The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Inspire the People Around You

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Leaders aren't just generals, presidents and CEOs. You're probably a leader too! Someone in your home, school or workplace might look to you for guidance - and that's leading. So how do you inspire the people around you and make yourself the best leader you can be? Columbia Business School's Adam Galinsky (author of Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others) reckons we can all learn simple lessons that will make us better and more encouraging colleagues, parents and friends.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin When you first think of what constitutes a leader, you might picture presidents, generals, and CEOs. But if you reflect a bit, it quickly becomes clear that many of us occupy some sort of leadership role. Parents and caregivers? They're leaders. So are college professors and coaches? Even if you're not officially a manager on your job, you're probably more experienced than at least one of your co-workers. And if that less senior person looks to you for guidance,

then guess what? You're a leader too. Given that so many of us are being looked up to in at least some capacity, we should probably put more thought into becoming the best leaders we can be. Which is why today's episode will be exploring how to inspire the people around you. And I've lined up a particularly inspiring guest. Hi, I'm Adam Glinski.

I'm a professor at Columbia Business School and I'm the author of Inspire, the universal path for leading yourself and others. Adam is one of the top business school professors in the world. His research has inspired the bosses of huge corporations and fast global organizations. But Adam has argued that the lessons that apply to folks leading tens of thousands of employees equally apply to the rest of us.

And so Adam is passionate about making all of us more inspiring leaders. But what sparked his interest in this topic? Partially, it started because I was teaching at a business school and I was asked to start teaching the leadership and organizations class. And just really loved teaching the class and sort of thinking about leadership and the skills that leaders needed. And I got a lot of opportunities to also interact with leaders, CEOs, presidents, a variety of different members of organizations, nonprofits, and just started learning a little bit more about their stories,

but also the type of challenges they faced as a leader. And that I think really got me engaged. And what are the challenges you talk about in your new book is this importance of being inspired. Why does inspiration matter so much for leaders? The key empirical foundation of all the research I've done on leadership is just asking thousands of people across the globe a very simple question, which is, tell me about a leader that inspired you. And then also I ask people to tell me about another

type of leader that also changed you inside, but instead of filling you with this wellspring of hope and possibility, they filled you with a seething cauldron of rage and infuriation. And I think that asking that question all over the world about a leader that inspired you and infuriated you, you know, really led me to have, I think, three really profound and fundamental insights about leadership and why this topic of inspiration is so important. The first thing I discovered very quickly in starting to ask these people is that the inspiring leader and the infuriating leader are mirror images of each other. Courageous versus cowardly, generous versus selfish, right?

They're almost the exact opposites of each other. So they kind of exist on this continuum. Now this continuum itself is made up of three universal factors. And so one of the most striking things about my research is that there's not a single characteristic of an inspiring leader that isn't mentioned in every single country in the world. And so one of the things about being this universal, and going back to your original question, like why does this matter, is it's like it's really embedded in the human brain.

It's really part of the cognitive architecture of the mind to really be sensitive to leaders on the one hand and how leaders impact us on the other. The second big insight besides being sort of these three universal factors along this continuum is those three are the universal factors because they each satisfy a fundamental human need. One of the factors is what I call visionary, how we see the world, and that satisfies the fundamental human need for meaning and understanding. Then another factor which I call exemplar,

how we are in the world, that really satisfies the fundamental human need for protection and passion. Then the third factor is being a great mentor, how we interact with others, and that satisfies the fundamental human needs for a sense of belonging and a sense of status or feeling respected by others. And then the third insight is that we're not born as inspiring people or infuriating people. It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates.

That means that each and every one of us can learn to be more inspiring, to impact people in a positive rather than a negative and infuriating way by learning those characteristics, by nurturing them, by developing them, by practicing them. This was one of the insights that I found most striking when I read your book, because even I, knowing some of the social science research, just had the sense that there's some people out there that are just kind of naturally inspiring, and there's some, you know, the flip side, which I think is maybe relevant for some of us. There's some people out there that just seem like deeply but very naturally

infuriating. And what I loved about your book is that you're saying, no, like we actually can get better at becoming inspiring ourselves. And maybe if we kind of have tendencies towards the not so inspiring side, there are things we can do to do better. Absolutely. And there's some things I mean, obviously, there are certain, sometimes physical constraints that we experience in the world, but we can still train ourselves to present ourselves in a way that impacts people more positively. One example is Margaret Thatcher. When she became Prime Minister of England, her voice was a little annoying and she actually, with a voice coach, learned to train her voice to be more effective. Now, later on, 20 years later,

I was doing research on how power affected people's voices. And what we found is that when we put people into positions of power, their voice actually became similar to what Margaret Thatcher's voice was trained to be, which was sort of a constant pitch. So that means that your voice is kind of steady, it's not going like this or this,

but also being dynamic in volume so that you talk softly, but then you raise your voice without losing the pitch. This dynamic steady voice is something that Margaret Thatcher learned to produce, and that naturally occurs when we think about times when we were powerful, for example, but we can also learn to develop that voice directly also. I love this example of these moments where you happen to have been powerful, because I think sometimes when folks are learning about your work or hearing about the book,

they can think this is for leaders. Adam works with CEOs and heads of big nonprofits and things like that. But in the book, you argue there's times when we all need to think about being a leader. So give me a sense of why everybody listening right now has probably been a leader in some context in their lives. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, when we're a leader, people are looking up to us, and they're looking for something from us, right? And it could be guidance, it could be support, could be protection. And so whenever there's someone that's looking towards us, we are in a sense, a position of leadership for them. So sometimes we look to

our spouse, right? Sometimes we look to our spouse, right? Sometimes we look to a friend. Sometimes kids look to their parents. We're often in these positions where people are looking up to us to help them in some way, and guide them, and protect them, or nurture them in some sort of important way. And sometimes it's to help us see the world differently, right? That's where visionary comes in. And so if they help the person see the world

in a broader and more creative or more insightful way, you've actually been their leader essentially in helping them see a different vision. And so I think leadership is really about the positions we're in, but also the behaviors that we're engaging in. And when we wind up in those positions, we have eyes on us in a different way.

We're sort of on this metaphorical stage. You've talked a lot about this idea of the leader amplification effect. What's that? So yeah, the leader amplification effect is, you know, whenever we're in a position of leadership, and again, you don't have to be in that hierarchical position. It could be worse. Again, people are looking up to you, looking for you for guidance, protection, nurturance, whatever it is, that people are paying attention to us. And you're a cognitive psychologist, so you know that attention is really the province of intensification. Anything that we pay attention to and we have more intensified reactions to, and those get amplified inside of us and impact us more. And so the leader amplification effect is

essentially that when we're on that stage and there's more eyes on us and that attention is on us, everything we do is sending a signal that is impacting people and those signals get amplified. One of the examples I like to give is sort of maybe a casual constructive comment becomes humiliating criticism when it comes from a leader, but also maybe an offhand compliment becomes glorious praise in the hands of a leader. And so one of the things that I've discovered is that all of my behavior is impactful for people,

even if I'm not aware of it, right? And so whenever we're in this position of leadership, we really see how our behavior affects others. You shared one example of this from another leadership context that I think so many people are in, but we don't think of it often is this idea of being a parent as a leader. You had a story of parent amplification effects with your son that I think so many people are in, but we don't think of it often, is this idea of being a parent as a leader.

You had a story of parent amplification effects with your son that I found quite common, but also quite disturbing if you don't get it right. Would you share that here? Yeah, sure. So, you know, I would say that maybe one of my single greatest joys that I've ever had in the world is my older son has for almost an entire life when he wakes up, he comes into our bedroom and he crawls in the bed and he just wraps his body around mine and then sort of goes back to sleep. You know, for years and years, we've had these snuggle moments in the morning and

it just fills me with joy. But one morning he came in much earlier than usual, let's say 5 a.m. instead of like 6.30. And I was working on the book and I had gone to sleep much later than usual, like 1 a.m.m And when he snuggles he also moves around him So it's hard to go back to sleep and so normally I just lay there and enjoy the experience But this time I just need to get some sleep And so I got out of bed and I went to the couch and slept for like another hour and a half And then a few days later I just noticed that she wasn't snuggling with me he'd come into the bed

But it kind of go almost like to the end of the bed like where a dog would sleep So after like two days I said Asher why aren't you snuggling with me. He'd come into the bed, but it kind of go almost like to the end of the bed, like where a dog would sleep. So after like two days, I said, Asher, why aren't you snuggling with me? And he said, because you don't want to snuggle with me. And I was like, that's not true. He's like, yes, it is. And I tried to convince him otherwise. And then later that afternoon, I put two and two together

and I was like, ah, so when I got out of bed the other day. So I went to him that night and I said, hey, Asher, were you upset when I got out of bed the other day. I went to him that night and I said, hey Asher, were you upset when I got out of bed the other day? He said yes. I said, is that why you think I don't want to snuggle with you? He said, yeah. I explained to him that nothing to do with him. I was just a little tired and I'm so sorry. Then the next day he came back and got into bed with me.

But I'll tell you one other story from the parent amplification effect. It's my favorite one that made me think about it. There's a doctoral student, Erica Bailey, who's now a professor at Berkeley. She told me a story about when she was around 12, her and her sister both played the piano. She overheard her mom say to a friend, ''Oh, both my girls are really good at piano,

but Erica's sister has a real knack for it.'' Erica was so incensed by this that she literally never played piano again. What's crazy about this story is I met sister has a real knack for it. And Erica was so incensed by this that she literally never played piano again. And what's crazy about this story is I met the mom and I mentioned the piano story and her mom's like, what are you talking about? And I was like, do you not know why your daughter quit piano? And she's like, no, it's just like with my son, I didn't know why he was mad at me, you know? And so we have these reactions. And that's true as a leader, right? You could have these people having reactions that have no idea why they've turned on you, you know,

and it could be just a misunderstanding. And this is why I think figuring out how to become inspiring is so important, right? Because in all these kind of minor leader roles, it might be something we're totally inadvertently doing that we absolutely don't realize, but it's because of this sort of amplification effect gets perceived by somebody else as really horrible criticisms or just like your deep belief that somebody is not good at something. And honestly, I find that kind of terrifying, right?

Just being in as many leadership positions as I am, both just like in my normal life as a friend and a good colleague, but also being a podcast host and a professor. It's terrifying to think that my inadvertent actions that I don't even realize are that visible or kind of big seeming wind up really deeply affecting somebody's livesent actions that I don't even realize are that visible or kind of big seeming wind up really deeply affecting somebody's lives in ways that I don't think.

Yeah, and I think a lot of times we don't recognize when we're in these roles. So just to give you one classic example, it would be a middle manager, right? Or in my case, when I was an assistant professor, so I'm an untenured member of the faculty, I think of myself as a low power position. Like I'm gonna one day be voted on for tenure by the senior faculty, but to doctoral students,

I'm in this credible high power position. Like, they depend on me for research resources, letters of recommendation, opportunities. And one of the things that I realized over time is that even as like an assistant professor, my offhand comments could have big impact. One story that I didn't put in the book, I had a doctoral student and she came to me with a dissertation idea. Apparently, I said to her, and I vaguely remember saying it, there's literally nothing interesting in your idea. Like literally nothing interesting. And I was just trying to push her to get more interesting, but like that almost broke her. And then apparently she came back a month later and I said, there's something potentially interesting. And then, you know, a month later, I actually told her, wow, that's a really good idea. And apparently she came back a month later and I said, there's something potentially interesting.

And then, you know, a month later I actually told her, wow, that's a really good idea. And apparently she called all of her friends and said, you know, we're going out getting drunk tonight because Adam finally liked my idea. That progression, to me, they were inconsequential. You know, they were just offhand comments. But for her, each one was like deeply impactful.

So if mild criticism can prove more devastating than we think, what should inspiring leaders say to boost morale and performance? Well, it turns out a kind word and compliment can help. Adam will share his how to give praise 101 when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We've all done it. We sit through a presentation or review a task someone's just completed, and even though it's basically fine, the first words out of our mouths are critical or some suggestion

for improvement. Adam Golinski from Columbia Business School thinks this tragically misses what people actually need to hear from a leader. His first tip to better inspire those around you is to praise them more. Well, first of all, it's a fundamental human need to feel like we matter, we're important, we're respected, we're having an impact. It matters so deeply. The other day I dropped off my son at school

and then my second son off and then I was walking downstairs and I saw my first son running down a different set of stairs, just looking so focused. He was going to get paper towels. But he took this so seriously, this little job, and you could see it like, I'm the paper towel guy today, you know, you could imagine getting upstairs and the teacher saying, Asher, thank you so much for getting those paper towels so quickly. And that would then motivate him in the future. So we're really driven by praise.

Dan Economin talks about that we know that positive praise is more important, but we tend to focus on punishment because we're punished for praising and rewarded for punishing because of some of the cognitive biases that we have. But people want recognition. They want to be recognized. There's phrases like I feel seen or I feel heard in what we do. And it matters so very much. Now again, as a leader, your praise gets amplified. So my little statement of, hey, good job, in somebody's head becomes like, good job, like this huge thing in ways I don't even realize. Absolutely, right?

You know, one of the things that I've discovered over time is we can start to think about the ways that we interact with people. Let me just give you a good example. Doctoral students, when they do their first presentation, it's at their, say, it's called their second year paper, you know. It's their first big research presentation from the faculty. And historically, what I would do is I would do there and I'd scribble down notes and I would meet with them and I'd say, oh, great job. And here's three things you could do to improve me. And then I realized that I was kind of crushing their spirit,

right? They just had this amazing accomplishment and there I was already telling them the things that they could improve. And so I actually just trained myself. I put in a rule. I will not criticize or offer constructive comments on a talk until the next day. So after the talk, I'll come to them and I'll have at least two things to say, wow, you really did this part great. And they did do those parts great. They're honest and they're genuine and they're important.

And you can just see, you know, they got through this difficult thing. And then, you know, the next day I can say, okay, as we think towards the future, here's three things that we can think about how to make your talk. And so part of it is putting in little checks for yourself. Right. And I literally do that, you know, before talk, I remind myself, this is their first talk. I'm going to only praise.

I'm not going to criticize till later. And it can really, really make a huge difference. And so what I tell people to do is always be genuine, always be specific, but look for ways to compliment and to praise others. And I'll just give you one very quick example. I was doing a lecture for 50 CEOs and at 10.15 I gave them a call to action, I called it, to use the leader amplification effect for good. Pick three people with less power,

send them an email that says, you hit that presentation out of the park, I've just been thinking how great it was or, hey, I couldn't have completed that deal without your help. I just wanted to say thank you. In a 1029, just before the break, one of the CEOs raised his hand and he said, hey, I've already sent my three emails,

I've already got three email responses back. Everyone was overjoyed and one person said they're taking their spouse to this restaurant they've always wanted to go to to celebrate. And I think there's two things to point about this example, which are so critical and so important. The first is a finding from my research, which is that powerful people tend to be impulsive. So this guy couldn't even wait to the break to do it. But the second thing is it took him no time at all. Took him a couple of seconds to write these emails. He probably did all three of them in less than two minutes. And so the cost is so little, but the reward is so great.

It sort of even shows a third thing, which is that even when you told the story, the CEO was seeming kind of happy, like that his comment had such impact. And I think this is something we don't expect too, which is that there's kind of a happiness benefit to the person who's giving the praise, to the person who's expressing the gratitude that we often forget too. Not only are you making the person that you're working with feel super inspired, but you yourself feel great. And when you don't

express praise, you're kind of leaving that opportunity on the table when you could have in two minutes kind of felt this sort of great feeling yourself and given somebody the praise that will help them be motivated and excited to do the work that they're going to do for weeks after that. And I think one thing I actually tell people, and this is a little ironic, is I tell people, send them by text or by email. And the reason why I do that is because that person who receives it gets to savor it. They can go back and relook at it. You know, if they're filling down, they can go back and look at that comment the CEO said. But the other reason why I do it is because of what you just pointed out, which is they're

going to respond to you. If you just said, hey, great job on the presentation, they're going to feel really good inside if you said it just in interaction, but they probably wouldn't even know what to say to you, right? They might even feel awkward saying thank you. But if you send it by email, they're going to reply to you and say, thank you so much. You know, I'm so glad that you noticed, you know. So that's tip number one. We need to express more praise and gratitude to kind of boost our own inspiredness, but also to feel good ourselves. Tip number two is that we need

to develop a vision, ideally one that's a little optimistic. Why is our vision so important? Yeah. I mean, I mentioned earlier the fundamental human need for meaning and understanding. And so a vision really allows us to make sense of our own behavior. I give this example in the book by one of your colleagues, Marsha Johnson, and a whole 1973 paper where she gave people this paragraph to read that literally doesn't make any sense. You separate things, you don't want to do too many, and then you put them back into piles and you put them away. And I've done this with thousands and thousands of people across the globe and only a handful can solve it every now and then.

But in her other conditioner experiment, she gives them a title. And the title is Doing the Laundry. And as soon as you get the title, everything just makes so much sense. I get it, okay, there's whites and darks and we might have to go to a laundromat, you know, and then we don't want to overstuff the machine, you know. And so without a vision, it's just almost impossible for us to make sense of our own behavior, but also to coordinate and interact with others. The simplest

example I love to give is, you know, two people walk out of a meeting and one person thinks they're supposed to do the task quickly and the other person thinks they're supposed to do it with the highest quality. And then they start working together. And the person who's going quick is like, why are you so slow? And the person doing it with high quality is like, why are you so sloppy? And so without a vision, we don't know how to behave and act and make sense of the world. And therefore, we get miscommunication, we get conflict. And so a vision is really orienting us in a way to help us make sense of our own behavior.

And you have a really great hack for kind of enacting a vision and kind of keeping it top of mind. You've talked about the importance of catchphrases. Yeah. I know you even have one with your wife, which I love. I'm totally going to steal it to use with my husband. But why do catchphrases matter? And what's the one that you use with your wife? Yeah, I mean, I think catchphrases are ones that just help us make sense of the world.

For any Ted Lasso fans out there, you probably remember that Ted Lasso says barbecue sauce before like important moments. Tin Cup Kevin Costner would say dollar bills before taking, you know, a shot. I'm a huge basketball fan and my wife is also a big basketball fan. She worked for men's basketball at University of Connecticut when they won their first national title. And there's an old coach named Jim Valvano, who had the top basketball moment in college sports when his team won nine consecutive do or die games, seven of which they were behind or tied in the final minute, just this miraculous thing. And he tells a story about his dad. When he first made the tournament, his dad said, my bags are packed for you.

I'm going to be there when you're in the national title. He's like, his dad never leaves the house. His dad thinks everything north of the George Washington Bridge is Canada. And so this idea that he's going to travel is so meaningful. And so my wife and I started using that phrase with each other, my bags are packed for you whenever we're going through a difficult time. Just letting the other person know, I'm here for you. I support you no matter what happens. I other person know, I'm here for you, I support you no matter what happens,

I have your back and I'm there for you. So we have our vision and we kind of keep it top of mind with catchphrases. But tip number three is that to become truly visionary, we need to connect not just with the kind of overarching goal, but also with our values. Why are values so important? To say why our values are important

is an interesting question. We know that values are one of the most impactful things in the world, and we still don't actually know the exact process by which these values matter us. In one study that Jeff Cohen did, he randomly assigned some at-risk students to reflect on their values for 15 minutes. And that predicted who graduated five years later. In a study I did, we randomly assigned people at a Swiss unemployment agency to reflect on their values, and two months later, they were twice as likely to

have a job. In fact, the values reflection was so powerful, we had to end the experiment and give everyone the values reflection task. We collected lots of variables to try to understand what was causing the effect, and none of them could fully explain it. But I think it just gets back to who we are as humans. We are meaning makers. We want to connect to higher, larger purposes, and our values are really our pathway to doing so. So one of the things that we make all of our students do at Columbia Business School, and

I even do it myself, is we make them think about their values and to create a values hierarchy with their top value at the top and the other values kind of stem from that. And then we give them a laminated card with their values on it. I have my own card in my pocket right now and to tell them to take it out and really think about that. For me, my top value is generosity. And for me, it's about being generous to other people materially, but also generous to other people emotionally. Generous in helping think about the larger context in which people find themselves that might explain some aberrant behavior. And how can I just go through the world with a more generous frame of mind as my top value is sort of one of those examples. Another value that I have in there which also connects me,

it's a catchphrase with my wife, is the word Kaizen. She lived in Japan for two years and the word Kaizen means continued improvement. We can always be better tomorrow, we can always be a little bit more inspiring tomorrow than we can today. This is such a fabulous practical suggestion because I feel like we can all write this list and take it with us, or even use our devices. Top page in the notes app is just a fabulous practical suggestion because I feel like we can all write this list and take it with us or even use our devices.

Top page in the notes app is just a list of your values. I think this is the kind of thing we can do in any leadership situation, I think especially in parenting. Imagine in that tough parenting moment, if you're trying to figure out what to do next, you could just click over to your notes app and you see generosity, kaizen, or whatever your own personal values are. It could just be so powerful to ground you and help you make the most inspired decision in that moment. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things for me as a parent, my own father

was just an amazing person, but he had a volcanic temper. It was not that frequent, but when it came out, it was sudden, extreme, and terrifying, and even penetrated my nightmares as a kid. I found myself early on when my two-year-old, when he was having a tantrum, I almost felt like I'd become my dad. This volcanic rage was coming out. I still remember the first time it came out,

and my son just fell to the ground in a fugue state of tears of just nothing like I'd ever seen. I really, again, the leader amplification effect, the parent amplification effect, I had to train myself, even when he's flying off the handle, to always take the more generous path, right? The more bigger picture path, the more visionary path, the more step back path that I can do,

be there as a container for his emotions without erupting myself. So that story about your dad is a nice transition to tip number four, another way we can become a little bit more visionary, and that's through engaging in a bit of time travel. How could time travel help? Yeah, so a couple things about time travel.

So one of the first things I studied in grad school, I still remember in 1993 when I was looking at grad schools, one of the things I was most interested in was counterfactual reflection. The idea about how we could think about our paths differently and how much that affected us. And the classic example of this is you go home a different way home from work and you get into an accident. And you're like, oh, I'd only gone the normal way home from work. But if you go to the normal way home from work, you don't think, oh, if only I could have gone to this exotic way home, right? So we go from unusual events back to usual events really quickly.

But it's really about how we think about all the different paths that we went. There's a real world story that drove me to do some of this research that you're talking about, Laurie, and that is I knew of a couple, she was a waitress at a restaurant and she met her husband at this restaurant, but she wasn't supposed to be working that evening and he wasn't supposed to be at that restaurant. He went to the wrong restaurant because I think there is two versions of the same restaurant in the city. And so neither of them were supposed to be there.

It's awesome. It's like a Hallmark movie. Yeah, exactly. And, and you could just see them tell the story and like, it just added meaning and wonder. Like it was faded. It was meant to be. So with Katie, with, with Laura Cray, my colleague at Berkeley, Phil Tellock, Neil Rose, a bunch of other people, we did a whole line of research where we basically showed that when you think about the paths that you didn't take but might have, your own path seems more meaningful and important.

So here's this, in one of the experiments we did, we said, think about the path you took to meet your current partner, your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, whoever it is. Or we said, think about all the past that you almost took that would have led you away from this partner. Then we later just ask people, how important is this person to you? How significant are they? How meaningful is this relationship? Now, this is your significant other, but thinking of all the ways you might not have met them

made that relationship more important, more meaningful, more significant, more impactful. So it's just a way that anything in our life that we want to feel a little bit more inspired about, we can just think like, well, it might not have been and then all of a sudden it starts to seem even more precious. Right. You know, and you know, I moved to New York partly to find love, right? And to me, the counterfactual is what if I hadn't come to New York, I would have never met my wife. We met at a party. What if she hadn't gone to the party? What if I hadn't gone to the party? I can feel that sense of wonder rise, me whenever I do that. One of the ways that we can make our own life seem more meaningful, or as a leader we can make our firm or group's journey

more meaningful, is think about the path that we hadn't taken as one way of really helping us value the path we are on. It's time for a short break, but when the Happiness Lab returns, Adam will have more actionable tips for turning you into an inspiring leader. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Emotional contagion. That's what happens when one happy, optimistic person

completely transforms the mood of a room. It's also what happens when one negative person quickly burns everyone out. And that's why inspiration expert Adam Golinski's next tip is for leaders to pay particular attention to the power of emotional contagion. If we just go back to the leader amplification effect, when you're on stage, people are really paying attention to you, so whatever you're expressing gets inside of them. And in general, emotions are contagious. We know that yawns are contagious, but when you're a leader, your emotions, I like to

say, go from being contagious to infectious. And so it really affects us more. So when you're a leader, your calmness becomes their calmness, but your anxiety can become their anxiety. Your courage can become their courage. And one of the areas where I've really looked at this is around the topic of passion and this idea that it's really hard to inspire others when you're not inspired. And one of the ways that we can inspire others is through our passion. And I do a little exercise whenever I teach and

anyone can do it themselves is just ask someone to tell you about their passion. And when you do that, I want you to listen but also observe what changes in their behavior when they start talking about their passion. And the thing that I've shown in my research, right, is that a number of behavioral things happen immediately. Their eyes light up. They smile, a big beaming smile, they move their hands more, they talk a little bit quicker, a little higher pitch, and they often lean in as if telling you a secret.

I ask people, what happened to you when you listen to their passion? People start saying, my eyes got wide, I started to smile, I leaned in and so we start reciprocating the behavioral things but start feeling that passion percolate inside of us. Now, what I love about this little simple exercise, it also shows us how tied passion and authenticity are. Notice that your eyes, your mouth, your voice, your hands, all those things are being changed simultaneously and spontaneously. If you were to try to do that, say,

okay, I'm going to pretend I'm passionate, I'm going to make my eyes big. Oh, wait, now I got a smile. Doesn't work. Doesn't work as well. So I think there's this link between passion and authenticity, and because of that, it also increases that infectiousness of passion.

The idea that we matter and our authenticity matters in this inspiration equation gets to top insight number six, which is that to be inspiring, it's not enough to be superhuman. We really kind of need to be human. The human part is really important. I think this is something that leaders often get wrong, that they need to be a little bit more vulnerable. Why is vulnerability so inspiring? Part of it, when we're super,

we seem out of reach. If we can find ways to humanize ourselves, make ourselves more vulnerable, then people can connect with us more. I was quoted recently in the New York Times talking about Hillary Clinton in 2008 when she had lost in Iowa. Then she teared up before New Hampshire,

and then she came back in one New Hampshire. And then later she made herself be more human by taking whiskey shots at a bar in Pennsylvania. The reason why the New York Times called me is because they're like, what did you think of Donald Trump going to McDonald's? And I said, it was brilliant. Here's a person who flies in his own private jet, but seeing him doing the same activities that an everyday average person does humanized him. And I said, you know, there's a chance he's going to win the election because of that, you know, because he just seems more relatable in that way. And so by exposing our own vulnerabilities,

we help people understand that not everyone's perfect. But we also often give clues and pathways to how we might overcome our own challenges and obstacles in that way. I like to tell people the story of myself that I came close to getting kicked out of grad school, you know, getting a second year, there's three categories, there's thumbs up, thumbs down, you're screwed, you're not going to make it, or the level of hands, we don't know which way it's going to go. And I felt very lucky because they told me, here's the three things you have to do in order to stay in the program. And so because I got very clear vision of what I had to do,

I was I was able to do those things and stay in the program. But it just lets people know, like, look, first year is going to be tough. And sometimes, you know, you're going to struggle. And and the question is, how do you find the guidance that you need and tap into the resources that you have to be successful? I mean, that must be huge for your own students to hear like, oh my gosh, Adam, who's this new book and has done all this amazing research, he almost got kicked out of the program, right? You could see exactly why that is an inspiring moment for your students because if they're facing their own moments of failure and insecurities, they could just kind of brush

those aside because you've been vulnerable enough to share, hey, I went through it too. Yeah. And so sometimes we need to be a little bit more vulnerable. But as a leader, I also know that sometimes you got to remind yourself that you're a little bit super, like you need to find moments where you kind of feel powerful and in control. And that gets to tip number seven. You also remind leaders that to be inspiring, it's helpful to kind of get a sense of that sense of power and control. And you have a really great practical exercise we can use to do this. What's that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing that I've done the most research on is thinking about a time when you were powerful. You know, I ask people to write out a reflection. And we've shown that this task of thinking about time when we're powerful has affected dozens of different types of behaviors in a variety of different ways. But the way that I think about it is that when we think about the ways that we're super, they allow us to go out and be more super. One of the things that I think that we want to tap into is our successful moments in life,

and our own experience when we were our best self, we can then leverage that and allow us to be our best self in the next moment. I tell people, you can actually even calibrate this even more. The next time you have to do an important presentation, think about time you gave a great presentation. The next time you have to write something, think about time when you wrote something really well. That can really allow us to tap into the task-specific inspiration

that we need to be successful. And you found that this power recall process is super effective in all kinds of different contexts. Like tell me some of the contexts in which you see this working, because it's really broad. Yeah, I mean, you know, and you know, use the word earlier, which I think is really important optimism, you know, about being sort of optimistic. So you know, one of the things we've shown is that makes people optimistic. But you know, we've shown, for example, in one study we did, we had people

come in and we said, we're going to have you write a letter for a job. So you're going to try to get this job before you do that. We're going to give you a chance just to get some practice writing. And that's when we used our, our manipulation. We told half the people think about time when you had power and the other half are told thing about time when you, when you lack power. And then we have them apply for a job, put their application in a sealed envelope. And then we, we had them apply for a job, put their application in a sealed envelope, and then we had other people rate it. They didn't know anything about

the power reflection task at all. We just had them rate, would you hire this person? The people that have been randomly assigned to get this power reflection, they were more likely to get the job. The single thing that seemed to matter the most was people just express

more confidence. They just came across as more confident in their letters. We showed that when we randomly assigned people to think about time when they had power in a negotiation and they go into that negotiation, their voice is more steady and more dynamic. They're also more likely to make the first offer in the negotiation. And we know from research that making the first offer on average leads to better outcomes. We've shown it makes people more visionary. Pam Smith has done this research showing that people see the big picture when they think about timing that power. And then finally, some researchers in Europe, they ask people to do public presentations. But why they did them, they measure their physiological arousal levels. And they found

that people who had done the power recall were more calm and less physiologically aroused when they did that. So again, I think the key thing is that it's tapping into our own lived experiences and allowing us to leverage those experiences. So tip eight is going to switch gears a little bit. It's not kind of the things you do to yourself, but the things you do in interaction with somebody that you're trying to inspire. And tip number eight is that you can be a bit more inspiring by giving more choices. Why are choices so inspiring? No one likes to be told what to do, right? We don't like to be treated like objects.

We don't like to feel pressure. We don't like to be forced. And so one of the things that I've shown in my research is that when we offer people options, they see us as more concerned with their well-being. They see us as wanting us to get the right outcome for ourselves. So in negotiations, we've shown, for example, that car salesman says, I can offer you this car for $25,000 and a five-year warranty or 24,000 and a three-year warranty.

Now, most of you can quickly calculate that for the car salesperson, one year of warranty is worth $500 to them. But what you're saying is, I don't know how much warranty is worth to you, so I'm going to let you make that choice. And we've shown a couple things in our research that are really, really important. The first is that we can actually be much more ambitious or aggressive when we offer choices because people see us as having their best interest into account. The second thing that was shown is that when we make these ambitious offers,

we get a better outcome for ourselves, but the other side often doesn't get a worse outcome, so it expands the pie. The thing that most excites me about this research is that it works for everyone. It works for everyone. It works for men and women. It works for people who have more power and less power in the negotiation. Offering choices just solves the problem.

Now, I started doing this research back in the 90s on choices and negotiations, but in the mid 2000s, I saw it in practice as a parent. I wasn't a parent yet, but my twin brother is a parent and his daughter was not getting dressed and she was fighting everything. And talking to my sister-in-law, you know, we said, what if we start giving choices? And so she'd do that. She just hold up two parents' pants. Okay. Fiona, which pair of pants? Okay, that one. Okay. Fiona, which shirt? And so all of a sudden, instead of fighting, she was making choices. And I saw just how valuable it is. Anytime that you can take a demand and turn it into a choice, you're going to be far better off.

You're going to get a better outcome. They're going to be happier. There's going to be fewer transaction costs. There's going to be less frustration. Everyone's going to be better off. And you think about that whenever you're in a position of having less power, right? When people give you choices, you just feel like you have some agency, like you can kind of make the decision for yourself. And that kind of gets to why tip number nine is so powerful. You've argued that to be more inspiring, we need to be more credit sharing as leaders.

Explain some of the unexpected benefits of credit sharing, even to the leader. Yeah, there is a survey that came out a few years ago that asked people, what's the most infuriating thing that happens at work? And one of the things that was, it might've been top of the list, I can't remember, or near the top of the list, was other people stealing credit from you, other people taking ownership over your idea. It just infuriates us, right? And it goes back to that fundamental human need of wanting to be recognized and respected

and to have the status. And two things we've shown in our research, which I think are really important. The first is that when we're feeling insecure or not inspired ourselves, it warps our brain and twists it into thinking that, oh my God, if I share credit with others, I'm going to lose status myself. And so we've shown that when we're feeling insecure, we're less likely to share credit with others because we see now status is zero sum. But what was shown in our research is that when you actually share credit with others, you actually get a status boost. So I was somewhere and I was like, people said how much they love my book. And

I said, I couldn't have produced such a great book without my amazing research assistant, Chloe. Now Chloe is going to be raised in status, right? Cause I've just said how amazing she is, but so will I. I get a boost in status because I credited her. People like people that share credit, right? They like generous individuals who acknowledge other people. And we've tried to push this to the extreme.

We said, okay, it's an entrepreneurial situation. Two people, there's two finalists, and each have to make a final little speech. And we have one of the people either say, you know, I couldn't have done it without all the things that I did. Or they said, you know, I couldn't have done it. I also want to thank my competitor

who also helped me and gave me some great advice. Now you could say, oh my God, you've just raised the status of your competitor, they're going to get picked to win the award, but you still are better off by doing that. You're still more likely to win. Now, the effect is much smaller than in other situations, but even when we share credit with the people we're competing with the most, we still get a status boost. And we can use that status boost in good ways, especially if you find ways to learn from the people maybe that we're competing with or maybe especially as a leader

that are kind of working under us. And this gets to final tip number 10, which is that to really be an inspiring leader, we should seek out some downward learning. What do you mean by downward learning? So one of the things that I've become really fascinating with is what makes a good mentor, right? You know, that's the third factor of being an inspiring person. It's like how we interact with others, but what does it mean to really mentor someone? And, you know, there are a number of characteristics that are essential. One is that we really take the perspective of the other person. We really engage with them, we think deeply about their

situation, just really getting inside their head, but looking at the world from their perspective and what they need and what they want. And one of the things that were found in our research is that people are better mentors when they recognize that they can learn incredibly valuable insights, even from people who have less power or status than they do. We showed in our research that downward learners, people who say, I can learn a lot from people who are below me in the hierarchy,

they tend to be better mentors. But in my favorite experiment that we did in this project, so we did a lot of correlational studies that showing downward learning people tend to be better mentors. But in one study, we actually took people who are going to be in mentor roles, and in half of them we said, think about a time recently when you learned something valuable from someone below you in the hierarchy. And then later we put them in a position where they were going to have to serve as a mentor

for someone, and we asked the mentees about their experience. And we found that when they'd been randomly signed to be with one of these downward learning reflections, people who had just ingained this reflection, they rated them as more engaged, but also more empathic. And so it was a combination of that engagement and empathy that made them feel like they got a lot more benefit out of that interaction. So just that curiosity to learn from the people that see us as leaders, that winds up making us seem more empathic and ends up helping the person that we're trying to help kind

of succeed in whatever they're doing. Yeah. And I'll tell you one quick story, which I really love from my life. I got to spend, I wrote the book proposal in Hawaii. I spent a year in Hawaii with my family and I was talking to someone on the phone because we had been having a problem with birds would fly into the house and then get trapped in poop everywhere And my friend had suggested a couple weeks earlier by these rubber snakes put them out

You know in front of the doorway and then the birds will be afraid and they will come in and it didn't do anything Literally the birds would just step over this, you know rubber snake And so I was telling my friend it didn't work and it was six in the morning. My son had just woken up He'd crawled into my lap. He heard me tell the story and he said, Oh, I know why, dad. I was like, why? He's like, there's no snakes in Hawaii. We learned that in preschool. So this four year old, he had learned something that I didn't know, you know, because he was going to school in Hawaii. And it was just a good example, like he had different knowledge than I did. And he had different experiences and was able to bring those experience and knowledge to bear and then realize that we'd have to come up with a different

strategy to keep the birds out of our house. I mean, you've been putting all these strategies to become more inspiring into effect in your own life. I'm sure that's made you a more inspired leader, but has it also made you a little bit happier too? Definitely. You know, I think, you know, you mentioned earlier the example, the CEO who got those effusive emails back, thank you so much for the praise and the gratitude. You said that made that CEO probably happier.

I have to say that was such an amazing epiphany for me because I hadn't thought about it in that way. I use the word spreading the seeds of inspiration. He spread the seeds, but then he got some back from doing that. I think that when we know that we've had a positive impact on people's lives, it makes us happier. But one of the things that I think that I've most learned from all of my research,

and it's something I've brought up three or four different times, but the power of reflection, reflecting on your values, reflecting on times when you had power, were confident, were successful. We talked about reflecting on what you've learned from people below you, reflecting on your passions. All of these things, we are the examine life. There's a famous phrase, it's examine life worth living.

But I think the reflected life is really the true path towards making yourself and other people happier because it's through those reflections or the right types of reflections that we can put ourselves into a frame of mind that allows us to be more inspiring and then to receive more inspiration back to us. So we've gone through all these great ideas that we can put into effect to become more inspiring leaders. But as someone who's been a leader myself, I know that you kind of screw up sometimes without realizing you can accidentally know that you kind of screw up sometimes, without realizing you can accidentally switch into that kind of not so inspiring or maybe

defeating sort of role. Any strategies for leaders to pick themselves up and maybe do a do-over when things don't go so well in a leadership role? Yeah. First of all, I want to just re-emphasize the point you just made, which is so important, which is it's really hard. We all screw up. My wife loves to throw my research back in my face and tell me when I've been particularly infuriating. My kids are very good at telling me when I'm not being the most inspiring person. I think again, reflection really helps to think about what was going on in that situation that made me lose the big picture or maybe not be as courageous I could have been or been too aggressive in a way that hurt someone's feelings.

So I think that's one thing. I really believe in the power of apologies as an incredible way of helping people understand. I think the single most important thing that we can do in apologies besides take responsibility, which is like the core of it, is tell the person what we're going to do differently the next time. Make a commitment to the future. And I think that is where you're saying, look, I screwed up, but that's just empty water without the promise of the future. So I think that that's one of the things that I really think about.

And part of what I tell people is how can you be more inspiring more of the time? I like using a little phrase from the Bible, reap what you sow. Reap what you sow comes from agriculture, like we tend our crops and we reap what we sow, but it has two meanings that I think are really important. The first is that what we do today impacts the future. Second thing, what we do today

comes back to us in the same form. So if we're generous, we're gonna get generosity back. But if we're mean-spirited, we're gonna get mean-spiritedness back to us. And so myREAP is not spelled R-E-A-P, it's spelled R-E-I-P. And R-E-I-P is an acronym. And R stands for reflections.

So again, we talked about the power of reflecting on our own experiences. But also thinking about when weren't we inspiring, when we're infuriating, the E is emulate. I've asked people all over the world to think about a leader that inspired them. The next step is how could you emulate that person? And then can you take those reflections

and those emulations and turn them into an intention, a commitment to the future, and that comes back to the apology thing I was just talking about. And then finally, how do you practice that the next day and turn that into a daily practice? And one of the things that I've found in my research and my own personal life is that if we can be a little bit more inspiring tomorrow, it actually gives us the skills, also the motivation to be a little bit more inspiring the next time. So every time I feel that volcanic rage rise up inside of me, but I stop it, I feel so good about myself that it increases the probability that I'm going to be that better father the

next day. And so the practice really becomes important. We can build off that practice and reflect on building off that practice for the future. I've long wanted to inspire those around me, but I'm only now just waking up to the power I have as a leader. If you're like me, then I highly recommend Adam's new book, Inspire, the universal path for leading yourself and others. But let's quickly go over some of the ideas he's just shared. Tip number one, park the criticism and find more praise, especially in writing.

A tiny investment in your time can make you and the person you praise feel great. Tip number two is to have a vision and share it. We all want to find meaning. If you can vividly explain why you're asking someone to do something, then they'll do it more effectively and more cheerfully. The third tip is to remember that your personal values are your guide.

If you value honesty, then ask yourself, what would an honest leader do now? If it's empathy, then how can I be the most empathic boss? Tip number four is to marvel at where you're at right now. Appreciate all the decisions, hard work, and strokes of luck that built your business or your family. Tip number five, practice positive emotional contagion. Remember that a leader's fear or their enthusiasm will have a profound impact on those looking for inspiration.

Tip number six is that you don't need to be superhuman to be a good leader. You can just be human. Letting people know you're vulnerable will give them the confidence they need to take their own risks. But don't overdo the self-criticism. Since tip number seven is to remember your successes, recalling your past triumphs can help you deal with new challenges on the horizon. Tip number eight is to give choices to those you lead.

No one likes to feel boxed in, so give options rather than orders. Tip number nine, share the credit. We all want to be recognized, but we truly succeed when we share the laurels with our teams and even our rivals. Adam's final tip is to show humility. The most inspiring leaders listen to the most inexperienced voices. Being open to downward learning can make you more productive than you expect. We've still got one more show in this how-to season, and while I've loved making all of these episodes, I've saved something very special for last. I'm

going to let you in on the science of how to find your purpose. That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.