How to Truly Flourish Through Life’s Highs and Lows with Dr. Michelle McQuaid

If you haven't failed recently, then you're not stretching far enough outside your comfort zone to discover to keep figuring out what you are capable of doing and what's possible for you. And it's only in that stretch that we get the learning and growth for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations 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. What if the key to flourishing at work isn't more control but more compassion? My guest today, Dr. Michelle McQued, is one of the world's leading voices in positive psychology and workplace flourishing. From her early career leading global brand strategy at PwC to becoming an internationally recognized well being scientist, author and founder of the well Being Labor, Michelle has spent more than 15 years helping leaders and teams move from simply functioning to truly flourishing. In this conversation, Michelle shares powerful insights from her journey, how she helps leaders feel safe enough to experiment, why self compassion may be the single most underused performance enhancer, and several science backed tools like oxytocin shots to do to tada chefs, safety check chats and many more that any leader can start using today. So check in. This episode is a reminder that flourishing isn't about perfection. It's about learning, growing and leading with an open heart. Shel, it's so lovely to have you here. Thank you for joining us all the way from Australia.

It's such a pleasure to be with you.

So look, I want to actually go all the way to the beginnings. You're a veteran in this field, right? You've been doing this work around flourishing and helping organizations and leaders flourish for over 15 years. But that's not your roots, that's not where you started. And so I want to trace back to you going from leading brand Strategy being at PwC. How did you go from there into positive psychology, flourishing? What was the turning point for you that got you curious and made the switch to dedicate a big chunk of your life over the last 15 years to this field.

Yeah, I've always been interested in how do we bring out the best in ourselves and each other. And so I trained in public relations and communication and marketing, trying to find ways to connect people. Really I think was what I was doing all of those years. And I. I wound up at PricewaterhouseCoopers leading some brand work for them out of London. So I was responsible for Europe, Middle east and Africa and trying to help our people live our brand values. Because in a consultancy firm, your people are the product. Essentially. We want our clients to have great experiences with them. And it was very different. Every country was very different. It was not a consistent experience. Often our leaders were put into leadership roles because they had great technical expertise, but knew nothing about how to lead people and bring out the best in them. And so as our clients grew more global, that became a real problem for us. And so we started these projects around living our brand values, bringing our brand to life. And then we had a whole lot of interesting competitive shifts in the marketplace to the point where PwC was going to launch its own consulting division. And so I was going with the consultants. And so we had to create new brand values. What was this organization going to stand for? How did we get 60 different countries with 60 different leadership teams and thousands and thousands of employees to actually then live those values? And I had this amazing period where I was in and out of a different country every week, working with different leadership teams. Getting to see what worked and didn't work was kind of the ultimate experiment design. And I was working with people that were paid a fortune for change management by our clients. And all I could see was it wasn't working. Yeah, I could see that we got compliance while leaders were focused on these things. And then the moment their attention went to the next thing on their priority list, people pretty much went back and did what they did. So I got really curious. I was like, what do we actually know about changing human behavior? And I stumbled into the science of positive psychology, which the masters of positive psych that Martin Seligman was running at the University of Pennsylvania was about 3 years old at that time. I was like, right, I have to go and study this and figure out how to do this. And I was fortunate that PwC were very supportive of that and then said, hey, go experiment on our people and see if any of this stuff works. So that for me was the transition point.

Amazing. And so as you finished the program and you started implementing in the context of consulting and audit this kind of work, where Absolutely. You know, I sent 17 years at McKinsey People is our product. Right. It's one thing for a company like Barry Wehmiller that makes capital equipment to say, we build people. Like, that's what Bob Chapman and everybody matter says. We Build people. We don't build products. It's our people who then, you know, do. And we measure success by the impact we are having on the lives of our people. It's something for them to say. But like for consulting firms, accounting firms, the people is it. There is no other it. So as you implemented some of the changes, you went back, you learned and you implemented what were some learnings that emerged in that context? Because I would say, you know, when it comes to these professions, especially the legal profession, let's take that for an example. Burnout is all time high. Stress is at an all time high. I know so many consulting firms where, you know, people are just super stressed. So they're not flourishing.

No, not at all.

And so tell me a little bit about the learnings. So if you're a con, if somebody who's a consulting firm partner or a leader listening to this, what should they do?

Yeah, and I think my most important learning from that time actually would be true for many leaders in all sorts of industries. And that is that often, you know, leaders believe that the value they add is being the expert, having the answers, knowing how to get something done. And boy, what a lot of pressure that puts on us. And so I think many of our listeners will relate today to the fact that often leaders are leaning from a place of fear and anxiety, for fear that it's about to be figured out, that they don't have all the answers because guess what, none of us do. And that leaders generally have not been taught how people's brains work, how the nervous systems work, how do they bring out the best in people, which is the resource that the companies entrusted them with and paying a fortune for. And so what I found was that these leaders were very protective of the way they were already leading. They really didn't want to hear that they weren't doing an awesome job at it or that it might need some additional tools. And often their identity was very attached to being the expert in the room.

Being expert. Being right. Yeah. Being in control.

Yeah. And so that means, like looking for all the things that aren't working and pointing out faults vigorously and finding ways to fix them. And it really creates those climates of anxiety in many workplaces that we might relate to. So the biggest learning I took from that time was how did I help the leaders feel safe enough so that they could get curious to want to learn and experiment and play with the things that I was offering for them? And that really became around, number one, recognizing how hard they are working. Two, absolutely respecting the Value that they're trying to bring every day. And then three, simply offering these as, hey, how about we try to expand our toolkit with some additional tools? Like you have amazing technical expertise tools. You know way more about that than I do. I do know a lot about how people's brains and nervous systems work. In order to bring out the best of them, can I just give you a few more tool options and you can choose whether you use them or not at the end of the session. But maybe let's just play an experiment and see where these take you. And the moment I could get them to feel safe enough with me to be curious, then all sorts of things were possible. And they did amazing things, things I never believed they would take so far. But it was getting them there that was the key.

Making them feel safe, reflecting back the value and what they were good at. And then I love your third, which is giving them options, saying, here's a bunch of tools. I'm not asking you to use them, I'm asking you to experiment with them at your own time, see what works, what doesn't work. So it's also not a one size fits all solution. Right. You must do this and that will make a difference.

Yeah. The first thing every time still when I am running workshops or coaching or that I will say when in a room is, hey, here's what we're going to do today. I'm going to share some of the latest science on what helps people to thrive. Hopefully that's going to accelerate our knowledge. I'll also share some really practical evidence based tools and hopefully they'll inspire some ideas and practices you can walk away and use. And then please pull it apart and figure out what works best for you in your context, for your people and the outcomes that you want. And so I think in honoring that, it creates some safety for all of us because as you and I know and your listeners as well appreciate, it's not a one size fits all solution for these things. And we want to honor people's lived experience and their wisdom, to know their context far better than any of us are going to be when we bring tools into their situations.

Yeah, no, I love that. What are some of the no regret easy tools that you offer, Michelle? Right. Science proven. Hey, here are four or five. Think about it, play with them. Which are your go tos that you found consistently seem to work.

Yeah. So we found kind of two parts to this journey. One is often trying to give people a framework because it's not one size fits all. It's not one tool that's going to fit everybody. So offering an evidence based framework that kind of gives them a bit of a bigger picture. So things like when it comes to Caring for wellbeing, Dr. Martin Seligman's perma framework we find works really well there. We're doing a lot of work at the moment in change. And so from all of my years in research now of navigating change, we've been playing with a framework we call heart. So one thing we're trying to find is what are evidence based frameworks that are easy to remember and that you can plug all sorts of tools underneath it so that then they really can walk away with a bit of a toolbox that they feel is flexible. So we'll start with Perma as one example. So Perma, again, really well known framework, we've taught it all over the world. We find people can hang on to it even though it's a made up word. Once they get the hang of it, they're like, oh yeah, wellbeing's not one thing. It's not just my physical health or it's not just my relationships are. It's these different dimensions and all of them matter in a way. And then a couple of my favorite tools in that that we find really help people. One is around positive emotions, that pillar and it's particularly the self compassion component. We've measured wellbeing with tens of thousands of people and thousands and thousands of workplaces at this point. And the one thing we find most consistently will help people have higher levels of well being is whether they have healthy levels of self compassion. And this kind of makes sense across all the perma factors because if I'm busy beating myself up every time my wellbeing is not going the way that I want, it's going to be very hard to keep showing up with the energy to look after it. Whereas if I can be that wise and kind friend that Dr. Kristin Neff talks about in her research, then when it's not going to plan, I can bring my curiosity and my compassion to it and go, okay, well he's working about this. What isn't? What do I try next sort of thing. So we often teach for self compassion. One of my favorite tools, I love a good somatic tool, not just a cognitive tool, is what we call an oxytocin shot. And if your listeners want to try it at the moment they're just taking one hand and they're placing it over their opposite wrist, skin on skin. If we can not on clothes or watches or jewelry. And we're just gently kind of wrapping the fingers around so they're on that underside of the wrist where the pulse point is. And then we're just breathing for seven seconds. Nice and gently here. It doesn't have to be particularly deep, but kind of just reassuring. I like to think about this. I've kind of. I've got it. It's okay. I've got you.

I've got you.

Exactly. What the studies suggest is about 7 seconds is enough to help induce a bit of oxytocin, our calming hormone, into our bloodstream and to lower our cortisol, one of our stress hormones. And so I like to think when I've got my oxytocin shot, I'm holding that wrist and I'm just reminding myself like a wise and kind friend would. So, okay, we'll figure this out. You are perfectly imperfect, just like everybody else. And we'll sort this through. What's ours to learn? What do we need to take accountability on? What will we try next? And so that's one of my favourites, the oxytocin shot Engagement. One of the other permafactors I love, actually, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson taught me this one. Turning a to do into a ta da. And the way Barb taught me to do this was looking at my to do list each day and choosing one of those tasks that I'm procrastinating and not looking forward to, kind of willing to put off and thinking intentionally, how could I align one of my strengths, the things I'm good at and enjoy doing, to that task? And so that way a to do becomes more of a ta da because I love engaging and energizing for us. And my third final favorite is in the accomplishment factor. This is again, where we find people often really struggle for well being in workplaces because we can be so outcome focused. And it comes from Dr. Carol Dweck's work around growth mindset. And it's called Be a yeti. And so be a yeti is when I'm not achieving what I want to achieve yet, it's not going away. I hope it's not going to plan. Instead of again getting that inner critic fired up, I can remind myself I'm just not there yet. And that's how we be yetis.

I love those three. So powerful. I love Kristin F's work. Right. I think self compassion, you know, just to reflect our brains, don't allow us right to. To treat ourselves the way we treat others.

No.

And I think Oftentimes especially we speak to ourselves much harsher than we would ever speak to anybody else.

Absolutely.

If we spoke to others even 1/10 at the level we speak to ourselves, we wouldn't be very lonely. Nobody would want to be with us. Right?

Yeah.

And I think it starts from there. It's really so, so, so important. I love that one. I also love the to do to ta das, especially using strengths and starting with knowing what your strengths are. Right, Shell? I mean it's crazy to me. In a lot of the work I do, I'm like, as teams, I'm like, do you know each other's strengths? And everybody looks and I'm like, you know, there's a tool for that. You can actually have a conversation around it whether it's a reflected best self, whether it is strength finder, whether it is just even just simply asking each other, hey, tell me a little bit. You'll learn a lot. But most people don't know it and they don't harness each other's strengths.

Yeah, we really love teaching leaders how to ask their teams once a week, what lit you up last week? What are you looking forward to this week? And those two very simple questions are great ways to see how are people's strengths being applied to their role. Also a great way to know whether your team are prioritizing the same things you want them to prioritize for the week ahead. And if they're not, how do I help you align some of those tasks to your strengths if you're still learning to do that for yourself?

Yeah, we actually in our at happiness squad, one of the practice we try and lead with right. Is we always open every standup we have with something, some energizer.

Nice.

And oftentimes one of the big ones is what's a big win from yesterday and what's the one thing you want to actually nail that you're going to put a big chunk of your time because there's always in a startup seven things to do. But what's the one that you really are going to focus and say, I want to actually get this because I often find when we complete something, that sense of accomplishment, that sense of, you know, no matter how small it is. It's just an email that I write about the outbound. You might have launched the campaign, but I did that I think makes you feel good at the end because so many people otherwise swim with I don't know what I achieved this week or I don't know what I achieved today. And that's Such a de energizing feeling.

Yeah. Well, one of the tools we've developed over the years with input from Carol and from Kristin and from Amy Edmondson on her psycho social psychological safety work, which has really been a tool for leaders, and we call it the Safety Check Chat, because certainly here in Australia we now have legislation that says workplaces and leaders in particular need to be supporting psychosocial safety. So emotional and social safety in their teams, which has been put a really interesting lens on the importance of wellbeing. I love that international standards for all countries that suggest that we need to be teaching leaders to do it. So this safety Check Chat to your point is four very simple questions. It starts with what's working well so we can take the victory lapse and celebrate the strengths. Then where are we struggling? And one of the things that always stuck with me, it was an early conversation in the work I had with Carol Dweck, and she said, michelle, I love the focus on strengths. Can I also encourage you to not be scared about talking about the struggle? And the more we normalize the ability to talk about the struggle, the more we help people see that struggle is just an invitation to learning and growth. We start to take the shame and the isolation out of it. So she said, I love that you start with strengths because that's going to help calm people's brains. We need to know what those strengths are so we can build on them. But can you please always follow it up and also ask about the struggle so that we're normalizing that. And then her point was the third question, which is actually the most important, is, and what are we learning from both of those things? And she really pointed out that particularly in workplaces, we are so outcome focused that often we miss the learning along the way. Absolutely. We think the outcome is all that matters. And she would say, you know, think back even six months to all the things you were working so hard on. I'll take a safe bet you can't even remember half of them. But what you did get to take forward, whether you got the outcome or not, was the learning from those opportunities to the fourth question, which is, and what do you want to do now? Yeah, what comes next? And so I love these four. They're super simple. We teach them to lead us all the time as a way to create more of that psychological safety, to have open and honest conversations about hard things. What's worked well? Where did we struggle? What are we learning? What will we do next? And sometimes leaders will say, oh, but what if nothing's working. And I'll be like, look, the fact you're even having the conversation is something that's working. And if we're still here to talk about things, something is working or otherwise we'd all be at home in bed, not here in the organization. And we don't want to lose those strengths in hard moments just because it might feel like the struggle is bigger right now.

Yeah.

And so I love this as a way to teach leaders how to have these conversations with people.

How often do you invite leaders to do this?

Yeah. So we encourage them to find what feels right for them and their team. Some leaders will add it as a weekly standing item on their agenda. Let's just run a safety check chat team, what's working well, where are we struggling? Others will use it more in one on one conversations. Again, some will use it almost every check in. Others will save it more for where there are issues sometimes use it more for end of project periods, for sort of wrap up of what's gone on. Others await that there's an, there's clearly an issue. Nobody's being honest and really talking about it. Let's use this as a safe way to open up a space for us to dig into it. So I love it can be more organic or planned, it can be more regular or, you know, in the moment. But it works so well to create the psychological, neurological and social spaces. We need to have more of those open and honest conversations in our workplaces.

You know what I'm taking away from this is I think as I'm thinking about our own team, I think this is something that I actually want to implement in one on one conversations every week with each one of the teams because they're all driving their work stream. And I think even just asking that question of what's working, where are we struggling, what are we learning and what do we want to do different will be good. And then making it a part of our once at the, we do three week sprints as a team and so as part of the sprint before we kick off the next one, what did we learn from the. From the last? What worked well? What did we struggle with? And incorporating that I think can be a beautiful collective sense making and individual sense making to kind of find our way through that. So I think that's probably how I would do it.

Yeah. And over time it's building that culture of psychological safety. It's building that growth mindset, that strengths disorientation. It's encouraging self compassion. I remember in my early days with this work when I was leading a team still at PwC and I was first learning about growth, mindset and I put on our team agenda each week screw up of the week. And they thought this was a management trick to get them to admit to all the things they were doing wrong. So for the first three weeks it was just my screw ups of the week that were being shared. But what we learned, you know, almost a month later is I was still there to tell the tales. I hadn't been fired yet. But many of our best conversations and learning during that month had come because of the screw ups that I shared. And so they started to become more comfortable sharing theirs as well. But it really just showed me the importance of how as leaders do we make it safe enough for people to have more open and honest conversations with us? And I think Amy's research on the benefits of psychological safety for wellbeing and performance are too good to ignore and just roll right past. Yeah.

Well, I think what I found most interesting about her work. Right. The origins of her work, which was around this notion of high performing teens having the highest also error rates.

Yes.

And it wasn't that they had higher error rates than the others, but they just talked about just so they could learn from it.

Yeah.

And it wasn't something to be hid, which is kind of what most organizational cultures are like. They don't want to talk about stuff that didn't work and they don't actually want to do stuff that's outside their comfort zone if they feel there's a risk of failure. Right. So on both ends it keeps you stuck not learning and not experimenting enough to grow. Right.

And I'll often say, look, if you haven't failed recently, then you're not stretching far enough outside your comfort zone to discover to keep figuring out what you're possible, what you are capable of doing and what's possible for you. And it's only in that stretch that we get the learning and growth for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And so I think this is so important that we're not just comfortable. I think one of the things that underlies that is we do have this mistaken idea that somehow everybody else has got it figured out except for us and that we're going to be found out at any moment. And so the other piece I've often, always leading when I'm teaching in workplaces and with leaders around this is we are all perfectly imperfect and that nature wired us that way so that we could learn and grow and adapt as the world around us and within us all keeps changing and the moment that we can all start to accept that, start to see the reality that is how our brains are wired to perform at their best, then not only does it take the pressure off, but it also opens up so much possibility and opportunity for us to be able to get in play. And it makes self compassion and growth, mindsets and psychological safety so much easier for us all to reach for.

We hope you're enjoying this episode and would love your help in spreading awareness and furthering our mission to help a billion people Rewire for Happiness. Please consider leaving us a review and sharing this podcast with others in your personal and professional life who you feel could benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend and spread positivity. Also, check out Rewire, our proprietary offering to move you from knowing to doing on the Happiness Squad website www.happinesssquad.com Rewire uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to help you build happier habits in five minutes or less daily. Now back to the episode. Yeah, you know, isn't it interesting? I'd written a LinkedIn post on this a while back and I was walking, I was really, we were walking actually in London and I'd seen this tree in this garden which is just completely crooked, right, Floating up and the thought that might go up in my head was oh my God, how beautiful that is. But that's not how when we look at nature we find beauty. Nature rarely is so symmetrical. There are always things off. We don't make sense of that. But literally when it comes to people very quickly go to what's not right with this person and what's not right with me. Right. We're always swimming in that, but we're also what's not right. And I think it's something that we have to consciously recognize as the bias and kind of how we are going to look at world and choose to do something different.

Yeah, when I find with leaders it helps to get them to understand that our brain is wired to attack any source of threat, be that somebody else or ourselves. To your point for on the self criticism and it's because the brain's job is to keep us alive. And it does that that by constantly scanning the world around us to go safe enough, not safe enough, safe enough, not safe enough. And when it's safe enough, all the blood and oxygen keeps flowing up of course to our prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain, where we can be Curious and creative and compassionate and courageous and confident. All those things. We are at our best. But when we get not safe enough, of course it flows out into our arms and our legs, ready to trigger our stress responses of fight, flight, freeze, fawn or flop. These days we talk about. And it's hard to do your best work when you're in those states, unless of course, your life is really on the line, which is where you need them to be. And so again, I find for many leaders, just helping them understand in the simplest forms how people's brains and bodies are working in order to show up and do the job is a big missing piece of the puzzle. I do find leaders right now are more curious about this than I've ever seen. And so, so often I find this can help me to move the soft skill into something that feels much more real and tangible and gets their attention.

Yeah, no, it's very true. So let's talk a little bit about that. You know, Shell you the center for Positive Organizations, Marty, and the whole positive psychology movement that just then evolved into the happiness movement. There are so many coaches, the amount of spending on wellness and well being is like close to $200 billion. It continues growing and yet only 20% of people are thriving. 20% find meaning, 22% are burnt out, 60% are stressed. What's going wrong? Why are we not making progress?

So I don't know if we're not making progress. Let's play with that for a second. I think context matters. Yeah. So the context over the last 20 years that really the positive psychology field, the positive organizational scholarship field, has been doing its work. The context of the world in which we're all living in has shifted dramatically over that time. Yeah. And really studies are suggesting that since about 2016, we're seeing the world perhaps starting to experience different forms of collapse. We've lived through a global pandemic. We, we are now in the starting stages of a poly crisis. So we talk about a super cycle of change where economically, politically, socially, environmentally, technically, we have a level of change colliding and amplifying in ways we've never lived through before. So context matters and context keeps changing along this journey. And so it's going to challenge us in new ways. I think the second piece to that is what does success look like here? What are we playing for? Is it increased levels of thriving? Is it increased levels of happiness? For me personally, when I went to do the Masters of Positive Psychology, I had that professional interest. How did I help people thrive as they worked and navigate change. But I had a very personal interest, which was from the time I was a little girl, when adults would ask, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? I used to say, happy. And. And they'd look at me as. I didn't quite understand the question, like, no, what are you going to do? Like, you know, you're going to be a teacher or a fireman, like, what are you going to do? And I'd be like, I want to do things that will make me happy. I was like, what's wrong with you? This is so simple. And as a kid, of course, that seemed like the easiest thing in the world.

Yeah.

And I went about life trying to tickle those boxes that we're told would make us happy. Good career, financial security, look after my physical health, find. Find people to love. And on paper, by the time I was 35, life looked great. But I was exhausted trying to keep up with that life, and it really wasn't making me happy. And so when I came across positive psychology, I was like, okay, there is a science to happiness. I will go to school and I will figure this out, and then I will know what it is. But what I realized about halfway through my masters is that perhaps there was something more valuable to. Than happiness that I was playing for. And I started to understand that for all of us, life naturally has ebbs and flows, highs and lows that we go through. And so, yes, we'll have moments of happiness. We'll also have moments of despair. We'll have moments where we're lost. We'll have moments where we feel like it is all falling apart and we do not know if we will get back off that floor and into life again? And the Masters really taught me, how did I navigate the highs and the lows? How did I have the confidence so that in the moments where it was high and things were great, I could savor it and enjoy it and not worry about the bottom falling out. And in the moments where I was on my knees on the floor, not sure if I'd ever get up to know that I did have the knowledge and the tools and the support to find my way through that learning and back out the other side again. So I agree, if we're measuring thriving just as a state of, hey, I'm feeling on top of the world, or happiness, it looks like we're making no progress to moving that population curve along in most countries. But if we're thinking about is the goal here to help build people's confidence so they have the knowledge and the tools and support to navigate the highs and lows of life and back themselves through that, then I actually would say we're making progress. Because the kind of conversations, the level of interest we're seeing is unlike anything I've seen in the last 15 years. I see the increase, incremental improvements. I'll say one last thing here that had a big impact for me was in a conversation with Dr. Barbara Fredrickson a few years ago, and it was not long after my dad had passed away from melanoma cancer. And she said, hey, Shel, how are you doing right now? And I said, well, right now, Bob, I'm just focused on functioning. I'm trying to get out of bed every morning, do some exercise, eat some food, see if I can get a decent night's sleep. And if I can tick those things off in my day, then I'm doing okay. And she said to me, well, Michelle, that sounds exactly like you're flourishing in this moment, not just functioning, because you've thought about your context and you're showing up in a way that is healthy and appropriate for the moment that you're in. And so what does thriving look like? What does happiness really get defined as? Is it just the on top of the world, or is it our ability to navigate the highs and lows flows that the super cycle of change we're in is going to require all of us in a way we've never seen before over this next decade.

Yeah. Well, I love that. Right. I think. And I think so just to play back, I think when I talk about thriving and happiness, right. I mean, I always say we want, fundamentally in our work, we want to help people cultivate a state of joyfulness rather than joy. Because I can be joyful in suffering. Right. In fact, sometimes when I'm lifting weights and it's painful and I. After that, I'm sore, I am joyful, I am in pain, but I am because I am doing it, because I know I'm growing through it. Right.

There's the bittersweet element.

The bittersweet, Right. So I always think about it that way, Shell. Right. That it is. And I also look at this field like I've been in it now for about 10 years, and I see all the research that's caught up and I see all the people talking, you know, all the conversations like you. Yeah, right. There's more and more people are talking about mental health and stress and this and that. But when we look at. I'm referring to the 20% thriving point. Not in terms of feeling on top of the world, but like, you know, the four key elements of. We did this research at McKinsey. When only 15% of people find meaning at work, especially the frontline, on something that you're spending majority of your waking hours on, then it is creating a level of suffering. People aren't thriving. Right. They're not thriving because they don't have meaning. It's like one of the core elements of perma. When people aren't growing, they feel stuck, stagnant, unseen. They are not satisfied by their work. You know, I think that satisfaction levels are an all time low when you have 60% of people experiencing stress because of workloads, work pressure, time pressure, feeling like that, I can't actually break away. I can't separate work and life because again, they don't find meaning. Work and life are two distinct one, for me they're the same. I don't think about them as differently. But for many for whom work we have not done, the work leaders haven't done the work to infuse meaning in what people are doing. It's this constant battle. Right. And I think about this a lot because I see these measures, we were looking at this, you know, when I was at the firm, I've been looking at it now and all of these indicators are actually lower. Right. People are at least in the U.S. right. The whole origin of thank God it's Friday is I'm glad it's Friday, I'm glad it's on Monday. Highest number of heart attacks on Mondays. Yeah, right. I think one, I think about this and say, how do we get more leaders to do that journey from the head to the heart? All the research around why we need to do it for performance and to actually alleviate human suffering. We know all the research, we have all the tools. 20 plus years between Michigan and UPenn and all the other great individuals who've been doing this research, we have the tools, we have the knowledge. But I just don't see people practice it and embed it in organizations. And my other reflection is I am with you that we are at a period of unprecedented change, this poly crisis. But if we think about it, you know, at the step back, nobody is doing this to us. No, we are creating it. And you know, my. That was the thesis behind the book I wrote around Hardwired for Happiness. The original title of the book was actually from fear to freedom. A journey from within to live your best life.

Yeah.

Because you know, what I hold is one the Environment is constantly putting us more and more towards fear, where we are operating in a scarce, closed focus on self here and now mode. But also when we have created a situation where. Where we spend the majority of our time leaves us stress and in suffering, we are not in a place to actually create something that is anything less than that for the others. Right. I go back to climate change. The science is clear. In 30 years we're not going to have. It's going to be irreversible and yet we're not moving fast enough in the US we are reversing years, 20 plus years of. I grew up reading the Lexus and the Olive Tree and we are literally reversing globalization after. And it's happening in Europe with Brexit. And I think I feel it's all coming from the origin of. It is our individual. Yes, the environment shaping us to your point, but also us actually creating that because we are just suffering. We are operating out of fear and stress circuits below the line most of the time versus in a state of flourishing and above the line. Right.

Yeah. I think my experience sample of 1 over the last 15 years, really of being deeply immersed in this work, I would say I see more. More awareness.

Yes.

And practice in a percentage of people than I've ever seen before. So again, if I think about where it was 15 years ago to where it is now, I do see shift happening. Not fast enough, not wide enough, not consistently enough. Absolutely. But I do see shift happening and I think about the contagion effect and the tipping points of things as to how far do we go. I think for me personally, what motivated me coming out of my masters was how did I help put the science of all of this into as many hands as possible in the most affordable and effective ways that I could. Because I truly believed 15 years ago that the future of the world depended on me, you and all of us listening. To be able to be out in the world and do that, that because I could see what was coming environmentally and in other forms, at least in some regard. And I was like, when these moments of change come, will we be navigating them from places of fear and scarcity or will we navigate them from places of community and trying to support each other the best that we can through it? And again, I think, you know, the die is still to be cast as to quite how we're doing. I, like you, am cautious and nervous and a little anxious about what I see happening in the world at this moment of change, particularly in places like America and Europe. Unfortunate. Here in Australia, we certainly have our share of challenges around this still, but we've also just recently had an election where we had two leaders both talking about kindness and treating each other with respect and integrity. Now, again, we're not perfect by any means, but there was a pulling towards community rather than away from each other that gave me some hope. But there's no good living in a bubble in a global world because that bubble is going to burst sooner or later as we all interact. So I see signs of hope. Whether the contagion and the tipping point is going to come fast enough for how we navigate what's ahead. I think the jury is still out.

The jury's out.

All I can do every day is show up and keep planting those seeds wherever somebody is willing enough to listen, just as you are on the podcast, wherever a leader or a workplace place is willing to have that conversation. I think the good news, we see so many more of us, so much research, so many books, so many beautiful podcasts or talking to similar things. So each morning I get out of bed with hope that maybe today will make a bit more difference. So I think that's all we can do in the. That's all I do think people are scared. I think people numb pain. They. We often lack a confidence that we are resilient, that nature wired us for learning and growth and adaptation. And so instead of stepping into the learning and growth, we tend to numb it. Right. Or avoid it or expect somebody else is going to come and fix it. Then we elect dictators, you know, and so there is a piece here about can we trust ourselves to stop abandoning ourselves over and over to trust that we are perfectly imperfect. Nature wired us for learning and growth. We can figure this out with each other. But we have to keep choosing to do the work and not opt out of it, or otherwise, you know, the pain is going to be much greater. Greater on the other side of all of this.

Yeah. No, I love that. I think that's why I jumped into this field, right? As after 17 years at McKinsey, 10 years as a partner, I mean, I had a choice, you know, I had to your point, I had designed the perfect mousetrap for me. I literally, you know, you'd be like, how did you do that? But my last five years at the firm, I worked 36 hours a week. I traveled a night a week. I was working on the field that I cared about. And I came to a point where I was like, I can do this for another seven or eight years. But the Level of change that I get to drive from there. Just given our economic model, given kind of priorities, everything else, it would be like scratching the surface versus what was needed. And as I reflected on my son, who was 12 at that point, he's 15 now. And I reflected on legacy and I reflected on the future, we all want our children to flourish, to do well. I felt, you know, adding more to the bank account and living a comfortable life was much worse than jumping into the fray. And take my learnings from driving at scale, sustainable transformations in the field of operations and figuring out a way to bring that into this, figuring out a way to use the language, the business thinking that I'd learned, combined with this to see if we can actually move the needle, we can accelerate it, we can get more people to adopt. And so very similar to you, Michelle. I think that became my rallying cry. And yet, you know, and when I see those numbers and when I see those stats and I see the slow, it makes me even more passionate and even more, you know, brings a sense of urgency and conviction around. If we don't do this and if we don't figure it out, like this is, I think this is the best that we can do. And if we solve this, in fact, I hold this as flourishing is the point. And if we do this, I think we will disentangle all the other crisis we have created, because the change, all of those, the origin is the human, and it's the human and which state is he operating from or she operating from that's in the end gonna decide what we create.

I agree. I think part of that is learning to value something more than money. And I say that as somebody that grew up in poverty, I understand how big that fear can be when you don't have enough of it. And I also think it keeps us trapped in patterns and jobs and behaviors of fear, that we really only get freedom back when we start to decide there is something more important and the money to be played for here. And that doesn't mean that money doesn't matter, but that I am going to value something higher than just money alone with the way I choose to live my life and prioritize things. And I think that's a big piece of this.

So, Shel, I have a question for you. As I think about your change. You know, you're an exper. You're a really experienced change leader. You're also an systemic thinker. You're also deeply in the field of flourishing. There's a lot of leaders who will listen to this, and even if they say, yeah, no, it makes sense, but then they're afraid to take it forward and actually do something with it. In your client work that you've led, how have you built the business case? But more importantly, the conviction of leaders to actually do something at an organization level to make this a reality for their people.

Yeah. So typically I try to find what are the issues in business that I can hook onto because then I don't have to make the business case. They already know that there is a need or a pain point and then how do I integrate, you know, the solution that we all work towards every day into that fit? So, pre global pandemic, certainly here in Australian workplaces, there was a growing focus on wealth well being. It was often as an employer of choice. So if you wanted to attract great people, you needed to be clear around what you were doing for wellbeing. There was a bit of starting concern around burnout around that time, but it was more about, hey, we're a great workplace, you want to come join us? We invest in people's wellbeing. And so at that time we really, when I go in to make the business case, it was around, hey, how do we help you be an employer of choice? How do we help you attract great talent? How do we help you get the most out of that talent? We're going to come and help teach wellbeing in your organization and help you measure it. We're going to help you understand with your leaders how to lead it. And so that was the hook during the global pandemic. Obviously, wellbeing became really important, especially as people were working from home and the like. And so how did we navigate this crisis and look after ourselves? Actually, rest and recovery was the topic we taught most during the global pandemic in workplaces, ironically, because people were just struggling so greatly coming out of the global pandemic I was mentioning here in Australia, we've had new laws come in where workplaces and leaders personally can actually be fined and even jailed in extreme cases if they are not doing everything reasonably practical to minimise the risk of emotional and social hazards. So things like unachievable job demands, poor workplace waste relationships, poor change management. And so now that there is a legal requirement on that, the last few years we've hooked onto that piece to say, how do you prepare leaders to do this? Hey, CEOs, you are personally on the hook. Boards, you are on the hook. Do you know what this is and what you need to do? And then now what we've been seeing really since the start of 2025 at the start of year saying like, looks like people's nervous systems are fraying. It's like they feel like they're kind of pulling apart because the state of change now is more visible in the world around us and people are feeling really overwhelmed. We just did a big population study here in Australia and we tested this term quiet cracking. And what we found was one in two employees were saying, I am quietly cracking right now. And we asked them, well, what does that mean? And they were saying, look, on the outside I'm working so hard to hold it all together, but I'm hiding the fact that on the inside I'm falling apart. And we found that this was a precursor to burnout. So if you were quietly cracking, you were six times more likely to wind up burned out. We have about a third of our workplace since 2023 in Australia saying they are clinically burned out. So they went to their doctor, they would be signed off work. So again now, right now we're in that change piece. And quite so I'm always trying to understand what is the challenge in the organization that I'm trying to support and how do I. It's all the same solution, all three times same solution in the background. But how do I meet that moment and hook what I can offer to the real business need that they have rather than trying to fabricate a business need that's really not on the leadership agenda.

Well, ciao. I love those things. Thank you.

You're so welcome.

We'll wrap up with one question and one hope for me. That's the hope for me as I have to figure out a way to come see you in person or meet somewhere.

Please do.

Like if I wish you were not around the, around the globe, I would reach through the screen and give you a hug. Because your energy, your positivity, your optimism, your hope, your passion is infectious and I would so love to figure it out how we collaborate together. But my question starts from there, which is what are your personal non negotiable practices that despite 15 years of doing this work in the face of when you started, this wasn't in the language. Now it's in the language. But as we said, it's still hard. The change is hard, change is slow. I know you would want it to be faster. I would want it. What are some practices that help you find, fill your cup, renew, recharge and just be this positive beacon of you're heliotropic, to borrow a word from Kim Right, Absolutely.

I think for me, I'm very fortunate. Where I am in Australia, the beach is about a five minute walk from the end of my streets where I'm headed right after this with the dog. And I try every morning around sort of sunrise or first thing to be down on that beach. I walk the beach and at the end of it I draw a circle in the sand. I think about it as my circle of love, but it also feels like kind of reminding me I'm part of this whole big beautiful mad world. And I step myself inside it, I sit down, I put my hands into the sand. Here in Australia, our First nations people, our Aboriginal people, have a beautiful wellbeing practice around connection to country. And so this grounding practice of hands in the the sand is to remind us of that connection to country, to, to Mother Earth, to the thing that we are all a part of this living energy. And so that's where each day starts. It's also where I try to be as the sun sets each day again, to be back there, to do my safety check chat. What went well today? Where did I struggle? What did I learn? What will I take forward and again to give gratitude and thanks and a moment of savoring back into that sand as I connect to country. It's a great way for me to remember how tiny I really am in the scheme of all of the things that are happening in the world. But also that we are all just stardust here, doing the best we can each day and to know that I get another shot at it tomorrow.

Wow. Beautiful. Thank you my friend. It has been such a joy to be with you, to hear you.

Likewise.

And yeah, I set an intention to figure out in the 12 months to find you, meet you someplace awesome.

I look forward to helping make that intention a reality.

Give you a proper hug. Thank you for all the important work you're doing and have been doing for so long. Be well.

Thank you. You too.

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. See you next week.