Placing happiness first will result in success, rather than relying on success to make you happy. This article is based on the seven principles that Shawn Achor wrote about in his positive psychology book called “The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles that Fuel Success and Performance at Work”.
The lessons here can be applied to professional environments, as well as life outside of work – especially personal passion projects.
The Happiness Advantage
In One Line
Happiness opens the doors to success in personal life and work life. And we should put happiness ahead in our lives, and be less reliant on the idea of success leading to happiness.
Practical Advice
Focus on increasing your own overall happiness with these activities:
- Do something that you’re good at, something that takes advantage of one of your personal strengths.
- Looking forward to something, like a planned holiday or another event in your life.
- Surround yourself with positivity, whether it’s people, or things that you love.
- Exercise.
- Meditate.
- Consciously decide to do something nice for someone, then do it.
- Spend money on experiences for yourself or someone else.
The Fulcrum and the Lever
In One Line
The potential power that we believe we have over our situation, and whether our current mindset that enables or disables us in causing our desired change, will determine our outcomes.
Practical Advice
Find meaning when doing something challenging:
- Ask yourself why you’re doing something, it’s purpose and what the result of the action will be.
- Keep repeating step 1 until you find a result that is a goal that you personally agree with.
The Tetris Effect
In One Line
Allow your mind to enter a self-reinforcing positive loop: focusing on happiness, gratitude, with a side effect of optimism. This will open your eyes to opportunities you may have not seen otherwise.
Practical Advice
Spend 5 minutes a day writing down three positive things that happened in the last 24 hours.
Falling Up
In One Line
Don’t focus on the negatives of a bad experience, focus on what you have learned from it. Our decision to view historic events as a positive experience encourages us to move on from them.
Practical Advice
Identify a setback as either temporary or permanent, and view the setback from an optimistic perspective, rather than a pessimistic one.
After a series of setbacks, beware not to enter a negativity spiral that may cause you to view further minor setbacks as related failures, when they are actually independent events. A negative loop of self-fulfilling must be avoided.
The Zorro Circle
In One Line
Focus on improving the things that are directly under your control. Many small changes lead to big changes.
Practical Advice
- Make a list of things that cause you stress.
- Identify them as either in your control, or outside of your control.
- Only focus your energy on the things that are under your control.
This topic stems from personality psychology. It’s the internal versus external locus of control concept developed by Julian Rotter in 1954. The important part of the idea here would be accurately identifying what is, and isn’t, under your control, as every individual tends more to either internal, or external.
Those with an external locus of control tend to believe things that happen to them are out of there hands, and may attribute their personal outcomes to other’s actions or external events. Those with an internal locus of control tend to take more responsibility for what happens to them, but may get unnecessarily stressed about things that are completely out of their control.
The 20-Second Rule
In One Line
Reduce the effort and time required to start, or break, a habit by doing everything you can to make changing your behaviour as easy as possible.
Practical Advice
Identify and mitigate (or eliminate) all paths of resistance that are stopping you from achieving your desired behaviour change.
The idea is that it should take less than 20 seconds for you to start your intended new habit. The actual 20 seconds doesn’t have any scientific backing and is a result of Achor’s own experience with learning guitar. What it boils down to is that you have to identify and remove what hurdles are stopping you from picking up your new habits easily.
Reducing the “Time to start up”, or the amount of steps for you to start your new activity, as much as possible will make it easier to adopt into your lifestyle. A typical example is getting your workout clothes ready the night before so that you don’t need to think about what you’ll wear to exercise first thing the next morning.
Social Investment
In One Line
A professional and personal social support network is beneficial in times of stress. Continue to invest time in it, even when you don’t think you have the time, as the physical and mental benefits are irreplaceable.
Practical Advice
- Invest in quality personal relationships, both socially and professionally.
- Respond to positive news from someone with an active and constructive response. Be congratulatory and asks questions that allow you to learn more about the news. The most important part of this is being genuine.
- The ‘vertical couple’ (Daniel Goleman) is the direct manager-employee relationship, and it’s the most important work relationship.