Happiness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)
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About this ebook
What is the nature of human happiness, and how do we achieve it in the course of our professional lives? And is it even worth pursuing?
This book explores answers to these questions with research into how happiness is measured, frameworks for personal behaviors, management techniques that build happiness in the workplace—and warnings that highlight where the happiness hype has been overblown.
This volume includes the work of:
This collection of articles includes “Happiness Isn’t the Absence of Negative Feelings” by Jennifer Moss; “Being Happy at Work Matters” by Annie McKee; “The Science Behind the Smile” an interview with Daniel Gilbert by Gardiner Morse; “The Power of Small Wins” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer; “Creating Sustainable Performance” by Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath; “The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work” by André Spice and Carl Cedarström; and “The Happiness Backlash” by Alison Beard.
How to be human at work. The HBR Emotional Intelligence Series features smart, essential reading on the human side of professional life from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Each book in the series offers proven research showing how our emotions impact our work lives, practical advice for managing difficult people and situations, and inspiring essays on what it means to tend to our emotional well-being at work. Uplifting and practical, these books describe the social skills that are critical for ambitious professionals to master.
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review es sin lugar a dudas la referencia más influyente en el sector editorial en temas de gestión y desarrollo de personas y de organizaciones. En sus publicaciones participan investigadores de reconocimiento y prestigio internacional, lo que hace que su catálogo incluya una gran cantidad de obras que se han convertido en best-sellers traducidos a múltiples idiomas.
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Happiness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) - Harvard Business Review
SERIES
1
Happiness Isn’t the Absence of Negative Feelings
By Jennifer Moss
Happiness feels intolerably elusive for many of us. Like fog, you can see it from afar, dense and full of shape. But upon approach, its particles loosen, and suddenly it becomes out of reach, even though it’s all around you.
We put so much emphasis on the pursuit of happiness, but if you stop and think about it, to pursue is to chase something without a guarantee of ever catching it.
Up until about six years ago, I was fervently and ineffectively chasing happiness. My husband, Jim, and I were living in San Jose, California, with our two-year-old son and a second baby on the way. On paper, our life appeared rosy. Still, I couldn’t seem to find the joy. I always felt so guilty about my sadness. My problems were embarrassingly first world.
Then in September 2009, my world tilted. Jim fell severely ill. He was diagnosed with Swine Flu (H1N1) and West Nile virus, then Guillain-Barré Syndrome, due to his compromised immune system.
Jim never worried about death. I did.
When we were told Jim’s illness was letting up, that he’d won this round, we were relieved. When we were told Jim might not walk for some time—likely a year, maybe longer—we were alarmed. We knew this prognosis meant the end of Jim’s career as a pro lacrosse player. What we didn’t know was how we’d pay the medical bills or how much energy Jim would have for parenting.
With 10 weeks to go until the baby arrived, I had very little time to think and reflect. Jim, on the other hand, only had time. He was used to moving at high speeds, both in life and on the field, so minutes passed like hours in the hospital. He was kept busy with physical and occupational therapy, but he was also in need of psychological support.
He put out a note to people in his social networks, asking them for reading suggestions that would help him to mentally heal. Suggestions flowed in. Books and audio tapes were delivered bedside with notes about how they’d helped so much
after whatever difficulty this person had also experienced but overcame.
Jim would spend his days reading motivational books from Tony Robbins and Oprah or watching TED talks, like Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight,
about the impacts of brain trauma. He would analyze spiritual books by Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama. Or review scientific research papers about happiness and gratitude written by researchers Martin Seligman, Shawn Achor, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and many others.
There was a repeated theme throughout all the literature—gratitude. It would weave in and out of the science, the true stories, and the drivers for success. Jim responded by starting a gratitude journal of his own. He got very thankful—thankful for the people who changed his sheets, thankful for the family that would bring him hot meals at dinner. Thankful for the nurse who would encourage him and thankful for the extra attention his rehab team would give him on their own time. (The team once told Jim that they were only putting in extra time because they knew how grateful he was for their efforts.)
He asked that I participate in his approach, and because I wanted to help him to heal so badly and I was seeing how hard it was for him, I tried hard to be in a positive place when I came into his world inside that hospital room. I wasn’t always at my best. I sometimes resented that I couldn’t break down—but after a while I started to see how rapidly he was getting better. And although our paths weren’t congruent, we were making it work. I was "coming