Happiness Advantage author offers tips on positivity

When Shawn Achor was tasked with trying to make tax auditors happy at their jobs, he was working with a group of people trained to look for mistakes. One man went so far as to make a spreadsheet of mistakes his wife makes because that’s how his job made his brain think. He wasn’t trained to praise or recognize anything positive, says Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential, says during his keynote speech at the National Association of Landscape Professionals Elevate event in Charlotte.

“The lens to which you view this work, predicts what happens next,” he says. If you are trained to always look for threats, “that’s the easiest thing for us to do.”

Dental hygiene and happiness. Achor says there is a thought in academia that “genes plus your environment predicts human potential.” Achor uses the example of brushing your teeth, to show that’s not the case, and you can change whether you are happy or not.

“We all have genes for teeth that rot out by age 15 in a high-sugar environment,” he says. “And yet if we get 100% of the people in this room to do the same habit for 45 seconds a day – brush your teeth – what it is to be human changes dramatically from your genes and your environment.

“Every time you brush your teeth, you're saying, I can beat my genes and my environment," he adds. "But as soon as we start to talk about happiness, we forget that if you don't think you can change your genes and your environment, stop brushing your teeth. But what we found is we can make massive changes.”

Train the brain. Achor thought he had it all figured out while working with a credit card company client during the banking crisis. Before the market opened, he had the employees write down three things they are grateful for.

“Nothing happened,” he says. “It turns out it doesn't matter what you're grateful for. What matters is the scanning. There's a part of your brain that scans your world for things you're grateful for that never activates.”

Achor says that when you are asked what you are grateful for and you answer "my work," "my family" and "my health," that activates a different part of the brain.

“The part of our brain we're trying to activate is the part that's scanning constantly – that's getting bombarded by our phones and our watches for the negative,” he says.

Achor found it would make you happier taking 45 seconds to activate that part of the brain to scan for three new things you are grateful for that happened in the past 24 hours.

“By day 21, you have 63 unique things you're grateful for, but that is not the point of it,” he says. “The point of it is, somewhere in the 21 days, your brain takes a short-cut and it basically builds a background app that passively scans your world for the pen pricks of the good. And when it does that, without doing anything, your brain starts processing the bits of meaning in your life.”

Achor found that even people who were pessimists into their 70s did this for 45 seconds a day, saw improvements by day 22.

“They were testing as optimist on average,” he says. “You're not supposed to change those. Those are the genetic ones. You can't touch those. You're born a pessimist, die pessimist, end of story. That's half the story.

“You were born with genes that predispose you to optimism vs pessimism. For some of you, happiness is way easier than it's for the rest of us. But that's the starting block. And from there, great movement is possible.  We know that that's what depression is. Depression is a movement from your previous set point to a lower one. But if you can lower, we can raise it, and we can raise it if you give us 45 seconds a day.”

Send praise. Achor also suggested writing a two-minute text message or email praising or thanking a person in your life once a day for 21 days.

“If you do it for, for three days in a row, we can see it on brain scans that your brains get addicted to this,” he says.

But Achor says people tend to stop on day 8 because they realize they don’t have many more people to message. That’s when you have to scan again.

“What you're scanning for are the weak types,” he says. “Who is that first grade teacher that transformed your kids' life? You don't talk to them anymore because your kid's in seventh grade. Who is that great coach who inspired you or your kids? Who is that person who cheers for her daughter as much as she cheers for your daughter on the same team?

“And you start to realize there's all these weak ties. Your brain doesn't know that and knows them as they're weak. When I ask you about social connections, your brain eliminates them. But if you wrote a two-minute text message or email praising them, they light up as a node of meaning on your mental map of social connection to your brain.”

“And what we found is if you actually did this habit for 21 days in a row and wrote to these weak ties, it turns out on day 22, your social connection score rises to the top 15% of people worldwide without adding a single person to your life," he says.

From a business perspective, Achor says they tried a similar experiment at LinkedIn. Achor found when employees received three touch points of praise over a six-month, retention rose from 80% to 94%.

Achor says he got excited because if you go one step deeper, if someone receives three touch points of praise, they doubled the amount of praise that they were giving back.

“It changes how they think this world works,” he says. “As a result of that, it starts creating changes that exist beyond our business outcomes to changing the cultures we deliver. We think how can we possibly change our mindset of the people around us. What we know is there are very simple ways to do this.

"You just actually have to do them. It's routinizing. Gratitude is routinizing. Grace is doing things like exercise or meditation or journaling about positive experiences or the ones we can't study because they're different for everyone. It's going on walks with your pets or it's going water skiing or it is playing chess or it's playing pickleball," Achor adds. "What we're looking for is not just moments of pleasure. We're looking for a routine that keeps your brain building that mental immune system to stop the negative from coming in.”

The author is editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine.