Do you want to be happier at work? New research shows how

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a Leadership Strategy and business podcast, brought to you by CPA Australia.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Welcome to INTHEBLACK 's Career Hacks series. I’m Jacqueline Blondell. Today we're scrutinising what it takes to be happy at work. Helping us out today is Declan Edwards, happiness researcher and coach. Declan founded the BU Happiness College with a vision of making the skills and science of happiness more accessible to individuals, organisations, and the world as a whole. Welcome to the podcast, Declan.

Declan Edwards:
Thanks for having me.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's look at happiness as a state of mind. It's a nice state of mind, but how does it correlate to success at work?

Declan Edwards:
This is one of my favourite topics to unpack, the relationship between success and happiness because so often we get it backwards. For a long time, now, as a society, we tend to fall into the trap of, “I'll be happy when”, and then insert whatever success or accomplishment you want after that. “I'll be happy when I get the pay rise, the promotion, the new house, the new car”.

But what research into happiness science shows us is that happiness is often quite fleeting. Whereas when we learn how to cultivate the skills of happiness, so things like self-compassion, grit and resilience, emotional intelligence, not only do we feel happier and better in life, we make better decisions and we are more likely to achieve the goals that we wanted to set out to achieve in the first place. So I often say to people now, don't think of happiness as the outcome of success. Think of success as a more likely outcome of happiness.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So the other way around, so to speak. And when you're talking about grit, it makes me think about leadership. Is happiness a key leadership skill?

Declan Edwards:
I believe so, and the reason I believe so is because if you think back to the leaders that you've had throughout your career and your life, chances are the ones who left the greatest positive impact on you and the greatest impression were leaders who had developed some of the skills of happiness. They were probably quite emotionally intelligent. They probably communicated quite well. They were probably quite compassionate. They were good at setting boundaries for themselves and for others.

These humanistic skills that are correlated with living a happier life with managing our mind and emotions more tend to lead to better, more humanistic leaders that leave a more positive impact on those that they're entrusted to lead. I think sometimes we make the mistake of thrusting people into a leadership position because they're remarkably good at their technical skills. The example I tend to give is, oh, this is our best salesperson, so they should lead our sales team.

But the skills of leading a sales team are fundamentally different skills than the skills of being a good salesperson. So we can't just promote people who have great technical skills into positions of leadership and trust that they're going to be great leaders. We need to also equip them with those humanistic happiness skills or sometimes we call them soft skills.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So when we're talking about a happy boss, we're not talking about someone who's upbeat and jolly all the time. We're talking about someone who's more content and self-aware. Would that be the right way of putting it?

Declan Edwards:
Correct. Yeah. So happiness, when we refer to it from a research perspective, is a bit of an emotional umbrella term, not we made the mistake of thinking that happiness is just joy or elation or excitement. They’re quite uplifting. They're nice feelings to have, but they are quite fleeting.

And if we gamble all of our approach to happiness on “I need to feel joyful all the time”, well, the reality is we're not going to feel joy at work all the time. There's going to be plenty of times where we're feeling challenged or stressed or overwhelmed, and joy is not naturally present there.

But if we expand our definition of happiness to include states like contentment, resilience, connection, meaning, purpose, these other feelings that are also quite conducive to living a good life, well, those feelings can show up in surprisingly difficult places. When we're going through times of challenge, we can also feel a connection to meaning and purpose.

When we're going through times of loss or grief or heartache, we can also have experiences of gratitude and connection. So although joy might not be present, happiness is often present in some form or another. And if we learn how to tap into that, we become not only better leaders, but we become happier versions of ourselves.

Jacqueline Blondell:
We've reached a very advanced technological state in the world. How do we get to the state where we have to study happiness?

Declan Edwards:
Well, yeah, I mean, look, it's a relatively new field of research, positive psychology, which is the branch of psychology that's focussed on happiness and flourishing and wellbeing. It's really only been around for the last 30 or 40 years, but conversations about happiness, explorations of happiness, we've been doing that since the dawn of humanity. Now you go back a few thousand years and the ancient Greeks were arguing around what a happy life meant and how we could live a virtuous and fulfilling life.

These aren't necessarily new conversations. I think we're just bringing a scientific lens to them, which is quite new. Another good example is all of the science and research coming out now about the huge health and wellbeing benefits of meditation and mindfulness. And then there's cultures out there going, yeah, of course, we've been practising meditation, mindfulness, and yoga for thousands of years.

It's like science is now catching up with what as a species we tend to have intuitively, somewhat lent towards anyway, but we're now getting the tools, the techniques, the practices, the evidence-base to go, oh, happiness is actually a skill that we can all get better at.

Jacqueline Blondell:
And so what does some of the key data around positive psychology show us about happiness?

Declan Edwards:
My greatest realisation, I've been studying happiness now for just over 10 years, and one of the greatest standouts to me is that happiness is a skill, which means like any other skill, we're going to not be very good at it first. I don't think many people pick up a guitar and expect themselves to be Jimi Hendrix straight away. I don't think many people try to learn a new language and expect themselves to be fluent straight away.

But when it comes to practising the skills and the science of happiness, so learning how to manage our mind more effectively, learning how to make better decisions, learning how to build good behaviours and habits, learning how to understand our emotions, people tend to have the expectation on themselves that they'll get it immediately. And we forget to give ourselves that grace period of, I'm going to struggle with this at first, and if I want to get good at it, it's probably advantageous for me to ask for help and support.

So the happiness research shows us is all of these things are dramatically learnable skills and so much of our happiness influence by depending on the research you look at, there were some studies that suggested about 50% of someone's sense of happiness in life is biologically or genetically determined. 10% is determined by their external circumstances. So what happens to them in life. So what happens with their work or where they live.

And then 40% is determined by their internal skillsets for managing their own mind and emotions, their own happiness. So what that tells me is it is four times more powerful to focus on learning how to manage your mind and emotions more effectively, on learning how to cultivate happiness, than it is to gamble your happiness on the next external change, which comes back to what we mentioned earlier about the relationship between success and happiness.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's look at that 40%. What are the key components of developing happiness and contentment from that 40%, what do we do? Is it about health and wellness? Is it about mindfulness? What is it?

Declan Edwards:
Yeah, so I mean there's so many. I refer to this as having a happiness toolkit and at the social enterprise, I run, BU Happiness College, we teach over 70 distinct skills for living a happier life, which obviously in the context and confines of our conversation today, we're not going to go through all 70, but I'll share my top five. The five that I think are most important for people, they're the five that the book I have coming up about the skills and science of happiness.

These are the five that made the final cut to be in the book, and they are: expand your emotional intelligence. So learn how to name, describe, understand, and manage your emotions rather than fight them and wrestle them. The second skill is learn to look inwards. So learn to introspect. I think we live in a society where we think the answer is outside of ourselves.

Attention is a huge economy. The wealthiest companies in the world now are often built on monetizing our attention, social media, Netflix, and we are losing the art and the skill of looking inwards and reflecting on ourselves. Our third skill is then retrain your brain. So this means practice things like gratitude, train your brain to see the good in yourself and others. A lot of us have a bit of a negative cognitive bias, which is just a scientific term that means our brain looks for the worst case scenario first.

We need to train it out of that if we're going to live a good life. The fourth skill is get to know yourself really deeply. So know your values. Know your definition of a happy and successful life rather than chasing other people's. A lot of people come to me and say, Declan, I want to have more self-confidence or self-worth or self-esteem.

And I go, well, all of those start with the same word for a reason. They all start with self. And if you don't know yourself, you're not going to have confidence in yourself. You're not going to have a good relationship with yourself. It's like trying to build a good relationship with a stranger. We have to get to know ourselves deeply. And then the fifth skill, the final one I'd recommend people start with is start directing your life more intentionally.

So this means set goals that matter to you. Again, set a vision that's important to you and that aligns to your definition of success and happiness, and then do difficult things to move towards it. There's so much benefit to our growth and development about doing difficult things that have meaning and purpose to them. If we do those five things, we manage our mind and emotions better.

We look inwards. We train our brain to be optimised towards happiness. We get to know ourselves deeply and we pursue a path in life that matters to us, you're already going to be many, many steps ahead when it comes to living a happy and fulfilling life. They're really the five core foundations.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Can I just pick up on the difficult things? I mean, obviously that's different for everyone else. I mean, we all have our different fears and trepidations, but can you give me a sort of blanket idea what a difficult thing, what kind of challenge would that be?

Declan Edwards:
I refer to it as a green light moment, which is the best decisions that you've ever made in your life. To everyone listening to this conversation, think back to the best changes you've ever made in your life. I would bet that leading up to that change, you felt a weird blend of fear and excitement at the same time, or a weird blend of feeling challenged, but also compelled or aligned to that decision.

So for example, whether it be changing jobs, stepping into a new role within your career, whether it be speaking publicly for the first time and taking a new opportunity of work, whether it be for me, finding out what we're having a child, I became a father this year, getting married, travelling, all the best decisions people tend to make are preceded by things that are equally scary and exciting, and that's because it's scary, because it's getting us out of our comfort zone.

It is doing something difficult, which is great for our sense of resilience. It's great for our sense of confidence in ourself to do things that challenge us, but it's also exciting because it aligns for our values. So if you're looking at options of, well, what do I want to pursue? What's a goal I want to set? If you're looking at your goals going, these just excite me, i don't feel remotely challenged by them, you probably need to up them a little bit. But if you're looking at your goals going, this just feels overwhelming and terrifying, well then they might not be the right goals for you.

We need to find a way to align them back to your values and back to your sense of self. So it does feel exciting and compelling. So whether that's go climb a mountain somewhere, whether it's do a marathon, whether it's take that next step in your career, whatever it is for you as an individual, if you find something that is equally scary and exciting, pursue it. That is a sign, that is an internal compass nudging you towards, Hey, this is a good move for a happy and fulfilling life.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Okay, let's talk about the other side of happiness, unhappiness. We all can get stuck in unhappiness ruts at work. How do we dig ourselves out? What's the best way?

Declan Edwards:
I love the saying that our brain often marinates in bad moments and navigates through good moments. So again, this is the negative cognitive bias from the research. It means when things are going difficult or things are difficult and going poorly, our mind tends to hyper fixate on them and stew in it. The classic example here is if 10 things go well in your working week and one thing doesn't go well, what's the one that we ruminate about when we get home and lie in bed at night, we're not thinking about the 10 things that went great.

Our mind is hyper fixating on what went wrong and there's good reason for this. Our brain's highest priority is not happiness. Your brain actually doesn't care if you're happy. That's probably another big realisation I've had from studying happiness. Our brain doesn't really give a damn about it.

Our brain cares that we're alive and it's more conducive to our survival to focus on what could go wrong and what the threats are than to appreciate all the good around us. Unfortunately, that's not very good for our happiness, great for survival, not great for living a fulfilling life. And so again, we need to train our brain and nurture our brain to go, Hey, not to deny the challenges. I'm not about toxic positivity.

I don't think anyone should say, life is always sunshine and rainbows and everything is great, but to be able to go, if I'm going to spend this much time ruminating on and focusing on all the difficulties at work, it's only fair that I give my brain equal time to focus on all the good things that are happening. So one of the best practices we can do to help with that transition and broadening our brain's perspective is something as simple as a gratitude list.

Out of all the tools and practices and resources from positive psychology, this is one of the most recommended because it's one of the most impactful. All you do, it's free. It's so simple. They ask people, Hey, at the end of each day, jot down three things that went well that day that you're grateful for, and then write about why they went well and why you're grateful for them.

And so it might be you had a nice little meeting with a client. It might be you got a task done that's been weighing on you for a while. It might be that your coffee was extra delicious that morning. Whatever it is, small trivial thing, gratitude towards other people, gratitude towards ourself, when we practice gratitude intentionally, which means we write it down and we write why we're grateful for it, we don't just do it as a tick box and say, oh, that guy on that episode of that podcast said that I need to write down three things I'm grateful for, and you do it, and then three minutes later you've closed it.

Spend a bit of time actually unpacking it. When you do that, it trains your brain to look for the good that already exists around you. And what they found is over 12 weeks of doing this, which is not long in the grand scheme of life, spending three months cultivating the skill of gratitude, I think is very much worth the time that you put into it. What they found is people rated their life happier. Some reports set up to 40% happier just by practicing gratitude.

Jacqueline Blondell:
That's 40% we're looking for, isn't it?

Declan Edwards:
Well, it's 40% of our total happiness in life is determined by skills and practices for us. There was this study found that your overall, yeah, how happy you felt in that moment, up to 40% of an increase on where you were previously. So I'm not great at math, but say you said I was five out of 10 happy. Well, then you went up by two points and you're now a seven out of 10 happy, which is pretty worth doing.

Jacqueline Blondell:
That's amazing. I go by the to-do list, I tick things off and I get this little tiny tweak of satisfaction, but I might actually try the other way round writing it down rather than having the challenges and then ticking them off at the end of the day. So yeah, I'm going to give it a go.

Declan Edwards:
Beautiful. I'm glad to hear it.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Now, you talk about having a personal trainer for your brain. Is this what you mean by that? Is it the same as being a director of your own life?

Declan Edwards:
Yeah, well, similar, a little difference there. So director of your own life I think is getting in the driver's seat of your life. It means taking full ownership and responsibility for your happiness, recognising that it's no one else's job to make you happy, and they actually can't. Your happiness is your responsibility. We can influence each other's happiness, but we can't determine it. So when we direct our own life, we take full ownership and responsibility for our happiness, for our decisions.

We stop blaming others or circumstances. We don't blame the weather or the economy for how we feel. We go, Nope, this is on me. I'm going to focus on what's in my control. When it comes to having a personal trainer for your mind, that's sometimes how I describe what we do at BU Happiness College. It's quite popular these days for people to go to a gym and work with a professional to look after their physical health, and they don't do it reactively.

People don't wait until they have a heart attack to then start exercising. Well, some people do, but most people don't go, I'm going to wait until I hit rock bottom and then start looking after my physical health. Unfortunately, we still have a bit of that reactive culture when it comes to mental health and emotional wellbeing, and a lot of people won't go and see a therapist or a counsellor or a psychologist until they're really, really struggling, and that just fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.

It would be like saying, oh, I'm waiting till I have a heart attack then I'll start exercising and eating well. It's so much more valuable to be proactive and preventative with our wellbeing rather than waiting till we're really, really struggling. That's led to, we have a mental healthcare system in Australia that is really struggling under the weight of that.

What we need to start doing, and what I encourage people to start doing is there was a time not that long ago where the idea of going to a gym and working with a personal trainer was unheard of. It just wasn't a thing. Now, it's a status symbol. Can you imagine the world that we would create and the society that we would have if it was a status symbol for people to work on their happiness skills, to work on their mindset, to work on their emotional intelligence, not when they were struggling, but just do it as part of their day-to-day care and maintenance for themselves.

And so that's what my team and I do at BU Happiness College, whether it be through our courses or coaching, the point is to have someone there who's a professional in the space, who can guide you, give you the right tools and resources, keep you accountable, and make sure that you're actually practising in a way that's safe and sustainable and actually going to lead to better outcomes for your wellbeing and your happiness.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Now, let's just lastly look at the outside world around us. I know we've covered this territory a bit, but it is a very complex world, and we've talked about the attention economy. What can we do particularly at this time to regain perspective and avoid catastrophizing about things we can't change in the outside world?

Declan Edwards:
It surprises people sometimes to hear that I originally went to university for journalism and somehow ended up as a happiness researcher. I made that change, I think because in my first year of studying journalism, I was told quite bluntly that if I wanted to be a decorated journalist and have a good career in the media, I needed to stop writing so many good news stories because the saying is, if it bleeds, it leads, right?

If we focus on the bad in the world, you'll get headline news, you'll get front page news, you'll have a decorated career as a journalist, and I didn't want to dedicate my life to that. We mentioned that biological bias that we all have to focus on the negative. I think that's only been exacerbated by social media, by the news, by the world as a whole, and I know within myself, sometimes I still get caught in it, even as a happiness researcher.

I go, wow, the world's looking really dark and grim at the moment. There's all these challenges, all these changes. Things are really uncertain, and that's all true. But there's also so much good that happens in the world that I think we overlook. We forget to give attention, and there are some media outlets out that are starting to focus on publishing good news, which is great to see. But I think being very mindful about your information diet, be very mindful about what you feed your brain.

So whether that be your social media, who you're following on there, whether it be the conversations that you have, whether it be the media sources that you consume, your newspapers, your radio, your television. Be very mindful about the media that you feed your brain and the information that you feed your brain, and then check in with yourself and go, does this actually make me feel any better?

And is there anything I can do about it? Because there's a certain point where you go, Hey, maybe I'm just kind of doom scrolling at the moment and ruminating in the bad, and it's actually not helping me or anyone else to do that. The only people that's helping is the companies that have monopolised our attention and have kept us glued to that. So if we can be a bit more intentional about going, I'm going to be more mindful about the information I consume, I promise you, you'll tend to end up living a bit of a happier and better life and also just connect with the people around you rather than focusing so much on what's happening out there in the whole world.

We are losing the art of being good citizens and good neighbours. So many people report feeling lonely now despite us being somewhat more connected than ever because of technology. So spend a little bit less time tuning into what's happening in the big wide world and spend a bit more time actually genuinely connecting with your loved ones. You're going to have a much better life from it.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Thanks so much, Declan, for sharing your expertise on happiness. I feel more upbeat already.

Declan Edwards:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Speaking of changing your information diet, hey, there's some good food for thought from this one, so I'm glad I could contribute.

Jacqueline Blondell:
For our listeners, eager to learn more, please check out the show notes for links to Declan site, and don't forget to subscribe to INTHEBLACK to hear more Career Hacks episodes. Also, please share this episode with your colleagues and friends in the business community. Until next time, thanks for listening

Garreth Hanley:
To find out more about our other podcasts check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.