Warren Cammack

Shawn’s energy was apparent as soon as he walked onto the stage and the pace at which the words flowed from his mouth was extraordinary so I hopefully managed to convey the key points with this post.
His talk focussed on the question of how do you change your brain to increase happiness?

We spend so much time in work that this is a great place to drive happiness in people. It’s great to see that more employers across the globe are looking to increase not jus the skills of their people but also the level of happiness that they have in their lives. Shawn recounted a story of meeting a CEO of a large US organisation, the gentleman took him for a drive in his Ferrari and wanted to know more about how he could help his staff to be happier people. Shawn began by asking the man why he didn’t wear a seatbelt, the man replied that there was no point as he was an optimist and had a belief that he would not die in his car. This, Shawn told him was optimism at its purest sense but what he taught was that people required a rational sense of optimism…and could he please put his seatbelt on.

Shawn talked about how in Economics we focus on eliminating the outliers in order to create a straight line of data to prove a pattern. Why do we do this though? By eliminating the outliers we focus on the normal, the average and we perpetuate the belief that average is good.

Shawn conducted an experiment with the audience in which we were paired up and had to stare at the other person whilst frowning, the other person had to try to not show any emotion. This was relatively easy and then the challenge was modified to be that the one person had to smile and stare at the other person. It was almost impossible not to replicate the smile. The interesting thing was when Shawn replayed how he conducted the same experiment in Abu Dhabi where the entirely female audience wore veils. Despite this barrier to seeing the other person’s face the women replicated the smile and when ask echo they did this they said it was easy to read the emotion of others through their eyes. Shawn has conducted this all over the world and typically 80-85% of people cannot hide their response to the smile.

There are further experiments that mimic the outcome – of note are the ones conducted a queues in airports where the researcher will stand in line and begin to look anxious, check his or her watch and start bouncing on their toes. Within five minutes the whole queue will be equally anxious and fidgety.

Shawn also studied depression at Harvard University and she case studies of positive outliers who felt privileged to be there. He found that 80% of students experienced depressions and 10% felt suicidal. When questioned why he would study this when from an outsiders perspective these students have everything to be happy about comes down to his theory that it’s not about the external factors but how your brain processes them that matters.

Some amazing research based facts about happiness:

• Children who are happy are able to complete tasks more quickly (e.g putting blocks into the correct holes)
• Happy doctors are 19% more effective at diagnosing problems
• Social cohesion (happiness) is a better indicator of team performance than IQ or experience
• People who are happy are
  • 3 times more creative
  • 31% more productive
  • Exhibit 23% fewer fatigue symptoms
  • 10 times more engaged
  • 39% more likely to live to 94

• Predictors of success in being happy are typically
  • optimism
  • strong social connections
  • perceiving stress as a challenge to overcome

Lots of jobs require people to be constantly striving for better performance and looking for the flaws in processes that can be fixed in order to help and organisation run more productively. This is a great skill to have however its important to compartmentalize this so that you aren’t constantly trying to fix problems at home – this would only lead to unhappiness.

Shawn recommended a couple of activities, again based on research that looks at why people are happy:

• 3 gratitudes (Emmons & McCulough 2003)
  Write down three things each day that you are grateful for. After a month the brain will begin to seek out the positive before the negative.
• The doubler (slatcher and pennebaker 2006)
  When you have a positive experience tell someone else about it and hence doubling the experience of joy.

You can watch his original TED talk (which is very similar to the one I heard) here:  Shawn Achor – the happy secret to better work

You can also cyberstalk Shawn here:

I bought his book (The Happiness Advantage) and will post more details once I’ve read it and absorbed the happiness!