How to Make Happiness Accessible with Ashish Kothari, Founder & CEO of Happiness Squad

Stress, anxiety and burnout were actually pretty widespread problems. Almost 40 to 60% of the people were struggling with it. When I realized how big this issue was, I couldn't stand by. I couldn't just live my comfortable life. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations to to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives, and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Hi my dear friends, this is Ashish Kothari, your host of the Happiness Squad podcast. I'm also the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad, a company focused on democratizing happiness and helping a billion people integrate the science of flourishing into how they live, work and lead. Now, I wanted to record this special episode because I wanted to give you a little bit of background behind my origin story. How I came to become so passionate about this topic of human flourishing that I decided to dedicate the second half of my life towards helping as many people flourish and live with more joy, health, love and meaning. My story started in India. I was blessed to have the most amazing parents who I learned from so much and have had a big factor in who I am today. They were unbelievably kind, really caring, always followed the right path no matter what, and were also unbelievably academically gifted. My mom was a PhD in mathematics, a gold medalist at that in calculus. My father was at the top of his class in engineering. He became a banker, and a very successful one at that. When I was born, we were 30, 45 years post independence. India was still a country with a fundamental mismatch between the opportunities and the resources, which meant that if you were not rich or politically connected, hard work was a necessity not necessarily to thrive, but just to survive. And that was something my parents tried to inculcate in me from a very young early age. I remember when I was seven I had one of these most transformative experiences. I was in second grade and back then we had report cards with scores and percentages. So I came home one day and I had 97 on 100 in my exams. My mom and dad who were always very supportive, very encouraging, but I also remember telling me that if I only went back and reviewed my answers, I would probably have gotten 100. So the next time make sure you do go back and review it. Now this was Something that was meant from the best place, right? It was meant to make sure that I was able to really showcase my best work. But you know how when we are young, sometimes we internalize the message a different way. While what I internalized was what matters was successful. What mattered was perfection. Nothing less than hundred was good enough. And I tied that notion of external success as the condition to make my parents happy and satisfied. Even though they never tied their love or their how proud they were to that their invitation, their encouragement was to make sure I was doing my best work. But I at a young age, internalized that as the price I had to pay. Now that lesson, by the way, served me really, really well. I decided to study for the Indian Institute of Technology exams. They're one of the premium institutes. It's really hard to get in. Out of 200,000 who take the exam, 2,000 get in. And I was one of those. I managed to get in. I graduated, I did really well. I joined IBM and came to the US in 97. Six months after graduating at the age of 23. I had $5,000 in my account in my pocket actually, which was a loan I had to pay back and the name of one person I knew well. Fast forward 25 years. Through all of the hard work that I had internalized and learned and basically had become the part of my identity. I reached the pinnacle of success along the way. I started my mba, graduated at University of Chicago with a concentration in strategy, finance and organizational behavior. I went part time and frankly even then was one of the only people who graduated with a 4.0. Because I was willing to work hard and do more than what was asked or expected of us at School. At McKinsey that I joined one of the premium consulting firms three years after my graduation. I rose very quickly and made partner in six and a half years again. My hustle, my hard work continued to pay me dividends. I was incredibly successful. It was at McKinsey that I actually met my wife. Almost a year, two years after joining, we fell in love. Everything was fantastic. You know, she makes me complete. She is unbelievable. So we have a very strong relationship. We had our son. A couple of years after that, we moved to Boulder from Chicago. I've always had a large set of friends, so everything in life was going fantastic. Everything was great. Everything was green. Externally, everybody would say, you have arrived, you're successful. Internally, everything was not perfect. I was struggling with anxiety. I was waking up every morning feeling like I needed to throw up. And the worst part, Trent, was I Didn't know why there are so many well wishers around who offered all these shortcuts, right, that exist in our world. One said, go see a therapist and they'll help you figure out what you're struggling with. And I was blessed to never really have any big trauma in my life. And I wasn't ready to have somebody create one. Then there were others who said, you know, you should go see a psychiatrist and they will give you a pill. I wasn't ready to numb myself through life either. And so I did what I'd always learned, right, which is when you face an obstacle, when you face a struggle, what do you do? You don't give up. You try harder. You pick yourself up and you try harder. You study, you research, you experiment. And so that's what I decided to do. I decided to really look into researching what was at the heart of my fear, what was at the heart of my anxiety. Friends, as they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And those two teachers came in the form of two amazing women who I had a chance to work with and meet at McKinsey. One was Joanne Levoie, a partner doing leadership development work. The second one was Amy Elizabeth Fox, the CEO of a leadership firm called Mobius. They had created a program for senior leaders at McKinsey around, really helping them discover their inner why and start to create a different life. Life, which was designed inside out versus outside in. The program was in this unbelievable monastery in Portugal, one of the oldest monasteries. So there was a lot of spiritual energy about the place. And it was in that place that really my inspiration, the seed for the second half of the life, was sound. You see, at that point, it was about 18 months that my battle at anxiety had started, where every day I was waking up with anxiety, feeling like I needed to throw up. Third day in the program, I woke up with no anxiety. Second, it was one of these programs that the reason I woke up with no anxiety was we were really getting exposed for the first time. I was getting exposed for the first time to some of the most unbelievable inner development work. We were doing meditations, we were off devices. We were really exploring the core of our psyche, of who we are and how our beliefs and learnings from early days shape our experiences in the world. And I could see it was working. We also did some work at the heart of who our essence is. And my answer that I discovered through that work was relationships were at the heart of me. I have always been the one connecting people to each other in ways that would help them. I'm somebody who stayed in touch with all of my colleagues and almost all my clients over my entire 20 years at that time. So relationships were always at the heart of who I was, which was the second big part. Enjoying this episode. If you think someone you know could benefit from these insights, why not share the podcast with them right away? A quick share could make a big difference in someone's day. Thanks for spreading the happiness and being part of this happiness revolution with us. And then the third was that I looked around and there were 25, 30 other people like me, all leading perfect external lives, but internally struggling with some of the same challenges I was. And for me, it was like a light bulb went off. All three things lying together. I cared about relationships and people. This work was powerful and not taught in any university or leadership programs at work. And I'd worked at seven different companies and had served 30 plus clients and I had not discovered this work was in kind of at the heart of any of these companies. And three, it was a big need. And so that's when I decided that I'm going to learn as much as I can about this field and dedicate my life to this work. I dove into books 25 years into at the end of the first kind of, if you will, phase of my life, I can say, you know, I've become an avid reader. I'm on my 6, 85th different book. I trained to become an ontological coach. I studied with a couple of Indian mystics, Sadhguru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar does the Art of Living. I did a Vipassana meditation for 10 days. I did a course, a couple of courses around psychology and neurosciences. And I was learning and practicing and experimenting on techniques that can really help us change from the inside out. I was coaching others. I started designing programs that I was starting to take for folks within the firm, within McKinsey that I was working on and they were starting to see some of the impact that I was experiencing as well. Everything was great. I had found my why, I had found the place where I could really have a great life, help a lot of people and things were going great. And then friends Covid hit now because of the shift that I had made away from the operations work I was doing to kind of leadership well being resilience work. I had the opportunity to build together with a couple of colleagues our offering around resilience and adaptability because we recognized that at the heart of this pandemic, in parallel, there was going to be a second epidemic that was about to kind of really get amplified. And that was the epidemic of loneliness, anxiety and stress. A territory I was well familiar with through my encounter with it six years ago. So I decided to write a book, Hardwired for happiness. By the way, the title originally of that book was from fear to freedom, A journey from within to live your best life. Because I really wanted to make these learnings accessible to everyone. But then as I got into the research around organizational stress and burnout, I was in for a shock. Dear friends, I realized through that research that I had been living a lie. You see this last six years, from 2014 to 2020, I always believed that stress, anxiety and burnout were prices, insecure, overachievers paid to get rich, famous, get promotions, have more control. If you were willing to be the easy go lucky person who doesn't want the limelight, then you have a good life. And what I looked in the research really shook me to the core. I realized that stress, anxiety and burnout were actually pretty widespread problems. Almost 40 to 60% of the people were struggling with it. Of course, the CEOs and senior executives were struggling with it. But I found that those who were in the front line were struggling with it even more. Of course, private equity and venture capitalists and consultants who work long hours were struggling with it. But you know who else was struggling with it? Teachers, doctors, therapists, other frontline first responders who were not in it for the money, but were struggling with it as well. And then not for profits, were struggling with it more than for profits. When I realized how big this issue was, and when I also realized how insufficient the existing solutions were around this, I couldn't stop standby. I couldn't just live my comfortable life. I decided to leave the firm and really create a firm that could create solutions that could reach a much larger number of people than I could while serving clients at the firm. I wanted to address three core issues that I saw out there with the programs. The first one was most programs focused on individual interventions. And from my research, it was very clear that we had to solve the organizational issues as much as the individual. So we decided to create two programs. One called Rewire, which was grounded in the science of habit formation for individuals. And another one called Pearl, which was focused on organizational flourishing and really arming people leaders to change work, integrating more purpose, more energy, more awareness, deepening relationships and redesigning work to be neuro friendly. Second, I realized from all of my time doing operations transformations, the power and importance of data. Most existing programs didn't really look at data continuously like we do in the case of factories or stores. When we run factories or stores, we look at data every hourly, if not every day. And we look at it at a very granular level at that store or at that factory or the machine level. Most employee engagement well being programs maybe looked at data once a year and really at a very high level. That's what they used to drive interventions. And I knew we needed to design a different approach. And so I decided to go and use the toolkit that I had used so successfully in the first half of my career, driving large scale transformations, upskilling frontline employees on new ways of working, and decided to apply that to this field of flourishing. And then the third insight, my dear friends, that we decided to orient this around was that this was not a quick one. And done. This was a journey which would take a long period of time. The results would start to come pretty quickly. As I told you three days into my retreat, I didn't have anxiety, something I'd struggled with 18 months, but it wasn't a linear journey. We keep making progress and then we fall down. It is also not a journey we can do individually. When we do it in groups, we are more successful. And that's what we integrated into all of our programs. The individual programs, we grounded it in a community platform, the organizational programs, again, we do it with integrated teams. So that has become the heart of this work. I also wanted to make sure that the work we did helped people practice rather than just spread knowledge. So this podcast and you know, the experts we bring on are great knowledge sources, but we continuously are integrating the learnings that I'm getting from these experts that you're getting into practice through our programs. And I really encourage you together with me to do the same for you. Keep integrating the practices because only when we practice do we change our neural pathways and truly become more resilient, more adaptable, happier. So that's a little bit of my origin story, that's a little bit around why I'm doing what I'm doing. I would love for you to tap into the power of flourishing so that you can create a lot more value and impact for the world around, but not by hustling and doing more like I did in the first half of my life, but by truly being more. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Hope you now understand my why and what is behind the work we are doing at Happiness Squad. And I am really grateful that you have decided to be a part of this journey and integrate this work into your way of being and your way of doing. Thank you for listening and have a great day. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.