Happy Nation. Article by Dr. Pratik P. SURANA. Chief Mentor and Founder.
Quantum, India. Good-day happiness at work might mean: I got to the office early,
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Happy Employee = Happy Company= Happy Nation Article by Dr. Pratik P. SURANA Chief Mentor and Founder Quantum, India.
Good-day happiness at work might mean: I got to the office early, I was able to take care of backlogged paperwork that had been nagging me, I had a productive meeting, and I was able to leave in time to make it to my daughter’s school concert. Good-day happiness is about an awareness of the fortunate conditions of one’s life--where stopping to smell the roses can have measurable positive impact. Good-life happiness as it relates to work would be more along the lines of being engaged in tasks that you find meaningful and challenging, and in which you are aware that you’re helping provide a decent material quality of life for your family. This kind of happiness is more connected to hard work--the sense that one is doing the best one can in any endeavour and, ideally, endeavours in which the work itself is its own reward. Good-life happiness does not relate to things like our gender or our age, over which we have no influence, but rather to conditions over which we do have some control, such as where we work or the kind of work we choose to do. But good-life happiness does not mean that we are “happy all the time,” to quote the (only somewhat ironic) title of Laurie Colwin’s great novel. Far from it. The positive psychology field puts this in perspective, acknowledging through empirical and replicable research that in spite of the advantages of thinking positively, there are times when “negative” thinking is appropriate, and that difficulty, pain, and sadness are inevitable. We need obstacles and challenges in our lives for achievements to have meaning, the cold and cloudy days that make us revel in the warm and sunny ones, the necessary and numbing scut work that lets us really enjoy the resulting moments of success. Outrage on behalf of the disadvantaged can lead people to make their corners of the world better places. Ferocity--a little anger, even--can fuel healthy competition. And, finally, the third kind of happiness--peak happiness--is the more transcendent sort, by definition rare in everyday life, including (and maybe especially) on the job. I’ve also found that this sort of happiness becomes more elusive the older we get--the more cares and responsibilities we have, the less willing we may be to engage in the kinds of experiences where peak moments tend to happen. It takes effort to wake up in the middle of the night with our kids to watch the Pleiades’ meteor showers if our prospective sense of how exhausted we’ll be at work the next day outweighs our anticipation of awe. But, Hecht intimates, it is the peak experiences in our lives that endure, that offer us hope and glimmers of meaning, and that connect us to our families, communities, and a sense of the eternal. And this kind of happiness is closely connected to the “V” in the happiness formula--these are the things we choose to do. While in our personal and private lives peak happiness may be, for instance, the kind of euphoria we experience at a great rock concert or after exceptional sex, at work it is more
often connected with the creation of something original: designing a new kind of ergonomic desk chair, discovering a new way to isolate and destroy viruses, delivering a giant project early and under budget, or creating the next Simpsons. In short, moments of peak happiness at work often involve some aspect of the creative process. This attitude towards work is all-pervasive in the Western world and has been for thousands of years. Just yesterday I mentioned it as a prime example of some of our most pernicious work-related cognitive illusions. But it’s still wrong for two reasons. First, it’s factually wrong. There are and always have been plenty of people who love what they do, who come home from work fulfilled and energized and for whom work is a beneficial influence in their lives. Secondly, this attitude is morally wrong because it’s hurting people. This attitude towards work is one of the main reasons why so many people accept stressful jobs, jerk bosses and bad working conditions. Let me say this very clearly: If your work brings you down, drains your energy and makes you stressed and frustrated then something is wrong. This is not something that should be accepted or (even worse) idolized and sought out. Work can make you happy and it should make you happy. Why anyone would argue otherwise is beyond me. Unhappiness is a feeling. Simple as this may seem, it is important to understand that this feeling is an internal mental condition. It is not a situation in the real world; it is something that happens inside our mind. Unhappiness starts as reaction to a disagreeable situation. Somebody shouted at me, I lost my job, my home is about to be repossessed, my spouse is angry with me. The first natural reaction of the mind is one of feeling unhappiness. Thus far things are OK What follows is not. We then feed this feeling till it becomes a demon in our mind. How do we feed it? After we have experienced this emotion or feeling, the mind then plays out “logic” to justify our emotion. We look for reasons to justify our negative thought. We play out the “fight” in our minds again and again and deepen the emotion. We are convinced about how unjust the world has been to us. The unhappiness grows. This emotion lasts far beyond the initial transaction that caused it. From an irritation, the feeling that can then grow to hurt, anger, hatred, fear. This feeling takes a life of its own and then lasts well after the initial planting of the seed. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Such strong emotions can cloud our judgement, take hold of our lives and that of others around us, towards even more grief. Our sense of anger and hurt then clouds our future interactions with the perceived source of conflict; further feeding itself. We then express our emotions towards others, who then pick them up. Like a cyclone feeding on the air around it, what started as a small seed of unhappiness takes a life of its own, spreading destruction in its wake. It may seem like that our anger, hurt, fear may be justified given the situation. However, the reality is that it is merely a habituated response to the external world. The whole process of sensing an input, evaluating, reacting and amplifying and reacting again, happens at such a rapid pace, it seems that there is no other way to be. A deeper understanding will reveal that our reaction is a choice that we make. We can choose to respond wisely.
Meditation can help us become more aware of this process. We then start to change our habit of reacting and amplifying. The central teaching of the Buddha was to examine the anatomy of unhappiness (suffering) and understand how to change this deep-seated habit. Some of the implications of this understanding are: 1. Happiness is not the pursuit of conducive situations 2. Happiness is an internal endeavour 3. We chose our mental states 4. We can practice the art of being happy 5. We most often focus on the ‘what’ of work. What we have to get done, what our boss needs next, what we need to do for our team to help them succeed. But we don’t often stop to think about why we do things, or why we are even in our job to begin with. Most of us want to build a career that we absolutely love – work that you cannot wait to get to every day; that you leap out of bed for, filled with anticipation and excitement for all that your day will bring. But how do you find that spark? A really important part is finding your purposeful path. So, where are you? So, let’s start with where you are. How do you currently view your work? Do you view it as a job, something you have to front up to every day to pay the bills? Where is your focus? Is it on acquiring skills, gaining power and self-esteem, and crawling your way up the ladder? When you are feeling most alive in your work, what are you doing? When you feel useful, who are you helping? What work could you do that you would never want to stop, that you would never quit talking about, and that you would do without earning a single cent? Answer those questions and you will get a glimpse (or a massive big lightning bolt message) of what your purpose is. Getting real about this is really important, so you have a real view of where you are, not a skewed picture of how you would like your world to look. Look at where you are first, and then you can build a picture of where you want to be. Choose your own path You don’t need to be Oprah to have a purpose. And it doesn’t need to be grand. It just needs to be you. Authentically you. When you are on purpose, you are on your own path. But getting your feet on the right path can sometimes be harder than you think. When we are tied up in our busyness – working hard to make money, pay the bills, or get ahead – we can so easily get lost on a road that looks nothing like what we thought it would, and doesn’t lead to where we thought it would either. You know it doesn’t feel quite right. You know it’s not tapping into your passion, you know you aren’t using your strengths, or working in a way that is aligned to your values, and it’s just not lighting your fire as it could be. But when you don’t listen to that thing we call intuition – your gut, your inner knowing – it is really easy to just keep going, push the discomfort down (way, way down) and ignore the fact that you are not on purpose. That you are walking on someone else’s path. That you are not being authentic to who you are, and what you really truly want to be doing with your career (and, oh yes, that small thing called your life). Getting Practical - Finding your purpose So what do we do about it? For a practical approach to finding your purpose, check out the
chapters on passion, strengths and purpose in Getting Real About Having It All. But in the meantime, be still for a few moments and think about this. What did you want to do with your life, before you were told what to do or before life and practicality took over? If you can get quiet enough and think back to who you were then, and what you dreamt about, you may tap into something that was purposeful for you. Or just ask yourself this question: Is this moving me further down my purposeful path? If you can answer a big ‘yes’ (or even a hell yeah), you are on purpose, so keep going. If your answer is ‘no’, then look at your motivation for what you are doing. When you are working on purpose, you have a burning desire to do what you do. If you’re not feeling that fire, it’s time for a rethink. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest we are motivated at work by things other than money and that, as long as we are relatively job-secure and earning a reasonable wage, the quality of working life is at least as important. In the Mercer global engagement scale – developed with thousands of workers in the UK, US, Japan, India, Germany, France and China – "base pay" as a motivator comes low down a list of 12 factors that engage workers. The top motivator is "respect" – how valued and trusted by their organisation employees feel. Then comes (in order of priority) "type of work", "providing good service to customers", "the people you work with" and finally, good "work-life balance". Only after these does pay come into the equation. Given the recent controversies over bankers' pay, it's interesting that "bonuses" come bottom of the list. President Franklin D Roosevelt said during the Great Depression that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence … people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made … the hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth." The way jobs are shaped, by both managers and employees, has a huge impact on our sense of well-being at work. But the quality of work is in danger of being neglected, especially when people are worrying about unemployment. The focus in much of the happiness debate is on the primacy of being employed and people's perceptions of their income relative to others. While there may be some truth in the Anna Karenina principle that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, we increasingly have a better understanding of what makes for unhappiness and stress in the workplace. If people don't have much control over their jobs, are not engaged and involved in decision-making, consistently work long hours, and are badly managed or bullied, they will suffer. There are ways of treating people at work that can make them happier that have little to do with money or bonuses. This has been confirmed by research based on the government's Workplace Employee Relations Survey, endorsed by the Health and Safety Executive and reflected in the National Institute of Clinical Excellence's guidelines on managing workplace stress. So what can we do to make our workplaces happier environments? First, we need managers with better social and interpersonal skills, who manage people by praise and reward and not fault-finding (because few managers do this, a pay rise is often the only time people feel their contribution is recognised). Second, individuals should have autonomy and control over their work – the absence of micro-management. Third, there needs to be a shorter working hours culture, where appropriate flexible working arrangements are available which people can take up without damaging their careers or feeling guilty. Fourth, there should be manageable workloads and achievable deadlines, and finally, a culture should be encouraged in which employees feel valued and trusted.
Alistair Blaxill, executive director of Communisis, one of the UK's biggest marketing services providers, says the happiest companies he has worked for are those that "give their staff 'wriggle room', don't micro-manage, let people know when they have done a good job, make them feel part of a family and ensure reasonable work-life balance". Yet despite all the supporting evidence, some of these basic ingredients are not being applied. And if that's the case, how will a national measure of happiness help? We think it will do so indirectly – by motivating businesses and politicians to do better when international and corporate bench marks are put into the public arena by business and social commentators. But developing this well-being index is also a high risk for the government, because over time it could highlight a worsening in people's happiness levels, holding government accountable. On the upside, the government will need to take action to enhance well-being, as it does when responding to slow economic growth or declining gross domestic product (GDP). Which reminds us of the old Japanese proverb "a vision without action is a daydream, action without vision is a nightmare". In launching the inclusion of well-being items in the Office for National Statistics' survey a few months ago, the prime minister emphasised that GDP was not a good measure of a society's success. In doing so, David Cameron echoed the sentiments of US senator Robert F Kennedy, in a speech he gave at the University of Kansas in 1968. "Gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play," Kennedy said. "It … measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
