Discover the unseen obstacles to your happiness as we discuss Mo Gawdat's transformative book, "Solve for Happy." Hosts, Sam Powell and Denise Russo, guide you through the exploration of seven perception blind spots—filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggeration. These are the unsuspecting culprits behind the distorted lens through which we often view our world. We also share personal reflections on the profound impact of recognizing and navigating through these mental barriers, offering practical advice on how to expand your awareness for a clearer and happier life.
Feel like negativity sometimes has a stronghold on your mind? We dissect the brain's default to latch onto the bad over the good, diving into how the amygdala plays a pivotal role in this process. You'll hear how, with a little effort and the right tools, we can all learn to encode positive experiences more deeply into our memory. I open up about my mother's journey to recovery, and how an optimistic atmosphere significantly influenced her healing, driving home the point that happiness is a skill set that requires consistent practice.
Ending on a heartwarming note, we delve into the extraordinary power of kindness within the healthcare industry. From moving tales of how a patient's gratitude can soften the hardest of hearts to the ripple effect of compassion in medical settings, this chapter demonstrates that empathy and a caring touch are just as crucial as any medication. Join us as we pledge to carry forward these lessons of positivity, and don't forget to tune in next Wednesday for more enriching conversations designed to steer you towards a happier, more fulfilled life.
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.
Discover the unseen obstacles to your happiness as we discuss Mo Gawdat's transformative book, "Solve for Happy." Hosts, Sam Powell and Denise Russo, guide you through the exploration of seven perception blind spots—filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggeration. These are the unsuspecting culprits behind the distorted lens through which we often view our world. We also share personal reflections on the profound impact of recognizing and navigating through these mental barriers, offering practical advice on how to expand your awareness for a clearer and happier life.
Feel like negativity sometimes has a stronghold on your mind? We dissect the brain's default to latch onto the bad over the good, diving into how the amygdala plays a pivotal role in this process. You'll hear how, with a little effort and the right tools, we can all learn to encode positive experiences more deeply into our memory. I open up about my mother's journey to recovery, and how an optimistic atmosphere significantly influenced her healing, driving home the point that happiness is a skill set that requires consistent practice.
Ending on a heartwarming note, we delve into the extraordinary power of kindness within the healthcare industry. From moving tales of how a patient's gratitude can soften the hardest of hearts to the ripple effect of compassion in medical settings, this chapter demonstrates that empathy and a caring touch are just as crucial as any medication. Join us as we pledge to carry forward these lessons of positivity, and don't forget to tune in next Wednesday for more enriching conversations designed to steer you towards a happier, more fulfilled life.
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.
Speaker 2:
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 bookshelves. My name is Denise Russo. I'm here with my co-host, sam Powell, and the book that we took off of our shelf that we've been reading through the last several weeks is a book called Solve for Happy by Mo Gaudet. He was formerly the chief business officer from Google. It's a really interesting read and we're at the point now where we're halfway through the book, so really looking forward to sharing with you some of what we are about to go through. So I thought first maybe what we would do, sam, is how about we bring the listeners just quickly up to speed on what the six was about, why we are now going into seven, even though this is chapter number nine?
Speaker 1:
Not confusing at all. Yep, so right. This book is really based around is about solving for happy, and there's a happiness equation which is happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events of your life, minus your expectations of how life should behave. And so he says, to solve for the happiness equation, he proposes the happiness model. And he says that the happiness model is to bust the six grand illusions, which is what we've been talking about in the previous episodes right before this, fix the seven blind spots, which is what we're moving on to today, and then hang on to the five ultimate truths, which is where we'll get to. And he calls all of this his happiness model. So we are moving away from the illusions and into the blind spots, and this is chapter nine, but there's a lot in here. All seven blind spots are in this one chapter, so this one, we think, is probably going to end up being a couple episodes, just so we can do the blind spots justice.
Speaker 2:
Yes, because we want to see beyond what we can't see for sure.
Speaker 2:
So these seven blind spots are really things that alter our perception of reality, and this is about widening your view to be able to see more.
Speaker 2:
And so the first chapter is about truths and what happens when we criticize and we judge not just others but ourselves, and then we go into a whole lot of different pieces here. And what it got me to thinking about Sam was if you think about a horse, like a race horse, and they have blinders on and it's mainly to protect them, so you've got the jockey on the horse, the blinders are on so that they don't get spooked when they're seeing other horses coming up on their sides. But then you think about blind spots that you have in your car. So you've got the rear view mirror in your car, but if you don't know there's a blind spot, you also can't see what's coming and it could cause an accident, just like the horse. And so I was thinking with this chapter this is to be able to widen our view, either remove the blind spots or be able to be aware of them so that there's no accidents.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that he explains that really well in just his introduction to this part, where he says that the seven blind spots affect the way our brain processes information and blur our perception of reality. To ensure our survival, the seven blind spots are combined with the brain's tendency to be pessimistic and this interferes with our ability to solve the happiness equation, which makes us suffer needlessly. But the seven blind spots, like you're saying, they can be really positive. They help us focus, they help keep us safe. Right, if we go back to our, you know, primitive brain, right, it's focusing on the danger, getting us out of that, moving us into safety.
Speaker 1:
But in today's modern world and, you know, in the world in which we live, they can cause us to miss things, that cause accidents, that cause problems for us, that cause us to really suffer in a way we don't need to. And so this chapter is really about bringing those blind spots into consciousness, right, recognizing them for what they are, right, you know, finding them in your own life. And it was interesting, and I was. I was really interested when we started this because he has kind of like the list of them at the very beginning, so I read through them really quickly and I'm like, oh, I'm just interested in what these are going to be. And as I read each one of them, I was like, oh yeah, I can definitely see that. Right, I've experienced that, I have worked through that in different places in my life, so I mean, I found these to be very accurate for myself.
Speaker 2:
I think so too. So there's seven. There's seven blind spots, and so we're going to do our best to try to touch on this, but we also want to encourage you to please check this book out. Scott will have a link in the show notes for you to be able to purchase the book and go deep. Go deep like we are, because we're not actually telling you page by page every single thing we read. We're sharing with you our real life, living this out loud by sharing with you. We read it, we digested it, we're living it, and now we're sharing some of our real life experiences of living it through.
Speaker 2:
These seven areas that he highlights are filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions and exaggeration. And when I was looking at that list, Sam, I was thinking to myself those don't sound like blind spots, because you would know if you assume something, you would think that, well, I assume X and you make your mind think a certain way, but you don't know what's outside the frame of what, where you, your thinking is. And so he first started with talking about this one around a blind spot of our tendencies of being grumpy and inspecting your brain, and so he has a really cool storyline and analogy of this about widening your view, and I think actually we were just talking about it, like the, if you think about your side view mirrors on your car. So when you were seeing this, what did it make you think about?
Speaker 1:
It's funny. It made me think about the news, right, like how the news tends to be like some overwhelmingly proportion like pessimistic, right Like it's. I'm a friend that works in, you know, in the news industry and it's just like just makes the world depressing, right, but we tend to gravitate towards that, right, we gravitate towards the gossip, the juicy stuff that is tends to be pretty pessimistic, right. And so when I thought about this, like our brains tend to be grumpy and it's like on top of these blind spots, like we tend to just kind of think pessimistically. But if you think about this from, you know, like a survival standpoint, it's something that helps keep you alive, right, if you're going to assume the worst and if your brain's going to be wired to assume the bad things that are happening, assume you know this will never work out. Or, oh, there's danger right around the corner. Oh, there's probably a tiger in those woods, right, like, not woods, I don't know where tigers live, I guess I need to do some tiger research Then, then that keeps you safe, right, because then you're thinking about okay, if that happens, right then what are you going to do?
Speaker 1:
Right, how many times do you lie awake at night? And you're like, okay, if a burglar comes in my house, right, which the odds are very low of that, probably right, like. But if that happens, what am I going to use to defend myself? How am I going to get people safe? How am I going to do that? Right and like, statistically there's no reason to really think of that. But this, like pet, this, you know thing to be pessimistic, right, and we hear about it on the news, we see this all the time. That, like I get it.
Speaker 2:
I get why our brain functions that way, from, uh, I don't know from a survival standpoint, which I had never thought about before until he started talking about that here yeah, it's kind of like he talks about it in terms of fixing your car, but what you're just describing is this is about fixing our thinking, and so he runs us through an exercise called check and track, and what he basically is talking about is first, you want to notice what's happening around you Like we shared off, mike, before we started the show today, that I have quite a bit of things, as do you, that are happening like around us. So let's not say they're happening right in front of us, but they're happening circumstantially around us. And so the idea first is, with check, you check around and you look to see what you notice. And so I thought it was an interesting exercise because you and I have done this before with even some mindfulness. So if you wanna empty your brain, sometimes you have to fill it with different things, and what I mean by that is we've done an exercise in the past with our clients where we'll say let's just take 30 seconds and in 30 seconds try to notice every single thing that you can see in your room, and then we're going to pause and then write it down. And it's interesting to think about this exercise as well because my mom she broke her hip not long ago and she had to go to a rehab center, and they did this with her to make sure her brain was functioning well after the anesthesia.
Speaker 2:
And so the check was the lady would say OK, angie, I want you to hear these three words, would say, okay, angie, I want you to hear these three words blue ball, swimming pool or whatever the words were. And so then she would totally change the subject and talk about okay, now lift your leg here and walk over there. And later in the conversation she would come back to my mom and say what were the three words. Sometimes my mom couldn't remember all the words, sometimes, lake, you know. So she was close but not right. Until she was right, it was about being able to take notice of what is around you. And then he says to widen your view. And so this exercise, I thought, was pretty intriguing, which is funny because you were just talking about a tiger, and I'm glancing at the page right now and he's, and he mentions a hunter, translating the movement of a branch on a bush as tigers. And so, anyway, that's totally ADHD moment.
Speaker 1:
Probably why I thought about it, because he uses the tiger analogy a bit, but yeah like that. The story in the book is that he, you know, like you notice, as a hunter, like a branch moving, and so your brain automatically jumps to it's a threat, it's a tiger, it's something that's going to come out and get me, and then in reality it turns out it was like a flock of birds that just left right.
Speaker 1:
Like, not threat whatsoever, but that you know that thing keeps you, you know, keep you safe. But yeah, you're right. Right, it's the. This exercise is the check right. What is right, it's the look around you observe and then the track. And the track is what are the thoughts that are going through your head? Right, observe the dialogue that's happening to you and what he's saying is track them like see how many times the thought is positive, See how many times negative.
Speaker 2:
You're going to find that it's overwhelmingly negative, often like as super easy, right, like all you have to do with this exercise, the way he describes it. In fact, I really want to do this exercise today, when we are done with our episode. You take a piece of paper and fold it in half vertically, so it's like two long columns, or just draw a line down, you know, vertically down the page, and on the left hand side you put a plus sign, and on the right hand side side you put a plus sign and on the right hand side you put a minus sign, and the idea is that you start to write down all the thoughts that are coming into your mind and maybe, especially for those of you who are listening, that are going through maybe a challenging experience right now. It could be personally, it could be professionally, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:
You just start jotting down everything that's coming to your mind and you put it either on the happy side or the unhappy side, or the plus side or the minus side, and then what he says is most people don't need to do this test for very long before they notice that the majority of their thoughts naturally sit on the negative side, the cautious side, the judgmental side, the pessimistic side, the fearful side, and this book and this chapter is about solving. To get more on the plus side, which, if you listen to any of our episodes or, let's say, you're new to our podcast, go back and listen to the how of happiness, because if you don't have a lot of pluses, we gave you 12 happiness activities based on an assessment from science and psychologists that will help you really capture, in the most accurate way, ways for you to add more pluses than the minuses. So what else do you want to add to that, sam?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think I just thought this was really interesting, right, like the things that kind of stood out for me is you want to add to that, sam? Yeah, I think I just thought this was really interesting, right? Like the things that kind of stood out for me is you do this exercise? Is that you know we tend to have, we tend to think pretty negatively, right, and we tend to give greater weight to the negative thoughts. We tend to dictate more of our brain resources to negative information and we tend to remember negative traits more easily and recall negative events more.
Speaker 1:
You know more often, and so you know this just kind of goes to show you that our brain, for survival reasons, for good reasons, does tend to skew us in the negative.
Speaker 1:
And so you have to know, right, and we're talking about blind spots here. But knowing that, like from the outset, before we even get to these blind spots, I think is is a powerful thing to understand is that you might be in a negative, you know, train of thinking or in a negative you know thought process, but that's just because of your brain's trying to survive, it's trying to keep you safe, and that doesn't really mean that that's reality, right? It just means that those are the things you're happening to remember, right, and so this is really about helping you see past that and see beyond that like default state that we sit in, you know, which I think is really, really important. And I do like that this comes before we even get to the blind spots because like, okay, right, just because that negative thought goes through my head, just because everything seems terrible right now, just because you know the world is such a you know dumpster fire at the moment, blah like all these thoughts that go behind this. So it's not even just a perception, it's scientific.
Speaker 2:
So he goes on to say that our amygdala, which is the front part in our brain, it uses approximately two-thirds of its neurons, and we're talking billions here. Two-thirds of the neurons detect negative experiences and once your brain starts looking for bad news, it stores it in your long-term memory immediately. So that goes back to what even you were saying about newscasters. Newscasters know that, so they play on that because their ratings go up. That's how they make money and bring in advertisers. So if you watch any of this sensationalized news channels that are out there on any side of any long term memory to occur, which is probably why when you do something like happiness coaching or you do positive intelligence exercises, or maybe even if you go do something like go silently outside and express yourself with gratitude, with sunshine and smell roses, if you do it for 12 seconds, then it only then can go into your brain as an experience. Isn't that interesting that it takes that long to cement the positive but it says immediately the negative will store.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that stood out for me too. I thought that was fascinating, right, and it shows you that you have to work harder, and it feels like it reinforces the happiness activities from the how of happiness that we did. Right, because, like, you have to work and happiness is not something that just comes at you, it's something that you have to work for because you're kind of set up against it, right, like you. You you sort of are because it's a survival thing, right, like you're just trying to stay safe and in an effort to stay safe, that doesn't exactly equate to happiness at the end of the day, right, and so I thought that was super fascinating. It's like I actually do need to do these happiness activities.
Speaker 1:
Right, and it makes sense as to why the research all points to you have to do something, because the longer you spend in that, then that commits it to your brain, right, if I'm, if I'm going out and you know spending time in gratitude or doing acts of service or you know any of those good things, then I'm spending them more than 12 seconds there, right, and rather than the negative stuff that's like, oh, that's a threat, let's file that away. Let's make sure we keep that, you know handy, in case, you know, this random thing ever happens and we need to know how to you know create a knife out of a you know whatever activity, you know MacGyver, something up here, but you know you've got to spend time to make that conversion. I just thought that was super fascinating and I thought, man, that really makes sense as to why you've got to spend action and activities in the space to really increase your happiness level.
Speaker 2:
I'll tell you what I was sharing with you about my mom being in the rehab center for her hip, and the people there were so lovely, they were so nice to her and at the end of her stay there, before she came home, they said Angie, we're so impressed by how quickly you were able to heal and recover. But I think that from the very first day we got there, some of the CNAs, like the nursing assistants, they were so positive with my mom, like they wouldn't let her criticize, judge, complain, talk about how this hurts and I'm never going to get better. Nothing like that. They would come in and they would say you look so beautiful today. It's going to be awesome. We're going to walk down the hallway, the weather is so amazing and you're getting stronger every day.
Speaker 2:
And she got to the point where what she would have these certain nurses that she really enjoyed being around. You could tell instantly that her demeanor was so happy that she ended up that you'll laugh. But my mom is the most loving, kind, amazing person I've ever known. So by probably the fourth day of three weeks in this facility, she would tell the nurses, instead of saying like bye, see you later, She'd be be like I love you.
Speaker 2:
And I was like mom, they're nurses, you're telling the nurses you love them. And she said I want them to feel good about themselves. So by the end, I swear to you it was like a retirement party. When my mom was checking out, there were lines of nurses coming to my mom to hug her, to wish her well. There was a couple nurses even crying. That said to my mom you're the best of all the patients that we've ever had, and so you think about it. Something they did for her that she was able to give back to them cause this like ignited experience of joy. All just by being aware of your surroundings and being conscious about the way you treat people.
Speaker 1:
Gosh, that's really great and I love that because in that environment right, like you know, I can remember like broke my foot in college and just like the depression that came along with that, I'm just trying to like it's physically exhausting to try to do stuff Right and like it's so hard but to have people in the role who are there, you know, helping you physically with you know the nurses and things like that, but being there for you in that encouraging positive space like gosh, it should almost be a requirement for the job, right, like it should be part of it, because it did right, it created this whole cycle of then her building them up, them building her up, and it just created this positive upward spiral. That is like man, that's a great, that's a great story. That's something that, like I don't know, all nurse, all nursing students should have to study that Maybe they do but like that's you know that's really.
Speaker 2:
Maybe we should try to push that all nurses should learn emotional intelligence positive intelligence and happiness.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, absolutely. I think. Nurses, I think a lot of times naturally you're good at it I always feel like I don't know sort of their vibe. Maybe we need to like get onto the doctors and stuff to get them get everybody on board.
Speaker 2:
I think you're right. I'll tell you another quick story, because I know where we got about, maybe 10 minutes or so left a little shorter, but in the book he talks about how the negatives we face are the exceptions that always interrupt our norms, but that life is almost entirely made up of positives. So, going back to my mom, there was this one nurse, sam. I mean, she was like nurse ratchet, like she was not nice and she was never happy and she was always grumpy. And if my mom would push the button I only know this because I have, for that, three weeks like, literally, was living in this hospital with my mom so this woman would come in and she would almost be like what, what do you want? Why did you press the button? And she was just never happy, and so it turned out that my mom, though, is the opposite. So every time the woman would come in, I remember, for the first couple of days, she'd come in and my mom would would say thank you so much for serving in this way. It really means a lot to me and the lady would be like like grumpy and go out, and so she just feels like grump and so, anyways, maybe around. I'm going to guess it was probably a week into this. This was the nighttime nurse. So the nurse comes in and my mom tries a small chat with all these nurses and finally we're like mom, they have a job to do.
Speaker 2:
But this one day I'll tell you exactly what it was. It was. It was the day before Easter and the reason I know that is because my mom and I because my mom couldn't check out of the rehab center, she wanted to watch church because she wouldn't be able to go to church with us the next day for Easter. So my mom and I were laying on her hospital bed watching church and the woman walked in all grumpy, like throwing pills all over the place, checking the blood pressure, and so she noticed what we were doing and I swear to you, sam, like not an hour later the lady came back in you would almost think her entire demeanor had changed and she said, still a little bit like on edge, she said Well, I just moved here and you know, I noticed that you were watching church and I've been looking for a church, like she said it like that. And so my mom, being my mom, she was like oh, would you like to sit down and and we can talk about it. And the lady was not. You know she was working so she didn't want to. But that night she came in at least three more times and started revealing stuff. Like my parents they live about an hour away. I don't get to see them as much as I would like and then she started talking about a tattoo that she has on her arm.
Speaker 2:
Now, up till this point, we're talking weeks that my mom had seen this woman, but there was one thing that took her out of her norm, in her negative norm, that snapped her back in, and by the end, when it was time for my mom to check out of that nursing home, sam, that particular nurse, even came to my mom and said some really nice things. So this is really about just pausing and thinking where can you add value to other people? Because you don't know what other people are going through and if you're not happy, you are not going to get happy really from other people. But you could cause your own happiness by the way you do treat other people yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
I love that and yeah, and, and it's funny, we can get caught in that spiral of negativity, right, like I mean I've been that nurse at times in my life, right, where it's like things are going on, it's like let me just grump from thing to thing to thing, but something breaks you out of it, right, and like I don't know, like I just think that's a like to be the person that helps people break out of that through. You know, like I mean I think of like, oh gosh, my sister works at a coffee shop, right, and you know, you see, in the customer service world, you see all kinds of kinds right, she tells me about customers that come through and all that sort of stuff. And you know, and a lot of the interactions are negative. It's people who are like just give my coffee, blah, blah, blah, like, move on, move on. But then there'll be people who come in and they're like, oh my gosh, I hope you have a great day and it like it breaks that spiral of negativity that we all get, you know, we all get caught up in.
Speaker 1:
And you know, and he's right, he said, you know, like you mentioned, as you're telling the story, that life is almost entirely made of positives, like just our health in general. Right Like we take for granted when things are fine, that things are fine. Right, like you, it's. You never noticed the absence of problems, right Like, oh, my arm doesn't hurt, that's great. If I hurt my arm tomorrow I'll be like oh my God, my arm is hurting, it's terrible. I can't do anything, I broke it. I can't write, I can't, you know, use the computer, blah, blah, blah, blah. But 99% of the time my arm's been functioning just fine, right, and it's like and it's only when there's that negative thing happening that you can look back and say actually, most of the time things are really good. But when there's that absence of problems, we tend to think of that as neutral instead of the positive thing that it is right.
Speaker 1:
The fact that, like, my body's working really well, that's great, like that's that's actually like feels like a miracle, like when you, if you really understand how complex all the systems in your body are to like bring you into this life and, you know, make things like it's amazing, but you don't live that. You don't live that every day, right? You notice like, oh my gosh, I have a hangnail. Oh my gosh, that day. You don't live that every day, right? You notice like, oh my gosh, I have a hangnail. Oh my gosh, you know, I have a headache, I've got a migraine, I've got these things, and that's that's where we tend to focus. And so it made me think of that, that, like, life is almost entirely made of positives.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah wouldn't it be amazing if we could live our life overreacting to happy things?
Speaker 1:
it feels kind of exhausting though, like it would be, be it would be great, but like it also feels sort of exhausting, which is weird.
Speaker 2:
It's weird, right, but yeah, in an instant we overreact to all the negative things. Exactly, which is also exhausting.
Speaker 1:
I don't know. It's interesting, it's super interesting.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I wonder if maybe next week we talk about the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That's the name of one of the parts of this chapter and it does get into that a little bit about how the things we think. Are they really that real and what are the filters that we put into our mind that cause our unhappiness?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah. So next week we'll get into the actual. You know, like that, this chapter is long and we didn't even get into the actual seven blind spots yet. This is all the. You have to understand the context of how your brain works before you can get into these filters.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, next week we'll talk about those and I talked off the microphone before we started the episode and there were so many things that you and I were talking about that truly were things that could impede happiness for both of us. But they're nothing that really matter, and I have to say that going through this chapter with you today and the things that we've gone through, even all year long, on focusing on happiness, have been so powerful, and so for our listeners if you're new to listening, please go back and listen to some of the other episodes. And if you're one of our favorite fans and you've been following along, I hope that you're also seeing the way that your life could be changing through all of this, because I know with 100% confidence that the things we've learned, the things we've applied and the stories that we have shared have helped me get through some really challenging times over these last several weeks together. But what's most important to me and my favorite thing, sam, is being able to share it with you.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely, I totally agree. This was a good reminder to focus on the positives, to not let my brain trick me into the negative things that are happening and, you know, really try to appreciate the goodness that's, you know, that's around me and you know, and your stories inspire me to, I don't know, be that for other people to write, be that positivity that helps somebody else break their own spiral of negative thoughts, and I just I love that. So I'm going to try to do that this next week.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. Maybe we'll make a new hashtag be like Angie, because that's my mama. So all right, friends, this has been a great experience today, but we've got a lot more to go, so come back next week. We have new episodes out every single Wednesday. It's been a joy to be here. My name is Denise Russo and, on behalf of my friend, sam Powell, this has been another episode of what's On your Bookshelf.