Back to Happiness Again
For a while now we’ve been spending time in our Peak Performance Leadership sessions on The Happiness Suite. Five tools that will help Personal Happiness and Work Happiness, and overall Productivity.
Simple tools like:
a) As you lie in bed before falling asleep, focus on three things that made you happy today. Really focus on them – ‘til you can’t help but break into a smile – hopefully in the dark so your partner doesn’t think you’ve lost your mind! And
b) Starting every day by writing down (not a to-do list) but a Happy Moment List. Note five things you are looking forward to during the day that will make you happy – then do them and score the day before you sleep. Get to Five!
Here’s Point 2) from our New Zealand Wellbeing & Resilience folk.
Deliberately seek out the people (and do the stuff) that make you happy. Research shows how vital experiencing positive emotions is for our resilience. Negative emotions are contagious, and prolonged feelings of helplessness are strongly associated with depression. Given negative emotions and experiences stick to us like Velcro while positive emotions and experiences bounce off like Teflon, aim to punctuate your days, evenings, weeks and weekends with as many positive emotion experiences as possible. Barb Fredrickson from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill identifies ten different positive emotions to consider: love, joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration and awe. Frequency, not longevity, is key. (You saw these here last week – they’re worth remembering.)
KR