The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor

I highly recommend reading The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. It is a well-written, practical book with simple, actionable ways to apply each of the seven principles (outlined below) to improve your performance and maximize your potential. Shawn writes “Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard, we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology has shown this formula is backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, productive and resilient at work.” It doesn’t mean being 100% positive or always happy (that’s not realistic), but rather putting more weight on being optimistic and shifting to a more positive mindset to create more opportunities and happiness.

Here is an outline of his seven principles in The Happiness Advantage:

1) The Happiness Advantage: capitalize on positivity to improve productivity and performance – retrain the brain to be more positive.

2) The Fulcrum and The Lever: adjust your mindset (the fulcrum) in ways that give us more power (lever) – we control how we think about the world.

3) The Tetris Effect: retrain our brains to find opportunity wherever we look or wherever we are – focus on the opportunity.

4) Falling Up: find the path out and up from the negative events of our lives – how can this make us stronger.

5) The Zorro Circle: regain control in the midst of chaos by bringing our circle in – focus on small, manageable goals until we get stronger.

6) The 20-Second Rule: with limited willpower we need to make small energy adjustments to reroute the path of least resistance and instead build better habits.

7) Social Investment: invest in our friends, peers and family so that when challenges or stress present themselves, you have a support network. Our social support network is a strong predictor of success and happiness.

What Next?

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Stacey L. Olson is a Leadership and Certified Positive Psychology Coach, has 15 years of corporate experience and has gone through her own transformational change from burning out to balanced in life while performing at a high level (both in her corporate career and own business). She works with professionals who want to work less, live more and be their best even with all the demands, high expectations and messiness of everyday life. Stacey is the founder of The Balanced Leader™ program and offers executive and leadership coaching, workshops, and speaking.