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Happiness, 6.15 (V) Week 6, Video 13 - The 7 Happiness Sustaining Strategies (1)

6.15 (V) Week 6, Video 13 - The 7 Happiness Sustaining Strategies (1)

[MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back. At the end of this video we're gonna do a happiness measurement, the third and final one. Hopefully, you will see that your happiness levels have improved. I fully expected to actually since you've obviously been diligent for watching all the videos if you've gotten to this point. It's also very likely that you've done all the exercises diligently and also been open-minded. But just because your happiness levels have improved since you started the course doesn't mean that it will continue to stay improved in the future. It's gonna take quite a bit of conscious effort and smartness on your part in order to keep your happiness balloon big. One big reason for this has to do with the fact that old habits die hard. Old habits are difficult to break. As several authors, including Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis and Chip and Dan Heath, Switch have noted. Your own habits, which were the cause of your lower happiness levels have been conditioned into you for years, if not decades. For example, if you work in a typical corporation you're probably surrounded by messages that reinforce the need for superiority and more generally the scarcity mindset. Likewise, if you follow news every day, you've probably been bombarded with negative news and stories that instill a sense of distrust of others and of life itself. During this course, you may have managed to keep some of these negative influences at bay. But now that the course is over, those old conditionings may re-emerge and re-assert themselves. And it is important that you do your best to not just be aware of how various genetic and social influences might reinforce the scarcity mindset and the seven deadly happiness sins. But it's also very important that you take action to fend them off. As Jiddu Krishnamurthi, a famous Indian philosopher once said, It's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That is, for your happiness balloon to continue to stay inflated, you need to find ways of mitigating the happiness sense and reinforcing the happiness habits in the future, for the rest of your life I would say, in fact. Okay, so in this video I'm gonna discuss seven strategies that you can use to help you do this. The first strategy is based on something that my good friend Marshall Goldsmith, the world renowned CEO coach and best selling author of several books including, What Got You Here Won't Get You There and more recently, Triggers, told me when I spoke to him recently. I asked Marshall, why is it that even the smart and successful people, those people who are otherwise brilliant at setting and achieving their goals, falter so badly when it comes to leading a happy and fulfilling life? Here is what he had to say, listen. » What I tell people Matt, is I'm gonna teach you a process that takes two minutes a day. It costs nothing, will help you get better almost anything. And about half the people will quit within two weeks. And you won't quit cuz it doesn't work, you'll quit because it does work. Now this is called the daily question process. Every day I have someone go through questions with me. For example, Raj, one of my questions is how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it was not worth it? Kind of hard for the old executive coach not to be right all the time. Now how about professor Raj? You ever try to be right just a little bit too much on occasion, yeah? How many angry or disturbed comments did I make about people yesterday? Did I say it would be something nice for my son, my daughter, my wife, my son-in-law? Every day, I ask myself these questions. Why? To keep it in my head. Why don't people do what I teach? As you probably know, I'm the only person I would bet you've ever met that's collected feedback and published it from tens of thousands of people who have been in my classes. And I measure do they do what I teach and do they get better? Well, the people that do the stuff get better. Shockingly, the people that do nothing don't get better. Well, why don't they do what I teach? Years ago, my biggest client was Johnson & Johnson. I had the privilege of working with the top 2,000 leaders all the way from Ralph Larsen, who was the CEO, down to number 2,000. They all went to my class, and they all said they were gonna do what I taught. 98% said I would do what he thought. A year later, 70% did something, and 30% absolutely zero, nothing. And we got to interview the people that did nothing and said why didn't you do anything? They would say nothing to do with ethics, values, or integrity. They won an award that year, most ethical company in the world. They're good people. Had nothing to do with intelligence. They're smart people. Why didn't they do it? It had to do with a dream. This is a dream I've had for years, and I'm gonna predict many people listening to me have had this dream. The same stupid dream on a recurring basis for years. And it's gonna describe why in life we don't do what we should do. The dream sounds like this, I'm incredibly busy right now. Given pressures of work and home, and new technology that follows me everywhere and emails and voicemails and global competition, I feel about as busy as I ever have. Sometimes I feel overcommitted. I don't tell others this, but every now and again my life feels just a little bit out of control. But I'm working on some very unique and special challenges right now. And I think the worst of this is gonna be over in two or three months. And after that I'm gonna take two or three weeks to get organized, and spend time with the family. And I'm gonna begin my new healthy life program. And everything is going to be different. And it won't be crazy any more. How many people have ever had a dream that resembles this dream? How many years have we been having the same dream? Why don't people do what I teach? They're busy, they're overcommitted, they're tired, they're depleted, and it is very, very hard to keep stuff in our head. Why do I pay someone to call me everyday, because if I didn't, I wouldn't do it. It's hard. It's hard for me, it's hard for you, it's hard for all of us to do these things. » So as you just heard Marshall say, one big reason why we all find it difficult assessing happiness levels is because we postpone prioritizing happiness to a later date. We tell ourselves that we will start practicing the happiness enhancing habits in a few weeks or months. This is a dangerous dream as we call it, because it can sound very reasonable to tell yourself that you'll start something once this currently busy period is over. But before you know it, the months have turned into years, and the years into decades and you are, as Pink Floyd said, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. So it's very important to make a very strong commitment to yourself, that you're going to do your best on a daily basis try to, starting today to do things that mitigate the seven deadly happiness sins and reinforce the seven habits of the highly happy. This leads me to the first strategy for sustaining happiness, which is to respond to daily questions posed by what Marshall Goldsmith calls a peer coach. A peer coach is somebody who will ask you a series of questions on an everyday basis, to make sure that you're on track to mitigating the happiness sins and reinforcing the happiness habits. Each question will begin with the phrase, today, did you do your best to. And the first question, for example is, today, did your do your best to prioritize happiness over other goals, like being right. Another question is today, did you do your best to be kind and compassionate, and so on. Now Marshall himself thinks this is such an important thing to do that he pays somebody to ask him these types of daily questions, but luckily for you and me, we don't have to pay anybody to be our peer coach. We have each other. We can just request somebody else taking this course to be our peer coach. And offer to be their peer coach in return. Of course if you're uncomfortable having somebody from the course be your peer coach, you can choose somebody else from outside Or we're gonna offer you the choice of choosing the computer to be your peer coach. Similar to how, if you remember, you received emails reminding you to eat well and move more and see better in the fourth exercise. You can choose to receive a daily reminder on the computer that asks you the questions. Later in the video, I'll will tell you how to put the first strategy into practice. Let me move on now to the next set of strategies for sustaining happiness. And in this context, I wanna mention that I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Art Markman, a colleague of mine at the University of Texas, and a brilliant professor of social psychology, and author of a book that recently came out called, Smart Change. The book is all about how one can get rid of old, unproductive habits and acquire new and productive ones. I asked Mark, why people find it difficult to break old habits like smoking or eating unhealthy and acquire new ones, like exercising ball? You'll see in his response that Art starts by telling us how our motivational system works. He then builds on that to derive some useful strategies for breaking old habits and replacing them with new ones, listen. » Here's the way your motivational system works really quickly. Deep inside your brain, you have a bunch of mechanisms that try to engage the goals that you have. Give activity to those goals and drive your behavior and then learn habits, where they associate the environment with the behavior. And I call that system the go system just, so that you can think about it as the thing that forces you to go and do something. And then there's the stop system, which is really just a couple ounces of brain material above your eyes that is really designed when the go system engages a habit or a behavior and you don't want to perform that habit, it's that stop system that says, hey, it puts on the brakes and tries to keep you from doing that. Now, here's the problem. A lot of the goals you mentioned, which are the ones that are most persistent, those are the ones that are hard to change. And the reason they're hard to change is because we frame them negatively most of the time. I wanna quit smoking, I want to eat less, I wanna stop checking my email. The problem with that is what you're doing is saying, I've got this goal. The go system is gonna engage the goal to smoke or to check my email and then the only thing standing between me and that is that stop system and the stop system is very inefficient. It can be impaired by stress, by drugs and alcohol, by overuse. There are effects called ego depletion effects, where basically if you do something, if you control your behavior for too long, that stop system doesn't work as effectively.


6.15 (V) Week 6, Video 13 - The 7 Happiness Sustaining Strategies (1)

[MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back. At the end of this video we're gonna do a happiness measurement, the third and final one. Hopefully, you will see that your happiness levels have improved. I fully expected to actually since you've obviously been diligent for watching all the videos if you've gotten to this point. It's also very likely that you've done all the exercises diligently and also been open-minded. But just because your happiness levels have improved since you started the course doesn't mean that it will continue to stay improved in the future. It's gonna take quite a bit of conscious effort and smartness on your part in order to keep your happiness balloon big. One big reason for this has to do with the fact that old habits die hard. Old habits are difficult to break. As several authors, including Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis and Chip and Dan Heath, Switch have noted. Your own habits, which were the cause of your lower happiness levels have been conditioned into you for years, if not decades. For example, if you work in a typical corporation you're probably surrounded by messages that reinforce the need for superiority and more generally the scarcity mindset. Likewise, if you follow news every day, you've probably been bombarded with negative news and stories that instill a sense of distrust of others and of life itself. During this course, you may have managed to keep some of these negative influences at bay. But now that the course is over, those old conditionings may re-emerge and re-assert themselves. And it is important that you do your best to not just be aware of how various genetic and social influences might reinforce the scarcity mindset and the seven deadly happiness sins. But it's also very important that you take action to fend them off. As Jiddu Krishnamurthi, a famous Indian philosopher once said, It's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That is, for your happiness balloon to continue to stay inflated, you need to find ways of mitigating the happiness sense and reinforcing the happiness habits in the future, for the rest of your life I would say, in fact. Okay, so in this video I'm gonna discuss seven strategies that you can use to help you do this. The first strategy is based on something that my good friend Marshall Goldsmith, the world renowned CEO coach and best selling author of several books including, What Got You Here Won't Get You There and more recently, Triggers, told me when I spoke to him recently. I asked Marshall, why is it that even the smart and successful people, those people who are otherwise brilliant at setting and achieving their goals, falter so badly when it comes to leading a happy and fulfilling life? Here is what he had to say, listen. » What I tell people Matt, is I'm gonna teach you a process that takes two minutes a day. It costs nothing, will help you get better almost anything. And about half the people will quit within two weeks. And you won't quit cuz it doesn't work, you'll quit because it does work. Now this is called the daily question process. Every day I have someone go through questions with me. For example, Raj, one of my questions is how many times yesterday did you try to prove you were right when it was not worth it? Kind of hard for the old executive coach not to be right all the time. Now how about professor Raj? You ever try to be right just a little bit too much on occasion, yeah? How many angry or disturbed comments did I make about people yesterday? Did I say it would be something nice for my son, my daughter, my wife, my son-in-law? Every day, I ask myself these questions. Why? To keep it in my head. Why don't people do what I teach? As you probably know, I'm the only person I would bet you've ever met that's collected feedback and published it from tens of thousands of people who have been in my classes. And I measure do they do what I teach and do they get better? Well, the people that do the stuff get better. Shockingly, the people that do nothing don't get better. Well, why don't they do what I teach? Years ago, my biggest client was Johnson & Johnson. I had the privilege of working with the top 2,000 leaders all the way from Ralph Larsen, who was the CEO, down to number 2,000. They all went to my class, and they all said they were gonna do what I taught. 98% said I would do what he thought. A year later, 70% did something, and 30% absolutely zero, nothing. And we got to interview the people that did nothing and said why didn't you do anything? They would say nothing to do with ethics, values, or integrity. They won an award that year, most ethical company in the world. They're good people. Had nothing to do with intelligence. They're smart people. Why didn't they do it? It had to do with a dream. This is a dream I've had for years, and I'm gonna predict many people listening to me have had this dream. The same stupid dream on a recurring basis for years. And it's gonna describe why in life we don't do what we should do. The dream sounds like this, I'm incredibly busy right now. Given pressures of work and home, and new technology that follows me everywhere and emails and voicemails and global competition, I feel about as busy as I ever have. Sometimes I feel overcommitted. I don't tell others this, but every now and again my life feels just a little bit out of control. But I'm working on some very unique and special challenges right now. And I think the worst of this is gonna be over in two or three months. And after that I'm gonna take two or three weeks to get organized, and spend time with the family. And I'm gonna begin my new healthy life program. And everything is going to be different. And it won't be crazy any more. How many people have ever had a dream that resembles this dream? How many years have we been having the same dream? Why don't people do what I teach? They're busy, they're overcommitted, they're tired, they're depleted, and it is very, very hard to keep stuff in our head. Why do I pay someone to call me everyday, because if I didn't, I wouldn't do it. It's hard. It's hard for me, it's hard for you, it's hard for all of us to do these things. » So as you just heard Marshall say, one big reason why we all find it difficult assessing happiness levels is because we postpone prioritizing happiness to a later date. We tell ourselves that we will start practicing the happiness enhancing habits in a few weeks or months. This is a dangerous dream as we call it, because it can sound very reasonable to tell yourself that you'll start something once this currently busy period is over. But before you know it, the months have turned into years, and the years into decades and you are, as Pink Floyd said, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. So it's very important to make a very strong commitment to yourself, that you're going to do your best on a daily basis try to, starting today to do things that mitigate the seven deadly happiness sins and reinforce the seven habits of the highly happy. This leads me to the first strategy for sustaining happiness, which is to respond to daily questions posed by what Marshall Goldsmith calls a peer coach. A peer coach is somebody who will ask you a series of questions on an everyday basis, to make sure that you're on track to mitigating the happiness sins and reinforcing the happiness habits. Each question will begin with the phrase, today, did you do your best to. And the first question, for example is, today, did your do your best to prioritize happiness over other goals, like being right. Another question is today, did you do your best to be kind and compassionate, and so on. Now Marshall himself thinks this is such an important thing to do that he pays somebody to ask him these types of daily questions, but luckily for you and me, we don't have to pay anybody to be our peer coach. We have each other. We can just request somebody else taking this course to be our peer coach. And offer to be their peer coach in return. Of course if you're uncomfortable having somebody from the course be your peer coach, you can choose somebody else from outside Or we're gonna offer you the choice of choosing the computer to be your peer coach. Similar to how, if you remember, you received emails reminding you to eat well and move more and see better in the fourth exercise. You can choose to receive a daily reminder on the computer that asks you the questions. Later in the video, I'll will tell you how to put the first strategy into practice. Let me move on now to the next set of strategies for sustaining happiness. And in this context, I wanna mention that I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Art Markman, a colleague of mine at the University of Texas, and a brilliant professor of social psychology, and author of a book that recently came out called, Smart Change. The book is all about how one can get rid of old, unproductive habits and acquire new and productive ones. I asked Mark, why people find it difficult to break old habits like smoking or eating unhealthy and acquire new ones, like exercising ball? You'll see in his response that Art starts by telling us how our motivational system works. He then builds on that to derive some useful strategies for breaking old habits and replacing them with new ones, listen. » Here's the way your motivational system works really quickly. Deep inside your brain, you have a bunch of mechanisms that try to engage the goals that you have. Give activity to those goals and drive your behavior and then learn habits, where they associate the environment with the behavior. And I call that system the go system just, so that you can think about it as the thing that forces you to go and do something. And then there's the stop system, which is really just a couple ounces of brain material above your eyes that is really designed when the go system engages a habit or a behavior and you don't want to perform that habit, it's that stop system that says, hey, it puts on the brakes and tries to keep you from doing that. Now, here's the problem. A lot of the goals you mentioned, which are the ones that are most persistent, those are the ones that are hard to change. And the reason they're hard to change is because we frame them negatively most of the time. I wanna quit smoking, I want to eat less, I wanna stop checking my email. The problem with that is what you're doing is saying, I've got this goal. The go system is gonna engage the goal to smoke or to check my email and then the only thing standing between me and that is that stop system and the stop system is very inefficient. It can be impaired by stress, by drugs and alcohol, by overuse. There are effects called ego depletion effects, where basically if you do something, if you control your behavior for too long, that stop system doesn't work as effectively.