Thriving at Life and Work: The Top Episodes of 2024

Hi, everyone. Welcome to a special episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. As we wrap up 2024, we're taking a look at some of the standout chats I had this year. I've picked episodes filled with practical tips, inspiring thoughts, and some really touching stories that clicked with listeners all over the globe. Today, we are revisiting three top moments that offer great takeaways for thriving and at life and at work. So let's jump right in. 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, 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. First up, we're talking deep organizational change with Robert Quinn. Chatting with Bob, a leader in driving change, was really something. We dug into what it actually takes to make lasting change in a company's culture and how hard it is. Changing a company's culture is not just about tweaking things here and there. It's about fundamentally understanding the heart of what makes a company tick, its people and its values. This talk was all about helping teams operate at their best and foster an environment where. Where resilience and growth can thrive. Here's what Robert had to say. So you are one of the deepest experts. The most. I think you're in the top, top 1% of the people who are quoted on change in every research work that has been done over the years. And you, in your book, you wrote a book, Deep Change, and you really articulate how change is different from deep change and the key tenets of what makes something a deep change. Share that insight because I found that so powerful, that distinction.

Most of the time we're engaged in incremental changes. Something disrupts us. That means we have a problem. We enter the state of problem solving. We use the logical mind to return to equilibrium. And we do that all the time. Incremental change would be, I'm in third grade and, or whatever grade and they teach me the two plus two is four. The next day they teach me that three plus three is six. That's an incremental step forward. If I understand two plus two, then three plus three makes, you know, it's a. It's a logical next step. I've learned something. If the teacher says, how much is three times three? Well, I'm in big Trouble, because that's an entirely different paradigm. I don't understand multiplication as opposed to addition. In our lives, we develop theories of who we are, of what the world is and how it reacts. It's a very hierarchical theory. It's very ego driven. We have a name for it. We call it exchange theory or transactional theory. And one of the first assumptions is risk management. In fact, we have a scientific concept called the conservation bias. And what that means is if you say something that disrupts my belief system, I work very, very hard to defend my belief system. That is, you and I have a bias towards past equilibrium. Yes, and preserve. So that means everybody, everybody on the planet has that tendency. So to have a purpose is to see something in the future and to go after it and not know how to get there. You get there through learning by experience. So you hold your purpose, you take action, you reflect, you fail or you succeed. You assess the difference, you institute another experiment and you go forward learning by experience. None of us want to do that. We want to be in control. We want predictability, we want to minimize risk. Now, another basic way to say this is everybody understands that knowledge comes from learning. So learning is the parent of knowledge. Knowledge hates its parent. Right? It doesn't want. Once we know something, we don't want to learn. If we have enough to get by, we can satisfy. Transformational learning is being engaged in learning from experience, pursuing a purpose or fending off a crisis, and because of it, having a dramatic set of insights around the things you're wrestling with. It is a new perspective, a new way to see the world. When that happens to you, you feel an enlargement of consciousness. You feel an increase in positivity. You feel that you have capacity you didn't have just a few minutes before. That is there's an instantaneous shift where you stop living in fear, where we all live all the time, and you start to live in confidence. I see this thing, I can learn my way into this thing, and you enter a new life state. When I talk about that, people listen to me from the fixed worldview and they say, no, no, it's not. This is not about the fixed worldview. This is about the fact that we live in continuous change. We are constantly dying, if you will, because we deny the fact that we need to make deep change. When we do make deep change, our contributions in the world go up dramatically. So we're talking about a kind of change that happens to us, but that we usually deny and that we don't understand very well at All.

Yeah. It's beautiful. And I love this quote from you that I'm going to read. I think it says, I think the land of excellence is safeguarded from unworthy intruders. At the gate stand two fearsome sentries, risk and learning. The keys to entrance are faith and courage. That really spoke to me. Right. We are risk averse and we only learn. Right. In fact, there's so much of confirming bias even when we do learn, want to try and learn. And so I think this notion of faith, bigger purpose and courage. Right. Courage. We are going to feel out of control when we try to make shifts away from the land of what we know, the land unknown, and to be able to walk, that is how we get to where we need to go. Right?

Yeah. In 2020, 2000, the year 2000, Kim Cameron and Jane Dutton and I launched a new field of study called positive organization. Scholarship was about the same time that positive psychology was launched. And the basic argument we made was social science is very good at telling us about the middle of the curve, what's normal. It's very weak at telling us about the right side of the curve. That is, what is excellence? We said we have to begin to ask the question, what does individuals, groups and organizations look like at their very best? Well, a lot of people bought into that. There have been many, many studies and we've come to understand a lot about the right side of the curve, about excellence. And the reason that quote, I think resonates with you is excellence is always out there. It gets denied for a lot of reasons, but it is not normal behavior. Excellence by definition is deviance from the norm. And so you have to go someplace you've not been before to experience excellence. And that's a terrifying notion because you have to trust the process of learning.

Yeah. And I love your work. Right. I mean, I discovered that work too late in my transformation consulting career. It's a shame. I think it should be a must, must read, frankly, the amazing work you all are doing for anybody who enters their first year in consulting, not for, not to discover it 20 years into it. And I actually think, you know, as much as I think positive psychology is talked about. Right. And how many people quote positive psychology? I think the work that you and Jane and Kim have been leading is actually more powerful and more needed because, you know, individual change without organizational change is just not possible. Right. It's just not possible. And in fact, that's part of the reason why many wellbeing interventions today fail. They all focus on the individual. But unless we actually change the organization and move it towards the positive, deviant, deviance of excellence. In pursuit of that excellence, everybody is gonna try and get us to the base, right? Get to the average. I am really, really excited about this because we are at a very interesting point in time. You know, the post Covid world is very different than the pre Covid world because it forced the whole world to stop, right? And that in that stopping naturally people became introspective because there wasn't a lot of things out there to distract ourselves or to keep ourselves busy. And people started looking for meaning. And people started asking questions around, you know, how are things going? And not liking the answer. You know, the field of flourishing, well being, all of a sudden lots of, lots of momentum, lots of movement towards that started happening. But with that is also coming a lot of disillusionment, right? Spends have gone up, outcomes haven't. There are lots of things happening. And as you know Bob, at the heart of what we are trying to do with Happiness Squad is really to drive that change. And I truly believe the nature of that change. Where we don't do flourishing outside of work, but we change the work. So flourishing is an outcome, is a type of change that is really deep change. It requires taking risks because leaders can force their people to work all night, all day, use control, command to get productivity, or lead differently around some of the practices that we are creating. And you've been at the intersection of both these fields, flourishing through all of your positive organization, scholarship, work and change. And what advice would you have to these change makers, all of these people who are doing well, being chief happiness officers, chief well being officers or other individual practitioners, HR leaders who really want to make well being integrated into the workplace. What advice would you have for them? What are some steps you might suggest they take?

That's a huge question, but a very good question. And the basic problem is that from the time we're at our mother's knee and she says, because I told you so, we learn a theory of social life. And that theory we can call conventional theory or transactional theory. And it's about hierarchy, it's about power, it's about obtaining power, it's about survival, it's ego driven, it's self interested in fact. If you say to the economists, what are the first three assumptions of economics? The answer is people are self interested, rational actors, resources are scarce, conflict is natural. Now they make those negative assumptions because they do thousands of studies. That's what they find. That's the real world. If you talk to, you know, study. In 2000, Kim Cameron and I circled the globe many times, talking to audiences about social excellence and positive organizing and positive leadership. We would be with a group of executives for a week. They would sit on the edge of their seats. They loved every word we said. On Friday morning, I would say, what are you going to go home and do differently? And instead of doing this or this, they did this. Right. They had a look of terror. And it took three years to figure out, why is this consistently happening?

Yeah, why are they terrified?

And the answer is they know that if they go home on Monday morning and they say, I want to try this new process technique concept that there's two people on their team who are going to roll their eyes and the eye rollers are going to say something like, oh, did you learn this last week at that seminar? Executives, highly educated, powerful, well paid people, live in terror of that sentence. That's called negative peer pressure. Our organizations are filled with legions of people who are oriented to fear. Everyone is, and threatened by learning. And when you suggest, let's do something differently, they're going to manage you, the culture is going to punish you. That's why behavior aggresses to the mean. That's why organizational change is so difficult. That's why most of the time change efforts fail. And so I get trapped in my own fears and I don't. Even if you just think about the eye rollers, I'm a team leader. I have a hundred ideas this week about how to improve the team. But every time I have to stop and think. Now, if I introduce this idea, what are the eye rollers going to say? Now just stop for just one second and think about that story and what it implies, who's running the company? It's not the team leaders, it's the eye rollers. And so everything gets nailed to the status quo. And so if you're going to lead change, you're going to have to leave the middle of the curve. You're not going to do that. In fact, I've interviewed hundreds of executives about this. I said, why don't you know, why is it that executives are managers and not leaders? Why don't they lead change? And they say, well, if, if I'm being asked to lead this change, I don't have all the skills I need and if I fail, I will be punished. So the first answer is fear. The second answer, I haven't seen my kids for a week. I am exhausted, Right? Where do I get one more moment of time? Number three, I Know the change they're asking me to make is going to do positive harm to. To my direct reports or my suppliers or my customer. And they won't listen. I feel full of shame. Number four, in order for me to bring about this change, I have to deal with people beyond my silo. Those are my peers. I don't have any authority over them. They think this is a tournament. What do I do about that? I have no power. Number five, I have a boss. My boss says he or she wants me to lead change, and then they behave. So I can't behave lead change, and I can't talk about it. Number six, culture. The culture is a living system that punishes deviants from the norm. It punishes negative deviants, and it punishes positive deviants. So I feel fear, I feel shame, I feel exhaustion, I feel conflict. I. Down the list, right? I can't say in a public setting, I. I'm full of fear. I can't say that in an organization. I. I can't say I'm ashamed. I can't say my boss is a hypocrite. In other words, I can't tell the truth. And I live in fear. Now, when I feed those back to executives, the room goes deadly still. You can hear a pin drop. They all know that that's true. That's the world they live in. So we have people who know for sure, because they've got 20 years of experience, that they're going to be punished if they ever lead. So why would anyone ever lead? Now, the only answer to that question is, I care more about a purpose than I do about my ego. It is only then that I will endure the pain of leadership, which means the pain of learning. And, you know, there was. I'm going on too long. But let me just summarize with one quick story. I'm at a major company. There's a wonderful woman from South America, very gentle woman. She says, we have 1600 executives. I said, that's a lot of executives. She said, when I meet them, they fall into three groups. The first group's very tiny. It's made up of leaders. I know they're leaders because when I meet them, I want to be like them. The second group's huge. It's made up of managers. They intellectually understand leadership. They can talk the talk of leadership. They just don't do it. The last group is very tiny. It's made up of technicians. They may never understand leadership. When she said that, it blew me away, because for 45 years, I've been going into organizations. I've seen that for 45 years. I was never smart enough to articulate it. She articulated it beautifully. So basically what we're saying is that hierarchies, for many, many reasons, are anchored in the status quo. Leadership is punished. We seldom ever see leadership in organizations and this really offends people. They say, I'm a leader. No, you hold a position. You may be the CEO of a company. That doesn't make you a leader. That means you have a position. You may be the team leader. You have a position.

And the converse is so true too, Bob, in this work, which is you might not have a position, but you can be a leader, right? You can be the creator of that positive change.

That is the single. You know, if I were to boil something down, I mean, that's kind of the central message of positive leadership, positive organization scholarship, is that you can lead. And they say now that's why you get this reaction, right? That is they know they can't, but you're telling them they can. I'm telling them they can. And the way they do that is they have to become positive deviants. But they're not going to do that if they stay in the theory taught to them at their mother's knee, the one that dominates social life.

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. Let's shift gears to another fascinating discussion on modern leadership I had with Andrew White. Andrew brings a fresh perspective on what it means to lead in today's dynamic and often unpredictable environment. In this segment, we discuss the evolving role of leaders from command and control to empathetic, purpose driven leadership. We dive into the importance of vulnerability, adaptability, and fostering a culture where people feel seen, heard and valued. If you are ready to rethink how you approach leadership, this conversation is for you. Here's a snippet from our time with Andrew.

Thank you. Can I say a massive thank you, Ashish, for having me on the podcast. It's wonderful to reconnect, wonderful to be here, and wonderful to have this conversation. So as you said, I focus on really two big topics in my research. One is how is leadership changing today? And secondly, how does transformation happen? And when you think about the last decade or so, or really since the financial crisis, we've had wave after wave of changes coming through climate change, digitization all the issues around people at work and flourishing, which I think is something that you're very interested in, diversity and inclusion. And. And so this is challenging the way people lead. And really I think there is a new archetype of leadership emerging. So there's a number of components of that. I explore that in my podcast, Leadership 2050. And in a sense, what I'm seeing is probably a couple of. Well, I'm going to go through just three or four major points just to kick us off. The first is I think we are in an age of disruption. And so even the language of transformation, I'm not sure works. And why is that? That language has come out of, let's say, the last century, come out of the Industrial revolution, periods of stability and then periods of change and back to stability. And I actually think we're in a period of just ongoing change. And in many ways that's coming back to who we are as people. We are not used to periods of stability and then periods of change. If you look at our own bodies, if you look at the nature that we're part of, trees, seasons, oceans, they don't talk about transformation, they just evolve and they go through these patterns of life and death and growing and declining with a level of ease about that. So I think there's something about disruption, there's something about change and how change is changing the way we have to lead. I also think things are being asked of leaders that they weren't being asked of before. Let's think about yourself. If you're a leader and you're in an organization, well, first of all, the outside world is asking for more of you. So you have to think about what is our role in society, what and who are we serving? And yes, profits are important, but it's so much more than that. And we've seen countless case studies of companies where they just felt, you know, focused on profit and actually they've undermined that profit and that growth. So the big question of who are we? What do we serve, what do we contribute? What are we making better, what are we improving? I think is there that's looking kind of upwards and then looking inwards. This comes to my research on transformation. What we now have is a whole body of evidence through our work that if you put people at the heart of any transformation effort, you get over a two times increase in the likelihood of success. And we're also looking at what happens when you hit what we call a turning point. And if leaders do the right things again, there's a big multiplication factor in the likelihood of success. So this isn't soft stuff. You know, I think that language for me doesn't work. This. If you really put a human centric approach into an organization, you actually build something that's better for people, is better for the planet. It's better for the world that you're serving. And all of that requires leaders who, if I'm honest, are different. Most leaders who've got to the top of organizations today have been very good at delivering the status quo. That's what's got them promoted. And let's say that's their left hand. And that left hand's really important. It's got them somewhere. It's enabled them to perform, enabled them to deliver. Now they're being asked to use their right hand, which is a different set of skills. And many of them haven't been brought up, trained, developed with those things. We're seeing some people out there who are really good at it, but more by nature than by training and development. And I think that's where the world of leadership development is shifting. And it's what we're seeing change in our world in Oxford, what we're seeing in the world of Mobius, where you and I both work as well. So that's, you know, a lot of different things, but it gives a bit of a summary that can hopefully kick us off.

Yeah, I love that. And it's so in sync, you know, Andrew, from my work at McKinsey when I was leading, you know, as part of our leadership service line and our adaptability work and especially come to fruit in the last year and a half. Right. As we've kind of launched into this space of flourishing. And so, you know, several of these points really are worth echoing. You know, one is you're also talking about both the speed of change and also, you know, how many factors are changing at the same time. Right. So even if we think about, you know, and I'll talk a little bit on the pace that really, as you were saying, like, comes to me, if you thought about the Industrial Revolution, you know, it was like, you know, it was over decades that improvements happened. Then we saw the Internet age, right. Where, you know, in 20 years, the world today looks so different than the world led 20 years ago. When I first started, you know, I discovered the Internet. I was at IBM, I still remember in 97, and this www. This, you know, Netscape came out.

Yes, Yep.

Right. You know, look at the world today. It's completely different in terms of the speed of processing, et cetera et cetera. But about, I would say, 10, 20 years of diffusion of that innovation. Look at AI. I mean, in the last year, I mean, the. It's been a 98, 99% improvement in efficiency around, you know, so much of the work that marketers and others are doing. And so that, you know, being able to kind of navigate that rapid of a change versus the slow, gradual change that we are used to seeing is a very, very unique challenge. You know, control doesn't work in this. Like, there is so much changing. There is no way you can mobilize an organization at that level. And then the second one, which you also highlighted is, you know, people always every. There is no board, there is no leadership team. There is no leader I have ever engaged with who has not said people is at the heart of our transformation. It's throughout. People is our competitive strategy. People is our competitive edge. And that's a big part of, kind of the challenge that I'm posing back to them saying, I think those are great words. I don't think you believe it, because if you believed it, you would measure the state of your people the same way, I'm sorry to say, manage the state of your physical assets. You'll continuously look at how they're performing. Are they stressed out, they burnt out, are they operating in the best way? And you would continuously make the changes. If you're not in every team measuring performance and health at the same time, at the same frequency. I'm sorry, I don't think people is at the heart of your strategy.

And it requires, I think, a, you know, I often describe it. I use that kind of sense of, you've learned to use your left hand. Now we're asking you to use your right hand. I also think, you know, you've been looking through your left eye, now you're looking through your right eye as well, and you see things differently. And I think more and more people are going to work not just for a paycheck, but they're looking for it to be a place where they can develop, where they can grow, where they can be part of something bigger than themselves. And how, if you're running a company with 50,000 or 100,000 employees, do you put in place a culture that can do that? How do you listen to them? And that's a. A deeply personal skill, but also you can use tech now to do that. And so that whole, you know, that whole process of listening is so, so powerful. We are. We've asked hundreds of executives what the most important skill is. When it comes to transformation, they all come back to listening. And someone came up to me and said, andrew, if it's so simple as listening, which I'll come back to, because I don't think it's simple as listening, why are we finding it so difficult? And there is something in that, that the word listening almost has been reduced. And I actually think it's more complicated. If I'm really listening to you, I'm hearing you, I'm giving you feedback, there's a dialogue between us, and how do I do that at scale? But that concept of listening is so, so powerful.

Andrew, can we, you know, I have a list of questions here that we put together. I put together for you that I want to delve into, but I'm with you around how important listening is, so let's stay with it for a minute because. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I had, I was having a conversation with the dean at a university here, and they asked for, you know, our help to say, hey, listen, before we can change, we really need to listen to all the stakeholders and understand what's at the heart of the challenges. So I'm really curious, can we dig into why is listening difficult? And what are some ways that you advise leaders to really listen?

Well, so. And I think this is probably why it's hard. If you think about one of the other things that's going on today. Our minds have always been a bit of a challenge to us. You know, you go back thousands of years, our minds have always been busy. And if you go back into practices that have developed, it's been about quieting the mind and bringing the mind back to the breath or to a candle or to a mantra. These things have been around for thousands of years. So we know that's a challenge we face. But then we plugged in electronic devices. So the drama that feeds my fear and my. What I'm attracted to has just become multiplied probably by 10. It's no longer in my home or just in my home. It's no longer just in my village. I plug in parts of the entire world. Yeah. So first of all, we've got that going on. There's also a sense of, in a leadership role, you're expected to have the answers. So you expect it to know. Now if you just take both of those things and we can probably play in another one there as well, which is trauma. You put that mix in, I've got trauma going on inside. And that could be very light trauma. Just the trauma of the day to day and the stress and complex situations and conflict in the organization play in the busyness of my mind, play in the fact I need to be right. Well, I can't listen because I'm so full of myself and so full of that I have to have the answer. So I guess to answer your question, practices that cultivate a sense of quietness and stillness and being comfortable with the fact that I don't know, I don't have answers, practices that bring compassion and I start to be able to see other people. You know, I think one of the most powerful phrases I've heard is that I don't have to agree with you, to respect you. And particularly in today's polarized world, that's so important. We begin to get to understand why listening is so difficult. And I think primarily it's an inner state that we have to cultivate within ourselves to really listen and that leaders need to cultivate within themselves. I think there is a complexity too around how do you do this across large organizations. But unless that inner state is there, you can get all the data that you want, you won't hear it. And when you walk the corridors, when you're on the town hall meetings, when you're fielding questions, when you're meeting people on Zoom or on teams, you're not going to listen. And so there's a deep inner state of whether we call it presence or stillness that I think you need to find in order to truly listen.

Wrapping things up we're diving into something I'm really passionate about, which is about building habits that result in long term happiness, adaptability, resilience and our overall well being. In this part, I lay out simple steps to help you make happiness a lasting part of your life. We'll explore how tiny regular habits like starting and ending our days, mindfully practicing gratitude, being intentional about what we want to achieve in a day, in a week, in a month, in a quarter. Really taking a step back can change your daily life. If you've ever wanted to make stress your ally and find real joy in the day to day simple moments, this segment is definitely for you. So first, let's talk a little bit about happiness and why happiness is so important. See, for me, happiness is at its heart, human performance. I just invite you to tune inwards and just think about this. When are you at your best? Most creative, innovative, kinder? The best version of you? Is it when you're stressed, anxious, angry, resentful? Feeling shamed, guilty, afraid? Or is it when you are happier? Is it when you are happy? Happiness is human performance. And the science is really clear on this. It's happier people who, who live longer, are more creative, are more successful, are more resilient. They live longer than others. They have higher immunity. So happiness is actually a really important state to cultivate now. Notice I called it a state. That's one of the most common myths that people have about happiness, that happiness is an emotion. And people say, oh, I don't, you know, I am happy. That's the other piece that people talk about, or, how can you be happy all the time? Why worry about happiness? It seems such a trivial thing. In this world right now where we have so much suffering, there is so much. You know, we have a crisis at every level. We have a crisis ecologically. Our planet is getting warmer faster than ever. We have a humanitarian crisis in so many places, even in our own communities. We live in Boulder, and homelessness is on the rise in Denver and Boulder. We have a humanitarian crisis around the world, right? If you look at what's happening in the Middle east, there is so much suffering on both ends. The Israelis as well as the Palestinians. If you look the war in Ukraine, the earthquakes, the floods, the fires, there's so many who are suffering right now. There's a huge humanitarian crisis, and there's a lot of people who are helping too. There is a political crisis, you know, in almost every country out there. You know, there is increasing polarization within the countries. US is is a big example of that, you know, where as Democrats or Republicans, we just reject the idea because it comes from the other party versus recognizing that we are all elected representatives, you know, trying to serve the nation and help progress the nation. We have a crisis in terms of the economic crisis, right? In. Inflation has been high. It's starting to come down now, but that's actually causing a huge pressure, especially on those who are in the lower or middle classes. So there's a lot of crisis everywhere. So why talk a little bit about, you know, why. Why worry about. We have a refugee crisis. Why the hell, Ashish, are you talking about happiness and talking about, you know, really focusing on happiness? And my answer to them is the following. First of all, happiness. Yes, happiness is an emotion. And like all emotions, happiness comes and goes. Anger comes and goes. Fear comes and goes. Everything is impermanent in life, and it comes and goes. And we are not talking about happiness as an emotion. We are talking about happiness as a state. Think about your own childhood when you were younger. Something needed to happen to make you unhappy. You could spend hours playing, you were happy and Just smiling when you saw somebody. For most babies and young kids, when we are young, something needs to happen to make us unhappy. Maybe we fall down and get hurt, maybe we are hungry, maybe we wet our diaper or soiled it and it's causing us discomfort. But along the way, as we get older, that's not the state in which we inhabit. I wasn't that way 20. You know, when I look at my 20s and 30s, something needs to happen to make me happy, to make me feel joy. That's the cycle, the if, then else cycle so many of us live in. So happiness as a state, joyful as a state is about how can we cultivate that? And that's what these nine hardwired for happiness practices do. That regardless of what is happening out there, we can meet it from a place of joy, we can meet it from a place of surrender, we can meet it from a place of curiosity. We can meet it for a place of compassion, for self and for the other. That's what the state of joy allows. Because we cannot avoid suffering in life, we cannot avoid hardships in life. We cannot avoid people who might act in ways or say things to us that really in that moment leave us off balance, that they really trigger us, they really affect us. But what we can do is cultivate that inner state of calm, that joy peace that allows us higher ability to navigate whatever the world is throwing at us. And that's why we care about happiness. That's why we care about helping people build habits that help them be happier, healthier, and have more love and meaning. Notice emphasis on happier. No matter your base state of happiness. And I can talk a little bit about that as well. From the work that Professor Sonia Lyubomirsky did. We all have different states. Some of us, as you know, always see glass half full, others see glass half empty. So genetically, as well as how we brought up, there is a state, there's a base state of happiness that we kind of are born with or live with. But that's only 50% of the story. 10% is the life circumstantial things that come at us, the things we constantly keep chasing, the if, then, else. Only 10% of life circumstances are actually contributors to that state. Long term State of Happiness, 40% are activities that we can do voluntarily. And that's where these hardwired for happiness practices, the Sunflower model that you might have heard about quite often on our podcast, comes about these nine practices. Let me share them with you here so you can see them for a minute. These nine practices are truly these practices that can help us rewire away from this base state of fear that our brains have evolved to keep us in. I'll talk a bit on that, but a bit on these practices. So these practices, these nine practices, you will recognize that they are in every wisdom tradition that has ever existed. They are in the yoga sutras, they are in Christianity, they are in Islam, they are in Buddhism, they are in Stoicism, they are in Taoism. They've been around forever, two, three thousand plus years. Our wisdom traditions, our spiritual traditions talk around these. But we have evidence now from the field of positive psychology and neurosciences that if we truly integrate these practices into our life, we can truly experience the world differently. The field of neuroscience highlights that the reason we experience these differently is because our neural structures in our brain change. Yes, we have evolved. Our brains have evolved and they are wired for fear, not for joy. But that's not the full story. Our brains are neuroplastic, which means we can form new neurons and new neural pathways all through our lives. I'm sure you've heard this saying, neurons that fire together, wire together. And so we truly can, with these nine practices, learn to dance with complexity. Learn to dance and smile and play in the face of obstacles that we face. Because only that state of curiosity, joy, playfulness, or learner mindset that can help us navigate these better. So let's talk a little bit around what these nine practices are, so you have an overview, because in the following episodes, we're going to use the sunflower model to see how you can navigate the challenges or the goals that you have for your life. So at the heart of this model, and it is designed as a sunflower, you know, sunflowers are beautiful flowers. They're one of my favorite flowers. And the sunflower, if you notice, all always faces the sun. In fact, it changes the direction as the sun moves across the sky. Now there is darkness, there is a shadow beneath the sunflower, but the sunflower is always looking up, looking up at the sun. It's choosing to follow the sun. In the same way we can choose happiness, we can choose to be happy or happier. That state is what I'm talking about. Meet the world from that state of happiness so we can navigate it better. So that's the analogy. At the heart of this model is self awareness. And it's the most important foundational practice to begin with. Anais then was talking about self awareness and how important this is and captured it beautifully in the saying, we see the world as we are not as the world is. And in this practice of self awareness, I talk a lot around three different levels at which we can build this capacity for awareness. At the base level is, you know, how we make sense of the world. And we often make sense of the world through certain beliefs, certain belief sets that we capture early enough around ourselves and around the world. You know, one of the biggest belief is that if then else, or hey, if I make money, I will be happy. We know from research that beyond 70 to $90,000, incremental dollars, at least in the US stop providing additional utility. Okay, it's not by this logic, you know, billionaires and millionaires would be happier than ever. So it's a false belief. Money by itself and things we can buy don't bring us happiness. But there's so many of us who are caught in this rat race because we believe, you know, if we make money and more money and more money, we'll be happy. Self awareness is also something that every wisdom tradition has talked about. And so there is another level of awareness which is at the level of consciousness. You know, who is it that is actually making sense of the world? Where does ego come from? What are all the different elements in the role of emotions and moods and you know, our somatics, our body, how tired or what we hold in our physical space, how that shapes that unique observer. So we talk a bit about that. You can learn more about that from the book. We also have a rewire program that you can enroll in so you can engage more with self awareness there. But really recognize that it's this fundamental belief set that is critical for us to examine if we have to achieve anything out there. Because often many obstacles at the first level appear like an obstacle. But when we look below, there is something within. There is a deeper obstacle hidden beneath the surface of the iceberg that we really need to tackle. What we see at the top is only 10, 15% of the story. And that's what awareness is, critical skill. So we'll talk a bit around that. You know, think about addiction in addiction. On one level, we can talk about how do you break free from alcohol or from, you know, other hard drugs. But what is that drug doing? What are we trying to numb when we take that drug? What are we trying to escape? If we don't face that head on, we won't be successful in navigating that. Thank you for tuning in as we revisited the best of 2024. As you carry these insights into the new year, keep in mind that happiness isn't just an emotion or something that results in us pursuing it externally. Happiness is a mindset. It's a habit and it ensues from living a virtuous life filled with meaning, with connection and rich relationships, taking care of our mind, body, spirit, and finally practicing equanimity. I hope these episodes motivate you to make a move, whether that's transforming your workplace, deepening your relationships, leading with more kindness, or just adding a bit more joy to your everyday life. Until next time, keep exploring, keep caring and keep committed on your journey to rewire for happiness together. Catch you later. 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.