Making the effort to effectively serve and care for team members is always a win-win: it helps improve business outcomes while also helping us to live a more meaningful, fulfilling life.
With some of the efforts we make to serve team members, it can take a little contemplation to make the connection between the effort to serve and the fulfillment that it brings.
There are a few examples, however, where the connection between fulfillment and achievement are immediately obvious. One of those examples is being happy.
One of the greatest gifts we can offer to the people on our teams is our own happiness.
Research cited in the book Happiness Advantage, by positive psychology expert Shawn Achor, shows that leaders in more positive moods are better able to think creatively, problem solve, and negotiate.
Happiness is quite contagious. According to a study at Yale, happiness is more contagious than bad moods, and smiling and laughter are the most contagious of all.
Thus, happier leaders are better able to drive positive emotions in the people on their teams. Clearly, all other things being equal, a team with a more positive emotional climate is going to outperform a team where negative moods and emotions are the norm.
This might explain why in a study cited in Primal Leadership, by Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, researchers found that leaders who laugh the most, and are able to get others to laugh, significantly outperformed other leaders in terms of how they were rated by team members and the bonuses they received for financial performance.
This is all likely quite intuitive for most of us. We don’t need research to tell us that a happy leader is going to be more effective than a grump.
The important question is, “How do we increase our happiness?”
Fortunately, happiness is actually quite trainable.
It is now well established that we all have a baseline level of happiness that was set at a very young age.
We can experience times where we are happier or less happy than our baseline level of happiness as a result of pleasant or unpleasant life experiences but, within a short amount of time, we will return to our pre-set, baseline level of happiness.
This explains why some people generally seem to be happier than others.
It also explains why people who win the lottery or become paralyzed experience temporary changes in happiness but, within a year, both lottery winners and people who become paralyzed report that they are no more or less happy than before winning the lottery or getting into an accident.
Most people mistakenly pursue happiness by trying to change external circumstances in their lives, unaware that this only results in a short-term spike that will soon fade away, and won’t change their baseline level of happiness.
The wise approach would be to focus on cultivating happiness that doesn’t depend on outside circumstances by changing our baseline level of happiness.
Fortunately, this type of happiness is actually quite trainable. For an exhaustive list of methods developed by positive psychologists for changing our baseline levels of happiness, please check out the book mentioned above, The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor.
My preferred method is mindfulness training, which has been shown to literally change our brains in ways that change our baseline levels of happiness.
I believe, based on my own experience and research in neuroscience, that mindfulness has the most profound effects on the happiness that doesn’t depend on external circumstances.
The other major advantage of mindfulness training is that we can train in mindfulness without adding anything to our already busy schedules. All we have to do is change the way we do things that we already do anyhow.
For a quick-start guide to mindfulness training, please click here. If you’d like to go further, I highly recommend the book Search Inside Yourself, by my friend Meng, Google’s Jolly Good Fellow.
Please leave me a comment below if you apply these ideas. I’d love to hear about your experience.
______
Did you like what you read?
You can sign up here to get all my posts via our free eZine, which is full of great articles on personal and leadership development.
You’ll also get a $15 eBook for free.