Tag Archives: well-being

The Happiness Tipping Point

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I am thrilled to have just been offered a place to study for an MSc in Positive Psychology at The University of East London beginning in September.  My ongoing personal studies of the science of happiness literature, my participation in an excellent 10 week course in Positive Psychology at City University and my writing of The Happiness Experiment blog have all created a perfect storm in my life where I felt the need to learn more about this fascinating science. You could say that I have reached a happiness tipping point. It turns out I am not alone. This great article by Sunnie Toelle, published in The Huffington Post on 3rd June, investigates the fact that many other people seem to have reached a happiness tipping point too. The science of happiness is everywhere in the news and media at the moment as people become increasingly aware that economic success does not necessarily equate with a happy and fulfilled life. This article reviews whether the time has come for the science of happiness. Have we reached a happiness tipping point?  Read the article and decide for yourself.

The Happiness Tipping Point

 

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“I think it’s here,” Prof. Martin Seligman said as he made a blue dot only millimeters to the left of the tipping point on the diffusion of innovations graph I had sketched in my Moleskine notebook. Martin Seligman, the “father of positive psychology,” had just lectured on Well-being at Work to over 500 business professionals at the Positive Business Forum in Milan. The two-day conference can be understood as the latest manifestation of a larger global phenomenon, labeled by the media as the “happiness movement” or “happiness industry.” With initiatives springing up in every sector — academic, cultural, spiritual, economic, public and private — what is the big picture? Does it matter? And are we actually approaching a tipping point?

The origins of this growing phenomenon go back to what has popularly been called the “science of happiness” or, in more scholarly terms, Positive Psychology. In his book Flourish, Prof. Seligman explains that while the goal of psychology has traditionally been to relieve human suffering, the goal of positive psychology — a field that is just 15 years old — is different. It is about actually raising the bar for the human condition and enabling individuals and communities to flourish.

Since the field’s humble beginnings in the late ’90s, it has seen considerable growth. In 1999, the late Philip J. Stone, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, taught one of the first positive psychology courses to just 20 students. Ten years later, the landscape had changed. You can find over 200 university courses across the United States, a master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania and almost 1,000 articles related to the field published in peer-reviewed journals. Other fields have taken notice, too. In 2003, London School of Economics Professor Richard Layard founded the Wellbeing Program after giving a series of public lectures titled Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue? The publication of his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, soon followed and set the stage for a major upswing in interest in “happiness economics.”

As with several big, potentially game-changing ideas in the past 15 years — think Facebook, Google and WordPress — university students are at the forefront of their implementation. The happiness phenomenon is no exception to this pattern. On a national level, USA Todayran a story just last month on how “Happiness Clubs Spread Positive Vibes on Campus.” In the same month, the topic also surfaced in the oldest student-run daily newspaper, the Yale Daily News, which devoted its monthly magazine to college happiness movements.

So might this indicate that Prof. Seligman is right? A tipping point is defined as the point at which the buildup of minor incidents cause a larger, more significant change. So, is all this activity at universities going to tip this world towards happiness? Certainly, some of the world’s most influential social movements started on university campuses. And yet, I’ll refrain from carving out this argument any further because it is not just about what is unfolding on some American college campus. The most powerful evidence can be uncovered in “the real world.”

On a policy level, happiness made its debut on the world stage on March 20, 2013, when the first official United Nations International Day of Happiness took place. This was only months after the UN had released its inaugural World Happiness Report and England adopted the “Wellbeing Index.” As the first country in the Western hemisphere, England now complements the Gross Domestic Product figure with the Wellbeing Index “to measure what matters most.”

Politics is a reactive force rooted in a wide array of community organizations, artistic initiatives and popular support. In the case of happiness, the most notable community organizations are the London-based non-governmental organization Action for Happiness, Sustainable Seattle’s Happiness Initiative and the New York-based H(app)athon project. As for the arts, the popular documentary HAPPY comes to mind, as does graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s currently displayed Happy Show exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Jonathan Harris’ remarkable interactive art project, Balloons of Bhutan.

When academia, politics and the arts are on to something, business cannot be far. On the consumer side, a keen observer will note the ever-increasing number of books, magazines, blogs, online courses and conferences on happiness-related topics. But it is not just a consumer demand that the business sector seeks to satisfy. Ever since Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness – A Path to Profits, Purpose and Passion, and Google became famous for its culture of workplace satisfaction, happiness is perceived as a powerful competitive advantage in the job market as well. This idea received so much traction that the Harvard Business Review picked it up and devoted its entire January-February 2012 issue to the Value of Happiness: How Employee Well-being Drives Profits. This argument has also recently gained momentum in Europe, in part due to the inaugural Positive Business Forum in Milan in March 2013. Hundreds of human resource professionals diligently took notes as Shawn Achor lectured on The Happiness Advantage and Paul Zak explained the neuroscientific link between purpose and employee happiness.

The forum also brings me back to Prof. Seligman. After decades of scientific study, he makes one point very clear: happiness is not about smiley faces, unicorns and light-hearted merriment. Nor is it about self-proclaimed gurus and their self-help anecdotes of supposed enlightenment. When put in these contexts, happiness becomes an unworkable term for science or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or even just changing your personal life, according to Prof. Seligman. Rather, happiness — or “well-being” as he prefers to call it — should be understood as a comprehensive, holistic framework consisting of five measurable and buildable components summarized by the acronym P.E.R.M.A. (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment). It is this scientifically grounded understanding that lies at the heart of the global happiness phenomenon this article and many “happiness” experts seek to portray. And it is a much needed understanding too. With burn-out, stress and depression rates skyrocketing and mental health costs in 2010 hitting $2.5 trillion globally, we must find ways to reverse this shocking development.

Coming back to my initial question of whether we are reaching a tipping point, the answers appears to be as follows: Some fascinating and potentially powerful happiness-related frameworks and initiatives exist on multiple levels and across geographic regions. Happiness matters for many reasons, but most of all, because business as usual is leading to a staggering increase in mental disorders, mental health costs and a massive loss of human potential. Arguably, it should therefore become a key agenda item in boardroom meetings and at policy roundtables. Yet, it remains to be seen who and what will hit off the tipping point.

 Follow Sunnie Toelle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@sunniejaye
Posted by Shona Lockhart on 4th June 2013

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

 

Can happiness be a good business strategy?

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Happiness at work is big news.  Take a look at this new video by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) who have worked together with Zappos to create a new happiness at work survey.  This new tool which was launched recently gives companies a simple way to measure happiness and well-being in the workplace and to implement improvements to create a happier workforce. According to the article below from the Guardian Sustainable Business section, having a happy workforce actually makes good financial sense.

A happy workforce is more engaged, creative and more focused, increasing the overall productivity of a company, says Tim Smedley

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The link between happiness and productivity at work is increasingly understood. Photograph: Alberto Incrocci/Getty Images

How happy are you at work? Maybe you’re reading this at work right now? Which could indicate that you work in a friendly workplace culture where you’re empowered to do as you see fit and read whatever you want online. Or it could mean that you’re bored out of your brain, whiling away the hours until the clock clunks to home time. The former suggests that you’re a happy and productive worker; the latter, quite the opposite. And this link between happiness and productivity at work is becoming increasingly understood.

Nic Marks, of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), has spent the last 10 years of his life working in this field. It used to be known as ‘well-being economics’ until it was discovered that “normal people didn’t know what that meant”, says Marks. Happiness is what it’s really all about.

“People who are happier at work are more productive – they are more engaged, more creative, have better concentration”, says Marks. “The difference in productivity between happy and unhappy people at work can range between 10-50%. That’s 10% for non-complex repetitive tasks, or up to 40-50% in service and creative industries.” And that’s an awful lot in terms of business revenue.

The current poster boy for happiness in business circles is Tony Hsieh. A beneficiary of the dot-com boom he became a multi-millionaire in his early 20s by selling his web company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265m. He then took over fashion start-up Zappos in 1999 because he missed working in a happy environment. “It began selfishly for me”, he admits. “I was in the financial position of not having to work again… so if I’m going to go back into an office it better be around people I would choose to hang out with. Otherwise, what’s the point? But it actually turned out to be a good business strategy.”

By 2005, Hsieh decided that a happy company culture was Zappos’s number one business priority, from which everything else would grow. In an ironic echo of the General Electric CEO Jack Welsch who advocated axing the bottom performing 10% of managers each year, Hsieh removed the 5-10% of employees who did not buy into the same vision. “The best way to make [a happy culture] stick is to get rid of the whatever percentage of people who aren’t living up to the company values”, he argues. “What we found is that short term pain was totally worth the long-term gain of strengthening the relationships with everybody else.”

By removing the cynics, says Hsieh, the remaining 90% “became super-engaged”. Empowerment policies then came thick and fast. The company moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas where they could recreate a college campus environment; the sole communication policy reads “‘be real and use your best judgement”; call centre staff are hired on friendliness – only 5% of calls result in sales but long-term relationships are built over time. By 2008 the company reached $1b in gross merchandise sales. In 2012, it is now over $2bn, with 5,000 staff. That sort of growth – especially through a prolonged recession – is hard to ignore.

The UK government is not ignoring happiness. For the last two years Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson has chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. When it started out, two people came. The last sitting in May was standing room only. “Anyone who has worked in a business knows that when colleagues feel motivated, empowered and wake up looking forward to going to work – then they will work better. We all know that”, says Swinson. “And increasingly businesses are recognising that too.”

In light of this groundswell of interest, Nic Marks and Nef have just launched an online tool to help businesses measure and manage the happiness of their employees. Marks feels that the employee engagement surveys run by many businesses are too extractive, based on what employers can get out of their employees rather than what employees want. To avoid disappearing down an HR blackhole, as Marks puts it, Nef’s happiness survey gives employees instant results – including personalised action plans – as well as collating the results anonymously for the business.

One company who trialled the Nef approach – The Works, a recruitment agency in the north of England – ended up changing its working hours and internal communications practices on the back of the survey. “It’s given employees empowerment, hopefully it’s given them more job satisfaction”, says Joanne Shires, the firm’s head of people and talent. “And for us it’s a return on our social investment.”

So can happier people at work actually lead to a happier and more prosperous society? In down town Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh and Zappos are putting that to the test. Having bought the old Las Vegas city hall to house the new company headquarters, planning the obligatory cool workplace trimmings – funky break-out areas, an internal pub – all felt too insular, says Hsieh. So Zappos set up and funded a $350m project to invest $100m in local real estate, $100m in residential development, $50m in small businesses, $50m in education, and $50m in technology start-ups.

“What started out as a new office move has actually turned out to be a project to revitalise down town Vegas,” says Hsieh. And guess what, “we’ve seen our employees become engaged on a whole new level because of this. It all feeds back into the Zappos brand… we can do well and do good.” Which has to be more than just a happy coincidence.

Article by Tim Smedley originally published in The Guardian on 20th June 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