Image: adaptation of sometimes a hug is all what we need courtesy of kalandrakas

“Have you noticed (…) when you’re walking down the street (…) people don’t smile any more? They have lost the ability to smile!” – Jack Lalanne

If you’re new to this series, you may want to read our first article where we explain the four basic principles that are the basis of the Fish! philosophy, and how it can help you have a happier life. Today, we will discuss the second principle (Make someone’s day) and give you some simple ideas of how to do this on a daily basis, both at work and at home.

Principle # 2 – Make someone’s day

The second principle of the Fish! philosophy is really no secret: Actively and regularly exercising your Kindness muscles will lead to happier, healthier, better lives. Yes, there is a strong case for kindness and altruism. The best news is that this type of kindness does not require fat checkbooks or a life of deprivation and selfless sacrifices. No, we are talking about simple, ideally daily small and perhaps even random acts of kindness that make those around you feel appreciated.

This idea was not born out of naivety from do-goodies; Found first in the religious teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed and other leaders, today’s body of science has now proven the case for kindness. Recent academic studies in Positive Psychology by luminaries such as Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky from Stanford University confirm that “completing five acts of kindness every day has a significant and positive impact in our levels of positive emotion”, and leads to happier lives. Or as doctor Stephen Post and Jill Neimark proved in their recent book Why Good Things Happen to Good People, “when we give of ourselves, especially if we start young, everything from life-satisfaction to self-realization and physical health is significantly affected. Mortality is delayed. Depression is reduced. Well-being and good fortune are increased.”

Making someone’s day on a daily basis

Making someone’s day does not usually take a lot of effort, energy or money. Sure, spending large amounts of any of those can make a big difference to the impact you have through good deeds; unfortunately, most of us get easily confused by this fact, and assume that unless we set out to really make a big difference, it is all a waste of effort. I have good news for you: it isn’t.

At work, the easiest way to make someone’s day is to think about who has made your work easier or better lately, and then go and say Thank You. Yes, these words have a lot of power when they are said from the heart. And with just a little more effort, you can double its power. Our over-reliance in electronic communications has meant that the art of writing is becoming an ancient practice; use this well known fact to your advantage and write a Thank you note with pen and paper. I guarantee the recipient will not forget your gesture!

There are many other ways of giving on a daily basis, without having to spend a lot of time or energy on them:

1. Smile & Listen: As you meet people in the corridor, kitchen, or water cooler, choose one moment a day when you give your undivided attention to the person you are meeting, Smile at them, ask them how they are, and then listen. Many of us give out ‘How are yous’ without even waiting to hear the answer; make someone’s day by giving them 5 minutes of your time and actually listening to their stories.
2. Teach them how to fish rather than giving them the fish they ask for. As people come to you for help, choose instances where you can extend their skills by coaching them on how to do what they asked you about rather than simply doing it for them.
3. Offer a shoulder to lean on. Do you see someone who needs moral support? Perhaps the stress of it all is too much, or they look like they could use 5 minutes of respite; offer emotional and moral support to someone who is going through a difficult time. You’ll be surprised at the difference that you can make simply by saying “I am here to listen if you need me” to someone in distress.
4. Give someone a ride. If you’re at a business function, keep an eye out for those without transport and offer them a ride home, especially if it means only a small detour from your planned return trip. To you it may represent another 5 minutes of your day, but it may save an hour or more of travel time for the other person.
5. Give discount vouchers to those who will enjoy them. Have you ever noticed the vouchers at the back of your shopping dockets? Take a minute to cut a few of them out, and keep an eye for people at work or elsewhere that may need them or enjoy them. Even better, buy an Entertainment Book and carry some vouchers with you to give away randomly to people you meet at the shops, the supermarket,etc.

Once you get started using these ideas, and start getting ‘In the zone’ of making someone’s day on a regular basis, I recommend you read this article that will help you turn that habit into a daily routine. And if you really want to make a bigger difference in the world, then make sure you ask people to Pass the kindness Forward if they ever ask how they can pay you back for your generosity. With these simple words, you can create a snowball of kindness that will leave a path of smiles along the way.

Image: Natural Woman courtesy of Natalie Laure

“There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself” – Ken Blanchard, Stephen Lundlin, Harry Paul & John Christensen

If you’re new to this series, you may want to read our first article where we explain the four basic principles that are the basis of the Fish! philosophy, and how it can help you ave a happier life. Today, we will discuss the first principle (Choose your attitude), the impact it can have in your levels of happiness, and how you can incorporate it into your life.

Principle # 1 – Choose your attitude

Have you heard of ‘fake it till you make it‘? Then you already have learned about choosing your attitude. Some people believe that acting calm, centred and happy when that’s not how you feel is somehow unethical; after all, you are not being authentic, or so the argument goes. But truth is, acting as if you were happy leads to more positive and productive relationships , in the long-term; and this will in time create a happier life.

Choosing your attitude is not about choosing how we feel. As Dan Millman once told me, “your feelings are  like the weather; they come and go, and you can’t control them. But you can control how you act and react under different circumstances.” Choosing  your attitude is therefore about deciding how you choose to act to your present reality, and how you choose to treat those around you. When you choose to treat others in the same way you would like others to treat you, your life becomes brighter and happier.

Creating happiness by choosing your attitude

Choosing your attitude can help you create a happier life. Choosing your attitude puts you more in control of your life; since you are no longer a victim of your life and circumstances, but rather an active actor in the script of your life, you are likely to feel more motivated and happy. By choosing positive actions to difficult circumstances, you are also likely to improve the quality of your relationships, which will in turn improve the quality of your life and lead to happiness.

So the key question is how do we choose our attitude? The answer is simple: By paying more attention to how we act; developing more self-awareness of our inbuilt reactions when we are acting in auto-pilot; and consciously choosing alternate ways of reacting and using techniques that help us turn these into automatic habits.

Click here if you can’t see the video box above

If you read the article from last week, you know that over the coming weeks I will be discussing the four principles of the Fish! philosophy: Choose your attitude, Make someone’s day, Have fun, and Be present.

This month’s video is a sample of what the Pike Place Market is really like. By watching it you will get a glimpse of how these principles translate into every day actions for the employees of the Pike Place Fish market in Seattle.

If you follow the link to Wikipedia, you will find a criticism of the Fish! philosophy: a link to another Youtube video where a Pike Place Market fishmonger argues that ‘the Fish! philosophy was just a show for the people that make the videos [and the books]; they’re just trying to sell something. It is just not possible to continuously work like that all year long’. Yet a simple search in YouTube for the words Pike Place Market will show you a large number of amateur videos that prove the contrary.

I hope you enjoy this short preview of the Fish! philosophy, and stay tuned for more in-depth discussions of the upcmoming articles in this topic.

Image: Happy Happy Norouz 87 courtesy of Hamed Masoumi

Have you ever considered the possibility that a book written to help organisations improve morale and deliver better results might just have the secret to a happy life? Probably not. Yet that is exactly what you will find in Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results.  Fish! is a book written by Ken Blanchard (best-selling author of Who Moved My Cheese, The One Minute Manager, and Whale Done, among others),Stephen Lundlin, Harry Paul & John Christensen; and it tells a story of how a manager at afirm in Seattle finds the secret to building a high morale, productive business whilst visiting the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market.

Rob Walker’s article “The Radical Happy: Fish! Explained” explores how this book came to life. According to Walker, “In 1997, John Christensen, CEO of ChartHouse Learning, which makes educational videos, took a business trip to Seattle and found himself wandering around the Pike Place market. Fishmongering is tough work, done in 12-hour shifts and marked by stench, scales, blood, and exposure to the elements. To Christensen’s surprise, however, the workers at Pike Place Fish did not appear beaten down by their environment. In fact, they were positively giddy. In their fish-tossing antics, their theatrical clowning, their energy, and their fun, Christensen saw something magic. It was not a paradigm, but a paragon: the way work ought to be.”

So what was the secret of the success story at the Pike Place Fish markets? It all came to 4 very simple principle:

1. Choose your attitude
2. Make someone’s day
3. Have fun
4. Be Present

Over the coming weeks, we will be writing in detail about what these principles are about; the impact they can have in your own level of happiness; and how you can incorporate them into your life as part of your daily habits.

If you decide you’re too impatient to wait, you might consider shelling out the US$14 that the book costs, and reading it in one sitting. The book is short and very easy to read, and is guaranteed to give you plenty of ideas on how increase your level of happiness and wisdom. Whether you decide to buy it now or wait to the end of this series, we hope to see you here next week for the next installment in the series.

Image: IMG_2508 courtesy of beggs

Disclaimer & Introduction

Disclaimer: I have written & published this article in a rush; in fact, I have decided to publish this on  Wednesday night instead of sticking to my new timetable of Thursdays. Why? Because I want you to get it before the download link for the radio program I am about to review goes dead. Unfortunately, that means I have done almost no editing on this article.  In this column I will review the episode of the 17th of May from the Radio National program All in the Mind, a weekly program on Australia’s Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This program is available for downloading as a podcast for a limited time (about 2 weeks left, I believe),and I wanted you to have a chance to actually listen to the program . If you decide to listen to it right new before you continue reading, click here (a new window will open with an on-line player inside). If you prefer to download and listen to it on your favourite media player, right-click here instead and save the file to your computer. If you have no luck with those links because they have been taken off-line, then you can read the transcript here . Like I have already mentioned this review has almost no editing, so you are likely to find some rough edges; I hope the content will be worthwhile enough to make any grammatical mishaps easier to forgive.

First, I will introduce you to the wonderful world of podcasting and the universe of information it can open for you. I will then quickly present 3 of the more intriguing excerpts from the 17 May episode, and provide some short commentary. Let’s get started!

The Wonderful World of ABC Radio National

About 5 years ago, my wife Ines tried to convert me from a viewer of trashy Hollywood movies into an educated viewer/listener of quality content. I am sad to admit that despite her best efforts, she failed. Like a bad first date, this introduction was ephemeral and short-lived: I quickly went back to my fast-food diet of pop music and Hollywood blockbusters.

I am grateful to life for not making this failure a long-lasting one. Her introduction to the wonderful world of ABC Radio planted a seed that took a few more years to germinate.

It was the summer of 2006, and I was busily spending my weekends away on a DIY garden renovation project. One day, my brother-in-law came to help me do some painting, and brought with him a DVD he had burnt himself with several episodes of The Science Show, another fantastic  program from the ABC. That day changed my life. After a day of painting and listening to a series of programs, I was hooked. Since that fateful day, I have been downloading ABC podcasts and using them to enrich every minute I spend during my weekends working in my garden.

Last weekend, whilst mowing the lawn and listening to the aforementioned episode of All in the Mind, I became very excited. As Natasha Mitchell introduced the panel of interviewees, I got goose-bumps: I stopped what I was doing, and started the podcast again. I slowly went back to gardening, but this time I payed a lot more attention than usual to the program. When the episode finished, I knew I had to write a review on it.

This program deals with our quest for happiness. In Natasha’s own words,

The pursuit of happiness is a global obsession. But can science investigate its slippery, subjective nature? What are the metrics—self report, brain activity, or the good deeds we do? Five world leaders in the field join Natasha Mitchell in conversation—neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, psychologist Daniel Gilbert and philosopher David Chalmers.

Before I proceed with the review, I would like to recommend five programs available for download from Radio National:

1. Life Matters
2. All in the Mind
3. The Spirit of Things
4. The Science Show
5. Big Ideas

With that out of the way, let’s now move on to the most memorable parts of the episode that got me so excited. 

Buddhism as a contemplative science

Science is not just the domain of (…) explaining the universe, and predicting things, and discovering things. It is also about how our mind works; (it is about) what are the mechanisms of happiness and suffering. So I think Buddhism is an empirical investigation of the mind, and therefore we want to find some kind of truth about how things work and don’t work; and it applies to happiness and suffering as well. – Matthieu Ricard

Matthieu’s description of Buddhism as science was an important moment in the program, as it shifted my perceptions of Buddhism as religion or philosophy. What is amazing is that I’ve known for a very long time the arguments used by Mathieu, yet I had not connected the dots that allow me now to call Buddhism a science – the science of consciousness. Now you know too: Buddhism is more than a religion or a philosophy; it is the scientific & empirical study of consciousness.

Why apply science to something subjective like Happiness?

I think the only people who ever objected to scientific analysis of a phenomenon are people with something to hide, and they are afraid it’s going to get found out. The current American administration would be a nice example; you know they are quite anti-science (and for a good reason because science is going to show, and they know it’s already shown, that many of the falsehoods they want to promulgate are wrong). You know, in ancient Greece there were two kinds of physicians: there were empiricists and dogmatists; and the dogmatists thought the way you understood illness was by developing theories and ideas; and the empiricists thought you should actually go out and study some sick people. And the dogmatists went away, we all know what dogmatic means, because their patients kept dying. And the empiricists kept finding out true things about the world. So this is a very powerful way of finding out information; it is our newest way of knowing and we’re shining…using that to try to investigate one of our oldest problems. - Daniel Gillbert

Just like modern medicine has benefited from the application of the empirical method for its’ advancement; applying scientific disciplines to the study of happiness can yield the same results and assist us to make progress quicker in our understanding of happiness. Natasha alluded in the opening question to Daniel’s comments whether we want to keep the mystery on some knowledge domains, such as the nature of happiness. If we were to find out how happiness works, some may argue, won’t it rob it of its shine, and turn it into a mechanistic experience? This assumption, while understandable, is invalid. Just like applying science to the understanding of the brain has not led to the development of automatons, the scientific exploration of the mind will not lead to the elimination of true, unsuspected, and surprisingly happy moments. Instead, it will increase our awareness and understanding of just how complex we are, and allow us to appreciate our lives and happiness even better.

On the nature of our genetic make-up

Genetic inheritance is like a blueprint. You get a map for how to build a house, and if you just follow that – unless there are some other factors that intervened – probably that was going to follow its course. But you don’t have to build a house the way you’ve got it in the blueprint;  We start with a certain starting point, with no qualities and defects and [unclear] traits, they are pretty stable; but that means when you don’t do anything about it. And so, as Richard said as an epigenesist, it usually comes from outer environment: the affection of the mother, or environment of abuse, all kinds of other things. Here with mental training we are dealing with an inner arrangement, and that’s where you can change those baselines, by attending to every thought and emotion with mindfulness and attention that changes the moods; and the accumulation of that will eventually change the traits if you do something about it. – Matthieu Ricard

Oooohhh…. Aaaahhhhhh…. The timeless discussion of nature vs nurture raises its head again. Who is responsible for who we become and how happy we are: our genes, or our parents? As Mathieu so eloquently illustrates, it is both. And like most cult-like followers of The Secret will tell you, your attitudes, thoughts and focus also have a lot to play in this equation. Mathieu explains it in simpler terms, and without relying on mysterious paranormal laws: By attending to our thoughts and emotions with mindfulness and attention, we carve a better path to success. It is like changing the course of a river: throw one stone into it, and it will create a temporary ripple that will have little impact on the long term. Yet throw hundreds of stones, one at a time, in the right place, and you will build a dam strong enough to change the course of the mightiest watercourse. Practicing mindfulness and attention every day can do the same, bringing what you desire into your life by focusing on what gives you joy and happiness. It’s not magic; it is simply what happens when you continuously focus your attention on what you desire.