Valerie Freeman, the founder and CEO of Imprimis Group, is a big believer in the causal relationship between happiness and success. After several decades of experience seeing the impact of happiness on personal, team and organizational goals, she says that happiness is one of the greatest predictors of a successful hire.
“Happy employees are healthy, energetic, motivated and creative problem solvers. They’re cooperative and collaborative. They make informed decisions and don’t stress the occasional mistake. They take it in stride, learn quickly, and gain confidence and competence with experience. Effective leaders were happy people when we knew them earlier in their careers. For these reasons, happiness is one of the traits we value most in candidates and in our own employees.”
Award-winning Harvard University professor, PBS lecturer and author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work Shawn Achor concurs. His TED Talk on the subject is one of the
most watched, with 4 million views. In it, he says, “If I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. Ninety percent of your happiness is predicted not by your external world, but by the way your brain processes the world.”
In addressing job success, Achor says that 75% of success can be predicted by optimism levels, social support and the ability to see stress as a challenge and not a threat.
If you have these elements in place, this information would only affirm your feeling of happiness. But what if circumstances outside of your control are less than ideal? How can your brain possibly “process the world” so that you’re happy in spite of your stressors? And how is it that some of the happiest people don’t have the best circumstances, and some of the most fortunate are often dissatisfied?
In his book “Happiness is a Serious Problem,” Dennis Prager offers an intriguing hypothesis: “Yes, there is a ‘secret to happiness’—and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.”
Achor agrees. Number one atop his five key steps to achieving happiness is “Bring gratitude to mind.” He advises readers to “Write down three NEW things that you are grateful for each day.” His next four suggestions are journaling, exercising, meditation and engaging in random acts of kindness.
Assuming Achor’s last idea is effective in creating happiness, and Prager’s mantra that “happiness is a moral obligation” is also true, then we should feel a sense of career empowerment. What we can produce by being kind, caring people in the office is a perpetual cycle of happiness and success, for ourselves and others. If we can all agree that happier people are more productive at work, then it behooves each of us to find our own formula for personal happiness.
If you’re a job candidate with a passion for sustainable sources of happiness—from playing an instrument to charity work—talk to us and we’ll help fuel your success.