In this video, Noelle Russell guides leaders on how to treat happiness as a deliberate choice and a core component of emotional intelligence. She stresses the importance of owning one’s emotions rather than assigning blame, and advocates responding to situations with calm, intentional choices. Russell introduces the “90‑second rule,” a practice of allowing an initial emotional reaction, then pausing, breathing, and deliberately selecting a positive state such as happiness, joy, or contentment. She links this emotional choice to the concept of congruence—aligning thoughts, words, and actions—to build trust and compassion within teams. Recognizing that mistakes are inevitable, she advises leaders to avoid over‑reacting, instead using intentional pauses to maintain a hopeful, steady presence. Practical tools are offered: customized desktop screensavers with personal reminders, daily affirmations (including an Alexa skill), calendar reminders for brief mindfulness breaths, and short meditation apps or Alexa skills (Headspace, Calm, One Minute Mindfulness). These tactics help leaders model calm, positive emotions, enabling team members to emulate the same mindset. The overarching message is that happiness is a continuous, conscious decision that leaders can practice and demonstrate to foster healthier, more productive team dynamics.
Chapters
Hello and welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us and continuing your journey on learning what it means to be a mindful leader. So in this virtue, we are going to be taking a look at the concept of happiness and that happiness is a choice. And really, it's a discussion about your emotional intelligence and how that can really help drive excellence on your team. So the first thing I'd like to mention is the importance of owning your own emotions, right? Rather than, you know, blaming or shifting blame onto different teams or, you know, identifying that something bad happened or you failed to meet some goal and figuring out who is to blame, pointing the finger, making sure they step up and, you know, take ownership of that failure. What we— that may happen, but it's all in how it happens, right? Rather than kind of point the finger and be very confrontational, we want to come from a place of peace and calmness. We want to set our intention and make sure that our response— we are choosing our response in every situation. Your response is completely voluntary. You, you choose it. Again, many of you may not have exercised this muscle, so maybe it doesn't feel like a choice, but as you develop a sense of awareness of yourself and of your thoughts, you will be able to identify those situations where, where you are auto-responding, if you will, right? Automatically responding to a situation, you know, "Argh, that makes me mad." So I've had this happen where things happen in my work environment that irritate me or make me mad, or not really mad, but kind of irritate me, I guess is probably the best way to explain it. And what I say is, I say to myself, you get 90 seconds, you get 90 seconds to feel whatever it is you feel, like angry, mad, sad, whatever it is. But after 90 seconds, I want to take a deep breath and then pick happiness. If I'm going to pick an emotion, happiness, joy, contentment, any of those, right? And then everything I do is in the context of that emotion. It really shifts how I react and how I talk and how I attack a problem, right, based on the emotional state that I'm in. I often will say also to my team that when you're in this state, in order to do the right thing, you need to be thinking the right thoughts, right? This is part of that congruency we've talked about in previous sessions. Being congruent, making sure your thoughts, your ideas, your words, and your actions are all in perfect alignment, right? That you're not saying one thing and doing another, or you're not thinking one thing and doing another, right? Be congruent. It helps, again, foster a sense of trust in the environment across your teams, but also be compassionate to the fact that people might, you know, make mistakes, right? And so there's absolutely zero reason to get upset. I'll let you know this in case you don't already know: people will always make mistakes. Always. It will never be perfect because we're human, and all of us are human, and we have teams of humans, right? So something will always get messed up. And so knowing that, we shouldn't ever kind of kick into that, "Argh! This should not be this way. It needs to be different." We should never get into that over-emotional state because we know things are gonna be a mess, right? We know that. We also know that we can fix it pretty quickly. So having a sense of calm when you come into that conversation and then choosing the right emotion to convey that information to your team, you know, whether that's happiness, joy, calmness, whatever they need to hear, but you are a sign of hope as opposed to perpetuating a stressful situation. Another thing I want to talk to you about is overreacting. So again, I, I'm still working on this myself, so I give myself 90 seconds to overreact if I need to, which— and I've taken it on occasion. But when we overreact, right, it again creates just a weird energy in the team, a weird vibe, if you will. So it's much, much better if we can, instead of overreacting, to stop, take a breath, and think about what we're doing. Think about why we're reacting the way we are and be intentional about those reactions. Things you can do— I just want to provide you some tools. There'll be some links in the resources to help you out with this. Things you can do to help you kind of stay in this mode, or more importantly, switch into this mode when maybe something happens that angers you or upsets you or frustrates you. You can which is what I do. I have a series of desktop screensavers and they include principles from our leadership principles from my company. They include pictures of my children. And so if I'm in a meeting and things are not going well, or if I'm on a phone call and things aren't going well, I slide my mouse into screensaver and I watch these pictures. And it's amazing because it reminds me of what's important. Why am I doing what I'm doing, right? Having this kind of reminder of words as well as pictures of what's important to me show up and kind of scroll across my screen, super impactful to helping me maintain this choice of being happy and content in my work environment. Other things you can do are like daily affirmations, right? This is the concept of taking a statement that maybe you don't feel is true, but you know is the truth of who you are, and saying that over and over again until you believe it, right? Until it becomes a part of you. Training your brain, if you will. Affirmations are kind of like training wheels for the brain to get it thinking in a new way. And so using affirmations, actually, if you have an Alexa-enabled device, I have a skill called Daily Affirmations. You could use that skill if you want it in order to be better and get reminders that you are, you know, impactful, that you communicate well, right? Whatever the affirmation is. And then you can use the app to go go back and see what that affirmation was and restate it or remind yourself throughout the day. So it's really useful. Again, just one more tool. Another thing I do, which you might want to do, is set a reminder for calendar— or set a reminder on your calendar for mindfulness moments, right? Even if it's just to breathe. So maybe set— I do one at 10 and one at 4, and all it does is ping, pops up on my phone if I'm somewhere, or it pops up on my computer, and it'll say very succinctly breathe. And I know that that's my chance. I may— maybe I'll go into an app and launch it. There's many, many cool apps out there, like I think one's called Headspace, another one's called Calm. That's one I'm using right now. But any meditation app or skill, and just say, you know, I have another skill on Alexa called One Minute Mindfulness. So if that chime goes off, I can say, hey Alexa, open Mindfulness, and it'll take me into a meditation. I do a 1-minute meditation because honestly, that's all I got time for. That's why I built the skill. So, so you think about some of these tools that might help you maintain this sense of happiness, that may help you in a moment of mad or scared or stressed, being able to shift out of that into a happier state, into a different psychological state. Doing that, being an example that does that, will really create value for your team. Them seeing you being able to do that will allow them to feel enabled to do it as well. So really, really useful. Hopefully you— hopefully, like I said, I'll put some of those tools in the notes so you can refer to it. Hopefully you found that helpful and meaningful. Happiness is a choice. You choose it in every moment of every day. So choose happiness, and I'll see you in the next video.
