Tag Archives: the luck factor

How many real friends do you have?

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This article by Lisa Sansom, published in Positive Psychology News Daily, looks at the significance of friendships to our well-being.  In these times of hyperconnectedness in Social Media we tend to forget what a real friend is.  How many of your “friends” on Facebook can you really count on in your hour of need?  Professor Richard Wiseman also argues in his book The Luck Factor that your level of connectedness not only affects your well being but also the amount of “luck” you experience in your life.  Lisa and Richard just might be on to something, take a read of Lisa’s article and decide what you think.

 

Real People = Real Connections = Real Well-Being

A few weeks ago, I received a message in my LinkedIn mailbox. The sender indicated that she was looking for someone to fill a rather substantial contract position, and would I please come and talk with her about it. I didn’t know this person directly, but a quick search through LinkedIn showed that she had only been in her new position for a few months and we had several connections in common, though no one that I knew very well. Nonetheless, we arranged a meeting a few days later.

At that meeting, she asked me, “Do you know…” and she floated a name. My first response was blank, that I didn’t know that common connection, but then a tiny distant bell rang in a dusty dark corner of my mind. The mutual connection was a volunteer secretary for an organization that I belong to in another city where I used to live about a decade ago. The power of networking, indeed!

The Power of Weak Ties

 

In 1973, Mark S. Granovetter published what would become a highly-cited article about the strength of weak ties. He was one of the first to recognize and demonstrate that opportunities come to us not just through our close friends with whom we have contact regularly and deeply, but often through weak ties with people we don’t know well but whose social networks overlap our own. While Granovetter’s research is heavily detailed and laden with diagrams showing various types of weak ties between individuals and groups, the main take-away is that social networks rise and fall on distant connections, not just close ones. And this was before the mainstream Internet.

Fast forward a few decades and Nicholas Christakis, co-author of Connected, uses new social data to show that people two or three connections away from us can have very important impacts on our lifestyle, emotions, and behavioral choices, even if we don’t know it. Christakis and Fowler have shown that obesity spreads through social networks like an epidemic. They have shown that both happiness and sadness can be contagious. These networks are far from linear. They are very complex, beautiful, and ubiquitous.

Yet when most of us hear the term social network, we think about Facebook and other online social gathering places. Granovetter’s work clearly predates Mark Zukerberg, cofounder of Facebook, and Christakis’s book uses data that was gathered decades earlier. These social phenomena have been around since the dawn of humanity, not just the dawn of the World Wide Web. Why?

 

Brains Structured for Connection

 

Our brain structure is old and created for a very different environment. Today, we could argue that we are on Brain Version 3. Paul Maclean’s triune model of the brain posits that our brain has three parts which have evolved over time. The first part is the reptilian complex of the brain, which includes the basal ganglia. This part of our brain is largely responsible for fight or flight, reproduction, and other instincts necessary for basic survival. The second part of our brain is the mammalian complex. Here we find the limbic system: emotions, reasoning, and parental behavior. So, for example, when mammals are born, they emit a helpless cry and their parents will find them, feed them, and care for them. When reptiles are born, they are largely self-sufficient and don’t have a helpless cry. If they make noise, their parents might eat them.

 

Version 3 of our brain developed with the neo-mammalian complex. This part of our brain, also sometimes referred to as the human brain(though potentially other species have some elements of this too), helps us to navigate complex situations. This cerebral neocortex allows us to think strategically, forecast the implications of our decisions, and see the bigger picture. It also allows us to prepare a dinner party when we know that Mary is vegetarian, Astrid doesn’t like Philip, and Amy is allergic to nuts. Our ability to plan and strategize in social situations comes from this part of our brain.

 

Yet this brain structure has been in place for thousands of years. Maybe longer. We are arguably hard-wired for face-to-face real time social interactions.

What Does Research Tell Us about Social Networks?

Consider some recent studies that have come out.

In a Canadian study of happiness by Helliwell and Huang, doubling the number of “real” friends (as opposed to online friends) produces a significant effect on well-being, increasing it by 50%! The size of your online network, however, is not correlated with well-being. So don’t be envious of those people with 5000+ connections on LinkedIn. They aren’t getting any happiness boost out of it.

 

In fact, people who have been recently widowed or divorced need these real connections even more than others. Loneliness can actually damage your immune system and Christakis’ research has demonstrated that for virtual connections to have any positive benefit for our networking, those connections must “be real or feel real.”

 

In this day of Skype and home-to-home video conferencing, we might think that we are actually communicating face-to-face in real time. However it turns out that not all emotional cues are available through facial expressions. In fact, in moments of intense emotions, both positive and negative, body language can be more telling. You can’t see that on your computer screen.

Furthermore, researchers Willcox and Stephen find that social networks, such as Facebook, might actually cause us harm by inflating our self-esteem and our self-control.

Technology has evolved. For our own well-being and social networking benefits, we still need to meet with people in real time. Videoconferencing is great, but business travel didn’t grind to a complete halt after several terrorist attacks and attempts involving aircraft. Why? Because we still recognize the critical importance of getting in the same physical room as someone else to make meaningful connections. It’s a return on our investment, even from a business point of view.

Take-aways

 

There are two lessons that I draw from all of this research.

There are two lessons that I draw from all of this research.

 

  1. Get out with real people. I tend to be a bit of a Facebook addict, and I’m inspired by people who turn off Facebook for extended periods of time in order to have meaningful connections with the real world. Of course, social networks do make it easier to stay in touch. Returning to my original contract connection, once I moved a decade ago, I stayed in touch with people via LinkedIn and Facebook. No doubt that kept me on someone’s radar screen so that she could put me in touch with a hiring manager who needed someone to fill a seat. Most of my professional opportunities have come through weak ties that I met first in real life and stayed connected with through social media.
  2. Be kinder than necessary to everyone you meet. This is a truism that often floats around Pinterest and Facebook. It’s so very important. You never know when a weak tie will emerge years later. The world, even at 7 billion people, is smaller than you think. Your network is tighter than you realize, and highly influential. Seed your network with positivity and kindness. The benefits spread and, like karma, come back to you.

 

References

 

Willcox, K. & Stephen, A. (2012). Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control. Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 12-57. Soon to be published in Journal of Consumer Behavior. Abstract. Summarized in ScienceDaily (2013, January 14). Social networks may inflate self-esteem, reduce self-control.

Christakis, N.A. & Fowler, J.H. (2009). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. New York: Little, Brown.

N.A. Christakis & Fowler, J. H. (2007). The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years.New England Journal of Medicine, 35: 370-379.

Granoveter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360-1380.

Helliwell, & Huang (2013). Comparing the Happiness Effects of Real and On-line Friends. National Bureau of Economic Research. Abstract.

Photo Credits::
From the Christakis Research ImagesCompfight with a
Creative Commons license
Baby Aligators courtesy of Tim Pearce, Los Gatos
Puppies feeding courtesy of The Girl in the Picture
Video connection courtesy of Lars Plougmann
Be kind courtesy of jeffsmallwood

Lisa Sansom, MAPP ’10, is the owner of LVS Consulting, an independent consulting firm that helps to build positive organizations. Lisa provide services such as individual and leadership coaching, team facilitation, effective communications training, Appreciative Inquiry and change management consulting. Full Bio.

 

Article originally published in Positive Psychology News Daily.

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 14th March 2013

 

Three cheerful reasons to visit Todmorden

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1000 places to see before you die, Taj Mahal

1000 places to see before you die

Isn’t it funny how you can go through life blissfully unaware of certain places until suddenly a name keeps popping up again and again and you move from a state of complete oblivion to gradual awareness of that place’s charms and then to a sudden overwhelming compulsion to visit that particular destination as soon as you can?  Just six months ago Todmorden would not have been on my list of 1000 places to see before you die, not that I’m planning to die any time soon. Todmorden is not exactly up there with the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China or other places which are considered by many to be one of the 7 Wonders of the World. So what has fuelled my sudden desire to visit Todmorden?

Todmorden – a Yorkshire Town

The first reason is a personal one – it’s in Yorkshire and my husband who is from Yorkshire tells me Yorkshire’s hard to beat. The other two reasons stem from my interest in positive psychology as Todmorden has many valuable lessons it can teach us about happiness and the importance of trying out happiness experiments.

Todmorden first crossed my radar earlier this year when I watched the Derren Brown programme on Channel 4 about The Secret of Luck.  Derren Brown had chosen Todmorden as the town in which he aimed to try out a social experiment.  He wanted to see if by planting a rumour about a Lucky Dog statue it was possible to change the lives and fortunes of local residents.

Derren Brown and Professor Richard Wiseman

Derren looked at what makes some people lucky and other people attract only misfortune.  The theories which Derren Brown was testing out in his Todmorden happiness experiment were based on the book The Luck Factor by Professor Richard Wiseman.  In addition to writing The Luck Factor, Richard Wiseman, who holds a professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, has written many books on a range of topics including luck, self-help, illusion and persuasion such as Quirkology, 59 Seconds, Rip it Up and Did you spot the Guerrilla?

 

Richard Wiseman also happens to be a professional magician who frequently performs at the Edinburgh Festival . You can watch one of his magic trick videos below:

The colour changing card trick

As luck would have it, I happened to be reading the book The Luck Factor at the time the Channel 4 programme was being aired as it was on the recommended reading list of the 10 week course in Positive Psychology which I had just completed at City University in London.  The book teaches us how 4 simple principles can transform your luck and you can read more about these in this article.  It is these principles which Derren Brown investigated in his Todmorden experiment and I would urge you to watch his very entertaining and educational programme The Secret of Luck featuring the now famous Luck Dog statue by local artist David Wynne.

The third pressing reason I have for wanting to visit Todmorden is that I recently came across the wonderful community group called Incredible Edible at the Meaning conference in Brighton.  Pamela Warhurst CBE,  was a really inspiring speaker at this conference and received a standing ovation for her wonderful story of how the action of taking small steps to start a  seed swapping project to get the local community growing its own food on unused land just four years ago has now created a community wide organisation. The Incredible Edible initiative, of which Pam is now chair, has become an inspiration for urban regeneration and education projects around the world.  Todmorden has created a toolkit you can download if you would like to make your own town incredible.  The positive spin offs from this small local intiative have been huge and have not only put Todmorden firmly on the map in this country and abroad for its local food growing intitiatives but have also helped to regenerate many local businesses which are now thriving since this campaign started.

The launch of Incredible Edible in France

Watch Pam Warhurst’s inspiring TED talk and have a rethink about the places you want to see before you die.  Everyone needs to create their own personal list but I hope you will agree with me that Todmorden deserves to move up several places in your list.  Enjoy Derren Brown’s Channel 4 programme and Pam’s wonderful TED talk and hopefully you will be inspired to try some happiness experiments Todmorden style.

Pamela Warhurst: how we can eat our landscapes

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 16th October 2012

Self help: forget positive thinking, try positive action

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Self help: forget positive thinking, try positive action

The self-help industry is mired in ideas about positive thinking that are at best ineffective and at worst destructive. If you want to be more confident or successful, says Richard Wiseman, the best thing to do is act the part.

self-help graphic

For years self-help gurus have preached the same simple mantra: if you want to improve your life then you need to change how you think. Force yourself to have positive thoughts and you will become happier. Visualise your dream self and you will enjoy increased success. Think like a millionaire and you will magically grow rich. In principle, this idea sounds perfectly reasonable. However, in practice it often proves ineffective. 

Rip It Up: The radically new approach to changing your life: The Simple Idea That Changes Everything
  1. Tell us what you think: 

Take visualisation. Hundreds of self-improvement books encourage readers to close their eyes and imagine their perfect selves; to see themselves in a huge office at the top of the corporate ladder, or sipping a cocktail as they feel the warm Caribbean sand between their toes. Unfortunately, research suggests this technique does not work.

In one study led by Lien Pham at the University of California, students were asked to spend a few moments each day visualising themselves getting a high grade in an upcoming exam. Even though the daydreaming exercise only lasted a few minutes, it caused the students to study less and obtain lower marks. In another experiment led by Gabriele Oettingen from New York University, graduates were asked to note down how often they fantasised about getting their dream job after leaving college. The students who reported that they frequently fantasised about such success received fewer job offers and ended up with significantly smaller salaries.

Why should this be so? Maybe those who fantasise about a wonderful life are ill-prepared for setbacks, or become reluctant to put in the effort required to achieve their goal. Either way, the message is clear – imagining the perfect you is not good for your life.

However, when it comes to change, the message is not all gloom and doom. Decades of research show that there is indeed a simple but highly effective way to transform how you think and feel. The technique turns common sense on its head but is grounded in science. Strangely, the story begins with a world-renowned Victorian thinker and an imaginary bear.

Working at Harvard University in the late 19th century, William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, was attracted to the unconventional, often walking around campus sporting a silk hat and red-checked trousers, and describing his theories using amusing prose (“As long as one poor cockroach feels the pangs of unrequited love, this world is not a moral world”). This unconventional approach paid off. First published in 1890, James’s two-volume magnum opus The Principles of Psychology is still required reading for students of behavioural science.

Towards the end of the 1880s, James turned his attention to the relationship between emotion and behaviour. Our everyday experience tells us that your emotions cause you to behave in certain ways. Feeling happy makes you smile, and feeling sad makes you frown. Case closed, mystery solved. However, James became convinced that this commonsense view was incomplete and proposed a radical new theory.

James hypothesised that the relationship between emotion and behaviour was a two-way street, and that behaviour can cause emotion. According to James, smiling can make you feel happy and frowning can make you feel sad. Or, to use James’s favourite way of putting it: “You do not run from a bear because you are afraid of it, but rather become afraid of the bear because you run from it.”

James’s theory was quickly relegated to the filing drawer marked “years ahead of its time”, and there it lay for more than six decades.

Throughout that time many self-help gurus promoted ideas that were in line with people’s everyday experiences about the human mind. Common sense tells us that emotions come before behaviour, and so decades of self-help books told readers to focus on trying to change the way they thought rather than the way they behaved. James’s theory simply didn’t get a look-in.

However in the 70s psychologist James Laird from Clark Universitydecided to put James’s theory to the test. Volunteers were invited into the laboratory and asked to adopt certain facial expressions. To create an angry expression participants were asked to draw down their eyebrows and clench their teeth. For the happy expression they were asked to draw back the corners of the mouth. The results were remarkable. Exactly as predicted by James years before, the participants felt significantly happier when they forced their faces into smiles, and much angrier when they were clenching their teeth.

Subsequent research has shown that the same effect applies to almost all aspects of our everyday lives. By acting as if you are a certain type of person, you become that person – what I call the “As If” principle.

Take, for example, willpower. Motivated people tense their muscles as they get ready to spring into action. But can you boost your willpower by simply tensing your muscles? Studies led by Iris Hung from the National University of Singapore had volunteers visit a local cafeteria and asked them to try to avoid temptation and not buy sugary snacks. Some of the volunteers were asked to make their hand into a fist or contract their biceps, and thus behave as if they were more motivated. Amazingly, this simple exercise made people far more likely to buy healthy food.

The same applies to confidence. Most books on increasing confidence encourage readers to focus on instances in their life when they have done well or ask them to visualise themselves being more assertive. In contrast, the As If principle suggests that it would be much more effective to simply ask people to change their behaviour.

Dana Carney, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, led a study where she split volunteers into two groups. The people in one group were placed into power poses. Some were seated at desks, asked to put their feet up on the table, look up, and interlock their hands behind the back of their heads. In contrast, those in the other group were asked to adopt poses that weren’t associated with dominance. Some of these participants were asked to place their feet on the floor, with hands in their laps and look at the ground. Just one minute of dominant posing provided a real boost in confidence.

The researchers then turned their attention to the chemicals coursing through the volunteers’ veins. Those power posing had significantly higher levels of testosterone, proving that the poses had changed the chemical make-up of their bodies.

The As If principle can even make you feel younger. Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer has conducted many high-profile experiments; one of her most striking involved using the As If principle to turn back the hands of time.

In 1979 Langer recruited a group of men in their 70s for a “week of reminiscence” at a retreat outside Boston. Before the study started, Langer tested the men’s strength, posture, eyesight and memory.

She then encouraged the men to act as if they were 20 years younger. When they arrived at the retreat, for instance, there was no one there to help them off the bus and they had to carry their suitcases inside. In addition, the retreat had not been not equipped with the type of rails and other movement aids they had at home. After unpacking, everyone was assembled in the main room of the retreat. Surrounded by various objects from the 50s, including a black-and-white television and a vintage radio, Langer informed the participants that for the next few days all of their conversations about the past had to be in the present tense, and that no conversation must mention anything that happened after 1959.

Within days, Langer could see the dramatic effect of behaving As If. The participants were now walking faster and were more confident. Within a week several of the participants had decided that they could now manage without their walking sticks. Langer took various psychological and physiological measurements throughout the experiment and discovered that the group now showed improvements in dexterity, speed of movement, memory, blood pressure, eyesight and hearing. Acting as if they were young men had knocked years off their bodies and minds.

More than a century ago William James proposed a radically different approach to change. Decades of research has shown that his theory applies to almost every aspect of everyday life, and can be used to help people feel happier, avoid anxiety and worry, fall in love and live happily ever after, stay slim, increase their willpower and confidence, and even slow the effects of ageing.

So sit up straight and take a deep breath. It is time to rip up the rule book and embrace the truth about change.

How to change: Action speaks loudest

 

Here are 10 quick and effective exercises that use the As If principle to transform how you think and behave:

HAPPINESS: Smile

This is the granddaddy of them all. As Laird’s study demonstrated, smile and you will feel happier. To get the most out of this exercise, make the smile as wide as possible, extend your eyebrow muscles slightly upward, and hold the resulting expression for about 20 seconds.

WILLPOWER: Tense up

As Hung’s experiments show, tensing your muscles boosts your willpower. Next time you feel the need to avoid that cigarette or cream cake, make a fist, contract your biceps, press your thumb and first finger together, or grip a pen in your hand.

DIETING: Use your non-dominant hand

When you eat with your non-dominant hand you are acting as if you are carrying out an unusual behaviour. Because of that you place more attention on your action, do not simply consume food without thinking about it, and so eat less.

PROCRASTINATION: Make a start

To overcome procrastination, act as if you are interested in what it is that you have to do. Spend just a few minutes carrying out the first part of whatever it is you are avoiding, and suddenly you will feel a strong need to complete the task.

PERSISTENCE: Sit up straight and cross your arms

Ron Friedman from the University of Rochester led a study where volunteers were presented with tricky problems to see how long they persevered. Those who sat up straight and folded their arms struggled on for nearly twice as long as others. Make sure your computer monitor is slightly above your eye-line and, when the going gets tough, cross your arms.

CONFIDENCE: Power pose

To increase your self-esteem and confidence, adopt a power pose. If you are sitting down, lean back, look up and interlock your hands behind your head. If you are standing up, then place your feet flat on the floor, push your shoulders back and your chest forward.

NEGOTIATION: Use soft chairs

Hard furniture is associated with hard behaviour. In one study Joshua Ackerman at the MIT Sloan School of Management had participants sit on either soft or hard chairs and then negotiate over the price of a used car. Those in the hard chairs offered less and were more inflexible.

GUILT: Wash away your sins

If you are feeling guilty about something, try washing your hands or taking a shower. Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto discovered that people who carried out an immoral act and then cleaned their hands with an antiseptic wipe felt significantly less guilty than others.

PERSUASION: Nod

If people nod while they listen to a discussion they are more likely to agree with the points being made. When you want to encourage someone to agree with you, subtly nod your head as you chat with them. Research led by Gary Wells of Iowa State University shows that they will reciprocate the movement and find themselves strangely attracted to your way of thinking.

LOVE: Open up

Couples in love talk about the more intimate aspects of their lives. Research carried out by Robert Epstein, founder of the Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies, shows that the opposite is also true – more intimate chat makes people feel attracted to each other. If you are out on a date, get the other person to open up by asking what advice they would give to their 10-year-old self, or what one object they would save in a house fire.

 About the author:

Richard Wiseman’s first career was as a professional magician and he was once one of the youngest members of the Magic Circle. He studied at UCL and the University of Edinburgh and is now Britain’s only professor for the public understanding of psychology, based at the University of Hertfordshire. He is also a fellow of the US-based Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and in 2001 he led an experiment to find the world’s funniest joke. His previous books have included a study of luck, The Luck Factor, and 59 Seconds, described by the science writer Simon Singh as “a self-help guide based on proper research”. Rip It Up delves further into the science of self-help. The book is so titled because Wiseman wants readers to tear up the book’s pages as they read them: “The book is all about people changing their behaviour,” he says. “To emphasise this key message I am inviting readers to do something that they probably have never done. Each time, readers will be changing their behaviour and so altering how they think and feel.”

Article by Professor Richard Wiseman, originally published in The Guardian on 30th June 2012

This short animation video which Richard Wiseman created with Cognitive Media is a great illustration of what his new book teaches us.  Richard explains further:

“My new book, Rip It Up, is based on a psychological idea known as the As If Principle.  I recently teamed up with the lovely and talented folk over at Cognitive Media to produce this great clip about the idea.

We also used the clip to run a fun experiment, examining the impact of this type of animation-based video compared to a standard talking head clip.  We had 2000 people come online (thanks to everyone who took part), and randomly assigned them to one of two groups.  One group watched a clip of me talking about the principle, whilst the other group saw the animation clip.

The results were fascinating and suggest that there is a 15% increase in the retention of information after watching the animation vs the talking head video.  There was also an impressive 66% increase in the amount of participants willing to share the animation.”

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 12th October 2012

Wish yourself a happy New Year at any time of the year

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Like many people I started the year with many good intentions and quickly found that life got in the way.  I wrote this article at the beginning of 2012 with the aim of featuring it in my brand new blog about positive psychology, which I had great intentions of setting up in January. We are now in May and thanks to my decision to sign up for the Thirty Day Challenge with  http://www.screwworkletsplay.com/  I have finally set up my blog The Happiness Experiment. It is never too late to have a happy New Year and it is never too soon to start your own journey to happiness.  This article shares some insight in to my own personal journey to happiness and future articles will share some more of the lessons I have learned along the way.  I continue to experiment daily with the lessons of positive psychology and would encourage you to try some experiments too. We are all responsible for our own happiness and like me you have the ability to significantly increase your  own well-being and to flourish – as Mahatma Gandhi so rightly said you can “be the change you want to see in the world.”

An experiment in happiness: “Be the change you want to see in the world”

 

January is traditionally the time of year when newspaper and magazine articles abound with New Year, New You features.  Headlines such as “Make 2012 your best year yet”, “10 secrets to living a happier life” make us believe that this will be the year when everything will be different and circumstances will coincide to make 2012 the year when we finally attain the happiness we have been seeking.

This year I was in the fortunate position of being ahead of the curve as I had just completed Tim Le Bon’s 10 week positive psychology course at City University in December.  This meant that in January I could skip the articles and forget the usual New Year resolutions we all beat ourselves up about for having abandoned in February, as I was already armed with everything I needed to carry out my own happiness experiment in 2012.

The positive psychology course could have been subtitled “10 weeks to happiness” as most of the participants had made significant improvements to their happiness levels by the end of the 10 weeks. We left armed with a range of simple tools and interventions which, if mastered and used regularly, can have a very positive impact on your life.  When I began the course in October I was in a similar position to many of the other students in that I had done some reading on the subject of positive psychology but had not put a great deal of what I had read in to practice – the course proved to be the catalyst for change which we all needed.

The course was a great mixture of gaining an academic understanding of the current principles and theories of positive psychology (a relatively new branch of psychology begun in 1998 by Professor Martin Seligman) and of having the opportunity to apply these ideas in our personal and working lives.  I have always been interested in the theories and benefits of optimum nutrition, popularised by Patrick Holford.  This is a way of living a life of optimum physical health by taking personal responsibility for one’s own physical well-being through lifestyle and nutrition choices rather than abdicating responsibility to health practioners.  Positive psychology, in my view, gives us the opportunity to achieve optimum mental health and the resilience to bounce back from life’s challenges without resorting to a medically prescribed “happy pill”.  In the same way as optimum physical health is not merely absence of illness, optimum mental health is not merely the absence of negative emotions or depression.   Both theories aim to help us achieve a similar outcome – a life in which we are positively flourishing and thriving and living life to the full.

We initially looked at the “happiness formula” formulated by Professor Seligman and his team which is:    H = S + C + V

The level of happiness that you experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) that you do.

It was a revelation to me to discover that 50% of our happiness is determined by genes (S), 10% by life circumstances (c) and 40% by our intentional voluntary activities.  Like many of the other participants I had always assumed that our happiness levels were due to a combination of our personal circumstances and to having a naturally positive outlook on life. 

I read two books related to this subject which were instrumental in changing my attitude to our ability to determine our own happiness levels.  The first one “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, contains 12 practical happiness inducing activities which are simple to implement and demonstrates that having the possibility to influence our happiness levels by 40% is hugely significant.  The pessimists on the course were secretly thinking that if we can only influence our happiness levels by 40% it is not worth trying!

The second book was “Positivity” by Barbara Fredrickson which illustrates that even those who are genetically pre-determined to be die-hard pessimists can improve their positivity ratio by using her broaden and build theory and by focusing on achieving the crucial tipping point of 3 to 1 positive versus negative experiences.  One of the first interventions we were asked to complete on the course was to write a daily gratitude journal of three good things and how your behaviour caused the positive thing.  I have realised that when you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value. I now not only practice this personally every day but have introduced this positive intervention in my workplace as well.

Other topics we covered looked at 3 different routes to happiness; the pleasant life (a hedonistic approach in which temporary pleasures can elate us for a while but as we quickly habituate ourselves to them their effect diminishes), the engaged life (made up of flow experiences which use our signature strengths) and a meaningful life (in which we have a sense of purpose and connectedness and use our signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are).

I was in a similar position to many other students in that taking a hedonistic approach to life presented me with no particular problems.  However I had always had a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that there had to be a scientific explanation to the fact that the first cup of coffee in the morning always made me much happier than any subsequent cups.   I have always tried to live a meaningful life and giving back to communities less fortunate than ourselves (particularly the bottom billion in Africa) is hugely important to me and a great source of pleasure.

However I gained 3 important insights from this topic. The first one was that although I was familiar with the concept of “flow”, having read Mihály Csikszentmihály’s book on the subject, I did not choose to put this in to practice in my daily life and did not always live an engaged life.  The second insight was the concept of signature strengths which was a completely new concept to me and which illustrates how we can become significantly happier by focusing on our strengths. Having previously always focused on my weaknesses, this was a revelation.  Once you have taken the easy strengths tests which are available online, you can think of ways to use your signature strengths in different ways and situations. The third insight was the importance of making giving personal.  I became a convert to the idea of acts of kindness practiced at a very personal level (another of our interventions from class) and was inspired to watch the film “Pay it forward”.  I have now set up an Acts of Kindness challenge in my workplace and try to think of little things I can do on a daily basis to “Pay it forward”, such as leaving a surprise bunch of flowers for my dog walker.

We also looked at the concepts of hope, optimism and luck and at the importance of having a positive explanatory style in relation to the situations and events which life throws at us.  We focused on how optimists are capable of seeing good things as permanent, pervasive and personal and bad things as temporary, specific and temporary whereas pessimists do the opposite. Optimism can be learned and your explanatory style can be worked at.

The concept of hope and the importance of perseverance and taking the long view were brought home to me by watching “Shawshank’s Redemption” a film recommended on the course recommended. I also read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” and learned that if you can survive the horrors of concentration camp life and still be hopeful and optimistic about the human race, then everything is possible.  This quote from the book was really enlightening: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose - one’s own way”.

The concept of luck as a route to happiness was not something I had previously considered, but reading Richard Wiseman’s “The Luck Factor” which demonstrates that there are 12 key principles  which affect our luck and that we are all in control of these 12 principles.  I recently started putting one of the first principles in to practice, “lucky people build and maintain a strong network of luck”. This basically means that the bigger your network, the more opportunities come your way, so it is a great idea to constantly think of new ways to meet people.  It is not about having hundreds of “friends” on Face book but having a network of friends and contacts with whom you are on first name terms.  As a practical example I recently moved house and decided to invite all my new neighbours to a “Pot Luck” party as a way of getting to know people quickly rather than spending years not knowing who lives in the same street.  I am applying one principle of this book each month both in my personal life and at work. The principles can also be found on this website: http://www.theluckfactor.com/

Other aspects of the course which I will be focusing on in 2012 are lessons about savouring, mindfulness and meditation which we practised briefly in class.  This made me aware how little we live in the present and how important it is to master this skill if we want to be happy.  I will be signing up for a course on Mindfulness in the near future and intend putting this in to practice in my daily life.   We also learned about the significant role which positive relationships play in our happiness and of the importance of emotional intelligence in our overall well-being.  These are concepts which I will be studying further now that the course is over.

10 weeks is, of course, only a short period of study and I would not claim to have mastered all the concepts we were taught or indeed to have put everything in to practice yet.  It is now a month since the course finished and I still feel that I derived so much personal benefit from the course that I want to both continue studying this subject and to pass my knowledge (limited though it is at this stage) on to others.  I am implementing the teaching in my personal and work life and am already reaping the benefits.

I have never previously struggled with being hopeful about the future, but I have at times struggled with being optimistic about today.  Above all this is what Tim le Bon’s 10 week positive psychology course has taught me; that if we want to change our happiness levels we have to make that change happen.  To quote Mahatma Gandhi “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  If you would like to learn more, I would recommend you look at the course reading list as a starting point, sign up for the next 10 week course and start to take massive action.  Try out your own happiness experiment and this time next year you could be ahead of the curve too.

My personal top 10 lessons from the course

1. Be grateful and keep a positive attitude

2. Take the long view – post-traumatic growth is possible

3. Be kind and make generosity personal

4. Always stay inspired

5. Focus on strengths and use them creatively

6. Share knowledge about positive psychology

7. Never stop learning but take MASSIVE action

8. Be hopeful about the future and optimistic about today

9. Meet new people, try new experiences, learn new skills and get involved

10. Make a difference and be the change you want to see in the world.

 Article written by Shona Lockhart, 25th January 2012