The Psychology of Happiness | Dr. Laurie Santos

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19:16Dr. Michael Gervais:So go to findingmastery.com slash course code renew100 for$100 off today because your future is not shaped by what you intend. It's shaped by what you train. One of the things that I think my Yale students really struggle with is that they've always been awesome, right? to get into Yale, they've always had to have the perfect grades and the perfect extracurriculars. And for the first time, they're surrounded by comparison points that are just as good as they are. And what does that make them feel? That makes them feel crappy all the time. When I first started teaching the class, that song by DJ Khaled was out, all I do is win, all I do is win, win, win, no matter what.

19:52And I think that that's an awful, psychologically, that would be an awful way to live because after the first, second, third win, you don't notice the wins anymore. It's just -

20:00Dr. Michael Gervais:Touch. The Midas touch. Yeah. And but you said something really important is that, and this shows up in pro sport. So in high school, bigger, faster, stronger than everyone else. You're doing really good. You get a lot of attention from their community. You move up into the college ranks. You're like, oh, whoa, okay. But there's still some separators. And then if you're fortunate enough to get to the pros, you were one of the good ones in college. You get to the pros, you're like, whoa, everyone's the margins. Now, for those that have the framing, go back to the first principle, the way that the mind works, when they frame it like, this is so exciting.

20:30Dr. Michael Gervais:Like I'm around the best in the world. Iron sharpens iron. Like this is what makes people great. And I'm going to put in the work to try to figure this thing out. They walk into the pros like sponges. Now those that look around and go, whoa, my identity is connected to this thing. And like, everyone's good. And like, I'm not special anymore. And like, man, I don't know if I have a system and a structure to keep up. What do I do? And so that anxious framing or comparison framing. So it's not necessarily that you arrive in a highly competitive environment and it's a problem. It's the way that you're framing it.

21:02That's right. Wrapped around identity,

21:03Dr. Michael Gervais:wrapped around kind of, you know, your mindset, if you will. And the one challenge is like our brains often go to the framing that makes us feel crappiest. Oh, wait, say that again. I don't, I don't know this. Our brain often goes to the framing that makes it or the comparison, at least that makes us feel crappiest. I did very little work with sports teams, unlike you, but I had done this brief work with a professional basketball team and we were talking about social comparisons. And I was making this point and I said, well, who's your comparison for like the best, you know, three pointer. And they were like, Steph Curry.

21:31And I was like, who's your comparison for like, you know, who was making the most money at the time it was Steph Curry. I was like, who's your comparison for like, what's the appropriate height to be in basketball? At the time they saw a taco fail. And I was like, okay, why isn't it Steph Curry for height? And they're like, we wouldn't like, he's short. Like we wouldn't, it was like, why is it Steph for everything else? Like if you compared yourself with Steph now, all of a sudden you'd be like, well, how much better. Right. And so this is the problem with what's called reference points, these social comparisons, we pick the one that makes us feel crappiest.

22:00Dr. Michael Gervais:Wait, is that, I'm assuming this is research backed? Yeah, for sure. I don't know this. Oh, I am so excited right now. Yeah, yeah. You give people, for example, you give participants like, say, like something like a LinkedIn profile, which has different things and you rig it so that some of the things they're better at and some of the things they're worse at. The participant, right? Which ones do they notice? They notice spontaneously the ones that they're doing worse at. Oh, so this is, if this is a automatic bias, it's kind of built in, it must be connected somewhere to survival. Yeah. I think it's kind of like a negativity bias, right?

22:31Like, you know, for example.

22:32Dr. Michael Gervais:That's different. Negativity and negativity bias is different. Well, negativity in the sense that you're doing worse than someone else. I see. Because if you're doing worse, you're more likely to get relegated. Oh, that's a threat, right? That's a threat. Yeah. Okay. Again, another stupid feature of the mind. We don't need any mechanisms to pat ourselves on the back and be like, I'm doing so much better. Like that's not useful evolutionarily, but oh my God, when I forged, I got less nuts than that guy. Or, you know, I made it fewer times than this other person. Those are very salient to us. We notice those quickly.

23:00Dr. Michael Gervais:When I get asked often about like, what does it take to be a high performer, fill in the blanks around that type of question. I don't have a clean answer because it's just, it's so messy. The path to becoming is really so varied. But one thing I do embrace is that reference points are really important. And so you've got me down this path like, wait, the way I've been thinking about reference points is unique life experiences or unique, let's say, downhill skiing, having as many angles on varied terrain so that when I approach this one corner that I need to really lock in on, I've got all these wild reference points to draw on.

23:41Dr. Michael Gervais:And you're saying that those reference points, I think I'm not including this first principle bias that you're suggesting. I guess all of those are possible. Maybe that's what the mastery is about, right? It's about kind of moving your brain towards those other kinds of reference points, ones that take your identity in new ways. You're developing more of a growth mindset and so on. My point is more that our tendency, if we're not careful, if we don't put any work in, is we're going to lock onto the stuff that makes us feel pretty crappy. That is wild. Yes. I'm like really appreciative of that insight.

24:13Dr. Michael Gervais:Where can I learn more about it or where can we learn more about that? Yeah, well, there's some great work by, you know, lots of psychologists who've looked at this. One of my favorite papers, early papers on the kind of power of reference points and using your intentions to switch was actually in the context of athletes. They're looking at Olympians who've made the medal stand and what emotions they're experiencing. So you look at the gold medalist and they're obviously quite happy. You look at the silver medalist and here's where surprise number one comes in. they're not showing a little less happiness or a little less joy than the gold medalist they're showing emotions like contempt anger deep sadness if you analyze their facial expressions that's what you see your second best in the world and all you're paying attention to is the one person who just lost gold beat you yeah but the second surprise in that same study is what happens to the bronze medalist right they should be maybe if you know the silver medalist who a second is experiencing contempt and all this stuff they should be even more upset but no in some of the studies, their expressions are even happier than the gold medalist.

25:10Why? Their comparison point isn't gold. Like they are two points or two seconds or whatever, you know, 0.2 seconds or whatever it is away from the gold. They're thinking, oh my gosh, but by the grace of God, did I not like miss? I could have gone going home completely empty handed, right? And so I often joke when you're intentionally trying to figure out your comparisons, don't go with the silver lining, which we always say, I say, go with the bronze lining. So bronze means you're really looking to what the possibilities could have been. And so that's a situation that kind of happens naturally, right?

25:40Because it's so salient what the counterfactual is in those cases. But I think the key is that we need to build our own counterfactuals in, right?

25:48Dr. Michael Gervais:Big question I think that most people want to know is like, okay, great, great, great. How do we become happier in our lives? It's not the stuff we normally think. It's not getting richer, getting more accolades at work, being more successful, being more attractive, those things that we predict make us happier don't make us as happy as we think or for as long as we think. So the boost we get from achieving those things isn't as big as we think and doesn't last for as long as we think. What really matters is honestly all the stuff you talk about on this podcast, right? It's changing your behaviors and more changing your mindset.

26:20Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. So let's go back up one level to come back to some practical approaches. Happiness is? Happiness is feeling good in your life and with your life. Clean, very clean. Happiness is feeling good in your life and with your life. So the affect and cognitive. Yeah. And the affect one I think is important because my students often come in with these ideas of toxic positivity, right? Like if you have any anxiety or sadness or whatever, something's wrong, right? They want to be like a big smiling emoji all the time. That's wrong. what you want is a decent ratio of your positive to negative emotions, right?

26:54I think if you're going through tough times, you want to build in these positive moments of moral elevation, awe, humor, connection, compassion, right? You want to build in the positive to match the negative, but it's not getting rid of the negative. It's making sure that ratio is pretty healthy.

27:08Dr. Michael Gervais:So let's think about an equalizer and like a sound equalizer, and you've got a bunch of knobs or dials. Let's go one to 10 is above the line. Zero is kind of like a baseline. Okay. Like a neutral state and then minus one to minus 10. Okay. So are you trying to set it at a, I don't know, plus five for everything? Like how, how are you thinking about this? You kind of want to set as high. Maybe a better analogy is, you know, you have the base and the treble. When I was a little kid, I would always put both of them up. But I think that's what you're trying to work on. I I think it's helpful to think of the positive emotions and the negative emotions as different dials.

27:46Yes. And we can move them both up.

27:48Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. So you want to experience the most joy you can. Yep. Right. Do you want to experience the most sadness that a human can? Probably doesn't feel great. Right. But you might want to experience the kinds of meaning and purpose that come out of experiencing sadness. I've thought a lot about this. I don't want to be muted. I don't want to have like, I do want, I don't want to be stuck. I don't want to feel like, okay, so what is depression? Depression is like two weeks or longer where you're really struggling with, you know, five of the nine symptoms, you know, of depression for major depression, I should say.

28:21Dr. Michael Gervais:And that feels like I can't get out of that space. I don't want that, but I want to know the depths of that field. I want to, I don't want to be so afraid that I don't go there because I might not get out of there. So I think I'm dancing around a few things here. I want the fullness of life experience. I also don't want to spend an exorbitant amount of time and feel like I am stuck in that depth of those more prickly, difficult emotions. Because to your other point about comparison, I mean, the best nap I've ever had when I was like 36 hours, you know, exhausted. And it was on a hammock that was somebody else's that I didn't care who.

29:01Dr. Michael Gervais:And I fell asleep like you wouldn't believe. Right. And it sounds dramatic. There's a whole backstory about why I was that tired. And I've got like a really nice bed that in comparison, I don't appreciate as much as that one time. Okay. So it's this comparison bit between knowing sadness that I can feel joy. Yeah. Knowing nighttime, I can feel, you know, the joys of daytime, if you will. I think the right way to think about negative emotions is like the alert signal on your car, right? You know, and your car has this dashboard. It's like tire light, like engine light and so on. One reason you don't want to shut off negative emotions is the thing you're saying, right?

29:36which is like, we just want to experience the fullness of life. But another reason you don't want to shut off your negative emotions is like, they're really useful signals for something, right? When I experience a level of sadness or loneliness, a big one that I think your listeners will relate to when you experience overwhelm, that's a really essential signal that's telling you something's off. It's like your engine lights on and you're like, Ooh, that doesn't mean you have to drop everything and deal with your car. When the engine light comes on your car, you don't have to drop everything and deal with it right that very second.

30:05But at some point you got to put some time in to like check on it and see what's going on. I think our negative emotions are like that. And what that means is we want to experience them cleanly, fully. We definitely don't want to suppress them. We want to see them and notice them. But we also want some strategies to do the second thing you said, which is we don't want to like live with the engine light on forever. Like, whoa, it's me and my engine light. This is terrible. Like we want to have our way to psychologically take ourselves, you know, to the mechanic. And that's where I think so many skills of emotion regulation, finding more positive emotion come in.

30:36Dr. Michael Gervais:I like how cleanly you're able to articulate something that is pretty messy for most people. Like the inner life is pretty complicated because it's so invisible. And so I've really appreciated how concretely and cleanly you've used some analogies here. That being said, why didn't you name the course Joy? Why did you go for happiness? Well, the course is actually called. Is it well-being? Psychology and the good life. A cleaner way to think about all this stuff is the way that, you know, the ancient Greeks thought about this. What we're going for is eudaimonia, right? What we're going for is a good life overall.

31:10And that's going to include some negative emotions. Normatively, I don't think you could live a good life without having some sadness or anger or fear or whatever, right? You need that stuff to live a meaningful good life.

31:21Dr. Michael Gervais:And so is part of your skill set that you're and tools that you're helping people develop is to manage the more prickly, scratchy emotions? I'm avoiding positive and negative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I often use the term like comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, right? The uncomfortable ones, they're important. You want to see them. You don't see them. You will not be living a good life, right? You'll make things worse. But you do want some strategies for regulating them. And a big one and a surprising one is this, this practice of acceptance. It's like noticing and let me sit with this non-judgmentally.

31:56I want to see it. And that gets to something you mentioned, you give me this nice compliment that I'm able to explain our inner lies, which many of us don't understand very well. I think one of the reasons we don't understand it very well is we don't let ourselves see it. It's like, nope, can't, can't do with that right now. Just running around. Right. But the practice of acceptance is like, all right, let me look at this. What is going on? What's going on in my body, right? Say when I say I'm feeling anxious about something, I'm scared about this podcast interview. What's happening in my body?

32:22Well, my chest is tight. My brow is furrowed. What's going on? Where did that come from? What's the history of this? When have I also felt this emotion? Oh, it's because I have a value. I want to communicate this stuff well or because I care about this, right? You can kind of, when you look at things and look at them carefully, you start to gain some really rich insights. And what a lot of the work on radical acceptance practices finds is that when you really sit with your emotions, they kind of just chill out. Like one of the reasons really intense emotions stick around is that we don't like sit with, all right, let me look at you.

32:54But like you sit with sadness or anger or fear or whatever for a while. And like, it's going to go back to baseline. We just never give it a chance to do that.

33:01Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. It's remarkable. the findings around just naming an emotion that it dissipates it you know and then if you can sit and watch how it i don't know works in your body that that just watching the traveling nature of emotions has been a radical to use to second your word a radical commitment to me understanding like how it works for me and then now it's no longer a mystery now i can greet it and be like oh there you are actually you know what let's play and that or you know what right now is not a nice time. It's, you know, like I don't, so, but I'm going to come back to you. I promise I'm going to come back.

33:35Dr. Michael Gervais:So that kind of volitional ability to like work with and decide when and how has become a pretty massive asset. I think in the way that I personally live. That's so great to hear. And you probably had the same thing I had when I first started using these techniques too, which is that at least at first I didn't believe it was going to work in the way all the science thought it was going to work. I remember one time I was experiencing, you know, really strong sadness about something that was happening in my life. I'm like, all right. The research says I should sit with this. So let me sit with this.

34:01And I'm like, in the back of my mind, I was like, this is never going away. This is always going to feel just as intense. And I remember like, you know, a few minutes into the practice where I'm like, what may I have to start dinner tonight? I was like, oh my God, brain all of a sudden isn't thinking about the sad thing. So I think you really need to play with these techniques and try them. It's one thing to hear, oh, if you radically accept your emotions, like you'll be able to regulate them. And it's another to watch the magic of how quickly emotions become boring and uninteresting to your brain if you just give yourself the chance to pay attention to them.

34:30Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's remember the origin of emotions, which is a signal to mobilize. And okay, if you can follow that thing through and you're like, oh wait, but I don't actually need to mobilize right now. Yes. That's basically the emotions like, ah, I've done my job. We got the signal. We've actually hung out a little bit. I think you got the message. I'm good. Where are we going to dinner? Yeah. Yeah. And this way I think of our emotions are better than at least modern cars where it's like, beep, I'm beeping at you, I'm beeping at you. It's like, yes, I've heard the beeping. Our old evolved emotions are better designed.

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36:14Dr. Michael Gervais:That's always in my control. That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part? It only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to FindingMastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to FindingMastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. So are you pointing to mindfulness and meditation as a primary practice? For sure. I think, I mean, there are lots of different practices, but that's one that should be in the toolkit for sure.

36:52Dr. Michael Gervais:And for you, is that more about awareness or is that more about understanding how to work with the emotion? And of course, it's probably both at some level, but which one has a greater value? Maybe you mean this by understanding, but it's really about the non-judgment and the awareness. So it's noticing like, oh, that's sadness. That's how it feels in my body. This is not some strange thing. It's like, oh, sadness has shown up again. That's the kind of attention part. But then I think it's, and because I understand it, I don't have to freak out about it. Yeah. I think for me, the non-judgment piece is the tactic.

37:24Yeah.

37:24Dr. Michael Gervais:So I can do a lot of things once I notice an emotion. And if I can just observe, now I'm with awareness. Awareness is, it's like the sky. It's always there. If I am with it, if I'm tuned to it, then I can do some stuff with whatever I'm aware of. Yeah. So for me, non-judgmentally is the tactic to stay with it longer. If I'm judging, critiquing, trying to fix, shift, move, those are all tactics too, you know, but they lead to different places. Sometimes we're muting the very thing we want to be better at. But I will say not to get too confusing. there's a time and place if I'm on the edge of the cliff and I'm hanging in my fingernails are barely holding me together my legs are shaking this is a you know I'm using a physical analogy but of course it doesn't have to be but it's the feeling of like I've got to get fix this thing now awareness alone is not enough that's right right it's like no no no I need to put all of my attention to the next finger hold that I'm looking for and so awareness is like wow I'm a mess right now.

38:26Dr. Michael Gervais:Wow, I'm really scared. It's not enough. Because if we stay ruminating in that awareness, which is a radically powerful process, it's just not in the right moment, as I'm describing. So I need to build in moments of deep awareness. I need to build in when I'm doing that tactics, the nonjudgmental tactic, so that I can be more familiar with the inner experience. And that sounds like what you're doing as well. That's exactly right. Yeah. And how frequently and what's the duration of time that you're spending under this type of tension? Me personally? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I think inner life is always under this.

39:02Maybe I have stronger and more varied emotions than most, but no, I mean, these are techniques I'm using all the time.

39:08Dr. Michael Gervais:So you're not traditionally, it's like 10 minutes on a pillow, 20 minutes on a pillow, like formal meditation. You're saying it's more the air that you're breathing. It's the way that you're working. I think it's more organic. You know, I'm like going grocery shopping and someone takes a parking space. I'm like, oh, that jerk. It's like, oh, that's anger. That's frustration. I don't need to waste this energy right now. Right. I go into the grocery and I realize like, oh, God, do I know what we're going to eat tonight? I haven't even figured it out. And my mother-in-law's coming over, blah, blah.

39:36Like, oh, wait, that's anxiety. Let's feel that. You know, I'm slamming the stuff on the counter and I realize, oh, what is that? That's that's when Lori experiences overwhelm. What else is going on? Like, oh, I have 14 things on my plate this afternoon. Maybe I should make a less intense dinner, right? It's an organic process of trying to notice in all these moments. And I think the powerful ones are the stupid ones. Like, that's where you practice. You know, it's one thing, you know, if you have like some sort of terrible medical diagnosis or you have a real grief in your family or like, you know, you're fired at work unfairly.

40:06Like, they're the big things that happen. But I think the good practice points are the teeny things.

40:11Dr. Michael Gervais:Can you provide a couple of really concrete ways to train? I'm going to say sitting on a pillow, meditating, training. Yeah. So that you can move through the world more aware. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So one of my favorite ones is to monitor and maybe change around your self-talk in a few different ways, right? I forget if you had Ethan Cross on the show. Ethan's great. Yeah. So Ethan's best strategy, which is this idea of psychological distancing, is a simple change in your self-talk strategy where instead of using the same, the type of talk that we normally do, which is very self-focused. Oh my God, I suck.

40:42I need to do this better. I, I, me, me, me, you switch into a third or second person. You say, Laurie, you've got this, you got to do it, right? Why is this dumb linguistic change so powerful? Well, when we usually talk in the second and third person, what we're doing is talking to somebody else. We're just much more rational and like distance from our emotions when we're talking to somebody else. The other thing is that we kind of censor ourselves when we're talking to somebody else. So we're really like you, you know, F an idiot, like whatever, like we usually like reasonable And that makes us more reasonable when we're talking to ourselves.

41:13Dr. Michael Gervais:Is that how you sound to yourself? Sometimes, you know, before I started using these strategies for sure. And that gets to my second self-talk point that can be powerful, which is to notice how self-critical you're being. And this is when I've worked with leaders and the types of folks that you work with. That's the one that I find that folks mess up a lot, which is they confuse self-criticism with effectiveness, right? I got to push myself. And the way I push myself is I scream at myself in my head like a drill instructor all the time when all the research shows that we'd be better off engaging in a little self-compassion, which I think we confuse with self-indulgence.

41:50Dr. Michael Gervais:Can you make that more concrete? Yes. So this comes from the lovely work of Kristen Neff where she defines self-compassion as having these three steps. First step is one that we've just been talking about a lot. She calls it mindfulness. It's really just like I'm pissed right now. I'm having a hard problem right now. I'm, you're noticing ideally non-judgmentally your emotions, right? But then you take step number two, which is the hard step for leaders, which is you say, and that is a common human experience. It makes sense that I'm experiencing pissed off in this right now because like X, Y, and Z common human experience, normative.

42:20It's okay. It makes sense that I'm going through this, right? And the third step is what she calls self-kindness, where you just say, how would I talk to a friend that was going through this? How can I take something off by plate? How can I be nice to myself? And that's the part that we mistake for self-indulgence. We think if I'm kind to myself, I would never get off the couch. I'd just like be eating bonbons on the couch and never get anything done. But if you use this framework of how you would talk to a friend and you had a friend that you cared about that was really screwing up, I hope you wouldn't scream at that person like a drill instructor, but I hope you wouldn't let them off the hook either.

42:52I hope you'd get like curious, coachy, like all the people you work with. Like, I'm worried about you what's going on how can we fix this let's get problem-solving and proactive but not from a mean perspective and that's what you're doing in self-compassion that's the voice that you want to harness and she has these lovely data just like how powerful this shift is she finds for example that in the military a self-compassionate voice can decrease rates of PTSD so you go through the same terrible traumatic experience but because you talk to yourself without beating yourself up now all of a sudden you're better she finds in the work context it can decrease procrastination.

43:25And it's a really great way of developing compassion for other people too, because when you practice not screaming at yourself in your head, it makes it a lot easier not to do the same thing, maybe more mildly to your spouse or to someone on your team and so on.

43:37Dr. Michael Gervais:We give what we have. We give what we have. And we can sometimes give ourselves the least of all that we have to give, which is sad. Yeah. Which is why oftentimes I think without an investment in training to better understand who you are and how to take care of yourself, you never really become a great teammate. Yeah. Because life can feel like we're like a duck swimming underwater, like almost in that overwhelmed space. And when we're feeling that, how do we give compassion and kindness and support without, I don't know, it being kind of really thin or like, I just gave you everything I have, but it wasn't all that much.

44:13Dr. Michael Gervais:It was just, you know, like, because I don't have that much to give because I'm struggling. And so I do think that getting to know yourself is really important so that you can fill your buckets, whatever that is, joy, happiness, kindness, whatever it might be, so you can give that. And let's go back to the overwhelmment piece is that you mentioned it. I kind of hit on it quickly is that I do think it's a great word for capturing how many people are experiencing life. It's just overwhelming how much noise, how much shifting that we're aware of, you know, that's happening kind of undertow here. So how do you help people with that feeling of overwhelmment as well?

44:50Yeah. Well, one that I use for myself is this strategy of self-compassion, right? Like when I noticed that, oh my God, I'm overwhelmed. I'm slamming things on the Trader Joe's corner. What am I doing? And I'll say, oh, that's overwhelmed. That's the mindfulness piece. And that makes sense. Everybody's overwhelmed right now. I'm overwhelmed right now because I'm traveling this much this week. I have X, Y, and Z on my plate. What do I need right now? What can I help with? And that practice can be powerful.

45:14Dr. Michael Gervais:What if the next piece is, I don't know, because I just can't get a break. Yeah. Here's a question I love. What do you know about what you need right now? What do you need right now is too hard. Do I have any inklings about what I need right now? It's softer. And for me, that can be like, oh, I need a break. I need an hour. I need whatever. And what's shocking, and this comes up a lot, it's like, there's a lot of talk out there about self-care. And by that, people usually mean like, I'll have a Pilates workout or I'll take a bubble bath. That's never what I need when I'm overwhelmed. What I need is like, I need help, right?

45:48I need to ask, you know, someone in my office or my team to like take something off my plate. Like I need to make the hard decision to say no to this thing that I was looking forward to, but it's really just one too many things on my schedule. That what I know about what I really need right now can sometimes give you a glimpse into that thing that you don't want to look at.

46:04Dr. Michael Gervais:What do I know I need right now? What do I know about what I might need right now? What do I know about what I might need? It's again, it's psychological distance. It's like, if you set up those propositions, what might I glimpse about what I might see? What could possibly, if we just... But it works. It's powerful. It works. I really like the normative piece, which is like, wait, this is overwhelmed. This is normal, especially for people. This is what I'll say to myself. For the types of folks that really want to live a full life, this is going to happen. You know, the imposter syndrome. I'm like, oh, this is totally normal because you're going a little, if we're skiing together and you're going just a little bit faster than you feel comfortable doing, like that's how it works.

46:46Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. You know, you're just a little over your skis. Wait, hold on. This is normal. Great. It's an indicator, actually, that I need to pay attention to two things. One is, yeah, this thing's happening faster than I feel, you know, that I'm capable of. Okay, well, I got to get some skills. Second is, well, why am I paying so much attention to what they think of me? You know, like that second piece is such a lightning bolt. Okay, so you are the preeminent professor of happiness. How are you working with that you're supposed to have it all together? You know all the best practices. Your students are counting on you.

47:20Dr. Michael Gervais:Your peers are counting on you. Our community, no pressure, is counting on you. Everyone is counting on you. Yeah, because you understand something that we desperately want to enhance. So how do you work with your private life that you are not all buttoned up? Nobody is. So how do you work between those two conditions? Yeah. It's tricky, right? It sucks to be the person that's supposed to have it all together. You know, one of the, when I first got interested in this work, I think there are these interesting individual differences and how easy you find some of these practices that we talk about.

47:53How easy is it for you to have self-knowledge and regulate your emotions and so on? And I think before I get into this, my natural individual difference was like, I was really bad at some of these things before. Like I was not a naturally very happy person. I'm not naturally good at regulating or knowing my emotions or knowing myself. So this was like a real education slope for me when I first got into it. And that means that because this stuff doesn't come naturally to me, I'm constantly trying to remember to practice what I preach. And in some ways the pressure has been helpful, right? Because I know these strategies, you know, the people I work with know these strategies.

48:25I have a wonderful podcast producer for my podcast, The Happiness Lab. And I can't tell you how many times I've been like complaining about something or just like, you know, like expressing my overwhelm. And he'll say something like, you know, if only we had a strategy to deal with your negative emotions. If only we knew one, I'd be like, oh, yeah.

48:43Dr. Michael Gervais:That's not funny. It's not funny. You're right. But shut up, you know. But it means that I feel like I got to do this. Right. And that's super helpful. Right. It's not. These things don't come naturally and they don't come easily. Right. As you mentioned, their practice, like it's kind of like working out every day. You just it's not like you go once and you're good. You have to keep doing it. And so recognizing that it takes work and that I'm supposed to be putting in that work has been, for me, a real game changer. Do you think that you are, I don't know, have a genetic predisposition to, I don't know, I don't want to give you a word, but non-happy?

49:18Dr. Michael Gervais:Non-happiness, yeah. Or do you think you earned your way into it? You spoke your way into it? Yeah. So that's a deep question about where we think these things come from. And what the evidence really shows is it's probably a lot of both. So there is some evidence that happiness is heritable, by which we don't mean there's like a gene for it, by which we mean if you look out at the population, there's some variance in who's happy and who's not. And some of that variance can be attributed to something that's going on inside. If you look at identical twins, they're much more likely to be similar in their levels of happiness than, say, fraternal twins who aren't 100 % genetically related.

49:51But that level of heritability is pretty low. it's about the same heritability as other psychological factors like risk-taking or religiosity, right? You know, probably lots of religious people that don't have the same religion as their parents. That's about how much happiness is getting filtered through, you know, your biology and your genes. We also know that there's a lot of your happiness that's based on the skills you build up, the values you set, the rewards you experience, what you're practicing, right? And it's true that, you know, I've long been a very driven person and a person that pushed myself, And I'm not sure I developed the healthiest strategies for doing that.

50:26Lots of perfectionism and that kind of stuff. So I think both based on my like biology and based on my kind of environmental history in terms of what I was rewarding myself with probably wasn't set up for this stuff before I got into this work.

50:39Dr. Michael Gervais:And remind me, I think that number is about 10%. Is that? The heritability. Yeah. Heritability estimates are around between 30 and 40%. Oh, God. But that doesn't mean 30 % of your happiness is built into your genes. It means 30 % of the variants that we see in the population could be potentially explained by... 30 % of the variants in the population. It's not like... Yeah. So the way I describe this in classes, let's say you ran into somebody that had their finger chopped off and their finger was like this. Is that biological? Well, there's some genetic thing that could be that. But probably the variants that you see in like large variants in finger length that you see in the population is actually because somebody like chopped it off.

51:17Most of the variance in finger length is due to environmental problems, which is crazy because it's like the length of your fingers, which we know has a biological component, right? Happiness is similar.

51:28Dr. Michael Gervais:Well done. Super clean again. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. Earlier, I mentioned LinkedIn Hiring Pro, and I want to come back to something a little more personal. We talk a lot about the people who make extraordinary things possible. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of ours. Janelle, Taylor, Alex, Emma, and our newest teammate, Chelsea. Every single one of them came to us from LinkedIn. And every single one of them has raised the bar of how we operate here at Finding Mastery. Our relationship with LinkedIn, it also runs a lot deeper than just using their tools. We also work with their teams on the corporate side, helping them build the kind of high-performance culture where great people want to stay.

52:07Dr. Michael Gervais:They want to grow. I've been building businesses for over two decades now, and I'll tell you, the right team, that matters so much. It's the difference between grinding and flowing. So this partnership, I believe in from the inside out. When you hire through a platform like LinkedIn Hiring Pro that surfaces people who are genuinely aligned with what you're building, you get a different quality of candidate. Not just in skills, but in fit and values. The kind of energy someone brings to a team. So if you're thinking about your next hire, I want to strongly encourage you to be intentional about where you look.

52:41Dr. Michael Gervais:The right person is out there and LinkedIn Hiring Pro helps you find them faster with a lot more confidence. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash mastery. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's linkedin.com slash mastery. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Sunlighten. I'm really excited about a new partner of ours. something that I've come back to again and again is when I invest in recovery with the same intention that I bring to my work, everything gets better. My energy, my focus, my ability to show up fully for the people that I'm with and the work that I care about. That's why I am so bought in on the Sunlighten M-Pulse Intelligent Sauna.

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53:56Dr. Michael Gervais:They're offering the Fonny Mastery community up to$2 ,100 off. Simply head to sunlighten.com and use the code mastery for this great discount. Again, that's sunlighten.com and use the code mastery for up to$2 ,100 off. Okay, let's go wherever your set point is. Let's go to the daily habits or practices. If you were to be so prescriptive to say, wherever you are in your adventure, I would suggest you reinvest or make sure that these are rock solid for you? Yep. Huge one is social connection. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social, right? And that includes prioritizing the people you care about, your spouse, your best friend.

54:38It also means chatting with the barista at the coffee shop, chatting with the guy who's sitting next to you on the plane. These tiny little social interactions really kind of like fill up our happiness tanks in ways that we don't expect. And interestingly, the data suggests this is true for extroverts just as much as is true for introverts, which is something that I always get, you know, my students are always really surprised by. If you're an introvert, you get as much happiness boost out of social connection as an extrovert. Not necessarily going to a huge party or like, you know, do an improv show or whatever, but just like calling your best friend and chatting with them on the phone, you get as much of a boost.

55:13Dr. Michael Gervais:I think that's an important distinction because introvert does not mean socially awkward. Introvert means that one-on-one or one-to-two, a triad in a conversation is necessary. It just means that in the social settings, we need to recover a little bit more. It's how you gather energy from an introverted processing style or an extroverted processing style. And so it doesn't mean that one-on-one isn't good for introvert extroverts. Yeah. So that's a huge one. Another one is really focusing on other people's happiness. Again, so much talk about self-care, which I think we get wrong. But really, if you look at happy people, happy people tend to be a lot more other oriented.

55:53So controlled for income, happier people tend to donate more money to charity than not so happy people. And if you force people to do nice stuff for others, as they do in some of these lovely kind of little bit ridiculous experiments, where you force people to do a nice thing or you force people to donate money or spend money on others, you wind up feeling happier. So it really seems to be that doing for others, even doing the same thing that you would have done for yourself, but for somebody else winds up making you happier than you expect.

56:18Dr. Michael Gervais:Volunteerism has been a best practice for mental health, depression included. And so you're drawing on that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Another one is the connection between your mind and your body. So exercising, moving your body a little bit. This is not like running, you know, for ultra marathons this month. This is just like moving your body a half hour a day. There's meta-analyses, which are these big studies of studies that show that moving your body a half hour a day can be as good as a prescription of antidepressant medication for reducing symptoms of depression. And when you say moving, what do you mean by it?

56:49I mean like a half hour of cardio. Like, you know, whatever your cardio level is, like do that. That's good enough. The folks who listen to your show don't need that tip, but the tip that they do need, another physical habit that matters is sleep. There's this lovely study that kind of titrates like every hour of sleep, you get less and every like negative emotion, whether it's overwhelm or sadness and anxiety, it just like ticks differently. Right. So just an hour of extra sleep a day can be really powerful that like I'll sleep when I'm dead vibe. It's like really not great for mental health and, as you know, really not great for performance.

57:21Dr. Michael Gervais:No, it's a problem. I think that it's starting to. People are getting it now, I think. Yeah. I can't go into a room now and be like, hey, does anyone here know that sleep is important? everyone raises their hand. Yeah, I know. This is the problem with all this happiness advice. We can know that all this stuff is important, but that does not translate into doing it. That's why I wanted to like really drill down, like what are some practices that people can do? Because just like with the sleep thing, I know, but like, how? Yeah. You know, like, Mike, how, how do I get more sleep in? Because I can't figure out how to get it all in.

57:52Dr. Michael Gervais:You know, I want to be a good parent. I want to be, you know, great at what I'm doing. I want to have some fitness in my life. Like how? I'm at six hours. I want eight, trust me. But then that means I don't know my kids or that means I'm late on my projects or that means I have zero fitness in my life. Sometimes the right way is to really look at what's getting at it, right? You know, sometimes it's like, because I get up at five in the morning and I, you know, run six miles. Sometimes it's because you get up in the middle of night and you're looking at your phone and you're scrolling through a Reddit thread, right?

58:19And so I think with some of these things, when we look at what's really preventing us from achieving these things, it's kind of not what we think. Right. And sleep, I think is a big one. If I ask my students, yeah, they have homework and yeah, they have early, you know, hockey practice or whatever it is, but also like they're not engaging in very healthy sleep hygiene.

58:40Dr. Michael Gervais:It was like two or three years ago. I think it was maybe two years ago. My son is 17 and his school decided not to have phones on campus. Great. I said, what do you think about it? And he said, you know, dad, I think we all know. I think we all know. You know, this is a good thing. Some people have a harder time with it, but he was like, you know, it's fine. And this is interesting. You said he's 17. I think when it was just, you know, OG social media, maybe early Instagram, we didn't know. We're like, wow, this can't be messing us up. But the kids today who experienced TikTok, they watch their attention being sucked in to this thing that they don't like.

59:12They know the like grossness that they feel afterwards. So I think we get it now in a different way because it's just so palpable how bad these things are for our attention.

59:21Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's do your take on happiness and AI. Yeah. So what was pulling your attention between that interaction? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there's lots of stuff going on. I mean, to be fair, I wished when I thought about AI back in the day, I thought it would be, you know, a robot that does my laundry like shovels the snow. I didn't think it would be like writing poetry and doing podcasts better than we do, right? And so it's frustrating that the tools we've created, especially these large language models, are really good at stealing the stuff that gives us a sense of productivity and joy and so on.

59:53So that's a bummer. Another bummer, because I sit in the college space, is thinking about how AI is stealing my students' ability to learn, right? It's one thing if you're a leader or professor for me to like get a quick tip from LLM about how to, I don't know, write a letter, write an email. It's a completely different thing for them to get a tip about how to think about, you know, reading Shakespeare for the first time or to send their papers through a tool that's going to give them an executive summary. I think we're really not, there's a lot of talk about like, well, how can we grade students?

1:00:21We can't have essays anymore, blah, blah, blah. I think we haven't thought about what that means for their learning, not the assessment part, but the learning part. But another big one is the fact that these tools are really frictionless, right? It's frictionless to have it write my essay. I don't get the discomfort that comes with having to work on it, but I also don't get the good, happy feeling of having made it through that discomfort. And a big spot where I think that friction is going to mess us up is on the social connection piece. Right now, we're seeing a lot of young people and a lot of people who aren't so young using these LLM tools to get advice, to get therapy, not talking to a real person.

1:00:55And the data are mixed on this. The data really show that it genuinely decreases loneliness. In other words, it's genuinely a good thing for our short term happiness, but it might be a really bad thing for our long term happiness. I think we need to figure out how we balance that because it's always going to be the case that a chatbot is less frictiony than picking up the phone and calling your friend who's a real human.

1:01:17Dr. Michael Gervais:And a lot of these chatbots are designed to please. Exactly. For affirmative responses. You know, there's a well understood principle in high performance is time under tension. Same with academia, same with the love life, that we need tension to really work out what is honest. And whether that is expressing an idea or working a problem with a loved one, like I said, or figuring out how to get faster or stronger, you need time under tension. So I appreciate that you bring that forward. If we knew what you knew, how would we be better parents? I think we'd think a lot more about future parenting than right now, parenting, right?

1:01:58I think a constant tension for parents is like, there's something you often have to do right now. We got to get to the bus and you haven't tied your shoes yet. And I want you to learn how to tie your shoes. I want you to get good at this. I don't want you to be frustrated, but the shoes need to be damn tied right now. And so parents often intervene in these situations where there's something that has to happen. You know, you're, you're about to take a math midterm that I'm worried you don't know the answers for. So let me just like force feed you this stuff so we can get through the homework so you can get it right.

1:02:26And this is not parents' fault, right? Parents are overwhelmed. They're really time famished. Another thing that matters a lot for happiness is just kind of feeling like this sense that you have some time and that you're not temporarily overwhelmed all the time. And I think that causes parents to parent for the here and now as opposed to the future. I think a different thing that you do better as a parent is that you see your kid, even very young kids, as a little more agentive than they are. Some of the work I really love here comes from David Yeager, who's a professor at UT Austin, who does a lot of work on what he calls collaborative troubleshooting, right?

1:02:58Which is the idea that you assume that your kid is like a member of your team as agentive and as smart as you. And if they're having a problem, they've reasonably tried a lot of stuff first. So we're going to kind of collaboratively figure out what you didn't get to and troubleshoot. I'm not going to figure it out for you. I'm definitely not going to tell you what to do, but I'm going to be there like a teammate who's going to help you troubleshoot this stuff. And it turns out that treating your kids like that is a really effective way of getting them to learn better. You know, so you're, you're a teenage son, you know, you find out you went to a party and he was drunk, right?

1:03:29And you're like, comes home, like, your instinct is screaming, what are you going to do? I'm going to ground you. Like you shouldn't do that. Right. Collaborative troubleshooting says, okay, let's, I know you're a smart person who I've taught really well. I just want to understand, like, why'd you do that? I'm sure there was a good reason. Like why? And you find out like, oh, like he was trying to make friends with the folks on his team and he didn't realize that he didn't want to be left out. And you start with like, oh, those are good instincts. Like those are values that I've taught you that you want a sense of belonging and so on.

1:03:55But like, let's figure out how we can do that a little bit better. You see how that's so different than telling you how to do something. You know, your kids struggling with their math homework. You don't come and be like, well, let me just tell you how to do the, like, you're smart. You're the one who's taking the class. I want to figure out what you've tried so far. So I'm sure you've tried some smart things so far. So I just want to figure out, right? Totally different attitude.

1:04:13Dr. Michael Gervais:You're pointing to a best practice of mastery coaches, coaches that are true masters of craft is that they ask more questions than high performing coaches. Yes. If you think about the stack, mastery would be higher than high performance, right? So high performance coaches, they'll ask questions and they'll also say a lot. Amateur coaches say the most. Yes. And they're inaccurate. Yes. Performance coaches, they are still talking out of ratio to the questions and they're more likely to be inaccurate, but a little bit better. High performance coaches are more accurate, but they're talking and mastery questions are, let's say a quarterback comes off the field.

1:04:46Dr. Michael Gervais:They say, what'd you see? You know, what'd you notice? You had any unlocks? Okay. What do we do with that? Like, Like, hey, listen, they'll say, that's not good enough. How do we get this fixed though? You know, or, hey, that's not good enough. I've told you 10 times, it's this. So sometimes it's super direct, but it's accurate when it is. But they so value the information from the doer. Yes. Because they're uniquely the one in the experience. So the art of asking great questions, I think, is one of the great contributions to being a great teammate, a great partner in life, period. And the studies show to being a great parent.

1:05:19And it's a problem when you're a parent because, I mean, it's true, of course, for a mastery coach and like, you know, a quarterback. But it's really true for a parent and a third grader. You know more math than that third grader. So you know the answer and you really want to show off that you know the answer. But that's not your job. Your job is to generate insights. It's to get them to come up with the answer themselves and to see what they've already and to see what the process is like. This is another strategy that folks talk about as sort of parenting for the process as opposed to parenting for the product.

1:05:45You don't even care if your kid gets that math homework done. as long as they figure out the best way to figure out homework in the future. That's what you're parenting for.

1:05:52Dr. Michael Gervais:Where are you with iPhones and social media? And, you know, John Height's work has been amazing. And like, but how are you thinking about it relative to happiness? Yeah, there's so many things that technology steals from our happiness, right? The list I just gave you, social connection, paying attention to your sleep, right? Experiencing other things we haven't talked about yet. Things like gratitude, presence, right? All these things are so much harder when you have your phone around you. And we've known that for a long time. And so I agree with a lot of Haidt's work. One of the nice things about his work is he's pushing just towards these kind of cooperative strategies at the system level.

1:06:28Like it's really hard. You mentioned your son who was 17. It's really hard for him alone to decide not to have a phone when all his friends have it. But if his whole school decides not to do it, it just makes it much easier. And so I think these structural level changes for dealing with technology are important and helpful whenever we can figure them out.

1:06:43Dr. Michael Gervais:If we knew what you knew, how would we be better leaders? Well, the first one is I think leaders should be more focused on their happiness and their positive emotion, which is a shocking one. I think leaders talk a lot about performance on their teams and their teams feeling happier and so on. But there's just so much evidence that your positive mood affects your performance. One of my favorite studies on this was with medical doctors. You bring medical doctors into the lab and give them a tough medical diagnosis problem. I used to watch the TV show House or Quincy MD. I think there's one now called like Pairs of that.

1:07:15I don't forget, but like, you know, the TV show, tough medical things. Half the doctors get to be in a good mood first. They just watch some stupid cat videos, right? So they're laughing for a couple of seconds. What happens? Doctors who are in the good mood come up with the more innovative solution, the accurate, but hard one that you wouldn't see. And again, you don't need the study to know that everyone listening right now remembers back to a time when they were just feeling overwhelmed and there was too much on their plate. That was not your moment of all your best ideas. You were not coming up with the innovative solution.

1:07:41You were triaging, you were just getting stuff off your plate, right? To kind of feel expansive, we need a sense of positive mood. And more and more studies are showing that this doesn't just happen at the individual level. It happens at the organizational level. My favorite study of 2025 is like nerds, like nerds have like our favorite studies. My favorite study of the last year was one by Jan Emanuel Denev, this professor at the University of Oxford, where he asked the question, well, if there's all these individual data, individuals are more productive, they're happier. It should be the case that happier companies are more productive, ergo, they make more money.

1:08:14And so how can he test this? Well, he partners up with the job website Indeed, where they allow people from thousands of different companies to rate all these things about their workplace. But one of the things you rate is your happiness. And he says, okay, we'll take all those 15 million data points from thousands of different companies in all different sectors. And we'll just plot for the publicly traded companies, the average happiness of the worker and a stock price. And he gets this super strong, significant correlation that winds up outperforming. If you were just to invest in the happiest companies, you would outperform the S &P 500 in terms of your investment strategies.

1:08:50And basically what he says is like, we've known this at the individual level for forever, but if you kind of combine this in aggregate, of course, it's going to be the case that people who are happier are higher performing. What does that mean? That means if you're a leader, it's not just all the other tools that we know you need to pay attention to to make your business successful. It matters that workers are happy to and that you're happy to.

1:09:12Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. I mean, this is a full circle piece, which is you said, okay, our students were unhappy at Yale, right? They're struggling. And you were ringing the bell that as professors, we need to do something to address that. Or we're going to have a population of students that are a little bit smarter on a tactic, whatever, or coding this, but they are really struggling in life and will never really be able to access the knowledge that they know because it feels like the ship is sinking on a regular basis or semi-regular basis. Body Master is brought to you by Momentous Fiber Plus. Here's a stat that surprised me when I first came across it.

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1:12:19Dr. Michael Gervais:Again, that's ProtonVPN.com slash mastery. So what have you figured out to install or to democratize the best practices across an organization? Well, a different way of framing that question is to ask, okay, I just told you that happier workplaces perform better. But what do I mean by happier workplaces? What's that metric made of? And in the Indeed data, Denev was able to look at that. Like, what are the things he put together? What predicts happiness at work from ratings? And one of the things he finds is one of the best predictors of happiness at work is a sense of what he calls belonging. But it's the answer on Indeed to three different questions.

1:12:57One, what I do at work matters. Two, the organization cares about what I do at work. So the first one is like me personally, I feel like what I'm doing matters. Second, I matter to the place I'm working in? And the third question, which is just a yes or no answer, do you have a best friend at work? And those three questions predict people's happiness at work, which then predicts people's, you know, which then predicts company stock prices and so on. So I think the answer to your question is like, well, we need to promote are those things. We need to make people feel like they're doing meaningful work, feel like whatever the organization is cares about what they're doing.

1:13:31And we need to promote social connection at work. Those are the ingredients, it seems like for happiness. You know, those things are hard to build in, but they're easier than some of the other stuff. Like, it's not like how well the company's doing, how much you can pay people past, you know, a certain extent. It's not how well you train their managers. It's really about how they're feeling about their sense of purpose and connection at work.

1:13:50Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. We give what we have again. And one of the things I've noticed, let's say it's, let's just go back to sport for another moment is I'll see a head coach or the assistant coaches do a great job of coaching a room of athletes or an individual or the whole organization about how to think about something, a loss or win or an upcoming competition. And so they're framing, this is a framing conversation. Framing matters. I mean, it's a big part of mindset, right? And again, mindset is something that you can build. It's a skill that we develop. So they're helping frame a situation to give ourselves the best chance to compete at the highest level.

1:14:29Dr. Michael Gervais:And then you'll see the room, like athletes are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Assistant coaches, you know, if it's a head coach at the front of the room, we're like, yeah, yeah, that's it. Great. Okay, on it. Yeah. And then they go home. Now, no work has been done, just framing. Then they go home and let's say the agent calls or their spouse or their parent has a conversation and they say the exact opposite. Yeah. Okay, so now it's reframing and they either feel tension because they're trying to defend this other framing. No, that's not how we're thinking about it, dad. Okay. or they get overwhelmed with the mix between the two and they ascribe to the way that the agent or parent or spouse is.

1:15:08Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay. So my point is that helping people understand that they have value in this organization is a framing. And then you can point to it, like what you do matters because of A, B, and C. But then when the person leaves, they're left to their own devices, their own psychology and their community. Okay. So two parts to that. What I'm most interested in, what we spent a lot of time at Finding Mastery is helping individuals in organizations develop the mental skills so that they can navigate well. Yeah. Right? So that when they go, for example, the distance from the team meeting room to the living room is if you're stressed or anxious or sleep deprived or whatever, when you get that second bit of information, it's more likely to be disruptive as opposed to that you can navigate it well.

1:15:57Dr. Michael Gervais:So if we install, is another, I don't know why I'm using that word right now, but a set of psychological skills so that you can buffer all these things. So you go home and you're buoyant and you've got bright eyes and you can see that the other person actually is trying to help, but they just are misinformed. Or the way that they see it is not the way you see it. That type of buoyancy requires psychological skill investment. Yeah. And that's what I was wondering if you've got any of those best practices to help the individuals buffer the way they're working with a high speed environment and misaligned people, perhaps.

1:16:32Well, I think all, you know, all the things we've been talking about from social connection to sleep to these kinds of things matter, right? And they matter because they change your mood levels. And if you're in a positive mood, you're just much better able to kind of deal with this stuff. I think about this all the time. One of the things that, comes up a lot in university settings right now is how much political polarization we have and how hard it is to have these tough conversations. And I think, well, if 40 % of these kids are too depressed to function most days, and one in 10 is seriously considering suicide, like, yeah, they're not going to have a hard conversation with somebody who's like politically not aligned with them, right?

1:17:05Just paying attention to mood and making people feel a little bit better.

1:17:09Dr. Michael Gervais:That, Lord, that is awesome. That's a light bulb moment for me. 40 % are overwhelmed. Yeah. And somebody says to them, hey, you know, that person that you are aligned to politically, let's say, I totally see it differently. They're like, yeah, get out of here. Like, I can't even. I can't even. I can't even. Like, either you're with it or you're not. And I don't have the time to argue with you. Oh, that makes so much sense to me. I think the same things are true for anything that's like, that's tough, right? You know, we can do hard things, but it helps if we do hard things for a perspective, like feeling okay and not being at the end of our rope and not at our wit's end.

1:17:47And so I think that's really huge. I think another thing too, though, is where these mindsets come from, right? I'm thinking that the, particularly this belonging mindset that we just mentioned of like, Hey, the company cares about you. A leader can come and be like, Hey, the company cares about you, but that's not the same as a person in the organization, really feeling like the company cares about you. You know, so I think one thing we might be asking is like, what can we do to not say it, but show it? Right. And I think there's just all kinds of strategies. They need to be authentic to the leader.

1:18:16You know, I've been in cases where this work is talked about and I heard a strategy of one leader who said, you know, every day I start the mornings in a large 5 ,000 person organization with a list of everyone in the organization's birthdays. And some mornings I have to send 10 emails. But I send emails to that person and say, hey, I'm the CEO. Joe just want to wish you a happy birthday. And it takes, you know, 15 minutes of their day or maybe they have this, you know, but then Joe writes back and says, oh my God, I feel like you noticed it was my birthday. I can say, and not just, hey, happy birthday, but one thing from their manager that they noticed, like, notice your sales were up this time.

1:18:50Or like, I noticed your manager mentioned this, like, you know, just pay attention. And he's like, yeah, it's a little bit of time, but the effect that it has much more so than me sending out, you know, a company wide email that says you all matter and stuff like that. And so I think this is the thing for leaders to be thinking about is like, what's the thing that authentically shows you're paying attention that people matter and so on. Those are going to end up impacting people's mindsets much more than what you tell people.

1:19:15Dr. Michael Gervais:I love that. It's one of our best practices here at Finding Mastery for ourselves. And something that we'll teach on is like, before you arrive at work, be clear about at least one person, if you can do more, great, how you're going to be there for them today. Yeah. And some people need a hug. Some people need a handshake. Some people need a little, you know, like, hey. Yeah. You know, like. I'm going to have the hard conversation with you today. Like, you let me down on that last thing. Like, I got to bring it forward. And, you know, like, like, but work it. And if you arrive at work and you're just kind of taking care of yourself, I feel like, okay, that's good.

1:19:47Dr. Michael Gervais:No problems. But if you can take another step and contemplate, think, muse, open your heart to what another person in the organization needs. Now we're starting to be better teammates to each other. So I wanted to share that with you because I think it's pretty practical. Totally. And if you need some hacks to do that, I wanted to get back to meditation, which you talked about earlier. One of my favorite practices is what's known as loving kindness, meditation, bad marketing. It should be called like, you know, teamwork. But it's a practice where you just think about the people in your life and you say, you know, may you be happy to the, you know, the janitor who works on the floor.

1:20:22May you be happy. May you be safe. May you have what you need. Whatever phrases feel comfortable to you. And you just kind of point to people in your life or in your organization and your family. And you just think that, and so many studies show it can really increase the compassion that we naturally feel the way our brain naturally goes to, Oh, let me help that person as opposed to being about ourselves.

1:20:41Dr. Michael Gervais:I've got a good one for you. Are you a student of Thich Nhat Hanh? A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I recognize that approach, the love and kindness. So once a week, once every other week, somewhere in that range, I'll do acupuncture. And so call it 40 minutes on the table. For those 40 minutes, that is my kind of big heavy lift of love and kindness. And so settle in through the breathing. And then instead of using the words, I wish you well, or I, you know, what I do is open my heart to their heart. So I pour in from my heart to their heart. So it's more visceral in that way. And how many people you think you can do without racing through it, but actually have a meaningful connection in 45 minutes.

1:21:22I've done a lot. A lot. This is a lot.

1:21:23Dr. Michael Gervais:You're surprised how many people you know. I've heard people do a practice like that while brushing their teeth. Oh, that's good. That's a quick hit. And you can get through four or five. Yeah, it's really, yeah. Yeah. And it's helpful in my experience. It's helpful to have one that's, pick one that's super easy, like whether it's your dog or your spouse, like whoever is super easy to extend this kind of kindness to. And then pick one that's really hard. If you buffer it that way, but it makes such a difference. It makes such a difference. I remember I had a coworker who I really struggled with and could almost get in, you know, if you struggle for a while, you can accidentally start getting into like adjacent contempt space where you're like, and, and it just like, may you be safe, may you be happy.

1:21:59You're like, oh my God, this person's a pain in the butt, but they're still a human too. And they're still, they're just like working through their own stuff. Like they're just like me. And it just makes dealing with them so much easier. It's not a gift to the other person. It's just a gift to yourself of reducing your own frustration and anger about whatever's going on.

1:22:14Dr. Michael Gervais:Laurie, what a great conversation. I see why your class is so successful. And it's just a lovely way you have of delivering the best practices that are evidence-based and making it practical for me and for us. I hope it was helpful. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Awesome. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by entrepreneur and impact theory founder Tom Bilyeu. In this conversation, he makes a bold claim that many of us are working hard inside a system we don't fully understand and one that may be quietly working against us. He breaks down why some people keep getting ahead while others feel stuck and how your beliefs, values and perspectives might be shaping more of your reality than you realize.

1:22:56Dr. Michael Gervais:So join us Wednesday, April 22nd at 9 a.m. Pacific only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday.

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1:24:10Dr. Michael Gervais:So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring. come on