46. Eric Karpinski on happiness at work

In this episode, Deloitte chief well-being officer Jen Fisher talks with Eric Karpinski, a leading voice on positive psychology in the workplace and author of the book Put Happiness to Work: Seven Strategies to Elevate Engagement for Optimal Performance.

Show Notes

In this episode Jen Fisher talks with Eric Karpinski, a leading voice on positive psychology in the workplace and author of the book Put Happiness to Work: Seven Strategies to Elevate Engagement for Optimal Performance.

What is WorkWell?

On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.

Happiness at Work with Eric Karpinski

Jennifer Fisher (Jen): Hi WorkWell listeners, I'm really excited to share that my book Work Better Together is officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this book. It's all about how to create a more human centered workplace. And as we return to the office for many of us, this book can help you move forward into post pandemic life with strategies and tools to strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It's available on Amazon or your favorite book retailer.
The other day, a colleague said to me, “Jen, you’re always so happy, even when work gets hectic. What’s your secret?” Well listeners, I can tell you my secret is practice. I intentionally cultivate happiness daily with small behaviors because happiness doesn’t just magically happen. It’s a habit that anyone can learn.
This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I’m Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer for Deloitte, and I’m so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being.
I’m here with Eric Karpinski. He’s been on the cutting edge of bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for nearly 10 years, Eric is a key member of Shawn Achor’s GoodThink team. He’s also author of the book, Put Happiness to Work, 7 Strategies to Elevate Engagement for Optimal Performance. So Eric, welcome to this show.
Eric Karpinski (Eric): Thanks so much Jen. I must say it’s delight to be here. I’ve been listening to your podcast for a couple years and this is going to be fun to actually be on it.
Jen: Awesome. I agree. I get to pepper you with questions this time instead of you listening.
Eric: Exactly.
Jen: So, let’s get started. Tell us your story. How did you become inspired to focus on positive psychology and in particular happiness in the workplace?

Eric: So, personally I always wanted to be happy and I think society laid out a pretty clear path as wrongheadedness. Actually it was, but it was, “Eric, if you work hard, you become successful. Then, you’ll have plenty of money and be able to do things that will make you happy.” So, it was that, work hard, become successful; once you’re successful, then you’ll be happy. Fast forward 20 years and I did all the things I was supposed to. I really said, “Oh, that’s the way. That’s my way forward. That’s my way to success and happiness.” With a lot of hard work and a lot of luck, I got a biochemistry degree from Brown and I got an MBA from the Wharton School and was able to land really sought after jobs that were very competitive and very interesting and “powerful.” I made lots of money and I got married and I moved to San Diego, had a couple kids. I was more successful than I had ever expected to be as a kid and I was absolutely miserable, that constant drive for success, that next promotion, that next raise; once I get promoted to partner, then I’ll be happy; once I get that next raise, then I’ll be happy. Problem was, as you know, it’s really easy to get this caught in this trap of success. It leads to you being in another group and you have to work even harder to keep that level of success. That constant drive lead to anxiety, lead to insomnia and insomnia definitely lead to depression. While this whole idea was to try to become happy, now I’m seeing a therapist and on antidepressant drugs. I popped my head up off this hedonic treadmill. What’s next? What’s next? I realized I could not succeed my way to happiness. Of course, I was trained as a scientist so, I said, “Well, what does science know about happiness?” This was in 2008. So, positive psychology is just sort of six-seven years old. I really found, so I found the positive psychology world, the organizational psych world, the neuroscience world, and I found a treasure trove of real peer-reviewed research about not only how to be happier, because that feels good, but also the benefits of being happier, the benefits for our success, that if we find ways today to turn our mind positive more often, it actually helps us be more successful at work and in life. So, after really playing with this myself, learning and tapping into my strengths and my core values, really creating the social support network that I knew it was important, learning to work with my stress and with my negative emotions, two years of doing that self -work, I realized there’s so much great stuff here. I want to help others find this, find this research, apply it. So, I spent the last 10 years working with organizations, helping them apply this research because some of it you can take somewhat directly? You can just, “Well, they did a study like this. Let’s just do that. Others of the research needs to be tweaked in the real world and decide, figure out how to best implement some of these ideas and some of this research.” So, after 10 years, I decided to write a book because there’s a lot of great learning in there of how to really apply the research. So, McGraw Hill just published that book in March here of 2021. It’s called PUT HAPPINESS TO WORK. It really codifies all of the learning and brings the research down to a practical way, how do we use it at work? It comes down to seven strategies that are about how do we bring happiness to work? Yes, but which parts of happiness, which types of happiness that are also really strongly tied to work engagement. These are the positive emotions, I call activated positive emotions. Things like when we’re feeling inspired and enthusiastic, because when we’re feeling engaged, we’re feeling proud and we feel like we’re belonged, that we’re part of a team and that our work is meaningful and that it matters. So, the idea behind this book is, “Look, there are all these strategies that we can help bring people happier and bring them more engagements so that you can actually line up the incentives of everybody because many people don’t care about their engagement, but they care a lot about their happiness and leaders care a lot about

engagement because it ties so much to productivity and profitability and better customer outcomes.” So, anyway, that’s my career in nutshell because now we’re at this place where the book is published and there’s so many of us that are just in these late stages of the pandemic languishing.
Jen: Thank you Adam Grant for bringing that vernacular for us.
Eric: Exactly. I love that article.
Jen: I read that article and I was like, “Yes, I feel seen. I feel heard. I feel totally validated.”
Eric: Exactly. So many of us are feeling that and what I loved about that is he showed us. He gave us the word and also greenlighted the fact that “It’s okay that we’re all feeling this right now. We don’t need to be flourishing. There’s so many things that we normally have, that reinforce us that just are there right now.”
Jen: That feeds in directly to where I want to go, because I think that happiness is something that perhaps is misunderstood. This this kind of constant striving for happiness, but never really feeling like we get there or do we need to like always be happy and what happens when we’re not happy. So, can we talk about, number one, like what is the actual definition of happiness and then what is the science behind? Let’s demystify it for people because I feel like there’s this idea of like, “Oh, you have to always be happy” and this constant striving for happiness, which I’ve heard over and over and I’m sure you have.
Eric: Terrible idea.
Jen: This constant striving for happiness actually makes you more unhappy than if you weren’t striving for happiness at all.
Eric: Exactly. So, let me hit this one at a time. Happiness, the way that I talk about happiness and the way the research really captures it is it’s all positive emotions collectively. So, all of those things that we feel, that contentment, that satisfaction, that enthusiasm, that excitement, that pride, that sense of meaning, that sense of fulfillment. Anything that you consider a positive emotion, I consider that under the umbrella of happiness. So, it’s a much broader thing and it doesn’t have to be this extroverted, high five-giving type of happiness. That counts and that’s one aspect of it, this high energy, but just if someone who’s just he feels good and they’re expressing it in a calm way, that counts too. I appreciate that question because we do want to have that broad umbrella definition and then really important positive emotions are fleeting. We can’t force them. We can create space for them and we can plant seeds and we can do little things in our lives.
I’m sure we’ll talk about some of these practical things that we can. Little habits that we can do in our lives. Take a couple minutes a day. Little things we can do in a meeting or when we’re interacting with others. We can’t force anybody, but we can plant seeds and create space, and when we do, oftentimes happiness arises, but it’s not about being happy all the time. If we can have three or four more moments in a day where we feel a nice energetic positive emotion, that’s all we need to tap in all the benefits. In fact, as you said, if you have these expectations of happy all the time, that is a terrible place. In fact, that was my

problem when I first learned about this. I was like, this is all so cool. I am going to knock and I have to be angry or sad or frustrated again. Just anytime I want to, I’ll just go to the tools and this is in the same time that I was transitioning to be speaking about happiness, but I was completely ignoring all of the research we know about negative emotions and that we actually have to experience many of our negative emotions. We’re all really disappointed that something didn’t happen and we’re really sad that we can’t go out with our friends because of the pandemic. We need to open up to those negative emotions. We need to let them in and feel them. If we just cover it over, then that, I know you’ve heard Susan David on it, that just is so depressing.
Jen: They come back with a vengeance.
Eric: They come back in places you never expected and they completely sideswipe. They’re like, “No, we’re going to be expressed one way or another.” So, it’s important to be able to differentiate those negative emotions that are what I call necessary negative emotions and those that are gratuitous and stuff that we’re just creating for ourselves. So, I’ve got a whole chapter in the book about managing negative emotions and how to differentiate those so that you can do it from a healthy perspective.
Jen: Well, that’s where I was going to go. Let’s talk about that because I think as so many of us reflect on the past year, but depending on where you are in the world, this pandemic is still raging. We’re not done. So, there have been a lot of negative emotions. What are the strategies for dealing with that and then moving out of them or moving to a different place, whether it is moving into positive emotions? I struggle with calling emotions negative and positive. They’re just emotions, but you know what I’m saying. How do we honor our negative emotions, but then take steps to move out of that place so we don’t get stuck there?
Eric: I think the biggest thing is to just…we’re not good at opening up to the negative stuff. We want to push it away. We want to go to our Netflix. We want to go to our videogames. When we’re feeling, we’re just like…
Jen: Distraction.
Eric: Let’s go, let’s distract. Let’s pull ourselves away. Let’s go do a happy thing. That’s where we run into the problems. It’s when we don’t, “Hey, I’m actually really feeling sad right now. I want to go out with my friends and have a beer.” Or I’m driving by and I’m seeing other people at a bar they’re not supposed to be in. I’m like “I want that.” Well okay. Let that in. Just be like, “What does this feel like?” Then, you can do something. These mindfulness tools are really useful. So, why do I feel this negative emotion and why don’t you see you can be with it without using your brain to multiply it? That’s a lot of the gratuitous stuff. It’s like, “Oh, I’m never going to get to go ahead and how come they get to do it?” That’s just multiplying your negativity.
Jen: I’m really good at that by the way.
Eric: We’re all good practiced at making things worse for us.
Jen: I take it all the way down the stream until the stream doesn’t exist anymore.

Eric: Total catastrophization. Oh my God and this is going to mean that I’m never going to have any friends. It’s easy for our brains to do that. We have this negativity bias that takes us into, that brings up the negative stuff and helps us land it more often than we want. We can get good at recognizing that. Okay, no. What’s sad here is that I can’t go out and have a beer with my friends. Let me acknowledge that. Let me let that in. Yes, it sucks. Then, okay, well. Here I am and what’s good in my life. Giving yourself one of the practices, a gratitude practice. Any of the things that are well-proven to do it. Alright. Well, let me create some space for what’s good too, and not forcing it, but after you experience the negative stuff. Okay, I’m back to neutral or my brain wants to go cycle and all these gratuitous stuff. Let’s actually step away from that and let’s find what’s actually good.
Someway we get to spend more time with our families, some of us. There’s benefits that come out of this pandemic too and if we can spend a little time on that, great. If it doesn’t come up, that’s okay too. We’re trying to create space for positive things, but we can’t have the expectations for those positive emotions.
Jen: Can’t force it.
Eric: Exactly.
Jen: So, you in particular focus on or your book focuses on happiness at work or happiness in the workplace, which is such a relevant and interesting topic because I feel like for so long, we didn’t really…happiness didn’t have a place at work. It was like happiness wasn’t something organizations strived for. It wasn’t the organization job to have happy employees and if employees were happy, did that mean that they weren’t doing a good job because maybe they were having too much fun at work. We really want people to have fun at work.
Eric: Thank God we moved on from that.
Jen: We have, but conversations over the years that both of us have probably been involved in is do we really want happy employees? Obviously, the answer is overwhelmingly yes, but talk to me about happiness, you mentioned happiness and engagement, talk to me about how they’re linked, how they drive performance, and why happiness does matter in the workplace?
Eric: Circling into engagement, I think is really important because so many leaders understand they want their people to be engaged because Gallup’s done so much great research about how important engagement is on hundreds of thousands of workgroups. When people are engaged, they absolutely are tied to higher levels of productivity and profitability and customer service and all the great things. So, when you look at engagement though, engagement really is an expression of a lot of activated positive emotions because the problem is most leaders talk about, “Hey, we want you to be engaged because we want the benefits for the organization, which is the profitability and the productivity.” Or they’re like, “Well, I know what engaged employees look like. They look like they’re committed and they’re loyal and they’re willing to put in the extra mile and special effort.”
Jen: Their heads down, working all the time.

Eric: At least that’s what they want to see the benefits of that. Of course, as any individual contributor or even more junior manager hears that from the leaders and they’re like, “You just want me to work harder.” Like, “All you’re saying is you want me to work hard and be more committed. I’m doing what I can right now.” So, there’s not any motivation in the way that we talk about engagement as leaders. So, let’s switch that. Let’s change how we think about engagement because so much of engagement is those positive emotions that we’re feeling. Engage people as we talked about, like they feel proud, they feel motivated, they feel like they belong. Those are things that people want to feel. So, let’s stop talking about engagement as this great thing for the organization and start talking about how it’s great for the organization, yes, and it’s also great for us because when we’re feeling engaged, we’re full of energizing positive emotions. Let’s focus not on getting you happy in a generic way because if you look at some of the big organizations, the Facebooks and the Googles, they have three free meals a day and massage therapists coming in and nap pods and pool tables. That sounds great for recruiting and it’s great food helps people feel satisfied and content, but those satisfied and content kind of emotions are ones, they’re rest and digest kind of positive emotions. They don’t push you forward, whereas those ones that we’re talking about when we can help people feel like they matter, when we can help people feel inspired by what we’re trying to do, if we can tap into their personal ways, they find meaning in their work. Now, we’re talking because they’re going to feel good. So, they’re going to be motivated to keep doing these things. That’ll help us then be more engaged, help us all move towards the goals. Now, everybody wins. Everyone’s aligned because we all want to feel good, and as an organization, we want to achieve the things that are in front of us. So, let’s find that way where we’re aligned, which is engagement through activated positive emotions.
Jen: I love what you’re saying. I want to dig into especially the notion of positive emotions and purpose and meaning in work. So, for people that might be listening that are struggling to find purpose and meaning in their work, what advice do you have for them?
Eric: Two real paths to meaning at work that I live by and really try to help every other people find. The first one I call purpose meaning, and that’s where when our lives have purpose beyond our self-interest, when we’re contributing to something bigger than ourselves, that’s big. A lot of us have it by default. People working in a helping profession, in education or in healthcare. Those are easy to tap. “Oh, who am I helping? Well, this kid that I was teaching today and this patient that that actually after COVID was able to walk out and be taken care of.” The problem is most people in those spaces don’t actually remind themselves about why they’re there. You can live in them. You can be in the best helping profession there is, but if you don’t remind yourself that’s why you’re doing the work, that’s why you’re putting up with the stress is these benefits to these students or these patients or whatever it is. I think within a helping profession, we need to make sure we remind ourselves. Within any profession, we need to remind ourselves of who it is we’re helping and that that’s why we’re doing the hard work we’re doing because once we infuse our work with that meaning, now it gives us that engagement, it gives us that positive thing. If we’re just like, “Oh, here’s the next 20 things I need to do” and we don’t tie it to the beneficent, the people we’re benefiting, then we’re toast. We’re just not going to get the benefit. I think all professions, when we go to it, there’s someone who’s helped. Maybe it’s the end user of a product or a service, maybe it’s your coworkers and colleagues that you work with, maybe

it’s simply that your work supports your family and your kids or your other community activities that you do in your not work life. Whatever work enables finding someone else who benefits and then reminding yourself about that, finding ways of having that visible, whatever it is because everyone’s path to meaning is different than everyone else’s. so, no one can tell you what you find meaningful, but you can create opportunities, you can create space for your teams to find what’s meaningful for them and then once they have it, find ways of reminding them or reminding yourself stories or posters put in different places so you can re-read them, remember them. When you go to a nice note of appreciation for the work you’ve done. because someone else has really put that somewhere you can remind yourself. Right, this is why I’m doing this, not just because I have to, but because it’s beneficial.
Jen: I have a feel-good folder. So, I love that strategy. That’s where I go on the bad days when I need to remind myself about why I do what I do.
Eric: That’s where we go on the bad days.
Jen: That’s a great strategy. Also, I think what I hear you saying is purpose and meaning comes in large part from impact or connection with other humans when you get all the way down the line, regardless of what your job is. So, it’s not about the job itself, but it’s about the impact that you’re having on other human beings. It’s beautiful.
Eric: I talk about values meaning and I think that at the core of each of us, we all have our core set of personal values. I think a lot of people know some of their values, but very few people can define them and prioritize them in a way that’s useful. I think that taking a couple of hours to really write down all the values that could be yours and then tapping into your life stories and the big decisions. I’ve got a whole series of questions in the book that probe these big what matters to you. Why does it matter? Because if we can start to see how our life and our work align with those values, if we can live in congruence with those values, suddenly life is meaningful and that’s the research shows over and over. If we can live a life that’s congruent, then we can really…that’s a meaningful place too. There’s a lot of cool ways to both understand those values and then figure out how do I see them in my life more and then how do I actually change and adapt my life and my work a little bit to live in them more often and actually express them more often?
Jen: I do want to dive deeper into at least some of the seven strategies, in particular for team leaders, for colleagues. We are all leaders in our life in some way. What advice do you have? What are some of the strategies that leaders and teammates can help increase engagement and happiness within their team?
Eric: I think the first one we’ve covered really nicely, which is the meaning idea. We need to have meaning, whether it’s purpose meaning or values meaning, obviously going at both of them is important. I think it’s also important to know that when we’re going after meaningful things, we’re not going to feel good all the time. That is stress paradox. We often feel stressed when things are meaningful because they’re important to us.
Acknowledging that the path to an engaged, meaningful life is not one that’s always going to be the easy way I think is important. We can do lots of things to feel good and feel happy, but when we’re really working hard to do something meaningful, it’s okay. We call it

Allia Crum talks about it’s a cold dark night on the side of Everest. Her implication is what are you doing? So, you are climbing the biggest mountain in the world. You’re not expecting it’s going to be a walk in the park. If it was, everybody would do it. It wouldn’t be meaningful. So, there’s going to be some cold dark nights when you are like, “Why am I here? Why am I doing this?” But if you remind yourself, “Oh right, because I want to climb the biggest mountain or I want to be a great parent or I really want this product to be successful because it can change lives.” Suddenly, it’s okay that we’re “suffering” through stress, that we’re feeling the stress. It’s like, “Oh, that’s because it’s important.”
Jen: It reminds me of Glennon Doyle. She says, “We can do hard things.”
Eric: We can do hard things.
Jen: We can do hard things, yup.
Eric: In fact in life, it’s easy and hedonic. All about hedonic pleasures is not one that’s meaningful and for a lot of people not worth doing if we can’t find us. So, meaning is a big strategy. Another one that I think is really pertinent now is social connection. We have all been part of our languishing. We are wired or tribal. We’re wired to connect. It is so difficult when we can’t see our friends and we can’t see our people and we’ve got all this social distance. We all know that we’re suffering through this period of less. So, one of the things that I really like to talk about is how do we be proactive about a rebuilding. So many of us have lost so many of our wonderful skills because we spent over a year with just a few people. Some of us have lost even that is I’m an extrovert and all of a sudden the idea of going to a bar even though let’s say it was all vaccinated people, like, “Oh well, what would I say, what would I do? I’m out of practice and I’m an extrovert.” So, what I love to suggest to people and what I talk about in the book that is three different habits, personal habits, that can help us reactivate that desire and that interest and our empathy and our ways of learning. There are dozens of tools in the book, like tools and exercises and things. Think of it as an action buffet. You don’t have to do even a small percentage of them. Listen and find one that sounds intriguing to you, that sounds interesting and sounds kind of fun to you.
Then, try it out. Try it out for a few days. Try it out for a week. If it doesn’t take, that’s okay. There’s tons of more opportunities, all driven by research, that you can go and try. If it does work though, how do we make that into a habit that we do without having to think about it, how do we make it into something that we do every day. We wake up and we do our gratitude exercise. We wake up, we get to our first email, we first pick up our phone, and we do a little thing that connects us with somebody. Integrating it, hardwiring it into how we do our day is essentially important. So, let’s talk about three different personal habits that can help us with our connection with our desire to connect, etc. One is an adaptation of one of the most popular things, which is gratitude for others. Just take three minutes in your morning. Write down three people that you care about that are important in your life and what specifically you’re grateful for about them. So, it can’t just be I’m grateful for my mom, but I’m grateful for my son who’s 16 and he’ll still give me a hug all through the pandemic. He’s more than willing to give me a hug and that’s so important. So, it’s not just me and my wife that can hug, but I have another one. So, I really appreciate it that from him. So, taking a few minutes and just carving it out, creating that space, and write down three people you grateful for and for what’s specifically you’re grateful for at that

moment. This can obviously rewire and train and I know you’ve guests have talked about this a lot of time, you’re hardwiring your brain to activate and then make it easier. Each time you do a gratitude practice, you make it a little bit easier growing new synapses in that neuro pathway, you’re growing your neurons in that neuro pathway over time, and it makes it easier and easier to find the good stuff and appreciate it. So, a gratitude for others brings that and focuses on other people so that you really can start, “Oh yeah, I love them too.” Then the second one is something…this we worked out with. This comes from Shawn Achor and the team that I’ve been working with for a number of years there. We call it conscious acts of kindness, but a specific email or text where as soon as you get to your phone or to your laptop, somewhere that you tie it to something, send a two-line email to someone in your network, appreciating them, telling them why you’re grateful for them, encouraging them, or just sharing some good news with them. Sharing. you’re just sending this little packet of love and connection and positivity out to somebody. You just do that regularly and then you try to do each of these, like we talk about habits. We talk about 21 days only because it helps us get started and we say, “Oh, I can do anything for three weeks.” But 21 days isn’t enough. It’s like this is enough to lock it into a habit and then figure out how to integrate it into your life long term. Gratitude for others. Conscious acts of kindness, email or text. Then, my third favorite, and this is one I do a lot is something I call a connection meditation. Jen, have you ever done loving-kindness meditation?
Jen: I have, yes.
Eric: So, I’ve adapted it because loving-kindness meditation sounds like a hard thing to convince executives that they should do at work. So, I call it a connection meditation, but it’s based on the same 5000 years of history of loving-kindness meditation and we adapted somewhat. Just for listeners that aren’t familiar with it, the whole idea is you spend a few minutes in a quiet space just breathing, just like you would for a mindfulness meditation.
Then, you bring to mind someone who is really close to you, very easy to love. Sometimes, if people are feeling conflicted with their partner or with their kids, they think of a niece or a nephew or a grandmother, someone that’s really a benefactor of some sort, who is easy for you to love and open to. So, you just bring their face to mind and you send positive wishes to them, may you be happy, may you be healthy. You’re really open to the love that you feel for them, the connection that you feel with them. You run through a series of these sentences. Then, you change and you bring it to maybe someone else you love, but maybe there’s a little bit of conflict. Maybe it’s the partner whatever. You bring them the same, may you be happy, may you be healthy. You do it slow enough so you can really envision them and connect with them. Then you bring attention to someone that you don’t know that well. Maybe it’s a coworker you haven’t spent a lot of time with or a neighbor. You just take them through the same statements and then try to open to connection with them and what’s amazing…this one sounds really woo-woo in California to a lot of people. I want to say that it’s backed by really great research coming out of Stanford, coming out of University of North Carolina that shows that when we do this exercise, not only do we get primed with lots of positive emotion, but it really increases our empathy, our ability to take other people’s view and understand what they’re feeling and it helps us actually want to make those connections. So, this is one of my favorite ones. It’s great if someone already has a mindfulness practice to mix in this connection meditation from time to time. If people

want, they can find…there’s a prerecorded one on my website puthappinesstowork.com/resources.
Jen: I think especially now when so many of us are feeling disconnected from others. Along those lines, there’s a lot of talk about for those that have been working remotely, recognizing that many have had to go into work and they’re frontline and essential workers, but there’s now talk about offices opening or offices are opening and people are going back to the workplace and many are experiencing reentry anxiety for the reason that you said that we just haven’t been around others, but also many other reasons. There’s a whole host of things. Interestingly, I think the anxiety and fear that we were probably feeling at this time last year for many of us, we’ve adapted to. Now, this is a whole new set of unknowns and uncertainty. Do you have any advice or insights or strategies to share with us on reentry anxiety, if you will?
Eric: There’s a couple ways I’m thinking of going with this. I think one of them is how do we be proactive about recreating some of those connections? Once we feel connected with people again, it helps us work through some of the stresses and fears. So, there’s a fun. It’s called the Pecha Kucha presentation. It comes from the social connection chapter, but I want to talk about it because I think it really can help with exactly what you’re talking about, which is have everyone on our team. Whether you’re going to do this in person or because you’re starting to bring, I think it’s a great way to rewarm-up our interpersonal spaces if we are pushing our team back into an office. You just ask everybody to pull together 10 photos of their life outside of work. It can be their life outside of work both during and prepandemic so that you’ve got a full variety. Put those 10 pictures together.
The idea is you ask one person each weekly meeting or something to spend three minutes at the beginning of the meeting because here’s the key. You’ve got 10 photos, but you only have 15 to 20 seconds to share each one. So, you’re not going to be telling full stories.
You’re just going to be like, “Hey, this is my wife and kids and this is why they’re important to me.” Like, “I’m a beekeeper. These are my bees and I’m really curious about them and learning from them and they give me honey sometimes.” “Here’s me and my hospital. I had cancer this last year and I had surgery. I’m better now. It’s awesome.” That’s just the level of detail that you’re going to get. Obviously, they can share what they want to share, but the idea is just spending a few minutes at the beginning of a meeting helps people understand who you are, where you’re coming from, and creates all kinds of seeds for questions and interactions later. “Oh, I didn’t know you had cancer. Like tell me about that.” Or “I’ve always been curious about bees and I want to learn more. Like let’s have lunch or something and talk about it.” So, bringing some of the positive tools I think to some of this fear as we step back into work and whatever the fears are and then I evolve strategy about putting stress to work. This is about realizing that the stress that we feel, first of all, those negative emotions when we’re feeling fear and things like let’s make sure we open to them, make sure we let them in just like we talked about earlier. Then, when the stress is there, recognizing that stress actually reevolves stress to help us, but there’s a number of ways that we can change how we respond to stress from something called the threat response, which is the response that we hear so much about, about the negative health effects, the negative productivity and efficiency. That’s real. That happens. There’s another response called the challenge response, which happens naturally when we feel like, “Hey, this is going to be hard, but I think we have the resources to actually go after it.” It changes our

physiological response in stress, opens our peripheral vasculature and our brain vasculature, allowing more blood to actually get to the parts of the brain that matter and they’re really important for us to help address whatever that stress is. So, just knowing that, “Oh wait.” Just reminding ourselves, “Hey, my heart’s beating faster, my blood’s moving.” This is actually getting my body ready to perform.
Jen: I think obviously long-term chronic stress is bad, but I think stress gets a bad rap because we need it. We need it to grow. We need it to push. I liken it too. When you go to the gym and you want to grow your biceps, you stress it out. You lift heavy weights and then your bicep grows. It’s the same thing for the rest of us with stress.
Eric: We’ll get better. It actually circles and it circles back beautifully to the meaning stuff we’re talking about.
Jen: Absolutely.
Eric: Because if we can tap into why we’re doing it, why we’re accepting this stress, why the stress is part of our life, because it’s meaningful, because we want to get back to our people. Whatever the meaning is, this is stressful now, but it’ll get better, but it’s important.
Jen: Stress for the purpose.
Eric: Stress for the purpose. So much of it is and we just need to figure out what that purpose is so we can remind ourselves, this is why we’re going through this now, because it will allow us to actually achieve X, Y, or Z and help these people and do these things. Even just inventorying all the resources you have. What are my strengths? What about the team around me? What can they bring? As soon as you start realizing you’ve got more assets and more resources than you thought, that can switch how you process your stress from the threat response into the challenge response.
Jen: Love it. So, you’ve given a ton of tips, but I’m going to ask you how do you personally cultivate? What’s your go to number one thing that never fails you or maybe it fails you, but what’s your number one go-to thing?
Eric: I would be cautious about that language because there’s no way that all things work all the time.
Jen: I realized that is the word coming out of my mouth.
Eric: Let me catch it at its back and pull it back. There’s two things that are part of my regular practice that are essential and one is fitness. It only needs to be 20 minutes. It only needs to be moderate exercise. I like to do the hardcore spin classes. I did teach spin class and I plan on teaching again, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Find ways for you that you can just get your body moving. Then, the second one is my meditation practice. I’ll do a mindfulness meditation and I will integrate every third or fourth time I’ll use the connection meditation instead because it’s a nice integration because mindfulness meditation can give you that sort of calm, satisfied feel, but it’s not a higher-energy positive emotion. So, I really love doing the connection meditation because it helps me feel the people in it and it drives. In fact, Barbara Fredrickson did a whole head to head between the loving-kindness

meditation and the mindfulness and she said, “People stick with connection meditation a lot longer because it feels so good. If meditation is something that people want to do, think about starting with the connection meditation it’s still tons of the benefits of things, but also these positive emotional ones that are important.”
Jen: I’m going to try it and I’m going to recommend it too, because I often get people asking me, “I’ve tried meditation and I can’t stick with it. What do you recommend?” Now, I have a recommendation for them. I just usually keep telling them to keep trying. That’s what you hear, you’re not doing it wrong. If you think you’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it right.
Eric: You’re judging yourself, which is part of what we’re trying to let go off. Put your bottom on the cushion or on the chair and you get what you get, but it’s okay if you’re not staying. It’s great. We both are teachers, but it’s not about staying with your focus. It’s about noticing when you wander off. That’s the whole thing. You can’t wander off if you’ve got it perfect.
Jen: Exactly. I’ve never met anybody, even the most avid meditator, that doesn’t wander off. One final question for you. This has been awesome, so rich, and so many tips and things that you shared with our listeners. I ask this to every guest. So, you are probably familiar with it. What is your personal definition of well-being?
Eric: It is central to having the positive emotions. I probably default to the whole PERMA idea from Seligman, which is those positive relationships, having something that we engage in and we care about, positive emotions, and then meaning. Those are my four anchors if we can. Whenever something feels off, which of these am I not really paying attention to? Which of these am I letting fall off? I really need to, is it relationship, is it meaning, whichever it is, those are for me. Of course, it’s not about feeling those all the time like we’ve said. Neither this is like, “Oh, I’m feeling so fulfilled and I’m just sitting in this for days at a time.” Now, they’re just little fleeting experiences of positive emotions, the sense of meaning, this feeling connected with my people. Those are the real anchors flourishing.
Jen: Those are good ones. I like them. I approve.
Eric: Green lighted from Jen. I’ll take it.
Jen: Well, Eric, like I said, it was a joy to have you on the show. I’m feeling lots of positive emotions from it. So, thank you for lifting my day.
Eric: It was perfect and I thank you for the opportunity to share these ideas. I’ve learned so much from other guests. I’m glad that I could share some things.
Jen: I’m so grateful Eric could be with us today to talk about happiness at work. Thank you to our producers Revit 360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword WorkWell, all one word, to hear more. If you like this show, don’t forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you would like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, my profile is under the name Jen Fisher, or on Twitter, @jenfish23. We’re always open to your
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