the happiness advantage ted talk summary

“Interestingly, her research shows passive responses to good news (‘That’s nice.’) can be just as harmful to the relationship as blatantly negative ones (‘You got the promotion? Shawn says that happiness is the joy of striving after our potential Make your environment a positive and uplifting one, take a break during the day, spend 20 minutes outside in good weather. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.”, “People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.”, “Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge.”, “Happiness is not just a mood—it’s a work ethic.”, “Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy.”, “Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. His research on happiness made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 13 million views, and his lecture airing on PBS has been seen by millions. But I had to change my mind: this is one of the best books on positive psychology, including the ones written by actual psychologists. People who watch videos that induce joy recover from stress more quickly than those who watch neutral or sad videos. Sustaining lasting change often feels impossible because our willpower is limited. Because remember: with your happiness, you have the power to make others feel happier too. In the midst of defeat, stress, and crisis, our brains map different paths to help us cope. Similar studies reached similar conclusions with adults. His research on mindset made the cover of Harvard Business Review, his TED talk is one of the most popular of all time with over 13 million views, and his lecture airing on … Achor expanded on his original research in The Happiness Advantage in his second book, Before Happiness, which was published by Crown in September 2013. Result? When challenges loom and we get overwhelmed, our rational brains can get hijacked by emotions. Here is an idea on how to do just that: every evening write down three positives things that happened to you during the day. Morgana is a lesbian who came out during this TED talk, but doesn’t want to be defined by that. And another study even showed that happiness predicts lower blood pressure and heart rate. Shawn suggests writing down 3 things you are grateful for, perform random acts of kindness, meditate to clear your mind. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this “the error of the average.”, “If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average.”. Below 3 we might focus on threats too much and pick up more on the negatives of life. Studies show that watching less TV can make us happier. “In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyze a reaction. Turns out, a smile on your face makes you perform better. And that translates into success. In the midst of challenges and stress, some people choose to hunker down and retreat within themselves. Shawn Achor is one of the world’s leading experts on happiness, success, and potential. Belief is our reaction to the event; why we thought it happened and what we think it means for the future. Falling Up is about finding the mental path that not only leads us up out of failure or suffering but teaches us to be happier and more successful because of it. What will it accomplish? Physical activity has a strong impact on our mood. The Happiness Advantage teaches us how to control our brains in order to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance. Take a look at Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, “The Happy Secret to Better Work”, and you’ll know why the happiness advantage is so important… *Fasten your seat belts and turn off every distraction. This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBloomington, an independent event. Here are the 3 lessons I learned : Happiness comes before success, not after it. The 20-Second Rule shows how, by making small energy adjustments, we can reroute the path of least resistance and replace bad habits with good ones. Tests show that happy individuals are better off at fighting cold viruses. “The typical approach to understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome.” In a nutshell, an internal locus of control says that we are in control of our own life. My notes from a TED Talk by Shawn Achor, titled “The Happy Secret to Better Work” Thesis: Happier, positive brains work better: When we become “positive in the present”, our brains work better “Happiness advantage”: brain “at positive” performs much better than at negative, neutral, or stressed And as a result, these are the people who are generally more likely to get ahead.”, “Wrzesniewski’s most interesting finding is not just that people see their work in one of these three ways, but that it fundamentally doesn’t matter what type of job one has.”, “A calling orientation can have just as much to do with mindset as it does with the actual work being done.”, “Unhappy employees can find ways to improve their work life that doesn’t involve quitting, changing jobs or careers, or going off to find themselves. ; (2) Do I believe that my employees want to make that effort, just as they want to find meaning and fulfillment in their jobs? Actually in psychology for many years attention was paid to the outliers, but to the negative ones. “When over a thousand highly successful professional men and women were interviewed as they approached retirement and asked what had motivated them the most, throughout their careers, overwhelmingly they placed work friendships above both financial gain and individual status.”, “Organizational psychologists have found that even brief encounters can form “high-quality connections,” which fuel openness, energy, and authenticity among coworkers, and in turn lead to a whole host of measurable, tangible gains in performance.”, “Shelly Gable, a leading psychologist at the University of California, has found that there are four different types of responses we can give to someone’s good news, and only one of them contributes positively to the relationship. If you find yourself in need of a happiness booster, revisit a talent you haven’t used in a while.”, “Even more fulfilling than using a skill, though, is exercising a strength of character, a trait that is deeply embedded in who we are.”, “Studies have shown that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier you become.”, “While we, of course, can’t change reality through sheer force of will alone, we can use our brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it.”, “Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances.”, “Our power to maximize our potential is based on two important things: (1) the length of our lever—how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and (2) the position of our fulcrum—the mindset with which we generate the power to change.”, “By changing the fulcrum of our mindset and lengthening our lever of possibility, we change what is possible.”, “It’s not the weight of the world that determines what we can accomplish. At the end of the month, look back over each column and think about the pleasure each purchase brought you, and for how long.”, “Each time we use a skill, whatever it is, we experience a burst of positivity. Our environment and surroundings can have a huge impact on our mindsets and well being. That’s the case because happiness and positive states of mind are powerful performance-boosters. By contrast, people who view their work as a career work not only out of necessity but also to advance and succeed. They give us more motivation, physical and emotional health and they make us more energetic and creative. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.”. Acts of altruism decrease stress and increase our mental health. The Happiness Advantage makes the point that we can train our brains to focus on the positives. The Happiness Advantage Shawn Achor Crown Business, 2010 “My TED Talk is really a short version of my book.” Drive Daniel H. Pink Riverhead Books, 2011 “A good book to read in conjunction with The Happiness Advantage to create more successful companies. If what you wrote still seems unimportant, ask yourself again: What does this result lead to? The second mistake traditional psychology makes is focusing on those who fall only on one side of average—below it. The key to success at work is being happy -- not the other way around, says Shawn Achor (TED Talk: The happy secret to better work). And the inverse is true for habits you want to stop: make it hard to keep them up! In this way, you can connect every small thing you do to the larger picture, to a goal that keeps you motivated and energized.”, “You can have the best job in the world, but if you can’t find the meaning in it, you won’t enjoy it, whether you are a movie maker or an NFL playmaker.”, “What we expect from people (and from ourselves) manifests itself in the words we use, and those words can have a powerful effect on end results.”, “This phenomenon is called the Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.”, “The expectations we have about our children, co-workers, and spouses—whether or not they are ever voiced—can make that expectation a reality.”, “People act as we expect them to act, which means that a leader’s expectations about what he thinks will motivate his employees often end up coming true.”, “Every Monday, ask yourself these three questions: (1) Do I believe that the intelligence and skills of my employees are not fixed, but can be improved with effort? “We tend to miss what we’re not looking for.”, “When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.”, “Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.”, “The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life.”, “When you write down a list of ‘three good things’ that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future.”, “A variation on the Three Good Things exercise is to write a short journal entry about a positive experience.”, “It’s not your age, or what you do for a living; it’s the training and consistency that count.”, “On every mental map after crisis or adversity, there are three mental paths. “We view our work as a Job, a Career, or a Calling. I’m surprised they didn’t give it to Sally, she seems more suited to the job.’). However, that doesn’t make it any less effective. After a failure or negative event we can usually follow three different paths: It takes little energy to keep a body in motion. What makes “The Happiness Advantage” stand out is the extreme focus on practical advice. 30k; 50k; 50-Mile; Race Details; Sponsors; Results; Contact Us; KH Races. Now those guys took it to the next level of cutting edge frontier :). Another study linking happiness levels and lifespan of a group of nuns showed that there was a seven-year difference between the happiest and saddest nuns. Because positive brains have a biological advantage over brains that are neutral or negative, The Happiness Advantage teaches us how to retrain our brains to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance. The Happiness Advantage Summary. Psychology refers to this property as “undoing effect“, such as the ability to recover and erase previous unhealthy or negative states. Here to answer these questions is Shawn Achor, Ted Talk speaker, Harvard professor, positive psychology expert and author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.” ☁️ In the Happiness Advantage, Shawn talks about how happiness is the center around which success orbits. Below is the full transcript of the TEDx Talk. The more social help and support you get, the happier you are. Even if all that’s happening around us is negative. Most people chase money and success to be happy. It can! In The Happiness Advantage summary, we’ll give an overview of these 7 proven principles: 1) Tap on the Happiness Advantage 2) Change outcomes … Monks who spend years of meditating grow their prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain most responsible for the feeling of happiness. Even just thinking of watching our favorite movie can raise our endorphin levels by 27%. Martin Seligman, the pioneer in positive psychology, has broken happiness down into three, measurable components: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Move into a flat with smoke detectors where you can’t smoke inside and it’s freezing cold outside. As a guy who’s been working in tech a bit we always had to laugh at the buzzword “cutting edge technology”. Shawn is not a psychologist himself, which lowered a bit my expectations before I started reading “The Happiness Advantage”. When we’re very stressed and can’t keep up it can be difficult to feel like we’re on top of things. A study asked children to do a series of tasks. “ Presenting online with prezi is crucial to the success of our trainings. Doing the first step will get you going and accomplishing small tasks will give you confidence. Anticipating future rewards lights up the same pleasure centers that the actual reward will. This book doesn’t only help to make the readers happy, but also the people around the readers happier. He received his master of arts in Christian and Buddhist Ethics, then was teaching assistant to Tal Ben-Shahar’s popular “Happiness” course. You can start with just ten or fifteen minutes a day. Social Investment teaches us how to invest more in one of the greatest predictors of success and excellence—our social support network. To quote the author (I edit for brevity): Our brains are hardwired to perform at their when they are positive. ... It’s no coincidence he talks about the butterfly effect, he’s living it – his TED talk is among the 20 most popular TED talks of all time. One third of the speech emphasized happiness, in which I directly cited Shawn’s work from his TED talk and from the The Happiness Advantage. do be happier. Try to build a solid network of people around you. About the Author: Shawn Achor is an American author and entrepreneur, and also famous for his advocacy of positive psychology. And from then on, he deepened his passion and expertise in the topic of happiness and mental well-being. Put your negative emotions in writing. Even when mimicking a business deal negotiation. Across the world. “Studies show that these activities are enjoyable and engaging for only about 30 minutes, then they start sapping our energy, creating what psychologists call “psychic entropy”—that listless, apathetic feeling Cathy experienced. “This invisible pull toward the path of least resistance can dictate more of our lives than we realize, creating an impassible barrier to change and positive growth.”. “Psychologists have found that these kinds of gains in productivity, happiness, and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have.”, “The most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control,’ the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes.”, “Experiments show that when people are primed to feel high levels of distress, the quickest to recover are those who can identify how they are feeling and put those feelings into words.”, “By tackling one small challenge at a time—a narrow circle that slowly expands outward—we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes, that we are largely the masters of our own fates.”, “Small successes can add up to major achievements. Until we started seeing the new level of cutting edge tech: the “bleeding edge tech”. I highly recommend that you do. ; and (3) How am I conveying these beliefs in my daily words and actions?”, “Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. I believe The Happiness Advantage could have enjoyed a better structure. After many years and hundreds of interviews with workers in every conceivable profession, Amy Wrzesniewski has found that employees have one of three “work orientations,” or mindsets about our work. Then focus on micro-tasks you can execute. I have read several positive psychology books. Today, when I checked my inbox, I found an e-mail from one of my readers. And one, which I call the Third Path, that leads us from failure or setback to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall.”, “Study after study shows that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth.”, “By scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.”, “People’s ability to find the path up rests largely on how they conceive of the cards they have been dealt, so the strategies that most often lead to Adversarial Growth include positive reinterpretation of the situation or event, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it).”, “The people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened.”, “Things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.”—Tal Ben-Shahar, “When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often ‘overlearn’ the lesson and apply it to other situations. For the uninformed, Shawn's best selling book The Happiness Advantage shares Shawn's research about Happiness. The happiness advantage is available to everyone who puts in the effort. The three main lessons from The Happiness Advantage are: Here are a few ways of using a signature strength: Our brain cannot hold two feelings and thoughts at the same time. People with an internal locus of control are also more productive at work and in life. In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive. The same energy, both physical and mental, is needed of people to overcome inertia and kick-start a positive habit.”, “It’s not the sheer number and volume of distractions that gets us into trouble; it’s the ease of access to them.”, “Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. In my opinion, that type of language on a book that wants to be grounded on science is out of place. Fittingly, positive psychologist Shawn Achor has a wonderful sense of humor, which is one reason why his TED Talk about the “happiness advantage” has garnered millions of views. Just make sure you don’t spend on “stuff” but on experiences. Exercise releases endorphins, but it’s not just a short-term fix. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.”, “By adding 20 seconds to my day, I gained back three hours.”, “The key to reducing choice is setting and following a few simple rules.

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