Join us in this episode for heartfelt discussion, laughter, and a shared commitment to consciously cherish and enrich the relationships that bring happiness to our lives.
Recall the last time you initiated a heartfelt connection with someone who crossed your mind and the joy that a simple act brought into your life.
Today, Denise and Sam unwrap the profound joy found in the human connections we nurture, inspired by the insights from "The How of Happiness." We share our own stories of reaching out to old friends and how those moments of kindness can brighten both our days and theirs. It's about those small yet significant actions that reinforce why certain people are part of our journey, and we invite you to reflect on these connections as well.
Denise and Sam get personal about the ways we've incorporated technology-free time, active listening, and expressions of gratitude into our own lives and invite you to do the same, fostering deeper connections with those who matter most, and finding joy in the even little things in life. We also share the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (frequency illusion), drawing attention to the details in life you might have previously overlooked.
We leave you with a gentle nudge to reach out to someone important, reinforcing the power of maintaining those precious bonds. We're setting the stage for next week's deep dive into the book, which offers strategies for coping with stress, hardship, and trauma.
Connect with us on LinkedIn. We would love to hear what is resonating most with you!
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Join us in this episode for heartfelt discussion, laughter, and a shared commitment to consciously cherish and enrich the relationships that bring happiness to our lives.
Recall the last time you initiated a heartfelt connection with someone who crossed your mind and the joy that a simple act brought into your life.
Today, Denise and Sam unwrap the profound joy found in the human connections we nurture, inspired by the insights from "The How of Happiness." We share our own stories of reaching out to old friends and how those moments of kindness can brighten both our days and theirs. It's about those small yet significant actions that reinforce why certain people are part of our journey, and we invite you to reflect on these connections as well.
Denise and Sam get personal about the ways we've incorporated technology-free time, active listening, and expressions of gratitude into our own lives and invite you to do the same, fostering deeper connections with those who matter most, and finding joy in the even little things in life. We also share the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (frequency illusion), drawing attention to the details in life you might have previously overlooked.
We leave you with a gentle nudge to reach out to someone important, reinforcing the power of maintaining those precious bonds. We're setting the stage for next week's deep dive into the book, which offers strategies for coping with stress, hardship, and trauma.
Connect with us on LinkedIn. We would love to hear what is resonating most with you!
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Welcome to what's On your Bookshelf with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell. Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of what's On your Bookshelf. This is a life and leadership podcast where we are living out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves, or, I guess, the pages of the books that we've taken off of our shelves. My name's Denise Russo, I'm here with my friend and co-host, sam Powell, and we are exploring 2024, pursuing happiness, and right now we're in the middle of a book called the Howl of Happiness. I'm so happy to be here with you today, sam. How are you?
Speaker 2:
I'm good. I'm good, I'm happy to be here with you too. This was great, so I'm super excited. Everybody's here and listening to this and you and I were talking about our approach to this book and really how we've been talking about it. And, funny, we're talking about the books on our shelf but we don't really go through them page by page. You and I've gotten to this place where we're really just talking about what we're learning out of the books and I love that right, because it gives people I don't know like these extra ways to have this robust experience of like you all should be reading this book and you know, and listening helps kind of I don't know solidify it.
Speaker 2:
I get so much out of reading and then talking about it with you and thinking about. You know how this works in my life and how I'm bringing it into my consciousness and into my reality and into my actions, and I really hope that you know our listeners are doing the same thing, right? They're reading the book either along with us or after, before and you know, and engaging in this conversation with us, but also with other people too. I keep talking about this book with people here and there. As we're reading, I'm like, oh, did you know? You know? Did you have any idea? I was talking to my, my step sister in law a couple of weeks ago and I was like I'm reading this book about how to move more happy, and she was like, well, how, how do you do that? Tell me all about it. I'm like, girl, I got you, I got a podcast, you can listen to it.
Speaker 1:
I was like, but here's the book, you should read it and then listen this book actually goes along as well with a free class online about happiness, and so if you really want to go deeper love, you can get this free class online. I actually took the class last year, which is what interested me in the book, which is what caused me to put the book on my shelf, which then caused me to say, sam, let's take this book off the shelf and talk about. I love being here together with you because it's like our own little private book club that we've just exposed to anybody to listen to it totally is.
Speaker 2:
Yes, I love that. I love that. I love being part of book clubs is my favorite. My cousin, I used to do one that we called reading between the wines and we would we would all make a dish and do like a dinner and a bottle of wine and talk about like a book we're reading. It was one of my favorite things. We did it I don't know. I think it like our mid 20s it was. It was great. I was like maybe I should bring that back.
Speaker 1:
I was thinking about you the other day. Well, I talked to you almost every day, but so I was thinking about you when I wasn't talking to you because I was reading for I don't read fiction books and you're a big fan of fiction books but we're recording these. If you didn't know, we record these in advance. So we're recording this right now, during the holiday time, and and so during the holiday time I've had quite a bit of time for many reasons, to have to actually sit down and be still, and I've got tons of Christmas books that are like feel good Christmas books that I that every year I take out of a crate and I put up for decoration and then I don't read them. And so this year I was reading one and I've been in this kick where I know I need to be walking on my treadmill well, I really need to walk outside. But I figured if I walk on the treadmill, I can walk and read at the same time without fall, yeah. And so I was reading this book, which was sort of like a hallmark channel, sort of a book about Christmas. It's the whole time I'm reading and I'm like, oh man, sam is gonna love this, but I can't wait to tell her about this book.
Speaker 1:
So if you are listening to these episodes, you've probably gotten the gist that this is a business podcast. We're talking about self development, leadership development, how to live your personal and professional life in congruence, but this particular chapter is about nurturing your social relationships. And and as I read this chapter, sam, all I could think about is I can tell you, with the exception of remembering exactly what you were wearing. I remember exactly the day that I met you. We went to lunch together with our old manager and and a friend of mine as well that was in town. We were visiting where you live. I remember the way that the lunch place looked. I remember exactly where you were sitting. You were sitting to my right.
Speaker 1:
I remember having this conversation and thinking the whole time I love this person that I just met and I can't wait to get to know her. And I didn't know then that we would be able to not only work together but be able to become friends and then leave work together and be able to build this life together, doing these great things like our retreats, doing this podcast, me watching you build your business, talking together about things we care about, like coaching, but even more care about, like our families, and so I'm just so grateful for you, and I think what I got out of this chapter more than anything is that the researcher in the books talks about how, if you can begin today to cultivate your relationships, that you'll receive the gift of positive emotions. And, sam, for me, 2023 was a year where there was a lot of emotions and some of it wasn't so positive, and during those times, the things that were so beautiful as a gift to me was my time being spent with you, and I'm just so grateful for you oh, that's, I love that.
Speaker 2:
Um, yeah, it's funny. I was just talking about that with somebody I did coffee with this week and I was saying that one of the biggest differentiators, I think, in the experience of when you and I both like exited the corporate scene this year and we decided to try and thing, was having A relationship with someone who is going through the same thing but was in A more of a positive mindset about it, about okay, well, what not? Okay? Well, here we are in this situation, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do with it? And I think that I was just, you know, just telling somebody I was like I think one of the biggest differentiators In like, where I'm personally at now was the fact that you are nurtured this relationship and we walk through this together. We called each other up like, okay, I had imposter syndrome today. Okay, I had a freak out and I thought I should go, you know, do do something else with my life today. And you know we're kind of talk through that and work through that and you know it really created and she talks about this in the book of like this upwards spiral. Like Nurturing social relationships, especially good social relationships, creates this upwards spiral where, like I pour into you, you pour into me and then like, together we just become Happier, greater, bigger. You know that sort of a thing and some yeah, it's funny, I was just, I was just talking about, it was yesterday, about what, somebody about that, but yeah, it's. It's so very true, right, that Spending time on relationships makes all all the difference.
Speaker 2:
I remember At the start of twenty twenty three, as we were coming into that new year, we one of my goals at work was to just in life in general, was to reach out to people. When I thought about them, because I kept talking to people and they kept saying I thought about you, we haven't talked in forever, and so what are the? At the start of twenty twenty three, I was like you know what, when I think of someone, I'm going to text them. Or if I think about somebody three times, or you know whatever it is, but like somebody crosses my mind, I'm just gonna text them. Hey, I was thinking about you and that's, it doesn't mean anything more.
Speaker 2:
Sometimes that turned into oh, my gosh, let's catch up and grab coffee, let's do a video chat, let's do a phone call, my gosh, let's do dinner. So sometimes it turned into more, but it was just that tiny little act of nurturing relationships and it changed the game as the year started for me In something, in something totally different. And as I was talking to somebody at a women's event this week, I suggested that to that to her, because she was talking about how she's trying to grow her network and grow, you know, her connection with people and things like that, and I said, you know, one of the easy things I did was Just reach out when you think about them, don't let six months go by, and sometimes we do that happens, right, I woke up today and I was like whoa, six months, that's a lot of time has passed, I haven't talked to somebody, but just those little tiny out reaches, as little tiny, you know, connections really create this like spiral of energy, of positivity in your life.
Speaker 1:
We talk about on this podcast, living this out loud. So I wonder if we couldn't just do that right now. So, if you are able to in a moment, you can pause this recording. If you're not able to pause it, fine, you could do this after the recording. But I wonder if we could just for a moment think about who's the very first person right now that pops into your mind. Someone probably just popped into your mind that you haven't talked to In a while, or that you have a sense of love for that you know you need to reach out to. I can think right now, instantly, of two people and there's probably 200 people, but two faces just popped into my head. I'm going to write them down because when we're done recording this, I'm going to send them a note and I'm going to share with them just how much I care about them.
Speaker 1:
And this, this chapter that we did last week, was about acts of kindness. This chapter is about nurturing the social relationship, and so maybe for you listening, if you want to push pause and just jot that name down, or maybe even send that text and just say you're on my mind and maybe tell them why they're on your mind today, because I actually did this recently with someone that I hadn't talked to in a while, didn't expect anything in return, and the person wrote back and said you don't know how much it meant to me that you reached out to me today. It was a really hard day, and in fact last week last week or week before I was in the car with my kids and this friend of ours from our past shows up on my phone, and so both the kids were in the car with me and that's rare because they're both in college now. So we were just together because it was during a period of time when they were with me, and so I showed them the phone. I was like oh my God, you're never gonna believe who's on the phone right now. And both of the kids are like why is she calling you? Answer the phone, answer the phone.
Speaker 1:
And when I answered the phone, this wonderful, lovely person that I cared so much about that had a space of time with me in my past she said you know, I drove by your old house today and so I had to call you to just tell you that you were on my mind, and it was such a beautiful phone call. At the end she said please, let's meet up together. She's a person who, olivia, used to babysit her son before he was even in school, and so in my mind I could picture this boy as a little boy. And she said you're never gonna believe my son is in eighth grade. And we were like what? No way. And so what it said to me was that I didn't do a good job nurturing that friendship.
Speaker 1:
And yet I think I shared this on an episode of the past where a friend of mine who's one of my best friends, said to me in college people will come into your life for reasons and seasons. It's up to you to be able to embrace the reason and the season that you're in and not worry about what's gonna happen in the future, but just really relish the present. And so in the book, the author was talking about how social relationships are important for social support. So, especially if you're having times of stress or distress or trauma, if you have someone that you can confide in like you were sharing just now with your story, sam, that we together experienced some really big highs and some really perceived significant lows that actually turned out to be really good valleys that we climbed out of.
Speaker 1:
But when you are able to have an emotional connection with someone where you can listen and where you can reassure them and where you can help generate solutions. I think that's what you were sharing, which is you don't wanna just dwell in the negative with someone that is in that valley, but where you can actually do what this book says, which is live a life of happiness, which includes being positive, and it talked about early in the book I think we talked about it a couple episodes ago that this isn't about you know Skittles and rainbows and being like a cheerleader all the time, but it's about how do you find happiness despite your circumstances, and one way to do that is by nurturing your social relationships.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And in here she says that you know, like, the magic number of like really good relationships is like is low, it's really low. It's the magic number is that three friends or companions you can really count on, Three like most people can handle nurturing three relationships, right, like, the bar isn't that high of like, oh gosh, I've gotta have a hundred friends to be happy. It's oh, you just have to have a few different people who really connect with you, really have that strong, strong connection. And what I thought was really interesting about this is, you know, the at the beginning of the book she had talked about hedonic adaptation. Right, like, once we make a lot of money, once we acquire a lot of things, it becomes our new baseline and so we need more and we want more right To like kind of get out of that and so, like that pursuing those things doesn't inevitably lead to happiness, because you just need more and more and more. But relationships do not work that way. All of the studies show that that's not how relationships work. Right, you only need three, three solid, close relationships and you can be very, very happy and very, very content. Most people know more than three people, right, most people do have, probably more than three. But, like, when you think about it, right, who are the people you could call at two in the morning if you got a flat tire somewhere or something happens. Or you know, like, who are those people right and how do you nurture those relationships? Right? It's the 80-20 Pareto rule I think we talked about last time. Right Of like, spend 80% of your energy when it comes to relationships on your 20% of your closest relationships. It will lead you to happiness. Then she gives some great strategies in this one on how to invest in relationships. She uses research by John Goddham, who, it's funny, he just started popping up on my TikTok feed. Really, he started to do that.
Speaker 2:
There's this viral thing going around about the bird test. The test is a relationship test, but if you're driving down the road with somebody, it could be a romantic relationship like a marriage or a partner or something like that. But you can do it with really good friends too. You go my gosh, look at that bird. If the person turns towards you and says, my gosh, where, what is it? They're interested in that random little thing that doesn't matter that you're interested in. Or if they're like whatever, like you're dumb, that's dumb. I'm not looking at a stupid bird. That actually is a predictor, a very strong predictor, of if this relationship will work long-term. It's does your partner, does your person, does your friend turn to you in your interests or do they dismiss you right away? It's his research that does that. He just started popping on my TikTok because of that. When I read this and I saw this, I was like oh, there he is again. There he is again.
Speaker 1:
This is what is it called. It's called a Bader-Meinhal syndrome. It's like if you all of a sudden bought a red car, let's say a red Jeep, and then suddenly you start seeing red Jeeps Everybody. It maybe isn't that the red Jeeps weren't always there, but your conscious mind sees it now, because as soon as you started telling that story, I haven't seen that TikTok, but that story is very similar to what she says in the book about your loving relationships. By the way, if this is one of your top four on your personal assessment, please read this chapter, because it goes into detail about self-awareness and others' awareness. In other words, if your partner isn't doing those things, maybe it's time to take a second look at that. She also said that another strategy we talked about this off mic, which is this is all super common sense, isn't it? We just don't commonly apply it. I guess she said make time. Well, duh, of course you should make time with the people that you love the most, but she said people that invest at least five hours a week and commit to that are happier. Here's how simple this could be. It's something that you could take away from today. Like we shared at the beginning of the episode. We try to live this stuff out loud. It's the same thing John Wooden, his father, taught him that Pat Williams taught us through his book, which was that if you drink deeply from these good books and you apply it, you don't just read it, but you do something about it.
Speaker 1:
What the author said was you could just take five minutes a day. You think about how many minutes are in a day, take five of them and just express gratitude and appreciation for some particular behavior that happens. Then find out one thing that your significant other is going to be doing before they leave the house, like that day, ask them hey, what are you doing today at work, or what's something important that you have on your agenda for today? Then, when they come home, have a little mini reunion about that and a conversation. How often is it that you maybe have a stressful day, it's a hard day. Maybe you have a conflict at work. You try to leave work at work, but there is no such thing as work-life balancers. Work it's a part of your life and often it bleeds into the two, and especially for us, we work in our homes. This was talking about making the time, but also, secondly, to truly listen, because it's one thing to make the time for it, but to really dig in and listen to what the person's saying or maybe not.
Speaker 2:
One of the things that she said in that part was like make time was the first thing. She said. You're going to nurture a relationship, you got to spend time on it, but it was real time it is. You need to have phone-free time, technology-free time with somebody. That's what I think about. One of my favorite things to do in this space is to go out to dinner with people. Sit down with my friends. Nobody's got their phone out. When we're sitting there talking, catching up, it will pull it out to show like, oh my gosh, look at this thing. But it's part of the conversation, it's not. Oh, I'm sitting here scrolling, you're sitting here scrolling.
Speaker 2:
I think about that sometimes in our closest relationship, especially with our family, where it's like, oh my gosh, long day sitting here. There's been plenty of meals where I'm sitting there with my husband and my son and we're all on a device. I'm reading, somebody's doing something else or whatever, and that's like, okay, that happens here and there, sure, but when you're thinking about that time it's got to be focused. I'm looking you in the eye, I'm really talking to you, you're talking to me and we're getting down to some depth in that. That's the big difference and it's funny. It reminds me of the I think it's the fifth one in here about how to do this, but it's sharing an inner self with someone, especially with a romantic partner, like a life partner type of a situation is having shared rituals, shared dreams, shared goals for the future.
Speaker 2:
I was just on LinkedIn yesterday one of the people that I follow who's local to where I live. He's actually part of the Maxwell team. That's how I found him. I found him on the Maxwell team page and I was looking for people in the city name that I was in. So I connected with him like a couple of months ago, but he was talking about how he and his wife sat down for their 2024 family meeting. They went to coffee together and they sat down and they talked about what are we trying to accomplish this year? What are our big three goals? What are our? Let's review our family values, let's review that kind of stuff, and I was like what a wonderful example of spending time together, nurturing the relationship, while you create this shared inner life together. Like you know, they really hit like it was a perfect example of stuff that I had just read in this book and I was like, oh, look at them. They're doing a good job. There it is.
Speaker 1:
This time goes by so fast, doesn't it? Sam and I was thinking. I went to dinner not long ago with my brother and my mom and dad. It was the first time in a super long time that neither one of us had our kids with us and it was just like we were little again, because we were there with our mom and dad and we were joking and we were laughing. The server was getting involved with our conversation and she was having a good time with us.
Speaker 1:
But I recall very clearly, out the corner of my eye, there was a couple sitting across from us and they had their heads in their phones and they were probably let's say maybe in their late 50s, early 60s age-wise, just if I was to guess. So they weren't brand new in their relationship and they were just scrolling on their phones. I don't recall them looking up at each other. I definitely never noticed them speak to each other. So it was almost like they were there having dinner by themselves.
Speaker 1:
And I recall this feeling of the opposite of happiness. I felt sad for them and yet here I was, having this super happy and engaging and loving time with my family, but I kept looking back at this couple and wondering what happened to them, because maybe it was just that day they were just unhappy with each other, but it seemed like that was a pretty normal, that they were just sitting at the same table but not together. And how sad that at one time their relationship probably was different. And now something along the years has changed and the book talks about something that I think is so important for listeners and especially me as I'm trying to really digest this book which is that people who are lonely or are in unhappy relationships like what I perceived with that couple they suffer ill effects depression, anxiety, jealousy, stress and impaired health. So not only is happiness a feeling, but those feelings become transposed into manifesting into real life ill effects in our bodies, maybe even cutting our lives shorter than they could be on the earth.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then it's the opposite of that is true, right, it's the investing in time, really nurturing good relationships, like there's studies in here. She talks about a couple of different communities that having these strong social connections extended life. The average group she did three different groups of people that have unusually above average life expectancy and it's one of the biggest factors they found was that these are very strong socially connected groups and things like that, and so it's the opposite. It's one of those things. It's an upward spiral, but it can also be a downward spiral, right, if you don't connect, if you don't have that, like, we are social creatures. We are born into needing other people to for basic survival, and so that is the foundation of sort of how we work, and we come back to that over and over and over again, and this was interesting.
Speaker 2:
The other couple of things she talks about here and like how to do this, is the expressing gratitude, expressing admiration and then also celebrating good fortune of the people in your life too, right?
Speaker 2:
How many times do we focus on the problems? Do we focus on oh gosh, work was terrible today, and this and that, and the kids are this and that's happening, and my family's this and your family's this and blah, blah blah. But some of what you need to foster that connection is in feeling gratitude for those relationships in your life and expressing that gratitude in a certain way right and celebrating in the successes of what other people need and want in their lives. And that's part of the key, too is not only spending the time, not only cultivating this relationship that's got this kind of inner, shared, inner self about the future and what you want and things like that, but also like fostering the appreciation for each other and for the greatness that each other has. Like you know, those are easy things to do, but you have to be purposeful and take some time for them, you know this chapter, sam talks a lot about how to foster positive personal relationships with your most significant other.
Speaker 1:
What I took away from the chapter as well, though, is that this is very applicable to your professional relationships, mainly on what you just said. It's about self-awareness, and so I would say, as we wrap up this episode today, one of the things that struck me at the end of the chapter on this capitalizing on good fortune was that the author said to take delight in others successes, and so if you ever notice online, let's take LinkedIn. If we're talking to a professional audience, if you notice on LinkedIn that someone is celebrating something, maybe they just got a new job, or maybe they had a success at work that they're sharing. Maybe they wrote an article or a book or a movie or a song, or whatever it is that they did that they've completed something of significance. Take a temperature check on yourself. Do you feel jealous? Do you ignore the post and just pass it by? Do you criticize their good fortune to others by gossiping? Do you maybe just put a like on their post because you kind of just want to see who else is going to be out there and posting on that, or is it that you feel threatened, intimidated, envious.
Speaker 1:
Those are things the book talks about. Those are real things that happen to some people, but this book is about pursuing happiness. So take the reverse. The reverse says if you appreciate and validate the good news of this person that you supposedly do care about because that's why you're linked to them, otherwise let me encourage you to unlink yourself if you really don't want to validate and appreciate and celebrate what that person is going through in their life, or also empathetically be there for them when they're going through something challenging that these things, if you celebrate them, the book says it will not only please that person if you celebrate them, but it will do something to uplift your own conscious happiness within your own self as well, and helping someone else realize their dreams will put even more value into your relationship with them.
Speaker 1:
So that's for me. I think what I took out of this is take the time. If somebody is celebrating something, take the short amount of time to congratulate them, but don't just use those canned little things that have that say congratulations and it's not really from your heart. It's easy to do that. Building and nurturing a social relationship isn't always easy, but it's worth it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I love that. Anything else, sam, you'd like to share before we close up for today?
Speaker 2:
This is one of my favorite ones. I just think that it's one of the ones that really can make a huge difference. I love that upward spiral thought process of right I pour into you, you pour into me, you pour into me, you pour into me, and then together we're both full right all of the time. I just love that concept. So I encourage people to go out and fill each other's cups up, nurture those relationships and you know you will find happiness on the other side of that effort.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely Fill it up, because next week it gets a little tricky. Next week is the happiness activity number six, but this is about developing strategies for coping and managing stress, hardship and trauma. So we take a little bit of a turn next week. I encourage you get a copy of the book. Dive deep into it. Scott is sharing lots of free resources, so let's see what we go through next week when we're talking about something that's a little bit more challenging. We hope you got value from being with us today, sam. I always get value being with you myself, and so friends. Thanks for listening and we encourage you to make sure you take that time to develop and nurture your social relationships. Go ahead and text that person you were thinking about earlier. Let them know that they're on your mind. Thanks for joining us today. This has been another episode of what's On your Bookshelf.