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THE VALUE OF BROADCASTING HAPPINESS
I am a happiness researcher. But I didn’t start out that way.
In fact, I am a computer engineer with a specialty in electrical engineering and systems architecture—who just wanted to be on TV.
My dream was to become a network news anchor broadcasting from New York City. The reality is that you don’t start your career in New York. You start anywhere they’ll take you.
Realizing that, I sent one-hundred fifty tapes to news stations around the country. I got one call.
“Bienvenidos á El Paso!” I heard on the other end of the line, and I packed my bags for Texas. I worked such an awesome schedule there; it led me to ponder some deep philosophical questions, including: If you start your newscast at 3 A.M., do you begin with “Buenas noches” or “Buenos dias”?
I would like to say that my rise to media prominence was due to my hard-hitting investigative stories in El Paso. But that would not quite be accurate. Some of my top stories included “Bed Bugs Invading Your Mattress,” “Skin-Eating Fish DO Make for a Better Pedicure,” and there was, of course, my biting interview with the Dalai Llama—I mean, “Dolly the Llama.” Yes, that interview went down at a petting zoo.
But because of some luck and determination, a year later I found myself in Chicago, covering city hall, and doing an investigative series on alleged police brutality. Because of that work, a short time after that I was sitting in the anchor chair at CBS News in New York City.
I was over the moon and thankful every morning for what I knew was a one-in-a-million dream job. CBS News is an incredible place to work to effect large-scale change. I anchored two early morning news programs and did reports for The Early Show—more recently named CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose and Oprah’s best friend, Gayle King. My office was down the hall from Andy Rooney. Katie Couric would often stop by the studio. I met and interviewed newsmakers, politicians, and celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Donald Trump, and Deepak Chopra. For most of the time I was at CBS News, I was given more airtime than any other anchor or reporter. And every time the red light went on over the camera, I was broadcasting to millions of people. I was one grateful former computer programmer.
But within weeks of getting to that anchor desk, the economy tanked. All of a sudden the news cycle became overtaken with heart-wrenching economic stories in addition to the usual reports of murder, death, and destruction. Morning after morning we watched as families lost their homes during the recession and ended up on the streets. We heard about single mothers-of-three who couldn’t keep their jobs and were sinking deeper and deeper into debt. About couples in their seventies whose retirement accounts had been decimated and who were falling behind on paying their basic medical bills. Over and over, our mornings began with helplessness and hopelessness. It was painful to watch, especially from a dark news studio, on repeat all day long.
Our choice to continually broadcast stories of unhappiness is why viewers stopped watching—or at least many of them did. When I ask in my talks at companies and schools how many people have decreased the amount of news they watch because of the negative effect it has on mood—theirs or their family’s—often more than 50 percent of the audience members raise their hands. And there is ample science to prove why.
A study I conducted with researchers Dr. Martin Seligman, Dr. Margaret Kern, and Lizbeth Benson from the University of Pennsylvania found that it takes just minutes to dramatically shift someone’s mood from neutral to negative simply with news reports.1 A barrage of negative news reports shows us stories of a world that is frightening and seemingly hopeless. Often these feelings linger with viewers and cascade into their time at work or school. The results of another study show that people who watch local news view their city as significantly more dangerous than it actually is, in terms of anticipated amounts of crime or likelihood of disaster.2 Given this research, decreasing news consumption can be a form of self-preservation . . . but it has a cost.
My niece Ana, at the time six years old, once complained when I came over to her house that she had been “ostrichcized” to her room all afternoon. The fact that both of her parents went to Harvard explains why she uses such big words. (My husband, who also went to Harvard, says, “The fact that they later went to Yale is why she misuses them.”) But the more I think about it, the more I think that it is the perfect word. In many ways, ostrichcized is what largely negative news stories have done to you and me. To preserve a modicum of happiness, we oftentimes stick our heads in the sand, hoping that the negativity in the world will never touch our lives. I don’t endorse turning a blind eye to the negative, but I understand feeling overwhelmed by it. But we just can’t live our lives ostrichcized. Ignorance of the negative does us, and the world, no good.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” We can get frustrated about all the negative things going on in our world, but unless we go to the root, we are fighting a losing battle. One of the major roots of the world’s challenges is the belief that change is not possible. In fact, the majority of negative news on TV and in our lives feeds us the lie that outcomes are not affected by our behavior. Of course, the reality is that there are millions of things we cannot control, but the problem is when we think all things are out of our control.
My epiphany came when I realized that what’s happening with the news was not a problem of merely too many negative stories. The deeper problem was that we were also telling many of the stories in the wrong way, just as we did when reporting on the little girl’s death back in Chicago. The lens through which we were broadcasting and viewing many of the stories was distorted. And the trap journalists often fall into is the same one that you and I can get caught in as we lead our families, teams, and organizations through hard times.
While we may complain about the news—its negativity and story selection—in truth we are all broadcasters, and our family, friends, coworkers, and even the strangers we meet are our viewers. We have the same power as journalists. Our brains are constantly selecting stories and transmitting them to others. The things we choose to talk about during the course of our day to our colleagues, friends, and family have a direct influence not only on their mood but also on how they respond to stress, change, and challenges. Everything about our broadcast can paralyze or activate another person’s ability to create and sustain positive change.
Each of you reading this may have different audiences in mind. Some of you want to change the way your work teams think about challenge. Some are thirsty for research on how to positively influence your children’s trajectories. Some are feeling overwhelmed as an optimist in a pessimistic culture and are looking for tools. But regardless, the conclusion is the same: You are a broadcaster, which comes with a great deal of power and responsibility.
I had a hunch that it was not just the ratio of negative to positive news that mattered but also how we told the stories. I am a scientist and engineer, so my first thought was to test this hypothesis on one of the biggest stages of all—at CBS News in New York. The result of my experiment was the highest viewer response of the entire year.
ACTIVATING NEWS, WATCHING THE RIPPLE EFFECT
One time I was at a fancy-schmancy New York bar, Gilt, and a slick banker with an obnoxious Burberry pocket square cornered my friend and me and attempted to impress us by trying to be the world’s foremost expert on . . . everything, including news media.
“Let me tell you ladies, happy news doesn’t sell. Trust me. Don’t waste your time. The proof is in the fact that almost all of the news shows are negative. People want the negative. We are addicted, and negativity is our drug. And that’s why we drink.” His cognac-infused soliloquy went on and on, but the sentiment was clear, and it is often shared by much more thoughtful people.
So when I first pitched the idea of doing a series called “Happy Week” to my most open-minded producer, I wasn’t surprised when he initially looked at me like I was suggesting an expose on the mating habits of French guinea pigs. (And we had already done that story.) But here was my idea: In the middle of one of the darkest times in American economic history, let’s showcase happiness. Let’s bring in experts from the field of positive psychology, which is the scientific study of happiness and human potential, to give practical advice on how to find happiness in the face of big challenges, namely the recession. Since my mentor and subsequent research partner, Dr. Martin Seligman, founded the field in 1998, the body of research that has emerged has turned positive psychology into an essential science-based tool for optimal living, especially for leaders in every organization, family, and community.
During Happy Week, our aim was not to ignore the reality of the economic collapse. We wanted to talk about ways to foster more happiness in the midst of it and not wait helplessly until it was over. We wanted an activated, wholehearted, solutionsfocused approach to broadcasting news. Our forward-thinking producer agreed to give it a shot.
We got more positive emails from viewers as a result of that week of programming alone than we did for the entire year prior. I read email after email from viewers who said that those segments made them realize they had control of their happiness, and that even in the middle of the hardest economic challenges of their lifetime, they could take positive steps to create change.
One viewer from Oklahoma wrote in, and his story still makes me emotional. His home, like many others, was facing foreclosure. He wrote that he had not talked to his brother, who lived a mere twenty-five miles away, for the past twenty years. They had fought over money and cut off contact. He had recently heard that his brother’s home was facing foreclosure as well, and after seeing the segment on CBS on rethinking financial stresses, he decided to reach out to him. The two men ended up pooling resources to save one of their homes and moved in together! Each was now very happy to not only have a roof over his head but also his formerly estranged brother by his side. This story was one of many that showed how people are propelled to take positive action when they experience even the smallest mindset shift, and what results is a new reality.
Stories like this one from those Oklahoma brothers prompted me to walk away from a broadcast journalist’s dream job to get an advanced degree in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, working under Professor Martin Seligman who founded the field. Inspired by what I learned, I cofounded the Institute for Applied Positive Research (IAPR) in order to connect thinkers from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania to study outliers who are able to motivate people through effective communication.
My cofounder is Shawn Achor, whom many of you know as a famous Harvard-trained researcher, speaker, and New York Times best-selling author of multiple books on the connection between happiness and success. But my favorite of his credentials is that he’s now my husband. Some of the greatest moments of my life that have propelled the most growth have been serendipitous and unexpected. Meeting Shawn was one. Meeting Arianna Huffington at the perfect time was another.
A week after I finished the near-final draft of the manuscript for this book, all that earlier work from CBS and UPenn came to fruition in a very unexpected way. On a wintry morning in 2015 in New York City’s Soho, Shawn and I were invited to the home of Arianna Huffington—cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. During the course of that morning, we realized that we had been on the exact same mission to transform journalism. The Huffington Post’s fantastic What’s Working initiative to highlight positive, solutions-focused stories is a prototypical example of what I call “Transformative Journalism” that a decade of research in positive psychology had proven was necessary to create positive change. (See also the appendix: The Journalist Manifesto.)
In her book Thrive, Arianna provides a compelling case for rethinking our definition of success and its relationship to our well-being. Applying that enlightened thinking to journalism, she now argues that our collective well-being hinges in large part on the way the news media reports the news. I was also thrilled to learn that Arianna is one of those rare thought leaders who actually live what they preach. Her approach is courageous; she is leading the charge to transform media based on the broadcasting-happiness research at a time when doing so runs counter to industry practices and when the obsession with sensational, negative news coverage is at an all-time high.
The moment Arianna heard about the research Shawn and I had been doing at the IAPR to test the impacts of Transformative Journalism on everything from mood to cognitive ability to business outcomes, she called the editorial director of the Huffington Post, Danny Shea, to race over to her place to join us for the discussion. Danny is the kind of person who is three steps ahead in a conversation, seeing the implications and cutting through the clutter to get to actionable ideas. I liked him immediately.
Together we designed a partnership between the IAPR and the Huffington Post that would create a compelling research-based argument to journalists, news executives, and advertisers on the value of supporting activating, engaging, solutions-focused journalism. The results of studies will be available to the public (check out BroadcastingHappiness.com), so everyone can see if watching positive news stories before going to work improves sales and customer service, if watching negative news impairs cognitive abilities and creative problem solving, if watching transformative stories improves one’s athletic performance at the gym, and if educating journalism students about how to create optimism inoculates them against the cynicism pervading some of the industry. Arianna has predicted zeitgeists before, and we are fully confident she has done it again. In fact, the cultural shift has already begun—and this one has the potential to transform society in ways we have never seen before.
Ultimately, though, this book is not about me or my institute or even the power of the news media. It is about you. It is about the power we all have to ignite and create positive change. By changing the way we all communicate, we can make the people around us at work, at home, and in our communities believe that their behavior matters and therefore see a path forward. This book is about how you can be the person who consciously influences others for the better.
YOU ARE A BROADCASTER
Since leaving my anchor chair, I have come to three main conclusions, gleaned from all the research and the work we have done at organizations around the globe:
1. The vision of reality we see and share changes other people and can move them from paralysis to activation. The stories we tell about the world predict whether we believe that happiness is a choice and whether we’ll take action to create happiness—or stay stagnant, inert, and powerless. Our stories are a reflection of our mindset or outlook on a situation and stem from the way we synthesize the facts we gather from the world around us. Positive, optimistic, solution-focused stories, even if they start in the midst of challenging circumstances, fuel hope and inspire others to believe that change is possible and that our behavior matters. Changing our story from one of paralysis to activation amplifies our power to inspire other people and ignite positive change.
2. Our stories are predictive not only of happiness but also of business, educational, and health outcomes, including engagement, intelligence, energy, and profitability. New research from the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience shows that small shifts in the way we communicate internally and with others can create big ripple effects on business outcomes, including 31 percent higher productivity,3 25 percent greater performance ratings,4 37 percent higher sales,5 and 23 percent lower levels of stress.6 Using scientifically supported communication strategies to ripple out a positive mindset can increase happiness and success at work for others as well as for ourselves, instantly making us more effective leaders.
3. We are all broadcasters. We constantly broadcast information to others, even if we don’t say a word. Managers broadcast to their teams during meetings about potential new business opportunities within the industry. Team members broadcast to one another about the likelihood of success on a project. Clients broadcast to potential clients about a company’s customer service. Parents broadcast to their children about how to look at the challenges they experience at school. Even introverts broadcast their reactions to what other people are saying through their nonverbal communication. And the messages we choose to broadcast shape others’ views of the world and how they operate within it. But before we can influence others, it is crucial to see in the first place how powerful we are to do just that.
THE POWER TO INFLUENCE
MINDSET AND THE MEN
The story you hear about aging is simple. After thirty, your body degenerates as you age. You are on a trajectory toward decreased ability and attractiveness. The end.
But that story is scientifically inaccurate. It would be more accurate to say that the story you believe and tell about aging could change even something as seemingly intractable and incontrovertible as the aging process. And if we can change that, what else can we change? Let me explain more fully.
The brilliant maverick Harvard professor Dr. Ellen Langer has been designing studies for four decades that prove our mental story affects our health. In a single study Dr. Langer cracked the code and scientifically reversed signs of aging. She did not accomplish this with expensive creams or plastic surgery but simply by telling a different story about aging. This happened almost three decades ago, but it still has yet to be learned by the general public.
“Welcome to the year 1959!” Dr. Langer said in 1979, as she invited a group of seventy-five-year-old men to go on a weeklong retreat as part of a large-scale psychology experiment.7 The men had been told one thing only before coming to the retreat: They could not bring any newspapers, photographs, or books from the past twenty years of their lives. Langer and her team took these men twenty years back in time to the late fifties by refitting the retreat center with items recalling the year 1959, when these men were fifty-five years old, such as Saturday Evening Posts and Life magazines. Each man received a badge with his name on it and a photo of himself from 1959. They were told to talk only about their jobs and lives from that time period.
Langer had a daring hypothesis: The human aging process was mediated by what we tell ourselves about our life stories. And this seemingly off-the-wall study showed she was right. Langer tested the men for signs of aging before and after the week, and the results were mind-blowing. After one week of reliving life in their mid-fifties, the men showed, on average, statistically significant improvements in strength, posture, flexibility, memory, and intelligence. Even more incredible, the men’s eyesight improved by an average of 10 percent! Even naive raters—people who had never met the men—viewed pictures of the men at week’s end and judged them as looking an average of three years younger.
For more information on this incredible study, Dr. Langer has a fantastic book called Counterclockwise, which shows over and over that our perceptions of the world around us—our personal beliefs and the stories we tell ourselves—drive our health.
This study is one of many in a burgeoning field of research that shows how changing our mindset can improve not only our bodies but also our sense of humor, intelligence, athletic ability, sales prowess, and energy. These elderly men had slowed or reversed many of the effects of aging after adopting a different mental outlook for just one week. Imagine the impact that practicing an energetic, youthful, and wise mindset today could have on your life as you break from the normal expectations for your age. The study successfully shows that we can live healthier, happier, and longer lives simply by thinking differently—in this case revitalized with youth and happiness.
Stop for a moment to think about how much Langer’s research changes everything. Studies show that a change in story and mindset—thinking of yourself as a confident person—can enable people to perceive you as having more confidence.
Social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School Amy Cuddy has found that by simply looking the part, by using a “high-power pose” to tell a nonverbal story for two minutes, you can drop your levels of the stress hormone cortisol by about 25 percent and raise levels of testosterone by 20 percent.8 Additionally, naive raters will, on average, view you as better performing and more likely to be hired.9 If you mentally conceive of yourself as grateful, you might see more miracles in your life as your brain scans the environment for things to be grateful for. If you see yourself as an agent of change, you increase your power to create social influence. Mindset, it turns out, is the key to broadcasting a positive message to the world. And if you help others to see that positive change is possible, empowered action becomes the logical next step.
THE PRESIDENT WHO HATED HAPPINESS
The first time he heard about the research on happiness and its link to success, he called it “fluff.” But very quickly Gary Baker, president of Nationwide Brokerage Solutions, formerly Insurance Intermediaries Inc. (III), a Nationwide company, changed his story. And his new story tripled his company’s revenues from three hundred fifty million to more than a billion dollars and serves as a case study for other companies around the world, including Google, US Foods, and T-Mobile.
Using happiness research was a big change for Baker’s wholly owned subsidiary of Nationwide Insurance. His company had fallen into the same trap that ensnares much of corporate America: “If you are having fun or enjoying your work, you must not be working hard enough. Hit your numbers and then we’ll all be happy.” This societal norm, or “social script,” has created internal conflict at work for many of us because it goes against our nature. Science has shown that when we are filled with positive emotions, our brains actually work much better and our results improve.10 Instinctively we may know that the negative social script puts us at odds with our most human instincts—and that creates stress and an epidemic of disengagement. But because the desire to conform is incredibly strong, most of us give in and slowly disengage from our work too.
In 2010, our team at GoodThink, in partnership with the International Thought Leaders Network (ITLN), developed a positive psychology–based workshop called The Orange Frog and began a massive rollout at Nationwide. The aim of the program, based on a business parable about an orange frog named Spark, was to help the organization confront and rewrite social scripts that were not serving success, and provide a narrative pathway for people to reach a more positive mindset, attain higher levels of optimism, and deepen social connections. Through the stories of the various frogs in the parable, employees learn the best practices of resilient leaders, become more adaptive, and develop a capacity to “see” more opportunities, which all lead to better business outcomes. Together with ITLN, we trained thousands of employees at Nationwide how to put the latest happiness research into practice to achieve tangible business results, and it didn’t take long before Baker and his team saw the effects.
Baker, while initially against “fluffy” happiness research, is a man driven by data and results. When he saw his company’s revenues triple after the Orange Frog training and the largest improvement in engagement scores across all of Nationwide Insurance, he changed his story. He also changed the walls in his office, painting the entire call center bright orange. The once somber cubicles are now scattered with orange plush frogs, and hanging around the offices are large framed pictures of employees working at soup kitchens wearing bright orange shirts. Employees are very enthusiastic about “being orange.” They know broadcasting happiness can fuel their success.
The changes did not stop there. Now at the Nationwide Sales Academy, as salespeople are initiated, they are taught a story that is different from the usual corporate social script: Happiness leads to sales, not the other way around. With permission to broadcast happiness, many other leaders in the company changed their stories and practices as well, including Nationwide Insurance COO Mark Pizzi.
For years, when Pizzi entered his Columbus office he often would think about or write down reasons he was grateful for his job and life. But now that publicly practicing happiness is central to the company’s approach, he also occasionally gets on Yammer (Nationwide’s internal social media) to broadcast his gratitudes to the company’s employees. His hope is that practicing gratitude will inspire others to adopt a similar positive habit.
“I have to work at it; I am no different than anyone else,” Pizzi explains. “The boldness with which we act to rebuild people’s lives, and our business results, ties in to how we think. We want to embed positivity into Nationwide’s DNA.”
The leaders at Nationwide accomplished this by reassessing the stories they broadcast to employees and rewriting the ones that work against their individual and collective success.
I often share these stories and other business cases in the talks I give at companies around the world, and invariably someone asks the question that is on the minds of many in the room: “These people are leaders of big organizations. Of course they can influence others. But what about me, or my colleagues, who don’t lead teams? I mean, really, what could we possibly do?” It’s a fair question, which has popped up so many times that, eventually, I began addressing it before it was posed. The “I’m just a [insert title here]” is another example of a social script that works against us. It’s a story that says you are powerless. It’s a story that is false. More accurately, it is a story that does not have to remain true.
Change your story, change your power. I have seen countless examples of how you don’t need to be in a traditional position of power to broadcast happiness and be successful at sparking positive change.
You can transform the way people think about work, and create both business and social change, no matter what level of the organization you’re at. Numerous examples are shared throughout this book. As a matter of fact, of the case studies described herein, the lion’s share do not feature those in the C-suite but rather normal people like you and me. Even at Nationwide, the person who actually had the biggest ripple effect was “Sparkette,” a female employee in Learning and Development who, with the help of one of those orange plush frogs, was able to get a positive story to go viral in less than thirty seconds. Her story will come later on. But first, let’s learn about a woman on a mission to shift the story being told about her neighborhood. It was the same community I mentioned at the beginning of this book.
REWRITING A BAD REP
Thinking about the amount of crime in Englewood overwhelmed me. For years, the vast majority of the stories told about this Southside Chicago neighborhood have been crime-related. A quick Google search of “Englewood Chicago” produces a plethora of articles about guns and murder, including a website that tracks homicides by block. And that can leave anyone feeling like a revival of this once-blossoming neighborhood would be impossible . . . so why try?
Rashanah Baldwin knew there was another story to tell about her community. I got to know her during her internship at FOX News Chicago. She shadowed me to learn how to conduct interviews and write scripts—but through that process I learned from her as well, especially about the value of telling often-untold inspiring stories from forgotten parts of the city. She already knew at the time that even though she was “just a girl from the ’hood,” she wanted to work on rewriting the stories people were telling about it. Her hope was to motivate fellow residents and government officials to believe in her neighborhood and make a greater investment in it. Baldwin said, “I’m trying to convince people that there is hope here and [that] it is a place where you can raise a family.”11
On a trip to Chicago in 2014, I saw Baldwin smiling back at me from the front page of the Chicago Tribune. She was featured for her work spreading positive stories about Englewood. The article was about “What’s Good in Englewood,” a media campaign she began as a way to tell some of Englewood’s best stories. Baldwin has her own radio program, appears on TV segments, and uses the hashtag #goodinenglewood on social media to broadcast positive reports, including high school students who were awarded Gates Millennium Scholarships, gun buyback programs that work, and job-training classes offered by the community’s urban farm organization. And these days she doesn’t have to work as hard to uncover the positive news; it finds her. Community members use social media to connect with her about inspiring stories they hear from friends and family. Rashanah Baldwin is broadcasting a different side of Englewood, and changing people’s minds in the process.
More recently, the movement has gone national. The positive stories have spread far beyond the three square miles of the neighborhood; her efforts were featured in the Huffington Post. Even better, when you search “Englewood Chicago” on Google now, on the first page of results among the stories of crime, is a link above the fold that leads to positive stories about the neighborhood.12
If Baldwin had stopped at “I’m just . . .” she would never have had the kind of mindset that fueled her to tell the story no one is telling. If she had worried that no one would care about these stories because positive news isn’t sexy, she would not have started #goodinenglewood. And if she had thought, “Even if I did do this, no one will get involved in the movement,” she would have never seen its potential. But Rashanah Baldwin is a positive broadcaster, and she brought great change—and happiness—to her community.
THE THREE GREATEST PREDICTORS OF SUCCESS
Behind these three seemingly disparate examples are the keys to creating positive growth in every domain of life gleaned from our research in positive psychology. After working with more than one-third of the Fortune 100, we have isolated the three greatest predictors of success at work: work optimism, positive engagement, and support provision. We have since developed a thirty-item metric called the Success Scale, which measures how your brain processes your work and to what degree you are a positive broadcaster.
And excitingly, you can test yourself on these predictors—right now. Before reading the next section, we invite you to take the assessment on our website for free at BroadcastingHappiness.com (use the code “ichoosehappiness”). It will inform your understanding of the rest of the book, so I encourage you to take a few minutes to try it. You’ll receive your personal scores and an interpretive report.
Taken together the results of these measures are amazingly accurate predictors of success at work, and knowing these can give you a strong indication of how someone will perform. As a matter of fact, our research has shown that together these measures from the Success Scale account for as much as 75 percent of job successes. (So, considering that employees are often hired based on grades and technical skills, perhaps it’s time to rethink that formula.)
WORK OPTIMISM: “GOOD THINGS HAPPEN”
On the Success Scale, “work optimism” measures where you devote your mental resources—that is, if you’re focused more on the paralyzing or energizing aspects of work—and how strongly you believe good things will happen, which includes not only your own successes but also those of your colleagues and your organization. As a Work Optimist, you are five times less likely to burn out than a pessimist and three times more likely to be highly engaged in your jobs. You are also significantly more likely to get along with coworkers. If you score in the top quartile as a Visionary Work Optimist, compared to normal Work Optimists, you’re two times as likely to be highly engaged at work and three times as likely to be extremely satisfied with your jobs.
Research from the field of positive psychology shows that when we are rationally optimistic, we are more successful at work. At our research institute we call this the “happiness advantage,” and any of you who have read Shawn Achor’s book of the same title will know all the ways that happiness fuels success. In short, when we are able to take a realistic assessment of the present moment while maintaining a belief that our behavior matters in the face of challenges, we achieve better results at whatever we are doing. For instance, doctors who are positive-minded come up with the correct diagnosis 19 percent faster than doctors who are neutral.13 In a large-scale experiment done at MetLife, optimistic salespeople outsold their pessimistic counterparts by 37 percent.14 For managers, this study single-handedly demonstrates the importance of including optimism at or near the top of the list of job requirements when hiring.
Other studies have shown that if you think of a happy memory ahead of standardized testing, you’ll do better. Happiness and positivity even influence our health and longevity. In short, cultivate happiness and you’re cultivating success at the same time. Positive broadcasters do that for themselves and others.
POSITIVE ENGAGEMENT: “IN THE FACE OF CHALLENGES, I CAN SUCCEED”
Positive engagement measures your response in the face of stressful situations. In other words, this measures your story about stress. Those considered Engagement Masters on the Success Scale, who fall into the top quartile, perceive and broadcast the idea that stress is “a challenge as opposed to a threat,” and their brains become activated in the face of setbacks. As an Engagement Master, you are fifteen times less likely to burn out than those workers who feel helpless and six times more likely to be highly engaged with your work. You are two times as likely as all others to perform your assigned duties well, three times more likely than all others to be satisfied with your jobs, and three times more likely than all others to contribute to the company.
In a study done at UBS, a global financial services firm, researchers from our institute and from Yale University found that with a simple three-hour training, stressed-out managers could change the story and learn a new way to deal with stressful situations—and the effects were nothing short of incredible.15 The leaders who went through a Rethinking Stress training, which taught them how to change their mindset about stress, experienced a 23 percent drop in stress-related symptoms, like headaches, backaches, and fatigue, as compared to the control group. And that drop occurred during the busiest tax season to date! Positive broadcasters understand how to rethink stresses in their own lives and broadcast that engaged mindset to others so that they too believe they can succeed in the face of challenges.
SUPPORT PROVISION: “I INVEST IN THE SUCCESS OF OTHERS”
Support provision on the Success Scale measures how much support you provide to others at work. It may sound counterintuitive—in order to be successful, shouldn’t you be the one receiving support? Interestingly, knowing how much you give instead of receive is much more predictive of your success at work. This metric assesses how likely you are to step in to help others when they may be falling behind in their work or need a listening ear. As a Work Altruist, that is, those who score in the top quartile for the support provision, you are five times less likely to burn out than those in the bottom quartile. You are much more engaged at work and 65 percent of you can expect a promotion in the next year! These numbers are the scientific proof that when you give, you get.
Social support is the greatest predictor of happiness that exists. For many people, having a handful of meaningful relationships is the surest path to happiness. Creating an environment at work that supports a positive, bridge-building culture drives success in a way that is infectious and cumulative. Positive broadcasters are able to nurture cultures at the office that support individual and team success and cause positive behaviors to go viral, creating an upward spiral of success.
THE SEVEN KEYS TO BEING A TRANSFORMATIONAL BROADCASTER
Anyone can become a broadcaster and learn how to communicate in a way that motivates others and produces results. Based on the latest research from the fields of positive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience, and my extensive media training, I have developed the following seven practical strategies to help you become a positive broadcaster.
This book is organized around the three principles outlined above. Work optimism, positive engagement, and support provision are the leverage points you can use to influence the mindset and behavior of other people. Move the needle in any of the following three domains and you’ll end up impacting individual and team success rates. Many of the examples presented in the following chapters are pulled from the business world, but we’ll also look at how to apply the research at school and home to deepen our most important relationships and create environments that promote success.
In Part I: Capitalize on Positivity, you’ll learn how to develop and leverage an optimistic mindset in yourself and others to fuel success. By starting with power leads, I’ll teach you how to effectively prime the brain for higher levels of performance and set the social script of your business relationships to positive in order to raise business outcomes, including engagement, productivity, and profitability. In the chapter on repeating success stories to create flash memories, I’ll share with you how to use past wins as fuel for future successes. You’ll learn how to identify and communicate to colleagues about previous accomplishments in a way that drives high performance moving forward. In the chapter on leading questions, I’ll introduce you to the most effective ways to use questions to drive positive thinking. In my institute’s work with our clients, we have seen that when business leaders employ these simple techniques, not only does morale improve but a whole host of business metrics do as well.
In Part II: Overcome Stress and Negativity, you’ll learn how to boost positive engagement in others by facing stress and negativity the right way. In the chapter on how to fact-check, I’ll tell you how to help others rethink stressful situations and identify the parts of their reality that are energizing in order to move their brain from paralysis to activation. When faced with negative people, I’ll show you that one of the scientifically proven strongest ways to handle them is by engaging in a strategic retreat. In that chapter, you’ll learn how to make a strategic retreat and then create and execute a victorious reentry plan that will lessen their destructive gravitational field at the office. And in the chapter on the four Cs, you’ll learn how to deliver bad news better. If done right, bad news can actually create bonds and a deeper sense of connection.
In Part III: Create a Positive Ripple Effect, you’ll become a master at creating an environment infused with high levels of support provision from everyone, in which positive habits and behaviors can organically spread. In the final chapter, I’ll explain how you can make a positive message go viral. You’ll learn how to spread contagious optimism, spur positive behavioral changes, and shift the culture at work or home from negative or neutral to positive.
For those of you who have ever complained that the news is too negative, the Journalist Manifesto on page 243 is a research-based case showing how the emerging business model in journalism supports the coverage of activating and engaging solution-focused news stories, and why it is a fallacy to believe that negative news sells better than positive. The manifesto reviews exactly how to engage in Transformative Journalism and why it is not only good for society but also good for business. The manifesto contains tools to report the news while simultaneously making this world a better place by engaging with decision makers and the public to create positive action. I encourage you to read and share the Journalist Manifesto with the TV, radio, and digital journalists and outlets that you would like to see cover the news more positively. And more importantly, please share it with reporters, bloggers, and news organizations already engaging in Transformative Journalism, so they fully understand the scientific reasons behind why what they are doing is right and why now is the time to tell even more of those stories. Transformative Journalism is the key to transforming society at large. You can be the broadcaster to point them toward this new model.
While the news media as a whole might not yet be ready to make the great shift, I think we—individuals and organizations—need not wait. As broadcasters ourselves, we can use the same strategies in our own lives to create upward spirals of positive change. Although you might already be broadcasting happiness to some degree, there is always more that can be done, and more importantly, you can activate others to boost their own signals.
The loving, activated response of the community in Englewood, Chicago, during the aftermath of tragedy eventually changed the entire trajectory and story of my life. I believe wholeheartedly that the research and stories in this book can do the same for you. I hope this book will empower you to broadcast happiness and help change the trajectory of the people around you, activating them and showing them that happiness can be a choice. Once we have a positive message, we need to find a way to crank the power to full. That is why I wrote this book, and that is why you are crucial. The world needs more people broadcasting happiness.