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Happiness, 2.19 (V) Week 2 Video 13 - Summary of week 2

2.19 (V) Week 2 Video 13 - Summary of week 2

[MUSIC] [SOUND] Hello, my grateful and self-compassionate beings. I hope that you're doing well. In this video, which is the last video for this week, I want to summarize everything that we've discussed this week. We started out with how the need for superiority is such a prevalent need, and how we are all socialized to seek it, even as kids. As a result of being socialized to seek it, we internalize the need over time and therefore end up seeking it for our own sake, to boost our self-esteem. In addition to seeking it for the sake of others approval and for boosting our self esteem we also seek it to see how well we are progressing towards mastery. And finally we seek it to gain a sense of freedom and autonomy. The fact that the need for superiority helps fulfill so many different and important needs suggests that it is not a shallow need. In fact, it's a very deep seated need. And one that we have inherited from our ancestors. I recently spoke to Kristina Durante, who is an evolutionary psychologist at Rutger's University. Here's what she had to say about why we seek the need for superiority. » Fundamental motive to obtain status, » Is something that we're all born with, that blueprint, and then we learn it through what is valued in our environment. » So, as you just heard from Kristina, the need for superiority, or the need for the status as she and some other researchers like Michael Marmot call it, is something that we're hardwired to pursue. And the fact that we also socialize to person only makes it that much more deep seated. So contrary to what some new aged spiritualists might have us believe, the need for superiority is not some shallow need that only with a really unusually big ego or unusually narcissistic tendencies. Tend to pursue. We all, to some degree at least, are culpable of pursuing it. And that's a shame because the need for superiority is not just a killer of happiness. It is also a killer of success and productivity. About the only thing That is good about the need for superiority, is that it can motivate us to get things done. But as we saw from the discussion of flow, we don't really need the need for superiority to get motivated. We can just as easily be motivated by flow. Of course, for many of us who have lost touch with our passion or with our element It may seem like an impossible task to figure out what type of job will get us to experience flow. This is why I think it's very important to be patient and not put pressure on yourself to immediately find a job that will get you to experience flow on a regular basis. Like I said in a previous video, the best approach to finding flow at work may be to do some self experimentation. Volunteer at a job that you think will get you to experience flow for a few hours every week. Or meet a person who is working in such a job and ask if you can shadow him or her for a few days to find out what their work involves. You'll be surprised at how willing people are to help you if you're motivated to find flow. As opposed to wanting to make more money or become more famous or more powerful. Additionally, when you start spending a few hours every week doing the job that you think will get you into flow, you learn several important things, including whether you were right about that job getting you into flow and, you know also develop some useful contacts, etcetera. Of course, as you try to find more flowed work, you can also pursue hobbies that give you flow. Findings show that engaging in anything that gives you flow makes you happier. Pursuing flow is the second habit of the highly happy and it is an antidote to the second deadly happiness sin which is chasing superiority. I ended the week by talking about how it's important to, not just pulse your flow, but also to get rid of, or at least try and mitigate the need for superiority. I mentioned two practices to help you with this. Those practices are self-compassion and gratitude. Self-compassion lowers the need for superiority by helping you recognize the ways by which you're similar to, rather than different, from others. And the gratitude mitigates the need for superiority by taking you away from hubristic pride and towards love/connection. As it turns out, gratitude enhances happiness, not just by helping you build and maintain relationships. It boosts happiness in multiple other ways. Many happiness researchers consider expressing gratitude to be one of the most powerful happiness boosters. For example, Emmons and McCullough, two leading researchers in gratitude, noted in one of their articles. That, and I quote, gratefulness is the panacea for insatiable yearnings and life's ills. Likewise, as I mentioned in the previous video, Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky calls gratitude a meta strategy, meaning that expressing gratitude works on many levels to enhance your happiness. I recently asked Professor Lyubomirksy exactly why she calls gratitude a meta strategy and here is what she had to say. Listen. » Why I call gratitude a meta strategy in my book, The How of Happiness. It is true, expressing gratitude has been found to be a really powerful strategy for making people happy you know lot's of experiments both with kids and teenagers and adults have shown this, and there are a lot of reasons for it. You know, we argue in my laboratory and we show that when you express gratitude you feel more connected to others. You feel close to others. It strengthens relationships. Gratitude also makes you feel more humble. It makes you understand that your success or your happiness isn't just due to you. That you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Expressing gratitude also makes people feel sort of uplifted and elevated. And sort of wanting to reciprocate, wanting to pay it back, and to pay it forward. Gratitude also helps people reframe adversity to kind of think about negative events in a more positive light, to be grateful for what they have as opposed to focusing on what they don't have, or what other people have. Gratitude helps people also to sort of, as I said, appreciate what they have so they don't adapt to the good things in their lives. It really presents hedonic adaptation. There are many reasons for why gratitude makes you happy. » As you just heard from Professor Lyubomirsky, there are many reasons why expressing gratitude boosts happiness levels, including that it lowers the desire to feed superior To others. » I'm confident that those who have completed the expressing gratitude exercise got to sample some of the benefits of this practice. Please, share your experience with all of us by contributing to the discussion forum titled Expressing Gratitude Exercise. Now, if you're one of those who hasn't yet completed the gratitude exercise, because you feel awkward about thanking somebody, let me share something personal with you. Even though I've been asking my students to do the gratitude exercise for several years now, I never got around to doing the exercise myself. Why? Because I, too, felt awkward doing it. But I also realized that it's a little bit hypocritical of me to ask my students to do something that » I didn't have the courage or the ability to face my discomfort to do that. So just a few weeks back, I overcame my discomfort. And I actually wrote gratitude letters to my parents. And not just that, I thanked them publicly, in front of my students, at the Indian School of Business. And I'm really, really glad that I got to do it. And having done it, I can definitely vouch at a personal level for the positive effects of expressing gratitude and happiness. So with that, I want to end this week with a small story. This is a story of how we all play our part in relatively subtle ways sometimes. In propagating the need for superiority. My son was about five years old. He came back one day after having played soccer. As soon as he entered the house, a relative who was visiting us turned around to him and asked him, "So how many goals did you score, my son?" This question was quickly followed up with another question. Did anyone else score more goals than you did? Think for a minute of what these kinds of questions reinforce. I think that they reinforce the need for superiority. If instead of asking my son those questions the relative had asked, so, did you have fun playing soccer, my son? The relative would have reinforced the need to find flow and enjoyment. So in our own small ways, by the type of questions that we ask. Or in the type of rhymes and movies, or books that we expose our kids to, we give our kids information on what is important in life. And steer them either in the direction of the need for superiority or in the direction of the need for flow. Being aware of this, I think, is very important, If we want to make sure that we don't handicap our most precious assets, our children, with the deadly happiness sin even before they've had a chance to venture out into this big world. With that, allow me to take your leave for now. See you bright and early. [MUSIC]


2.19 (V) Week 2 Video 13 - Summary of week 2

[MUSIC] [SOUND] Hello, my grateful and self-compassionate beings. I hope that you're doing well. In this video, which is the last video for this week, I want to summarize everything that we've discussed this week. We started out with how the need for superiority is such a prevalent need, and how we are all socialized to seek it, even as kids. As a result of being socialized to seek it, we internalize the need over time and therefore end up seeking it for our own sake, to boost our self-esteem. In addition to seeking it for the sake of others approval and for boosting our self esteem we also seek it to see how well we are progressing towards mastery. And finally we seek it to gain a sense of freedom and autonomy. The fact that the need for superiority helps fulfill so many different and important needs suggests that it is not a shallow need. In fact, it's a very deep seated need. And one that we have inherited from our ancestors. I recently spoke to Kristina Durante, who is an evolutionary psychologist at Rutger's University. Here's what she had to say about why we seek the need for superiority. » Fundamental motive to obtain status, » Is something that we're all born with, that blueprint, and then we learn it through what is valued in our environment. » So, as you just heard from Kristina, the need for superiority, or the need for the status as she and some other researchers like Michael Marmot call it, is something that we're hardwired to pursue. And the fact that we also socialize to person only makes it that much more deep seated. So contrary to what some new aged spiritualists might have us believe, the need for superiority is not some shallow need that only with a really unusually big ego or unusually narcissistic tendencies. Tend to pursue. We all, to some degree at least, are culpable of pursuing it. And that's a shame because the need for superiority is not just a killer of happiness. It is also a killer of success and productivity. About the only thing That is good about the need for superiority, is that it can motivate us to get things done. But as we saw from the discussion of flow, we don't really need the need for superiority to get motivated. We can just as easily be motivated by flow. Of course, for many of us who have lost touch with our passion or with our element It may seem like an impossible task to figure out what type of job will get us to experience flow. This is why I think it's very important to be patient and not put pressure on yourself to immediately find a job that will get you to experience flow on a regular basis. Like I said in a previous video, the best approach to finding flow at work may be to do some self experimentation. Volunteer at a job that you think will get you to experience flow for a few hours every week. Or meet a person who is working in such a job and ask if you can shadow him or her for a few days to find out what their work involves. You'll be surprised at how willing people are to help you if you're motivated to find flow. As opposed to wanting to make more money or become more famous or more powerful. Additionally, when you start spending a few hours every week doing the job that you think will get you into flow, you learn several important things, including whether you were right about that job getting you into flow and, you know also develop some useful contacts, etcetera. Of course, as you try to find more flowed work, you can also pursue hobbies that give you flow. Findings show that engaging in anything that gives you flow makes you happier. Pursuing flow is the second habit of the highly happy and it is an antidote to the second deadly happiness sin which is chasing superiority. I ended the week by talking about how it's important to, not just pulse your flow, but also to get rid of, or at least try and mitigate the need for superiority. I mentioned two practices to help you with this. Those practices are self-compassion and gratitude. Self-compassion lowers the need for superiority by helping you recognize the ways by which you're similar to, rather than different, from others. And the gratitude mitigates the need for superiority by taking you away from hubristic pride and towards love/connection. As it turns out, gratitude enhances happiness, not just by helping you build and maintain relationships. It boosts happiness in multiple other ways. Many happiness researchers consider expressing gratitude to be one of the most powerful happiness boosters. For example, Emmons and McCullough, two leading researchers in gratitude, noted in one of their articles. That, and I quote, gratefulness is the panacea for insatiable yearnings and life's ills. Likewise, as I mentioned in the previous video, Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky calls gratitude a meta strategy, meaning that expressing gratitude works on many levels to enhance your happiness. I recently asked Professor Lyubomirksy exactly why she calls gratitude a meta strategy and here is what she had to say. Listen. » Why I call gratitude a meta strategy in my book, The How of Happiness. It is true, expressing gratitude has been found to be a really powerful strategy for making people happy you know lot's of experiments both with kids and teenagers and adults have shown this, and there are a lot of reasons for it. You know, we argue in my laboratory and we show that when you express gratitude you feel more connected to others. You feel close to others. It strengthens relationships. Gratitude also makes you feel more humble. It makes you understand that your success or your happiness isn't just due to you. That you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Expressing gratitude also makes people feel sort of uplifted and elevated. And sort of wanting to reciprocate, wanting to pay it back, and to pay it forward. Gratitude also helps people reframe adversity to kind of think about negative events in a more positive light, to be grateful for what they have as opposed to focusing on what they don't have, or what other people have. Gratitude helps people also to sort of, as I said, appreciate what they have so they don't adapt to the good things in their lives. It really presents hedonic adaptation. There are many reasons for why gratitude makes you happy. » As you just heard from Professor Lyubomirsky, there are many reasons why expressing gratitude boosts happiness levels, including that it lowers the desire to feed superior To others. » I'm confident that those who have completed the expressing gratitude exercise got to sample some of the benefits of this practice. Please, share your experience with all of us by contributing to the discussion forum titled Expressing Gratitude Exercise. Now, if you're one of those who hasn't yet completed the gratitude exercise, because you feel awkward about thanking somebody, let me share something personal with you. Even though I've been asking my students to do the gratitude exercise for several years now, I never got around to doing the exercise myself. Why? Because I, too, felt awkward doing it. But I also realized that it's a little bit hypocritical of me to ask my students to do something that » I didn't have the courage or the ability to face my discomfort to do that. So just a few weeks back, I overcame my discomfort. And I actually wrote gratitude letters to my parents. And not just that, I thanked them publicly, in front of my students, at the Indian School of Business. And I'm really, really glad that I got to do it. And having done it, I can definitely vouch at a personal level for the positive effects of expressing gratitude and happiness. So with that, I want to end this week with a small story. This is a story of how we all play our part in relatively subtle ways sometimes. In propagating the need for superiority. My son was about five years old. He came back one day after having played soccer. As soon as he entered the house, a relative who was visiting us turned around to him and asked him, "So how many goals did you score, my son?" This question was quickly followed up with another question. Did anyone else score more goals than you did? Think for a minute of what these kinds of questions reinforce. I think that they reinforce the need for superiority. If instead of asking my son those questions the relative had asked, so, did you have fun playing soccer, my son? The relative would have reinforced the need to find flow and enjoyment. So in our own small ways, by the type of questions that we ask. Or in the type of rhymes and movies, or books that we expose our kids to, we give our kids information on what is important in life. And steer them either in the direction of the need for superiority or in the direction of the need for flow. Being aware of this, I think, is very important, If we want to make sure that we don't handicap our most precious assets, our children, with the deadly happiness sin even before they've had a chance to venture out into this big world. With that, allow me to take your leave for now. See you bright and early. [MUSIC]