Shawn Achor Quotes

A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling.2 Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960.3 Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old.

When you write down a list of "three good things" that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives -

Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they're successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn't work.

The primary one among executives, she says, is an inability to rely on other people: when most executives face a massive challenge or stressor, they try to figure out how to solve the problem alone.

What identity are you wearing today?

The idea of investing in the positivity of employees is often low down on companies' priority lists.

As St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century said it best, "Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive.

For that matter, you might also try watching less TV in general; studies have shown that the less negative TV we watch, specifically violent media, the happier we are. This doesn't mean shutting ourselves off from the real world or ignoring problems. Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life's risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o'clock news.32 That's because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly. Exercise

Luckily, I was in a unique position to conduct this research.

He more you believe in your own ability to success the more likely it is that you will.

Positivity is such a high predicator of success rates.

Based on my study of Harvard undergraduates, the average number of romantic relationships over four years is less than one. The average number of sexual partners, if you're curious, is 0.5 per student. (I have no idea what 0.5 sexual partners means, but it sounds like the scientific equivalent of second base.) In my survey, I found that among these brilliant Harvard students, 24 percent are unaware if they are currently involved in any romantic relationship. What

You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body.

studies have determined that happiness functions as the cause, not just the result, of good health.

As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we've focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment.

Successful people see adversity as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block.

In the world of marketing, the term is "opt-out" - a genius invention, really, that takes supreme advantage of human psychology. Opt-out marketing is when people are added to mailing lists without ever consciously consenting, so that if they want to stop the barrage of promotional e-mails, they must actively unsubscribe themselves.

Try this exercise: Turn a piece of paper horizontally, and on the left hand side write down a task you're forced to perform at work that feels devoid of meaning. Then ask yourself: What is the purpose of this task? What will it accomplish? Draw an arrow to the right and write this answer down. If what you wrote still seems unimportant, ask yourself again: What does this result lead to? Draw another arrow and write this down. Keep going until you get to a result that is meaningful to you. In this way, you can connect every small thing you do to the larger picture, to a goal that keeps you motivated and energized.

reality" is merely our brain's relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it.

statistical analysis revealed that the training was responsible for the positive effects.

only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional and intellectual resources to make that change happen.

The best leaders are the ones who show their true colors not during the banner years but during times of struggle.

By changing our mindset and habits, we can actually dramatically change the course of life, improve intelligence, productivity, improve the quality of our lives, and improve every single education and business outcome.

Waiting to be happy limits our brain's potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.

Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.

You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains?

Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.

Technology may make it easier for us to save time, but it also makes it a whole lot easier for us to waste it.

Remember, happiness is not just a mood - it's a work ethic.

Why did some of the impoverished children in Indonesia create a happy playtime with only some sticks and string, while others sat bored and sullen?

You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you'll only attain the average and you'll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.

Yet hundreds of years ago cartographers from Europe decided that Madrid was above Rio de Janeiro and that Australia should be way "down under." From then on, we have always looked at the world from the same fixed viewpoint.

One study proved just how powerful exercise can be: Three groups of depressed patients were assigned to different coping strategies - one group took antidepressant medication, one group exercised for 45 minutes three times a week, and one group did a combination of both.33 After four months, all three groups experienced similar improvements in happiness. The very fact that exercise proved just as helpful as anti-depressants is remarkable, but the story doesn't end here. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent! In short, physical activity is not just an incredibly powerful mood lifter, but a long-lasting one.

Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed.

The absence of disease is not health.

The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.

The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.

Happiness is such an incredible advantage in our life. When the human brain is positive, our intelligence rises, we stop diverting resources to think about anxiety.

Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness.

As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.

Spend two minutes a day scanning the world for three new things you're grateful for. And do that for 21 days, The reason why that's powerful is you're training your brain to scan the world in a new pattern, you're scanning for positives, instead of scanning for threats. It's the fastest way of teaching optimism.

Happiness inspires productivity.

All it takes is consciously remembering that we need to include others in our reality.

Habits are like financial capital – forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.

You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.

The way we define happiness is the joy you feel striving toward your potential

Happiness is a social creature. If you try to pursue it in a vacuum, it's very difficult to sustain it. But as soon as you get people focused on creating meaningful connections in the midst of their work, or increasing the meaning and depth of their relationships outside of work, we find happiness rising in step with that social connection.

For the most part, our jobs require us to use our skills, engage our minds, and pursue our goals - all things that have been shown to contribute to happiness. Of course, leisure activities can do this too, but because they're not required of us - because there is no "leisure boss" leaning over our shoulder on Sunday mornings telling us we'd better be at the art museum by 9 A.M. sharp

The Cleveland Clinic Foundation funded a study in which one group of healthy volunteers spent fifteen minutes a day practicing "finger abductions," which are basically like a biceps curl but with one finger.

And only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional

Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect . And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.

The typical approach to understanding human behavior has always been to look for the average behavior or outcome.

Mike Morrison, vice president and dean of the University of Toyota, likes to ask employees: "What's on the other side of your card?" In other words, the front of your business card may read "Managing Director," but you may better identify with "big picture thinker" or "educator" or "calm under fire." This kind of information - or even a few simple details like where a person lives, what his or her favorite hobby is - cuts through the red tape to get somewhere more meaningful, and it can more immediately and effectively forge a connection between two people.

This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase "creation or construction of happiness" to the more popular "pursuit," since "research shows that it's in our power to fashion it for ourselves."13

Researcher Richard Wiseman, in his article "The Luck Factor," says that if you are an apple picker and you keep coming back to the same trees every day, eventually you're going to run out of fruit.

happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement - giving us the competitive edge that I call the Happiness Advantage.

So many people are struggling to create happiness while their brain is inundated by noise. If your brain is receiving too much information, it automatically thinks you're under threat and scans the world for the negative first. Because the brain is limited, whatever you attend to first becomes your reality.

even though doctors know better than anyone the importance of exercise and diet, 44 percent of them are overweight.1

The reason some people see the world so differently from others is that the human brain doesn't just take a picture of the external world like a camera; it is constantly interpreting and processing the information it receives.

Turn on the news, and the majority of airtime is spent on accidents, corruption, murders, abuse. This focus on the negative tricks our brains into believing that this sorry ratio is reality, that most of life is negative.

Because in life, knowledge is only part of the battle. WITHOUT ACTION, KNOWLEDGE IS OFTEN MEANINGLESS. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. Yet the action required to follow through on what we know is often the hardest part.

It's for this reason that, however counterintuitive it may seem, psychologists actually recommend that we fail early and often.

Here was someone who had dismissed most of what I had just been saying as too obvious to even discuss; yet apparently it wasn't obvious enough. I realized that he was the living embodiment of one of the greatest paradoxes of human behavior:

Common sense is not common action.

We not only need to work happy, we need to work at being happy.

Turns out, there was one - and only one - characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result - social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it's huge - most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life.

Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge. Two

We are taught to believe that total makeovers of house, body, and psyche are possible all in a 30-minute episode (minus commercials). But in the real world, this all-or-nothing mindset nearly guarantees failure.

But the most successful people invest in their friends, peers, and family members to propel themselves forward.

Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn't surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women's life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12

Success is about more than simple resilience. It's about using that downward momentum to propel ourselves in the opposite direction. It's about capitalizing on setbacks and adversity to become even happier, even more motivated, and even more successful. It's not falling down, it's falling up.

Happiness is not the belief that we don't need to change; it's the realization that we can.

put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance,

We often feel the most stress, or the most emotionally hijacked, when we stare into the void of our jam-packed to-do list, in-box, or desk top. One look at the towering pile of papers looming on our desk, or the 300 unread e-mails, and our feelings of control fly right out the window.

One of the most powerful forces in human nature is our belief that change is possible.