Shawn Achor is brilliant in this funny and inspiring TED talk. A two minute a day for 21 days recipe for happiness and success.
It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.
Shawn Achor attended Harvard and was grateful to have been admitted. His assumption was that everyone that was accepted at Harvard would feel the same way; however that was not the case. What he found was that 90% of our long term happiness is predicted not by the external world but by the way your brain processes the world.
The Happiness Advantage
He goes on to describe “The Happiness Advantage” which is, when your brain is in a positive state it will perform significantly better than at a negative, neutral or stressed state. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. To raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences “The Happiness Advantage.”
There are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, you can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully.
Here’s how, for the next 21 days take two minutes a day and do the following:
- Write down three new things that you’re grateful for.
- Journal about one positive experience you’ve had in the last 24 hours, this will allows your brain to relive it.
- Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters.
- Try meditation, to teach your brain to focus. Meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we’ve been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand.
- Random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. The first time you open up your inbox, write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in your support network. Spread the happy.
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like you train your bodies, you can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
Please disrupt the endless barrage of bad news reported by the media by sharing this with your friends, right? We can all use a little more happiness.
