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Amanda Kramer: Every episode, we have an LBIdea or a key takeaway. And the key takeaway here is that we are at a crisis point for humanity, but there is a solution available.

Welcome to the Leeds Business Insights Podcast, featuring expert analysis to help you stand out from the herd. I'm your host, Amanda Kramer. We are thrilled to be discussing the science of happiness, both inside and outside of the workplace, with Ashish Kothari, a friend of the Leeds School of Business, author of "Hardwired for Happiness," and Founder of the Happiness Squad. Welcome to Leeds Business Insights, Ashish, and thank you so much for being here with us today.

Ashiash Kothari: It is my pleasure to be with you, Amanda, and your listeners.

Kramer: We are really looking forward to hearing from you. And let's start by grounding the listeners in your story, why we're here talking about happiness science, and why listeners should care about happiness and flourishing.

Kothari: Yes, absolutely. I'll take you all back a little while. Actually, maybe, I'll take you just back all the way, all right. So, I mean, I grew up in India, grew up in a middle-class family, from an early age picked up, you know, really, really deeply the fact that, you know, you have to work hard, study harder, give it all to be successful. And the reason to be successful is, only if you're successful will you have the money and you will be able to be happy. You'll be able to buy all the things you want that bring you happiness.

Well, I definitely followed that to a tee. I graduated from IIT Bombay, came to the U.S. in the '97, and spent the next 20 years climbing the corporate ladder. In my last role, I was a partner at McKinsey & Company. You know, I spent about 25 years in consulting before I left. But this is five years before that. So, when I was, you know, already 20 years into consulting, I was 43 years old. We had moved to Boulder. I was married. We had a four-year-old, five-year-old son at that time.

You know, everything was great, right? I was literally at the pinnacle of the success, working for one of the best firms you can imagine. I loved the firm. I loved the people. You know, my parents were happy. I always had great friends. I was making more money than we could spend. So, life was good. We were saving for retirement, what have you.

And my client stuff was great, you know. My client portfolio was great. I was... I loved working with my colleagues. So, you can imagine, right? You go there. Everything on my checklist of things that I had picked up that were going to make me happy and were going to be really enable me to flourish were all checked. But I was waking up, Amanda, with high degree of anxiety. Every morning, you know, I feel like I needed to throw up. There was nothing externally that was actually wrong. And there was nothing that I was worried about, right? So, oftentimes, you’re worried about what's happening and like, you know, oh, my God. None of that was there. And yet, I was waking up with this debilitating amount of anxiety every morning. And then, once I'd get through my day, it'd be fine.

It was, you know, in that context that, you know, I found myself searching for, why is this, you know? And a lot of well-wishers said, "Hey, you should go see a therapist, and they'll help you figure it out." And I didn't take that advice at that time because I was like, what is somebody going to help me figure out? There is nothing cognitively that I can think that's troubling me. I haven't had any trauma in my childhood that I'm aware of. You know, life's been pretty good. Life's been pretty good all the way through. So, I'm not sure they're going to help me. I think I need to find the answer within.

And so, I turned to three fields, Amanda, which usually don't go together. I turned into the fields of spirituality, reading extensively works, you know, the Buddhism text, and Hinduism text and Taoism and stoicism, and I read the Bible, I read the Quran, just looking continuously at, you know, what was the age-old wisdom around flourishing.

I also started reading the latest and greatest works coming out of Harvard and Wharton and Penn State and UPenn around flourishing and what the psychologists had to say around this world. And I discovered this amazing field of positive psychology, right, which was really studying the science of flourishing. And happiness is a sub-shoot of that, if you will.

And as I started integrating them into my life, anxiety was gone. I was living a life which was a lot more fulfilled. I had found my purpose. And then, the COVID pandemic hit, okay. And so, I mean, I was... I had completely re-engineered my life. Life was really, really good. And I had a chance, because of all the successes I was having, I was asked by McKinsey to, kind of, work in creative offering around wellbeing, adaptability, and resilience.

And, you know, as I looked into that, we built an offering. We were incredibly successful with that. But as I built that offering, Amanda, for the first time, I realized that I had a story around this whole stress, anxiety thing, which was completely wrong. For me, I thought stress, anxiety, burnout are prices insecure overachievers pay to climb the ladder and to accumulate wealth, if you will, from outside.

When I did this research to build this offering, I realized how wrong I was. I realized how big this issue of stress, anxiety, and burnout was in our world. Yes, CEOs were struggling with this, but so were frontline workers.

For sure, for-profit large companies were struggling with it, but so were startups. But more importantly, the burnout stats were even worse for nonprofits — teachers, doctors. I mean, this was all over the place. And it was actually at epic proportions. And so, when I saw that and I realized that, actually, we had an approach that could really help people build happier lives and build healthier lives, you know, I decided to leave my corporate career and just focus on my new company, Happiness Squad, which sole purpose is to democratize happiness and to help a billion people over our lifetimes, you know, integrate these practices that we've known about for thousands of years, that are well-researched in psychology that they actually work, and have grounding in neurosciences that they work by, actually, fundamental shifts in our neural structures. And yet, we don't do it. And yet, we don't do it.

So, I want to solve that problem and make it happen. So, that's my story. That's what we are about.

Kramer: So, Ashish, what have you learned about happiness from talking to people about meaning and fulfillment?

Kothari: Yes. So, happiness, I think there are several myths out there about happiness. And they're really myths. And they're so deeply ingrained, Amanda. So, I think it's worth covering them for a bit. I think one is this myth, which, you know, I described, which is between my story, right? Which is, if you are successful, you'll be happy. And research done by Sonya Lubomirski, Martin Seligman, Ed Diener, so many renowned psychologists, have turned it on its head. It's actually not true. It is not success that leads to happiness. It's happiness that leads to success, right? I mean, it's the evidence is extremely clear.

I think the second big thing about happiness is, Tal Ben-Shahar talks a lot about this, which is you can't actually pursue happiness. Those who have happiness as a goal are inherently unhappier, because they're so focused on, "Am I happy? Am I happy now? Why am I not happy now?" And Tal talks about a bit around this notion of happiness is something that ensues. You can't see the light, but you can break the light into its different components, and you can see the different colors. And that's, you know, I completely agree with that approach. And that's been my experience. And that's been the experience through all the work that I've done with people, which is, if we can help people integrate practice as a way of living, I think happiness ensues.

The longest-running study at Harvard around flourishing clearly points that. There are almost 60% of the longevity, the success, flourishing, and life satisfaction is actually driven by the quality of relationships we have. So, I think that's a really, really big deal. And then, the other big deal is, you know, how we are feeling physically, mentally, spiritually? How are we doing? Are we taking care of our bodies? Are we taking care of our minds? Are we really taking care of our spirit, you know, our energy, our bigger reason for being? And as we integrate these into our lives, you know, happiness ensues. It's the byproduct of all of this.

Kramer: Absolutely. And Ashish, I want to talk with you more about this, from both an individual perspective and an organizational perspective.

Kothari: Yes.

Kramer: So, for those listening, how can they think about their own happiness journey and find meaning and happiness in what they do?

Kothari: Yeah. I think it's a great question, Amanda. And I think it's a really, really important question, for a couple of reasons. I think, first of all, look, I fundamentally believe that, you know, a big chunk of our happiness, because it comes from within, right, it's mastering our inner worlds, individuals should be able to do, right, a big chunk of it. But the reality is we spend one-thirds of our working lives... you know, our lives working. We spend the majority of our waking hours, at least during the week, at work.

And so, yes, while we can be happier and we can be less stressed, if organizations join forces to fundamentally shape cultures of flourishing, it can actually make a big difference, both in individuals’ life, but even bigger, in actually the performance of organizations.

So, meaning-making is a really important part of that. You know, we are at this place right now where, think about it, I just shared this stat, you know, majority of our weeks we spend at work. One-third of our lives, we work. How crazy it is that only 30% of people in the U.S. are engaged? That number is 20% globally. And then, when you talk about meaning on top of engagement, you know, when you ask the senior leaders, oftentimes that number can rise up to 80 to 85% that they say they find their work meaningful. When you go lower in the organizations, that number drops to 15%.

So, for 85% of the people, the work is just an inconvenience to put up with. It is something to bear. And that is at the heart of so much of our suffering and dissatisfaction, right? Now, this affects the individual, because obviously, if I'm not engaged, you know, it's stressful. But it really affects companies, because they're not getting the best of individuals.

So, I think, I do, I do a lot of work, Amanda, both around individual consumers, but actually around companies. And I'm basically helping them build four key skills, right? And to all your listeners who are working in organizations, I think this is important. Look, the four key skills that can make a big difference to get as much out of our investments in our people assets as we do out of our equipment and machines, right, to get as much more are, number one, how can we create more meaning for people in what we are doing and connect the work we are doing at organizations to something bigger than ourselves? Make it not just be about shareholder profits, but also about our role in communities and the planet for each other. But also make it personal, right? Make it really personal. So that people, when they show up to work, are excited.

I think the second is, how do we actually look? I think it's... I mean, we've known about what allows us to be at our best, from a neuroscience point of view, for a very long time now. But our workplaces aren't designed based on that insights. So, how can we find more neuro-friendly ways of working? How do we actually realize breaks that we take throughout our day, rather than go back-to-back in meetings and be at, like, 40, 50%, right? How do we get better at spotting anxiety and stress and fatigue and learn mechanisms that allow people to be at their best versus burnout?

The third is around belonging and psychological safety and trust. How do we create places, where, as teams, we can collaborate and support each other and build true friendships? Because guess what, when you do that, not only do people feel great, but they are at their best in terms of creatively be able to generate ideas.

And finally, how can we create workplaces that are fundamentally creating positive energy spirals, so that, when people show up, they're excited about Monday and they leave with more energies versus completely drained out at the end of the day and end of the week.

Kramer: And so, Ashish, you've answered my next question, I'm wondering if you have any more to add on to that, which is, how do we create organizational buy-in around this?

Kothari: So, we do it by, again, tying it to the impact that this thing can really drive. But listen, you know, I appeal... I've been doing a lot about this as I go around the country talking to executives. When I say, "Look, all I'm asking you to do is, you know," because sometimes this thing can become across as, "Oh, this is all soft stuff," and, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's nice, but do I really see it?" And I actually tie it to something that they've done for 100 years.

Okay, think about it, most manufacturing companies or any company that has capital investments, they know how to get the most out of their assets, right? I said, look, human assets are the same. Availability loss is 30% of your roles are not filled or people are calling in sick. Performance losses are you have new employees that are not operating at the same level as the ones you lost or are burnt out and are only at 30, 40% output because they're just exhausted. And your teams aren't operating at the way that they can so that you have lots of meetings, takes much longer to make decisions. And your quality losses are people are making suboptimal decisions, near-term versus long-term, one stakeholder versus another. Same three losses.

And so, I say, so, why are you not managing your people assets in the same way as you do your physical assets? Why is it that you collect data once a year on employee engagement surveys, look at a central number, and have somebody centrally look at it and say, "Hey, we need to launch this initiative," and then roll it out to everybody? Could you ever run your plant that way? One number across 100 lines or around 50 lines that somebody centrally looks up and says, "You know, this is what we are going to do, and it applies to all." No, you don't do that.

So, my invitation is do this because, if you build this skill, if you collect data continuously on flourishing, on happiness, on wellbeing, on belonging, on meaning, and you feed that data back to the frontline teams, to every team that's working together, and arm them with the skills around meaning, belonging, wellbeing, and energy mastery, you can create a system that mirrors how you have run your operations for 100 years on your human side. So, that's my simple pitch to companies on why they should care and why this makes common sense.

Kramer: I was just going to say, it just makes sense when you lay it out like that. So, that really helps us understand this from an organizational perspective. I'm thinking, too, about our listeners who are sitting here and thinking, "I'm not at an organization right now that currently supports this. I enjoy some parts of my job." What can you share with those listeners about the notion of job crafting or infusing what you love into what you're doing?

Kothari: So, that's a great question, Amanda. In fact, I get this question asked a lot. My company isn't there. That's not who we are. And so often, we wait for others to come and make change happen. Or, we just give up and say, "Hey, this is not going to change. When I change my job, I'll go do it." So, the beauty is this work can be done by anybody individually, or if you are a team leader who's leading for a team, you don't need any permissions from anybody, you can start to make this happen.

So, let's talk a little bit about job crafting. Job crafting, as a concept, in a way, has came out of the work done at Michigan Ross by Professor Jane Dutton and Amy. I'm not going to pronounce her last name because I'm going to badly butcher it. So, you can look it up, extensively research. But in job crafting, we are trying to do two things, Amanda, that all of us have the ability, regardless of the CEO, the Senior Vice President, EVP, and the culture of the place supporting it or not.

Fundamentally, it's about having a conversation with our immediate teams around two big aspects. What do you love? What are things that I really love to do that fill me with joy? And what are my strengths? And how can I do more of that in my job that I'm doing right now? And equally talk about, what are the things that I do or we do that drain us? And how can we minimize that? Or, maybe, it's for somebody else, you know, somebody's... what one person hates, another person loves, right? "I am not very detail-oriented, so this whole notion of writing project plans, like, kills me. I'm much more big picture." For somebody else who loves that and might, kind of, go, like, "Well, I like big picture, but not as much," I think it's this notion of, how do we form teams? How do we work together, right? How can I do more of this, you do more of that.

So, I think there are tons of ways in which we can fundamentally re-engineer our jobs without asking for permission. Even if you're in operations and you're a creative person, you can put your hand up and talk to somebody in marketing and say, "Hey, I really think I love creativity, I love, kind of, new products. Can I join the next brainstorming session that we are having when you're thinking about a new product?" So, I think, you know, you talk about even when companies don't support, first off, or even if you're in a place where, you know, you can't do something that you love to do, there are little ways, if we take initiative, to start to integrate them. And that's the power of job crafting.

Kramer: Absolutely. Thank you for outlining the power of job crafting for us. Another thing that can be really powerful for individuals listening is harnessing the neuroscience of habit formation. Can you tell our listeners more about how they could harness this today?

Kothari: Absolutely. So, that is at the heart of the work that I'm doing right now, Amanda, that was at the heart of this program that I've actually created coming out of the book, "Hardwired for Happiness." Depending on who you talk to, right, and I've researched this extensively, you'll see numbers anywhere from 50% to 95% of actions that we take that are completely habit-based and out of the unconscious. I don't know what the answer is. It's somewhere between 50 and 90, it doesn't matter.

And I'll give you an example of how powerful these can be and how effective they can be. Think about the first time you started to learn to drive a car. How much attention did you have to take around the break? You know, I learned on a stick shift. I'm horrible at stick shift now, but I learned. And that was a whole additional clutch and the accelerator and the brake and the steering and the mirror and looking everywhere to make sure you don't cross. You know what I mean? Can you imagine how much attention it took, how much prefrontal cortex, the front of our brain? If somebody talked, when I was learning initially, oh, my God, I knew I was going to run somebody over. And now, how much attention does it take now?

When we form a habit, we can auto-program what can go, right? In this work, Amanda, it is the habits that we have formed over our lifetime that get us into trouble. And it is also how our brains have evolved over millions of years. See, our brains have evolved with two things that come at the heart of the human suffering right now. Three things, actually. One is our brains are evolved always to look for what's going to come get us. We have a fundamental negativity bias. I can tell you five things great about your performance, and I'll tell you one thing that is, you know, that you can do to improve. And I bet, seven days from now, you'll remember the one and not the other five. Negativity bias, right? We attract. We attract. We are a magnet for all negative. We are a Teflon for everything positive.

The second issue that we have to overcome, and that's where habits come in as well, is we have this thing called hedonic adaptation. Once we get something, it stops actually providing any utility, or we just get used to it. That promotion that we so wanted, once we get the promotion two years later, or one year later, we're like, "Oh, I hate this." But you really wanted it. I know, but you know. Times change, right? Hedonic adaptation.

And the third one is, you know, our mind has been and is a wandering mind. 40 to 50% of the time, it wanders. But over the last 20 years, I think we have actually made it so much worse because we've all become dopamine addicts, thanks to smartphones and social media, right? An average American checks their phone 96 times in a day. So, we are constantly, kind of, multitasking, looking all over. And research is, again, very clear. When we multitask, we drain our brains. We are less efficient. When we are stressed, when we are triggered, when we are focused on the negative, especially, if we have, you know, something that threatens us, we lose IQ points. Daniel coined the word, "amygdala hijack," Daniel Goleman. So, we know all this, and that's where habits help.

Kramer: Fantastic. Thank you so much for that information, Ashish. Every episode, we have an LBIdea or a key takeaway. And the key takeaway here is that we are at a crisis point for humanity, but there is a solution available.

Kothari: We've gotten hardwired for fear, and we are seeing the world from a place of fear, solving for the self rather than the other, solving for survival rather than truly thriving. And if we actually do build habits around these nine practices that I write about, I think we can hardwire our brains for happiness and I think we can create much better outcomes for ourselves, for our families, our teams, and more importantly, our planet.

Kramer: I love it, Ashish. Thank you. Speaking of doing this work, could you share with us three tips that listeners can implement right away?

Kothari: Absolutely. So, look, three big things. And by the way, you all can easily go over to community.happinesssquad.com, where we have a course, which is grounded in the neuroscience of habit-formation and is loaded with micro-practices — 26 micro-practices — that are all about little tiny steps that we can take every day in five minutes or less to change our lives.

I'm going to give you three of my most favorite ones from there. The first one, mindful breaks. A lot of people, I'm sure, have told you, you should meditate, meditation is really good for you, yeah?

Kramer: Absolutely.

Kothari: Meditation is amazing, but most people don't do it because they have the story that, "I can't, like my mind is all over the place." And we are also very exhausted because we are running continuously. Here's one of the, one of the micro-practices. Take four one minutes, four one minutes during the day. You can take them at 10:00, 12:00, 2:00, 4:00, or however, what have you, four one minutes. And in that one minute, all I invite you to do is to just plant your feet, sit straight, close your eyes, and just take six full belly breaths, 6 deep breaths, bringing attention to when you're breathing in and when you're breathing out. And just notice how you feel when you give yourself that one-minute break through your day. You'll notice a big bounce in energy. You're going to notice a clarity of thoughts. You might actually even notice that, "Oh, my God, my brain just started thinking sharper," right? It's grounded in neuroscience, because post 90 minutes, our brains start to, kind of, struggle. So, one simple break... one really simple thing, mindful breaks.

The second big thing that I could... it's tiny thing, but a really big impact is, I'd invite your listeners go by a little standing desk or a little platform. Sitting is literally called the new smoking. When we sit down and we are sitting for more than 45 minutes or 60 minutes, our fat-burning capacity in our body goes down by 70%. Our metabolism slows down. We are not born to sit, Amanda. And we sit for 12, 16 hours in a day. And as a result, when we get older, we get stiffer. We have all these aches and pains because we are sitting. Our bodies aren't meant for sitting. We are meant for running. We are meant for moving. We are meant for walking.

And then, the third one is the following. And this is one of my favorites. And I actually picked this from the work of Dr. Kristin Neff, who's done so much work in self-compassion. Give yourself a hug. What do I mean by that? We are our worst critics. We speak harsher to ourselves than we would ever to anybody else outside, right? So, when you find your inner critic raging, just take your arms, put them on each other, and just give yourself a squeeze. You might even want to rub your shoulders, just for three or five rubs. And just notice what opens up for you. For me, it is warmth, I calm down. Because just that act of hugging ourselves releases oxytocin in our brain.

So, three simple things that listeners can start to do right away that'll make a big difference.

Kramer: Thank you so much for that, Ashish. And if you enjoyed hearing from Ashish today, you can hear more from him on his own podcast. Ashish, tell us where we can find that and what you cover.

Kothari: Yes. So, we launched a podcast, Amanda, in January. It's called the Happiness Squad Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. You can find it on Spotify. So, it's on all of the platforms. We also have a website, podcast.happinesssquad.com. So, you can go get us there.

And in that podcast, we do a range of things. So, one, you will hear from experts in all of the different practices around how we can integrate and rewire our brains for happiness. Together with my co-host, we talk about the different chapters in the book and what's covered in there as well. But you'll also hear from organizational leaders who are really prioritizing flourishing in their workplaces. So, you'll pick ideas on what companies are doing to make this a reality, where work is not just places where we show up because we have to, but because we love and we are truly enjoying what we are doing and we are living into our true calling.

Kramer: Wonderful. Well, Ashish, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Kothari: It is such a pleasure. Thank you, Amanda, for having me. I wish all of your listeners well.

Kramer: Thank you again for listening to Leeds Business Insights. Don't miss a single episode, subscribe to Leeds Business Insights wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find more information about our podcast series at leeds.ly/LBIpodcast.

If you've enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy Creative Distillation, an entrepreneurship research podcast from the Leeds School of Business. Check it out at pod.link/creativedistillation.

Leeds Business Insights Podcast is a production of the Leeds School of Business, and it's produced by University FM. We'll see you next time.