Trailer Episode

Foreign. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast, A podcast dedicated to helping you integrate the science of flourishing into your life so that you can live, work and lead at your fullest potential. Now I am Ashish Kothari, Founder and CEO of Happiness Squad, a company dedicated to democratizing happiness and helping a billion people live with more joy, health, love and meaning. Prior to starting Happiness squad, I spent 25 years in consulting, 17 of those as a partner at McKinsey Co. Where in my last role I was leading our work on leadership, adaptability, resilience and well being for our clients. I'm also a trained ontological coach and have read over 650 different books on the topics of philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, spirituality and I am really looking forward to distilling the wisdom from these completely different fields and help bring them to you as part of this podcast journey into really simple, actionable tips that you can deploy in your own personal life to make happiness your competitive edge. Now let's talk a little bit about why launch an episode on happiness and why this podcast is different than so many others. Well, the first one, dear friends, is this insight that I had that we are drowning in knowledge, but we are really parched for practice. So one of the ways in which we are going to try and differentiate our content is by really helping bring to you deep insights from practitioners, executives who truly believe into flourishing as a competitive advantage. We want to bring you insights in not theoretical but applied research from experts who are applying, researching and applying this work in real organizational settings. And we want to bring you insights and solutions to from solution providers, technology products that are helping organizations and leaders again integrate flourishing into how work gets done every day. So it's a real practical orientation around application, which is our hope to bring to you in this Happiness Squad podcast. Let me end by talking a little bit about why actually spend our times learning to be happier, learning and truly integrating flourishing into the way we work. Well friends, individually, happiness we know from the science is truly human performance. We operate at our best. Not when we are stressed, angry, exhausted, burnt out, but when we are happy. The science proves it too. When they study happier individuals versus the rest. Happier individuals are more adaptable, they're more resilient, they live longer, they have higher immunity, they have better relationships relationships they are actually more successful versus the other way around. So happiness is worth investing our time and that is going to be part of what you are going to learn on this podcast. The second part is around flourishing and building that as a key way of shaping cultures, cultures that allow individuals and organizations and teams to be at their best. Now again, we know from research that it is worth integrating these interventions into how we work. Happier organizations are 2x higher value creating in terms of shareholder returns. They are 20% plus more profitable, 20% plus more productive. They are a lot more creative and have 65% lower attrition. Who doesn't want that in their organizations? Especially in a time when the targets we are trying to deliver are higher than ever, under operating conditions that are harder than ever and with a workforce that is exhausted, stressed, fatigued and in many cases disengaged. So if you're really able to learn the skills and apply them, integrate them, weave them into how work gets done, we can achieve a lot more. Not by doing more, but by being more. So that's the journey. That's what we are trying to cover as part of this podcast. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to continuing to bring these insights from literature, but most importantly from real conversations from practitioners in the field. Take care and have a great day.