Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com, and it's guest time on the show and I'm pleased to have a very special guest with me Shawn Achor a significant advocate of the psychology of happiness. Shawn, welcome to The BusinessMakers Show.

Shawn: Thank you very much.

Russ: Why don't we start by you telling us about the psychology of happiness and why that's so important to you?

Shawn: Positive psychology to me is a complete change of the way in which we study humans and how they interact with one another. Previously, if people studied psychology they'd look at people that had depression or had disorders, people that fell below the average and people that were struggling, so we would focus all of our energy upon studying those people, hoping to return them back to normal again. What positive psychology posits is if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. So the goal of positive psychology is to study people that are up above the curve for some specific reason. Maybe it's an entrepreneur that has an extremely high level of resilience, maybe it's a child that has an extremely high level of musical ability or an athlete who can run extremely quickly. And part of what we're attempting to do is to study why it is that makes that person so fast or that strong or that smart or that energetic, because maybe then we can learn and glean information about how to move people not just up to the average, but above so that we can make people be better at their businesses, better in their personal lives and achieve more happiness as a whole.

Russ: Okay. Well, that sounds real cool. Now, when you study these people do you actually find different characteristics that clearly make them more positive?

Shawn: It's extraordinary. I started this research with just a simple question. For the past 12 years I've been living and teaching and researching at Harvard University, and during that time period I had the opportunity to not only teach but to meet with so many students who have all been selected to be there because they have high levels of potential, and yet some of the students were extremely happy and would thrive in that environment and others seemed to under-perform or remain average. And the question that I began asking, which was just at Harvard, was what causes somebody at Harvard to rise up above the average?

The things we have found that seemed to differentiate those people that rise up at Harvard are the exact same things that we've been discovering have worked in Fortune 500 companies, worked for entrepreneurs, worked for individuals in non-profit organizations and have helped parents work with making children more successful and positive as well. These three things that we've discovered (and there's a whole host of them, but we can isolate them down to about three) which is first of all, they have a belief that their behavior matters. It's an optimistic view of their world and what their behavior actually entails and can have the effect of. So when an individual believes that their behavior matters, they're more likely to study, they're more likely to take risks at the entrepreneurial level, they're more likely to make changes to their life in terms of their health and their happiness that have a positive effect.

Russ: Okay

Shawn: The second is that they realize that people around them matter. They invest in people in the midst of stress instead of divesting from their social support networks, and as I've studied Fortune 500 companies over the entire world, I will be in 40 countries this year alone researching and talking to business leaders about how the psychology of happiness impacts business world. What we've discovered is that individuals that connect to their managers, connect to the other people on their team, and connect to their family and friends are the ones that survive an economic downturn the best.

And finally we realized that it's the individuals that can manage their energy and stress the best way, not just the ones that are not stressed ever, but use that stress in a positive way to move them forward. What we find is that even the most successful people, their brains still follow the path of least resistance, but what they do is these positive outliers tip the path of least resistance towards things that are more positive, positive habits and higher levels of success.

Russ: We're talking with Shawn Achor, the advocate of the psychology of happiness, and Shawn, those were the three sort of characteristics of positive people, correct?

Shawn: Yes.

Russ: That is really cool. So, we have discovered that by some of the analysis that you've done that there's clearly an advantage of being positive in general, right?

Shawn: I'd say it's actually an unfair advantage. When scientists and researchers have looked at how a positive individual works in the business world, competes in the athletic world, plays in the musical world, what we find is that individuals that are positive have significantly higher levels of energy, actually higher levels of intelligence, they're able to work on a task for longer periods of time, they'll be able to connect to people and they have more resilience in the face of the stresses and challenges that of course that we will all meet. What we find is that individuals when they're positive their brains actually let more information into their brain, which allows them to see more possibilities and actually be able to capitalize on those when others that are focusing upon stresses and upon the hassles of their life might miss out on the joys and the possibilities of greater success.

Russ: Well, I noticed in doing research that when you first started this focus at Harvard you kind of did an analysis of the general positive nature of many of the students there and I think you discovered a very high ratio of them were not happy.

Shawn: It's extraordinary. You would think that students that get to go to an elite school that they were thrilled to get accepted to, that have these absolutely beautiful buildings and all these opportunities and resources afterwards, that of course that they might be happy. But in a poll by "The Harvard Crimson," the newspaper, four out of five Harvard students reported experiencing work debilitating depression at some time during their four years at Harvard. I did the largest study that we've done on happiness and potential in the Ivy Leagues at Harvard, studying what it is that causes individuals to be positive and whether or not they're happy relating to their stress levels, to the number of friends that they have, whether or not they're dating and the remarkable thing is we're finding that many of them are stressed and depressed, even despite the outside external forces upon them, which help us to realize that the external world is not what's completely definitive and defining of our happiness.

Russ: Okay. We're talking with Shawn Achor, very strong advocate of the psychology of happiness, and we'll be back with more with Shawn after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and on online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com and continuing on the subject of the psychology of happiness with Shawn Achor. Shawn, I can't help but think when I hear you, how similar your message seems to the book that we all had to read back in the late '50s, early '60s, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.

Shawn: Absolutely; it's actually one of my favorite books and one of the reasons that I got inspired to do positive psychology in the first place. What we're finding in the field of positive psychology is we're reconfirming things that we've heard before by motivational leaders, by business leaders, by philosophers – ideas we've heard through all the religious traditions up until the present. Part of what we're attempting to do is to discover what's going on inside the brain that causes, for example, smiles and positivity to be contagious to entire teams and what it is that we can do in our individual lives to raise our levels of happiness. Or, are we stuck with the type of happiness that we have from birth. When I was giving a talk actually on Wall Street one of the analysts stood up in the back of the room and said, "You know, Shawn I know you're from Harvard and everything, but isn't this a huge waste of time?"

I replied no, and mentioned that this is very much common sense, that people have heard this before, which is what his main complaint was, that this was a waste of time because we've heard this before, this is common sense. No one thinks ingratitude is better than gratitude. But interestingly after the talk another analyst came up to me and said, "Do you remember that person who stood up? He's the most unhappy analyst we have here," which was such a poignant moment for me because I realized that here's a person who's absolutely correct. We've heard these things before and they're common sense, but common sense is not common action. So what we're studying in positive psychology is how we can make that common sense more common.

Russ: Well, I buy the fact that happiness and positive thinking are effective and very important, but what can one do about it? Let's say somebody's listening and they say well, I know that I'm not positive, maybe I should be. Is there any way to change your behavior?

Shawn: There is. But it would be interesting if there wasn't. Because all of this research that's been coming out in positive psychology says that if you're positive, you have an unfair advantage over those that are unhappy and stressed. Which is great news for the people that are positive and feel like that they were born happy, and terrible news that just confirms all your theories if you're negative and stressed as you're going through an economic downturn or stresses in your own life. What we've discovered and what we've been researching is how much can we change our genetic set point? Because everyone, and you've probably seen this if there are multiple children in a family, that one child might be easier to smile and easier to be happy than the other one. And this seems to be due to their genes. So if our genes set an initial baseline of happiness, can we change it from there? If we can't, we're doomed to just have what our genes have given us from birth. What we've studied over the past decade is there are actually five ways that we've discovered (and there's probably a lot more that we haven't even begun to discover yet) of ways that we can change that baseline so that, of course, everyone fluctuates up and down but that you're fluctuating up and down around a higher level of baseline. Those things are very simple and ones of course we've heard before.

Shawn: One of them is that if every day you write down three things that you're grateful for – this is called "the three gratitudes" – with as much specificity as possible – not just I'm grateful for my health; why does having good heath make you grateful? You write down these three things or you say it out loud to your spouse when you go to sleep at night or you say it with your children over the dinner table, and I've been doing this not only in the United States but internationally and I'm getting calls from individuals in Singapore and Hong Kong from business leaders who say, you know, I've always been a cynical and stressed person, that's the way I've run my teams, and now my children will yell at me if I don't say my three gratitudes at dinner.

Russ: Great.

Shawn: And I get thank you notes from spouses saying my husband or wife has always been such a cynical person and after doing this for just 21 days these individuals' viewpoint of the world has changed. And the research says that if you actually do this for 21 days, writing down three things you're grateful for, not only does your optimism levels increase, not only does your success rates at work increase and you have to take fewer sick days, but up to six months later your optimism levels, your resilience and your productivity levels are all at elevated rates.

Russ: Do you do this to this day?

Shawn: I do. It's interesting; some of the top researchers in the field that studies these things don't do them. I talked to a sleep researcher and he said that there was a connection between a lot of sleep and aging slower, which seems like a great idea, so joking around I said, "Well, you must sleep 20-22 hours a night." And he says, "No, Shawn, I'm a sleep researcher; I stay up all night watching people sleep; I never sleep." And he told me his age and he looked 10 years older than he actually was. He is walking proof of this, and so part of what I believe is that I don't want to be talking about these things and advocating them if I'm not trying them out myself. And the more that I try them out, the more I realize what obstacles get in the way and how powerful they actually are.

Russ: Okay, well tell us about the others.

Shawn: There's a couple other ones that we've found have been extremely successful. One of those is when you're looking at the stresses and obstacles you have in your life, oftentimes people focus upon their weaknesses and as a result of that, they put all their time and energy into solving those weaker areas of their character or their personality or their skill sets.

Russ: Right.

Shawn: Ignoring their strengths. What we find is that business leaders, individuals and students who spend their time strengthening the strengths that they already have are actually better at overcoming their weaker areas and as a result of that, their stress levels decrease, their happiness rates increase, and their success levels begin to rise. So it's focusing on what's working instead of what's broken but not ignoring what's broken because by using your strengths to deal with the weaknesses you're better able to achieve at work and at home.

Shawn: Another one that we do is journaling, which is an interesting one – it doesn't seem like putting a pen on a piece of paper would have any sort of a positive effect upon us, but remarkably it changes not only your productivity but your immune system as well. What we found is that if you journal for just five minutes a day for three weeks straight we've found that we've been able to drop the pain medication of individuals that have been experiencing neuromuscular disease; we've found that it's the fastest way of raising somebody's levels of charisma as perceived by other people, and it's one of the fastest ways to decrease stress upon your system, which causes your immune system to become stronger.

Russ: And when you're journaling you're writing down positive things that happened to you that day?

Shawn: Great question; what we ask is for people for five minutes a day to journal about a positive experience that they've done or experienced over the past 24 hours with as many details as they can remember. Not only does it allow them to relive those experiences, but their brain starts to connect the dots and they create a life trajectory over those 21 days of the things that matter most, so that their e-mails, the commutes that they have, the meetings that they have, all begin to wrap around those and they become more authentic and as a result happier.

Russ: Okay, we're talking about things where you can enhance your positive attitude and your happiness, and we're talking with Shawn Achor and we'll be back with more with Shawn after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com, and continuing on with the topic of the psychology of happiness with Shawn Achor. Shawn, those last three "to dos" that you just outlined were just incredible. Now there's a couple more, aren't there?

Shawn: Yeah, there's absolutely more that we've researched. I'll talk about the top five. The fourth one I want to mention is we all think that we need to multi-task because our society is moving so quickly. The only problem for our brains is we can't multi-task. Our brains are incapable at the conscious level of doing two tasks at once, which is the reason why driving while talking on the cell phone causes so many car accidents. So what we get business leaders to do and students to do as well is for two minutes a day, for 21 days straight, to practice doing nothing but one activity at a time. What we have them do is a non-work related one. We have them watch their breath go in and out or stare at a picture that they have on their desk or think about a single thought and try and keep their brain there. Their brain will of course try to go off in all different directions, and when I tried this the first time I found myself up doing an e-mail instead of spending my time practicing doing nothing but the activity that I was doing. But over time your brain actually trains itself to do a single thing at a time, which allows you to focus more intellectual resources on the task.

Researchers have found that if you leave e-mail open while you're working on another business project, your IQ points on that other project go down 10 points. Just by stopping the multi-tasking and closing that e-mail screen or turning off the vibration on your BlackBerry you can increase your level of IQ by 10 IQ points on the task you're doing as well as decreasing stress and increasing your levels of happiness.

Russ: Interesting – whoo – okay. And you're going to share one more with us?

Shawn: Yes, and I think this is one that especially would be helpful for people that are in the business world and entrepreneurs who are attempting to create positive change in their own lives. We all know that there are positive things we want to do. We set out these resolutions at the beginning of every year and by January 15th we are already not doing those things and we wait until the next year. Part of what we have been researching is looking at what causes us to do positive habits and makes us more likely to do the things we want to do. What we found is that if there's an initial investment of energy, called activation energy, which is required to start any task and if you want to create a positive habit, you need to find a way to decrease that initial investment of energy.

For example, I want to start exercising every morning because we know that there's such a connection between exercise, stress and happiness. But every morning I wake up and say do I want to exercise this morning? Well, no, where are my clothes; where are my shoes; where am I going to work out and by that point I've fallen back to sleep. So what I did to decrease the activation energy is I just went to sleep in my gym clothes. Now I only had to do this for 21 days straight but as a result of that, it made it easier to do the task that I wanted to do. And I actually created a life habit of exercise by making the activation energy necessary to do it lower. So for things you want to add to your life, find a way to make it easier. For things you want to stop doing in your life, try and make it harder. Like taking the batteries out of your remote control for your television, or putting unhealthy items higher up in your pantry.

Russ: Real cool, real cool. I really appreciate you sharing those five to-dos, man. I'm going to focus on that, for sure. Before I let you go, though, with all that you know about the psychology of happiness and being positive, what kind of advice would you give maybe to an aspiring entrepreneur? Entrepreneurs have all sorts of pressure; they work, generally speaking, long hours; generally they're multi-taskers. That being the case, what could you offer as a good way for them to change their behavior?

Shawn: Over the past year during this economic downturn I've studied entrepreneurs and business leaders in now 40 different countries and discovered the same thing everywhere. What we find is the single greatest predictor of success for these entrepreneurs is not their intelligence. IQ only predicts about 25 percent of the differences in our job success. What we find is 75 percent of it is related to our positivity and our belief that our behavior matters, which means that the key to being a strong and powerful entrepreneur is building resiliency. You can build resiliency by taking small steps that are outside of your comfort zone. Realizing that you're able to do that creates a feedback loop so you're more likely to take another step and then a larger step. And what we find that resiliency itself is built by taking the risks in the first place and believing that your behavior matters and that your behavior will cause a positive outcome, and when you do so, not only is your brain happier and more positive but you're seeing more possibilities that you can capitalize upon, you have more energy, and as a result more resilience.

Russ: Shawn, I really appreciate you visiting with us. That's Shawn Achor, major league advocate of the psychology of happiness. And you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.