Living with the H word

I have spent many hours over the past week updating the content on my website and reorganizing the pages. This task forced me to re-examine who I am and what I do.

I have struggled since the beginning of my entrepreneurial career with talking about happiness in a business setting.

How do I get business conference managers to accept that happiness is an important business tool, not a fluffy extravagance?

My first strategy was to stop using the H-word. If happiness wasn’t serious enough, I’d find something that was.

I’m not the only person who has struggled with this problem. How do you get the world of science or business to take you seriously when you are talking about happiness?

In the early days of the positive psychology movement, Ed Diener, a faculty member at the University of Illinois, wanted to create a serious study of happiness, but he wanted to avoid the H-word.

He knew any study that had happiness in the title was likely to be dismissed as fluffy and insignificant. He got around this problem by using ‘subjective well-being’ instead of happiness.

This is the term that is still used today by positive psychologists. Levels of well being are assessed by asking participants to give a subjective assessment of how they feel at the beginning of the session and then again at the end.

Researchers have also moved into brain scans to show what areas are activated by certain stimuli like photos, words, and activities. As our understanding of the regions of the brain grows, so does the power of using scans as a measurement tool.

I tried to follow in the path of Ed Diener, but "Make well-being work for you" doesn’t have the same ring as "Make happiness work for you."

When I discovered that I couldn’t avoid using the H-word, I tried moving myself to a new audience. I loved preaching to the choir, but talking to enlightened female entrepreneurs wasn’t making the impact I wanted. It isn’t where my message is needed.

I find myself being drawn back to the corporate world to talk about well-being. I believe it is time to look at happiness as more than a feeling.

I expect that everyone reading this knows what it feels like to be happy. You have probably experienced many of the positive emotions that fall under the happiness umbrella:

• joy
• satisfaction
• delight
• contentment are all types of happiness.

They are emotions that you may enjoy experiencing, but when I talk about happiness I am referring to a way of life, not just a feeling.

Happy people have bad days, horrific circumstances, and disappointments, just like everyone else. It isn’t what happens to them that that marks them as happiness believers, it is how they deal with everything.

Practising happiness includes beliefs in personal development, a desire to help the world as well as yourself, mindfulness, and taking responsibility for your decisions, actions, and well-being.

If you want to be happier, you will find a way to adopt the philosophy. The bigger question for me to answer is not how to be happy, but why you should care about being happy, especially in your work life.

Evidence-based research has proven that people with a happiness philosophy:

• are more successful
• are better leaders
• get promoted faster
• have more friends
• have stronger support networks
• have better social lives.

They are also more creative, more resilient to challenge and change, live longer, and are more successful in job interviews.

The list of benefits that accompany a life of happiness is longer than that, but I think I’ve given you enough examples to catch your attention.

Happiness is not just a feeling, nor is it the cherry on the top of a business cake.

Happiness is a tool for business success. It is also a tool for personal success, but I’ll try not to get side-tracked. If you want to do better in your work environment, start by adopting a happiness philosophy.

Working on my website gave me the opportunity to re-ignite my passion to share a better way to succeed in business.

I’ve decided to re-establish my presence in the business world and to stop feeling self-conscious about using the H-word.

Happiness! Happiness! Happiness!

I feel better now.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.