Before Happiness
The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change
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Do you want to achieve success in your personal and professional endeavours? The first step is to see a reality where success is possible. Only when we choose to believe we live in a world in which challenges can be overcome, in which our behaviour matters, and in which change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional and intellectual resources to make that change possible. In Before Happiness, Shawn Achor, former Harvard professor, and bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage introduces a groundbreaking new theory about success and human potential. Achor shows how a positive mindset is the best predictor of motivation, engagement and performance in the workplace and in your personal life and offers five practical, actionable strategies for creating this mindset that will make us more successful at work and at home: 1)Add vantage points – how to select the most valuable reality 2)Map to success – mapping success greatly increases the chance you will get there 3)Finding the X Spot – proven techniques for harnessing your cognitive abilities 4)Boost the signal by cancelling the noise – how to cancel negative noise 5)Positive Inception – how to spread positive reality to others Backed by science, great stories, and research-based strategies, by the time you finish this book, you will have a complete understanding of exactly how to create a better reality and magnify the volume of happiness and success in your life, and equally important, transfer that positive reality to others.
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If you tell me a book is about happiness, I'm gonna check it out. I just am.
This one was not a disappointment. Here are the ideas I took away:
“...in the working world the most valuable reality is one in which there is at least a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions....Below this ration, engagement plummeted and turnover rates shot up. In fact, Losada found that the highest-performing teams had a 6:1 ration.”
“...Dr. Loretta Malandro names some of the most common blind spots that hold us back in our careers. The primary one...is an inability to rely on other people: when most executives face a massive challenge or stressor, they try to figure out how to solve the problem alone....The second most common blind spot among business leaders is...the ability to see the effect their decisions will have upon their teams. Leaders with this blind spot assume that everyone will view their decisions and choices in the same way they do, or they downplay the importance of feedback; as a result, their perspective on problems or challenges is limited. The final common blind spot is...”bottling it up,” or concealing emotions....”
“...we need to change how we judge people...the human tendency to judge our own behavior based on context but to attribute others' behavior to their character.”
“...if you take the power lead (simply by being first to speak) and start with the positive...you can rewrite the script of the entire interaction.”
Valuable information about positive psychology, but of course, it isn't much more than a pleasant read if you don't actually adopt the techniques. Also, I was kind of annoyed that it was so skewed toward people in business and parents—it made a lot of assumptions about the reader, which is so common in these general-interest psychology books.
