Happiness Advantage Part III

The Ripple Effect

Part III - Happiness Advantage

Spreading the Happiness Advantage at Work, Home and Beyond

Once we start capitalizing on the Happiness Advantage in our own lives, the positive changes quickly ripple out. This is why positive psychology is so powerful. Using all seven principles together sparks an upward spiral of happiness and success, so that benefits quickly become multiplicative. Then the positive effects begin to ripple outward, increasing the happiness of everyone around you, changing the way your colleagues work, and eventually shaping your entire organization.

Spiraling Upward

This whole process starts with your brain. As we saw in Principle 6, your thoughts and actions are constantly shaping and reshaping the neural pathways in the brain. This means that the more you practice the exercises in the book, and the more you shift your mindset toward the positive, the more you cement these habits for the long haul. And your brain becomes more adept at one habit, it improves your ability to capitalize on another. That’s because these principles are for the purpose of clarity, but as you may have already noticed, they are inextricably linked, and using several in concert with one another only enhance their collective power.

For instance, the Tetris Effect fuels Falling Up, because training yourself to scan the world for the positive can help us reinterpret failures as opportunities for growth. Social Investment can help us in our quest to master the 20-second Rule to improve our Social Investment by decreasing teh activation energy required to form high-quality connections. The more likely we are to see our work as calling instead of just a job, which in turn fuels the Happiness Advantage. So on and so on. The effects of one principle become the trigger for another, so that they become far more than just the sum of their parts. Together, they can take us farther than any one could on its own.

The benefits don’t stop there. The more we capitalize on the Happiness Advantage ourselves. The more we can impact the lives of those around us. Extraordinarily, recent research exploring the role of social networks in shaping human behavior has proven that much of our behavior is literally contagious; that our habits, attitudes and actions spread through a complicated web of connections to infect those around us. 

This theory holds that our attitudes and behaviors don;t only infect the people we interact with directly _ like our colleagues, friends and families, but that each individual’s influence actually appears to extend to people within three degrees. 

At this point it might seem a little far-fetched. To begin to understand why our behavior is so infectious, and our influence so powerful, we need to first take a look at one of my favorite experiments. 

Smiles in the Brain

I begin most of my lectures by asking the audience to break up in pairs. Then I say something like…

“Over the course of your life, you have excelled in part because of your impressive self-discipline. You have used it to study so you could pass the classes you needed to, apply to the schools and jobs you needed to, and be successful enough that you are in the room to hear this lecture today I want you to take all of that self-discipline you have been cultivating for the past couple of decades to do the following. For the next seven seconds, no matter what your partner says or does, I want you to show absolutely no emotional reaction. Do not get angry, sad, or frustrated and do not smile or laugh. Go completely blank. No matter what.”

Then I ask each Person #2 to simply look their partner in the eyes and smile genuinely. I have done this experiment hundreds of times in corporate settings across the world with everyone and the result is always the same.

If you think about it, its really pretty incredible. After all, if these people have the self discipline and focus to work 10-16 hours a day, lead global teams, and manage multi million dollar projects, surely they can handle a task as simple as controlling their facial expressions. But the fact is they can’t.

Your colleagues are contagious

This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to physical sensations or actions – thanks to these same mirror neurons, our emotions too are enormously contagious. As we pass through the day, our brains are constantly processing the feelings of the people around us, taking note of the inflection in someone's voice, the look behind their eyes, the stoop of their shoulders. In fact, the amygdala can read and identify an emotion in another person’s face within 33 milliseconds, and then just as quickly prime us to feel the same.

Spreading the Happiness Advantage

Luckily, positive emotions are also contagious, which makes them a powerful tool in our quest for high performance in the workplace. Positive emotional contagion starts when people subconsciously mimic the body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions of those around them. Amazing as it might sound, once people mimic the emotion themselves. Smiling for instance tricks your brain into thinking you are happy, os it starts producing the neurochemicals that actually do make you happy. While authentic positivity will always trump its faux counterpart, there is significant evidence that changing your behavior first – even your facial expression and posture – can dictate emotional change.

Conclusion

When you capitalize on the Happiness Advantage, you are doing far more than improving your own well-being and performance; the more you profit from the principles in this book, the more everyone around you profits. By making changes within ourselves, we can actually bring the benefits of the Happiness Advantage to our teams, our organizations, and everyone around us.