PNTV: Broadcasting Happiness by Michelle Gielan

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Broadcasting Happiness by Michelle Gielen. Broadcasting Happiness Subtitle the Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change Michelle Gieland is a fascinating human being. She's a former CBS News anchor who then went on to study positive psychology with Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania and also married Sean Acor, another leading positive psychologist. And together they formed an institute called. What is it called? The Institute for Applied Positive Research. And Michelle wrote this great book down there, Philosopher's Note here. Five of my favorite big ideas here that we're going to explore. So the idea is we need to broadcast happiness. That positivity has very, very powerful, scientifically proven benefits in our lives. Here's something to think about. We'll start with our first idea, Success. They've identified, they've worked with something like a third or more of the Fortune 100 companies out there. Michelle and her husband Shawn have, and They've identified that three factors lead to about 75% of success in business. And this should be part of anyone's hiring process. These are the three things. Quick look, one is optimism, two is engagement, and three is social support. So optimism, we talk about it all the time. Optimism is huge. Martin Seligman, she talks about her mentor, wrote the book Learned Optimism. Check out our note and episode on that for more. But the basic idea here is when we are optimistic, we believe that our future is going to be better, and we believe that our behavior is going to be what makes it better. If you're pessimistic, you don't think your future is going to be better and you don't think you can do anything about it. You tell me which individual is going to be more impactful and successful at work? The optimist, of course. And all the research shows that unequivocally, that's our first variable. We want to be a work optimist. The second one is around engagement, and that is related to dealing with stress and challenges. So the individual who's engaged powerfully in work is going to experience stress, but they're going to see it as fuel for their growth. They're not going to get overwhelmed by it. Right. They're engaged constructively with their challenges at work. And then the third is the social side of things. What's fascinating about the social side is that if you want to predict someone's success, look at one of the variables is look at how much they're helping others, not how much help they're getting, but how much help they're giving. Michelle calls this being a work altruist. Trying to find ways to help other people is one of the most powerful ways for you to increase your level of success. Amazing stuff. So you want to have deep social support, you want to give a lot of support, you want. You want to be engaged, see stress as fuel for your growth. And you want to be optimistic, knowing that your future is going to be better and that your behavior is going to be the reason why. Quick look at the three factors that they say leads to 75% of success. If you're hiring people. Yeah, okay, sure, you can look at grades and scores or whatever, certain technical skills, but look at those three qualities and attributes as well. Second idea here is power leads. So Michelle uses the metaphor of broadcasting. Being a former anchor, right? She talks about broadcasting, obviously, throughout the book. So one of the ideas, the first chapter actually, is about power leads. So if you're watching a news show, the first story covered is called the lead, Right. She says that in our own lives, we need to create power leads, positive interactions right at the beginning of the. Of an interaction. And apparently research says that if an interaction starts positively, it's likely to end positively. If it starts negatively, it's likely to end negatively, knowing that we want to do something about it. And she says we need to broadcast happiness and positivity by having power leads, having simple but effective ways to initiate our interactions with people in business. That can be something as simple as starting a meeting with five minutes of gratitude or progress. She talks about progress all the time. She and Sean both talk about progress as a catalyst for momentum. You got to celebrate how far you've come. So if you have a challenging meeting, rather than launch into all the challenges, start with a few minutes in a positive lead and be grateful for different people or celebrate the progress you have made. Even if you've kind of bumped your heads and need to recover and deal with some challenges in parenting. She says when your kid comes home from school or you pick them up from a sports activity or whatever, start with a power lead. Say, hey, what was the best part of today? What was the best part of your sports experience or your day at school or whatever, Right? That's a power lead. Even email, she says, something as simple as saying, hi, first name, hope you're doing great, and then get into what you want. That's a power lead. Know that if you start positively you tend to have the outcome and that's positive as well. Therefore use a power lead. Third idea here is rational optimism. Rational optimism. So she talks a lot about positivity and how it's one of the most underutilized, natural, renewable resources we have at our disposal. But we're not talking about irrational optimism. Irrational optimism is, I'm going to ignore all the negativity. I'm going to pretend that nothing negative is going on. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about rational optimism. Rational optimism looks at the negative, looks at it directly, takes it head on, but strategically chooses how we're going to interact with it. Right. We're not going to be overwhelmed by all the negativity. We're going to look at it and go, okay, cool, that's a challenging situation. I'm going to approach that as well as I can. I'm going to talk about a way to do that in the next Big Idea. But I want to establish the idea of rational optimism first. We're not talking about irrational. Fly away into pure positivity. Ride away on your unicorns into a never ending rainbow. We're talking about dealing with reality constructively. And when I was reading this and in the note, I reflected on the fact that this reminds me of you can have rational or irrational visualization. So Gabrielle Oettingen, one of my favorite books last year, Rethinking Positive Thinking. She told us that irrational visualization, what unfortunately most people do when they visualize, they just imagine the best possible outcome. Oh yes, that's going to happen. It's going to be so great. And don't tell me about any of the negative stuff. I don't want to hear that. Because the secret is you got to just focus on the positive. Right? Well, that's irrational visualization. And Oettingen's research is unequivocal. That's less effective. What you need to do is start with the positive for sure. See the outcome and the benefits. You're going to have wish and then outcome in her model. Then you continue with obstacles. You want to rub your positive fantasy up against reality and see that, oh yeah, I might face that obstacle. That will definitely be a challenge. Right. Then you create a plan to deal with that obstacle so you can experience the outcome from fulfilling your wish. She calls it whoop, wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. We want to have rational visualization, not irrational. We want to have rational optimism, not irrational optimism. Third big idea. Our fourth one is one way that we can be rational, optimists which is fact checking. So another thing a journalist does, a good broadcaster fact checks their story before they go live with it. So if you want to be a rational optimist and a healthy human being, you need to fact check the things you're saying in your head. So let's say you're stressed out, right? You have a stress in your life. We're not going to ignore it as an irrational optimist. What we want to do is fact check it, which is kind of a fun tweak on a lot of the cognitive behavioral stuff we talk about in, like, Sonja Lybomirsky's how of Happiness, Albert Ellis's Guide for Rational Living, basically challenging negative thoughts. So what she suggests is you start with identifying the negative. What's the stress in your life? Write it down, look at it, and then write down the facts. Right? The facts as you see them, all the negative stuff that might be present in your life, creating and contributing to that stress. Then you create what she calls fueling facts. Too often when we're really stressed, we're only seeing one side of the equation. We're just seeing the negative. She says we need to find other facts that can fuel our growth. Fueling facts. It's a really cool idea. In the note, I share a story about my own personal experience. As I was imagining an example, it wasn't hard for me to imagine. One of the most salient for me was a year and a half ago. As I've discussed many times in these episodes, I significantly pivoted our business. Now, I had raised $2 million to finance a vision. We were building a huge academy with hundreds of teachers. And I got to the point where it was clear that that just wasn't quite it. We had a million dollars of revenue a year, and I basically took that from a million to zero and rebooted the business where I was focused on being the teacher. And I felt it was a wise decision at the time, and it proved to be a very wise decision. But at the time, there was a lot of stress around that. Now, I wanted to be a rational optimist, not an irrational optimist. I needed to look at the facts that I had $2 million worth of investors, my dear friends and family who believed in me and who gave me that money to create something that would impact the world and give them a nice, healthy return. That was a very real fact. And it came with a lot of stress and, you know, all the other variables that went into it. We're going to disappoint a lot of partners and our team by changing things, etc. Etc. Those were facts, right? So I can identify those. And then I had. I didn't have this tool to do at the time, but basically what I did was I looked for fueling facts, right? I wanted to fact check it. Is that the whole story that that's what's happening? No, there are other fueling facts. One of my friends and advisors and investors, a guy named Zack Zeitwin. Zack, thank you for your support. Gave me great advice. Gets me in tears in my eyes right now. He reminded me that all great businesses have pivots. He's invested in dozens and dozens of companies and all great businesses have pivots. Stood by me, supported me, was huge. That's a great fact check that fueled my growth, right? I could see that and say, yeah, well, this is just part of the process. I had experienced it myself in my prior two businesses with two big pivots, right? And then I can look at it and say, look, no pressure, no diamonds. You want to create something great. Oftentimes it takes great stress to catalyze your best performance. And I made a list, both consciously and unconsciously, of these fueling facts. So for you, that's a long story to hopefully give you insight into how you can do the same thing. What's going on in your life that's stressing you out right now? Write it down. We're not going to ignore it. We're going to be rational about it. Write it down. Write down the facts that support why you should be stressed. Then write down the other facts that are fueling or could fuel your growth. And this is Nassim Taleb. When you think about fueling, When I think about fueling, I always think of his antifragile. He says, wind extinguishes a candle and it fuels a fire. So we need to have a fire and we need to see what's possible with that optimism and allow those challenges to fuel our growth. It's always there if we allow it to be fact checked. Find the fuel facts. Fifth big idea is halt. Halt. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. One of the chapters in the book is on strategic retreats. You've got to know when you're broadcasting happiness that sometimes you're dealing with a negative person or a negative situation. And it actually makes the most sense not to try to broadcast happiness, but to strategically retreat. That can be a sign of strength. And she says one very handy model is from the addiction recovery world. Halt if you are. We'll Write these down because they're important and because I haven't written anything down yet. If you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired, that is not the time to engage in. That's typically not the time to engage in really intense conversations. Oftentimes when we're feeling one of these halt emotions or physical states, we're going to spiral down when we engage with something that's challenging for us or a negative individual. In those times, it's often wise to strategically retreat, take care of our physiological or emotional needs, and then reengage when we're in a better place. And I joke in the note that if you mapped out every single argument that Alexandra and I have had over the last nine years, what you'll see is one or both of us. And when there's really fireworks is when both of us have one or more of these issues. It's a perfect correlation. Right? So check in. What are your primary triggers? Is it when you're hungry that you tend to get a little bit feisty and conversations tend to spiral down? Or is it when you're angry or is it when you are lonely or is it when you're tired? For me, hungry and tired, those are my two triggers. Top kryptonites. We want to know what they are such that when we start engaging in those friction points, we can decide whether we want to retreat or not. So that's a quick look at this great book, Broadcasting Happiness. Thank you, Michelle. I'm looking forward to interviewing Michelle and sharing that soon. We've got our halt, we've got our fact checking. Be honest about what's going on, be a rational optimist, but also do that fact checking and find the fuel facts that can really help you grow. Make sure you start with a power lead. How you start an interaction dictates and predicts how that interaction is going to be concluded in the outcome of it. Right? You can do simple things in a business meeting, starting with gratitude or with progress with your email simply saying hi, first name. Hope you're doing great. Now let's talk about we're gonna do power lead and then parents, start with the positive with your kids, hey, what was awesome about today in a genuine I actually care kind of way. Power lead. And then our three factors of success. That leads to up to 75% of success. Optimism. We think our future is going to be awesome. We can do something about it. Engagement. We deal with stress well and social support. Right. We give it to others. We're work altruists. Get out there, see the wonderful happiness, the love, the joy in the world and broadcast that one by one. We can be positive broadcasters and make a significant difference in the world. Let's do that. What was your favorite big idea? Think about it, reflect on it, right? Write it down, share it and go embody it. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me two basic things. One our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And two our our Optimal Living Membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. 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