The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 366: Laurie Santos - The Science Of Well-Being (Psychology & The Good Life)

Starting point is 00:00:00 One thing that we know from science is that your emotions can be contagious. You know, if you're a leader and you come in and you embody calm, then you're going to contagiously affect your team such that they're calm. If you embody panic at the recent numbers that came in, they're going to feel that too. And research suggests that emotional contagion happens all through teams all the time, but that folks who are team members are most susceptible to the emotions of their leader. Over the past nine months, I've been developing a new online learning tool called the Learning Leader Academy. It's been carefully designed to help you become a more effective leader.

Starting point is 00:00:40 The content is a combination of what I've learned from the past five years' worth of conversations with more than 350 of the world's most effective leaders, as well as lessons learned from my own experience leading teams. With that said, the content will not be the best part. We are building an online community of learning leaders who will have access to the following. The initial 30 lessons, I sat side by side with my dad, my greatest mentor in my life, and we spoke through 30 different leadership topics. In addition to seeing all of those videos, you will receive a playbook, a manual to take what you've learned via the videos and put it into action.

Starting point is 00:01:26 Additionally, we'll have live calls on Zoom with me and other members of the Academy. There'll also be a private forum for members only for you to discuss the challenges of your personal leadership journey with the other growth-oriented leaders to lean on for advice, feedback, and general conversation. And every once in a while, there will be a special live session via Zoom where I will bring on a guest, a previous podcast guest that I've had on my show that you can speak to directly. The initial people who sign up for the first cohort will receive a number of benefits that later adopters will not get. For more details, go to Ryanhawk. That's Ryanhawk.me and sign up today.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by, Brixie and Meyer. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, learners to 4-4-2-2-2 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about my book, Welcome to Management. Text learners to 4-4-2-2. Now on tonight's featured leader to the great doctor. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology, head of Silliman College at Yale University. Also created the most popular course in the history of Yale University.

Starting point is 00:03:11 One and four students have signed up to take it. And it's called Psychology and the Good Life. Lori deconstruct how to be more happier. A few of the topics we discussed. The common misconceptions about happiness. Then three key behaviors and actions of happy people. And then the perfect exercise to do at the beginning of your next meeting with your team at work or with your family. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Dr. Lori.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Santos. All right, Lori, so great to have you here on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me on. I am curious, especially from your backgrounds who have an understanding of what you're going to say about this, but I study people who sustain excellence over an extended period of time. And I'm curious from your perspective and all of your research, as well as spending a lot of time around institutions of higher education and being around very intelligent people. What have you found to be the commonalities among people who have sustained excellence? Honestly, I think sustained excellence in my view really boils down to good habits. You know, we sometimes think fantastic leaders have really awesome willpower and so on,

Starting point is 00:04:45 but often I think really great leaders end up forming good habits. In other words, they do consistent routines over and over again so they don't have to face individual choices through their day. They've figured out ways to put in good, healthy habits like exercising and being social and certain things like that. And those things come naturally to them. And so leaders are allowed to think about the big picture stuff because they've in some sense offloaded all the dumb, boring decisions of their day to really fantastic habits. You said they've come naturally to them. What do you mean by that? So I think it's the one great thing about the way habits work is it's kind of like when we learned to drive a car. You know, when we first picked up our driver's license and

Starting point is 00:05:27 we started driving a car for the first time, it felt like it was taking a lot of cognitive work, right? You know, when you turn the blinker on and so on? As you do it more and more and more, it comes kind of cognitively easy. Because you've turned driving a car into a habit that your body knows and your mind knows, you just don't have to think about it anymore. And my sense is the way leaders get to be good at what they do is that they end up offloading a lot of this stuff that that doesn't necessarily require hard thought to the form of habits. So, for example, they're the kind of people that get a morning routine down so that they know when they're going to eat breakfast, when they're going to work out, when they're going to shower.

Starting point is 00:06:02 They don't have to make a single decision all the time. Oftentimes, great leaders, fantastic leaders, even turn that kind of habit on for simple things like what they're going to wear in the morning. People like Steve Jobs and Barack Obama talk about how they really limited their wardrobe choices so that their mental energy could go to the good stuff. And the main way that we can limit that mental energy going to the boring stuff is to just turn it into habits like driving a car that we just do every day and form these routines that are easy. Yeah, I think you'd be surprised how many great leaders do this.

Starting point is 00:06:34 There's a wonderful book called Daily Routines that came out that lists the daily routines of all kinds of folks. So artists like Vincent Van Gogh and scientists like Charles Darwin, presidents like FDR. And what they all have in common is they all have a very specific. daily routine. And I think the way that works is, again, it just frees up your mental energy for the big stuff. So I've read a lot about this. And it makes so much sense. Why, what's the difference between the person who is able to build these habits and routines and the person who is not? Why is this hard to do? It's hard to do because at the start, habits take time. I mean, again, think back to our

Starting point is 00:07:16 driving analogy, right? When you first sit behind a wheel of a car, you're almost exhausted when you're done, you know, when you were a teenager and you first learned to do this because it takes so much mental energy to do. And so setting up those habits doesn't come easy. You really have to put the work in to do those habits consistently for a while in the beginning to set up situations that help you get the right cues. You can do those habits easily. You know, for example, if you're the kind of person who wants to work out in the morning, you have to have your exercise clothes available and ready. you have to know know how to get to the gym and have your car all prepped and like you have to set up situations that allow you to succeed and that can take a little bit of work and I think not everybody

Starting point is 00:07:52 realizes the power of that consistency. I think some of us think like oh I'll just decide on a whim and just figure it out as I go but psychologically speaking that just simply doesn't work as well. How since you're in the heart of studying this and learning about it, how have you taken what you've learned through your research and put into play? your life. Yeah, well, I've tried to harness the power of habits whenever possible. You know, for me, I think working out is not necessarily something that always comes easy, but turning that into a habit has been really powerful for me. Things, just simple things like having the exercise clothes out the night before. So they're the first thing I see in the morning. You know,

Starting point is 00:08:32 I've even taken the step of setting them up so that even before I, like, right when I get out of bed, they're kind of there. And the first warm thing that I throw on after taking off my pajamas. And then you're in your exercise clothes and it just makes it easier to work out. I think I also do that a lot as a leader with my students to try to get them to form good habits in terms of writing and things like that. You know, faculty are always working with our PhD students and we want them to succeed. Those are the teams that we're generally managing. But I think trying to use this as advice for them can be really helpful. For example, you know, if writing is an important thing you want to get done, set that up as the first thing you do in the day. You know, it's not your gym clothes that you see when you get up in the

Starting point is 00:09:09 morning. It's your laptop set on the word file. That's the thing you're just working on that you need to get going on. And so I think working with your teams to make sure they're putting in place the right habits is also a thing that excellent leaders do. Perhaps this is selfish, but someone who has just published their first book and working on the next one, are there other good habits to create, to get your thoughts down on the page, to produce writing really that is useful for other people. Do you have other good writing habits you could share? Yeah, well, one really is this one that do it at a consistent time every day no matter what. So even if you're having a day of writers block, you know, if you set your time from say 9 to 10 a.m.

Starting point is 00:09:51 to be your writing time, you just have to do it and you just have to be typing something, even if it's, I don't know what I'm typing right now. I don't know what I'm typing right now. The reason that works is that you basically just get your brain into the habit that during this time you sit down and you write. And eventually writing, you know, I don't know what I'm writing right now. gets boring and you just are like fine let me just try something and you know as you know as a writer you know half of writing is editing it's just getting the first content on there so you have something to work with and go for so part of what that writing habit does is it allows you to decrease uh your anxiety and that

Starting point is 00:10:24 helps you overcome some procrastination another great writing tip is to set things up so that is if you're on a role and you kind of know what you're going to say stop there some folks even give the advice of stopping mid-sentence and the reason is that your brain wants to fill things in. Like it kind of has this motivation to have closure on things, you know, particularly kind of a sentence that's not even done. And the idea is that you'll be more motivated the next day to go back and finish it and it'll be easy to finish it because it was, you know, half a sentence. You already knew what you were going to say. So you kind of stopped in the middle of things. So I think sort of stopping your work kind of in media res, you know,

Starting point is 00:10:57 the Greek term is, allows you to sort of pick it back up on something that's easy. And that can kind get you in the workflow and make you feel productive and keep you going even in times that you know writing is pretty tough so laura you've you teach and you've created what has turned out to be the most popular course in the history of yale and yale's been around for more than 300 years it's called psychology and the good life and i'm first curious about your thought process behind the creation of this course. And secondly, the response to it. So first, what was it about psychology, the good life, happiness that you felt, I think this needs to be a course? Yeah, well, it all started when I took on a new role at Yale. I've been teaching at Yale for the last 17 years, but I took on a

Starting point is 00:11:53 new role recently when I became a head of college on campus. So Yale's kind of one of these weird schools like Hogwarts where there's like colleges within a college like Gruffindore and Slophe. and that kind of thing. I'm the head of Silliman College. And in that role, I live on campus really closely with students, like my house is on campus. I eat with them in the dining hall and so on. And it was in that role that I first started to see this so-called mental health crisis up close and personal. You know, I was seeing students who are too depressed to function, who are anxious all the time, who are just experiencing overwhelming levels of stress. And the class emerged out of an attempt to help them. As a practicing psychologist, I know there's lots of really

Starting point is 00:12:30 simple tips that we could be putting into place to reduce this kind of depression and anxiety. And I thought, if I just develop a class where I teach students these tools, then they'll know what to do. They can put these things into practice. And so, you know, I put the class together. I assumed to be, you know, 30-year students, or so students who would take it because it was a new class. And I was a little overwhelmed when we had over a thousand students sign up. In the end, just under one out of every four students at Yale was taking the class. We had to teach the class in a concert hall. It was a little incredible. Wow. So you're you're up there now lecturing or teaching from, you expected a normal small classroom and now you're basically in a theater. Yeah. At first we moved the class to the university

Starting point is 00:13:12 church, which sat about 900 students and then even we even outgrew that. And so yeah, teaching on a concert stage that like yo-yo-ma has played on. It was a little surreal. What was the initial response like when from the students after, it had to be like not only the content in your presentation, but the experience of being surrounded by so many fellow students. What was that like for both you as well as the students? Well, it's definitely incredible for me to feel like that many students wanted to hear this content. And also just since we were giving these practical tips that that many students on campus were now employing those tips.

Starting point is 00:13:54 That meant that, you know, if we were teaching students about, say, gratitude or social connection or doing random acts of kindness, we had a quarter of the whole undergraduate body that were employing those tips at once. And so it was a little incredible. But I think for the students, one of the reasons it went viral is, you know, I think they didn't realize how much their neighbors were suffering, you know, how much their neighbors also wanted these tips to feel less depressed and less anxious. And so I think it was a little bit of social support for trying to engage in these practices. It's kind of like we're all in this together. We're all going through the same kind of thing at once.

Starting point is 00:14:27 So a big part of the course is about happiness. I'm curious from your perspective from the research and all the work you've done and the response you've received from students and people you've taught. What are some of the primary misconceptions about happiness? Yeah, well, they're pretty common. And in fact, that's really the topic that we start the course on is ways our minds goes astray when we're thinking about what makes us happy. You know, the common misconceptions are the ones you can guess, right?

Starting point is 00:14:58 You know, to be happier, I need to change my circumstances. I need to become richer and to get more money. I need to change my job. I need to, you know, have the perfect house or the perfect car, the perfect material possessions. Research suggests that that's what people really think is involved in happiness, but the science suggests that life circumstances simply don't matter as much as we think. So it doesn't matter what your income level is. If you're basically above the poverty line and reasonably middle class right now,

Starting point is 00:15:24 getting more money isn't going to help you, which again is not what we think. You know, many of us are playing the lottery and the hopes that we'll do better, but in practice, the research suggests that's just not going to help. So then let's dive into what the research suggests that does help. Yeah, those are the important things. What are some of the actions, behaviors, thoughts, mindsets of the people who are exhibiting happiness on a regular basis? Yeah, well, this is exactly how the research works, is that, you know, because for some people wonder like, well, how can you figure out what makes you happy? You know, how is that a scientific question?

Starting point is 00:15:59 What scientists do is they just go out and find happy people. And so they look at what are those happy people doing? And then they, once they do that kind of ethnographic work of figuring out what the happy people are behaving like, then they do experiments where they make not so happy people do the things that the happy people are doing. And then you see whether that bumps up happiness. And from that work, you know, we now have decades of that work, lots of insights about interventions that you can make in your, own life that make you happier based on what happy people tend to be doing. And so one of those big interventions involves social connection. Every available study of happy people suggest that happy people are social. They spend more time with other people and they tend to prioritize time with the people that

Starting point is 00:16:39 they care about. And there's simple interventions you can do just to, you know, talk to your neighbor at the coffee shop or really make time to connect with friends you haven't talked to in a while. And the studies suggest that that can significantly boost while being incredibly quickly. Another misconception we have is that happiness is all about the self. You know, right now there's a lot of work on sort of self-care, you know, treat yourself kinds of things all the time. But the research suggests that happy people don't focus on themselves as much. Happy people tend to be relatively other oriented. You know, they give more money to charity, they volunteer more of their time. And again, a simple intervention you can do is just to do more things for others. And that significantly starts boosting your

Starting point is 00:17:16 well-being. Just the simple act of doing a random act of kindness or two a day can actually bump up well being quite well. The final thing that really matters for happiness is our mindset. And I mean that in a couple different ways. One is that happy people tend to be really grateful. They tend to look for the benefits in life and count their blessings rather than gripe and sort of pay attention to the hassles. And this is one that has picked up in the popular culture, this idea of a gratitude journal

Starting point is 00:17:43 or a gratitude app. The simple act of scribbling down three to five things you're grateful for, research shows can start improving your happiness in as little as two weeks. But the other kind of mental attitude that's really useful or a mindset that's really useful is a mindset of being present, taking time to be mindful. A lot of scientific work has been focused on meditation and other practices to induce mindfulness and being present. And that work has really suggested that the simple act of meditating, you know, five to ten minutes a day can really boost a lot of things from concentration to memory and even immune function, but it also has a lot of it. It's a lot of

Starting point is 00:18:18 a significant effect on happiness where just taking time to be present can make you happier. How have you taken, again, I love, especially when speaking with a scientist or someone who does a lot of research about how they actually put it into their life, because I'm fascinated by you, the person, not just the work that you produce, Lori. And so when you think about you learn this, then I'm always, my next question is, okay, how do we put this into play for the person listening? think we can learn some of that through just asking you. Yeah. And so how do you put becoming more socially connected and others oriented and and that

Starting point is 00:19:01 attitude of gratitude, right? You can't be hateful if you're grateful style of living. Like how do you put this into play? Yeah. Well, that's the key, right? Because you can know all these findings. And if you don't do them, it kind of doesn't work. In my class, I teach students about this cognitive.

Starting point is 00:19:18 bias known as the G.I. Joe fallacy. I don't know how old you are, but if you're a child of the 80s like me, you might remember the cartoon G.I. Joe, where it kind of ended with this sort of famous phrase of knowing is half the battle. Yeah. But this is what we think. We think, especially I think leaders and folks like your listeners, like folks think that just knowing, I'm good. You know, I read that management book, I'm good. But knowing isn't half the battle. It's probably not even like five percent of the battle. The idea is that knowing is merely not enough to get these things active in your own life, especially when it comes to the science of happiness. You need to do the interventions that you hear science talking about or they're not going to work. And that's true for me as well.

Starting point is 00:19:59 I mean, I think I know this stuff well now from teaching this class, from running my podcast and so on, but it still takes work to put it into practice. And so how have I done that in my daily life? One is to be really deliberate about it. So for example, things like social connection don't come naturally for me, especially talking with strangers, you know, I'm the person that when I get on the plane, I immediately put my headphones on and dive into a book so like the person next to me can't talk to me. That's my natural response. But these days I've tried to be a little bit more social. I've kind of made the effort to get over that friction of first starting to talk to someone and I've been surprised at the results that it can be a lot more pleasant than I tend to think.

Starting point is 00:20:36 I've also tried to get a lot more intentional about making time to hang out with the people I care about, including people who tend to be far away. I think listeners for your podcast are the kind of folks who may have moved from where they were in college or may have friends all over the globe from the work that they do, but we don't often connect with those folks. And so I've tried to make a deliberate effort to set up, you know, Skype calls that aren't just for work, but that are really about connecting with the people I care about. In terms of gratitude, that's one, that's been one that's a really hard one for me. I'm a big griper by nature. I have whole friendships and like whole like family relationships that seem to be based on griping and complaining. But I,

Starting point is 00:21:15 but I've tried to be more deliberate about that too. Part of it's I've tried to notice the effect that that kind of complaining has on me. You know, if you have that person that you tend to complain with, when you stop hanging out with them, do you feel better afterwards or do you feel kind of like yucky and more stressed and gross? And so I've tried to notice the effect that that kind of complaining has and I've tried to put into place just the attitude when I'm, you know, I can't really complain unless I also give one thing that's going well has been a good. strategy that I've used. And so that's been particularly helpful for me. How has your life changed since this course was created, went viral. You've created an incredible podcast with Malcolm Gladwell's

Starting point is 00:21:56 company. How has your life changed and how has that impacted your happiness? Yeah, it's been, as I said, kind of it was surreal on campus to be teaching in a concert hall. But the things that happened after that have gotten all the more surreal. The class went viral, not just on campus, but everywhere. By halfway through the course, we'd have an international or national press team filming every single lecture I did. So it wasn't just me doing my PowerPoint lecture for the first time. It was me doing a PowerPoint lecture for the first time with the Today Show filming us the whole time. And so that has been a little bit surreal, but it's caused me to realize that people really want this content and are so starved for evidence-based tips that they can use

Starting point is 00:22:36 to improve their lives, to improve their mood. And so I've kind of switched. years full time to be working on happiness and kind of being a communicator of what the science suggests. And so we've done that through the podcast, which is just called the Happiness Lab. That is now, you know, consistently in the top ten of podcasts. So that's also been incredible. But just finding different ways to share this stuff. In terms of my own happiness, I think becoming a happiness expert in sharing these findings has really given me some meaning in my own life. I think the only downside is that it's also reduced the amount of time I have. And another thing, research shows matters for happiness is having a little bit of what's called time affluence,

Starting point is 00:23:14 sort of feeling wealthy in time and not feeling so time famished. I'd say that's the main spot that becoming a happiness expert has really decreased my happiness, but on mass it's been a positive net effect in my life. Let's try to get practical for a second, Lori, around. There's somebody right now on the elliptical or driving in their car, and they're listening, saying, you know, that sounds great. And Lori is certainly doing it on a college campus, but I am trying to run a team. And I currently have two open positions. I have a lot of pressure. We're just, we're just short of achieving our goal that the company has set forth. And I'm trying to build a team that has a culture where people are happy about coming to work. They get fulfillment in their

Starting point is 00:24:03 job that I am I am a leader of a team that people want to work on. I'm a leader that people want to commit to. And so how could that person who's living that life right now, who's got some stresses put on them both for what they signed up for in a leadership position as well as wanting to be there for their team, what is some general advice you would give to them from a happiness perspective in living a good life that could potentially go into play immediately. Yeah, well, one piece of advice is just to realize that being that kind of leader, in other words, a leader that's focused on your employee's happiness or your team's happiness, that is a smart thing to do.

Starting point is 00:24:46 Not just, it's probably a morally good thing to do to worry about your team's happiness, but it's also smart from a business perspective. Everything we know about the science of happiness suggests that happier workers are more productive. Happier workers are more creative. Their studies showing that the simple act of putting doctors in a happy mood allows them to find diagnoses even faster so it can increase creativity. Happy workers end up having job performance that their supervisors are more satisfied with. And these are causal studies that are longitudinal studies. So you say measure a college student's happiness right at graduation. You come back five years later and ask whether that level of

Starting point is 00:25:24 happiness that they had back then predicts their performance on the job several years later. And what you find is that yes, indeed it does. And so we sometimes kind of get the causal arrows wrong. We think, you know, if only we could get our employers to be productive, you know, then we'd worry about their happiness after that. But actually, as a leader, your best case scenario is to make your employees happy, and that's going to increase their productivity. It also helps with immune function. And we know that happier workers spend 15 less sick days on the job per year. And so, again, you're just increasing productivity in all these different ways. So the upshot is, it's a good idea. Then the question is, how do you do it? As a leader, I think you have all kinds of ways to do that.

Starting point is 00:26:06 I'll give a couple tips here. One is to kind of work with your employees to allow them to do the job that they're assigned to do in a way that meets with their values and their strengths. There's a lot of research suggesting that people who find their job a calling rather than just a job that they're doing tend to be better at that job. And the way that jobs become callings is to find ways that the things you personally find meaningful, whether it's being social or humor, being brave, or helping people, once you can infuse your job with that meaning, it allows you to do that job better and to enjoy it more and to just be happier generally. And so I think as managers, it'd be useful to know kind of what your employees find meaningful. I've done this in my own manager role. I have an administrative assistant who works with me

Starting point is 00:26:50 and various grad student teams. And I've tried to do that personally to really get a sense of what they're getting out of the job. With my assistant in the case of working in the college, for her, it's really just kind of working with these students and feeling like she's helping them. Like, you know, she thrives. Her biggest value is kind of feeling like a mom to these students.

Starting point is 00:27:08 And I've tried to kind of shift her job duties to kind of fit with that more, and knowing that the more we can reframe what she's doing as helping the students, you know, even if that's, you know, entering, you know, some like payroll stuff. It's like, no, no, when you're doing that, that's allowing them to get their checks. That's allowing them to be happy and thrive.

Starting point is 00:27:24 And so whatever you can do to help your employees reframe their role as something that gives them, meaning that can be really powerful. The second tip I'll give is about your own emotions and your own happiness. One thing that we know from science is that your emotions can be contagious. You know, if you're a leader and you come in and you embody calm, then you're going to contagiously affect your team such that they're calm. If you embody panic at the recent numbers that came in, they're going to feel that too. And research suggests that emotional contagion happens all through teams all the time, but that folks who are team members are most susceptible to the emotions of their leader. And so you can do a lot as a leader to try to embody the kinds of emotions that you want to see in your own teams.

Starting point is 00:28:12 And there's some wonderful research by a researcher at Wharton Seagall Barsaid, who's done some work on what she calls affective spirals, which is the idea that if someone comes into a team kind of having a bad day and other people kind of catch that negative mood, then it sort of becomes this spiral of bad stuff that can lead to really negative outcomes. But her idea is that as a leader, you can affect that affective spiral yourself.

Starting point is 00:28:35 You can kind of seed positive emotions, seed joy, seed calm, seed excitement over a challenge, and those things can contagiously infect your team members too. So that's another way that I think, leaders can make a big difference is just actually watching their own happiness and their own emotions and really trying to regulate those, especially in workplace settings. Have you worked with anybody, maybe a crazy question, but have you worked with anybody of how to set the proper tone as a leader for their, let's say they have Monday morning meetings to get the, I know a lot of people email,

Starting point is 00:29:06 they have that Monday morning meeting to get the week kicked off right. And there are a lot of people listening who lead those meetings. And I've written a lot about this and a lot about meetings and why they're very necessary. And as a leader, it is our responsibility to do them extremely well. And it's our job to think about this all the time. Is there some advice or a thought, a practical idea from a happiness perspective for somebody who wants to set the proper tone for the week on that Monday meeting? And they're the leader, a way to start it, whether it's with, I mean, we know a lot of the science behind storytelling and how that can grab people and then make that related to what the task at hand is.

Starting point is 00:29:51 But I'm curious, Lori, from your perspective, as someone is getting ready to lead their Monday meeting and they're thinking, what is, what can I take from this, this happiness idea in order to help my team be happier and then do better work? Yeah, I think, I think two very specific practical tips there. one is to try to infuse that sort of morning meeting with a little bit of gratitude. You know, imagine you walked into that meeting and you said, you know, one thing I'm grateful for this week that happened at work is X, Y, and Z. I've heard teams that do that where they have members go around and say one thing you're grateful for. And again, not like, I'm grateful for my morning coffee because it tastes awesome.

Starting point is 00:30:33 But like, I'm grateful that Joe from billing like was able to do this thing for me and it really helped me out. to allow the team to see that they're all have this norm of helping one another and that everyone is really grateful, then can be incredibly powerful. Work by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino shows that grateful team members end up being one and a half times more productive. Just by kind of expressing gratitude towards your employees, you can actually make them more productive and set them up for an incredibly positive work week. So that would be kind of tip number one. Tip number two is to kind of, again, this idea of regulating your own emotion, right? Like, you forget that, you know, if you had a rough morning with your spouse and, you know, your kid wouldn't get to school and the car was giving you trouble and then you get to work and you're kind of holding that negative energy, you forget that you will immediately without realizing it transmit that negative energy to your team. And so I think leaders have a responsibility before they go into those meetings to find a way to put themselves in a positive space, whether that's taking a few mindful breaths, trying to reframe whatever you're going to talk about in a more positive light as a challenge rather than a crisis, all of those things that you can do to regulate your own emotions in that moment can

Starting point is 00:31:45 have a powerful effect on the way your team is going to be thinking for the rest of the week. Really helpful, Lori. Let's shift that actually to the home life. And for the person listening who is married with kids and all the stressors that go along with owning a home and cars and, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. cost of living in a family today. Not everybody's in a situation, but I know a lot of people listening are based on the emails I receive. And so for that person who perhaps works in a high stress job, which a lot of people do, what advice do you give to the mom or dad who's listening right now for them to be a better spouse, a more happier mom or dad, so that that, because we know the power of

Starting point is 00:32:34 of what that impact can have on the other people in your home. What are some ideas for that person as they leave work, as they leave their home office and go back to be with the family. So they could be, again, they're the emotional thermostat for their families. The leader is listening right now. So what can they, what can they do in order to be better at that? Yeah, I think, I think advice is a little similar. You know, before you walk into your team meeting, try to regulate your emotion.

Starting point is 00:33:01 You know, the same thing when you hop in your car, hop in your, train home commuting, like take that time to kind of figure out what space you're in. You know, what are you bringing back to the family? And you can do that just by simply paying attention to your own emotions, right? Like, you know, if you sit there and think of kind of what am I feeling right now, is it anxious? Is it frazzled? Is it like super not present? You know, all of those negative things you're going to be bringing into your life with your family. But by having a moment to recognize those, you can take time to deliberately reframe them before you walk into the door. I've heard cases of people who literally do this in their car on the way home is that their cue is when they get, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:37 we talked before about forming good habits. You know, your cue is that when you get in your car to drive home, you do this moment of like, all right, what's going on my body right now? Oh, my chest is tight. You know, like I have this like wrenching headache. Like I can't. I'm ruminating about this decision we made at work and so on. Once you recognize those things, that's in some sense the first step to taking action on them. And the way you take action is just, again, to kind of, you know, take a breath, like reframe, you know, think about what you're going to be grateful for when you walk into the house and so on. A second tip I would give is that, you know, a lot of the things that make family life great come from the simple act of being present and expressing gratitude to your

Starting point is 00:34:12 family. And so, you know, a simple thing of, you know, expressing one thing you're grateful for over the dinner table with your family members, you know, especially saying that to your spouse, like when you walk in, the focus of shifting from kind of complaining mode in their family life to gratitude mode can be incredibly powerful. And there's lots of work suggesting that, you know, the simple act of expressing gratitude among relationship partners can really increase relationship satisfaction. And so oftentimes I've, you know, even in our dining halls, you know, because I eat dinner with my husband and my family in a dining hall with students, but we'll often during dinner times sort of go around and, you know, do a kind of gratitude session of like, one thing you're grateful for. You know, sometimes back in the culture,

Starting point is 00:34:53 we used to have a culture of, you know, saying grace before meals, which, you know, it can be a religious act, but it can also just be a secular act of sort of thinking about the things you're grateful for. So bring back those gratitude practices in your own family and they'll have huge benefits, much, much bigger benefit than you might think. One of the things we do at the dinner table is have each child, and we do it too as the mom and dad, but have each child share something about another child that they're grateful for that I found to have, like you should see the look in a child's eyes when their sibling

Starting point is 00:35:26 who at times, you know, they fight with, that their sibling says, you know, I love Ella because of X and a look in their eye because sometimes they'll say things that maybe they haven't really said before. They haven't expressed it. And so it has so much benefit because the child is thinking about a positive and they're creating a lot of joy for the other child. And it doesn't always work perfectly. But, but wow, it is a beautiful setting as a way to start your dinner when you, when each person is going around saying what they're grateful for or what they love about somebody else at the dinner table. And you forget that, I mean, the research suggests that we just don't realize how beneficial

Starting point is 00:36:06 it is. You know, we assume our kids know, we assume that my kid knows how much I love them and why I love them. But the act of expressing it can be much more powerful, powerful for us in the act of expressing it can increase our well-being, but it can also be so powerful for the people that hear it. So I love that practice. And as I'm guessing, like, you know, it probably takes like five, ten minutes at the dinner table and you didn't have something to talk about anyway.

Starting point is 00:36:29 So it's a completely free intervention that takes up some airtime that's doing incredible good for the well-being of your family. Yeah, Lori, I'm curious. What's next for you? Well, we are working diligently on season two of our podcast, The Happiness Lab, and that's going to launch in April. I'm not sure if you're talking about this in your podcast, but we're also busily trying to figure out how we can use all these interventions to help us through the current crisis. Sure, sure. Depending on when this air is we're in the midst of COVID-19

Starting point is 00:36:59 and figuring out how to telework from home and deal with families in completely different ways and manage all the anxiety and stress of this current time. And so we have a special season of the Happiness Lab devoted specifically to COVID-19 that's playing right now. And you're doing this through Pushkin, is that correct? That's correct, yep. And so that's Malcolm Gladwell's and Jacob Weisberg's company, Is that right?

Starting point is 00:37:24 Yeah. So the Happiness Lab is a Pushkin podcast. So this is the company launched by Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. And so we have wonderful producers who do an excellent job on this podcast. I've been super proud. We're working hard to get the good content out. Extremely well done. And Malcolm's audio work now I think it's pretty cool to see his shift to be so much more

Starting point is 00:37:46 focused on audio when he was one of the kind of kings of the written word in books and not that he'll stop, I'm guessing. So I would imagine being around and partnering with the right people is, it has to, I mean, just a really good move on your part and has to be beneficial. Yeah, no, it's been really fantastic. And in addition to working with Malcolm and Jacob, who are amazing, I also produce and co-write all my shows with my good friend, Ryan Dilley, who is just a wonderful journalist and a great storyteller.

Starting point is 00:38:16 So I'm also, in addition to making these fun podcasts, I'm learning a ton, which has been fantastic. That's awesome. I've found that teaching has been one of the greatest mechanisms or tools for learning ever in my life as I've shifted to go from the reader to the teacher on a regular basis that that process of distilling down the evidence or the ideas or the stories and then preparing to share them on a stage for others, that there's so much that happens in that process where a ton of learning takes place. I have to imagine your position that that happens on a regular basis. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the best way to learn the content is to teach it. And that's especially true if it's content that's really practical, right? You know, I'm supposed to be sharing these tips with other students. They're looking to me. And as the teacher, you know, I'm going to look really stupid if I'm not, you know, expressing gratitude and being more social and so on.

Starting point is 00:39:08 And so it keeps me on track. I have to kind of practice what I preach. Absolutely. Lori, I'm so appreciative of your time. So thank you very much for all the great work that you're doing as well as investing your time with me today. where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Sure, you should check out the Happiness Lab podcast wherever you download your podcasts. And if you want to do your own version of this Yale class that my students have taken,

Starting point is 00:39:33 you can go to corsera.org and sign up for the science of well-being. It's a freely available course that's basically everything that Yale kids learn in a slightly shorter format. Love it. Well, thank you again, Lori, for being here. This is fantastic. and I absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Fantastic. Looking forward to it. All right.

Starting point is 00:39:52 Thanks. Wow. Lori is just yet another example of the benefits of speaking with people who are far smarter than me on a regular basis. I thoroughly enjoyed it and got a lot out of every second of that conversation with Lori. A few of the key points that I took away. As the leader, your emotions are.

Starting point is 00:40:16 contagious. It is imperative that you understand this and be mindful of it. How are you monitoring your own emotion before you walk into work, before you walk on the door to be with your family after work? Very important. Then the power of gratitude. Use a journal. Say what you're grateful for out loud. Remember to look somebody in the eye, tell them, that you're grateful for them and why it will leave a lasting impact on both you and them. And then great leaders create rituals and routines for themselves. What habits are you creating for yourself? Be mindful of this as you continuously move up the ladder of leadership positions.

Starting point is 00:41:13 It gets tougher and tougher with time. restraints. And so it's so important that you create great rituals and routines for yourself. Once again, thank you so much for continuing to tell other people, others that have perhaps never listened to the Learning Leaders Show why this is so useful. And in particular, this one with Dr. Lori Santos could make their life better. Because you continue to do that, it gives me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you soon. Can't wait.

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 366: Laurie Santos - The Science Of Well-Being (Psychology & The Good Life)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.