Mindfulness According to Dr. G, Pediatrician/MBSR participant:
Mindfulness is a state where one accepts the past as unchangeable and the future as theoretical, where thoughts are just thoughts
and the present moment is all there is.

So what is mindfulness already? Mindfulness is the ability to live life more fully aware of what’s going on both around us and in our minds. Through that awareness, we become more familiar with our ongoing mental habits. That awareness increases our ability to pick and choose (without expecting total success) which ones to continue and from which we might step back at any moment…

Mindfulness for a healthy brain.

Mindfulness According to basketball coach Phil Jackson:
The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game — and life — will take care of itself.

I don’t work out because I want stronger lungs or legs or arms in particular. I want my body as a whole to stay in shape. And I don’t practice mindfulness because I expect better focus or less stress or more responsiveness in isolation. I support a general state of mental well-being through ongoing effort. That hopefully improves life not just for me, but for my family and anyone else who deals with me day to day…

Mindfulness is a word, and a less than perfect one at defining anything in particular. The concepts behind mindfulness matter far more. Try it and find out.

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…What are the barriers to open expression of emotional learning in most institutional systems?  In Part 1 I shared my assumption that any organization committed to EI learning and widespread application must be willing to act as an “open system.” Too often people are asked to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in systems they believe are inauthentic and closed.

Some EI practitioners have asked whether deep EI practices can flourish in systems that are rigidly hierarchical.  It’s an important question that often gets to the heart of assumptions and behavior in authoritarian-based relationships and structures.  The engine that runs these systems is often based on fear – and most EI advocates would agree that fear is antithetical to EI learning and practice. Because so many managers still mistake compliance for engagement, EI can sometimes be seen as a solution for lack of cooperation or enthusiasm among employees…

…One of the most important lessons I have learned since I began studying EI has been to get out of head and into my body.  Body awareness is typically low in most corporate audiences – and it’s essential to any real EI learning….

…Unfortunately most workplace cultures still require us to ignore the needs of our bodies. Long hours, not enough breaks, lack of access to the outdoors, endless sitting and increasing work loads and demands conspire to reinforce the mind-body split. Most EI learning does not sufficiently deal with these conflicts. I’ve facilitated many EI programs and team meetings in dreary, windowless rooms with heavily distracted workers who wonder why they are so chronically stressed…

…Mindfulness is a tool to build emotional intelligence not a corollary of the learning.  In a use and discard culture, mindfulness training is just another tool that can be downloaded and applied to get whatever is needed to make the deal. It’s a cold and cynical view of an ancient practice that must enter sacred territory to succeed – the body and the mind.

In my work, the essence of EI  is  emotional freedom. I know that many managers are attracted to competencies like Emotional “Regulation” (ah, at last we can train them to control themselves) but the heart of EI must be internal truth-telling.  Too often, leaders expect that EI learning will get employees to “comply” and engage even in cultures that do not support emotional honesty.

Still Asking the Wrong Questions

Twenty years on, some of the questions people ask about emotional intelligence still surprise me.  Is it really useful for business?   Should all levels of the organization have it? …

…As we move forward into the future of EI in the workplace, we need to begin asking different questions. These questions should be premised on something deeper than the bottom line. What do people need to come alive through their work? What kind of culture is needed to create an atmosphere of emotional safety and courage? What are the beliefs that hold us back from changing – personally and collectively?

Emotions are deep and complex. The cold, hard calculus of business demands short-term solutions and quick-fixes. Practitioners can’t install  EI nor can they provide the “deliverables” without  a change in the mindset of business culture.   Yes, you can improve your emotional intelligence. No, you cannot do it in a day or even a week. Yes, it’s really useful, even essential for every business, in every industry. When we stop asking the wrong questions, we’ll know we’re making progress…

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School Mindfulness Programs May Reduce Stress — And Make Teens Happier, Study Finds

By Carolyn Gregoire

It’s at the most stressful times of the school year — like during exam periods — that strategies to relieve academic pressure mean the most. And recent research is shedding light on an effective way for schools to help manage students’ stress: mindfulness, a mental practice that aims to develop greater awareness of thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.

A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry this month found that mindfulness programs could reduce stress and lessen symptoms of depression among secondary school students, as well as increase well-being…

How to teach … mindfulness

The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help introduce the concept of mindfulness to pupils, to help them be calm, focused and creative.  A wonderful set of resources we can all tap into from Guardian writer Emily Drabble…

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6 Ways to Be Happier at Work This Summer

Nellie Akalp

For most of us, more of our waking hours are spent at work than anywhere else. In fact, the average American spends approximately 100,000 hours at work over the course of his or her lifetime. That stat alone is a pretty sobering reminder about just how important it is to be happy at work.

The novelty and excitement of starting a business tends to wear off after the first year, as we become focused on the less-than-optimal aspects of running a business. However, there are some simple things you can do to change this mindset and have a more positive outlook at work this summer:

1. Make time to exercise…
2. Take control of your time…
3. Appreciate others…
4. Challenge yourself…
5. Start something outside of work…
6. When all else fails, smile…

Meditate Away the Sizzling Stress of Summer

Linda Lauren

Meditation is about being mindful of your spirit enough to focus inward for the serenity and guidance you need. It’s having a moment to hear yourself think. We have the answers within us, and with a steady routine, we can harness a personal power that will remove much of the emotion that stress can cause. The only steadfast rule is slow breathing. Proper breathing is an advantage to handling life and health matters, and is especially helpful for dealing with overall stress. I have outlined a simple method of breathing to get you started so that anyone, at any age, can enjoy meditating…

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8 Ways to Cure Over-Thinking and Regain Your Happiness

Some straightforward simple yet effective tips from Peggy Nolan

Let’s face it — over-thinking leaves you drained. It robs you of your peace and poise of mind. It’s mental exhaustion on the level of running a marathon every day. It’s a mind-numbing habit that keeps you stuck from leading a happy, healthy life. And who doesn’t want to be happier? Here are eight proven strategies to help you kick the over-thinking habit.

1. Stop!  Enough!  The next time your monkey mind begins to produce a drama worthy of an Oscar, silently shout: “Stop! Enough!” Change the channel to something peaceful.
2. Visualisation.  Visualise a happy memory or simply allow your mind to sink into its happy place…
3. Just Breathe.  Turn your attention and focus on our breath. Focus on your inhales and exhales. Slow your breathing down. Take deeper breaths. Relax your jaw. Unclench your fists. Just Breathe….
4. Go For A Walk.  Get out of your head, move your body. Swing your arms. Do a few lunges. Walk it out. Focus on each step. Pay attention to the way your foot makes contact with the pavement. Tune in to the movement of your body and not the replay of last week’s argument.
5. Journal.  If the complaint or drama even has the inkling of being persistent, I write it down. As a response, monkey mind goes quiet. Once written, the need to be heard has been met. No need to revisit….
6. Engage In Your Favourite Hobby.  Over-thinking produces no results and offers no solutions. Switch gears and do something you enjoy!
7. Be Mindful.  Whatever you decide to do, engage your full attention on that activity….Keep your focus on whatever it is you’re doing. It will help prevent your monkey mind from wandering….
8. Be Present.  Over-thinking is all about dredging up the past and/or borrowing trouble from the future. The best cure for over-thinking is to simply be present. Be here right now….

Why I’ll Never Write Another Top 10 List About Happiness

Britt Reints writes in her blog In Pursuit of Happiness…

…you aren’t taking your happiness seriously if you need a top ten list. And that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with being in a place where you take other stuff more seriously. Truly.  Maybe you’re researching how to cure cancer, or raising six kids, or focusing all of your energy on putting food on the table this month. Those lists that make happiness seem like something you can slip in between appointments probably just piss you off anyway, and that’s OK.

But maybe you are at a point where happiness is important.

Maybe you’re restless, searching, and always feeling not quite right.  I don’t know what that “OK, it’s time now” moment feels like for you; for me it felt like “screw it, let’s just blow up my entire life and start over.”  Whatever it is, you know.  And you know those shorthand missives about how to be happier are crap.

You know there’s more to it.

So do I.

And I’m promising you right now to stop pretending otherwise.

Let’s do this…

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Beyond McMindfulness

Not all commentators are unequivocally positive about this mindfulness movement.  Ron Purser and David Loy suggest some reasons for caution…

Suddenly mindfulness meditation has become mainstream, making its way into schools, corporations, prisons, and government agencies including the U.S. military. Millions of people are receiving tangible benefits from their mindfulness practice: less stress, better concentration, perhaps a little more empathy. Needless to say, this is an important development to be welcomed — but it has a shadow.

The mindfulness revolution appears to offer a universal panacea for resolving almost every area of daily concern…

While a stripped-down, secularized technique — what some critics are now calling “McMindfulness” — may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.

Most scientific and popular accounts circulating in the media have portrayed mindfulness in terms of stress reduction and attention-enhancement. These human performance benefits are heralded as the sine qua non of mindfulness and its major attraction for modern corporations. But mindfulness, as understood and practiced within the Buddhist tradition, is not merely an ethically-neutral technique for reducing stress and improving concentration. Rather, mindfulness is a distinct quality of attention that is dependent upon and influenced by many other factors: the nature of our thoughts, speech and actions; our way of making a living; and our efforts to avoid unwholesome and unskillful behaviors, while developing those that are conducive to wise action, social harmony, and compassion.

This is why Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati). The distinction is not moralistic: the issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterized by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human flourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself…

Up to now, the mindfulness movement has avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in modern business institutions. Instead, corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments. Cloaked in an aura of care and humanity, mindfulness is refashioned into a safety valve, as a way to let off steam — a technique for coping with and adapting to the stresses and strains of corporate life…

One hopes that the mindfulness movement will not follow the usual trajectory of most corporate fads — unbridled enthusiasm, uncritical acceptance of the status quo, and eventual disillusionment. To become a genuine force for positive personal and social transformation, it must reclaim an ethical framework and aspire to more lofty purposes that take into account the well-being of all living beings…

These thoughts are picked up and challenged back by ELISHA GOLDSTEIN in her post in Psychology Today, which summarises and champions the heart and hope our western interest in mindfulness is centred and moving from:

photo credit: AlicePopkorn via photopin cc

Beyond McMindfulness: Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

Ever since mindfulness began spreading its wings in Western culture, there has been the fear that it would be stripped down, diluted and packaged for sale by greedy money-hoarding capitalists just wanting to make their bank accounts fatter. If this happened, inevitably it would just become a passing trend that the public would eventually grow weary of. The most cautionary piece about this was an article published on Huffington Post called Beyond McMindfulness. While the sentiment of commodifying mindfulness into a marketable technique is alive, and worth cautioning against, it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater…

Ultimately, a program has to be marketed to meet people where they are. The 15^th century Indian poet Kabir said, “Wherever you are that’s the entry point.” For people to enter into the experience of mindfulness, it helps to package it for stress reduction, reducing depressive relapse, increasing productivity, increasing attentional focus, or lowering blood pressure. These allow people to be attracted to it and then have a genuinely beneficial experience that can guide them toward what matters.

Can you imagine if you walked into a corporation and said, “We have a program that integrates ancient practices from a Buddhist context that embeds moral and ethical guidelines for the benefit of all beings.” I don’t think you’d find many takers. But, rest assured, most of the leading programs out there are taught by people who hold these moral values in mind and integrate them in a way that can be understood and accepted…

Ultimately, the reason mindfulness will not just become another trend is because too many people at this point are experiencing how it not only reduces stress, but gets you in touch with what matters. It’s intentionally not tied to the Buddhist context, so maybe we call it “Western mindfulness.” More and more people are being trained under a more secular perspective and with the intention of it being a benefit beyond the egoic self.

In fact, there’s now an entire magazine called Mindful that’s dedicated to these more secular perspectives and how it is changing the face of business, education, mental health, medicine, and all these various sectors of life. Take heart, the magazine was started by people who have a deep appreciation for mindfulness as a movement that is globally transformative.

A very popular conference called Wisdom 2.0 that is all probably the leading conference for mindfulness and business has a subtitle that says, “How do we live with greater awareness, wisdom and compassion in the digital age?” My sense is that the trend is not heading toward McMindfulness, but is deeper than that. The folks that are just packaging it for a buck are more likely going to be the ones whose voices get drowned out by the leading programs.

I appreciate the cautionary notes in Beyond McMindfulness since we need to be aware when someone is just using the term as a buzz word without ties to a deeper moral purpose. But I want to make sure it’s balanced out with the reality of how a secularization of mindfulness, while not explicitly tied to Buddhist principles, is a vital movement for individuals, businesses, medicine, mental health and education…

5 Ways to Make It Easier for Men to Channel Empathy and Compassion

Boys and men commit the vast majority of violent acts, from domestic violence to murder. We’ve got to get at the root causes.

…Men practice high levels of mindfulness in a variety of arenas in our society. At  military boot camps and police academies, men learn to control their breathing and focus on a target before firing a weapon. Sports are a great training ground for mindfulness: Basketball players are taught to clear their mind by going through a routine when shooting a free throw. Being in “the zone” is active meditation in its highest form.

Notice, however, that in all of these mindfulness practices, compassion is removed from the equation. These boys and men are being trained for win-or-lose competition. “It has been historically dangerous for a man to be vulnerable,” says Elad Levinson, who suggests that men’s resistance to explore interior emotions like compassion is the result of hundreds of years of conditioning…

While some argue that this is the result of a biological predisposition, contemporary research in neuroplasticity, by scientists like Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s  Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, finds that even short-term compassion meditation training (30 minutes a day for eight weeks)  alters the brain activity in regions associated with positive emotional skills like empathy. That is true for both men and women. As Davidson  says, “Compassion is indeed an emotional skill that can be trained.”

We understand the benefits. The need is there. But how do we get men to participate in mindfulness and compassion training? Here are five ways to plant the seeds of compassion in boys—and cultivate its growth in men…

Moon Over South London
Photo: Mark Trezona

The power of shutting down your senses: How to boost your creativity and have a clear mind

Written by Belle Beth Cooper

John C. Lilly’s original floatation experiments involved people wearing uncomfortably tight suits and breathing masks while being completely submerged. The tanks also made lots of noise, so complete sensory deprivation wasn’t possible.

The modern scenario sounds much more comfortable, and goes something like this:

You strip off, shower and step into a pod-like tank full of water and 850 pounds of Epsom salts. The salts make sure you float and prevent the risk of drowning by making it extremely difficult to roll over…

The long period of nothingness leaves you with only your mind, essentially. Once your body starts to get used to the lack of sensory input, the stress-centers of your brain relax and release less cortisol—the main brain chemical related to stress. Graham Talley, who owns a sensory-deprivation tank center in Portland, explained it like this:

Getting rid of all sensory input allows the ‘constantly-make-sure-you’re-not-dying’ part of your brain to chill out for a second, allowing the creative, relaxed part of your brain to come out and play.

Without the constant pressure of analyzing the world around you, your body lowers its levels of cortisol, the main chemical component of stress. “Your brain also releases elevated levels of dopamine and endorphins, the neurotransmitters of happiness,” Graham continues. “Not having to fight gravity lets your muscles, joints, and bones take a well-deserved break. Without the gravity pushing you down, your spine lengthens an inch, chronic pain is relieved, and your muscles get to fully rest.”

…One of the coolest advantages of floating is how much it boosts creativity and nurtures inspiration. After floating in complete isolation, your senses are heightened… colors are more vibrant, scents more aromatic, and food taste better.

When part of your brain stops getting input—e.g. if one of your senses is deprived—other parts of your brain will pick up the slack. Many floaters experience hallucinations as their brains respond to not getting sensory input. This is part of the vivid mental imagery I mentioned earlier—your brain is relaxed enough to visualize strong images you wouldn’t see normally.

Are you curious enough to try it now? I certainly am. But, if you’re not quite ready to give it a go, or you’re not lucky enough to have a tank nearby, you can actually try some mild forms of sensory deprivation at home…

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Mindful Photography: A Simple and Fun Exercise That Boosts Well-Being

Here’s another to add to the list.

It’s based on the idea that happiness is boosted by being grateful for what you have.

Unfortunately we often ignore what we have in the rush through everyday life.

One way of combating this is to take photographs of whatever is important to you as a reminder. Here are the instructions for ‘mindful photography‘, by positive psychology experts Jamie Kurtz and Sonia Lyubomirsky:

“Throughout the course of the day today, you will take photographs of your everyday life. [...] think about the things in your life that are central to who you are. If you wanted someone to understand you and what you most care about, how would you capture this? While this is highly personal, some examples might include sports equipment [or] a memento from a favorite time spent with your romantic partner [..]. Have your camera or camera phone handy and take at least 5 photographs of these things today.” …

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Harrison Ford Is A Carpenter

BY MICHELLE WITTON

Wise and practical ideas from actor, lawyer, Russian language student Michelle Witton about how to make a path through to your dreams that can be built from doing things you like and feel good at while you’re waiting to do the thing you love and feel passionate about…

…Both law and acting are working with language. Law is about creative problem-solving, generating options to deal with issues. It’s given me the knowledge to deal with contracts, raise money for shows, do free legal work for The Actor’s Centre. I don’t advocate it for all. I’m sharing about a path – just one of many – that I’ve found creatively sustaining and rewarding…

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SHAWN ACHOR Author of the international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage and Positive Psychology Expert!

A summary of some of Shawn Achor’s writing and speech topics, including:

The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance

Most companies and schools follow this formula: if you work harder, you will be more successful, and then you will be happy. This formula is scientifically backward. A decade of research shows that training your brain to be positive at work first actually fuels greater success second. In fact, 75% of our job success is predicted not by intelligence, but by your optimism, social support network and the ability to manage energy and stress in a positive way.

By researching top performers at Harvard, the world’s largest banks, and Fortune 500 companies, Shawn discovered patterns, which create a happiness advantage for positive outliers—the highest performers at the company. Based on his book, The Happiness Advantage (2010 Random House), Shawn explains what positive psychology is, how much we can change, and practical applications for reaping the Happiness Advantage in the midst of change and challenge.

Positive Leadership: Restoring a Culture of Confidence

Confidence, trust and job satisfaction are at historic lows. When the economic collapse began, the world’s largest banks called in Shawn Achor to research how to restore confidence and forward progress. While many managers succumb to helplessness, with their teams and clients quickly following suit, Shawn researched those who maintained high levels of success and leadership during the challenge. He found that our brains create confidence based on the belief that our behavior matters to the outcome we desire. To develop this trust, we must create “wins” for our brain necessary to overcome learned helplessness and must train our brains for rational optimism.

Based on the science of positive psychology and case studies of working with companies in the midst of an economic collapse, Shawn provides practical applications for raising the belief that individual behavior matters and helping leaders to keep teams motivated and engaged.

The Ripple Effect: How to Make Positive Change Easier

Common sense is not common action. This is because information does not necessarily cause transformation because we require a certain level of “activation energy” to start a change. Shawn Achor’s research in the field of positive psychology has revealed how changes in our own brain due to mindset and behavior can have a ripple effect to a team and an entire organization. This positive ripple effect can create a more productive, positive work culture making positive change easier. Audiences will learn about the latest scientific research on mirror neurons and mental priming to explain how positivity and negativity spread, case studies on how to become a lightning rod for change, and findings on how a positive ripple effect profoundly affects an organization’s ability to transition and change.

Rethinking the Formula for Success: The Power of Positive Education

At schools and companies alike, we are sometimes taught to think: “if I work harder, then I will be successful, and then I will be happy.” This formula–which undergirds much of our educational and professional world–is scientifically backwards. Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, explains how positive brains reap a unique advantage raising nearly every educational and business outcome–but only if we get the formula right. By demonstrating how happiness is a choice, we can help students not only cultivate positive habits and mindsets, but achieve higher levels of success as a result.

Shawn’s study on 1600 Harvard students and his seven years as a Freshmen Proctor gave him a unique window into the thinking of success-driven and sometimes overwhelmed students. His subsequent work at schools and companies in 51 different countries now reveals how very simple changes to our mindset and habits can result in positive changes that cascade to others around us. Using his new research which made the cover of Harvard Business Review, interactive experiments, and humorous stories, Shawn shows how we can bring this research to life for our schools and for ourselves.

Shawn Achor
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Inside Bhutan: Is Happiness More Important than Economic Growth?

Max Johnson

As Bhutan heads to its second round of elections this weekend, Max Johnson reports on the mountainous nation and its commitment to Gross National Happiness

‘WE ALL WANT happiness: the question is, how much happiness does economic development bring you? Gross National Happiness is more important to us than GDP. We want to develop, but not at the expense of losing our culture, our identity.’ …

‘Look, all human beings want their lives to improve of course. But when we are on our death beds and we look back, we want to know that we lived a fulfilled life, a life without laziness, greed, arrogance, wrath and desire. The pursuit of wealth does not lead to the satisfaction of the soul. In the end, ashes to ashes, as you Christians say.’  …

But what exactly is Gross National Happiness? President Jigmi Y Thinley said in his party’s manifesto that the central tenet of GNH is about balancing the needs of the body (material gains) with those of the mind (spiritual growth).

GNH is thus based on four pillars: equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, environmental conservation (72 per cent of the country is covered by forests and 60 per cent is protected), preservation and promotion of culture and good governance…

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And here’s an interesting exercise…

The 7-Word Autobiographies of Famous Writers, Artists, Musicians, and Philosophers

by Maria Popova

John Irving, Joan Didion, David Byrne, Rem Koolhaas, Madeleine Albright, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Dennett, Andrew Sullivan, Ed Ruscha, Brian Eno, and more…

What seven words would you choose to describe you?

Happiness At Work #54

These and many more stories can all be found in this week’s collection.

Enjoy…

Moon Over South London
Photo: Mark Trezona

Here are some of the stories we especially like in this week’s new collection of

Happiness At Work #56 of 26th July 2013

Step Back, Relax and Enjoy Summer

Diane Lang is a frequent guest on TV and radio and has been featured in many magazines, newspapers, and blogs and has a website, dlcounseling.com.

How can we live mindfully? Here are some steps Lang recommends:

1. Be an active listener: When someone is talking to you, stay present. Don’t think about anything else. Stay focus. Give direct eye contact. Ask questions. Summarize. Show you’re listening by the non-verbal messages with you send tiwth your eyes, hands and face.

2. Do one thing at a time: We are a society of multitaskers, but to be mindful we need to slow down, focus on the task, get totally absorbed on what we are doing, get into “flow.”

3. Simplify your life: Don’t fill your day just to be occupied. That is just being busy without purpose. Do the things you enjoy and love. Don’t waste time and energy on things that are just “fillers.”

4. Take some time each day to do nothing: “I mean nothing,” Lang says. This doesn’t mean thought time or nap time. It means just sitting and observing. Try to clear your mind completely and enjoy the silence.

5. Embrace nature: Another way to be quiet is by being surrounded by nature. Sit outside. Take a walk. Go for a swim. Lay in the sun (but wear sunscreen!).

6. Avoid judgment: That takes away from the experiences of the season. Don’t look at mindfulness as a chore. It’s just a state of being. It’s enjoying every moment. It’s being alive in every moment. It’s being fully involved in every activity and conversation.

7. Mindfulness is awareness: Be aware that every moment of your life is important, no matter how big or small.

8. Truly accept your life: Accept where you are at this moment. Be aware of your emotions. Don’t push them down or avoid them. They will eventually rear there ugly head. Accept them, feel them and then you can move forward. Don’t intellectualize or repress your feelings. If you feel what is happening, the negative feelings will pass quicker. Use your negative emotions as a teachable moment.

9. Mindfulness means self-compassion: Have a “higher talk” with yourself. Watch the tape recorder playing in your head. Change your self-talk. Use positive affirmations.

Link to read more

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How Naps Affect Your Brain and Why You Should Have One Every Day

Written by Belle Beth Cooper

…Studies of napping have shown improvement in cognitive function, creative thinking and memory performance…the body clock and your body’s best time for everything, we’re naturally designed to have two sleeps per day…

…while the left side of your brain takes some time off to relax, the right side is clearing out your temporary storage areas, pushing information into long-term storage and solidifying your memories from the day…

Here are some tips to help you work out the best way to get the most from your nap:

1. Learn how long you take to get to sleep…
2. Don’t sleep too long…
3. Choose the right time of day…
4. Practice…

Link to read this article

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Study: Happiness of British Teenagers is in Decline

Britons ages 14-15 were less likely to be happy about school, their appearance and the amount of choice and freedom they have, than the others surveyed, the report said.

The charity, which questioned 42,000 8-17-year-olds, said all of society has a part to play in boosting children’s well-being.

“The well-being of our future generation in Britain is critical. So it is incredibly worrying that any improvements this country has seen in children’s well-being over the last two decades appear to have stalled,” Matthew Reed, chief executive of The Children’s Society, said in a statement.

“These startling findings show that we should be paying particular attention to improving the happiness of this country’s teenagers. These findings clearly show that we can’t simply dismiss their low well-being as inevitable ‘teen grumpiness.’ They are facing very real problems we can all work to solve, such as not feeling safe at home, being exposed to family conflict or being bullied.”

Link to read more

Happiness peaks during 20s and 60s, slumps in mid-50s: study

Backing up a popular well-being theory called the U-shape, new research shows people are happiest around age 23 and then again around age 69. Most people are the least satisfied with life in their 50s, but ditching regrets could help get them back on the happy track.

BY RHEANA MURRAY

Schwandt’s data comes from more than 23,000 surveys that were conducted in Germany, among participants between ages 17 and 85. They were asked how satisfied they were with their current life, and how they expected to feel about life in five years.

The research also shows that people are bad at predicting their future well-being.

“The young strongly overestimate their future life satisfaction while the elderly tend to underestimate it,” Schwandt said.

Link to read more

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What Is Resilience?

Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means “bouncing back” from difficult experiences.

Research has shown that resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary. People commonly demonstrate resilience. One example is the response of many Americans to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and individuals’ efforts to rebuild their lives.

Being resilient does not mean that a person doesn’t experience difficulty or distress. Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity or trauma in their lives. In fact, the road to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress.

Resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have. It involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone…

Link to read more

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11 Steps To Happiness At Work (in photos)

To achieve greater happiness at work, you don’t need your boss to stop calling you at night. You don’t need to make more money. You don’t need to follow your dream of being a sommelier, or running a B&B in Vermont. So says Srikumar Rao, the author of Happiness at Work. The biggest obstacle to happiness is simply your belief that you’re the prisoner of circumstance, powerless before the things that happen to you, he says. “We create our own experience,” he adds.

Here are 11 steps to happiness at work, drawn from his recommendations…

Link to read more

Happiness in the Workplace: Enjoyed By Few, But Achievable For All

If you still have doubts about – or need to make the case for – the importance of happiness at work this excellent article by Kaitlin Louie summarises some of the key research into the link between professional and organisational success and happiness, and then goes on to outline some of the best advice about how to increase happiness at work from experts in the field…

Whether we realize it or not, happiness is one of the ultimate goals of everything we do. From the jobs we strive to obtain to the homes and cars we buy to the company we keep, many of our daily decisions are steps towards what we believe will bring us joy. Given the importance we place on achieving happiness throughout our lives, it comes as no surprise that workplace contentment is a topic of strong public interest and discussion. We spend a great deal of our waking hours at work, thinking about work and preparing for work. Books have been written on the subject, and there are numerous studies and articles that attempt to explain what it takes to find true and lasting professional happiness…

Link to read more

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The Secret to Entrepreneurial Happiness

theyec

…if happiness cannot be bought — and yet we use it to measure our business success — what can we do to attain it? Over the last decade, researchers in Positive Psychology have discovered a number of behaviours that boost happiness. To boost your own, practice these four behaviours:

1. Create a social circle of like-minded entrepreneurs…
2. Give your time away…
3. Set attainable goals…
4. Practice gratitude…

Link to read full article

What Silicon Valley Developers Can Teach Us About Happiness At Work

By Carolyn Gregoire

…For some companies, like Mindflash, Agile has been a way to redefine success — an alternative to a workplace culture of stress and burnout that ultimately takes a toll on both employee well-being and the company’s bottom-line profits…

Here are four Agile principles that anyone can use to boost productivity — and happiness — at work.

Take breaks…

Focus on what you enjoy and what you’re good at…

Eliminate unnecessary work…

Take time to reflect…

Communicate face-to-face…

Link to read more

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Are Shallow People Happier At Work?

A nice reflective piece by By Gretchen Rubin (which also includes video conversation about what helps to make happiness at work) …

One surprising thing about happiness? That it has such a bad reputation.

Happiness, many people assume, is boring–a complacent state of mind for self-absorbed, uninteresting people…

In fact, however, studies show–and experience bears out–that happiness doesn’t make people complacent or self-centered. Rather, happier people are more interested in the problems of other people, and in the problems of the world. They’re more likely to volunteer, to give away money, to be more curious, to want to learn a new skill, to persist in problem-solving, to help others, and to be friendly. They’re more resilient, productive, and healthier. Unhappy people are more likely to be defensive, isolated, and preoccupied with their own problems.

Some people are argue that it’s better to be interesting than happy. But that’s a false choice…

I often think of Simone Weil’s observation, adapted for unhappiness and happiness: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” …

Link to read more

Ed Diener’s ‘Science of Happiness’

By Kathy Graham

…Guaranteed happiness boosters include meditation, doing exercise, helping others, having interests you’re passionate about … the list is long. Diener is very careful here to distinguish between lasting contentment and short-lived pleasure. “So we talk about it as sustainable happiness because sometimes people try the short and quick things that don’t work like drugs, and alcohol and lots of sex and sensation-seeking, and we say no, turn to the things we know work in the long run,” he says.

And what works better than anything else is having close supportive relationships. When Diener and founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman who presented at Happiness & Its Causes 2012, looked at the data, they discovered the top five percent, “the really, really happy people” all had very strong connections with others, “people who would really step up and help them and go to bat for them. And it was universal.” …

Link to read more

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Bioeconomics: The Hidden Megascience

…If we conceive of human beings as Homo economicus, as non-sentient automatons whose behaviours can be described by algorithms, sentience will be ignored if not forbidden and felt experience will be seen as irrelevant. This is exactly what is happening.

By contrast, to see reality as a living process would literally change everything. This is the challenge of Enlivenment as a “transcendent paradigm.” Its insistence that our policies focus on living experience provides the deepest possible ethical leverage for intervening in our global system.3 Of course, this approach is moot in today’s political culture. But political change must start with our imagining of a different reality. Only by imagining a different world have people ever been able to change the current one…

Link to read more

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The Art of Memory

By Kathy Graham

…I’m very interested in hearing about any techniques that might help me do this, including those described here by accomplished memory athlete Daniel Kilov, who will be presenting at our Mind & Its Potential conference later this year.

Kilov says that when he tells people he’s a memory athlete, many wonder why he bothers given it’s so easy in today’s world to retrieve whatever information we want by clicking on Google or Wikipedia. He believes their question goes to the “heart of the conception we have of memory and of the relationship that we think it has to learning”, a conception that’s formed when we’re at school and asked to memorise through boring repetition. “It’s a conception of memory as being a dull, impersonal and ineffective parroting,” he says.

His preferred conception of memory is that it’s creative, personal, fun and highly effective. Moreover, he espouses the value of memory techniques as a potential revolution in education. Not that this would be the first time excellent recall skills have enjoyed high status in academia. As a matter of historical fact, the art of memory has its origins in ancient Greece where, says Kilov, it was practiced universally by the great thinkers of the time who “recognised that creativity, focus and critical analysis were the kinds of things that could only happen in the minds of well-trained mnemonics.”

Link to read more

The Science Behind How We Learn New Skills

THORIN KLOSOWSKI

…Everyone prefers to learn a little differently, so unfortunately you might need to experiment with different methods as you’re taking on a new skill. The above list certainly doesn’t inlucde everything, but it’s a starting point to learning more effectively. You’re bound to hit plenty of barriers along the way, and sticking with it isn’t always easy, but the benefits are worth it: a bigger, smarter brain that can process things easily…

Link to read the full article of knowledge and guidelines about how to learn well

Leadership Lesson: Do You Hear Me?

by Andy Uskavitch

“Listening requires you to stop what you’re doing and to have patience with the conversation.”

Leaders need to focus in order to keep listening, or else we’re just . . . hearing.  Too many leaders have so many things on their minds that if they don’t just stop and focus on listening, it’s not long before they’re thinking about other things and slipping into the hearing mode…

Link to read full article including practical Active Listening techniques

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The Four Facets of Communication at Work

This article was written by Neil Payne, Founder and Marketing Director of translation services company Kwintessential.

Ask ten people what they think contributes to a successful working environment and you can bet your bottom dollar the majority will agree on one factor – communication. We recognise and value communication for its contribution to a better workplace through the efficiencies it brings, performances it enhances, trust it builds and morale it nurtures.

Communication is good, and as a result most organisations seek to promote it in one form or another at the heart of their affairs. However, as we all know, sometimes things are not as we would like them to be; communication can be inconsistent, non-existent or simply poor. The consequences are on the whole negative and can lead to an organisation with problems…

Although there are many facets to communication, a simple approach is to look at the four key areas of the organisation, the culture, the people and the platforms…

Link to read more

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Steve McCurry’s Blog: Eye Witness

The latest eye-opening photos from master photographer of human life around our planet…

Eyes speak a universal language, and no
interpreter is needed

Link to these photos

Fishes and Trees: Timely Mindfulness Tips from Albert Einstein

Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid. – Albert Einstein

12 Tips on Mindfulness From Albert Einstein

1. I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. Use your passionate curiosity! How to begin? Use mindfulness. Settle into yourself, hear those whispered truths.
2. Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. Are you trying to drive and kiss? Trying to work a “job” and hold your dreams ’till some future whenever? Stop that. Start kissing.
3. Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.** Fish who are paying attention, being mindful, know that trying to climb a tree is a waste of a life. Smart fish go for the water, that place from which one happily thrives.
4. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Is there any room in your life for the mysterious? If not… bummer. That’s the space wherein fish understand that trying to climb a tree is pretty stupid. Mindful awareness can help you see the mysterious body of water that’s right in front of you.
5. Any fool can know. The point is to understand. Any fool fish intellectually knows that climbing a tree just isn’t going to happen. But. To understand the ramifications, and make a different choice, well… that’s where mindfulness comes in handy.
6. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. Cultivating a mindful awareness practice helps us manage those inevitable difficult times. It helps us get in the water rather than trying to climb trees.
7. Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. If all the fish around us are crazily trying to climb, it’s more challenging to see with our own eyes that it’s a no-win effort. Feeling our way with our hearts is the minority position. (70 percent disengagement in the workforce?) Mindfulness goes a long way toward giving us the courage to do what needs doin’.
8. The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. Yes, you’ll need to do something different in order to swim in your own little pond (or big fat ocean). What can help you make the necessary changes? That’s right… mindfulness.
9. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.Mindful awareness helps develop the ability to drop into the gift of your intuitive mind. If more fish cultivated this practice… well, just imagine the results!
10. I believe in intuitions and inspirations…I sometimes FEEL that I am right. I do not KNOW that I am. Most fish aren’t stopping long enough to know how they feel about anything. Mindfulness helps us feel into what is true. When we understand that, we can begin making better choices for ourselves and the people we love.
11. Imagination is the highest form of research. Imagination? Feeling into your heart? Intuition? None of these concepts is high on the list of most organizations. What might be wrong with this picture? Start asking yourself what you need to know. Do it through mindful awareness. Align with Einstein.
12. The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. How much of you is dying inside while you’re madly trying to climb a tree when you really belong in the water? Develop your mindfulness muscle. Start living.

Mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for everything on the planet. But it sure does help. With almost everything…

Link to read more

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For all of these articles, plus many more, please see this week’s new collection of stories about happiness and wellbeing at work, resilience & self-mastery, learning & creativity, leadership and artistry …

Happiness At Work edition #56 of 26th July 2013

We hope you find things in this to enjoy and use.

Photo by Martyn Duffy

The emergent theme coming through many of the stories of this week’s Happiness At Work Edition #57 considers what it means to be living The Good Life in our 21st century age of abundance and austerity, and the importance of altruism and helping others for our own happiness and even success…

Steve McCurry’s Blog: Light of Faith

Each week Steve McCurry’s new photo collection arrives in my inbox as a little gift, and I always save looking at them until I know I can take my time to quietly enjoy then and ket my mind go wherever they want to take me.  This week’s collection is no exception, and, even if you do not share any of the beliefs portrayed here, I think you might still find, as I did, that these images make worthwhile focus to just stop a moment and notice and consider the importance in all of our lives of reflection, stillness, breathing and breathing together…

I have seen many manifestations of faith during my travels over the past three decades.
Some have been spontaneous, some have been part of a liturgy,
some have been prescribed rituals,
Some have been in magnificent buildings, others have been outside under a tree.
Some people’s faith is embedded in the way they live their lives.  Steve McCurry

Here is the link to these photos

Not All Happiness Is Created Equally, and Genes Show It

By RICK NAUERT PHD

photo credit: USACE HQ via photopin cc

Provocative new research suggests happiness or positive psychology can affect your genetic makeup.

However, not all happiness is the same, and different types of happiness may have significantly different effects as the body responds in a unique manner to dissimilar forms of positive psychology.

Researchers from UCLA and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered people who have high levels of what is known as eudaimonic well-being — the kind of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (think Mother Teresa) — showed very favorable gene expression profiles in their immune cells.

That is, the “do-gooders” had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.

However, people who had relatively high levels of hedonic well-being — the type of happiness that comes from consummatory self-gratification (think most celebrities) — actually showed just the opposite.

The “feel-gooders” had an adverse expression profile involving high inflammation and low antiviral and antibody gene expression…

Here is the link to read the rest of this article

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Virtue Rewarded: helping others at work makes people happier

Altruists in the workplace are more likely to help fellow employees, be more committed to their work and be less likely to quit, new research by UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs shows.  And these workplace altruists enjoy a pretty important benefit themselves — they are happier than their fellow employees.

“More and more research illustrates the power of altruism,” says La Follette professor Donald Moynihan, “but people debate whether we behave altruistically because of hidden self-interest, such as the desire to improve how others see us.

“Our findings make a simple but profound point about altruism: helping others makes us happier.  Altruism is not a form of martyrdom, but operates for many as part of a healthy psychological reward system,” Moynihan says…

Here is the link to read the rest of this article

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Helping Others Makes Us Happier At Work, Research Finds

Here’s a good reason to help your coworkers with an upcoming project or presentation: Altruists in the office are more likely to be committed to their work and are less likely to quit their jobs, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But beyond all that, researchers found perhaps the biggest benefit of office altruism: Those who help others are happier at work than those who don’t prioritize helping others.

“More and more research illustrates the power of altruism,” Donald Moynihan, a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the university, said in a statement. “Our findings make a simple but profound point about altruism: Helping others makes us happier. Altruism is not a form of martyrdom, but operates for many as part of a healthy psychological reward system…”

Here is the link to the rest of this article

Belongingness: Essential Bridges That Support the Self

by Allen R. McConnell, Ph.D.

Recent research is establishing the critical nature of social belongingness.

…people with greater perceived social support enjoy greater self-esteem, fewer illnesses, and longer lives.  In fact, research in our own lab has shown that people not only demonstrate better outcomes (e.g., less depression, less loneliness, greater self-esteem, greater happiness) from better quality relationships with people, but that even the quality of interactions with one’s dog can provide additional benefits above and beyond human social support (McConnell et al., 2011).  Social connection is a perception rather than an objective quality, and many sources may play an important role in augmenting one’s sense of connection and belongingness.

Promoting happiness: It is better to give than to receive

Another recent lesson from the research literature is that we are actually happier when we give to others than when we give unto ourselves.  One interesting benefit of social belongingness is that we spend a good amount of time caring for others, and recent research has shown that even in a consumer-driven culture, we can be happier when we address others’ needs instead of our own…

Here is the link to read this article in full

Good News, We’re Slightly Happier…But Why?

Dr Mark Williamson. Director of Action for Happiness

…Research suggests that the external circumstances of our lives generally have a smaller impact on our happiness than our attitudes and actions. And at Action for Happiness, our review of the latest evidence has identified ten areas where actions we take as individuals tend to increase our wellbeing. We call these the Ten Keys to Happier Living. They include having positive relationships and strong social connections, giving to others, being mindful, staying physically active, taking a resilient approach to adversity, pursuing life goals and being part of something bigger than ourselves. These are the real drivers of wellbeing just as much as having a job, good health or being married.

The ONS identified the Jubilee celebrations and Olympics as factors that may have contributed to our boost in wellbeing since last year. I suspect this may indeed be true. But if so, this is not thanks to our love of the Royal Family or our outstanding sporting success. It’s because these events encouraged actions which helped us to connect in our communities, to share enjoyable times together and to feel part of something bigger. Although these once-in-a-lifetime events won’t be repeated any time soon, there’s still so much more we can do to create and maintain those community connections and that positive and outward-looking spirit…

Here is the link to read the full piece by Mark Williamson considering what the first year-on-year UK national happiness statistics might mean.

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How Do We Measure A Good Life?

Samantha Boardman MD

How do we measure a good life? Do we judge it by the quality of an individual’s relationships and sense of meaning and purpose?  Or, do we judge it according to an individual’s wealth, status and power?  These external measures of success seem to count for a lot and yet, they clearly don’t buy happiness.  Park Avenue psychiatrists and their patients know this all too well.  Complaints about burnout, loneliness, meaninglessness and broken relationships are often at the core of their unhappiness.  They spend so much time ticking boxes that they lose sight of what really matters. In the name of “success,” they often sacrifice their mental and physical health.

If tangible achievements don’t amount to happiness, then what does? …  As I began exploring the meaning of “the good life” a few years ago, I learned about the field of Positive Psychology.

In broad terms, Positive Psychology focuses on human strengths and well-being.  Essentially, it is the scientific study of what makes life worth living versus traditional psychiatry and psychology that studies mental illness and pathology.  Instead of focusing on what’s wrong, Positive Psychology focuses on what’s right.  Along these lines, Positive Psychology is interested in a different kind of success: Success with a capital “S” that focuses on well-being.

One of the key takeaways from Positive Psychology is that relationships with other people matter most…

Here is the link to read this article in full

Guardian Books podcast: The pursuit of happiness

Claire Armitstead

 Is positive thinking the route to happiness? Oliver Burkeman and Jules Evans make the case for looking on the dark side, while the narrator of Joanna Kavenna’s latest novel takes off in search of a new way of living…

For Oliver Burkeman, a contented life must embrace uncertainty and get friendly with failure. But could the active pursuit of happiness be part of the problem?

Jules Evans takes a more can-do approach, looking back to the wisdom of ancient Greek philosophers and tracking it through to the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy of today, which helped him to escape depression in his early 20s…

Here is the link to listen to this podcast

And here is a link to the video of Jules Evans talking about his journey out of depression with the help of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and its connection to the Ancient Greek’s idea of what Living A Good Life means…

Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

Susie Steiner

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumps. A palliative nurse who has counselled the dying in their last days has revealed the most common regrets we have at the end of our lives. And among the top, from men in particular, is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’.

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

…Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me…
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard…
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings…
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends…
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Here is the link to read this article in full

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Searching For Happiness: What Makes Life Meaningful?

by Amie Gordon

Picture it – a cabin in the woods next to a gurgling river, a garden out back with beautiful flowers and delicious produce, a feeling of being close to nature, like my ancestors.  More time for important social interactions, which are really at the heart of a meaningful life.  No more random interneting or hours spent ignoring my husband in favor of my smart phone. Instead I’ll spend my days doing meaningful things, going to bed with the setting sun and sleeping as much as I need.  Really, imagine it.  Don’t you all want to come and join me in the woods?

But would I really be happier if I gave up modern conventions and moved to an isolated cabin?…

Here is the link to the full article to find out how Amie Gordon answers this question

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The Quality of Life

by VENKAT

This is a long and deliberately provocative, fiery and funny essay that challenges many of the ideas and principles we believe and build our work towards.  While I do not agree with every thing written here, it is rich with ideas worth thinking about.  Here is my deliberately biased and unapologetically biased précis of this essay:

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century.  It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management.  It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways.  That lives can be idealised and normalised in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures.  That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave.  That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit…

…That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today.  But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

In 2013, the concept of quality of life is effectively drowning in the banality of self-reported statistical surveys based on unreconstructed concepts overloaded with institutionalised connotations.

Just looking at (for example) the Gallup well-being survey categories – career, social, financial, physical, community – depresses me.  It’s not just that the words themselves denote banal categories with which to think about life.  You know that they also have the force of committee interpretations by statisticians and economists behind them.  Committees that probably included no writers of imaginative fiction or speculative philosophy…

…Nobody, other than bureaucrats who fund research and economists, asks the question “how much income is needed to be happy?”  We already know that talking about happiness without talking about what trade-offs we are making to pursue it is meaningless.  The rest of us real people ask the question “how much wealth is required to be free of scripts that dictate what trade-offs you are allowed to make?”…

…The problem isn’t specific stupid numbers or specific ideas about how to live on certain incomes.  The problem is that we have stupid discussions about numbers because we cannot have intelligent discussions about what quality of life means.  Our culture forces us to argue about how others ought to pursue quality-of-life. You there, save for college.  You there, buy a house.  You there, get your calories and daily protein requirement before you get your psychadelics…

…It is easy to dismiss such ideas as the  criticism of hard-working bureaucrats in thankless jobs by first-world residents working the top of their Maslow hierarchy of needs.  Perhaps those navigating the bottom of the hierarchy of needs in Africa benefit from hard-nosed attempts to reduce poetic thoughts about freedom into clean-edged models and metrics.

The problem is, this approach doesn’t work in Africa either.  And it is paternalistic to suggest that it does…

…When you actually meet people living in tough conditions, you realise that they don’t exactly make up dreams for their lives in some UN-approved sequence; water first, food next, healthcare third, money fourth, philosophy when I am rich, alcohol and marijuana never.  With “democracy” injected somewhere along the an S-curve from pre-industrial squalor to post-industrial anomie.

Humans are capable of nurturing rockstar dreams even while they are schlepping their twenty-miles-a-day to fetch water.  There is a reason there is music and art in all societies, not just the privileged ones…

…Even for those literally living on less than a dollar a day, the quality of life is about more than a hard daily scramble for the “basics.”  Humans strive to live full lives whatever their situation.  This requires freedom…

…So the search for meaning in life does not wait on the satisfaction of basic needs.  Any notion of quality of life that starts with a breakdown and classification of quality of life into more and less basic needs is starting in the wrong place.  Any model that conceptualises development as a progressive fulfilment of needs in a predictable sequence, and offers aid constrained by that sequence (or worse, penalises attempts by beneficiaries to break out of the sequence), is headed for a very quick unraveling.

You need music and literature even when you are hungry and ill.  There is a reason middle-class revolutionaries stir up popular passions among the hungry and dispossessed with theology, philosophical rhetoric and self-actualization narratives rather than narratives driven by the logic of access to basic resources…

…So to repeat, the Maslow pyramid isn’t some sort of sequential script for life.  Once truly acute stressors — we’re talking being chased by lions right now – are removed, the quality of life is a function of the whole pyramid, not just the level you happen to be navigating at that moment.  Life isn’t a video game.  You never really complete a level and move on.  You don’t need to complete a level before being afforded a glimpse of the next one.  You don’t need to tackle the levels in a set order…

…Human life, modeled by economists, measured by bureaucrats, and celebrated by statisticians, seems to miss the point in some deep way.  If we need those sorts of experts to tell us what constitutes a good life, and whether or we’ve achieved it, something is already very wrong…

…A deep truth about the human condition as captured in the Maslow hierarchy is that it is much easier for humans to help each other with acute needs at lower levels of the hierarchy.  For all non-acute needs, and acute needs in the upper levels, the only defensible way to help others is to increase their freedom of action.  Whether they choose to make themselves happy or miserable with that freedom is up to them.

So how did we get ourselves into a situation where institutions, politicians and economists are trying to tell us what quality of life ought to mean?  How did we get to the point where arbitrary ideas like home ownership and a college education have been inserted into the script of oughts and shoulds?…

…Right problem, wrong approach.  Not aesthetically or ideologically wrong, but physics wrong.  But still, it is better than the not-even-wrong approach of UN economists.

So it is a start.  We have asked the right question.  What does it mean to live a quality life today?…

…Freedom is not the same as access to entrepreneurial modes of being. That is still provisioning with an element of gambling.

But at least we’ve made another small improvement.  From not even wrong questions and answers to right question, wrong answer, we’ve arrived at right question, workable starter answer. 

We are getting somewhere.  Frustratingly slowly and painfully, but we’re moving.

It’s a start.

Here is the link to read Venkat’s provocative and thought-provoking essay in full

One Guaranteed Way To Boost Your Happiness

By Jeanette Leardi

…“Happiness is a sense of wellbeing we experience when we are engaged in meaningful and manageable projects in our lives,” says Carleton University associate professor of psychology Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D, and author of “The Procrastinator’s Digest.” “One of the key attributes of humans is that we are goal-oriented beings.”

Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., University of California–Riverside professor of psychology and author of “The How of Happiness,” would agree. “People who strive for something personally significant, whether it’s learning a new craft, changing careers, or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations,” she writes. “Find a happy person, and you will find a project.” …

But committing to a goal won’t automatically guarantee that you’ll feel better about your life. Sure, you’ll be busier, but not necessarily happier. That’s because some goals are unreasonable, inappropriate, impractical or unachievable. Explains Lyubomirsky, “The type of goal … that you pursue determines whether the pursuit will make you happy.”

So what kind of goal will help you lead a happier life? …

Here is the link to find practical answers to this questions and read this article in full

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What makes a great talk, great: Chris Anderson at TEDGlobal 2013

‘It’s an alchemic question that’s very hard for us to answer: what makes a great TED talk?‘ writes Kate Torgovnick in her blog post about this…

In this talk, which was given to a gathering of 100+ TEDx organizers from 43 countries during the TEDx Workshop at TEDGlobal 2013, our curator Chris Anderson stresses the incredible power of a well-structured, honest talk.

“We’re giving someone a new worldview that, 30 years later, might make them think differently, might make them act differently,” says Anderson in this video. “Sometimes I think a  (presentation) is like playing Tetris with the brain. All these ideas are coming in and you’re trying to fit them in and slot them so that they are received.”

“What are the two things you need to do if you want to persuade a group of people to come with you on a journey?  Well you need to start where they are and you need to persuade them to come with you…”

In this talk Chris Anderson reminds us how astonishing it is that we can transmit a complex idea from our head into the heads of a listening group of people just through communication.  But, of course, we can also fail in this and leave our audience unchanged, unknowing and uncaring about what we wanted them to understand, care about about, act upon…

Here is the link to this talk to hear what Anderson considers the key to a good talk — taking the audience on a journey. In it, he shares his advice on how to do so authentically, without forcing it…

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Chris Anderson shares his tips for giving a killer presentation

In this essay in The Harvard Business Review’s June issue, Anderson shares his fine-tuned advice for delivering a powerful talk. Here are some of his words of wisdom…

“We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people. When I think about compelling presentations, I think about taking an audience on a journey. A successful talk is a little miracle—people see the world differently afterward.”

“If you frame the talk as a journey, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and where to end. To find the right place to start, consider what people in the audience already know about your subject—and how much they care about it. If you assume they have more knowledge or interest than they do, or if you start using jargon or get too technical, you’ll lose them. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should, too.”

“Perhaps the most important physical act onstage is making eye contact. Find five or six friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and look them in the eye as you speak. Think of them as friends you haven’t seen in a year, whom you’re bringing up to date on your work.“

There is a link to the full article by Chris Anderson at the end of this TED Blog post

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Dr Mark Williamson: My Manifesto for a Happier World

…what does a happier society look like and how can we make it happen? As Director of UK-based Action for Happiness, a growing global movement of people who care deeply about this topic, I’ve had the privilege to meet with many of the world’s leading experts as well as engaging with many of our 80,000 supporters and followers to hear their views.

My conclusion is that a happier society is possible – and rather than being some nebulous or idealistic dream, there are some clear actions needed to make this happen. It will of course require a shift in priorities for our governments and institutions. But it will also only happen if we as individual citizens play our part, particularly by choosing to live in a way that contributes to the happiness of others.

So below is my 12-step manifesto for a happier world, which calls for change not just from our leaders but from all of us. I’m not pretending these are simple changes or can happen overnight. But if we were to put these ideas into practice I’m certain we could create a society which is not only happier, but also more productive, caring, fair, responsible and sustainable.

For our political leaders:

• Ensure a Stable Economy…

• Focus on Wellbeing…
• Support the Disadvantaged…

• Prioritise Human Relationships…

For our institutions:

• Healthcare for Mind And Body…

• Education For Life…

• Responsible Business…
• Balanced Media...

For each of us as individuals:

• Family Values…
• Contributing In The Community…

• Making A Difference…

• Taking Care of Ourselves…

Together our actions make a profound difference…

Here is the link to read the detail of Mark Williamson’s Manifesto

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Happiness Infusion Blog

Photo by Martyn Duffy

Happiness At Work Edition #58

This week’s collection features several stories that consider what being balanced means in our 21st century lives, and how this is changing as we increasingly make choices that favour our happiness over our wealth or power, and how we can learn to think about things in ways that give us a greater sense of balance and resilience and help us to manage difficulty and stress.

Here is the link to this week’s full collection of  stories

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Taking the Third Metric Abroad: Redefining Success Goes Global

Arianna Huffington writes

…it has become increasingly clear that the current model, in which success is equated with overwork, burnout, sleep deprivation, never seeing your family, being connected through email 24 hours a day and exhaustion, isn’t working. It’s not working for women. It’s not working for men. It’s not working for companies, for any societies in which it’s dominant or for the planet.

At the same time this system is breaking down, there’s a growing awareness – increasingly and overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence – of the profound benefits of using tools like mindfulness and meditation to reduce stress and improve our health and our well-being.

So this is the perfect time to begin to redefine success to be more in line with what actually makes us happy…

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Contrary to the stereotype that the British respond to pressure with withering cynicism, a stiff upper lip or an invitation to have some tea and forget about it, stress is having the same effect here as it does back home. Here are just a few examples:

• Some eight million men, women and children in the UK suffer from anxiety disorders, at a cost of nearly £10 billion per year.
•  As of May 2012, hospital admissions for stress had risen by 7% in just the last year, to 6,370.
•   Stress and depression resulted in over 10 million lost workdays last year.
•   In the same time period, stress was responsible for 40% of all work-related illnesses.
•   Nearly one in five adults in the UK suffers from anxiety or depression.
•   The British receive the fewest paid and public holidays in Europe.
•   From 2009 to 2012, the annual costs to the National Health Service of sleeping pills increased to nearly £50 million.
•   In 2011, over 45 million prescriptions for antidepressants were given out, up 9%from the year before.
•   The NHS spent over £270 million for antidepressants in 2011, a 23% increase in one year.

In fact, this epidemic of depression is a global phenomenon…

In the book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World Mark Williams, Professor of Psychology at Oxford and ordained minister in the Church of England writes:

“This is a book about how you can find peace and contentment in such troubled and frantic times as these. Or rather, this is a book about how you can rediscover them; for there are deep wellsprings of peace and contentment living inside us all, no matter how trapped and distraught we might feel. They’re just waiting to be liberated from the cage.”

Meditation, Williams writes, can have profound effects on virtually every aspect of our health and well-being. It boosts the immune system, increases memory and physical stamina and decreases depression and anxiety.

“You may be astonished,” he writes, “by how much more happiness and joy are attainable with even tiny changes to the way you live your life.” And, yes, meditation takes time, but, as he points out, “mindfulness meditation frees up more time than it takes to carry out the practices.“

But mindfulness frees up more than just time.  It frees us from a very limited view of success that defines it in terms of just two metrics: money and power.  It frees us from being in a perpetual and destructive fight-or-flight mode.  What we can find when we step off the hamster wheel is, Williams writes, “the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones and promotes a deep-seated authentic love of life, seeping into everything you do and helping you to cope more skillfully with the worst that life throws at you.” …

Europe, like the US, is facing major challenges that our political systems seem unable to deal with at the moment. The Third Metric and redefining success is not a substitute for the accountability and large-scale change that the citizens of both Europe and America deserve. But leaders who are more connected to their own wisdom will be more likely to make better decisions, which, of course, can make a world of difference in individual lives.

Our unsustainable definition of success is a global problem, and it’s going to require a global response. I hope you’ll join the conversation and tell us how you’re redefining success in your own life and in your part of the world.

Here is the link the the full article

In their words: Rasmus Hougaard & Corporate mindfulness – an answer to the realities of today’s fast paced business environment

By Kathy Graham

While you are reading this, you are likely to get distracted by an incoming email, a colleague who needs a word with you, or a phone that is ringing. And according to research, chances are big that your attention will follow the distraction, and you will find yourself caught up in something else other than finishing this article.

If this scenario rings a bell for you, you are part of a modern work-life that is characterized by distractibility, complexity, pressure and information overload.  And the results of this have shown to be decreased performance, well-being and productivity.  This article describes an alternative, an alternative that has been taken in-house by companies like Google, Carlsberg, Sony, Nike and many others.  The approach is often referred to as corporate mindfulness training.

The question is this: how can an ancient method like mindfulness have any benefit in today’s fast paced business environment?  And the answer is found in the change of work-life that has taken place over the past few decades…

Technically, mindfulness is about taking control of our thoughts and being more present with what we are doing.  It entails managing our mind rather than letting our mind manage us. The mind is like a muscle; it can be strengthened and toned and make us more present. And it can be trained to more effectively engage in everyday work activities to be more productive, efficient, collaborative and creative.

Essentially corporate mindfulness training is about developing the mental calm and clarity that enables us to do the right things rather than just doing things.  It is about having the mental space to see clearly what is most important in this moment.  Even in the middle of busy daily work life. These are the words of former Carlsberg CIO: “A mindful organization is an organization where people do the right things. Not just things. It is an organization where people have the mental competence to think clearly, make the right decisions and act accordingly.”

Here is the link to take you to the full article

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Balancing Act: Do Your Work/Life Choices Add Up To Happiness?

BY CINDY KRISCHER GOODMAN

…If you were to track your time, carefully, for a week, how would you say you spend most of your days and nights?  Are you spending your time in a way that makes you happy?

In our ongoing quest for work/life balance, I often say the elusive “balance” comes from spending more time on what fulfills you rather than trying to maintain equilibrium.  For some, it’s work that makes them happy, for others it’s time with family, friends, or a hobby.

For most people, there’s a gap between where they say they want to spend their time and how they actually spend it…

A few changes in time usage could move you closer to improving happiness.

~ Get more fulfilment from work.  Understanding how we should be spending our time at work is much more important than people think…and the happiest people at work tend to be those facing the toughest – but most worthwhile – challenges.  ”When workers feel like they can make a difference, it leaves them more fulfilled”, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Passion for your job increases happiness, too.  Entrepreneurs spend more time on work-related activities than others.  Those who combine what they do best with what they enjoy most and with what the world needs report a high level of happiness.

Many people view learning a new skill at work as a frustrating task.  But accomplishing personal growth makes people happy. “When someone is moving a project forward, or going to a conference to learn something new, there’s a big time/happiness payoff,” said Gretchen Rubin…

~ Spend more time on leisure, less time on mundane.  Of course, the bills have to be paid, the bathroom cleaned, but are you being strategic with your time?…

Rubin says people often move from activity to activity without really thinking about what they prefer to be doing and with whom.  “Time gets filled up but not with things important to you.”

For most people, physical activity and volunteer work are linked with happiness.  Social connections are big predictors as well.  “The more time that individuals spend on relationships – going to lunch with a co-worker or out to dinner with close friends – the happier they are,” Rubin said.

South Florida executive coach Margarita Plasencia says a first step is figuring out what drives you.  She calls it “centering.”  “If gardening makes you happy, then you know that on Sunday, there’s no question what you are going to do. You make gardening a priority.”

~ Re-assess your spending. With all the advancements we have made, [we] still equate being rich with being happy…

Money can make you happy but it’s the way you spend it that affects happiness.  Rather than buying bigger homes or luxury cars, psychologists found people are most happy when they spend their money on experiences, such as attending a baseball game with friends or taking a much-anticipated trip.

Psychologists also found the value of experiences tends to grow over time, making us happier as we look back on them in our memory, possibly because they tend to bring us closer to other people, whereas material things are more often enjoyed alone.

~ Consider easing up on multi-tasking.  As we try to squeeze more activities into our busy lives, one of our poorest ways to spend time has proved to be multitasking. In the moment, multitasking might make us feel good.  But researchers say we are most happy when we are engaged directly with an activity with a single focus, such as working quietly and alone on a project or having a conversation with someone you know well and not being interrupted by cellphone calls. “That takes discipline, and sometimes people don’t want to engage in it,” Plasencia said.  “They don’t realize they are less happy when they are trying to do everything and not focused on anything.”

~ Ask for flexibility.  An increasing number of workers feel they would be happier with a flexible work schedule or a sense of control over their work day.  Managers are most likely to grant flextime to men in high-status jobs who request it to pursue career-development opportunities, according to a new study by Victoria Brescoll, professor at the Yale School of Management.  Women, regardless of their status within a firm or their reason, are less likely than high-status men to be granted a schedule change.  But that shouldn’t stop you from asking.

Even if you already consider yourself happy, it’s important to revisit your time use now and then and make sure you are making a habit of spending it in ways that lead to maximum fulfilment…

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Empathy: the last big business taboo?

Belinda Parmar writes in The Guardian:

Empathy must no longer be perceived as a soft, overtly feminine skill but as a commercial tool that businesses ignore at their peril

…We can see the empathy deficit in the culture of business.  Most corporations have become places where ‘systemisers’ flourish. According to professor Simon Baron-Cohen, these are individuals who excel at logic and analysis but tend to perform worse at empathy skills.  Systemisers are more likely to be male.

Corporations place very little value on the other extreme: the empathisers:  These are people who are good at reading emotions and understanding the dynamics of a situation and they tend to be female.

This imbalance means that most companies are led by people who are bad at tuning into people’s emotions (such as my former manager).  These leaders fail to consider their customers and staff as human beings.

Instead, boards of directors retreat into a parallel universe of numbers and spreadsheets.  It’s far easier for non-empathisers to understand a Powerpoint presentation full of abstract boxes and circles than the human beings who have fears, desires and hopes that need to be understood. In such an organisation, women and empathisers struggle to get their voices heard…

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Companies should care about this.  It’s not about fairness – it’s is about profit. Businesses that put empathy and emotional intelligence at their heart outperform their more robotic rivals by 20% according to the Harvard Business Review.  A wide range of businesses, from the insurance sector, cosmetics and even debt collectors have found that increased empathy leads to better results.

Empathy must no longer be perceived as a soft, overtly feminine skill but as a commercial tool that can be learned and deployed in all aspects of a business if women are to thrive.  Leaders should not forget that behind the numbers, spreadsheets and surnames are people, just like you and me.

Here is the link to this article 

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What Silicon Valley Developers Can Teach Us About Happiness At Work

By Carolyn Gregoire

“Maintaining a culture of work-life balance requires constant reinforcement. We’re regularly tempted to compromise these values due to business challenges and crises and sometimes new employees eager to demonstrate their passion and commitment by working crazy hours on a key project. But the team invariably self-manages back to our values in simple, but effective ways: people pulling late nights don’t get held up as heroes and they may even get a message from their boss saying that working crazy hours is not a company value.”

So says Donna Wells, CEO of Mindflash, an online employee training firm, who use the increasingly popular Agile -

a management strategy devised by Silicon Valley software developers in the late 1990s, deemed the “best-kept management secret on the planet” by Forbes last year — is helping tech companies build more reasonable workloads for their employees while also improving their products…

Here are four Agile principles that anyone can use to boost productivity — and happiness — at work.

Take breaks.

A major focus of the Agile program is creating reasonable workloads that allow employees to take the breaks they need to fuel productivity, health and well-being…

“It really forces a discipline that we all work within our capacity,” she says. “Ultimately, in the long-term, you’re much less productive … if you try to run sprint and run ‘death marches’ than if you have a predictable pace that’s actually sustainable.”

Focus on what you enjoy and what you’re good at.

The Agile method can boost happiness and productivity by allowing individuals to do the work they care about. Teams are self-managed, and they divide the workload so that employees can focus on what they do best and derive the most enjoyment out of. According to a 2011 Society for Human Resource Management survey, 62 percent of employees said that the opportunity to use their skills and abilities was an important contributor to job satisfaction…

Eliminate unnecessary work.

Simplicity (i.e. eliminating work that doesn’t need to be done) is one of the foundational principles of Agile, which strives to allow employees to spend the majority of their day on work that actually benefits the customer, rather than work that satisfies administrative or bureaucratic needs.

Giff Constable, Managing Director of Neo, a global software development consulting company based in New York, has seen the program have a humanising effect, eliminating needless work and documentation so that team members can focus on more productive tasks.

“Agile broaches the question of, ‘Are we working on the right things?’” Constable tells The Huffington Post. “You’re not a drone on a factory line. You can actually use your brain, you can ask questions, you can be creative … It’s really empowering, and it can make the job a lot more fun.”

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Take time to reflect.

…Research has shown reflection to be crucial to effective learning, particularly in the workplace. “It’s very important for clearing the air and setting us up for success during the next sprint of work,” Wells says.

Communicate face-to-face.

Agile can also boost satisfaction at work by fostering social connections. The Agile principles stress the importance of cutting back on email and increasing the amount of in-person brainstorming and problem-solving among teams, according to Constable.

Extensive research backs up the idea that employees with strong relationships at work are happier, feel more passionate about their work and more connected to their employers, and are less likely to quit their jobs. A 1995 University of Georgia study even found that the mere opportunity for friendship could increase job satisfaction and organisational effectiveness.

“To work lean and agile, you stop focusing so much on documentation and you rely much more on constant communication. Not meetings, but lots of little touch points,” Constable says. “That in itself is humanising — you are freed from the drudgery of documentation and can instead talk to real humans and solve problems together.”

Here is the link to read this article in full

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How Brain-Science Can Help You Reduce Stress

by Bruna Martinuzzi

…Unmanaged anxiety can become an insidious energy drain.  As author Arthur Somers Roche put it, “Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”  While no one is immune to the ills of prolonged anxiety, entrepreneurs in particular can be vulnerable because of lifestyle changes that are inherent when striking out on one’s own.  The well-known Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale measures stressful life changes.  A few of these relate directly to the experiences of entrepreneurs.  They are: a major business readjustment; a change in financial state (a lot worse off or a lot better off); a change to a different type of work; taking on a large mortgage or loan; a change in work responsibilities; outstanding personal achievement, and a change in work hours or conditions…

Here are 8 simple things you can start doing today to lead a less stressful life, based on science-backed remedies proven to help diminish anxiety:

1. Digital Abstinence … Being addicted to the Internet may well be the same as being addicted to cocaine.  There’s no doubt that information overload, the wide array of technology gadgets in our life and involvement with social media fuels some anxiety as we try to keep up with the digital barrage… Self-awareness precedes self-management.  Know when to unplug.
2. A Solution In Your Fridge … Researchers at UCLA found that eating probiotic yogurt twice a day can reduce anxiety and stress by changing the way our brain responds to the environment.  the gut–brain connection is a two-way street.”  Adding probiotic yogurt as one simple change in your diet may be of help in managing anxiety.
3. Take Your Vitamins … vitamin and mineral supplements can enhance mental energy and well-being for those prone to anxiety.  If your diet is not optimal, supplementation can play a role in lowering your anxiety.
4. A Volitional Act … An extraordinary tool at our disposal all day long is where we choose to focus our attention.  We can focus on things that impact our brains in a positive way, or on self-criticism and senseless worry… Mindfulness, as Hanson reports, has been shown to thicken cortical layers in regions of the brain that control attention so we get better at attention itself; it also increases activation of a region of the prefrontal cortex, which helps control and reduce negative emotions that can cause anxiety.
5. A Stable Bridge … There is a wide body of research that shows the most important influence in our long-term health and well-being is the quality of our personal relationships and social support… Work on fortifying the bridge between you and others so you can strengthen your ability to manage anxiety.
6. A Readily Available Shot of Dopamine … Several studies show that listening to music is an effective antidote to anxiety… Listening to music you enjoy gives you a shot of dopamine, the feel-good chemical. When dealing with anxiety, calm, slow and gentle music has been shown to have the most positive result.
7. What 7 Minutes Can Do For You … Exercise rewires the brain so anxiety is less likely to interfere with normal function — donning your sneakers and hitting the pavement can go a long way toward calming anxiety.  No time to exercise?  Consider the Scientific 7-Minute Workout, which is a set of just 12 exercises involving only a chair, a wall and your body weight.  It fulfills the latest requirements of high-intensity effort…
8. What Tibetan Monks Have Known All Along … Scientists and Zen aficionados have long known that meditation reduces anxiety, but it’s only recently that brain research proves how this happens…”Just a few minutes of mindfulness meditation,” says Fadel Zeidan, lead author of the study, “can help reduce normal everyday anxiety.”Researchers found that meditation reduced anxiety by as much as 39 percent. Two quick online meditation videos to help you get started are One Minute meditation by Point of Focus, and this three-minute meditation by Dr. Susan Taylor.

Ultimately, the best way to deal with anxiety is to understand that it’s a normal part of being human…

Here is the link to this article in full

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How To Stay Calm In A Crisis

BY NADIA GOODMAN

When a crisis hits your business, you have to put aside fear, anger, and anxiety to tackle it with level-headed leadership.  That’s a tall order when the stakes are high.  But learning to stay calm in a crisis will inspire confidence among your employees and empower you to find effective solutions quickly.

In stressful times, most people either let negative feelings spiral out of control or push them under the rug, but neither method works. “The worst thing you can do is suppress your feelings,” says Allison Troy, a psychologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. who studies emotion regulation.

Still, that doesn’t mean you should let them get the best of you.  Strong leaders acknowledge their feelings and manage them without losing sight of what’s most important — fixing the problem, fast.

To stay calm in a crisis and lead your team through the fire, try these three strategies:

1. Look at the problem like an outsider…

2. Remember past obstacles you overcame…

3. Take action…

Here is the link to this article

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Love Your Work, Or Sing The Dinosaur Blues

Back from this year’s World Domination Summit, Jonathan Feldman ponders why finding work happiness – a prerequisite for innovation – is so dang hard.

…I’ve said in the past that if you aren’t happy at work, or if you disrespect the stupid stuff that’s going on at work, you need to jump before you get pushed.

Yet, it is incredibly difficult to do. One of the most touching presentations at WDS was by Tess Vigeland, the host of “Marketplace Money,” who quit her “dream job” at the height of her success, with 9 million listeners every week.  While she was circumspect about the reasons, it clearly had to do with happiness at work.  After a pivotal unhappy event that she didn’t share, she says she simply couldn’t do it anymore. In her words, she “jumped without a net,” and “what’s amazing about a leap of faith is how everyone around you is so sure that it’s going to work out … and deep down, you’re pretty sure it won’t.”  Far from telling everyone “hey, you need to do this,” she related the true difficulty of jumping out of a bad situation.  And most would think that she’s got the visibility and career assets as a well-known NPR host to transition without much of a struggle.  She’s struggling.

“What I’m also supposed to tell you is what a great learning journey it has been.  The truth is it has been terrifying, awful and heartbreaking.  This has made me doubt my decision-making ability, made me wonder whether I’m in a loop of self-destruction.  This has made me wonder if everyone who has admired my accomplishments, or who has told me that I’m remarkable was just being nice.“

The tragedy here is why someone who clearly is so good at her job couldn’t be happy in her work.  I’m guessing it was the usual large-organisation stuff that makes seven out of 10 of us disengage at work…

…Gretchen Rubin says that negative emotions are a claxon call to wake up and do something.  The blues that I felt on coming back from WDS to “real life” are such a call. It may be true that traditional organizations need to change for us to be able to realize truly great business technology innovations in the same way that smaller startups do. But just as ERP change management techniques recognize that you don’t change organisations, you change individuals, maybe we need to start focusing on individual change — starting with ourselves. None of us is too fossilised to learn something new, but it takes time and attention to form the right habits. What you, me and everybody needs to do is to get off of our duffs and invest in our own happiness at work. Today’s dysfunctional world of work will only change one person at a time.

Here is the link the this article in full

Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work

In this TEDTalk Jason Fried talks out all the reasons why we don’t – and can’t – do our best work at work:

Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn’t a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.

Serenity Now: Apps to Help Manage Your Stress and Mood

Bonnie Cha tried out two free smartphone apps, Senti and Stress Tracker, which are designed to help keep tabs on your mood, and reports here on how she found them, concluding…

It’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of a day, but it’s also okay to take some time for yourself. Whether you need to express how you’re feeling at the moment or need a stress break, Senti and Stress Tracker are easy and free ways to do this.

Dr. Mike Evans: 90:10 The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do For Your Stress

An animated video talk outlining how we can better manage stress by increasing our ability to change how we think about things.

Richard Burnett: Mindfulness in Schools: Richard Burnett at TEDxWhitechapel

Stop. Breathe. Pay attention. “Our mental health and well-being are profoundly affected by where and how we place our attention“. In this enlightening talk, Richard guides through a short mindfulness meditation, and shares his experience of teaching mindfulness in schools. He reveals some of the amazing benefits being mindful can bring to the classroom and inspires the audience with simple ways to bring more awareness to how we respond to our everyday experiences.

Richard Burnett is co-founder of the Mindfulness in Schools Project. With Chris Cullen and Chris O’Neill, Richard wrote the highly-acclaimed 9 week mindfulness course, .b (pronounced dot-b), designed to engage adolescents in the classroom. He is a teacher and Housemaster at Tonbridge School, the first school in the UK to put mindfulness on the curriculum, an event covered by press, TV and radio in early 2010. Since then, thousands of young people have been taught .b in a wide range of educational contexts, from independent girls’ schools like St Pauls to Young People’s Support Services for those excluded from school. .b is now being taught in the UK, USA, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Holland and Thailand.

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6 Non-Creative Thoughts on Creativity

This is an excellent resume’ of ideas and practical lessons on how to be  - and how to enjoy being – more creative…

One of the cool things about creativity is that every leader, every employee, and indeed every organization has the potential to be creative and likely already is to at least some degree.

But if all this is true, why haven’t “we” — and by “we” I mean the biz world at large and our respective workplaces specifically — got this thing down yet? Here are at least a few reasons that come to mind off the top of my head, as well as considerations for helping us think through what creativity is and isn’t.

Follow this link to explore these ideas

How (And Why) To Stay Positive

by Travis Bradberry

When faced with setbacks and challenges, we’ve all received the well-meaning advice to “stay positive.”  The greater the challenge, the more this glass-half-full wisdom can come across as Pollyannaish and unrealistic.  It’s hard to find the motivation to focus on the positive when positivity seems like nothing more than wishful thinking…

Pessimism is trouble because it’s bad for your health.  Numerous studies have shown that optimists are physically and psychologically healthier than pessimists.  Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania has conducted extensive research on the topic, and often explores an important distinction — whether people consider their failures the product of personal deficits beyond their control or mistakes they can fix with effort.  Seligman finds much higher rates of depression in people who pessimistically attribute their failures to personal deficits.  Optimists, however, treat failure as a learning experience and believe they can do better in the future.

Keeping a positive attitude isn’t just good for your health.  Martin Seligman has also studied the connection between positivity and performance.  In one study in particular, he measured the degree to which insurance salespeople were optimistic or pessimistic in their work, including whether they attributed failed sales to personal deficits beyond their control or circumstances they could improve with effort.  Optimistic salespeople sold 37% more policies than pessimists, who were twice as likely to leave the company during their first year of employment.

Seligman has studied positivity more than anyone, and he believes in the ability to turn pessimistic thoughts and tendencies around with simple effort and know-how.  But Seligman doesn’t just believe this.  His research shows that people can transform a tendency toward pessimistic thinking into positive thinking through simple techniques that create lasting changes in behaviour long after they are discovered.

Your brain just needs a little help to defeat its negative inner voice.  To that end, I’ve provided two simple steps for you to follow that will begin training your brain to focus on the positive.

Step 1. Separate Fact from Fiction…

Step 2. Identify a Positive…

photo credit: Moe M via photopin cc

How Courageous Leaders Address Fear In The Workplace

Tanveer Naseer writes…

In the face of continual change and uncertainty in the global economy – not to mention the increasingly myopic focus on short-term gains at the expense of understanding the long-term context – fear in the workplace has become a long-term affliction as evidenced in study after study showing increasing levels of stress paired with falling engagement levels in today’s work environments.

Not surprisingly, such conditions naturally lead to calls for courageous leaders to step forward to help guide us through the storm and back into calmer waters. Unfortunately, when it comes to courage in leadership, we often have a wrong impression of what that means.

When it comes to courageous leadership, the image that often comes to mind is of a leader who is not just assertive in the face of uncertainty, but who also exudes a sense of fearlessness regarding the situation before them. And yet, the reality is that courage in leadership is not about the absence of fear. Rather, it’s about learning to manage one’s fear in order to do the work and make the decisions that need to be made…

1. Identify and label negative thoughts that weigh you down
When it comes to managing fear, the first thing we need to recognize is that a key driver behind our fears is derived from our own perceptions and with it, the expectations we consciously or unconsciously create in our minds…

2. Reframe the situation by finding out what’s really going on
Research has shown that our brain operates like a predicting machine – it likes to decipher various bits of information to create patterns in order to anticipate what’s next, something that’s becoming more difficult to do in this increasingly complex and faster-paced global market. Add to this how our own biases and beliefs serve to create the framework within which we interpret a situation and we can see how easy it is to feel disconnected or wrongly assess the realities of a given situation…

3. Seek out opportunities to gain new skills and understandings
One of the core psychological needs we all share is competence – not just in the traditional sense of being able to do our jobs well, but also in the context of being challenged to stretch our existing competencies and grow new ones…

4. Focus on what’s in your control to manage
The last step we need to take is to let go of those variables for which we have no control over. As easy as this may sound, this is often the biggest hurdle for leaders to overcome, especially if they confuse their authority with being in control…

Here is the link to this article in full

photo credit: h.koppdelaney via photopin cc

Here is the link to this week’s Happiness At Work Edition #58 where you can find all of these stories and many more.

We hope you enjoy what you find…