Dr Adam's Blog

We all want it but it appears that most of us don’t have nearly enough of it. What am I talking about? Happiness!
Happiness research is now big business. Where once the secret of happiness was left to the philosophers to ponder, the world of science has since joined the party. Scientists want to know what makes us happy, psychologists want to know why, and marketers want to know how to make money out of our desperate need to be happy.
Why has research is this area exploded? Despite rises in the standard of living and greater and fancier possessions, depression rates have risen to 1 in 4 people. While our external world is getting more luxurious, our internal world is struggling.
Why isn’t our happiness scale climbing in parallel with our quality of life? I set about answering this question. Having spent the last three months analysing the research, I’ve found that everything we thought we knew about happiness is wrong.
It’s time to debunk some common myths about happiness.

1.    Don’t the big things make us happy?
Major positive events such a promotion, a new relationship or house or even winning the lottery may provide a boost of happiness but they do not always promote long-term happiness – we eventually return to our previous level of happiness. Research shows that few positive experiences affect our happiness for more than three months.
The frequency of our positive experiences rather than the intensity of our positive experiences is a better indicator of happiness.  A person who experiences a number of good things in one day is likely to be happier than another who has one great thing happen. It really is the little things in life that matter.

2.    Aren’t I happiest when things are easy and I am cruising along?
We mistakenly tend to think that relaxing and not working hard or cruising in life with no pressure will make us happy but the truth is boredom equals discontent. Communities with high youth crime rates often cite the root cause of crime as boredom in kids who then look for trouble to overcome the boredom.

Matthew Killingsworth from Harvard university has created an iPhone web app called Track Your Happiness, tracking more than 15,000 people in 83 countries. The app queries users at random intervals on their mood and what they are doing at the time, as well as their level of productivity and their social interactions.
His findings show that for 50 percent of our day our mind wanders away from what we are doing during which time we are incredibly unproductive. When our mind wanders and we are no longer ‘present’ we experience our greatest level of unhappiness. Why? Because our mind tends to wander to unpleasant thoughts or personal concerns.
Most importantly he showed that when our attention is completely absorbed in a task we experience our greatest level of happiness.
So how does this relate in the business world?
We are happiest when we are challenged and engaged – working to achieve difficult goals, yet those within our reach. Most employees do not want to be bored at work. Bored employers are neither content or productive.
If you are a manager and want more engagement from your team give them challenging work, keep track of their progress and debrief it with them.

3. Surely you can’t be happy at work?
In terms of overall wellbeing, career wellbeing has been shown to be more important than physical, financial, social or community wellbeing. In other words, whether we are happy at work or not is more important than the other aspects of our lives. Why? Because work makes up so much of our time and we often relate work to your self image and identity. Also, it is vital for employers to ensure their staff are happy as the research linking happy employees to greater productivity and performance is so strong that it is no longer up for debate.

4. Don’t I have to focus on myself to be happy?
A study was conducted where people were given a sum of money and asked to either go buy something for themselves or for someone else. Afterwards, the group that bought a gift for someone else had much higher levels of happiness than the group that bought something for themselves. When we do things for others we get a much bigger happiness bump than doing something for ourself. Same goes for the workplace, when we help others improve and develop their skills, our happiness is far greater than if we just focus on getting ahead.

5. That’s just me I am not a happy person!
Researchers have since discovered that happiness is not solely linked to genetics. While genes and heritage determine about 50 percent, the rest depends on lifestyle decisions and daily habits. While there is no magic pill for happiness and wellbeing, we can make daily habitual changes to make a difference.

6. When I have nice things then I will be happy!
While we certainly get a bump in pleasure after we buy something beautiful for ourselves, the effect is short lived. What gives us a bigger and longer lasting impact on happiness is when we spend money on great experiences. A holiday, a concert, hot air ballooning. If you want to use money to get you happiness, spend it on experiences rather than possessions.

7. Don’t I have to be a tortured soul to be creative and successful!
Is happiness really desirable since it is often thought that to write a best selling book or song you need to have pain or heartache? There is no solid evidence to support this theory. These people are the exception, not the rule. It’s like saying my grandfather smoked every day until he died at 99 years of age, therefore cigarettes must make you live longer. Happier people are generally more creative and successful than tortured souls.

Hints for greater happiness
•    Regular exercise
•    Practicing meditation
•    Daily reflection on what you are grateful for
•    Striving to experience happiness in each moment
•    Do things for others
•    Get absorbed in each task you do
•    Invest in your personal relationships
•    Focus on experiences not possessions

Looking at that list it is a list that would make the people around you happy too and the world a better place. Looks like personal happiness is a win for everyone.

Latest psychological research tells us that our emotions drive and guide our behaviour, develop or ruin relationships, guide attention and help us store memories. Put simply our emotions control our performance and quality of life. They even have a dramatic impact on our health as negative emotions lead to the release of toxic chemicals that damage our body. Intensive care units have shown that patients who are comforted by others have lower levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure and even have lower secretion of artery clogging fatty acids.

Obviously emotions have a big impact on you, but do your emotions affect your environment?

The reality is that emotions are carried through your organisation like electricity through a cable.

Put another way your emotions are contagious. The question is are your emotions worth catching?

A closed loop system is one that regulates its self and is not influenced by the outside world. Your emotions/mood is an open loop system meaning that the environment affects them. This open loop system allows a mother to console her distraught child, or a manager to rev up their sales team.  
This means that our mood affects the mood of our team. In 2000 Caroline Bartel at New York University and Richard Saavedra at the University of Michigan found that people in meetings adopted the same mood (good and bad) within 2 hours. They also found that teams of nurses and accountants tracked the same emotions over the week, even though they varied in terms of external stress and challenges.

Depending on what sort of emotions you bring to work you could be quite literally killing your co-workers. Pause for a moment and consider how do you affect the mood of your team? We so often only focus on the role of the leader, however we all affect the mood of our team.

Having said that the greatest influence on a team is the mood of the leader. It is so potent that many leaders should consider their primary task as the emotional leadership of their team. This is not to say that leaders cant have bad days, however research tells us that teams perform best and solid culture is built when the leader regularly has an optimistic, authentic and high energy mood.

Can we change our mood? In a word YES!. A person’s emotional state and attitude are not genetically hard wired, they can be changed. However we all have a bias towards a certain style and emotional set point.
The more we act in a certain way be it happy, cranky or sad, the more we reinforce that pattern in our brain and the more we act that way.

This is where emotional intelligence matters. An emotionally intelligent person can be self aware of their mood/emotions, change them for the better through self management, understand their impact through empathy and act so that they improve the emotional state of those around them.
Steps to improve you emotional state:

1.    Picture it up!
What emotional state do you want to be in? Picture how you want to act, be perceived, what is the mood of your team like. Get a clear understanding of how you want things to be.

2.    Take Stock!
Find out your starting point. Many leaders do not know how they affect their team and environment. I have spoken to many leaders to have them inform me of the great “vibe” in their team and how their team loves their leadership style. Only to be informed by the team that they see them as a “tyrant” and unapproachable. Park the ego and ask your team for feedback. The best way to do this in anonymously, you might also consider getting formal 360-degree feedback. In addition make it ok for your team to give you feedback on your emotional leadership.  Relax we are not as perfect as we think we are.

3.    Bridging the Gap!
How do you start to develop your leadership? First step is to up-skill yourself. Here are some things I have seen other leaders do in the past.
a.    Simply start to research and educate yourself on this area through books and courses.
b.    Take time to reflect, some of the best leaders I have worked with spend 30 mins a day reflecting on their emotional leadership. They analyse different situations during that day and examine how they reacted and how they could have responded in a better way.
c.    Some look outside of work, they develop empathy and emotional regulation by coaching their children’s soccer team or devoting time to a local charity.

4.    Practice Makes Perfect!
Choose one emotion to work on. For example you may choose to practice more patience with your co-workers, more empathy, greater optimism or simply look at removing anger and judgement from your leadership style. The way we change our behaviour, is to do and redo the new behaviour, over and over again. This breaks old neural patterns. An added bonus is that we can fast track this with visualisation. Imagining something in vivid detail fires the same brain cells and neural pathways that are actually involved in the real life task. Before a meeting or on the way to work start to run through your head and picture how you want to lead and manage your team.

5.    Get some Help!
Find a coach or a colleague who you can debrief you activity with. I have encouraged many leaders in large corporates to form coaching groups where they discuss their challenges and how they handled them. The feedback has been that they are exceptionally beneficial.

Find a copy of this article here

When I was an academic (in a previous life) I noticed that people in this environment were drawn to complexity. They would always find the most complicated way to explain something and always gravitated towards the most complex solution to a problem. My take on the driver for this behaviour was two things:

1.    It formed an intellectual barrier that did not allow the average person to access that world. Intellectual snobbery at its highest level          
2.    They saw simplicity as a sign of intellectual laziness and this work was of poorer quality.

The problem was that this attitude made the material mind numbingly boring. I must have sat through over 300 academic presentations and never stayed awake in any of them. However most importantly it hampered their ability to teach and pass on concepts. I never had a lecturer help me learn and understand concepts - they just threw information at me.
However when I moved into the business world as an educator, I discovered the amazing power simplicity has. In a meeting with Ralph Norris the CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, I asked him what the biggest mistake we make in business was? His reply was - “We overcomplicate it. I run this bank on five simple principals. Simple principals allow people to learn them fast, remember them and have clarity about what behaviours they have to exhibit”.
My obsession with understanding how people change recently led to a psychologist from the University of Virginia, Jonathan Haidt. He has a change model that I think is one of the best that I have ever come across, because of its simplicity. The model consists of three parts, a rider on an elephant walking along a path. Sounds weird? Let me explain.

The rider is our logic, our rational side.
The elephant is our emotional side.
The path is the environment in which we are changing.

Within this model you can see that the logical side has very little control. The rider can pull on the reins as hard as they like, but if the elephant wants to go in another direction the rider can do little to stop it. An example is that you know you shouldn’t text your ex at 3am but you still do. The elephant has the most power in this model.

According to Jonathan, to facilitate change you have to do 3 things:
1.    You must give the rider clear instructions about what change needs to occur. What are the exact behaviours you need them to exhibit? If the rider does not know exactly what they need to do they can wander off all over the place.
2.    You must appeal to the elephant. You have to make it so that the elephant has a desire to go in that direction.
3.    Lastly you have to clear the path. You need to make it easy for the elephant to go there. Ensure that there are no roadblocks.
I have been using this model in my work with companies with amazing results.

Guide the rider
I was with a department of a bank. As a group they came up with a goal to become number one in customer service. While that is a great goal what I pointed out is that there is no clear behaviours attached to that goal. How will people change their behaviour to achieve that goal? Upon reflection they then came up with a clear behaviour. ‘Never pass a customer on, do not transfer them to another department and you must solve their problem on the spot’. Since the introduction of this clear behaviour they have seen a sharp rise in their client satisfaction.

Motivate the elephant
I was working with a manufacturing group who were having problems getting people to stick to safety policy. The problem was that the employees saw safety as unnecessary because they thought they were bullet proof and would never get hurt. In my research on the company I found out that the major accidents people had in the company were due to another person cutting corners. In other words when an individual did not stick to the safety policy they put their co-workers at risk. Then I presented to them and talked about how they would feel if their actions lead to a mate being injured or even killed. How would they feel if they took away their livelihood and left their family struggling to survive.  I then had a guy in the group talk about when he did not follow policy, which led to a co-worker being seriously injured.
They went from thinking that not paying attention to safety was a cool/brave thing to do. To my actions could hurt my mates. Their elephant was seriously motivated.

Clear the path
A number of years ago I was engaged by a law firm to put in place a work life balance strategy for the senior associates and lawyers. I presented the strategy to the partners and they were on board. Six months later when we reviewed the project it had had little impact. Why? Well the strategy was simple and they knew the exact behaviours they had to do, so it wasn’t that. The elephant was engaged because they all wanted to see their families more and to reduce their stress. The reason it failed was that the partners penalised them when they exhibited those behaviours. The problem was that the partners put barriers on the path.

From now on when you are trying to change anything in your life or leading others through a change process ensure that you:
1.    Guide the rider with crystal clear behaviours.
2.    Appeal to their elephant.
3.    Clear the path.

For a copy of this article, go to Why change is so hard to do