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Transcript – Unleash Your Creativity With Steven Kowalski
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Unleash Your Creativity With Steven Kowalski
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 402 of Live Happy Now. Creativity is a driving force of innovation. But have you thought about how it can change your life at work and at home? I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm being joined by Steven Kowalski, a leading voice in the global movement for conscious creativity. In his new book, Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work, he explains that all of us are creative, whether we think we are or not, and he tells us how to find our own creative style. Then use that to find greater satisfaction, both on the job and at home. Let's have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:44] PF: Steven, welcome to Live Happy Now.
[00:00:46] SK: Great to be here.
[00:00:47] PF: This is such a great topic to talk about because we talk about creativity in our lives, but you are really taking it into the business space and looking at how it affects us at work, at home, and all these different ways. So I'm excited to talk to you. I guess before we dive in, can you tell us what you mean when you talk about conscious creativity because this was interesting to me.
[00:01:09] SK: Yeah, super. I think conscious anything, conscious leadership, conscious capitalism, conscious creativity, we're hearing a lot of that these days. What that really means to me is that we're bringing attention and intention to what we're doing. So there's a component of self-awareness. There's a component of being clear about what I'm aiming for, reflecting on how results are mapping to my intentions. Intention and attention is probably the shorthand.
[00:01:36] PF: Yeah. How does one start giving more thought to that? Because I do think in the past, we've been like either, “Oh, I'm creative, or I feel creative,” and not really thinking about our control over it.
[00:01:49] SK: Yeah. So in the book, Creative Together, I talk about how most of us are walking around with what I call an ability-based definition of creativity. What that means is we think it's an ability that we have or don't have or have to some degree, and we just kind of settle into – In some ways, maybe that's even comfortable to think, “Well, maybe I'm not that creative. So I shouldn't expect it that much for myself.”
But we all have the opportunity to move to this different way of thinking about creativity, but it's a potential. So I talk about this in Creative Together that shift is really critical. Because when I approached my life and my work as if creativity was an ability, I may or may not realize all the opportunities that I have to bring it forward and bring it into work, into the teamwork that I do, into the business.
That's the first part about paying attention and bringing more intention, more conscious creativity is understanding that we're operating in this old story of what creativity is, and the first thing we need to do is to change the story. Then we can change the story of who we are as creators and then create more effectively with others.
[00:03:01] PF: Right. Because that is one thing, and you bring it out so beautifully in the book that we've kind of been taught, when we think of creativity, we think of artists and writers and musicians. So someone who is in a business space, someone who's an accountant doesn't think, “Gosh, I'm a creative person.” We've been told that our entire lives. So how do we start thinking about creativity differently and seeing how it is being used in our daily work so that we can tap into it?
[00:03:33] SK: Yeah. I like to think about creativity and propose this definition. Creativity is really this potential that we have to invent new solutions to problems we either face. So pandemic –
[00:03:47] PF: Oh, is that a problem?
[00:03:48] SK: Flooding, job losses, whatever, right? Problems we face or problems that we designed for ourselves. Like I have an aspiration to write a book. I'd like to start a business. When I call them problems, it's really opportunities, right?
[00:04:03] PF: I love that.
[00:04:04] SK: That's a big part of the switch. But creativity is just our potential to invent new solutions, new approaches, new in the face of these challenges and opportunities we might face or design for ourselves. I think that's critical as a starting point because then, anytime we face a challenge or an opportunity and an accountant or a scientist, or an IT professional, or an HR professional, or an engineer, or anyone from any industry at all, in any domain or line of work, is going to face challenges and opportunities, some of those we’ll design for ourselves, and some of them will be impinging on us.
If we pay attention, we start to see evidence that our creativity is there every day, moment to moment, as we need it. That's, I think, the critical piece. In the potential definition, it shows up when we need it. In the ability definition, it's supposed to be there all the time, and some people just have less, and some people have more.
[00:05:08] PF: So what do people need to do to kind of start changing their mindset and realizing, “I am creative, and this is creativity at work.”? What are some of those little baby steps to start looking at that?
[00:05:20] SK: Yeah. In the book, I talked about the GIFTED methodology, G-I-F-T-E-D. So I'm going to use the first couple of letters as some of the answer to your question. So the G stands for greet the unknown with passion. I know I often greet the unknown with dread.
[00:05:38] PF: Yeah. Or fear, terror.
[00:05:41] SK: I try to control against it. So greet the unknown with passion, with faith in my creativity. So greeting the unknown is like one of the most important steps. There's uncertainty. There's volatility. There's complexity. We've heard this VUCA thing for many, many years now, right? There's ambiguity. What we need to do as a first step is not shy away from this because that's where our creativity will get activated. That's the G in GIFTED.
I is ignite creative potential, and it's important to know what kinds of conditions give rise to creativity and to work those conditions. I call it the intersection of purpose, possibility, and constraint. All three of those things are essential ingredients for our creativity to show up. Maybe just at the very start is to think about like what are the unknowns in my life? Where are the arenas in which my creativity might show up? Maybe I'm getting a divorce. Maybe I'm looking for a new house. Maybe I'm starting a business. Maybe I'm recovering from a challenging illness, whatever. What are some of those unknowns, and how is my creativity showing up there or not? Or how can I bring more conscious awareness to how it is showing up and then work it a little bit more?
[00:06:59] PF: You are really a fan of actually working on your creativity in terms of it's not just like becoming aware that I’m creative. They need to do some exercises, and they really need to do things to nurture and cultivate that.
[00:07:13] SK: Yes, we all do. It's the most sustainable, inexhaustible resource we have, our creativity. I call it CDD, creativity disruption disorder. We're walking around, not realizing the amazing potential that we have and how to use it more consciously.
[00:07:31] PF: Another thing that you say, and I love this, it's once we discover our creativity, we must have profound faith in it. That was just a really powerful statement. Can you explain what you mean by that? Then tell us why we need to have that much faith in it.
[00:07:49] SK: I can and I'd also love to hear what went through your head maybe after when you read that, and it had that impact on you. When we rely on our creativity as an inexhaustible, sustainable resource, we can face these unknowns, this ambiguity, this uncertainty that where – It seems to me – I don't know. I don't think I'm unusual in this way, but it seems like there's more and more of it, and it's coming from every direction.
I don't know how many inboxes I have now, with all the email inboxes that I have and the – Forget the mailbox. It's like old school, right? There's all these inboxes. There's all this input. There are so many demands. There's obligations. There's things I want to do, that time is running out. How am I going to manage this? There are so many unknowns that I'm facing, and I think that's critical. When I have faith in my creativity that it's going to show up, it's less overwhelming. These things are less taxing. I see them more as opportunity as opposed to trauma and adversity.
[00:08:49] PF: That makes absolute sense.
[00:08:51] SK: Was there anything that came into your awareness as you read that?
[00:08:54] PF: Yes. Because I think it's almost like two sides of a coin because on one hand, I do take that creativity for granted, and that is doing what I do. I write. I write stories. I write books. I do a lot of things, in addition to podcasting. So I kind of take it for granted. But then on the other side, it’s almost like realizing I don't have enough faith in that creativity that it is always going to be the thing that I lead with.
That's what I want to get into as well. I think sometimes, I need to lead with the idea and let the creativity catch up to it. You talk about that in the business sense of we're focusing on innovation, when we should be focusing on creativity, because that's the spark that drives it. The way that you put that all together, it's like, okay, I'm doing kind of the reverse. I've reversed engineered the way that it should be done. That is, as you said, so many businesses are doing that, placing the emphasis on the wrong thing.
So can you talk about that, why it's important? We’re all talking about innovation and disruption, and this is how we lead, and you're saying like, “Hang on. That's not where it starts.”
[00:10:04] SK: Well, I see innovation as a type of creative result. It's a creative result that yields value, new value. The interesting thing you could ask is like, okay, value for whom? What kind of value, like constructive, destructive? I don't know. But innovation at its core is about new value, new markets, new customers, new benefits, new whatever, new value.
As a creative result, if I'm not working with my creativity and my relationship with my creativity is kind of in the closet or – In Creative Together, I say where is your creativity? Is it out in the lobby checked out? Imagine you're in a theater.
[00:10:48] PF: It's waiting in the trunk.
[00:10:49] SK: Out on the balcony, like unreachable or – Where is it? So I don't have that daily connection. If I'm not leveraging it, if I'm not drawing on it, if I'm not stepping into the unknown with faith, I'm kind of disadvantaging myself.
[00:11:05] PF: So what should leaders be doing to foster that creative thinking and to really encourage it in employees?
[00:11:14] SK: First thing I'll say is clarify the purpose, the reason why people's creativity should show up. Because if it's just about the routine or if it's just about delivering business as usual, creativity won't show up. The thing about that is it's so sad to me when people are in jobs, or their work is sort of routine day to day, and they start to think, “I'm not creative.” The truth is the work that I'm doing, I'm not being asked for that. My manager, my leader is not being asked for that. He’s not asking me for that.
So I say the first thing that leaders need to do is to clarify the purpose, the reason why people's creativity should come up, come forward today. Why do we need something different than the status quo? So that's number one. The second thing is we all have a tolerance for ambiguity in our self, and I find that leaders often limit the degrees of freedom that they allow for folks to do their work.
So if I'm a leader, and I've got a low tolerance for ambiguity, and I don't give degrees of freedom, I need to see results right away. Creativity needs room. There's exploration that's part of it. There's prototyping and things that work out and things that don't work out, right? If I'm micromanaging or if I'm stuck in having it done my way or the way I think it should be done, I'm not getting the degrees of freedom that are necessary for creativity to emerge. So those are two things I might answer in a short answer. We could talk about that.
[00:12:49] PF: Exactly. That could be a whole episode right there. So what then happens to the individual, as we're allowed to use more creativity on the job? How does that make us happier? How does that make us more productive at work?
[00:13:03] SK: Yeah. I immediately go to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think self-actualization is kind of at the top of that pyramid. It starts out with things like safety and security and just getting my basic needs met. At the top of his pyramid is self-actualization, and I think creativity is part of our feeling like we're self-actualizing. We're making a difference. We're learning. We're transforming in ways that we're seeing changes in our lives. So creativity is intimately intertwined with some of these processes that make life meaningful and help me connect with others.
[00:13:40] PF: Then as we become happier, we're going to take those feelings home. There are so many studies that show if it's not working out on the job, you're taking that home. You're not going to feel great when you get home. So obviously, the reverse is true. So what happens? What have you seen in the people that you work with, as they begin implementing more creativity in their work? How does that spill over into their home life?
[00:14:04] SK: Sure. I'll share a story about an IT professional, a leader in the IT department of a company that I worked with. We were talking about the voice of judgment and how that inner critic that we have – Arianna Huffington calls it the obnoxious roommate. There are so many names for it. We were working in this concept because the inner critic can really stifle the expression of creativity. The inner critic is there to keep you safe, right? So we were talking about the inner critic, and we weren't focusing in on business, and what are some of the declarative statements that stakeholders are making, that customers are making, that we're making about what's possible and what's not possible?
Sure enough, the next time we got together, she said, “You know, I went home, and I really reflected on my relationship with my 15-year-old son, and I realized there was so much critic operating and running in my head. The stories I was telling, the questions I was asking him, that I was shocked and stunned at how this was getting in the way.” So the practices that help us access our creativity and bring it forward more effectively also can help us in our relationships, and in our communities, and the work we might be doing with nonprofits and all kinds of things. I think that's some of the ways that people can see this interchange between work and life.
[00:15:26] PF: Yeah, because you can't really compartmentalize creativity. Once you let it out, it's going to take over. Let's talk. You mentioned someone with their 15-year-old son. What is it that we as adults, as parents can do to bring up children to nurture that creativity, so they don't have to wait until they're on the job, and they're in their 30s or 40s and trying to figure out their creative side? How do we nurture that creativity as they're growing up?
[00:15:51] SK: I'll tell a story. When I was young and I was expressing my creativity through art and I would take what I was working on to my parents. It was only partially done, or I had just started. They will say, “Well, bring it back to me when it's done.” Now, of course, if anyone who's familiar with agile and agile methodologies, right? One of the tenants of agile is early and frequent customer input. So in a way, I was there looking for input early and often, and I was getting shut down or like, “Don't come to me till it's done.”
So sometimes, we don't even realize how we may be setting up weird assumptions and rules for our kids by just the simplest behavior or not even being aware. But I would say encourage exploration. If a kid comes to us with something that they're working on or something, provide some input. Ask them questions, instead of giving answers. These are maybe a few things that I think we could do in response to your question.
[00:16:49] PF: I like that. Then the more you practice it at home, you're also going to keep doing it work.
[00:16:54] SK: Mm-hmm, asking questions is one of our –
[00:16:55] PF: It’s an upward spiral.
[00:16:57] SK: It is. It is. Asking questions is one of our four superpowers that I talk about in Creative Together, and asking questions is such an important part of encouraging creativity, not just in ourselves but in others, whether it's business colleagues or kids or elderly parents or whoever it is.
[00:17:15] PF: Yeah. We get caught up in the talking, especially we're in a high-output society. We got to tweet our opinions. We got to make our posts on Facebook, Instagram, and we don't ask enough questions. We don't listen enough. So I love the fact that you really emphasize that and show us the value of doing that. That's a big part of it.
Now, let's talk about creative styles. I really enjoyed this part of the book because it's fun to say, “Oh, I can see myself in that one and that one,” but then find out like, “Okay, yeah. I definitely skew toward that, over it.” Let's talk about the three creative styles and that fourth thing with the styles.
[00:17:52] SK: That's great. So this came out of my doctoral research at UCLA. During my dissertation, I saw in the work that I was doing in the research I was doing these different styles showed up. Because I was at the Department of Education, I was looking at teachers in a very bureaucratic school district most of them are. So how do teachers in that context express their creativity in relationship to this social system that they're in? That's all of us. Me and my job, I'm in a social system. Anyone in any industry, anyone in any, whether you're a nonprofit or healthcare or corporation or whatever, we're all in a social system. So the styles that showed up then that have stayed true over the years, the soloist, the soloist said – You're saying – You're putting your hands up.
[00:18:42] PF: Yeah, yeah. That's me.
[00:18:44] SK: I'm a soloist at my core too, and soloists love to sort of create within the sphere of influence that they have and share the products of their creations. I'll just say our creations because I'm there too. Once they're done or pretty far along, so that other people can benefit. But it's not really like a co-creating kind of thing. I have my space of creative in that space. I share with others. But let me do it in my space. So that's a little bit about the soloist.
The second style that I talked about is the rebel. The thing about the rebel is the rebel’s motivated. The rebel’s creativity gets activated by the gap between what is and what could or should be. There's this sense of like what's right and just. So we saw this in any number of folks in the school system, and I see it in myself as well. When something's not right or words don't match actions, there's a part of me that gets activated. I want to deliver solutions or help solve that. My creativity gets activated there.
But the thing about rebels is that right can sometimes turn into righteousness. If I go on a crusade, I’m going to alienate the folks I very much want to join me, right? So that's a little bit about the rebel. The entrepreneur, there's a lot of us that can relate to the entrepreneur, and anyone starting a business and anyone sort of initiating things inside of a business also might relate. We have this strong vision for what could be some kind of solution, a new service, a new product, a new marketing angle, a new market base.
So the entrepreneur sees these opportunities, looks kind of broadly across the system. Okay, how am I going to work politics and resourcing and investments and all kinds of things to make this happen? The trick with the entrepreneur is that sometimes the vision that I have is so strong that it's hard for people to join me. When that vision may need to evolve or change, as it meets the real world and the realities and constraints of the real world, I may become disengaged or not lose interest.
That's a little bit about the three styles. One of the things all three styles share in common is they believe that the ideas that they're having are mine, my idea, my idea to arrange the classroom this way, my idea to fix an injustice, my idea to start this company. You mentioned that fourth style that I suggest in Creative Together that we all need to bring forward a little bit more. The collaborator doesn't have the same sense of ownership of ideas. It doesn't matter who has the idea.
From the collaborator’s perspective, it's like, “Let's move it forward. I'm playing a part. I'm contributing. We're co-creating.” You're not creating over there and then sharing it with me. We're actually making it together. We're jointly tangibly producing something together that we couldn't produce alone. So that's a little bit about – That was kind of long-winded. Sorry, but that’s –
[00:21:59] PF: No. No, it wasn't.
[00:21:59] SK: Talking about the four styles.
[00:22:01] PF: That was great. So why is it so important for us to understand our creative style? Once we do, once we know that, what do we do with that information?
[00:22:11] SK: Yeah. So I talk about developing a practice plan for bringing the collaborator forward because that's what I see in this new world of work, where things are so interdependent, where what I do here today impacts all sorts of possibilities for others and other parts of the system today and tomorrow. So bringing that collaborator forward is really critical, and first step is to understand my style, and maybe challenge some of the beliefs and assumptions that are behind that.
For example, as a soloist, I may think that it's possible to create alone. But creativity is actually meant to be shared, and it's kind of an illusion that we can create alone. Even if I'm sitting in my room, and I'm doing something, I cannot separate myself from all the influences that are around me every day, the entire world that's around me. I'm taking fragments of ideas and fragments of conversations and pieces of information from something I read. I'm connecting them, right? So it's an illusion that we actually create alone. It’s also an illusion that the idea is mine, right?
Okay. So maybe I realize that. I've come to terms with that. I want to develop some practices to you know, to help me open up, to help me join others sometimes, instead of having others just join me.
[00:23:34] PF: I like that. I like that. There's so much wisdom in this book, and it's also fun. I was surprised like how fun it was because I thought it would feel more scholarly. This is something that everyone can really dive into. I wondered, as the author, what is it that you really hope that readers take away from this book?
[00:23:54] SK: I think the big message is in this new world that we're in post-pandemic, with the pluses and minuses of how we're all connected with through technology, all of these kinds of things, in this new world that we're working in, strength will come from creating together. But it's not something we're schooled in. It's not something we're practiced in. It's not something we've been conscious about. So the book is organized as a journey to first change the story of what creativity is and who I am as a creator.
If I had left it there as the author, I would feel that it was incomplete. Because the reason to do that inner work, the reason to reflect on what gifts I bring, what challenges I face, what tests I face, what my superpowers are, all those things that are in the first part of the book. The reason to do that work is so that I can create more effectively with others in business, in life through my communities, through my social activism or advocacy. Whatever ways I might want to express that, that's where the strength is going to come. So that's my core message. In the new world of work, we have to get creative together.
[00:25:08] PF: That’s so excellent. Steven, I appreciate you taking the time today. This was a wonderful conversation. It's a great book. I've really, truly enjoyed this book, and I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of it as well.
[00:25:21] SK: That's great. Thank you so much, Paula.
[00:25:22] PF: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:25:27] PF: That was Steven Kowalski, talking about how to discover our creativity. If you'd like to learn more about Steven and his book or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab.
While you're on the website, I'd like to invite you to check out our new podcast channel, Live Happy Presents. This sponsored podcast sees us partnering with like-minded brands to bring you information about products or services that can help improve your well-being.
For our first episode, we talk with Megan McDonough of the Wholebeing Institute and learn how times of uncertainty often are the best opportunity for bringing positive change into our lives. We hear Megan's own story of how such an inflection point led her to leave corporate America and pursue inner peace and how that led to creating the Wholebeing Institute.
Then we'll tell you about their program to help you take the next step toward personal happiness. You can find that episode called Take the Next Steps to Happiness with Megan McDonough on our podcast tab under Live Happy Presents.
That is all we have time for today. We will meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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Transcript – Making the Most of Your Time with Cassie Holmes
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Making the Most of Your Time with Cassie Holmes
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 401 of Live Happy Now. Do you feel like you have plenty of time to do all the things you need to get done? Or are you like the rest of us, who are just trying to fit it all in? I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with Cassie Holmes, an award-winning teacher and researcher on time and happiness and author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. Cassie is here today to talk about what it means to feel time poor, and why that has become so prevalent today. Then, she'll explain how we can learn to better structure our days and begin using our time, instead of losing it. Let's have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:45] PF: Cassie, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now.
[0:00:48] CH: Thanks so much for having me, Paula. I'm excited to chat with you.
[0:00:52] PF: Well, you have written an amazing book that takes on a huge topic that so many people are dealing with today. I think, before we really dive into that, can you clarify by telling us what you mean when you say time poverty?
[0:01:05] CH: Yeah. Time poverty is the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. I am sure, even if you haven't heard that term before, everyone knows exactly what that is, because they felt it is really prevalent. We conducted a national poll that showed that nearly half of Americans feel time poor. That they don't have enough time to do what they set out to do.
[0:01:33] PF: That's amazing. Because I mentioned this book to my nurse practitioner when I was seeing her a couple weeks ago. She was like, “Time poor. I'm not familiar with that.” I explained, not as eloquently as you just did, and she was like, “So that's what you call it.”
[0:01:48] CH: Yeah, exactly.
[0:01:49] PF: Like you said, and even if they haven't heard the term, everyone has experienced this. I find myself saying a lot like, okay, our parents didn't live this way. What happened? Where did the time go? Why is it that we are all living in such a time crunch?
[0:02:04] CH: Yeah. It's a really important question. Because it is such an issue. It's an issue, because it's so prevalent, as I said. It's an issue, because it has really negative consequences, which we can speak to in a second. In terms of why, why is it that we feel this way? I think there's a couple of factors that contribute to it. One is cultural. That there's been this taking on as viewing busyness, almost as a status symbol, a signal of competence, and that you're needed. Then we take on so much, because we feel like we should, right? It's that productivity orientation.
Also, recognizing that it is a feeling of having too little time to do all that you want to and think you should be doing. That expectation of what we think we should and could be doing is influenced by technology, to be honest. I think that our smartphones are so useful in so many ways. They help us do those things that we should be doing, to check tasks off our to-do lists. We can order groceries at any moment. We can coordinate schedules. We can respond to emails. Also, it's the idea of all the things we could be doing at that moment. With social media, you have this constant view into other people's lives, but only their happiest moments of their lives.
[0:03:32] PF: Like the highlight films.
[0:03:35] CH: Right. It's like seeing. Well, you're waiting in line at the coffee shop, or at the grocery store, you're looking at your phone and seeing the amazing vacation, or the fun meal that someone is having and have like, “Oh, I could be doing that right now.” As well as we could be learning Spanish at any moment, watching a performance somewhere. Of course, there's no way that we would have time to do all this notion of what we could and should be doing. I think that that's also one of the culprits of why we feel time poor.
[0:04:11] PF: Right. We're going to obviously get more into what it means to be time poor and what it's doing to us, but one thing that I found so interesting early on, that you talk about having too much free time is just as detrimental as not having enough free time. I've found that so fascinating. Can you explain why? Can you also talk about what that sweet spot is of that perfect amount of free time?
[0:04:37] CH: Yeah. I think that's a really important learning from the data for all of us who feel time poor. Because in those days and in those states where we feel so time stretched, oftentimes, I know for myself, for instance, I have been like, I don't know if I can do it. I need to quit. There's no way, so I should quit this job that I love so much and I've worked so hard for it, but it's just not possible. We day dream. “If only I had all the hours of my days. Living on a beach somewhere.”
[0:05:07] PF: I'd been Costa Rica picking whatever is in Costa Rica.
[0:05:11] CH: Yeah. Surely, I would be happier. But is that true? In our work, we looked at with Hal Hershfield and Marissa Sharif, what's the relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness? Among our studies, including looking at data from the American Time Use Survey. Looking for among tens of thousands of working, as well as non-working Americans, how they spent a regular day. We could calculate the amount of time they spent on discretionary activities. Across studies, we found this consistent pattern of results.
Namely, it was a upside down U-shape, or like an arc, or rainbow, suggesting that on both ends of the spectrum, people are less happy. In that data, we found that folks with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in the day, they were unhappy. Those were the time for folks. That's because heightened feelings of stress. On the other side, we saw that those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time in the day, were also less happy. The reason is, because we are driven to be productive. We are averse to being idle. When we have all the hours of our days open and available, and we spend them with nothing to actually show for how we spent that time, it undermines our sense of purpose. With that, we feel dissatisfied.
I also want to note that it's not just that paid work is a way of spending that gives us purpose. For many of us, it actually is. Volunteer work, engaging in a hobby that's really enriching and develops us, that's also worthwhile ways of spending. Actually, we see that when people spend their discretionary time in worthwhile ways, that you don't see this too much time effect. You don't see that more is better. You don't see that too much time effect. This is, I think, important for all of us, in those heady days to not quit. Don't quit. Don't sell your house and move to the island, because a weekend, you will be bored and looking for a sense of purpose.
[0:07:29] PF: Yeah. As I was reading that, I was thinking about some of the research that exists on people, how the death rate goes up when people retire. It's not really associated with declining health. It really ties back into what you were talking about, when they lose a sense of purpose and their overall happiness goes down, their overall well-being goes down, I feel like, that's got to be connected.
[0:07:48] CH: Absolutely. Related to that you see among retirees who actually do volunteer work, that you see higher levels of satisfaction. When you have that available time, is making sure that you invest it in ways that do feel worthwhile, that give you that sense of purpose. Again, our days living on the beach might not be quite as happy as we daydream about.
[0:08:16] PF: Absolutely. One exercise that you offer that people can really help to figure out their days is time tracking. I thought this was so excellent. We'll make sure that we have a link to your site, so people can go and download these, because you have given some wonderful worksheets and exercises. Can you talk about time tracking and how it works and why it is so important in the way we see our days, and the way we start shaping our days?
[0:08:42] CH: Absolutely. In terms of how to live days that feel fulfilling and satisfying, the trick is to really maximize the amount of time that's spent on activities that feel worthwhile. Minimize the amount of time that is spent on activities that feel like a waste. Then, the question is, well, what are those activities that are worthwhile? Research does time tracking to pull out tracking for that individual, or among a broad sample of people, what activities they spend their time on, how they feel over the course of their day, so they could pull out on average, what are those activities that are associated with the most positive emotion? What are those activities that are associated with most negative emotion?
You see that on average, activities that are socially connecting, so whether intimately, or spending time with family and friends are the most positive. You see the most negative are commuting, working and doing housework. Maybe not surprising. What's important is that this is based off of averages. There are some folks and I would like to put myself in the category of work is actually a great source of satisfaction. Also, there are instances of socializing that are not at all fun. I suggest that people track their own time for a week. The worksheet is on my website. It's so simple. I mean, granted is somewhat tedious for that week, but it's worth it.
[0:10:12] PF: It pays off.
[0:10:14] CH: Is that for every half hour, write down what you're doing, the activity. Being more specific than just work, or socializing. What work activity are you doing, so that you can pull out what are those activities that are the good ones? Also, whether those ways of socializing that are the good/bad ones. Because in addition to writing down what you're doing is rating on a 10 point scale, how it made you feel coming out of it. Of satisfied, happy fulfilling. Then what's wonderful is at the end of the week, you have this fantastic personalized data set. You can look across your time and see what are those activities that were your most positive. Also, what are commonalities across them.
You might see, for instance, that actually, it's not socializing per se, or being not at work. It's for me, it was like, I really value one-on-one time, whether with a family member, or a friend, or a colleague, that was actually time that was really fulfilling for me. Then I also recognized in groups, less fulfilling. But that's me. You, as you have your own data, you can really hone in on what are those activities that feel not satisfying. To dig into the commonalities to figure out why.
Also, you can see just how much time you're spending across your various activities. Helping you pull out like, “Holy cow. I had no idea that I was spending that much time on social media, or watching TV, or burning like, oh, email.” It's like, my entire life is spent on email. Recognizing that, in fact, maybe not surprising for email, but for some, it's actually quite surprising that social media doesn't make them feel very good, even though they have it in their head like, “Oh, this is my fun time. This is my me time.” It's really helpful to have this information to see where you're spending your time, such that there are opportunities to reallocate away from these times that are actually somewhat of a waste, according to you, not according to me, but according to your own data, so that you can reallocate them towards those activities that are more worthwhile.
In the context of time poverty, where so many of us feel we don't have enough time, this is really important information to find pockets, where actually, we do have available time. If we spend it on ways that are more fulfilling, then perhaps, and I experienced this myself and have heard from readers, perhaps at the end of the week, even if you're busy, you look back and you feel fulfilled and satisfied and happy, because you spent on these worthwhile things.
[0:13:09] PF: That exercise really reminded me of when you're going to go see a nutritionist, or something, they say, write down everything you eat for a week. You're like, “Oh, I got this. I'm going to blow it away.” Then you're like, “Oh, wow. I didn't realize I really picked up that many little pieces of chocolate, or whatever.” It's like, it really does make you sit down and think, “Wow, okay. There are areas where it's not just time has been stolen from me. I am generously giving it away.” What a great way to reset and figure out how to change that. You also give tips for making chores, or things that you don't love doing. Say, housework. How do you make that more enjoyable and feel more fulfilling?
[0:13:48] CH: Time tracking, or even in your reflection, there are activities that are not fun. That's just –
[0:13:53] PF: We can't just quit doing them, I guess.
[0:13:54] CH: You can't quit doing. They’re necessary. Unless, you want your family, or housemates to kick you out, because you're not contributing to chores. We do have to do them. I do share some strategies to make them feel more positive. One of those is bundling. This is out of research by Katie Milkman and her colleagues. It's so simple yet so effective. Is basically, you bundle this activity that you don't enjoy doing, like chores, like folding the laundry, and you bundle it with an activity that you do enjoy, such that that time that you're spending becomes more worthwhile. It becomes more fun.
For example, folding the laundry, if you bundle that with watching your TV show. Actually, one of readers was saying that her husband is now bundling ironing with watching sports and he is now so excited to iron each week, because he sets up the ironing board in front of the TV and that is his dedicated time to watch sports. Commuting, that was one of those other activities that is just so painful, because you're waiting through it. You just want to get there already, and it feels like a waste. During your commute, if you're driving, listen to an audiobook. Or if you're on the subway, or bus, read a book. When in this work on time poverty, I ask people to complete the sentence, I don't have time to.
One of a very frequent response is, I don't have time to read for pleasure. If every time you got in your car, or that you're on the train going to work, you are “reading,” then you'll get through a book every week or so. All of a sudden, that time that was a chore, or felt like a waste feels more worthwhile and fun.
[0:15:49] PF: One thing that you bring out and we all know this is true that when we feel pressed for time, the first things that go out the window seem to be those things that are going to make us feel better and are good for us, things like exercise, things like preparing our meals, so we're eating more healthy. How do we change our mindset and realize that those are the things we need to schedule in first, so that we don't just disregard them?
[0:16:12] CH: Exactly. Exercise is a really important one, because exercise is an activity that has direct implications, not only for your health, but your emotional well-being. It's a mood booster. It is very effective at offsetting anxiety, which so many people are suffering from. Also, offsetting depression. It makes us feel really good about ourselves. Once we do make that time, we realize that we can do it. Actually, in terms of our feeling of being time poor, a part of that is that we don't have the confidence that we can accomplish what we set out to do, given the resources that we have, namely the time that we have.
If you actually spend your time in ways that increase your self-efficacy, like exercise, then and I can speak to myself and I share this as an anecdote in the book is that, like you said, when I feel busy, my morning run is the first thing I give up. When I make the time and I'm out there running, it's like, “Oh, my gosh.” Thank, gosh, I did, because I'm feeling good. I feel like, I can take on the day on those important things. With that sense of accomplishment, it expands my sense of how much time I have available to do and complete what I set out to do.
Both exercise, as well as doing acts of kindness. I have research that shows that when we actually spend time to give a little to someone else, that increases our sense of accomplishment, and self-efficacy. It actually increases our sense of time affluence, too. But it's important that it's giving time, not that time is being taken from you.
[0:18:07] PF: You're an expert at this. How do you tell yourself, go ahead, invest the time, do the exercise, take the time to prepare your meals, whatever it takes? We can make a habit out of it. Once we get into that groove after 30 or 60 days, it's not that difficult, but how do we then, we're at this time of the year where people are trying to develop new habits anyway, so this might as well be one. How do we do that?
[0:18:30] CH: It's such an exciting time of the year as people with that fresh start, looking for it and becoming more intentional. Actually, towards the end of the book, I have this chapter on time crafting. Pulling all of the strategies together from across the book, how do you design your week, such that you are protecting, carving out time for those things that matter, putting them into your schedule, so my Monday morning run. In many cases, it's the time and investing in those relationships that are so important to us that often do get neglected, when we're in a hurry.
Putting those things into the schedule first. Protecting them. Also, placing them in that important work that you love so much. Your deep-thinking work. Put it into your schedule, so that it doesn't get filled by unnecessary meetings, or even responding to email. So that you make sure that you do have that time in the part of your day where you're most alert and most creative, and then seeing, consolidating the activities that you don't enjoy doing, because as we start activities and our anticipation of those activities have a big effect. If we condense them, then all the bad stuff, it's less painful if you get it all done together.
Whereas watching TV, for instance, that first half hour is great. Five hours in on binging, less enjoyable. In fact, quite anxiety producing, because you feel really guilty and bad about yourself and it's not even fun at that point anyway. Putting those half hours and being really intentional. I do talk a lot about how to design your week, so that you are making time for the things that matter. Highlighting and increasing the impact of those activities that really matter. This is so important to do, because – Can I share an analogy that I think is –
[0:20:35] PF: Please do.
[0:20:36] CH: - really helpful for folks to have in their heads? I continue to touch back on it, when I'm making my own time saving, or spending decisions. It's an analogy about prioritization. It's nicely depicted in a short film that I share in actually the first day of my class that I teach to MBAs on how to be happy applying the science of happiness. In the film, a professor walks into his classroom and on the desk, he puts this large, clear jar. Then into the jar, he pours golf balls up to the very top, and he asked the students, is the jar full? The students nod their head, because it looks full. Nope.
Then he pulls from a bag on the side, pebbles, and he pours the pebbles into the jar and they fill the spaces between the golf balls, reached the very top and asked the students, “Is the jar full?” They’re like, “Yes.” But he's like, “Nope.” Then he pours sand into the jar and it fills all those spaces between the golf balls, between the pebbles, up to the very top and he asked the students, “Is the jar full?” By this point, they're laughing. They’re like, “Yes.”
He explains like, this jar is the time of your life. The golf balls are all those things that really matter to you. Your relationships with your family members, your friendships, that work that you truly care about. The pebbles are those other important things in your life, like your job, your house, the sand is everything else. The sand is all of that stuff that just fills your time without you even thinking about it, whether it's social media. For me, the email inbox. For some, it’s TV. It’s like, those never-ending requests that come in that it's easier to say yes to than no. Even though, you don't really care about what that task is.
What's really important to note is that had he put the sand into the jar first, all of the golf balls would not have fit. That is if we let our time get filled, it will get filled with sand. We won't have had time, we wouldn't have spent the time on those things that really matter to us. We have to identify what are those golf balls, put them into our schedules first. Protect, prioritize that time. Then the sand will fill the rest, absolutely. We need to be really intentional and thoughtful. The time tracking exercise that I mentioned was one way to really identify, what are those golf balls for you, such that when you are designing your week, you're doing the time crafting part of it. That goes into your schedule first.
That morning run, or whatever your form of exercise is actually really important. Put that into your schedule for us. Because actually, for exercise for instance, not only does it influence how you feel while you're doing it. You get that mood boost and sense of self efficacy, but also it colors how you experience the rest of your day. It has a really big impact, beyond just the experience itself.
[0:23:34] PF: That is so huge. I know we have to let you go, but there was one more strategy you talked about that I had never heard of. Absolutely fell in love with, and really want you to share this with our listeners. That's the idea of time left. That was so powerful. Can you talk about what that technique is and why it works so beautifully.
[0:23:55] CH: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked about that, because I do think it's a really important one. It is recognizing that some of those golf balls are really, actually from simple, ordinary moments in our life. These everyday moments, like a coffee date for me with my daughter, or having dinner with your family. Or, it's just these everyday moments that sometimes we're moving through them, because they're so every day that we expect they will continue to happen every day. But that's not true. Our time is passing, our time is fleeting, and circumstances in our life are changing. If those sorts of activities that bring joy involve someone else, circumstances in their life, too, are changing.
One way to make it so that we do pay attention, we prioritize time and pay attention during these sorts of simple joys that are right there and the time we're already spending is to count the times left. Picking a experience that brings you joy and calculating, how many times have you done it in your life so far? The next step is to calculate, how many times do you expect to have do this activity in the future, accounting for the fact that circumstances in your life will change, if it involves another, circumstances in the other person's life will change.
The last step is to calculate of the total times doing this activity in your life, what percentage do you have left? More often than not, it's way less than you think. Initially, it's sad. But the benefits of seeing this is really worth that initial sadness, is because what it does is it makes me protect the time. Then also, it influences how you experience that time, knowing that it is limited, that it is so precious, we remove those distractions, so that phone gets put away, that constant to-do list that's running in our heads, that gets quieter, because we realize that this is the time of our life that really matters, and to really make it count.
It doesn't have to be a whole lot. All of us who are time poor, it doesn't have to be a lot of time for these activities to have a really big impact on how satisfied we feel in our weeks, how fulfilled we feel in our lives. I think that the counting times left is a very lenient and impactful exercise to make us spend our time on the activities that matter, as well as make the most of those times when we're spending them.
[0:26:29] PF: I would say, that is correct, because that, like I said, it just stopped me when I read that. That's absolutely incredible. This book is so full of strategies, information, hope, techniques. What is it that you really hope readers take away from it?
[0:26:46] CH: I hope that people just become more intentional in the time that they're spending and to really soak up. There's so much happiness and joy right there that's available, no matter how time poor, no matter other constraints that we have facing our lives, that there is a lot of happiness and joy available to us, if we are that intentional about the way that we spend our time.
[0:27:13] PF: Cassie, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We're going to tell our listeners more about your book, where they can find it. Thank you for writing this. This is something we all need. It's presented so incredibly well. I really appreciate it.
[0:27:28] CH: Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. It was a treat.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:27:35] PF: That was Cassie Holmes, talking about how to make the most of our time. If you'd like to learn more about Cassie and her book, download some free worksheets to help you plan your time better, or follow her on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. While you're on the website, be sure to drop by the Live Happy Store and check out our great selection of Live Happy gear and merch, so you can show the world how you live happy.
That is all we have time for today. We will meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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Transcript – Create Your Fun Habit With Mike Rucker
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Create Your Fun Habit With Mike Rucker
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 398 of Live Happy Now. It's a brand new year, and we're all thinking about creating new habits. So why not make yours a fun one? I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm talking with Mike Rucker, an esteemed organizational psychologist whose new book, The Fun Habit, looks at how the pursuit of joy and wonder can change your life. He's here to talk about how we can learn to prioritize fun, and how that can make us both happier and more productive. And as you'll learn, it can also improve the lives of those around us. Let's have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:39] PF: Mike, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now.
[00:00:43] MR: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:44] PF: We've been talking about this for a while. We had to wait for your book to get out. Just talking before the show, there were so many delays because of COVID. So first of all, congratulations on release of The Fun Habit.
[00:00:57] MR: Thank you so much. Yeah. It's been a long time coming, so I'm excited to be –
[00:01:00] PF: Yeah, it has. It has. I feel like we've been talking about it for a couple years, at least.
[00:01:04] MR: Yeah. The pub date’s gotten moved twice. Once, it was like a soft one. Then this last one, June to January, was a hard one. You know, like –
[00:01:13] PF: But we’re here now.
[00:01:15] MR: Yeah. That’s right.
[00:01:16] PF: What a great way to –
[00:01:16] MR: [inaudible 00:01:16] are, right?
[00:01:17] PF: Yeah. What a way to kick off the year. It's so interesting because you have such a distinguished background, including being a charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association. So from the outside, we would expect that you'd have the whole happiness thing down. But as we learn in your book, that was not the case. So can you kick us off by talking about how you learned to recognize the distinction between happiness and having fun?
[00:01:43] MR: Yeah. I'm still a believer in happiness, right? So I’ll explain that. But the backstory is I was a charter member. Positive psych could have been something prior to that organization coming together. Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow years before. 2009 is when that kind of came together. It was really Marty Cyclamen that kind of created the movement, him and Ed [inaudible 00:02:08]. I think authentic happiness had come out the year prior, and there was this need for it, right? The movement was doing something positive.
Up until that point, clinical psychology was really just to treat deficits, and there are some amazing tools for folks that are living a life well to create things to make it better. So those tools were certainly fairly useful to me during that time, up until 2016. I still benefit from gratitude journaling, I still keep a mindfulness practice, and I still value happiness. What had gone awry was I had become overly concerned with my own happiness.
So I'll explain that distinction, and that is really when something goes wrong. In my case, it was the death of my younger brother quite suddenly and just having to process that all at once. Then these two aren't related. But a couple months later, after years of being an endurance athlete, not professional or anything, but really just enjoying that and that way to mitigate, I've always had low level anxiety. I haven't needed medication. I've used fitness to mitigate anxiety. I identified as a runner, for sure, and I was told I had advanced osteoarthritis, probably due to an injury. It wasn't genetic. But it probably tore my labrum and just a 220-pound guy doing a couple Ironmans.
[00:03:38] PF: Right. That'll start doing some [inaudible 00:03:39] there.
[00:03:40] MR: Yeah. But because it happened at such a young age, I was told I shouldn't run again. So I lost my younger brother, found out that this identity I had as a runner was destroyed, and then this third thing happened. It wasn't really misfortune, but I just finished my doctor [inaudible 00:03:56] and graduated. My wife, who had supported me through those six years of academic work, we had two children during that process, so you can only imagine.
[00:04:05] PF: Wow. That was home.
[00:04:07] MR: Yeah, right. Again, over optimizing for a lot of stuff. She got an amazing opportunity, and this amazing opportunity manifested and wanted to have her back. But I was still going through a lot of stuff, and that essentially moved us away from our support network of family and friends. So I wanted to figure out how to will myself to be happy, and the more I was doing that paradoxically, I was becoming really unhappy. Because I am a researcher, I identified fairly quickly that something wrong was happening, and I was getting close to probably low-level clinical depression. But I understood that there was some sort of awareness that I was doing it to myself, and I don't know if I would call it serendipitous. It was just more happenstance and good timing.
Emerging research was coming out that you're probably familiar with. A professor I liked a lot is Dr. Iris Mauss out of the University of California Berkeley. But her work has been replicated now that here in the Western world, folks like myself, how I found myself in 2016, that are kind of just always chasing happiness, have a pretty direct line to being pretty unhappy, paradoxically. So, wow, okay, so here's sort of empirical evidence to suggest what's happening to me. But if that's the case, what can I do? Because I really want to get back to being happy.
Over time, it started to change my perception. Like, okay, life can suck sometimes, but I have more control over sort of shifting my life to the good side, rather than kind of wallowing in this act of rumination and introspection, which is essentially wasting energy, waiting for happiness to come, when I can kind of move in that direction and not necessarily chase it. Just live a joyful life that things that enrich me like pro-social behavior, hobbies that really connect me to things that I like, make me realize that it's not just about myself. Again, just understand that I do have some autonomy over my time.
[00:06:09] PF: As adults, even though we all want to have fun, we don't make it a priority. So what in your research did you find is keeping us from doing that?
[00:06:19] MR: A lot of it's rooted in the Puritan work ethic that's still pervasive here in the West. Quite literally, we think our self-worth comes from how we can contribute, right? What's unfortunate is there's been this kind of fast evolution from what Daniel Pink calls algorithmic work to heuristic work, whether – You could call that the knowledge economy, whatever you want.
Unfortunately, in this new paradigm of work, we don't know where the goalposts are, right? Also, because of advances in technology, we're always kind of connected to our workplace and that –
[00:06:54] PF: Yeah. Our workdays do not end, where like we just fall asleep.
[00:06:57] MR: Yeah. I mean, from the moment we wake up till our head hits the pillow, there are a lot of people that are always on their phone. If they get a notification, they feel like it's a prime to have to answer it. Because of that, even when we think we're in a state of leisure or a state of our domestic duties like enjoying time with our wife or our kids, half the time, it's still an extension of work because if our phone buzzes, we pick it up.
What we know is that, subconsciously, that essentially just becomes an extension of work. We've never created this transition ritual from work to leisure. So the rub there is that the same way that we champion people that lived in a state of sleep deprivation in the ‘90s, like –
[00:07:44] PF: Oh, yeah. I remember that.
[00:07:46] MR: Yeah. I fell victim to it. I never took down the post because I didn't want to be inauthentic. But if you search deep in my website, I think I was like, “Oh, Gary Vee is amazing.” And like, “Yeah.”
[00:07:57] PF: If I can do four hours of sleep a week.
[00:07:57] MR: That’s right. Yeah. So we now know that's asinine, right? Like the research is in. If you're not getting sleep, a year later, you're not even going to be able to work, right, because that is a direct line to all sorts of physiological and psychological ills. We're now finding that that is true. This is emerging research. So I like kind of being on the forefront of it. Emerging research is suggesting that when we're not engaged in leisure, so whatever that means, if we're really being honest, there's two to five hours a day that we could potentially recapture, depending on where we are in life.
We're not doing that. What we're doing is essentially pacifying that time, a lot of times. If you don't believe me, just look at the health meter on your iPhone or your Android and see how much time you're on social media apps or some sort of mobile game. Ultimately, we know that those seem to be fun. But when we look back and ask ourselves, how did you spend that time? Tell me what you saw on social media between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00? Your phone says that you're on that. There will just be a shoulder shrug because that essentially displaced boredom or discomfort, or it wasn't something that really added to your betterment or attracted joy.
[00:09:14] PF: How do you build in little pieces of fun? Because it's not like you have to take a vacation. It's not like you even need to take 30 minutes. You can do something in five minutes to add a little fun to your day, and that's going to really change your brain. Can you talk about how we work that in?
[00:09:31] MR: You need to start by creating space, and then we're going to get into play model. So we'll discuss how to do that. But I think, first, you need to look at activities that aren't adding anything to your life, right? In the book, I call them the nothing, like this time that's just contributing. Because I think where positivity kind of got off the rails, now we term it toxic positivity, is that everything needs to be additive, right?
So kind of falling back on my understanding of system design, it's just so hard for us to remove things, right? Because that's just – We inherently think that adding stuff on is always better. So we start by figuring out what are those moments that we can capture back. So a simple one could essentially just be your lunch hour, right? Like a lot of us will just kind of hang out. If we're working in a workspace, we'll just kind of hang out and let that hour pass. So I like this metal frame of like if you can't go on holiday, maybe you can take a whole hour, kind of playing into your point, right?
[00:10:32] PF: That’s great.
[00:10:33] MR: So can you schedule a time with a friend, if you're more of an introvert? Because fun doesn't have to be a high arousal activity. Like I love [inaudible 00:10:40] in this area, right? Like it could just be enjoying a book, but recapturing something so that you can enjoy yourself in a pleasant way, rather than just kind of trying to get through the next hour. So you're exactly right. Like, what are those opportunities, especially if you – A time for where you can add in elements.
Now, I will be careful on that. I talked about this in the book that task switching is definitely another way to become unhappy, right? We know that if you're kind of just always moving around from task to task, even if they're pleasurable, the cognitive load of that can just zap your energy. We don't want to over optimize your life, but we do want to create the space so that you can exchange things that really aren't adding anything to your betterment, and figure out how you can have more joy in those spaces.
[00:11:28] PF: Yeah. I think that could be a fun exercise in itself to kind of step back and say, “What is it that brings me fun? What are things that I want to do?” Because I think so many of us jump on this treadmill. If someone says, “What do you do for fun,” it’s deer in the headlights. They're like, “I don't know. I haven't had fun for a while.” So I think too there's that part, just that brainstorming of what brings me joy, what is fun for me.
[00:11:55] MR: Yeah, exactly. You're spot on, and that's like another one of those interesting headwinds that I mentioned, like the resistance to that, because it does seem super silly, right? Like so many of us, I know how to have fun. Yeah, you know. But you need to remind yourself.
[00:12:08] PF: But what do you do for it? Yeah.
[00:12:10] MR: Yeah, that's right. So being premeditated and just making a simple list, one, it's fun if you approach the activity with curiosity, right? Like not to stay and like, “Ah, I can't believe I have to do this to have fun.” But like, “Hey, let me remind myself of what lights me up,” right? So that exercise of brainstorming can be fun in and of itself. Even if it's not fun, it's sort of a quick, necessary step because you want to remember. What are the things that really did bring you joy before you had all of this responsibility? Some might not suit you anymore. So you can get creative with this list and make it expansive. Then figure out what is it that you can incorporate and start figuring out, with the space that you created, what to do.
[00:12:53] PF: One thing you mentioned in your book, and this can really help people out, it’s like what's your fun type. That’s great because you actually can go onto your website, and there's an assessment quiz, and it's very easy. It's not like you have to study for it. Then you figure out like, okay, this is your fun type. So maybe these are the kinds of things that you should look for when you're creating your little fun list.
[00:13:15] MR: Yeah. I think that one was – I did graduate in sciences. I think everyone is all for fun types. It just kind of points to where you seem to really enjoy yourself.
[00:13:25] PF: What’s your dominant?
[00:13:26] MR: Yeah. But to your point, you could use kind of whimsical tools like that. Or you could identify, in the chapter on fun and friends, who are your fun friends and see if you can create more opportunities with them. Because, generally, if you've identified them as fun friends, they can be great mentors in getting you to have more fun, right?
[00:13:46] PF: Absolutely.
[00:13:46] MR: What are they doing? Because I do believe it becomes problematic if you're overly marketed things, or if you're mindlessly scrolling social media, and just kind of going, “Oh, I wish I could do that. I wish I could do that.” Because that's just incoming stimulus, right? It's not really an inward like, “Oh, I really identify with that.” Some people are mindful. Like if you're into crafting and you only follow crafters, like there's always the exceptions to the rule, right?
But a lot of us are sort of – If we don't do it with our own interests at heart, we’re sort of like, “Oh, they're having so much fun.” Well, they are. But is that what you would find fun, like if you were really in their shoes? Do you really want to be on a yacht? Because the last time I remember, you would throw up every time you’re on a boat, right? So –
[00:14:33] PF: That is a trap of social media because you're like, “Oh, that looks like so much fun.” But then, yes, when you break it down, it's like do you want to do that? It's like, “Oh, heck, no. No.”
[00:14:40] MR: Well, and it’s curated, right? Like these are post photos of people that are trying to gain your attention. It's called the attention economy for a reason. But, ultimately, if you fall victim to that, and you think that that's real life, that can become problematic because, again, it goes back to what I fell victim to like, “Oh, my gosh. Happiness is here on Instagram, and I'm way back here in reality.”
All of a sudden, that gap between normal reality and this fictional reality becomes like – You start to identify like, “Well, I'm not where I want to be,” and that can slowly become identifying as an unhappy person, which isn't necessarily true. It's the subjective reality you've created, and it's clear from the evidence that it's kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy. You now have these negative scripts that you're not even necessarily consciously aware of. They're leading you to believe that you're unhappy, when that's not necessarily true.
[00:15:38] PF: That's why your play model is so fantastic. It's a great way to assess how we're spending our days. Can you talk about that? Explain what it is and how we can use it, so we can incorporate more fun into our lives.
[00:15:50] MR: It’s essentially a sorting mechanism. So it helps you identify like things that really have gone off the rails, right? So play stands for pleasing, living, agonizing, and yielding. Pleasing activities are activities that are really easy to do, right? Like walking your dog, taking a nature walk, engaging in pro-social behavior with the friends that you enjoy.
The living quadrant takes some energy, but ultimately leads to really engaging activities. So that can be mastering a new skill. That can be a vigorous hike, like if connecting to nature is your thing. That can be a spiritual practice because mindfulness becomes hard if you – So etc., etc. But things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do all the time because they do take some energy, people are now classifying that as type two fun. I think that's a playful term for it.
[00:16:40] PF: That’s great.
[00:16:42] MR: Agonizing are the things that we have to do. So, again, in the book, I make it clear that we can't engineer all of those out of our life. There are things that we need to do as humans that are hard.
[00:16:52] PF: Like our taxes?
[00:16:53] MR: Exactly, yeah. I mean, that's a common one, right? But a lot of times, when people look at like things that are really agonizing that happen week after week, there's generally ways to improve them. So looking at those critically and thinking what is it? If you get creative, things that kind of suck for you, you could potentially change them, either by changing the activity or outsourcing, if you're in a place that you could do that.
The last one we've already kind of talked about, but it's the most nefarious, is the yielding, and that is things that don't bring us joy. But because they don't take much energy, we kind of do them mindlessly. Oftentimes, especially in this modern life we live, they're engineered to make us believe we’re enjoying our time, but they really don't. So social media is an obvious culprit.
Again, I don't villainize watching TV. There are shows that I certainly like that are fun to watch because I'm watching them either with my kids or my partner. But what is a common routine for people is they’re so burnt out from work. They plop down on the couch and just turn on whatever is there. If I were to ask you the next week like, “Hey, I know you watched TV Wednesday from 7:00 to 9:00. What did you watch?” They’re like, “Ah, I don't know.”
[00:18:06] PF: Then you're frustrated. When you're done watching television, you look back, and it's like, “I wasted this time. I could have done something.” Yet we haven't identified what we would have done. So we just keep doing. That's why we need our fun. We need to like figure out what we do for fun because we would have done something differently.
[00:18:22] MR: That's exactly right, and that identifies another headwind. That is in those moments, it is hard for you to believe that you could go out and do something, right? So what I've seen, and this has to happen with multiple people that I've worked with, is that there's two things going on. One, for a lot of adults, for whatever reason, there's this notion that you can't do things on a school night. We've just been programmed to believe that we can't go out and have fun Monday through Thursday. That’s fundamentally not true, right?
[00:18:52] PF: Right.
[00:18:54] MR: Then the second headwind is, I'm just so tired. Like let's say dancing because, surprisingly, but in a fun way, like dancing seems to be one of those really fun activities that a clear majority like. I would say like 60 or 70 percent. We just don't do anymore, right? So, okay, try taking a dance class during that time, right? For the folks that really do want to reconnect with dancing. The first couple of weeks suck because you're still tired. You're still in that state like, “Oh, plopping down on the couch would be more comfortable.” Not necessarily more fun but it’s more comfortable.
By the third week, it's such an invigorating activity that they realize, okay, now they're looking forward to it. And, two, they're a better person when they show up for work. Then three, oftentimes, once you get a taste for that, like, “Wait a second. I am a better version of myself. I'm also more productive,” then it turns into this upward spiral, and you start to figure out what are those boundaries. I was good at work. I'm going to stop now and go take time off the table for me. Now, it's not just a dance class. It’s a comedy club with a friend and it's – Again, all the things start to fall into place. It's just that initial nudge, like how can you break the inertia of this kind of habituated life that we lead.
[00:20:13] PF: You bring up a really good point about our productivity at work. A lot of times, when we think of having fun, we don't think of it improving our productivity. If anything, we think, well, it's going to cut into my time, and I'm not going to be as productive. So how does it actually make us more productive?
[00:20:30] MR: So the first is I always explain this with a simple math equation because I think it really highlights it, and it's easy for people to understand. When we're living the best version of our self – And this is clear, you can go to Google Scholar, and there's plenty of studies that back me up on this. When we're living with vitality and vigor, then we produce more, right? So think that if you're living a life where you're actually capitalizing on your leisure and feeling like you're fulfilled in all areas of your life, that you can produce two units of output per hour.
So you're working a simple 40-hour work week, but you're – For each one of those, whatever you're doing, creating widgets, or making websites, or writing manuscripts, whatever it is, you're creating two units of that output. People that are working 60 hours a week, so they think they're working hard, but they're really just busy and aren't taking time to recharge their batteries, are working a lot longer. So that might feel good, but each one of those hours are only producing one unit of output.
So the person in scenario A is producing 80 units of output and living a really fun life and just kind of happy with how everything is going. The person in scenario B is creating 60 units of output, thinks they're a hard worker, but isn't having fun at all, and is on a fast track to burnout. Again, that's not just an assertion. That's been backed up. So that's why I think, again, leisure and fun are going to – We're going to start to understand that making sure we protect that is as important as protecting sleep. Again, no one now is telling you not to sleep, right? Like even the most staunch supporters of healthy culture, right?
[00:22:13] PF: So absolutely.
[00:22:15] MR: The second is their amazing research coming out of social science, the person I really liked in this area, her name's Caitlin Woolley, is that when you make activities more fun at work, one, you just do more. Two, obviously, you enjoy going to work a lot more. So there's all sorts of creative ways to do that, and it can be as simple as if you really enjoy the people that you're with during that meeting that needs to take place, just taking it outside of the office, and doing it as a walking meeting to creating like gamified aspects of your work so that you enjoy it more.
It's really going to be specific to how you engage in work, but there's all sorts of really neat ways to make your work more fun. So figuring out what that means to you, so you don't dread it that you're actually like, “Oh, my gosh. I can't wait to do this activity because I've figured out a way.” Another great method is exploring it as an anthropologist like, “Wait, I've done this work the same way for five years. It’s so habituated and boring. That's probably why it's not fun. Could I do it in a totally different way?” Whatever that means to you. A lot of times, just that curiosity of approaching your work in a new fashion can be enough to make it fun.
[00:23:26] PF: That's excellent. Mike, this book is so engaging. It gives us so many entry points to rediscovering fun in our lives. We're going to tell our listeners where they can find it, where they can find some of the great quizzes, so they can identify their fun type and learn more about themselves and having fun. But before we let you go tell us, why is it so important for us to get back to having fun and not put this off anymore?
[00:23:49] MR: One, for our own wellbeing, right? There's a clear path to psychological and physiological benefits, especially as we start to age. Not only that, but we know from Bronnie Ware and others that when we index joyful memories throughout our life, we tend to really enjoy our later years because we have so much to look back on, and we generally have better social nets too, right? Because we've made friends through this amazing thing.
We also know through social contagion theory that when we’re fun, we make everyone around us have more fun and live more joyful lives. So we're not just doing it for ourselves, but we're doing it for the ones that we love. So even if we live this dutiful life, where I want to be selfless because that's not necessarily a poor trait, you could do it for the ones around you because when you're more joyful, you just spread that, right? So it's similar to kindness. Having fun is going to affect all those around you.
Once you really master it as a method, you can start to contribute to the greater good as well. It’s not just about you, but it's really about the world at large and making the world a better place.
[00:24:53] PF: I love that. That is a great place to wrap this up. Thank you so much for coming on the show, explaining it to us, and for writing such a wonderful, insightful, and necessary book.
[00:25:05] MR: Thank you for those kind words, and thank you for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:25:14] PF: That was Mike Rucker, talking about his new book, The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life. If you'd like to learn more about Mike and his book or follow him on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link.
That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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Transcript – Choosing Your Word for the New Year With Matt Derrenbacher
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Choosing Your Word for the New Year With Matt Derrenbacher
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 397 of Live Happy Now. It's the very last episode of 2022, and that means it's a great time to talk about setting our intention for the New Year. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm sitting down with Matt Derrenbacher, a fifth year rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and a chaplain candidate for the US Air Force. Matt is here today to talk about how we can set an intention, not a resolution, for our New Year and how choosing one word to guide us through the year can serve as a touch point in the months to come. Let's have a listen.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:42] PF: Matt, welcome to Live Happy Now.
[00:00:45] MD: Hey, thanks for having me.
[00:00:46] PF: It is a pleasure. You know, I had an idea that I wanted to do something about choosing a word of the year because that's a practice I've had for several years now, and it's been very effective. So I turned to your wife, who is a frequent flyer on Live Happy Now, and she's our resident pet expert, Brittany Derrenbacher, and she said, unbeknownst to me, that this is something that you are very familiar with. I didn't know that choosing a word of the year, setting that intention, that that's actually a practice within the Jewish faith.
[00:01:18] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Just a little bit of context, so there's also a Jewish New Year. There's a few Jewish New Years, but the big one is Rosh Hashanah, which is the start of the year. So Judaism is based on a lunar calendar, which means our dates kind of move around in the secular calendar because that one's based on the sun. So we just have the High Holy Days end of September, early October this year. So during that process, when we have the New Year, and then Yom Kippur, which is like the Day of Atonement, there's one word that is really central to the experience of the New Year, and that is the Hebrew word to teshuvah. It's generally translated as repentance. But that's a terrible translation, a terrible translation.
[00:02:07] PF: Just for the record.
[00:02:09] MD: Because it comes from the word shuv, which is to return. So the word that I've chosen for the past few years, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and through the whole period of Yom Kippur, and the High Holy Day period, is that to shuva, to return. It's really nice and sort of freeing to choose a word, rather than like set resolutions or all of these grand things because it's simple, right? So return, what can I do to return to myself, to return to what I want to be, to set new goals, return to my inner child, to all of these pathways of possibility? Because it's a word, we can keep returning. Yeah. We can return back to it.
[00:03:00] PF: What is the purpose of choosing a word that you want to guide you through the New Year?
[00:03:06] MD: So the purpose of choosing a word, rather than setting, I don't know, some grand sort of resolution is that a word can sort of serve as a mantra in a way, right? So we can continue to go back to this word, and it can look backwards. So when we return to ourselves, we're evaluating what has happened, we're returning, and then we're looking ahead to what we hope for the next few hours, few days, weeks, months, years, whatever it is. But it's freeing. It doesn't put us into a little box. It's an opportunity, rather than a constriction.
[00:03:49] PF: Then unlike a resolution, you can't break it. Like you can't really fail at it the way you can with a resolution, and the failure rate on resolutions are like higher than new businesses. It's just like, man, what is it? Like six weeks into it that something like 80% or some astronomical number, these resolutions have already failed. It seems like with resolutions, once we've missed the boat, people tend to be like, “Oh, okay. I'll just give up and try again next year,” whereas having a word that you keep coming back to is completely different. Is that correct?
[00:04:22] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Just a little more background, the Jewish understanding of time is very cyclical. Our lunar calendar is cyclical. We begin with the year, and then we re-begin with the beginning of the next year. We read the entire Torah, our sacred text, all the way through every single year, and we return back to the beginning. So the beginning of the cycle of Torah and the cycle of the New Year is this opportunity to engage in this act of creation because we as human beings have influence in our world. So we are actively creating the world that we're in and the world we want.
So by choosing a word, we're able to continue to actively participate in that cycle, rather than sort of, well, I missed this resolution. So I’ll get it next year. It gives us something to keep evaluating and reevaluating and jumping back in. That’s important too because we may set some goal or intention for ourselves, and we may realize partway through, this isn't actually what I wanted, or this isn't actually how I want to interact with my world. So let me just recalibrate a little bit and just take another path.
[00:05:37] PF: How does that help us stay motivated or reach a goal in a way? I kind of see it as if you have goals that you want to reach, and I'm not going to set a resolution because that's crazy. I can still set a goal, and then I use this word kind of as that motivation too. That is a practice or the mindset that I'm going to use to achieve what I want to achieve that year.
[00:06:04] MD: Yeah, absolutely. Because a word serves more as an invitation. Let’s break it down a little. So if we think of a resolution, like here's a resolution that people across the world set every year, right? Like this year, I need to lose weight, and I need to be healthy. Okay, great. Now, instead of approaching it that way by just having a word as an invitation, we can sort of reframe that, right?
So we can ask ourselves, instead of commanding ourselves, “I need to do this. I need to do this,” and putting that stress, that anxiety, and creating this sort of overwhelming weight that we're sort of carrying, until we just can't carry it anymore, and we chuck it off, and we say, “Hey. All right, that's it. I'm not doing that resolution this year.”
It's an invitation, so we can say like, “Oh, imagine if this year, instead of all of the time I sat and binge-watched Netflix, imagine if I just broke that up a little bit and did maybe like 30 minutes of exercise and then two hours of Netflix?” It’s an invitation, right? So you're still interacting with that goal that you want to reach, but you're not sort of putting it in this little box that makes it seem almost overwhelming and impossible.
[00:07:27] PF: I like it. I like seeing it that way, and it can help us reset throughout the year when we get off track. The very first time I did this practice of choosing a word, I was in Cincinnati, and I went to a church with a friend. They handed out these little white stones and a Sharpie, and they said, “You're going to choose your word and write on that stone.” So then the idea was like you can keep that stone in front of you, and it becomes a literal touchstone to what you want to accomplish or what you want your mindset to be.
[00:07:58] MD: Yeah, absolutely. I love that because it takes this word and this intention, and it makes it a process of being instead of doing.
[00:08:08] PF: Right, right. One thing that really surprised me was I didn't leave with a word on my stone that day. It's amazing when you sit down to do this. Now, let's see the – Okay, the other people in the church had a little advantage because they knew it was coming. I was a first time flyer at this service, and so I had no idea. They knew. I think they had been putting some thought into it.
For myself, I really had to take it and think about, I mean, for a long time. So let's talk about that. How do you get down? When you want to choose your word that's going to guide you for a new year, what's kind of the process that someone can go through to think about what they want for that year?
[00:08:48] MD: Yeah. That's a phenomenal question. I think that one of the best things we can do is just be intentional and honest with ourselves. So really thinking about and evaluating who we were as a person in the past year and how we feel about that, the things that we wish we could have done differently. Celebrate the things that we did do, that we're proud of, and then hold on to all of that, and sort of use that as the lens in which we view the New Year.
[00:09:19] PF: That's really effective.
[00:09:20] MD: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:22] PF: Because for myself, I know I will brainstorm. I still remember that very first stone, I wrote mindful. I decided like I'm going to be more mindful this year.
[00:09:31] MD: Nice.
[00:09:31] PF: And I've done different things since then in like a year of gratitude. What I've tried to do is every time I select a word, then I decide to put a practice around it. So not just saying I'm going to be more mindful, but it's like, okay, what am I going to do to put that into action? Because I think that's important too that you have that mindset, but then you also need to know what your action plan is that goes behind it.
[00:09:57] MD: Absolutely, this idea of being mindful and stopping and listening. Once we sort of get that feeling, the beginning of that direction, then we can start the doing of creating ritual, of creating different ways to interact with the intention that we've set in a meaningful way that's renewing to us and helps us achieve some of those goals that we set based on the lens of this word that we've chosen.
[00:10:25] PF: That's excellent. What's great about this too is there's like no right or wrong answer. I mean, you shouldn't use a word like annihilation or anything like that. But you can really – It’s like what word works for you and where you're at. I think something that surprised me is how easily those words – I already had my word for 2023 like in October, and it just struck me. I mean, it's not something I was going out like brainstorming what am I going to do. But it just dawned on me at one point like this is what I need to look for in 2023. This is what it needs to be about. So it does start becoming a habit where you incorporate that into your life, and you start figuring out ways to use it.
In terms of reminding us what our word is, like I said that first year, I had it written on a white stone. I did that for a couple years after that, and then I've found other ways that I can symbolize it. Like when I did gratitude, there's a lot of things that say gratitude out there. It’s not hard to find it. So you can incorporate other visuals to remind you. What are some of the things that you could suggest to people so that it is, especially when they first start doing it, the first month or so, where it's like, “Oh, I got to remember to be mindful. I want to remember to incorporate this into my thinking today.” What are some ways that they can remind themselves?
[00:11:46] MD: Yeah, absolutely. So in this way, the Jewish calendar is sort of an advantage because we have like the Jewish New Year in September, October. I mean, it moves around, depending on what cycle of the moon we're in in the year. But then we have a couple of months, and then we have the secular New Year. So there's a couple-of-month period where we can sort of we set an intention, start living out that intention, and then reevaluate, right? Because –
[00:12:14] PF: But you get like a trial run is what you’re saying.
[00:12:16] MD: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:12:18] PF: Like I need to see if this word really works for me.
[00:12:23] MD: Yeah. But, no, I think that's perfect. So maybe in choosing a word, we also think about it as like a trial run because I know commitment can be scary for a lot of people, especially when it involves like personal self-growth and change and introspection. Looking at ourselves is one of the hardest things to do.
So thinking of it like a trial run, okay, so my word is return or my word is listen, and I'm going to try to be more mindful and intentional about listening for the next month. How do I check that? Well, as I set my intention, I go to my calendar one month from today, just put in a little alert. How have I been listening? Then set the alert. Let it go. Because if we forget, if we sort of let it go, the alert pops up. We take that moment to recalibrate and say, “Hmm, I haven't really been listening. Why?”
Then we can start over again, and maybe we need to choose a different word. But the idea is intentional growth within ourselves. So latching on to a new word or sort of reevaluating or thinking about why the word didn't work for us. Or if we get into a really nice groove, like we've doing a really good job of just stopping and listening and meditating. This is really working for me, cool. Then we're reenergized for the rest of the year or to our next checkpoint.
[00:13:48] PF: I like that. I really, really like that. I love using technology as a tool to facilitate that because there's other things we can do. Some people might make a vision board out of it. Some people might journal. There's several things that we can do to kind of supplement it along the way and help build that up as an experience.
[00:14:10] MD: Absolutely. So my word for this year, even though I sort of latched on to the idea of teshuvah, of returning to myself, I realized that the main thing that I wanted to focus on this year was listening. By setting that intention and then choosing that as the theme for my service, which was in December, there's a couple of months to really think about that and just exploring all of the incredible change and transformation that can come from just listening.
[00:14:39] PF: That's powerful because we don't listen in. I mean, we have so much coming at us that it's hard to listen. It's hard to get still and explore a quiet place where we can listen. So that's very cool. What a great word. So how does it change our lives? Like what have you seen in your own life when you're able to focus on a word and give intention to a word, give intention to a year, and let that guide you throughout?
[00:15:04] MD: I think the best thing about being able to choose a word and to just live very mindfully and intentionally is discovering all of the really small things that you'd miss otherwise. So in like this year, my word is listen. I'm going to go back to it. But really sitting and being intentional about not only how I'm feeling but how I feel sitting in this chair right now, sort of the light white noise of the fan that's going on right now. Our voices back and forth, the conversation and sort of the linguistic music that we're creating together, like a lot of these things we kind of just take for granted. Just taking one second to think about, all of the things that we take for granted going on around us can open up the entire world for us to just the sheer beauty of everything.
[00:16:04] PF: That's fantastic. I love that. I love that. What a great way to just kind of sit and become more introspective, as we start the New Year. Thank you for sitting down, having this discussion. This was very insightful.
[00:16:18] MD: Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is great.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:16:25] PF: That was Matt Derrenbacher, talking about setting intentions for the New Year. Speaking of that, I'm bringing in Casey Johnson, our Live Happy E-Commerce Marketing Manager. Casey, thanks for coming to the show.
[00:16:36] CJ: Thanks for having me. It's always good to be back.
[00:16:39] PF: It's always fun to have you on, and I want to talk to you because we have this New Year coming up. I don't know if you've heard of it, but I wanted to find out. Are you a resolutions gal or not?
[00:16:50] CJ: I am, although I like to call them intention. So for me, intentions are like a constellation of purpose and values. So like resolutions and goals tend to be more focused on future outcomes, and intentions are more about how we want to show up in our lives in the present moment. So by shifting this mindset, it helps me channel my energy into what matters most.
[00:17:16] PF: I like that. I like that a lot. That's a great approach to it because I’ve never been a resolutions person. I have been doing this, picking a word for the last at least five years. Maybe a little bit longer than that. That's what Matt and I talked about this week was choosing that word of the year. It's something you and I had kind of talked about a little bit, and I wondered what your thoughts were on that, if you were doing that or if you're like, “Paula, you're crazy,” or what are you thinking about that?
[00:17:44] CJ: Well, to be honest, I haven't really done this before, but I am interested to try it out in the New Year. For me, by like choosing a word, it's kind of like a gentle reminder or like a mini affirmation.
[00:17:55] PF: This will be great. We should check in at the end of the year, as we're looking toward 2024, and see how we did with it.
[00:18:01] CJ: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:18:02] PF: So what else? Like we have New Year starting before we wrap it up. What's going on in the Live Happy Store for the New Year?
[00:18:09] CJ: Yeah. Right now, the Live Happy Store, we have the cutest journals, in my opinion. My favorite at the moment is the Stay Grateful Journal. Fun fact, research shows that by writing down your intentions or goals, it makes you 42% more likely to achieve them.
[00:18:25] PF: That's very specific, Casey.
[00:18:26] CJ: Very specific, 42%.
[00:18:30] PF: I like that. That's very cool. We just send them to store.livehappy.com?
[00:18:34] CJ: Yeah. Head over to store.livehappy.com to shop our happy journals and stationery.
[00:18:39] PF: Awesome. That’s fantastic, Casey. Thank you for sitting down with me, and that is wall we have time for this week. So if you’d like to learn more about Matt or follow him on social media, visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. Then don’t forget, while you’re there, to go to store.livehappy.com and check out the journals Casey was just talking about.
Then we will meet you back here again next year for an all-new episode. So until then, this is Paula Felps and Casey Johnson, remind you to make everyday a happy one.
[END]
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Transcript – Becoming a Happy Leader With Tia Graham
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Becoming a Happy Leader With Tia Graham
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 389 of Live Happy Now. Not everyone feels that work and happiness go hand in hand. But today's guest believes that not only can you find happiness at work, but you must. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm sitting down with Tia Graham, a certified chief happiness officer, Founder of the company Arrive at Happy, and author of the new book, Be a Happy Leader.
Tia has multiple certifications in neuroscience, positive psychology, and leadership coaching, and she works with executives and teams to help create happier workplaces. Today, she's here to teach us how we can find more happiness at work.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:45] PF: Tia, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now.
[00:00:48] TG: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:51] PF: Work has long been a challenge for people, and it's so important because it's something that we spend most of our time doing, and there's a lot of unhappiness in the workplace. I wondered, in your studies, in your research, what made you decide to focus on leaders in the workplace?
[00:01:10] TG: Yes. So prior to starting my company, Arrive at Happy, I was a director of sales and marketing, a leader in the luxury hotel industry and different places in the United States and Europe. So I was a leader of teams for 14 years. Positive leadership was always very, very important to me. I took it as an honor, leading people.
In my 14 years of leadership in the hotel industry, I had some incredible inspirational happy leaders, and I also had the complete opposite. I had some toxic, very negative leaders. One of my big missions is to have more happy leaders in the world of work. Then when I started researching the levels of disengagement with leaders, that was another big motivation. Also, the science of happiness isn't extremely well known within corporate America. So, yeah, lots of motivation to bring this into work.
[00:02:12] PF: What is the difference between unhappiness at the leadership level and unhappiness at the employee level? Have you seen any differentiation?
[00:02:21] TG: So it's actually quite similar, and this is all of the Gallup research. There's a little bit more disengagement at the employee level, but it's pretty close. In terms of people who are actively disengaged in both groups, it's around 13 to 15 percent, so really everyone's interconnected.
[00:02:42] PF: Because you tend to think that leaders, at least from an employee standpoint, employees think, well, they should be happier. They're making more money. They get to take some time off for golf. Whatever it is, it seems like leaders should have it a little bit easier when it comes to happiness. They're in a little bit more comfortable position.
[00:03:00] TG: Yeah. There is some correlation, like how you reference being able to play golf. There is some correlation between how much money you make and how happy you are and having less stress and anxiety about money. Really, some leaders have more time affluence, right? They have more time for friends and family, for hobbies, etc. Also, though, with leadership comes more stress, more anxiety, more pressure. So there's different challenges as well.
[00:03:31] PF: The leaders that you have worked with that you've seen, is that happiness kind of an innate thing, that they are naturally happy people, and they bring it to the workplace? Or is it something that they've had to work at?
[00:03:43] TG: So the research shows, and this aligns exactly with all of the companies that I've been working with over the past six years, is there's a group of people who are more genetically predisposed to be happier, and life circumstances do play a part. But there are some leaders who actively make choices that increase their wellbeing and create sustainable wellbeing.
Then there are some leaders who do not, right? Who do not prioritize their own happiness and focus on whether it be their physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, mental health, psychological, investing in their relationships. As I said, little bit genetically predisposed. But then there are some people who truly make this a priority and focus on it and others who don't.
[00:04:40] PF: What kind of outcomes do you see in the leaders, and what are the differences in the outcomes they see in their workplace?
[00:04:47] TG: So a leader who is happy at work is more productive. So they work faster and they work smarter. They are more creative and innovative, as their brain broadens and builds with more positive emotions. They have higher rates of employee, team member loyalty, less unwanted turnover. Motivation within the team is higher. Sales are higher. There's a direct correlation between sales, and the customer service scores are higher as well. That all translates to the engagement scores, which most companies do engagement surveys once a year.
[00:05:27] PF: There’s actually a cost to the company of unhappiness and stress in the workplace.
[00:05:32] TG: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Whether it be the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, the cost of knowledge drain, when people leave, the cost of customer unhappiness or customers not being satisfied, and then putting that out on social media or choosing not to come back to that business as well. There's this huge phenomenon happening called quiet quitting, where people are doing the bare minimum, right? You think about the cost of productivity there, which directly relates to engagement.
There is also the cost of potential revenue. The research shows that when sales or business development professionals are happy while they're working, they'll sell 37 to 45 percent more. So if you have a lot of your sales force that isn't feeling that great, they're not making as much money for the organization as well.
[00:06:36] PF: So interesting because I think if more people equated the financial outcomes with happiness, they might kind of change the approach. So how do people start changing that mindset? Because, obviously, this has to start at the top for you to change the organization. So how do they start changing that?
[00:06:57] TG: Yes. So the world of work is changing fast and for the better. I'm actually very optimistic about where it's going and how it's going to benefit humans globally. There are some organizations. Like Deloitte, for example, has achieved wellbeing officer at the very top, Jen Fisher. So leaders at the top, if you think about the CEO and the executive team, is first to understand about positive psychology, the science of happiness and the neuroscience behind happiness. Also understand and be motivated by the direct connection between happy employees and business outputs. To see the correlation, how it directly affects the bottom line, right, just what we were talking about earlier.
Then be committed to creating a positive work culture and focusing on supporting the whole being all different aspects of people's lives. In addition to continuing to focus on productivity and output and driving results, focus equally as much on the relationships and how people feel, cultivating a sense of belonging, making sure that people have psychological safety, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and so on. Really investing in leadership training and development, as well as measurement to make sure that people are feeling happy, they're feeling engaged, and that the executive team can see, can be proactive, if there's an area of need, if there's a leader that's not creating this type of culture.
[00:08:41] PF: So what do people do in situations, where maybe you have an organization, and the top leader or the CEO, owner, whatever it is, is not happy, is not going to be happy, is not going to buy into this? How then does a team underneath that start making it happen? Because that's something I have seen a lot of, where you have a leader who is a bully, really. It's a situation where they want things done a certain way, and they don't care about happiness. They don't care about wellbeing. They just want it done. So how does the rest of the team then create an environment that can kind of override that?
[00:09:21] TG: Yes, such a great question. I was in that exact situation when I worked for five hotels in New York City, and the leader above me was just as you described, and then I had a team that worked for me that I truly wanted to create a bubble. So the first step is to know that even though everyone at the top might not be a happy positive leader, it doesn't mean that you can't create a positive culture within your team and to never underestimate the ripple effect that you have with your coworkers and with the people that you work with because emotions are contagious.
Mirror neurons in our brain have us feel the way that other people are feeling around us, whether it be virtual or in person. So just to remember that you truly can have a positive effect on people, and to look at strategies and tools for you to contribute to make the team happy, as well as make yourself happy. There's a wonderful book by Dr. Annie McKee called How to Be Happy at Work. So for anyone listening, who's not necessarily a leader but really wants to increase their happiness at work, there's a lot of great actions in there, proven actions in there for how you can increase your wellbeing, even if maybe the CEO or executives aren't that happy.
[00:10:49] PF: That's great, and that's great to know there's a resource out there for that because that is becoming more and more important for people and especially with Gen Z entering the workforce. I think that's really going to change the way that leaders have to create an environment because Gen Z places such an importance on mental health. You think that is going to help turn this tide too and help us realize like we really need to foster a culture of happiness and creativity?
[00:11:19] TG: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the levels of anxiety and chronic stress, overwhelm, burnout with different generations, even including teenagers, that it's bringing to the forefront and need to focus on mental health. Of course, there's been so much focus on physical health over the years, and yet mental health now is really, really coming into the foreground. Leaders and people need to go farther than maybe suggesting meditation or saying, “Okay, here's a discount to a yoga class where you live,” or that sort of thing. But to really actually create safe spaces, where people can have vulnerable conversations.
I can't help but think of the wonderful Brene Brown of talking about having hard conversations at work. Recently, I heard the CEO of Microsoft speak at this conference called The Future of Work, and he was talking about he shares with his team when he's not doing well mentally. I'm like, “Okay, if the CEO of Microsoft can talk about this when he's feeling extremely stressed or he's feeling very anxious, everyone should be able to.”
So the old paradigm of it's sort of like game face for work, do not show emotions, be strong, have your work face is not working for people right now, right? I don't think that people need to be authentic. Of course, they’ll be professional, but to be authentic and to have vulnerable conversations about how people are really doing.
[00:12:58] PF: Yeah. That is a big shift to turn around, but it is slowly listing toward that side.
[00:13:04] TG: Yes. That will take time.
[00:13:06] PF: It will. What about people who are workers, but they're working from home? So they have a different kind of struggle. How do they apply these things?
[00:13:20] TG: Yeah. So for people who are working at home, there's benefits and, of course, there's challenges, right? So a lot of people are loving that they have more time back, don't necessarily have to commute. Maybe they can get a quick workout in at lunch. Maybe they can eat lunch outside, give their kid a kiss and a hug when they get home from school, etc. So first up I would say is savor and recognize and have gratitude for the blessings that are in your life with that working from home.
Also, recognize that the challenges include feeling more disconnected and some people even feeling isolated, so being intentional about creating human connection moments. So human connection is the number one driver of happiness, right? Spending time with people you care about who care about you. So whether that be video calls, walking meetings, sending little video chats, having that human connection piece is really, really important.
Another potential driver of unhappiness from working at home is sort of that work scope creep. It can creep into every part of your day. So having very clearly defined boundaries of when you’re work and when you're not working and making sure that the habits that help us stay healthy like good sleep, good food, meditating, exercise, time for hobbies, time for learning, spending time with friends and family, loved ones, etc., that you honor those. I recommend scheduling them.
I joke of like I schedule everything. I schedule meditation. I schedule date nights with my husband. If not, it's very easy to just keep working. So, yeah, and I would say at home, as much as you can also incorporate if you can get a standing desk, if you can have a little more movement and keep your body healthy at home, to do that as well. But really focus on the human connection piece.
[00:15:20] PF: Whether you're working at home or in an office, how do you then reach out to someone who is working remotely or another coworker to help them have that same experience? How do you help them along in their happiness journey?
[00:15:33] TG: Yes. So I mean, one just resource that pops in my head is if you have someone on your team who or that you work with that you see is struggling or maybe could use some more happiness and wellbeing, I would highly recommend people take the free Yale Happiness Class by Dr. Laurie Santos. It's a great resource of sort of this introduction to positive psychology or the science of happiness.
Another great resource is the book Happier by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, who I actually studied with for a year. He's a fantastic teacher. I speak on this multiple times a month, and most people aren't that familiar with the science of happiness, so really just starting to share those resources. A very simple question is when you're connecting with people to say, “How are you doing really,” and truly being present for someone that you know is not doing so well, and they're kind of like, “I'm fine,” is I would say open up and share maybe some challenges that you're going through right now. By being vulnerable, they might feel safe to do the same. But I think just checking in with people is really, really important.
[00:16:47] PF: Yeah. It’s something we got away from during the pandemic, and it feels like a lot of people are having trouble going back to that, that check in. Would you say that's what you're seeing?
[00:17:00] TG: Yes, yes. I mean, during the height of the pandemic, when everyone was so isolated, right? It was like this constant, “Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay?” Even though life is more open now, there are a lot more experiences that we can do, there's still a continuum of people feeling lonely and feeling isolated. So I would, yeah, say reach out as much as you can.
[00:17:28] PF: Obviously, technology has made all this possible, our ability to work remotely and connect remotely. But how does technology also negatively affect our happiness and our stress levels?
[00:17:41] TG: Yes. Thank you for bringing this up, such a great question. Yes. So the research shows that too much technology, and especially too much time on social media, increases human anxiety and increases levels of sadness and depression. So it's about being very intentional and cognizant about how and when you're using technology. So in my keynote talks, I talked about being very intentional about the content that you consume.
Obviously, this podcast is a fantastic piece of content. This is a great type of content for people to consume. But if you are watching and checking the news throughout the day on your smartphone, it's going to make you less happy and more anxious. So maybe you have one or two times a day where you check. I tell people never watch the news on television because it makes you 31% more negative for the rest of the day. But stay informed. Read about the news. But it can consume you, and it can make you feel very negative and anxious.
Also, in terms of email, right? Having – Setting boundaries for yourself that – For example, my two young daughters go to sleep around 8:30 PM. I try to have connected time with my husband and not sit and do email from 8:30 to 10:00 at night. I really try and have that as focus on our relationship time. Again, it's being very intentional and also noticing how you feel engaging with the different technology pieces. I tell people, if you get on Facebook and you're full of anger, maybe you need to unfollow a lot of accounts. Or maybe you just need to not get to be on Facebook.
[00:19:39] PF: Go watch a cat video, right?
[00:19:40] TG: Exactly. So, yeah, I say nourish your brain the way you nourish your body.
[00:19:46] PF: It’s so important, especially the emails. I'm glad you brought that up because that gets overwhelming. Being able to put limits and boundaries on that in itself is just a huge thing to be able to do. As we let you go, where do people start? As they walk away from this, what is the one thing that they can do today to apply one of your principles in the workplace to start making it a happier place for them?
[00:20:11] TG: Yes. So one place to start is to increase the amount of specific appreciation that you give to others. People, adults are not acknowledged enough in life or in work. When you give specific appreciation for something that they did for you, a way that they took care of a customer, whatever it is, they are going to be filled with happiness, and you're going to feel happier because you deliver that information, whether it be verbally or written, etc. I would say whatever team you're a part of is increase that type of communication, where people are appreciating each other more, and everyone's happiness will rise.
[00:21:07] PF: That's terrific. Tia, your book gives us a lot to learn. I'm going to tell all our listeners how they can get it. We'll have something on the website about it. But thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. You're doing some really important work, and I'm glad you took 30 minutes out of your day to be able to spend this time with us.
[00:21:25] TG: Oh, thank you. You can't see me right now, but I have a huge smile on my face. So thank you for having me.
[00:21:30] PF: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:21:36] PF: That was Tia Graham, author of Be a Happy Leader. If you'd like to learn more about Tia, follow her on social media, access some her great tools online, or buy her book, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab.
As we begin November and enter the season of giving, Live Happy has a whole new way to share your happiness with others. Brand new in Live Happy Store is our giving plate, which you can use to pay it forward to others. Just fill it with your favorite treats and share it with a neighbor, your kid’s teacher, a coworker, or anyone else in your life you'd like to show appreciation to. The poem on our Live Happy giving plate encourages them to spread joy by doing the same for someone else. You can find it right now in the Live Happy Store at store.livehappy.com.
That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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Achieving a Mindset of Permanent Reinvention
“Changing our internal model of reality requires time to develop, and we require time to grow into it,” says Dee Hock, founder and CEO of VISA, in his foreword to Aidan McCullen’s new book, Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organizations, and Life
Based on his newest book, Undisruptable, ex-pro rugby player, Innovation Consultant and adjunct professor on transformation at Trinity College Business School, Dublin and now bestselling author, Aidan McCullen and I recently discussed creating a mindset for permanent reinvention.
Undisruptable illuminates a path toward what he calls permanent reinvention, for both individuals and organizations. His discussion on how to achieve this evolves around developing a seamlessly flowing mindset. If you’d like an image to go with that, Aidan offers the constant motion conveyed by the infinity icon. Well … there is an old Zen saying comes to mind: Keep one eye on the destination and the other eye on the way. And I get this same vibe in every section of Aidan’s carefully organized (and entertainingly argued!) model for transformation. Change constantly flows from destination to way.
Importantly, Aidan presents the pivot point for permanent change as being able to change before change is necessary. To do this, individuals must tune in to the need for coming change as it exhibits.
Undisruptable is a smart, informative book that smacks with crisp, entertaining analogies that make its points sparkle. It is divided into sixteen chapters each introduced by humorous sketches. One of my favorites pictures a tired mayfly before an enormous sequoia, commenting that the tree has been there his whole life and it has not grown even an inch. In the first sentence of this section, Aidan writes, “a mayfly lives for only two days, while a sequoia tree lives for over one thousand years. Well … the discussion turns into a learning model on perspective.
Each chapter concludes with a section on “Individual Considerations” and notes he calls, “Take Aways.”
I recently had a conversation with Aidan about Undisruptable.
Aidan: “I have had the wonderful privilege to get to the top of my game in Rugby. I choose those words carefully, Joe, because there are 3 kinds of players in sport. There are the talented, the disciplined and then the talented who are disciplined. I was more disciplined than talented. The raw materials at my disposal were limited. I was that kid in high school who was last picked, so my starting point was low. It was discipline, coupled with vision that helped me represent my country and play for the two best clubs in Europe, Toulouse in France, and Leinster in Ireland. My rugby career thought me a formula that I have used ever since: you start with a vision (it evolves), you persist with execution, it has a limited life cycle, you reinvent. Beginnings and endings are woven into the fabric of human existence, so embracing this fact is liberating.
Aside from being a bestselling author, Aidan is the host and founder of the Innovation Show, broadcast globally and on national radio stations in Ireland and Finland.
He is a change consultant, board director and executive coach. He works with organizational teams to improve how they engage and innovate. He is a champion for change who reinvented in his own career after rugby. Aidan has worked in transformation for digital, innovation and now culture and leadership.
Aidan: “I have lived everything I share in the book, the highs and lows of reinvention, the pain of letting go, the joy of embracing of vision, the transience of things.”
Aidan’s life is a profile of changing with change.
Aidan: “With the Innovation Show, I have the distinct opportunity to interview global authors each week. I often interview authors about innovation, neuroscience, and transformation. It all led me to a conclusion that you cannot change business models until you change mental models, you cannot change what people do until you change how they think. I wanted to share this in a story-rich, metaphor-laden format that is digestible to anyone.”
My second favorite section of Undisruptable deals with the speed of change, especially with regard to Artificial Intelligence. We pursued that.
Aidan: “Many organizations get caught out by disruption that they were aware of but did not address. Many disruptions are driven by technology, and at the heart of technological change is exponential speed of change. Exponential is unlike linear change; exponential change is doublings. Think how far you would get if you walked 30 incremental steps, each out about a meter wide? 30 meters, right? How about 30 exponential steps? 30 exponential steps would bring you all the way to the moon and the last step would bring you from the moon right back to earth again. That is the power of exponential change, and it catches us off guard, because we don’t think exponentially.”
And there’s much more on that and I encourage you to go to Undisruptable and discover it.
Aiden’s tips for a more “undistruptable” life
Write down what you can do, unbundle the tasks that make up your job. Write down what you like to do, what parts of your job light you up.
Now see if you can add some new skill that will make your skills viable in a different field. Learn that missing skill now while in a job, make time for it.
When the rug is pulled from under your feet, you will now have another rug to stand on. You will be undisruptable. Rinse, repeat.
Aiden holds that the more of us that are happy, the less discontent we are, the more harmony and the better treatment of each other we will engender.
Joseph Cardillo, Ph.D., is an American writer, philosopher, and bestselling author of The 12 Rules of Attention: How to Avoid Screw-ups, Free Up Headspace, Do More and Be More at Work. Visit: www.josephcardillo.com for more.
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Transcript – Learn How to Ditch the Devices With Florence Ann Romano
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Learn How to Ditch the Devices With Florence Ann Romano
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 380 of Live Happy Now. As we go back to school, it means kids are spending even more time on their screens. So, what's a parent to do?
I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm talking with childcare advocate and author, Florence Ann Romano, about the importance of balancing time on devices. Florence Ann is a big fan of ditching the devices and discovering off-screen play. And she's here today to talk about how parents can get a handle on their children's screen time, and maybe improve their own screen habits in the process.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:39] PF: Florence Anne, welcome to Live Happy Now.
[00:00:42] FAR: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:44] PF: We are headed back to school. And this makes it the perfect time to sit down and talk with you. Because as we head back, it makes managing our children’s screen time even more challenging than maybe during the summer. So, I guess to start, do you have any different guidelines for different age groups about like how much is too much time?
[00:01:05] FAR: It’s really going to depend on the circumstances of the family. You don't have to follow these parameters necessarily and be like, “Okay, if you know they're three-years-old, it's only going to be 30 minutes a day.” I think it depends on what you need to use the technology for. And I've never been someone who is a stickler for rules consistently necessarily. I know that may sound funny. But what I mean by that is you have to be flexible. Depending on the day, depending on what's going on with the kids, you may need a little more screen time than less. And that's okay.
I think people get caught up in this idea that it's balance, balance, balance. And every day is not going to be balanced the way you may define it. Certain days may be more balanced than others. And I think giving ourselves a lot of grace with that is important. Because if you don't, then you're really setting yourself up for failure. So, seeing what the needs of the day are, I think that's the first way to try and vet it.
[00:02:11] PF: Oh, that's a great approach. I was talking to someone yesterday, and we were talking about Gen Z. And he was bringing up the point like when he was growing up, if he wanted to research a paper, he went to the library. If he wanted to talk to a friend, he used to telephone. If he wanted to take a picture, he used a camera. And he's like, “Now, that is all in one device for these children.” So, when people complain about too much screentime, he's like, “They're doing some of the same things we did. They're just doing it all on one device.”
[00:02:39] FAR: Mm-hmm. And isn't that amazing, right? In terms of –
[00:02:41] FAR: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:43] FAR: I know. It feels like there's so much. There's so much that we're technology-wise being inundated with in our face. And it's a lot to sort through. But the idea of having technology is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be educational. It can be very useful. And I think that knowing that we can use it in ways that can be beneficial, that's also a good way to approach it. Because if you're only looking at it as entertainment and not educational, then you can be really hard on yourself about allowing technology. It's just the idea that you're using it as needed. And you're using it in ways that are going to, again, be beneficial to kind of the rhythm of the day. And if you're just sticking your kids in front of the TV or their iPads all day long, then yeah, I would say there's a problem with that. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're just talking about the idea that there needs to be regulation, and then also finding the space for where it can be educational and entertaining.
[00:03:53] PF: Right. And how do you get a handle on screen time when it is? It's not might be anymore. It is required for school. We had a situation in our family where a certain niece was allegedly doing her homework, and it sounded a lot like video games. And turned out that’s what we were doing. And so, how do parents work with that situation? Because, yes, you want to send your child. Go to your room. Do your homework. That's great. How do you make sure they're doing this?
[00:04:23] FAR: Making sure that they have a routine I think is what it comes down to. You want to be able to give them consistency in that sort of way, because I think it helps them become more disciplined. It helps them become more responsible. It also helps them be able to deal with the day. And I think even as adults, we see this. When we're in a routine, when we're productive, when we're –We feel like we're operating at our best selves. And children feel the same way too.
So, if there can be some structure where, “Okay, chores, and homework, and some screen time, and some reading time, those are things that they can depend on then.” And as long as they have the expectation, they're going to be set up for more success in that way because they get used to it. They know. They know what is expected of them. And so, you're teaching them a lot of responsible lessons there.
[00:05:24] PF: That's a really great point, because you can look down the road and see how teaching them to balance these things is going to have effects on their careers and on their relationships down the road.
[00:05:35] FAR: Exactly. And I think it's important for us to remember that we're raising our children because they're going to be adults. They're going to have to have professional relationships. They're going to have careers. They're going to have romantic relationships, all of these things. And so, we're setting them up for success as adults. And they need to learn about critical thinking, and all of those different things, when they're younger, because that's going to inform how they are as, hopefully, a very operational adults.
[00:06:13] PF: That's a great approach. I love that. And one thing that you've talked about, too, are the implications of spending too much time on a screen. And so, I want to deal with in a few ways. And let's start with what it's doing to young brains, if they are just on devices, that they're constantly on a screen, how does it affect their brain development?
[00:06:30] FAR: Well, you want people to think outside the box. Not just children, right? We all see these people that come up with all of these inventions and unbelievable breakthroughs, things like that. It's that’s because they're thinking outside the box. And you go back to what was childhood like for them? What did they learn? How did they play? How are they creative? And that to me is so interesting, because that I think is the real sweetness of it all, is this imaginative play part, where you are allowing the creative juices to flow. You are allowing a child to imagine, and create, and inspire. And the way they do that sometimes is through boredom. The way they do that is by having those tablets taken away from them. Playing with people. Socializing with other kids. Learning how to share. How to be empathetic. All of those different things. I think that leads to a lot of – Shapes the person in a really significant way as they grow up because they were allowed the chance to imagine. And I think we can't de-emphasize that in our lives today, where there's different ways to raise kids, right? Now, versus then, old school, new school.
But I think one thing that is evergreen is that we do need to continue to be able to raise our children with the emphasis on figuring out how their brains work. What they know? What they're passionate about? And then giving them the chance to really express that.
[00:08:11] PF: And are there any tips on play that you can give? So, when you take that screen away, after the screaming stops, what are some ways in play that you can engage them that will really start those brain synapses firing?
[00:08:26] FAR: Well, you can do things that maybe don't necessarily feel like learning. Tricking kids into learning. Maybe you're going to bake. You're going to bake a cake, or cupcakes, or do something like that. You're going to be teaching math skills to them. They don't know it, but they are going to be doing that. And that's fun. It's helping their brains work. It's creative. It's tactile. It's really about kind of masking it sometimes for them.
And also, the option. Giving them options. Making kids feel like they have a little more control than perhaps they think they do. So instead of just saying, “Give me that iPad, and you're doing this.” You could say, “Okay, how about we can either read a book? We can make a pizza? Or we can go swing on the swing set?” Give them options for things that you want them to do that they're all healthy options, get them off their iPads. But make them feel like they're involved in the decision making.
[00:09:25] PF: Oh, that's terrific. I love that. And one thing that you mentioned was empathy. And can we talk for a minute about what too much screentime does for emotional regulation? And how we can start offsetting some of that?
[00:09:40] FAR: The idea of emotional regulation has always been interesting to me, because I think we see a lot of meltdowns happen because of overstimulation. And I grew up with a brother with autism. And Michael still has autism today. But him, as an adult even, we see him being overstimulated and he can be on his iPad a lot, non-technology a lot. And he plays this game called Angry Birds that, oh my gosh, he goes crazy when he loses. And sometimes we have to take that iPad away because it makes him too upset. And I see this even with neurotypical children. It's not going your way, or you’ve just been binging a show. Or you're on social media, and it's starting to make you feel bad about yourself because you're comparing everyone you see on social media. Sometimes you need that break. And I think we can all feel ourselves being overly stimulated by technology sometimes and seeing that sometimes it really is affecting us negatively. And it takes stepping back from it to sometimes realize that that's what's happening.
I know for me, if I've been on the computer all day, or I've been on social media too much. And I can sometimes feel a little depleted. And I'll wonder where that feeling is coming from. And I'm like, “You know what? It's because I've been plugged in too much today. I need to go for a walk. I need to get outside. Or I need to call a girlfriend and have a chit chat,” or whatever it is. But it's about removing yourself from the situation. Changing it up and changing the environment. And you do feel better when you do it.
[00:11:16] PF: 100%. I did that yesterday. I had four-hour-long Zoom calls during the day. And by like five o'clock, I'm like, “I'm going outside. I don't care what I do.” I'm not just – I will walk around in circles. It doesn't matter.
[00:11:30] FAR: Exactly. Right. And that's important, though, for your brain, for your heart, for all of it.
[00:11:35] PF: Yeah, and it's hard with kids. Because when they get into that mode, we know these apps and the games get really addictive. And they just hunker down, and they don't want to go outside. I think that's a big difference. We wanted to go outside. There were three channels, let's face it. I didn't want to stay in and watch it. That was a thing. Like, we wanted to go outside and play and do all these things. But when kids are resistant and reluctant to do that, how can we get them engaged and make it something that they do voluntarily that they start looking forward to?
[00:12:05] FAR: Again, it's about giving them options. It's about allowing them the opportunity to do things that are going to give them some sort of sense of purpose, and entertainment, and joy. And again, giving suggestions, I think is also important too. Parents will say to me all the time, “I can't stand hearing from them that I'm bored.” I’m so tired of hearing that. And I also don't want to have to entertain my kids all the time. And that's very fair. You don't want to have to entertain your kids all the time. And you shouldn't have to.
But, for example, there are these great sensory kits that you can buy, you can make, you can do. Montessori moms like them a lot. And you could set it up for them in the kitchen and bring them in and say, “Here you go. Now, figure out how it works. Create something. Here's a puzzle.” You can give them the tools, but then you can walk away and you can say, “I'm going to come back in 20 minutes. I want to see how you're doing. And show me your great work or whatever it is.” You don't have to sit there with them unnecessarily oversee it. Depending on the age, of course you don't give them anything that's a choking hazard or something like that. But you certainly can walk away and come back and check in and allow them that independence.
[00:13:21] PF: Now, what kind of joy do they have when they start getting the sense of accomplishment offline and start finding these other tactile ways to experience life?
[00:13:31] FAR: It seeing the confidence come from them, where you feel like they're able to figure out a little bit more who they are, and see that their personality is coming through and their interests are coming through. And acknowledging that with your children I think is important too. I would see some of my friends’ kids. They would be on stage at a recital or something like that. And they'd come off and give them flowers. And you'd say, “Oh my gosh! You were smiling so big. You looked like you were having so much fun.” And then that opens the conversation with them for them to elaborate on the fun that they were having. How it made them feel. And you'll always be excited to hear them say – Even if you say to them, “I'm so proud of you. That was so brave. That was so beautiful.” Whatever it was. And hearing them reflect back to you sometimes saying, “I'm proud of myself too.” That's the holy grail there. Allowing a child that moment of self-awareness.
[00:14:34] PF: Oh, that’s beautiful. So, obviously, you're an expert at this. Do you see differences in children who are spending less time on screens and those who are always plugged in?
[00:14:45] FAR: I see that the combination of those things. I always say, everything in moderation. I do find that children that are exposed to a little bit of everything, it makes for a much more fragrant popery in life. You want them to be able to have a lot of different life experiences so they can pick and choose the things in their life that are going to interest them and the ways that they can make a difference in the world.
And so, yes, I think that by just limiting, and also compartmentalizing, and also exposing them to all sorts of different things culturally in society, environmentally, all of that, it just makes for a more well-rounded individual. And us as adults should constantly be challenging ourselves like that, too. We should always be learning and growing. And we should expect the same from adults that we do from children.
[00:15:39] PF: And that's a great point that I wanted to talk about. Because as parents limit screen time for their children, they do kind of need to take stock of their own time being spent on screens. And you talk about how children or even our spouses feel when we are constantly on our devices. Can you talk about how our screen usage affects others?
[00:16:02] FAR: I think it can significantly decrease our social skills. I think that – Look at what happened during COVID. I think we saw – When we were no longer a part of the village. When we weren't with people anymore. And all of a sudden, life started to open up again. And all of us were kind of like, “I kind of liked being in my yoga pants and watching my Netflix, and not having to go to that party.”
And even me, who was a very social person, found myself struggling coming out of COVID having to be social again. Not that I didn't know how to talk to people. But I did find that maybe my skills were a little rusty. Making sure I was being an active listener. Making sure I was being present. And I think that I noticed those skills. Again, they didn't go anywhere. They're still there within me. It's just I didn't have a chance to practice it in a while. We saw that with children too, when they weren't in school. When they did finally go back to the classroom, it was harder to concentrate. Maybe an already shy child now was even more shy because they were able to isolate. They were able to kind of de socialize in some sort of way. So, I think you could see this in many different capacities. And COVID actually was a really good example of how when we do stop socializing, how it can impair you.
[00:17:30] PF: For adults who are in the situation where now they're spending a lot of time on their devices, how can we kind of correct that and become more aware of how much time we as adults are spending on devices?
[00:17:46] FAR: I think it's always difficult for us to preach to our children about getting off technology when we as adults have a really hard time doing that ourselves. Ad walking the walk and talking the talk. I've seen a lot of families be very successful, where they actually use a timer, where all of them have to put their devices away. And it's maybe during dinner time. Or maybe it's after everyone's done with homework, and they're going to have a little family time. And they're all maybe not even going to talk to each other. They're all going to do like a family reading session. Everyone picks up their book. They all gather around, get real snuggly, and read.
Again, it's about understanding that it's not the quantity of the time. It is the quality of the time and also leading by example as adults. Showing them, “This is something I do myself.” Instead of, “When I have some downtime between meetings, or between Zooms, or whatever it is, I pick up my book instead of my phone, and I read maybe a couple chapters. Or I go outside. Or take a walk around the block.” It's showing our spouses, showing our partners, showing our significant others that you also are prioritizing them in that time. You have a half hour free. How about during that half hour, we take a walk around the block together? Or we're going to have lunch together real quick. Or whatever it is. Again, it doesn't have to be the quantity. Because it's very difficult in life to be given quantity of anything when we are all such busy people. But those small moments lead up to big results.
[00:19:19] PF: Yeah, and sometimes we have those great intentions and we say, “That's what I'm going to do.” It's like, Florence Ann is right. I'm going to do that from now on.” And then you get the work text, or things like that happen. So, how do we maintain those boundaries? Because I know so many people who are like, “I've tried. Like, I tried to just set it aside.” But then you're concerned about your mother. You're concerned about work. You're concerned about all these things that you might be missing. So, how do we chill our minds out and except the boundaries that we need to set?
[00:19:51] FAR: Boundaries are hard. Because people assume when you say the word boundaries, that all of a sudden it means that there's rejection or that they're wrong. Or that it’s a dirty word when you say that. People get like their shield up in some sort of way. Communicating, that's the first rule of any good relationship, friendship, romantic relationship. Asking for what you need instead of waiting for the person to fail, because you're expecting them to read your mind.
And so, making your wants, needs, desires aware to the other person, that is going to help you tenfold. Because you're not going to just be sitting there waiting for someone to pick up on your mood, or pick up on your vibe, or again, wait for them to fail you in some way. Ask for what you need. Ask for what you want. But then also, be open minded, enough to hear what they also need. It can't be one sided. And that's every relationship that we have in this world, even with your children. It cannot be one sided as a parent. If you mess up, you need to be able to say I'm sorry to your child the same way you're going to say sorry to your spouse or your friend.
[00:21:03] PF: I know that you have so much great advice. Your website is a wonderful resource. What would you say like the one thing everybody listening out there, if they can just remember one thing from all this? How do we make the school year and our work more about human connection than Internet connections?
[00:21:18] FAR: Well, my favorite line is a quote from Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you did. People forget what you said. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” And that to me is life right there. And I think we need to teach our children that from a young age, that the way we make people feel is important. The way that we're kind. The way that we're compassionate. And the only way that we're really going to be able to do that is if we do unplug from those devices and we are aware of what's going on around us, and who maybe needs help, and how can we be helpful? And so, that's my last message, I suppose, as we go into this new school year that we as adults as well as children should be abiding by.
[00:22:01] PF: I love it. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Like said, you've got a lot of wisdom to impart upon us. We're going to tell people where they can find you. But I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today.
[00:22:12] FAR: Thank you for having me. It was such a joy.
[OUTRO]
[00:22:17] PF: That was Florence Ann Romano, talking about how to create a balance with screen time. If you'd like to learn more about Florence Ann, watch her Windy City Nanny YouTube series, listen to her podcast, Finger Painting the Future, or follow her on social media, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab.
And if you haven't hit our back to school sale yet, make sure you get in on the special deals we're offering. Right now, you can get 20% off our back to school merch when you use the code Happy Learning at the Live Happy Store. Grab some of our bestselling mop top pens, our cheerful coffee mugs, or our fun buttons with positive messages, and get it all at 20% off. Just visit our store at livehappy.com and remember to use the code Happy Learning.
That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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The Impact of Adult Bullying on Children’s Developing Brains
We prefer to talk about child-to-child bullying. Even though it’s a horrendous and serious crisis, it’s still a comfortable topic. However, we become quickly uncomfortable when anyone raises the issue of adult bullying. Advances in brain science have provided us with new understanding that can give us the courage to talk about adults who bully children.
Not long ago, we did not believe a concussion was a problem. In fact, we saw it as a badge of honor for an athlete to go back into competition and show his team and coach what he was made of. We now know that concussions are actually serious brain injuries and must be recovered and repaired before an athlete returns to play.
Likewise, we now know that all forms of bullying and abuse can do serious harm to the brain. This includes: neglecting, ignoring, refusing feedback, walking out on someone, ghosting, excluding, shaming, blaming, using put downs, humiliating, berating, threatening, yelling, swearing, assaulting and all forms of cyber, sexual, and physical abuse.
Extensive, replicated, consensus-building research documents on brain scans how these kinds of bullying behaviors harm the brain. We cannot see the injuries with the naked eye, just like we cannot see the blackening of lungs when individuals smoke. We need a brain scan to make visible the harm to the brain and we need an x-ray to make visible the harm to the lungs. Now that non-invasive technology has revealed to us just how deadly all bullying behaviors are to our brains, we need to change how we conduct ourselves.
Adults — especially those in positions of trust and power over children, such as parents, teachers, and coaches — need to lead the charge. Children’s brains are developing and vulnerable. They are extremely sensitive due to their developmental stages especially from 0 to 5 and from 13 to 25 years. A teen or twenty-something may look like an adult, but their brains are not yet mature and they have heightened sensitivity to their environment and peer relationships.
In a positive, psychologically and physically safe, caring environment, adolescent brains will flourish. In a toxic, psychologically or physically dangerous, bullying environment, their brains will struggle and may suffer damage.
It can be difficult for adults to recognize that they are bullying children and youth. It is challenging because we’ve been raised in a society that normalizes adult bullying while telling children not to do it. When adults bully, we do rarely hold them accountable. In fact, we are more likely to change our terms when adults bully. We say what they are doing is “motivating, giving tough love, rejecting political correctness, being passionate, refusing to be a wuss, toughening kids up for a tough world, breaking down the victim to build them back up better,” and so on. As a society, on a deep level, we still believe the myth that bullying and abuse are a necessary evil to attain greatness, power, and prestige. Perhaps this is why political leaders in society do not feel compelled to coverup blatant bullying behaviors in public or documented on social media.
The myth that bullying is necessary to attain greatness is a myth in the sense that there is no research to back it up. None. In contrast, there is extensive research spanning decades that provides evidence for the long lasting, serious harm to the brain by all forms of bullying and abuse.
A quick way for adults to identify if they are bullying children is to compare how they treat kids to how they treat adults in positions of power over them. Do the parents speak and act the same way with their bosses as they do with their children? Does the coach act and speak to the Athletic Director the same way he does to his child athletes? Does the teacher act and speak the same way to the principal as she does to her students? If not, why not? Do children not deserve the same kind of respect and care? Surely they deserve more because they are sensitive and vulnerable and in a massive power imbalance with the adults in their lives.
Science has informed us that all forms of bullying and abuse harm brains. Now it’s up to us to take this empowering, inspiring knowledge and change our conduct. We can work together to role-model empathy, thoughtfulness, and compassion so that our child populations learn a new way of being in the world, a far healthier, happier, and more high-performing way, grounded in brain science and advanced through the adults concerned by the normalized bullying in society
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Transcript – Using Music to Understand Emotions With Nadine Levitt
Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Using Music to Understand Emotions With Nadine Levitt
[INTRO]
[00:00:04] PF: Thank you for joining us for On a Positive Note. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and each month I'm sitting down with a songwriter, recording artist, or music insider to learn how music can lift our spirits and heal our hearts.
Music education programs are usually designed to teach students who want to be musicians or music teachers. But today's guest sees music education as a way to teach many other valuable life skills.
Nadine Levitt is a mother, former opera singer, and the founder of WURRLYedu, which uses music to teach social-emotional learning skills to children. She sees music as a vehicle for teaching empathy, collaboration, impulse control, and so much more. Today, she's going to tell us how music can help change the way young learners look at the world.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:54] PF: Nadine, welcome to On a Positive Note.
[00:00:57] NL: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:00] PF: Oh, this is so exciting to have you on the show because you're a perfect fit for everything that we're talking about and everything that On a Positive Note represents. So before we dig into that, let's tell the people a little bit about you. I really am interested in knowing how your background as a music artist has led you into the path of music education.
[00:01:21] NL: Yeah. It really is the example that your career these days doesn't have to be a straight line, right? I've been a meandering journey. I've been on –
[00:01:29] PF: Those are the best, aren’t they?
[00:01:32] NL: Absolutely. So I started actually as an international trade lawyer, but I was an opera singer by night. So I always – I love to sing and a lawyer by day. One day, I just realized that arguing about cheese for the last six years was not making me feel fulfilled or connected, but the singing really was. So I kind of went further.
It was actually my now husband, but at the time boyfriend, who really encouraged me to pursue the singing again like full time because he'd come home every day, and I'd be singing for two and a half hours, at least. He said, “If you're serious about it, you should really go back to doing it. You're not getting any younger,” which I didn't really love that comment. But it was true, and so I went and pursued the singing again full time and quit my job and absolutely loved it and actually started of all things in the professional bull riding.
I know that sounds a little random. But I had the opportunity to meet Randy Bernard and a few other people at like a dinner, and they asked me to sing, and I'd had a few wine, so I said absolutely. I got up and I sang. They both asked – Well, the people at the table both asked me if I would sing the national anthem, and one of them for Randy Bernard was at the professional bull riding. I jumped at the chance, and I said, “Absolutely. This will be fantastic.” Being in New Zealand, I didn't know the national anthem for America yet, and I had to figure it out. But my –
[00:02:56] PF: It’s a tricky one.
[00:02:57] NL: I know. The first entree back was actually at Madison Square Garden.
[00:03:01] PF: Oh, my gosh. No pressure whatsoever.
[00:03:03] NL: No pressure, exactly. So right before it went on, somebody said to me, “Don't forget the words. Everyone forgets the words.” So that was kind of a cruel thing to do. I started really my career, and I ended up touring with a professional ball riding a little bit, and I got to sing Nessun Dorma. Then when Randy went to Indi 500, he had me sing on the main stage of the Indi 500. So it was like really amazing, and I got more and more sports sort of opportunities and then started doing my own shows of the wine tasting shows, and finally got the opportunity to sing with – To meet with, I should say, David Foster. I've been wanting –
[00:03:36] PF: Oh, my gosh.
[00:03:37] NL: I've been wanting to meet him forever because I thought he would absolutely understand what I'm about. I really wanted to democratize and sort of make it less exclusive, make opera less exclusive and more inclusive and fun and a little bit different. He absolutely I thought we would understand that, and he did. Finally, I got to meet him through a friend of mine. Honestly, I didn't believe that they could give me this intro, but they did. They really came through, and they said, “You have 20 minutes with him.” I was with him for I think three hours, and he asked me what I was doing that night. Of course, I said nothing, even though I was supposed to be going to a friend's wedding rehearsal dinner.
[00:04:17] PF: You could have missed the wedding for that.
[00:04:19] NL: I know. I know. I was like, “Nothing, nothing.”
[00:04:20] PF: I'll catch the next one.
[00:04:22] NL: Exactly. He asked me if I'd sing that night at a show, so that was amazing. Then I got to do more and more with him and his whole crew and got to sing in Canada, all over the show. It was really fantastic. Then, of course, I had kids, and the last thing I wanted to do was be on the road anymore. But that ultimately led me to – I still saying. But I think when you're not recording, I remember talking to me sort of manager at the time, and he said, “Look, if you're not going to be touring, you don't really get to have a career, and that's because it doesn't work that way.”
I ended up doing one more show where I was doing. It was for a vocal health benefit, and I was opening for Steven Tyler. He had said to me if I can – He asked me to sing one of his songs but in my own opera way. It was that moment, actually, and he won't even probably remember this, but it was a huge moment in my life because that was when I realized I'd been asked to sing these songs quite a lot, and I couldn't just take an karaoke backing track and sort of make it my own. Because every time I tried to do that, all I could hear was this sort of very iconic version.
[00:05:27] PF: Sure, yeah.
[00:05:28] NL: Anything that I tried to do with that sounded really cheesy, just really terrible, the epitome of sort of Popper, if you please. It just wasn't sounding authentic to me, and so I thought about it, and I said, “Well, really, music is about self-expression.” So it's interesting that there's nothing out there that’s kind of, I guess, an Instagram but for music that allows you to take a song, break it down into what I call campfire mode, which is a guitar or a piano, and choose your own instrumentation. Choose your own key or your own speed. If you're a girl singing a guy song, generally speaking, it's always in the wrong key. Or if you want to make it mean something different, it’s amazing how just changing the tempo can really influence the song and the delivery.
I basically made this. Let's call it a karaoke on steroids product that allowed us to do all of those things. It was that product, WURRLY, which ended up getting into schools for some reason because as people were learning songs, they wanted to slow it down. As I said, if they were singing a guy song, they just wanted to be a little bit more creative with it.
[00:06:36] PF: Okay. I’m going to interrupt because I want to come back to WURRLY. But I have to know, first of all, what Steven Tyler song did you sing?
[00:06:44] NL: Oh, Crazy.
[00:06:46] PF: Really? Really?
[00:06:48] NL: Yeah.
[00:06:48] PF: That had to be just an incredible experience. What was the audience doing when they heard your rendition of it?
[00:06:57] NL: I could see him watching, which was kind of crazy, right? He was – I could see him grinning from ear to ear, so that was pretty amazing. The audience, they were super supportive. I don't know. I always feel like that's where you get your energy from in live shows. I just love watching their faces.
[00:07:13] PF: I think what really strikes me about your whole story is what a beautiful example of when you are supposed to be doing something, the path will appear. You take the steps, and it just unfolds in front of you. It doesn't mean you didn't put in a whole lot of work. But the way that it happened, it's not supposed to happen that way. If someone had written a book, and this is the path, they would have said, “Okay, that's fiction there.” There's no way it ever happens like that.
[00:07:41] NL: It's so true, and it felt like that. Actually, that awareness came through while these sort of random events kept happening. I still feel like that because I think other people might not see it all connected. I see everything that I've done has been incredibly connected because every single part of my career from law, to the singing, and all the relationships that I've made, have really now influenced the way that I problem-solve in education. It’s also what allows me to bring all these different people in to, for example, help teachers with PD Reimagined. With all the things that we're doing with WURRLYedu, it’s all working in a really beautiful way together.
[00:08:25] PF: Yeah, yeah. I can see how it's just so interwoven. When you step back and look at it, it's like, “Oh, yeah. That's a beautiful tapestry, and everything fits together as it should.” So I think that is absolutely amazing. So you started WURRLY. As you said, you were a lawyer, so you're like, “This could have some challenges.”
[00:08:45] NL: I was already sitting on a couple of different education boards, so I would go to classrooms, actually, because of those boards and trying to see what worked, what programs worked, what didn't work. I noticed people using WURRLY in the classrooms, and that's kind of what got me excited and also a little worried. I do remember saying to a couple people. I said, “I'm going to build something specific to education, and it'll just be a little side thing, and it'll just be something that's just a safer version of WURRLY.” But I fell way down that rabbit hole, way down that rabbit hole. I got really excited by it because I started to really be driven by the impact we could have.
I noticed very early that there was this sort of conflict in the sense that we don't teach English to be a writer or math to be a mathematician or science to be a scientist. Yet in schools, for some reason, at the very, very outset, we only teach music to be a musician.
[00:09:46] PF: Oh, interesting.
[00:09:48] NL: I just thought, “Wow, that seems to set you up for failure because not every person is going to have the interest or drive to be a musician.” I really dislike it when people start to say, “I'm not musical,” because anyone that actually listens to music and has an opinion about music and enjoys music and can talk about it is innately musical. I also noticed that music is one of these fundamentally sort of human – It has these reactions to it, in the sense that music makes us feel things, right?
The reason it does that often is when you think about the physicality of it and what's happening to your body, these sound waves are going into our ears. They sort of fiddle around with our eardrums, and our eardrums actually move. It’s the only time that that happens without our brains really having instructed something to move. So our brains are trying to play catch up and make sense of this. That's why it starts to sort of recall other memories and so on and so forth. But it's like a very interesting physiological experience, and it makes us feel things. Because of that, it's a really great place to teach social and emotional skills.
[00:10:59] PF: So let's talk about that because I love the fact that you look at music as a way of teaching impulse control, critical thinking, collaboration, all these things that I have not seen that addressed elsewhere. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm just saying I've never seen it. I've never seen anyone approach it like this. So can you talk about some of those skills that music teaches our children?
[00:11:23] NL: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people think that because it's inherently collaborative, and there's definitely a lot of sort of social-emotional learning happening, my opinion on all this is unless you're purposeful about it, unless you're actually pointing it out and signposting it for kids, it's not going to come across as social and emotional learning. So we just wanted to maximize the learning and think about like how in every situation. What’s the most we can teach you, and what are all the things that we can signpost for you?
An example would be if I said, “Hey, Paula. We're going to learn a song.” But if you're not really thinking that you're going to be a musician or you're not interested in that, then subconsciously, all the information that goes in after those words actually goes in the not important right now pile, and it's really, really hard to retain. Whereas if I say, “Hey, Paula. We're going to learn the song,” but this is just problem solving one on one, right? What do we do when we problem solve? Well, we break it down into bite-sized chunks. We recognize patterns. We create a schedule for ourselves as to when we want to complete something by knowing that we're going to have to adjust accordingly. So we do check in with ourselves and adjust our schedule accordingly, and we celebrate our wins along the way.
That is problem solving across the board, not just in music. It’s in other areas of your life, right? So it's a transferable skill. All of our lessons, every single thing that we do from youngest elementary, so on and so forth, where we have kids, not just learn an instrument, but instead just say, “What music do you already like,” and take something that they are already familiar with and enjoy, and let them dig a little deeper through musical concepts to understand why they connect with it.
We still teach about rhythm and tempo and dynamics and all these sort of musical concepts, harmony, melody. We teach them about those concepts but in relation to what they already know and love, if that makes sense.
[00:13:25] PF: Yeah. It is so interesting. What have you seen in children when they start using this program?
[00:13:32] NL: Well, it becomes fun, right? I think it engages their authentic curiosity because I think we've been really conscious of the fact that we don't want it to be in a silo of like, “Here's your one hour for social and emotional learning.” No, right? No, it's integrated and woven into our lives. So simply asking questions like, “What emotions do you think are being reflected in the song,” and letting kids take ownership in that and start talking about what they hear and why, there's not a huge gap then between what they already know and what they've been taught.
I think curiosity requires a couple of things. One, it has to have some kind of prior knowledge. You can't have curiosity for something that is so far away from anything that you know. You kind of just – It’s too hard. Whereas if you have some kind of prior knowledge in the gap between what you already know and what you are learning, it’s not that significant that it's scary, right? But it is challenging. It's the right balance between support and challenge, so to speak. That becomes something that then builds your curiosity, and it becomes a cycle with its own life force. When you go down a rabbit hole, that's basically what's happening.
[00:14:49] PF: So when someone's using WURRLY, are they teaching music or are they teaching life skills?
[00:14:55] NL: Well, it's both, right? So we have general educators, and then a lot of elementary teachers are general educators. It is pretty turnkey so that teachers don't need to necessarily be music teachers. Some modules require a little bit more of that skill. We have, for example, ukulele lessons. We have an amazing partnership all the way through middle school and high school with 1500 Sound Academy, which is all recording and engineering. We have music business, artist branding. So it's career technical sort of education at that higher level.
But, again, in every single lesson, we provide the opportunity for teachers to point out, these are the social and emotional skills that you're learning, blogging, and podcasting. Here are the social and emotional skills that you're learning, and we signpost it in the moment. It's more really so that we maximize the learning. It can also be a general educator who's using music. I should say the arts and video in an integrated way. So I feel very strongly that experiential learning is very successful, and it's really deep learning.
But experiential learning requires us to also reflect on something. In most settings, how can you truly, truly reflect on something accurately without having recorded it?
[00:16:12] PF: Oh, interesting.
[00:16:14] NL: We have a full step learning process of inspire, practice, record, reflect. So the kids, they really see this as a really fun experience where they get to learn something, but it's always something inspiring, something that is relevant to them. Then from there, they get to make it their own. Practice whatever the skill is that they're learning or new information, right? It might be a science thing. It might be the difference between living and nonliving things.
But then we'll give you – Instead of just having the definition, we'll give you a rap song where you can rote learn the definition for what is a living and a nonliving thing, but then also give you the space to make a music video where there's gaps where you get to test yourself and really apply your own knowledge. Then, of course, when you watch that back, you're learning it not just while you're doing it, but you're learning it again when you watch yourself because it's so shocking to see yourself. It’s much deeper learning. I think the retention is much longer.
[00:17:13] PF: How do parents respond to this? Because this is so revolutionary, and I can see that it would have such a profound impact on the students. So what are the parents saying when they see their children learning these other subjects unrelated to music, seemingly, and really thriving and growing?
[00:17:31] NL: Well, so far, we've had only positive feedback, only positive feedback. So interestingly, right before the pandemic, I think we were a little ahead of our time, in the sense that we require Internet, number one. A lot of schools didn't have Internet in the classrooms. They might have had it in the staff rooms or in certain rooms, but they didn't have Internet in the classrooms. A lot of that has changed. Staff, also, I think teachers these days are much more adept at technology.
But one of the things that we noticed during the pandemic, and we've had a mental health crisis looming, even pre-pandemic. It was just exacerbated by the pandemic, I think. What's been interesting is this concept of self-expression. So, yes, we have all the lesson plans that are teacher-led. In every aspect, we never want to replace the teacher. We just want to enhance the teacher's experience and make it easier for the teacher in the classroom.
But we also do through the recording, and we have the largest popular music catalog in K-12 education or fully licensed. So these kids can go and create their own things, either with a blank track or with one of our tracks or with any of these license songs. We have videos there that teachers can share with artists teaching kids how to do a certain skill, whether it's an instrumental or otherwise. So I think it is something that parents see as being something that brings joy and energy. To me, that should be the goal of all education. We should be fostering this sort of concept of a lifelong learner in celebrating curiosity.
[00:19:06] PF: I 100% agree with that. Another thing that struck me as you're talking, anxiety has been so high. Like you said, mental health was not good before the pandemic, and anxiety and depression just skyrocketed during the pandemic. So how can music help in terms of that? How can it help children become more at ease in the world around them because things are still in upheaval? There's still so much turmoil and anxiety going on. So how can that music help them?
[00:19:37] NL: Well, it's interesting. Let me just back up a little bit. So I think one of the things that can happen with emotions, and I do a lot of work with emotions very specifically, is that challenging emotions like anxiety and so forth and the groups that come with anxiety, there's lots of emotions there, can absolutely hijack our brains. So the hippocampus of our brain, the part that basically controls the going in and out of information, the retention and recall of information can only ever inhabit one task at a time.
You can think of it as having a waiting room, so there's different tasks that can be in the waiting room and dip in and out and dip in and out. But it's not at any one time there's only one thing, one task for that hippocampus. So when you have these really challenging emotions like anxiety that's taking over like all these big emotions that are taking over your brain, your hippocampus, there is no way that you can actually intake any other information or recall any other information.
A good example of that is, for example, grief. So when you're feeling grief, you might read the same paragraph 30 times and still not retain a single thing. So the biggest thing is you have to – A, there's a cycle to these. That whatever is driving those really big emotions, you have to interrupt that cycle, right? Whatever is causing you to feel overwhelmed, overwhelmed is just a drowning out of our nervous system because all those really big challenging emotions are vying for attention. So you have to break the cycle somehow.
Music is an amazing way to break that cycle. So to interrupt the cycle, I should say, and stop the drive of these super challenging emotions. The reason it does that is because it makes us feel things. So even if we're feeling a certain emotion, if we listen to certain songs, it will get our attention and interrupt whatever we're feeling with something different.
Now, one of the exercises that we do with WURRLYedu is we have kids think about all the different emotions that they're feeling regularly in a given, I don't know, week, month. We try to have sort of at least 15 emotions that they're exploring, which is, by the way, a really high number, considering a lot of people think of four or five.
[00:21:57] PF: Yeah. We have the basic five. That’s like the food groups or something.
[00:22:00] NL: Exactly. So it's already stretching it there. But then what we do is we have kids pair each emotion with a song. Now, they have what we call an emotional playlist.
[00:22:12] PF: Oh, I love this.
[00:22:12] NL: They can explore like what does it feel like to go from one to another to another because sometimes, like if you're really frustrated and angry and feeling misunderstood, or there's so many different emotions that might go with that, and then you listen to a super happy, confident song, you're going to be irritated by it. But if you start to nudge, like you can create a spectrum of things that you'd love to feel it and see what goes kind of together, and you can create yourself a little landscape for your playlist, and you can start exploring what it feels like to move between these different songs.
It’s a bit like a remote control, where you start to be able to say, “Okay, if I'm really sad, it's important for me to identify and acknowledge my feelings right now or anxiety. I'm feeling really anxious. It's important for me to acknowledge it and think about what it might be signposting for me. But at the same time, I can move out of it.” There are ways to interrupt those cycles, and create space around it. So imagine how great it would be to put on music and just dance, right? Or put on music and just sing and just let yourself really feel certain emotions because you do, I think, healthy processing of emotions. You have to allow yourself to feel things and let them be there, and that's okay, right?
The more that we tend to repress emotions, the more that we try to ignore our emotions, the harder it is, I think. The longer they'll be there. That's a whole another subject. But I think music is a wonderful way to interrupt the cycles of emotions. Remember, emotions come in waves, so anxiety and stress. I think there are definitely ways to use music to put us in certain moods.
[00:24:05] PF: I love what you're doing. This is just absolutely fascinating and so well needed. The skills that you are teaching our children and young people, this is just amazing, and I wish it had been around. I wish you had done this 40 years ago.
[00:24:21] NL: Thank you.
[00:24:22] PF: But we talked about it in schools. What about parents that are listening and maybe their schools don't offer this? Is there a way that they can utilize some of these tools?
[00:24:31] NL: Absolutely. Any parent can actually log on and be a teacher. So it's free to anyone to use, until you want the recording functionality because the recording is only through the student portal. But if you just have the teacher portal, it's actually free to use. So any parents, any teacher can go to WURRLYedu. So they can go and explore. Again, it's a great way, even just for the lessons. We have the practice video in there, so you still get to see all the cool filters and stickers and stuff that you can put in that studio. We try to make it feel very much like a recording studio.
[00:25:06] PF: I think if people use this as a family, I think this could be so changing because, like I said, right now, there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of things going on with people and because of everything going on in the world. What a great tool for families to move through these emotions together.
[00:25:25] NL: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:25:27] PF: Wow. Nadine, what you've done is absolutely incredible. I'm so glad that you came on and talked about this. I'm excited to share the links and more information on our landing page and let people know about you. What is the main thing that you really hope people take away from this conversation and from using WURRLYedu?
[00:25:46] NL: I think it's that awareness, right? Mindfulness is just an awareness and I think encouraging people to be mindful when they're listening to music or playing music. Like really trying to be aware of how it makes you feel, what, and why, I think those are the big things. How does it make you feel and why? How can you use it for all those different – Like what are all the skills that you could be developing and trying to be really purposeful about signposting it for yourself or for your kids?
All those skills like collaboration, problem solving, self-management, planning, self-awareness, emotional regulation, things like that. There are so many pieces to this that unless they're signposted, kind of get wasted. So I just want to encourage people to try and optimize it a little bit in a fun way.
[00:26:36] PF: That's terrific. Nadine, again, thank you for being on the show and for all the fantastic work that you're doing and really changing the world with music.
[00:26:45] NL: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:26:49] PF: That was Nadine Levitt, talking about how music education can teach critical life skills to young learners. If you'd like to learn more about Nadine and WURRLY edu or any of her other programs, just visit livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note and look forward to joining you again next month. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
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