The Stories that Connect Us

Happiness Languages

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:59:06 -0400

Language is expression, meaning, and purpose. Language shapes our narratives. It is the essence of culture and the core of identity and destiny.

Our Happiness Language is the unique and dynamic combination of practices that make our happiness possible.

From the research we now know that the prime happiness practices are appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each of these form the vocabulary and syntax of that give our happiness its expression and character.

In the Happiness Profile, we discover our most significant happiness practices strengths and opportunities. We use this understand of ourselves to create our Happiness Language, the expressions of happiness that will make our joy more possible, more contagious, and more inspiring.

Thinking about happiness as a language empowers our possibilities for joy. It takes happiness from being a pursuit and possession to practice in the way every language is a practice that profoundly shapes who we are. It makes happiness less contingent and vulnerable to the inevitable changes life creates. It makes happiness more of a choice.

Happiness is a language whose power connects us beyond generations, gender, and geography. It is the expression that makes our best possible and that infuses our lives with purpose, meaning, and aliveness.

The language of happiness

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:57:41 -0400

Language is expression, meaning, and purpose. Language shapes our narratives. It is the essence of culture and the core of identity and destiny.

Our Happiness Language is the unique and dynamic combination of practices that make our happiness possible.

Your Happiness Language

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:18:46 -0400

Language is expression, meaning, and purpose. Language shapes our narratives. It is the essence of culture and the core of identity and destiny.

Our Happiness Language is the unique and dynamic combination of practices that make our happiness possible. From the research we now know that the prime happiness practices are appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each of these stream into a syntax of expressions that give our happiness its character.

Thinking about happiness as a language empowers our possibilities for joy. It takes happiness from being an object of pursuit and possession to practice. It makes happiness less contingent and vulnerable to the inevitable changes life creates. It makes happiness more of a choice.

The Happiness Profile is a powerful and simple tool we use to discover and develop our Happiness Language. It’s a 50-item self-assessment of our strengths and opportunities when it comes to how we do and could practice happiness in our life. The Profile is a tool for developing our Happiness Language that inspires and informs our personal and collective thrivancy.

As we develop our Happiness Language, happiness becomes more possible anywhere, anytime.

Happiness Languages

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:01:01 -0400

Language is expression, meaning, and purpose. Language shapes our narratives. It is the essence of culture and the core of identity and destiny.

Our Happiness Language is the unique and dynamic combination of practices that make our happiness possible.

Happiness Languages

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:57:00 -0400

Language is expression, meaning, and purpose. Language shapes our narratives. It is the essence of culture and the core of identity and destiny.

Our Happiness Language is the unique and dynamic combination of practices that make our happiness possible. Our happiness practices are our happiness languages.

Announcing the Happiness Workshops & Profile

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:05:33 -0400

Announcing two exciting new developments here at TheJoyOfThriving.com: the Happiness Workshops and the Happiness Profile

There are Introductory and Advanced Workshops, covering the new compelling happiness research and practical applications. And the Happiness Profile is a 50-item inventory that gives you a profile of opportunities to cultivate your happiness practices.

Email jack(at)happinesschoice(dot)com for more details on hosting, convening, participating in the workshops and using the Profile.

Announcing the Workshops & Profile

Sat, 12 May 2012 18:45:56 -0400

Announcing two exciting new developments here at TheJoyOfThriving.com: the Happiness Workshops and the Happiness Profile

Email jack(at)happinesschoice(dot)com for more details on hosting, convening, participating in the workshops and using the Profile.

The Happiness Workshop

Thu, 03 May 2012 14:05:22 -0400

The Happiness Workshop is an engaging and sustainable discovery of the power and practices of happiness. It is based on the compelling research and practical approaches presented in “The Joy of Thriving” (DesigningLife Books 2012). It is a hands-on and interactive learning experience customized to any group that makes happiness more accessible than ever.

The workshop addresses several topics including:

The amazing results from current neuroscience and social sciences on the benefits and possibilities of happiness in every dimension of everyday life

The 10 qualities of happier people and how they become possible with practice

The 5 prime practices that make happiness accessible anywhere, anytime

The new perspective on unhappiness and tactics for making transitions to greater capacity for happiness

How to become a part of cultivating happier relationships, organizations, and communities

Workshop designer and facilitator, Jack Ricchiuto, is a leading voice and practitioner in the positive psychology and strengths based engagement movements. He is a 10-time author, innovator, and mentor to leaders worldwide. For over 30 years, Jack has worked with people in the US and globally who are committed to making a difference in their communities and organizations. The focus of his work is designing happiness into how we make change possible.

The business of happiness

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:40:14 -0400

This whole business of positioning happiness at the core of our success indices is grounded in the principle that happier people do better in life and work. These research evidence tips overwhelmingly in favor of this perspective.

Here are 10 qualities of people who are happier through the five prime practices of happiness: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.

They are energized by progress
They are more feel more grateful than entitled
They live and work with passion
They are more flexible and resilient to change
They learn and discover more
They share more of what and who they know with others
They are more generous and present with others
They are less intimidated by the difficult and impossible
They are easier to live and work with
They are more enjoyable to be around

Given this profile, making happiness a central indicator of personal and collective thrivancy promises to strengthen relationships in couples and families, communities and networks, organizations and social groups.

Supporting the cultivation of happiness is about education. Period. It is about people becoming more literate in the practices of happiness, more knowledgable about the science now behind happiness, and understanding how to help make happiness a core success indicator in personal and collective contexts.

Can We Become Happier?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:56:18 -0400

When I recently asked this question to a sample of the happiest people in the world, they resonated with a resounding yes. It is their experience that happiness is a practice that can be learned and cultivated as a habit. For these people at the higher end of the well-being continuum, happiness is an action we engage. It’s about doing more than having.

These are the perspectives gleaned from the research I did for “The Joy of Thriving” with 300 people across geographies, genders, and generations. It is also what neuroscientists around the world have been finding. And what countless empirical and clinical studies prove with conclusive long term evidence.

Neuroscience gives us the principle of neuroplasticity. This is the now data rich fact that our brain has no permanent structures. Everything that we identify ourselves as, starting with habits of thinking and engaging in our world, are chemical patterns in our brain that can be reshaped with new habits of action. Our intentional habits of action are responsible for all of the continuities and changes we experience in who we are in our world.

In as little as six weeks of any new practice, we start to develop new measurable habit patterns. So the more we engage the prime practices of happiness, the more we literally restructure our brain in ways that make happiness more possible.

We can intentionally develop our capacity for happiness. We can also develop and sustain our capacity for any form of unhappiness imaginable.

The research for the book identified five prime practices of happiness that the happiest people around daily engage to cultivate their capacity for happiness: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy.

Appreciation is a grateful and passionate heart. Generosity is sharing what brings mutual joy. Interest is discovering new people, spaces, and things. Lightness is a sense of aliveness. Easy is the grace of simple. At least one practice is possible in every moment of your life however it is.

Building our capacity for happiness also raises our happiness set point. This is the personal baseline level of happiness that we return to within six months to a year after any kind of significant life event, whether that event is charged with high levels of happiness or unhappiness. With practices of happiness, we steadily increase our set point level and our capacity for resiliency to it.

The confluence of this growing field of research clearly points to the fact that we can become happier. Our historical narratives on happiness and unhappiness only become destiny if we consistently sustain the practices that have the power to make them possible.

Until people get this research, they continue to be constrained by old unsupported mythologies that happiness cannot be learned. In this world, we’re stuck with beliefs that question the possibility that we can be happier. We’re inaccurately suspicious that “too much happiness” erodes our capacity for passion and change.

Nonetheless, we have evidence now that we can cultivate our capacity for happiness in our lives and at work, in our communities and networks. And the significance of happiness is immense in the way it impacts our personal and collective well-being and thrivancy. Our capacity for happiness is unlimited and its implications for sustainable thrivancy is nothing less than profound on all scales.

Reality is that each moment we are given is a moment of choice. We can choose to practice unhappiness or practice happiness. Happiness is the possibility always available to us. Happiness is a choice.

The Happiness Imperative for Leaders

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:20:04 -0400

We now have evidence that happier people lead to higher levels of passion and engagement at work. Happier people also lead to happier customers and clients. And happiness at work spreads into the rest of people’s health, relationships, life, and well-being.

Leaders in organizations, formal and informal, are uniquely positioned to cultivate a happiness-friendly organizational culture.

Life in the Old Days of Happiness Illiteracy

Before we had the compelling and growing body of research on happiness we have today, happiness was considered to be a byproduct of genetic predispositions or circumstantial variables. The old narrative placed happiness outside the actionable domains of intention and learning.

In this world, the most a leader could hope for is being given enough surrogate resources to literally “compensate” people for their intrinsic and intractable unhappiness. This is the model that has been the foundation of the current state of organizational happiness. In the US alone, the 75% of employees who are mostly unhappy at work costs over $300 billion annually.

The New Happiness Imperative

Thanks to the emergence of happiness research over the past decade, we have come a long way in understanding the neuroscience of happiness and the practical and empowering implications.

We now know that happiness is a practice. It is a function of how we focus and engage in our world. And as such, happiness can be learned and cultivated. It is an intentional possibility and actionable strategy when we know how to make it actionable.

In “The Joy of Thriving” we talk about five prime practices of happiness that makes happiness more accessible anywhere anytime: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each has the power as a principle of practice to transform leadership.

Transformed leadership creates happier organizations because it designs conversations and practices that invite the practices of happiness. The evidence is now clear: happiness is a choice of how we focus and engage in our world; it can be learned and developed; and it has profound implications for personal and collective thrivancy.

The Possibilities of Transformed Leadership

Here is an introduction to some of the possibilities.

Appreciation We can begin or end meetings with people telling success and progress stories featuring explicit appreciation for contributors to each scenario. We can schedule time for people to regularly email or text thanks to someone who has made their life in any way easier or better. We can invite people to design beauty into their work spaces. We can regularly invite people to share their vision for their work group’s impact.

Generosity We can set a practice expectation that everyone in our group spends up to a specific percentage, like 5%, of their week giving someone else help and receiving help from others in the organization. We can make some of our spaces and resources available to people in other work groups. We can set the expectation that everyone will weekly do some random act of kindness for someone else.

Interest We can ask everyone to set quarterly new learning targets and give people time to share their gains. We can sustain accessible talent directories for anyone looking for peer2peer learning. We can translate all performance and outcome measures into learning measures that we share as a work group. We structure every meeting and presentation with participant inquiries and questions, which is to say shift from an information push to pull model, to build a vibrant and relentless culture of curiosity.

Lightness We as leaders can model a healthy sense of humor and perspective. We can have regular half-days where everyone goes outside the organization to explore and play with something or someone new. We can create and utilize physical and virtual water coolers for impromptu conversations that make strategic serendipity more possible. We can actively encourage the ha-ha as provocation to the ah-ha.

Easy We can consistently engage people in simplifying anything: systems, decision making, and access to resources. We can use simple and easy as design principles in designing every aspect of what we produce and how we produce it including how research, communication, learning, and accomplishments occur. We can teach people how to have easier conversations, organize projects and time more easily, and make their happiness at work more contagious to the rest of their lives.

The Call for Change

It takes a whole new kind of leadership to create happier organizations. Current practices, even those deemed unquestionable, are yielding high levels and costs of unhappiness at work. We have sufficient data demonstrating that. There is no evidential support for conventional leadership practices that naively expect performance to exceed attitude.

Fortunately, making the transition doesn’t require expensive investments in capital improvements. Happiness is a practice not a purchase. It starts with giving formal and informal leaders in organizations new levels of happiness literacy. Leaders will care about happiness indicators in their organizations in an actionable way at the rate they are exposed to the compelling research on happiness that invites practical everyday implication possibilities.

The new research profoundly holds old management practices and perspectives directly accountability for the fact that worldwide, according to Gallup’s annual research, fewer than 20% of employees feel the happiness of daily engagement of their strengths by their employers. And recent studies indicate that the vast majority of managers are equally unaware of this reality, the costs of it, and the way forward.

The way forward is educating leaders so they discover and deploy the power to create happier organizations where, at the end of the day, everyone gains.

The Happiness Imperative for Leaders

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:16:39 -0400

Leaders in organizations, formal and informal, are uniquely positioned to cultivate a happiness-friendly organizational culture.

Life in the Old Days of Happiness Illiteracy

The New Happiness Imperative

Thanks to the emergence of happiness research over the past decade, we have come a long way in understanding the neuroscience of happiness and the practical and empowering implications.

The Possibilities of Transformed Leadership

Here is an introduction to some of the possibilities.

The Call for Change

The way forward is educating leaders so they discover and deploy the power to create happier organizations where, at the end of the day, everyone gains.

The New Shift in Community Happiness Indicators

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:30:30 -0400

Our metaphors for community growth indicators are in an important transition.

We’re talking more about cultivating communities than building them because we’re moving from the lens of economics to the lens of eudainomics. Eudaimonia is Greek for the happiness of well-being. Eudainomics is the domain of well-being. In this context, cultivating becomes a more apt metaphor than building when it comes to the thrivancy of communities as living systems.

We now know that community thrivancy cannot be measured naively in economic terms. Only indicators of well-being point to what anyone would call a flourishing community, whether we’re talking about the scales of neighborhoods, villages, cities, or regions.

We now have abundant evidence that happiness is the practice of how we focus on and engage in the world. There are five prime happiness practices that rewire our brain and rewrite our narratives: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each provides a compelling framework for new community thrivancy indicators.

Here are examples of simple indicators that utilizes each practice as a design principle in cultivating thriving communities.

Appreciation

There are accessible spaces in the community that offer natural and crafted beauty
Community celebrations feature public appreciation for community success stories

Generosity

People know others in the community they can offer help to and request help from
People share and volunteer their talents and stories with others in the community

Interest

There are always new things and people to discover in the community
There are classes, workshops, and learning events available in the community

Lightness

There is evidence of spontaneous interactions and gatherings in the community
It is common to see smiles, hear live music and see children playing in the community

Easy

People have easy access to good schools, health care, jobs, and fresh food and water in the community
It is easy for visitors and residents to find what they’re looking for in the community

These can be trended through systematic observations and surveys. Mapping trends can indicate areas of strength that provide contexts for future focus. We can map happiness trends by geographies and generations when the intention is to cultivate more happiness in targeted contexts within the community.

We can target specific contexts relative to the kinds of resources we want to grow. These including making a community more elder, children, employer, entrepreneur, artist, farmer, visitor, funder, or family friendly. Each of these sectors bring and receive unique value in the community. And each grows at the rate of the growth of happiness indicators.

Happiness is emerging as one of the most compelling qualities of communities that flourish. Now that we know how to quantify and design it into the fabric of communities, happiness is both the cause and effect of thriving communities.

StrategicDoing365

Tue, 04 May 2010 12:59:54 -0400

StrategicDoing365

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Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:59:00 -0400

2009 Jack Ricchiuto | DesigningLife Books, $16.95 (US) through secure PayPal (due for release late July 2009) For inquiries into book talk arrangements, contact Jack at jack(at)designinglife(dot)com

Are we losing our narrative culture or are we at the threshold of a new narrative Renaissance?

As more of us engage in growing the horizons of our connections, we remain equally committed to the quality of our connections. Since the beginning of human time, rich narratives create rich connections. When narrative is core to who we are and what we become together, the stories we share unleash the serendipity of new possibilities.

Our personal narratives have always been and will continue to be the basis for our most engaging intimate, social, economic, political and spiritual media.

In ”The Stories that Connect Us” 8-time author and designer Jack Ricchiuto explores the power and art of storycrafting, storytelling, and storylistening, the power of the stories that connect us. Visit Jack at DesigningLife.com.

Transforming our planet, one story at a time

In “The Stories that Connect Us”, Jack Ricchiuto explores …

Why have stories been the most powerful way of connecting since the beginning of time?
Is social media eroding or empowering our cultural capacity for narrative?
What kinds of personal stories have the greatest potential for creating rich connections?
What are the design elements of well-crafted stories?
How can we listen to evoke rich meaning from each other’s stories?
How can we build and enrich our portfolio of personal stories?
Why do stories have more power than statistics in inspiring transformation and change?

From the introduction

In this golden age of connection, screens have become the new face reshaping the landscape of what it means to be distant and close.

Screens are connecting students in remote villages to a new globe of possibilities online. Screens are reuniting and updating friends and families across time zones. They are creating economies unconstrained by the boundaries of nations.

In my grandparent’s time, the only screens were back door screens and all connections were close connections.

My parents’ generation saw the advent of television screens. And as media became the message, the possibilities of a global village emerged.

In these days of multi-screen environments, there are no limits to the footprints of friendship and partnership. As space and time shrinks to the size of our screens, distant connections can easily outnumber those that are close.

What technology hasn’t changed is the fact that I have the same daily personal capacity as my grandparents to cultivate and sustain close connections. What is also true is that close connections become possible today in the same way they became possible millions of years ago: through the sharing of our stories.

Closeness is no longer confined by the dimensions of geography. It is defined by the power of shared personal narratives. We come together in the stories that connect us.