Create an environment that supports well-being

Description of the video:

Kelley faculty presenter: Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Power of Positive Psychology. We are now in our final week where we will be talking about the Ripple Effect. So today's agenda, we'll briefly cover the review, the happiness habits that we've covered so far. We'll talk about programming our environment for success as we're looking to implement these habits into our lives. We'll look at the Ripple Effect, which is basically how the changes we make personally ripple out to those around us. And then we'll talk about next steps. So this is a list that you've seen before, just putting it up here as a reminder of all the things that we know make us happy and a reminder that the top three bullets on the left are the interventions that have been proven to make us happiest. So these habits are easy. Maybe, maybe simple is a better word. But instead they're simple in theory, but they can be hard to implement. And Shawn Achor talks about how common sense is not common action. And he gives the example of, we know that we should sleep eight hours and I, we should eat well, we should exercise every day, but we don't always do that. He also says that without action, knowledge is meaningless. And I talk with my students in this course about this quite a bit because we can have fun talking about positive psychology for an hour and a half every week during class. But unless they actually put their knowledge to work, they won't see their happiness increase. And then Dr. Laurie Santos in her course says it's one thing to know what to do. It's another to do what you know. So that's what this portion of this week is going to be about, is how to implement what we now know will increase our happiness. So Shawn Achor talks about the 20 second rule and principle number six in his book. And the idea here is that removing barrier - The idea is how can we remove barriers to increase our positive psychology and our happiness habits. And it's not about willpower. We all use willpower a lot. And the problem with willpower is that it weakens the more you use it. Multiple studies have been done where participants have been given two sequential tasks, both involving willpower. They tend to do really well on the first one, but by the time they get to the second one, they performed significantly worse. Using our willpower tires us out. And after we've used it for awhile, it makes it harder to keep using it. And so we're using willpower all the time to sit in a long meeting to work on a difficult spreadsheet or a database to create an hour-long presentation from scratch. All of this requires willpower and it makes us tired and sometimes we seek out the easiest path or the path of least resistance. And Shawn talks about how we can have the most exciting plans for the weekend. But come Saturday morning, we sit down on the couch and the remote is right there, our phone is right there and you can just, it's an easy reach and it just it can kinda suck us in, if you well. It's, while those things are, are easier, they don't give us the amount of joy that we spend on them. And it explains why we can get sucked into TV, Netflix, social media. This path of least resistance. We can get sucked into those and they only give us about 30 minutes of enjoyment, And then that 30 minutes goes down. There was a study of Amer- of American teenagers done about their habits of TV watching vs, and the enjoyment they get from that versus the enjoyment they get from other things. And teenagers were 2.5 more times likely to have elevated enjoyment when they're doing a, have a, sorry, doing a hobby over watching television. They were three times happier doing a sport than they were while watching television. But they watched four times as many hours of TV than they do doing these other things. And so Shawn asked why? Why is that? And he said that we are naturally drawn to things that are easy, convenient, and habitual. So the important thing here is that we need to program our lives so that these happiness habits are easy. So that brings us to the 20-second rule. Now, the 20-second rule was something that was born out of Shawn trying to learn how to play the guitar. And he followed the wisdom of it takes 21 days to create a habit. And so he created a spreadsheet. So he's going to practice guitar every day for 21 days. And at the end of 21 days he had four check marks. And so he hypothesized that the reason why that didn't work for him is that the guitar was put away in the closet. And so he brought it out of the closet and put it next to the couch. And thus saving himself 20 seconds to program, which was basically he was programming his environment. so that these habits encounter  the least resistance. So he would have no resistance. There would be no reason for him to not pick up that guitar and play. So lowering the barrier to change makes that change easier. So as we're looking at these habits, if we're looking at, we want to write in our gratitude journal, make sure that we have our gratitude journal next to our bed with a nice pen.  Or next to our computer and out so we can see it. If we're going to do it in the morning. If we want to meditate, make sure that the meditation app is right on that main screen of our phone. If we want to exercise people who've said to sleep in your workout clothes, trying to make it as easy as possible to implement these new habits will greatly increase your chance of actually doing them. You want to raise the barrier for things you want to avoid. So the best weapon against bad habits is to make them harder to do. So if you're trying to reduce your social media time, consider deleting the app off your phone and only checking when you're on your computer. Maybe bury the app further down. So you have to flip through a bunch of screens to get to, to get to that social media. Maybe put time limits on it so your phone will shut it off at how, however many minutes you set and stick to that. Achor talked about how he took out the batteries from his remote control for his television because he was watching too much television. They put the batteries across the house and said when he went to sit down on the couch, he couldn't turn on the TV and at first he found it really annoying. But he had programmed his environment so that it was easy to do the other things that he wanted to do. So he put a book next to himself on the couch that he wanted to read. He had the guitar right next to him. He had his laptop within easy reach so he could write his book. So raising the barriers on the stuff you want to avoid and making it easier to do the stuff you want to increase is, is key. He talks lots more about creating rules to make habits stick. And by the way, this 20-seconf rule, he does acknowledge that some things will take less than 20 seconds. Sometimes things will take more than 20 seconds. The idea is just to program your environment for success. And he does talk a lot about creating rules to make habits stick, which is great if you're good about following rules you set. But not all of us are me included. So that brings us to a new book that I came across, well new to me, called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And this book was the first pick of the year for the IU Alumni Association leadership book club. And so I, I read over the synopsis. It looked really interesting. I picked it up. I will be honest, I'm not very far into it, but I've read enough that it's pretty intriguing. And I think it would work well for people like me and some of you out there for whom just setting rules in our lives that doesn't really make things stick for us. So the idea of atomic habits, in my opinion, is it's a values-based approach. And James talks about how it's a simple two-step process. Of course, then he goes on for a couple of hundred pages explaining that simple two-page pro - two-step process. But the first step is to decide the type of person you want to be based on your values and principles. So it's not about results. It's about who you decide that you are. And then you prove it to yourself with small wins are small habits. So you're deciding on who you are and then you make your decisions about what you do in life based on who you believe that you are. So starting from this direction makes habit change less about rules that you set, and more about making choices in concurrence with who you believe that you are. So the example he gives is it was actually about playing an instrument. And he said, if you decide that you want to be a musician, you make that a value and you make that who you are. So I am a musician, so every time I practice my instrument, I'm a musician. And when I go to decide am I going to practice today? I fall back on I'm a musician. Of course I'm going to practice today. So you decide your identity. Based on what you value and then you prove it to yourself based on your actions. So habits are not about attaining something, they're about becoming something. I was already becoming someone. So when we look at it from a positive psychology perspective - now this book is not about positive psychologists, is purely about habits and wildlife change - but looking at it from a positive psychology perspective, if I want to look at who I am as a person, perhaps I want to say I am a happy person. And based on what we know from positive psychology, we know that happy people meditate, they exercise, they have good social connections. They express gratitude. They carry a, or they write it in a gratitude journal. So if we know that that's what a happy person does as we're making our decisions each day, what we are going to do, it will make it easier for us to decide to do those things. He also talks about pretty early on in the book about how habits are the compound interests of self-improvement. And this was pretty interesting to me because he would, he used exercise and eating right as, as an example. And we all know, well, I guess we all don't know, but if you work out each week, I guess we do all know it. If you work out for a few times in one week, you don't see a huge effect in that one week. You might see the scale move a little bit, but where you see that happen is in the long-term. So if you work out a few times a week for a year, that compound interest of that, that working out habit is it could be incredible. And it works on the negative side too. So if you eat poorly a few times this week, you won't see a big effect on your health. But if you do that for an entire year, you're going to see a huge effect on your health. So if we take that to positive psychology, if we know that writing in our gratitude journal increases happiness and we do it for a day or two It boosts our happiness for a little bit. But if we really want to see a huge change on our happiness, we need to do that for a long period of time. So I thought that was pretty interesting habits or the compound interest and self-improvement. Thinking about it that way and thinking about the small changes that we can make and how that can make a big effect later on is really interesting. And then finally, a large part of the book is about focusing on systems rather than goals. And this is something I've heard for a long time. You know, you go, if you're trying to lose weight, set a goal that I'm going to lose 30 pounds by such and such date, because you're not truly in control of how much weight your body loses when you are in control of, is you eat, and how often you exercise and what you do while you're exercising. So focusing on the systems and I see the, the, these happiness habits as our system. So focusing on those symptoms, I'm sorry, focusing on those systems is how we will, we will we get there to being, to being happier. Alright, so finally, the Ripple Effect. This comes from the last chapter in The Happiness Advantage. And it focuses on the seven principles of the happiness advantage. We haven't talked about those in this, in this program because I focused more on just the positive psychology research and the science. Basically, the idea is that utilizing the science of positive psychology ripples out to others who surround us. And Shawn talks about how human behavior is contagious. And it comes from the mirror neurons in our brain, which is really fascinating, but we don't really have time to get into it. But if you, if you think about it, if you hang around happy people, you tend to be happier. If you hang around someone who's grumpy or irritable or mad, you take on that, you can take on those feelings. So our habits, our attitudes, our actions, affects those that are around us. And there was a book written in, I believe, 2009 called Connected that found that our influence reaches out three degrees. So we influence our friends, our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. So the things that we do ripple out to three degrees that they estimate could be up to 1,000 people. So happiness is contagious. If you think about watching a funny movie. If you're doing it in a movie theatre, you're going to laugh more than if you're doing it alone on Netflix. I find that to be true here. If I'm watching a funny movie with my husband and we laugh together and it's a lot more fun than if I watching the same funny movie by myself. It's the reason why it, shows, used to use laugh tracks because when you hear other people laugh, it makes you laugh. Some people have more of an influence than others and, and Sean was talking about this in, in the, the Ripple Effect chapter. That some of us are more open with our emotions. Some of us have stronger social connections. Happiness spreads among co-workers. Yeah, we, we know what happiness does. It makes us more creative, more efficient, more productive. We work at a higher level. And the same is especially true if the team leader is using these happiness practices. And the happiness of the team leader can infect the whole team. And Shawn talks about towards the very end, the last couple of pages in the book, he gives an example and forgive me, I'm going to rely heavily on my notes on this because I want to make sure I get it right. But he talks about a leader who chooses to do a gratitude journal every night. By doing that every night, that leader then starts the morning meeting by being able to spot more opportunities to be positive. He praises the work of one of its employees, and expresses gratitude for the work of one of his employees. That employee feels positive emotions from that. That allows them to think more creatively, more efficiently. They feel like they've achieved something and they have the confidence to go after something bigger. It builds the relationship. It makes the relationship stronger between the leader and the employee. And the rest of the employees. Seeing this happen increases the social connectedness of the group and the commitment of the group. And it ensures that once everybody sees that you're looking at how everything ripples out, it ensures everyone will spread positivity to their own employees and so on. Times 1,000. And it's all because one person decided to keep a gratitude journal. That is what he calls the Ripple Effect. So where do we go from here? We are to the end of our final installment. I have a few thoughts for you. The first is, if you are a writ- a paper planner person, the Panda Planner people have come out - it's kind of washed out, but this is, I have in my hand what you see there on the screen. And this is a planner based on both positive psychology and the VIA character strengths survey that you talk - that you took. And it's actually called the VIA Panda Planner. And it's your usual kind of planner. It's got your schedule and your tasks and everything. But it goes beyond that. And it you have a morning routine where you actually write out I'm grateful for these things. I'm excited about these things. You write a strength affirmation that relates to your character strengths. You set your priorities for the day and then you list what strengths that you will use to achieve those priorities. And then at the end of the day, you list out your wins for the day. And then you also look at you, you list a strength that you are, you appreciated in others and what happened. This is kind of cool. And Panda Planners also worked with the Rocket book if anybody uses that. Now I'm not a 100% sure the VIA works with that, but I do know that some of the Panda Planners work with Rocket. But you can also go back to what we learned was successful for the KPMG managers back after the global, the global collapse in 2008. And these items I believe what we totaled up, took about 20 minutes and these were proven to increase their happiness during an incredibly stressful time for four months and beyond. So you could take these and make these your plan. Finally, if I were to, I'll give you my favorite tasks of things you might consider. I would give you, suggest that you do these. Of course, continue with your gratitude journal. Use your character strengths each day. Do regular gratitude visit. So remember those are the three interventions proven to boost your happiness the most. I would suggest that if you use social media decrease to 30 minutes a day or less. And then of course, keep up your meditation practice because not only does it make you happier, we saw all of the benefits and hopefully you read the article that we posted in the resources about the benefits to your brain of, of meditating. Down in the bottom corner, there are the other happiness habits that we've talked about. Feel free to use the ones that, that meant the most for you, to you as you went through this. But the biggest, don't forget the biggest bang for your buck are the first three there. So that's all I have for you today. And for this program. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've benefited from it. And I hope you found it useful. Take care.