Nano Tools for Leaders® — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.
Contributor: Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions.
The Goal:
Reduce anxiety by adopting two methods that help improve performance and results.
Nano Tool:
No one is immune to anxiety: when you’re faced with uncertainty or high demands, or in a situation that’s novel, consequential, or public, you’re likely to experience it. Today, anxiety can feel like a near-permanent state. And although you might be able to conceal your racing heart rate and sweaty palms, research shows that feeling anxiety can be quite harmful. Anxious negotiators, public speakers, and test-takers do worse. And people who feel anxious are less discerning and become more likely to seek and rely upon bad advice.
When we do reveal that we’re feeling anxious, we’re commonly counseled to “just calm down.” But that’s an impossible ask. Anxiety causes both high activation (rapid heart rate) and negative feelings (worry about unfavorable outcomes); trying to simply lower our activation and switch to feeling positive by “calming down” doesn’t work. Instead, we have discovered two powerful ways to control anxiety and its negative effects, both described in the Action Steps below.
Action Steps:
1. Reframe anxiety as excitement. This first action step is quick and easy. Telling participants in a study to state out loud “I’m excited” when they were anxious reduced their negative emotion even though their heart rate remained elevated. Instead of focusing on what could go wrong, they focused on the potential upside and their performance improved. Try it yourself. The next time you feel anxious, smile and state out loud, “I am excited!”
2. Use a ritual. You see them all the time in sports: athletes wear “lucky shirts” (in Tiger Woods’ case, it was red), bounce a tennis ball a precise number of times before a serve, or adjust a cap before pitching. There are religious and cultural rituals that comfort us during some of life’s most stressful periods, including the death of a loved one. In our research, we found that rituals — even when they’re made up — lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, and improve performance. In one study, we told participants that they were going to sing in front of others. Before doing that, we told one-third of participants to draw a picture of how they were feeling, sprinkle the picture with salt, crinkle up the page, and throw it in the trash. We told another third of participants to calm down, and we gave the last third, the control group, no instructions. The group that performed the made-up ritual before singing performed the best. We replicated the study with other made-up rituals and other performance tasks including public speaking and math tests. We even measured participants’ blood pressure. Which group experienced a large drop in blood pressure? Each time, it was the one performing the ritual.
How Leaders Use It:
Leaders inevitably deal with their own stress and anxiety — as well as the anxiety of their team members. Introducing and sticking to rituals can help. Entrepreneur and author Tim Ferriss starts his day by making his bed followed by 10 to 20 minutes of meditation and 30 seconds of light exercise. He ends his ritual, which he says helps him “push the ball forward and feel better throughout the day,” by drinking a strong cup of tea and journaling.
Leaders inevitably deal with their own stress and anxiety — as well as the anxiety of their team members.
Babette Ten Haken, founder and president of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, takes a cue from Olympic athletes, advising salespeople to “visualize the meeting in your head, rehearse, and have a walk-through. Then breathe, [and] shake your arms and legs to get your circulation going.” Sales coach and consultant Anthony Iannarino suggests a similar pre-sales call ritual: “Get yourself into the physical state where you portray the energy and the passion you need.” That could involve listening to energizing music, pumping your fist in the air, or changing your posture to stand tall and confident.
Tennis great Rafael Nadal has a series of rituals he performs before and during matches, which he credits with keeping him focused by “ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” They include putting two water bottles in precise positions near his feet; tucking his hair behind his ear, pulling his nose, and adjusting his shorts while bouncing the ball before serving; and drying off with a towel after every point.
Additional Resources:
- Maurice Schweitzer is academic director of Effective Decision Making: Thinking Critically and Rationally and teaches in Wharton’s online Management Development Program: Develop Your Managerial Mindset.
- Access all Wharton Executive Education Nano Tools.
- Download this Nano Tool as a PDF.
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Anumakonda Jagadeesh
Excellent.
Happiness
‘Happiness’ is the subject of debate on usage and meaning, and on possible differences in understanding by culture.
The word is mostly used in relation to two factors:
• the current experience of the feeling of an emotion (affect) such as pleasure or joy, or of a more general sense of ’emotional condition as a whole’. For instance Daniel Kahneman has defined happiness as “what I experience here and now”. This usage is prevalent in dictionary definitions of happiness.
• appraisal of life satisfaction, such as of quality of life. For instance Ruut Veenhoven has defined happiness as “overall appreciation of one’s life as-a-whole.” Kahneman has said that this is more important to people than current experience.
Some usages can include both of these factors. Subjective well-being (swb) includes measures of current experience (emotions, moods, and feelings) and of life satisfaction. For instance Sonja Lyubomirsky has described happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” Eudaimonia, is a Greek term variously translated as happiness, welfare, flourishing, and blessedness. Xavier Landes has proposed that happiness include measures of subjective wellbeing, mood and eudaimonia.
These differing uses can give different results. For instance the correlation of income levels has been shown to be substantial with life satisfaction measures, but to be far weaker, at least above a certain threshold, with current experience measures. Whereas Nordic countries often score highest on swb surveys, South American countries score higher on affect-based surveys of current positive life experiencing.
The implied meaning of the word may vary depending on context,[32] qualifying happiness as a polyseme and a fuzzy concept.
A further issue is when measurement is made; appraisal of a level of happiness at the time of the experience may be different from appraisal via memory at a later date.[33][34]
Some users accept these issues, but continue to use the word because of its convening power.[35]
Philosophy of happiness is often discussed in conjunction with ethics. Traditional European societies, inherited from the Greeks and from Christianity, often linked happiness with morality, which was concerned with the performance in a certain kind of role in a certain kind of social life. However, with the rise of individualism, begotten partly by Protestantism and capitalism, the links between duty in a society and happiness were gradually broken. The consequence was a redefinition of the moral terms. Happiness is no longer defined in relation to social life, but in terms of individual psychology. Happiness, however, remains a difficult term for moral philosophy. Throughout the history of moral philosophy, there has been an oscillation between attempts to define morality in terms of consequences leading to happiness and attempts to define morality in terms that have nothing to do with happiness at all.[36]
In the Nicomachean Ethics, written in 350 BCE, Aristotle stated that happiness (also being well and doing well) is the only thing that humans desire for their own sake, unlike riches, honour, health or friendship. He observed that men sought riches, or honour, or health not only for their own sake but also in order to be happy. For Aristotle the term eudaimonia, which is translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ is an activity rather than an emotion or a state. Eudaimonia (Greek: εὐδαιμονία) is a classical Greek word consists of the word “eu” (“good” or “well-being”) and “daimōn” (“spirit” or “minor deity”, used by extension to mean one’s lot or fortune). Thus understood, the happy life is the good life, that is, a life in which a person fulfills human nature in an excellent way. Specifically, Aristotle argued that the good life is the life of excellent rational activity. He arrived at this claim with the “Function Argument”. Basically, if it is right, every living thing has a function, that which it uniquely does. For Aristotle human function is to reason, since it is that alone which humans uniquely do. And performing one’s function well, or excellently, is good. According to Aristotle, the life of excellent rational activity is the happy life. Aristotle argued a second best life for those incapable of excellent rational activity was the life of moral virtue.
Western ethicists have made arguments for how humans should behave, either individually or collectively, based on the resulting happiness of such behavior. Utilitarians, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, advocated the greatest happiness principle as a guide for ethical behavior.
Friedrich Nietzsche critiqued the English Utilitarians’ focus on attaining the greatest happiness, stating that “Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does.” Nietzsche meant that making happiness one’s ultimate goal and the aim of one’s existence, in his words “makes one contemptible.” Nietzsche instead yearned for a culture that would set higher, more difficult goals than “mere happiness.” He introduced the quasi-dystopic figure of the “last man” as a kind of thought experiment against the utilitarians and happiness-seekers. these small, “last men” who seek after only their own pleasure and health, avoiding all danger, exertion, difficulty, challenge, struggle are meant to seem contemptible to Nietzsche’s reader. Nietzsche instead wants us to consider the value of what is difficult, what can only be earned through struggle, difficulty, pain and thus to come to see the affirmative value suffering and unhappiness truly play in creating everything of great worth in life, including all the highest achievements of human culture, not least of all philosophy.
In 2004 Darrin McMahon claimed, that over time the emphasis shifted from the happiness of virtue to the virtue of happines
Personal happiness aims can be effected by cultural factors. Hedonism appears to be more strongly related to happiness in more individualistic cultures.[44]
Cultural views on happiness have changed over time.[45] For instance Western concern about childhood being a time of happiness has occurred only since the 19th century.
Not all cultures seek to maximise happiness, and some cultures are averse to happiness.
People in countries with high cultural religiosity tend to relate their life satisfaction less to their emotional experiences than people in more secular countries.
Happiness forms a central theme of Buddhist teachings. For ultimate freedom from suffering, the Noble Eightfold Path leads its practitioner to Nirvana, a state of everlasting peace. Ultimate happiness is only achieved by overcoming craving in all forms. More mundane forms of happiness, such as acquiring wealth and maintaining good friendships, are also recognized as worthy goals for lay people (see sukha). Buddhism also encourages the generation of loving kindness and compassion, the desire for the happiness and welfare of all beings.
In Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate goal of life is happiness, in the sense that duality between Atman and Brahman is transcended and one realizes oneself to be the Self in all.
Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras, wrote quite exhaustively on the psychological and ontological roots of bliss.[56]
The Chinese Confucian thinker Mencius, who had sought to give advice to ruthless political leaders during China’s Warring States period, was convinced that the mind played a mediating role between the “lesser self” (the physiological self) and the “greater self” (the moral self), and that getting the priorities right between these two would lead to sage-hood. He argued that if one did not feel satisfaction or pleasure in nourishing one’s “vital force” with “righteous deeds”, then that force would shrivel up (Mencius, 6A:15 2A:2). More specifically, he mentions the experience of intoxicating joy if one celebrates the practice of the great virtues, especially through music.
Happiness or simcha (Hebrew: שמחה) in Judaism is considered an important element in the service of God. The biblical verse “worship The Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs,” (Psalm 100:2) stresses joy in the servic d.e of GoA popular teaching by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, a 19th-century Chassidic Rabbi, is “Mitzvah Gedolah Le’hiyot Besimcha Tamid,” it is a great mitzvah (commandment) to always be in a state of happiness. When a person is happy they are much more capable of serving God and going about their daily activities than when depressed or upset.
The primary meaning of “happiness” in various European languages involves good fortune, chance or happening. The meaning in Greek philosophy, however, refers primarily to ethics.
In Catholicism, the ultimate end of human existence consists in felicity, Latin equivalent to the Greek eudaimonia, or “blessed happiness”, described by the 13th-century philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas as a Beatific Vision of God’s essence in the next life.
According to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, man’s last end is happiness: “all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness.” However, where utilitarians focused on reasoning about consequences as the primary tool for reaching happiness, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that happiness cannot be reached solely through reasoning about consequences of acts, but also requires a pursuit of good causes for acts, such as habits according to virtue. In turn, which habits and acts that normally lead to happiness is according to Aquinas caused by laws: natural law and divine law. These laws, in turn, were according to Aquinas caused by a first cause, or God. According to Aquinas, happiness consists in an “operation of the speculative intellect”: “Consequently happiness consists principally in such an operation, viz. in the contemplation of Divine things.” And, “the last end cannot consist in the active life, which pertains to the practical intellect.” So: “Therefore the last and perfect happiness, which we await in the life to come, consists entirely in contemplation. But imperfect happiness, such as can be had here, consists first and principally in contemplation, but secondarily, in an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions.”
Human complexities, like reason and cognition, can produce well-being or happiness, but such form is limited and transitory. In temporal life, the contemplation of God, the infinitely Beautiful, is the supreme delight of the will. Beatitudo, or perfect happiness, as complete well-being, is to be attained not in this life, but the next.
Al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the Muslim Sufi thinker, wrote “The Alchemy of Happiness”, a manual of spiritual instruction throughout the Muslim world and widely practiced today.
Theories on how to achieve happiness include “encountering unexpected positive events”, “seeing a significant other”, and “basking in the acceptance and praise of others”.However others believe that happiness is not solely derived from external, momentary pleasures.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological, and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid, he reaches self-actualization. Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. This is similar to the flow concept of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
Ronald Inglehart has traced cross-national differences in the level of happiness based on data from the World Values Survey. He finds that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. When basic needs are satisfied, the degree of happiness depends on economic and cultural factors that enable free choice in how people live their lives. Happiness also depends on religion in countries where free choice is constrained.
Since 2000 the field of positive psychology has expanded drastically in terms of scientific publications, and has produced many different views on causes of happiness, and on factors that correlate with happiness. Numerous short-term self-help interventions have been developed and demonstrated to improve happiness.
Various writers, including Camus and Tolle, have written that the act of searching or seeking for happiness is incompatible with being happy.
John Stuart Mill believed that for the great majority of people happiness is best achieved en passant, rather than striving for it directly. This meant no self-consciousness, scrutiny, self-interrogation, dwelling on, thinking about, imagining or questioning on one’s happiness. Then, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, one would “inhale happiness with the air you breathe.”
William Inge observed that “on the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so.” Orison Swett Marden said that “some people are born happy.”
A 2012 study found that psychological well-being was higher for people who experienced both positive and negative emotions.
Happiness can be examined in experiential and evaluative contexts. Experiential well-being, or “objective happiness”, is happiness measured in the moment via questions such as “How good or bad is your experience now?”. In contrast, evaluative well-being asks questions such as “How good was your vacation?” and measures one’s subjective thoughts and feelings about happiness in the past. Experiential well-being is less prone to errors in reconstructive memory, but the majority of literature on happiness refers to evaluative well-being. The two measures of happiness can be related by heuristics such as the peak–end rule.
Some commentators focus on the difference between the hedonistic tradition of seeking pleasant and avoiding unpleasant experiences, and the eudaimonic tradition of living life in a full and deeply satisfying way.
People have been trying to measure happiness for centuries. In 1780, the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed that as happiness was the primary goal of humans it should be measured as a way of determining how well the government was performing.
Several scales have been developed to measure happiness:
• The Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) is a four-item scale, measuring global subjective happiness from 1999. The scale requires participants to use absolute ratings to characterize themselves as happy or unhappy individuals, as well as it asks to what extent they identify themselves with descriptions of happy and unhappy individuals.
• The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) from 1988 is a 20-item questionnaire, using a five-point Likert scale (1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely) to assess the relation between personality traits and positive or negative affects at “this moment, today, the past few days, the past week, the past few weeks, the past year, and in general”. A longer version with additional affect scales was published 1994.
• The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) is a global cognitive assessment of life satisfaction developed by Ed Diener. A seven-point Likert scale is used to agree or disagree with five statements about one’s life.
• The Cantril ladder method has been used in the World Happiness Report. Respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.[106][105]
• Positive Experience; the survey by Gallup asks if, the day before, people experienced enjoyment, laughing or smiling a lot, feeling well-rested, being treated with respect, learning or doing something interesting. 9 of the top 10 countries in 2018 were South American, led by Paraguay and Panama. Country scores range from 85 to 43.
Since 2012, a World Happiness Report has been published. Happiness is evaluated, as in “How happy are you with your life as a whole?”, and in emotional reports, as in “How happy are you now?,” and people seem able to use happiness as appropriate in these verbal contexts. Using these measures, the report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness. In subjective well-being measures, the primary distinction is between cognitive life evaluations and emotional reports.[108][citation needed]
The UK began to measure national well-being in 2012,[109] following Bhutan, which had already been measuring gross national happiness.[110][111]
Happiness has been found to be quite stable over time.[112][113]
As of 2016, no evidence of happiness causing improved physical health has been found; the topic is being researched at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.[114] A positive relationship has been suggested between the volume of the brain’s gray matter in the right precuneus area and one’s subjective happiness score.
Happiness is partly genetically based. Sonja Lyubomirsky has estimated that 50 percent of a given human’s happiness level could be genetically determined, 10 percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining 40 percent of happiness is subject to self-control.
In politics, happiness as a guiding ideal is expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776, written by Thomas Jefferson, as the universal right to “the pursuit of happiness.” This seems to suggest a subjective interpretation but one that goes beyond emotions alone. It has to be kept in mind that the word happiness meant “prosperity, thriving, wellbeing” in the 18th century and not the same thing as it does today. In fact, happiness.
Common market health measures such as GDP and GNP have been used as a measure of successful policy. On average richer nations tend to be happier than poorer nations, but this effect seems to diminish with wealth. This has been explained by the fact that the dependency is not linear but logarithmic, i.e., the same percentual increase in the GNP produces the same increase in happiness for wealthy countries as for poor countries.[122][123][124][125] Increasingly, academic economists and international economic organizations are arguing for and developing multi-dimensional dashboards which combine subjective and objective indicators to provide a more direct and explicit assessment of human wellbeing. Work by Paul Anand and colleagues helps to highlight the fact that there many different contributors to adult wellbeing, that happiness judgement reflect, in part, the presence of salient constraints, and that fairness, autonomy, community and engagement are key aspects of happiness and wellbeing throughout the life course. Although these factors play a role in happiness, they do not all need to act in simultaneously to help one achieve an increase in happiness.
Libertarian think tank Cato Institute claims that economic freedom correlates strongly with happiness preferably within the context of a western mixed economy, with free press and a democracy. According to certain standards, East European countries when ruled by Communist parties were less happy than Western ones, even less happy than other equally poor countries.
Since 2003, empirical research in the field of happiness economics, such as that by Benjamin Radcliff, professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, supported the contention that in democratic countries life satisfaction is strongly and positively related to the social democratic model of a generous social safety net, pro-worker labor market regulations, and strong labor unions.[129] Similarly, there is evidence that public policies which reduce poverty and support a strong middle class, such as a higher minimum wage, strongly affect average levels of well-being.
It has been argued that happiness measures could be used not as a replacement for more traditional measures, but as a supplement. According to the Cato institute, people constantly make choices that decrease their happiness, because they have also more important aims. Therefore, government should not decrease the alternatives available for the citizen by patronizing them but let the citizen keep a maximal freedom of choice.
Good mental health and good relationships contribute more than income to happiness and governments should take these into account.
In the UK Richard Layard and others have led the development of happiness economics.
Research on positive psychology, well-being, eudaimonia and happiness, and the theories of Diener, Ryff, Keyes, and Seligmann covers a broad range of levels and topics, including “the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life.” The psychiatrist George Vaillant and the director of longitudinal Study of Adult Development at Harvard University Robert J. Waldinger found that those who were happiest and healthier reported strong interpersonal relationships. Research showed that adequate sleep contributes to well-being. In 2018, Laurie R. Santos course titled “Psychology and the Good Life” became the most popular course in the history of Yale University and was made available for free online to non-Yale students.
Wikipedia
Given the brain’s neuroplasticity, it’s to our benefit to make our lifetime experiences as positive and hilarious as possible
“Modern life has become increasingly complicated and it’s believed that stress is the primary obstacle to laughter. Laughter is a physical expression of humor and joy that has numerous protective qualities. It’s one of the best ways to manage perceptions of stress and to develop resilience and improve psychological sturdiness as it strongly correlates with happiness.2 Happiness and humor can improve brain function-there is evidence of increased connectivity in various parts of the brain in response to laughter.3 Humor releases brain derived neurotrophic factor, which supports existing neurons and encourages the growth of new neurons and synapses.4 Given the brain’s neuroplasticity, it’s to our benefit to make our lifetime experiences as positive and hilarious as possible.
The field of medicine has long recognized the importance of humor. In the 1300s, Henri de Mondeville, a professor of surgery, propagated post-operative therapy with humor.5 Norman Cousins, a journalist and a professor, also initiated this trend when he developed his own “treatment,” based on mood elevation through laughter.6 According to Cousins, ten minutes of laughter resulted in two hours of pain free sleep
Humor can enhance the willingness to change and improve emotional expectations and can revise habitual narratives that perpetuate shame, hurt, isolation, inferiority, sadness, worry, and perfectionism.4 Of all the commonly endorsed character strengths, humor contributes most strongly to life satisfaction.
A notable body of literature on the role of humor and well-being has developed over recent years and much of it addresses how humor can facilitate coping with stress or enhance personal and social relationships. Research has also provided evidence that humor can serve as an important facet of resilience and can contribute to the enhancement of positive life experiences.”( Laughter Is the Best Medicie
August 17, 2018
Kavita Khajuria, MD
Psychiatric Times, Psychiatric Times Vol 35, Issue 8, Volume 35, Issue 8).
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India