Description of the video:
Kelley faculty presenter: Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC
Hello and welcome to a new professional development and lifelong learning opportunity presented by the Kelley School of Business Alumni Association: The Power of Positive Psychology, New Habits for Work and Life. My name is Allison DeWitt, director of alumni engagement at the Kelley School of Business. We are very excited to bring you this new six part series which allows you to learn about and practice techniques related to positive psychology on your own time. Our faculty presenter for this series, Kelley School of Business Senior Lecturer, Nichole Alspaugh Williams is a highly skilled and sought after presenter on this material, as well as a Kelley and Indiana University alumna. Her past professional experience includes work in career development, at IU's Career Development Center and at the IU Alumni Association. In 2013, she returned to Kelley in a faculty role where she helped design and still teaches Kelley Compass. Nichole is a licensed mental health counselor and national certified counselor. Her interest in the science of positive psychology led to her teaching an extremely popular course among Kelley students on the topic, and now is the focus of this new series for our alumni. We hope you enjoy and find as much value in participating in the series as we did in creating it. Thanks Allison. I am so excited to take everyone through this journey into positive psychology where over the next six weeks we will learn how to make small changes in our lives that can result in a greater quality of life both at home and at work. But first I wanted to take just a minute to talk about how I became interested in positive psychology. It was a few summers ago when we started seeing a lot - and you all may have seen it as well - about a class that was offered at Yale on the science of happiness. It was created and taught by Dr. Laurie Santos, and more than a quarter of the Yale student population signed up. It was so popular that she ended up creating a course on Coursera, a similar course, which is where I took my first class in positive psychology. I was intrigued. I was hooked. I wanted to learn more. I took further classes. But most importantly, I was interested in trying to figure out how I could bring this content to our Kelley students. And so in the spring of 2019, I offered our first-class in positive psychology, which was aimed at our - wasn't aimed at - our students in the KLLC took that class. That was one of their options that they could take. And I taught it in spring of 2019 and spring of 2020. And out of all the students that have taken the class so far, 100% of them would recommend the class to other Kelley students, which is great. But the thing that I'm most impressed with, and we'll talk about it in a little bit, is how the student's average happiness scores increased over the, the time of the class. And by the way, I am teaching it two more times this semester. So I'll have even more data come in, come May. But that was, that was really exciting to see. Like I said, we'll talk a little bit more about it here in a second. Let me bring up my PowerPoint, sorry about that. So as Allison said a couple of minutes ago, the topic of our workshop here is the Power of Positive Psychology, New Habits for Work and Life. And because I think a few of you may have slept or, since you signed up, or forgotten what you signed up for I want to just briefly talk about each of the successes that we have coming up. So today we're going to talk about an intra, Intro, an introduction to Positive Psychology. And we'll talk a little bit about employee stress in the workplace. Next week we will talk about how companies, how different companies are helping employees with their mental wellness by helping them with their stress management and helping them with, with ways to increase their happiness. Our third week, we will talk about managing stress on a personal level. So we will talk about strategies and techniques you can use to help manage your, your own stress. Week four, we will talk about wanting the wrong things. Dr. Santos talks about how we as human beings are really good at wanting the wrong stuff. We're not very good at understanding what will make us happy. So we'll talk about all of those things that we are naturally pulled too, that we think will make us happy but really won't. Week five, we will dive a little bit deeper into what truly makes us happy. I'll give you a little bit of that every, every week as we go through this series. But we'll dive in deeper week five on what makes us happy. And then finally our last week, we will talk about The Ripple Effect which is something that Shawn Achor talks about in his book, The Happiness Advantage. Alright, today's agenda. We have four things on board for the time we have left. We'll talk a little bit about mental health during COVID-19. Then we will talk about how employees stress affects their workplaces. We'll then move into just a little bit of the science of happiness. And then we'll talk about what tasks I have for you next week. And that's what I was alluding to a minute ago. The tasks that I give you from week to week are the same ones that I give my students. And the class that I, that I teach is, is seven weeks. And over a seven week period, my students on average increase their happiness on a, increase their happiness by a 0.5 on a five-point scale, which in seven weeks, I think is pretty good. And several students have reported happiness increases of a point or more on a five-point scale. So I hope you will join us in these tasks because even in the short timeframe that, that our students have had in taking this class their incre- their happiness is increased pretty significant, pretty significantly. I believe I would be doing a disservice if I didn't talk a little bit about mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC reported on mental health during the pandemic. And they based it on a survey done by a University in Melbourne, Australia. And the, the basic connection here is that it's not just the disease that's causing mental health issues. It's our mitigation strategies to deal with it. It's the stay at home orders, it's quarantining itself. Isolation. That's having a huge effect on our, on our mental health. And they surveyed, the school in Melbourne, surveyed 5,400 adults and - during the last week of June and 40% of them are recorded having at least one mental health symptom. And you can see up there what they chose, they were able to choose more than one. It turns out that it's even worse for people aged 18 to 44. At least one mental health symptom was recorded by, when you're looking at people aged 18 to 24, 75% of those people reported at least one mental health symptom. When you look at people aged 25 to 44, 52% reported at least one mental health symptom during that week. When we look at the difference between 2019 and 2020, both during the second quarter, they they took into account similar surveys here. They weren't the exact same survey so they did have a little disclaimer in there, but they still compared it. So I'm, I'm sharing it with you here. But when you look at symptoms of depression between the second quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020, depression increased by three I'm sorry, four times. Depression increased by four times. And anxiety symptoms increase by three times. So, so, so COVID has had a definite effect on our mental health, which I think every one of us probably had a, had a pretty good idea of that, but it is interesting to see the numbers. So let's transition to what I call normal stress in the workplace. And I do air quotes on purpose because what's normal, right? But on the screen here is the effects of stress in the workplace. And these are pretty well know, they've been well documented, documented. There's probably no huge surprises here for you. There is one term you might not know and that is presenteeism. And presenteeism is when really stressed people come to work and they take longer breaks. Their meetings take longer because they're venting to their colleagues about what they are stressed about. They might be on social media quite a bit of the day. So presenteeism is, is a problem just like frequent absenteeism. So like I said, the majority of those things on there probably not a surprise to you. Okay, let's jump into the science of happiness, what you all have been waiting for. If I had you in person right now, I would lead a discussion on how you define success. And usually when I do that, the traditional definition of success comes out, which is something that is probably familiar to all of us, to all of you. If you work hard, then you will become successful. Once you become successful, then you'll be happy. So this is, is, These are ideas like if I land that next big client, then I'll be happy. If I get that new job with such and such company, then I'll be happy. Or one that many of us struggle with. If I can just lose those five pounds, then I will be happy. So it's basically you have to reach a goal in order to be happy. And so the traditional formula is that success is first and then happiness comes second. But the problem with this formula is that it is broken. I need a crash sound there. And why is it broken? Well it's backwards. And there's more than 30 years of research that proves it. And the thought here is, if you can do habits and work to make yourself happier, then success is going to follow more easily. So if you're happier, you're more optimistic. That's going to fuel your performance and it's going to increase and fuel your achievement. And this gives the competitive edge of what Shawn Achor called The Happiness Advantage. Many of you have probably heard of that book. Some of you may have, may have, may have read it. But it, it is a great book talking about how positive psychology interacts and affects us at work. Alright, so when we are happy, we feel more motivated, resilient, efficient, productive, creative, and basically our performance, it gets a boost, it trend, trends upwards. Okay, so we're going to transition here because we're running short on time. But I want to talk a minute about how researchers study happiness and basically what they do. Well, first of all, this is a chart that was taken directly out of Shawn Achor's TED talk which he happened to do in Bloomington. Which is kind of cool. But this is, is a chart taken directly out of his TED talk. And I don't know what the numbers are. I don't know what the axes are. When he talks about it, he says it's not important to what they are. What he is demonstrating here is that you've got an average trend line of happiness. And then up there at the very tippy top, I'm going to circle it here, I think you can see my mouse, that's an outlier. And with outliers, traditionally researchers just get rid of outliers through some sort of statistical analysis. So the outliers just go away. But, and traditional psychologist ignore those as well. What happened with happiness researchers is those people, these are the people that are flourishing. And so this is who positive psychologists study. They wanted to see why they were flourishing, why they were so much happy, happier with ever- than anybody else, than everybody else. Down here, that is where traditional psychology lives: in looking at how do we help people with their depression, their anxiety, their substance use, and looking at what kind of techniques and strategies can be used. But using those strategies only gets everybody up to that, that average, that trend line. Positive psychology takes over at that point and moves people from just an average amount of happiness up into flourishing. Okay, are you ready for your tasks for the week? So the first thing I would like you to do is take the same inventory that my students take. It's that Authentic Happiness Inventory. And this is out on the Positive Psychology Center, which is a website that is owned and the center is a part of the University of Pennsylvania. And the person that heads it up is Martin Seligman, which you may have heard of. He's considered the father of positive psychology. So when you take this, please do it before starting anything else, because we need to get a baseline of what your, your happiness score is. Once you've taken it, record your score and keep it in a safe place. After the program is over. I'll be asking you to anonymously report what your beginning and ending happiness score is. Second, I would like you to watch the happiness hamburger video and complete the model. Sounds a little silly, but it really is, is a, is a fun model. And by the way, the links for both of those tasks are on the resources in the resources area. And lastly, I would like you to keep a gratitude journal. Yes, I'm sure everybody has tried this. You might still be doing it, but give it another try this week if you've, if you've stopped doing it. I'd like you to write three things you're grateful for every morning or every night. And don't just write them down. Spend a minute or two, really thinking about each one, really feeling that gratitude. I'd also like you to take it one step further and write down one thing that upset you that day or the previous day, depending on when you're doing this and briefly journal on how might this thing that upset you be a blessing in disguise? How might you turn it to your advantage? And what could be good about it? So these are your tasks for next week. Thank you for your time. Thank you for coming and I will see you all in a week.
Introduction to Positive Psychology Video
Kelley faculty presenter: Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC
We’re pleased you’ve chosen to explore positive psychology. In this video, you’ll learn how the pandemic has affected our mental health, and how the study of positive psychology began. You'll also be encouraged to begin the first of several happiness habits you'll learn during the program. After watching the video, go deeper with these activities:
- Take the Authentic Happiness Inventory and record your score.
- Watch The Happiness Hamburger Model by Tal Ben-Shara, PhD and complete the model on your own.
- Start a gratitude journal by reflecting and writing on these prompts:
- Begin or end your day writing about three things for which you’re grateful.
- Spend one minute reflecting on each of these things.
- Write about one thing that upset you. How might this be a blessing in disguise? How may you turn it into an advantage? What could be good about it?
Interested to learn more?
This free video is proudly sponsored by the Kelley School of Business Alumni Association. We hope you find this and our other free videos and webinars useful as we navigate these challenging times together.