Have you ever found yourself stuck in a happiness rut, where even your favorite activities start to feel like a chore? Join Denise Russo and Samantha Powell, as we share the results of our deep dive into "The How of Happiness," and discuss the power of self-experimentation in keeping the joy alive in our daily routines. In this episode, we explore how integrating happiness activities thoughtfully can prevent them from growing stale, and I recount tales from my music industry days to illustrate how passions can wane and the importance of rekindling that fire.
Relationships are the bedrock of our well-being, and in our conversation, we examine the massive influence they hold over our personal joy. We reflect on our own experiences and the wisdom gleaned from various readings, emphasizing the need for building strong social connections. With anecdotes and insights, we illustrate how shared experiences can amplify our happiness. Furthermore, we dissect the crucial roles of motivation, effort, and commitment in personal growth, and Samantha eloquently dissects how each choice we make is a building block of our identity.
Finally, we tackle the topic of habit formation and its direct impact on happiness, pulling from the lessons in "Atomic Habits" and "The How of Happiness." I reveal my personal strategies for incorporating gratitude seamlessly into my daily life, and we set the stage for our next literary adventure with Mo Gawdat's "Solve for Happy." As we sign off, we express our heartfelt gratitude to you, our listeners, and eagerly invite your thoughts and feedback. Tune in for a blend of storytelling and analysis that promises to equip you with the skills to find joy, even when life throws you curveballs.
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.
Have you ever found yourself stuck in a happiness rut, where even your favorite activities start to feel like a chore? Join Denise Russo and Samantha Powell, as we share the results of our deep dive into "The How of Happiness," and discuss the power of self-experimentation in keeping the joy alive in our daily routines. In this episode, we explore how integrating happiness activities thoughtfully can prevent them from growing stale, and I recount tales from my music industry days to illustrate how passions can wane and the importance of rekindling that fire.
Relationships are the bedrock of our well-being, and in our conversation, we examine the massive influence they hold over our personal joy. We reflect on our own experiences and the wisdom gleaned from various readings, emphasizing the need for building strong social connections. With anecdotes and insights, we illustrate how shared experiences can amplify our happiness. Furthermore, we dissect the crucial roles of motivation, effort, and commitment in personal growth, and Samantha eloquently dissects how each choice we make is a building block of our identity.
Finally, we tackle the topic of habit formation and its direct impact on happiness, pulling from the lessons in "Atomic Habits" and "The How of Happiness." I reveal my personal strategies for incorporating gratitude seamlessly into my daily life, and we set the stage for our next literary adventure with Mo Gawdat's "Solve for Happy." As we sign off, we express our heartfelt gratitude to you, our listeners, and eagerly invite your thoughts and feedback. Tune in for a blend of storytelling and analysis that promises to equip you with the skills to find joy, even when life throws you curveballs.
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 Ruzzo and Samantha Powell.
Speaker 2:
Hi everyone, welcome back. It's 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 bookshelves. We are coming to the close of a really amazing book that we've been exploring for several weeks together. It's the book the how of Happiness. My name is Denise Ruzzo. I'm here with my friends Sam Powell and Sam. I can't believe that we really, truly now really are at the end of this book. We thought we would do it last time.
Speaker 1:
But you know, we just get to talking, and so we're splitting this last section of the book into two, and I think that's perfectly fine. There's more value to people, more time to really think about how to sustain happiness.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. Just to recap on what we've already talked about we've already talked about happiness activities. We've talked about the science of happiness. We've talked about how a lot of this was within your control. 40% of your happiness comes from the things that you can control. Let's talk a little bit today, Sam, about the importance of things like the timing and things that are happening in our life that we know we need to do and how to do it, and why timing is so important. So what really struck you with this part of the book, would you say?
Speaker 1:
I think this was the part that spoke to the practical side of my soul. That was like, okay, I love to be a dreamer and be ultra optimistic and let's like we're going to do all the things. But this was sort of like you know, and we just came from getting into positive states of emotion. You know, all things are very exciting to me. So I'm like, yay, we'll do all the things. And this was like, yeah, but slow down. You can't do it all. You shouldn't do it all.
Speaker 1:
It is not going to help you to design some crazy routine that's like do this and then this and then this. And she's pretty much telling us like this has to be a little bit organic. And this reminded me. We talked about habit stacking with the first of the things, but this also reminded me of habit stacking, of making sure that when you're doing these happiness activities, that you're doing them in a way that feel natural.
Speaker 1:
And it's like, okay, hey, if I'm, you know, in this state, after I finish this one happiness activity, maybe I just flip right over to this other one, because that feels right and it doesn't. It's not, doesn't have to be a daily thing. Maybe it's on Thursdays I do this and then after that I do this other thing, because it has this natural flow to it and I'm not doing something in an, I'm not forcing myself into a schedule. That feels unnatural and that to me was like okay, good, like let's pull me back down to reality and also really think about. This is, if you're going to sustain, it has to make sense for your life and it has to fit in in a way that is sustainable.
Speaker 2:
What you're describing is exactly what this part of the book is about, which is about the importance of self experimentation. So we've learned throughout the book about knowing how to get to a level of happiness. We've learned how to do that through these happiness activities. But now is the practical application. Like you said, and this is not a book that's a one size fits all this is a book that will fit you the way that it fits you best and through that self experimentation we're able to find the variety, the combinations, the way that these things will resonate the most with us. And one of the things that struck me in this part of the book was just about how, if you let the activities become a chore or become mundane, they may no longer bring you happiness. And so it started to make me think about how many years ago I used to work in the music business and I was producing full time. I was producing concerts and special events and festivals and things like that. And to the outside listener they might think, oh, wow, that sounds really amazing and exciting, happy, fun. Well, it got to be where. It was no longer those things, it was a job, and sometimes that job felt very frustrating and discouraging and time intensive and not fun, because the reason I got involved in that industry was because I loved music and I wanted to experience the live art of music. And what I found was in the role that I was having in the production side was I wasn't even hearing the music. I was dealing with customer escalations no different than you and I dealt with later in life in the software business, and I was dealing with things that no longer were bringing me happiness. And I remember the day that I decided to step outside of that part of my career, and it was not a happy day, sam. I was very sad because I was putting aside something that brought me so much joy and so much happiness, but all of that was seemingly sort of dwindling or even fading a little bit, and I needed to find a new source of sustained happiness, and so what I found long story short over time was that I was able to then go back into the music industry.
Speaker 2:
Not very much longer after I left.
Speaker 2:
I came back in, but the difference was I came back in doing it when I wanted it, the way I wanted it, with who I wanted it, with the types of music roles and experiences that I wanted, and so that happiness was then elevated once again to where it was when I first started, because I was able to remove the sort of influences, I guess you can say, that were around it that I didn't like and that sort of led me into my career, based on not just me trying to do it myself, but based on being surrounded by people that believed in what I was trying to do, believed in me and believed in the opportunity to take something and have transferable skills, talents and abilities, where I went into a completely different career when I left the entertainment business.
Speaker 2:
It's sort of segues in the same way with this book about the importance of having strong and meaningful relationships. Every time I talk to you, sam, I feel so much stronger, better and in depth with our friendship together. But one thing I value so much about you is that every time we talk every single time we talk when we talked about how was your week last week your week is always filled with stories about strong and meaningful relationships with your loved ones and friends, and I just love that about you.
Speaker 1:
Thanks, yeah, it's, and that's our third how here is social support. So this you know we're talking about. You've got to have the right timing, you've got to have variety on these activities, but you also should not go it alone and like that, I don't know. So people should be a life motto for everyone. Like nobody goes it alone, nobody gets where they want to get to, all by themselves in a vacuum. There's a single human that has ever done that ever. That's not true. So I that social support and that connection with other people is crucial if you are trying to build this identity of being a happy person.
Speaker 1:
And this reminded me again of like going back to atomic habits. Right, like that was. One of the tips he gave was around getting accountability partners. I was called him accountability buddies, but like getting somebody to help you stay accountable. But this is taking it to not only just the accountability but the actual support. If there's something and one of these activities do you want to do it with someone, it doubles what's going on. Right, like Reading these books all by myself, to be fine, but now that I read them with you and we talk about it, they come to life. I implement them in my actual day to day existence. I wouldn't be doing any of that without the support of you, and you know this environment that you've created. And that's really what she's telling here is If you want to do these activities, find some people to do them with and it will amplify and multiply the results for you and also give you a shot at longevity.
Speaker 2:
I think you're so right on that. It's about the concept of living out loud the pages of these books, and for me, what's interesting about what you just shared was I had already read this book, that's how I had it on my shelf, but none of it came to life the way that it did, and I even took a whole class by the way, a college class that this book was the highlighted book for. It was a good class. The teacher was amazing. She has awesome scores. She actually is from a very well known, reputable college that taught the class, but I didn't have sustained happiness. I just learned something, but I didn't actually apply what I learned, and so being with you over these last many weeks together, not just on this book, but really, it started, I think, for me, even though we did a couple of books in the beginning.
Speaker 2:
Where it started for me, sam was in coach Wooden's book, where he talked about, and I think probably the one principle that sticks out the most for me from those episodes from coach Wooden by Pat Williams was the chapter on drinking deeply from good books, and so that's what we've done here together. But it also took what this fourth how is it took us to have motivation, effort and commitment. Because this is an unusual podcast, I would say in the effort that this is not a podcast to just advertise somebody else's books and give you so many top level 20,000 foot view highlights that you don't get the gist of how this book can actually change your life. This isn't a book about, is not a podcast about books on the shelf. It's about taking the books off of your shelf and living through those books and applying the things you're learning from the books and getting the value from the book that you have.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. And when we think about this fourth, how and you think about motivation and effort and commitment, and I like that, she's buckled but, you know, bucketed those all together because you don't always have motivation. You've got to put in the effort, you've got to have commitment. Right, motivation waxes and wanes, but if it's something that again, like I just brought me back to the time I kept a script talked about getting an identity based habit, I want to be someone who is active versus I want to work out it's who do I want to be that this is in support of and that maintains motivation a lot longer, right, you've got to put in the work you have. This is work, but it's worth it. It is so, so, so incredibly worth it. Then you've got to make sure that you've got commitment to it every day.
Speaker 1:
There's a quote in here by CS Lewis where it says every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little bit different than what it was before. I love that idea of every time you're doing something, every time you make a choice, you're really feeding into this identity, and you're really feeding into this You've got to be committed to that in order to really make this sustainable. Again, that's so nice though these books have worked out. Coming off of the topic habits, we have a ton of information and guides on how to do that really effectively. That was the part of the book where I'm like I'm going to do this because I just learned this.
Speaker 1:
We just have been putting this into practice and now I've lost my teeth every day because of this. So this part is crucially important and you have to know that your feelings of motivation will wane, and when the motivation wanes, you've got to be able to lean back into commitment to re-motivate and all of its effort. Yes, it's a good effort.
Speaker 2:
It's important effort, like you said. I think I shared on a couple episodes ago how I get these threads or reels or whatever you want to call them. They keep changing the word of what it's called, but I keep getting these posts on my social media about how to clean your toilet and your sink. It's like cleaning videos.
Speaker 2:
I was like is it subliminally telling me my house is dirty? I don't know, but it switched at some point from cleaning the bathroom to these people that have this video where it starts by showing them extraordinarily overweight and then they do this thing where they like clap or turn around or something and suddenly they're skinny, but they never tell you how they did it. It's just supposedly supposed to motivate you to be on a diet. So as I was thinking about that example, I ended up getting myself on the page 274 of this book, which reminded me of the how of the motivation, effort and commitment. Is that those videos might be a video of what worked for that person.
Speaker 2:
It doesn't mean that it happened overnight, it doesn't mean that it will happen for you, but they never seem to tell you the secret sauce, and this book does. It's a four-step process. You have to first resolve to undertake a program to become happier. So if you're listening to this podcast and you've gotten this far with us, you have resolved to become a happier person. Just like you said, sam, in Atomic Habits, it's about becoming something and resolving to become that thing person the way that you want to be.
Speaker 2:
The second thing is you have to learn what you need to do.
Speaker 2:
In the case of these little videos I have on my social media, they never teach you how to do what they did.
Speaker 2:
This book teaches you how to do what you need to do and actually gives you 12 activities based on science, based on the assessments that you can do in the privacy of your own space.
Speaker 2:
The third thing that the author says is you have to put in the weekly or even daily effort to do it. I often think about a core memory from Atomic Habits, which was early on in the book, and you talked about how you would just get dressed up each morning as if you were going to work out, even if you didn't actually work out yet, you were dressing up. You had a daily habit to be able to do that, so that you could become a person that was known as someone who was healthy and exercising, and then it became part of your routine not to just dress up but to do it, which is the fourth step that the author talks about in this book, which is you have to commit to the goal for a long period of time, possibly even for the rest of your life, and wouldn't it be much better for all of us to commit to things for a long period of time, perhaps for the rest of our life, that are healthy, healthy habits, healthy eating, healthy living, healthy thinking, healthy relationships with people.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, absolutely. And she says that you know there's a question of like, what if you don't have the time to do this? And she is like many of the happiness activities do not actually require you to make time. They are simply ways of living your life, and I love that thought process of right it is. It comes down to what you just said. You have to resolve that this is what you want to do, right? I want to be happier. I want to end my life knowing that I lived it Happily and I am resolved to make that happen. And so I am simply changing the daily and weekly way that I live my life and I'm committing to that for the rest of it. Right, like that's Again, tom McCabex, james clear, says how long does it take you to form a habit like, if you want it to be a habit, it takes the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:
It takes forever To form the habit. That's what it is and this is the same thing. If you want to be happier, you have to get to that level of commitment that this is what I'm going to do and it is simply way a ways of living your life. It's nothing grandiose, it's nothing. You know that you've got some insane morning routine. It's just that this is what I do. This is always what I do, and really becoming and moving in a way that makes that happen.
Speaker 2:
I think what's important to share with our listeners is that we talk a lot on here, sam, about things that make us happy, and certainly the people in our lives that make us happy, but maybe for someone listening, they're struggling, and maybe they are struggling because they have backslidden, and the book talks about this like what happens If circumstances come into your life, and there's plenty of situations and examples of things that you may experience. But what the author said is that, yeah, there's not really a crisis there. You may feel like you're in crisis, but your complicated life simply was interfered with with something less happy, and that's why positive intelligence and man, the power of coaching, is so critical. Now there's times later in the book that the author talks about the importance of having therapy and clinical interventions for people who are depressed. But let's just talk about regular circumstances in life that maybe you lost some encouragement or you lacked that sort of joy and spark in what you're doing at work or in life, with your relationships, and maybe you just need to renew your motivation.
Speaker 2:
And when, when I read that sentence in the book renew your motivation it made me think about well, you renew your insurance, you renew your tags. It's just a normal transactional thing that you do to continue to live in your house and drive your car. So what's any different than renewing your motivation? And what she says is reconsider the reasons that you want to be happier and get back on track. And it's not just easy, but it's simple. Right, it's not easy, but it's simple, yeah yeah, absolutely, absolutely, this fifth hell.
Speaker 1:
I laughed when we got to it because it happens.
Speaker 1:
I was like, well, we spent a lot of time on habits. I read through her section and it reinforced a ton of what's in atomic habits about how habits form and all that sort of good stuff. But again, it's building up habits that are those automatic things. When I get up in the morning, when she gets up, she puts on a running clothes, like good for her. When I get up, I go get coffee. So it's what is this? Automatic things for you that you do and building habits that build you happiness. How can you make starting these activities a habit? How do you stack them right after something? Maybe when you're sipping that coffee you think of one thing you're grateful for and it's an immediate thing. Again, if you want the manuscript on how to build that up, go back to atomic habits, because that's that instruction manual. This is the instruction manual of how to pick the activities and the habits that you can build that make you happy.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. It's interesting because when we did the episode on atomic habits or the series on atomic habits, we hadn't yet thought about what we wanted our theme for the following year to be. It's been such a divine, perfect orchestration of the order of these books, going from atomic habits into the how of happiness. The last chapter of the how of happiness talks about habits. Oh my gosh, friends, wait until you hear about the next couple of books coming. Sam and I are just astounded, as we're reading through the next books, about how they're fitting together. It really is amazing.
Speaker 1:
Every time I'm like, oh my gosh, I know I can do this because I already learned this other piece. I think I would be struggling, of like, how do I put these activities into my day-to-day? But I'm not struggling because I read atomic habits. It's awesome. The next book you finished it already. You're much faster reader than I am. I'm part way through and that one. Every time I read something I'm like, oh, this is what Denise was talking about this, is it?
Speaker 1:
is. It stacks perfectly on top of it how happiness is done. You now know how to be happy. I know how to be happy and how to put that into our lives.
Speaker 2:
What's next? Absolutely the next book that we're going to be exploring as we wrap up. This book and this series is called Solve for Happy. Solve for Happy Sam's holding it up if you're seeing a clip of this on the video. Solve for Happy was written by Mo Goddard and he used to be the head of technology for Google. We've gone now from James Clear being somebody who wanted to become a Major League Baseball player Well, let's back it up. Coach Woodin was a very famous basketball coach. Then we went to James Clear, who wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. Things in his life happened and he ended up becoming a motivational speaker and not a scientist, but someone who really learned about the science behind habit stacking and habit tracking and picking good habits over bad habits. Then we moved into Psychologies and Psychologists College Professors with the how of Happiness. Now we're moving into a book that was written by a very senior level executive from obviously a very well-known tech company.
Speaker 2:
I'm not going to give out the spoilers on this episode, but let's just suffice to say the book is nothing what you would imagine it's about based on who I just told you that author is. If you've never heard of him or his story. That book is going to help walk us through how to live a life of happiness despite things that happen in our lives that really aren't driving toward happiness. I think that the book is very profound, much different than this book. It's more of a story book, easy to read book, but yet so filled with still sort of like, I guess you would say, the science. I want to know what your thoughts are on that same, because I'm not getting the word right on it. It's not the science, it's maybe the math. Like you are a math person, mogadat is an engineer and he uses the principles of fact math formulas to create solving an equation for happiness, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:
He literally has an equation for happiness which the math leap in me loves.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
And the tagline of the book is engineering your path to joy. And he's an engineer by trade and, yeah, it is a wonderful book and I cannot wait to get that started next week with everyone.
Speaker 2:
Me too. So, as we close out this one, this has been a long journey together. Let's just recap and wrap up this. So, in conclusion for this book, this is about establishing habits through activities that drive 40% of our happiness which that 40% is based on our ownership toward living a life of happiness.
Speaker 2:
It's not just about things that are happening in the past or things that happen or could happen I'm rephrasing that wrong in the future. It's about savoring moments today. It's about living in the moments of today. That's the true essence and purpose of Viki Guy savoring the moments of today.
Speaker 2:
It's about things, like the author says, practicing forgiveness that maybe from something from the past, so that you can move forward. It may be about striving for important life goals that will make a difference in your happiness. Maybe there's something in your career that you don't like or that you want to get better at. Those are the principles of Viki Guy.
Speaker 2:
Are you good at something or are you great at it? Do you like doing what you do or do you love doing what you do? Do you just tolerate the people that you work with or do you really love being around the people that you're with for eight to 10, 12 hours a day, and are you doing something that makes a difference in life, or are you just making widgets or making donuts and waiting for Friday and dreading Monday? This book is about the habits that bring us into a happy life and getting untrapped, unstuck, untethered from the tunnel of what she calls in here unhappy inheritance, pessimistic thoughts, maladaptive habits. I thought those are super powerful words to close out a book that's written about happiness and ending by cementing in our minds these words that we, none of us, should want in our life. Any closing thoughts from you, sam, as we decide to close the chapters of these books into the next.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think that I want to go back to just the cover of the book itself. 40 percent of happiness is within your power to change. This book really does give you a new approach to getting the life that you want, because we all want to be happy at the end of the day. We'll see about that next week as we start the next. He makes the argument that happiness is our default state. Now we know how to do it, we know the approach, we've got it and now we're going to go solve for that and solve the problems out and get to this really sustained happiness. Can't wait.
Speaker 2:
Yes, I'm so happy that we had a chance to do this book together. Listeners, thanks for being with us. We sure appreciate you joining us on these episodes. If this has been valuable to you, please share it with others. We'd love feedback from you. Scott always puts ways for you to get in touch with us in the comments and show notes For these shows. You can also reach out to us on LinkedIn, really looking forward to our time together next week as we solve for happy. Thanks for being with us. My name is Denise Rousseau, on behalf of my friend, samantha Powell. This has been another episode, and the last episode, of this series of what's On your Bookshelf.