Helen Alexander

Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 Happiness Advantage Be Your Better Self and Achieve Success Through Happiness Helen Alexander Table of Contents Introduction Section 1: Happiness and success What is happiness? Can money buy happiness? Make yourself happy Section 2: The Happiness advantage Happiness Benefits Section 3: Characteristics of happy people Optimism Seeing challenges not threats Social connections Section 4: Be happy by choice not chance What strategies should you choose? All you need is love Gratitude Journaling Exercise Meditate and be mindful Perform acts of kindness Your happiness shopping list Conclusion eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 SECTION 1: Happiness and success C onventional wisdom states that to be happy we need to have a successful career, a loving family, a good income and a healthy body. Consequently, many of us spend our lives chasing that smiling carrot that always seems to be just out of reach. • • • • If I lose a little weight, I’ll be happy. If I get that promotion, I’ll be happy. If I find the perfect partner, I’ll be happy. If I get better grades, I’ll be happy. But it turns out that, in fact, the link between happiness and success is the other way around. Happiness drives success “Your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed,” says Shawn Achor in his massively successful Ted Talk on the Happy Secret to Better Worki. Research study after research study has proven that the key to success is being happy. When we are happy we are more creativity, energetic, productive, efficient and resilient. A positive attitude helps us deal with stress in a constructive way and allows us to see difficulties as challenges, not threats. This is because, while negative emotions, like fear, narrow our focus and limits our actions (so that our ancestors could get away from tigers and bears without being distracted), positive emotions make us open to possibilities and new ideas. At the same time, positive emotions help us recharge and develop our personal resourceii. Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 What is happiness? When experts talk about happiness, what do they mean? Is the guy at the office who always clowns around happy? Is the mom at school who exudes calm and peace happy? Are you happy? Barbara Fredricksoniii is one of the early positive psychology researchers. She started her research into positive emotions in the late ’90s and has broken down positivity into “the big 10 emotions”, namely: love, joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration and awe. In some sense happiness, (or as Frederickson prefers to call it “positivity”), is a combination of some or all of these emotions. In their research, many academics define happiness to mean when a person has “satisfaction and meaning in their life”. It’s not a passing emotion, rather it’s an inclination to feel positive emotions like “the big 10”. It’s also about being able to recover quickly from negative emotions. Psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer says, “Long-term happiness has a lot to do with purpose and meaning and very little with consumption or gratification.iv” So are you happy? Are you more or less happy than you were last month? Are you happier than your neighbor? These questions are difficult to answer because happiness is inherently subjective. No-one can really compare your experience of happiness to anyone else’s. It’s true that there are some objective measures of happiness; the levels of cortisol in your body for example, which areas of your brain are seen to be active in a brain scan, or how many times you smile in a given period of time. Scientists use these indicators when conducting happiness studies, but for the most part they rely on how participants say they feel. So how happy are you? And do you practice happiness skills in your daily life? There are various online tools, questionnaires and mobile apps that can help you gauge your own level of happiness and any change in your positive state. For example, the organization Pursuit of Happinessv has a skills quiz to test your daily happiness practices. Dave Sze at the Huffington Post explains how to track your own subjective wellbeing over time. Or you could try the Tactics for Happier Living quiz. Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 Researchers often try to measure what they call “subjective well-being”. This usually involves asking people a range of questions that help the researcher understand their level of life satisfaction and their emotional experience. To develop understand different aspects of happiness and develop reliable insights, researchers need to explore happiness using different methods. If studies using different research techniques all come to the same conclusion, then you can be fairly certain that the conclusions can be relied on. Researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry, economics and other health sciences, have designed studies to explore positivity, each study providing a little more insight into happiness, how it’s experienced, what causes it and how you can create it. Studies into happiness can be broken into four major typesvi, which tend to observe or measure different aspects of happiness: • • • • Observation & experience sampling studies look at how people feel at a specific moment. Cross-sectional/correlation studies survey how people say they feel at one moment in time by answering various questions. Longitudinal studies are used to observe people’s lives over time to find the trajectory of a happy life. Experimental studies try to find causal links between happiness and outside sources. The positivity studies that have adopted these methods are starting to show a rich and nuanced understanding of the interplay between happiness, physical changes in the body and the brain, and behavior. We are starting to see how happiness forms part of a complex system. While there are still many aspects of happiness that we don’t fully understand, there are some key conclusions that are now well-accepted. That happiness precedes success and predicts success is one of these. Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 Make yourself happy It’s all good and well understanding that happiness leads to success. But what if I’m just not a particularly happy person? Am I doomed to live a life of mediocrity? The good news is that happiness is something that we can all work on. To some degree your level of happiness is determined by your DNA and your circumstances, but to a surprising degree, your happiness depends on you. As psychologists have come to understand what characteristics and behaviors help people to be happy, they have devised programs and advice to help people take control of their own happiness. And consequently their own success. So now, instead of putting all our energy into trying to be more successful, we need to start looking at how to be happier. We spend a great deal of time and effort making sure that our CVs are professional, that our projects are completed on time, and that we network with the right people. It’s time to shift some of that effort to making ourselves happier. Through this book, you will learn techniques and strategies that you can implement from day-to-day to make you a more positive person. And as you internalize a positive attitude, your behaviors in all areas of your life will change for the better. Don’t be daunted! While a few of the techniques we’ll be looking at involve a level of long-term commitment and perseverance, many are so quick and easy to do that you can do them during your commute to the office, or while you’re packing away your groceries. You will also see the results quickly. Keep the perfect journal, and in just five days you can feel the difference. Take on the 21 day happiness advantage challenge and you experience sustained happiness within a month. But before we look at how you can create your own happiness, let’s look a bit deeper into what happiness looks like amongst successful people. Shawn Achor, “The happy secret to better work” TedX May 2011, accessed at https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work#t-715518 on 5 Dec 2017 ii Barbara Fredrickson Positivity Three Rivers Press, 2009 iii Fredrickson, B.L., (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218-226 iv Manfred Spitzer (2011) “Learning Brings Happiness” accessed at https://www.humboldtfoundation.de/web/kosmos-cover-story-97-3.html on 7 Dec 2017 v www.pursuitofhappiness.org i Helen Alexander eBook Work Sample - Dec 2017 Patrick Allan 14 Sept 2015 “What Research Says Happiness Really Is” LifeHacker accessed at https://lifehacker.com/what-research-says-happiness-really-is- on 7 Dec 2017 vi