How to stay happy at work — a beginners guide?
At Livitay, we are on a mission to improve employee wellbeing, no matter what. Looking after your wellbeing can be difficult, frustrating and sometimes stressful. We are recommended so much that we often become paralysed by the amount of choice on offer.
We believe we need to learn about the different aspect of our mental wellbeing before it can be normalised in the workplace. Today we have take the first 2 parts of our happiness course made in collaboration with Mel Crate (on the Livitay app) for everyone to have and share.
We hope this helps begin your workplace wellbeing journey. Here is the transcript
An introduction to happiness.
“So let me ask you a question to start off with — what creates a happy life? What are the things we need in life to be happy? Take a moment to think about it and you can even jot your answers down somewhere.
To introduce this session, I wanted us to think about how In our modern world, we have more opportunities than ever before; more possessions, more ways to communicate with each other, more opportunity to travel, yet still happiness often seems to elude us.
Today we’re going to look at why that is and also what the research says about happiness.
Happiness is in part subjective, meaning different things will make different people happy, but there are some universal themes that always seem to arise and those are what we are going to focus on today.
Before we move on I wanted to highlight three common misconceptions that we often have around happiness.
The Three Misconceptions
The first is that happiness should just be there. That we don’t have to do anything to create happiness, but unfortunately this isn’t true.
Our brains are not hardwired for happiness. They are hardwired for survival. Meaning we are constantly on the lookout for threats and what may potentially go wrong. So we need to put a bit of work into it and work to create the conditions for happiness to arise.
The second misconception is that we can buy our way to happiness. Many studies have now indicated that there is a base level of money we need to ensure we can pay our bills and enjoy life but beyond that, there is no correlation between money and happiness. Happiness is more about how we spend our time than the things that we own.
Lastly, there’s a misconception that we should feel happiness all of the time and this just isn’t possible. Emotions like sadness, disappointment, frustration, grief are all part of the human spectrum of emotions and should not be denied or pushed away in favour of happiness. The goal is feel happy a lot of the time but not all the time. We have to accept that at times, we will feel sad, disappointed or angry and this is ok.
But the purpose of this session is to think about how we can introduce more happiness into our lives, which I’m sure for most of us sounds quite appealing, so with that let’s get started.
A story of Happiness
The story is about a fisherman and a businessman.
There was once a businessman who was on holiday sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat he spotted a fisherman rowing in towards the shore, having caught quite a few big fish. The businessman was impressed so he went up to the fisherman and asked how long it took him to catch that amount of fish.
”Oh not long, just a few hours” replied the fisherman
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” the businessman proposed.
“Well this is enough to feed my whole family and also sell a few to make a bit of money”
”But what do you do for the rest of the day?”
“I wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap, have dinner with my wife and when the evening comes, I join my friends in the village for a drink. We play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman:
“I have a PhD in business management. I could help you become more successful. From now on you should spend as much time as possible out at sea catching fish. When you have saved enough money, you can buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company and distribution firm. By then you will have set up your HQ in Sao Paolo, where you’ll live to manage your other branches.”
”And after that?” the fisherman asks him.
The businessman laughs. “And after that you can live like a king in a big house and when the time is right, you can sell your business and become rich.”
“And after that?” the fisherman asks again.
“After that you can finally retire, move to a house by the sea, wake up early, catch a few fish then return home to your kids, have a nice afternoon nap, have dinner with your wife, then join your buddies for a drink in the evening and play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman looked puzzled. “But is that not the life I have now!”
So what’s the moral of this story?
It’s not to say that hard work or ambition are not things we should strive for, it’s just that sometimes we overcomplicate happiness.
We work hard so one day off in the future, we can enjoy life by spending more time with our family and friends, reading more, taking more yoga classes or doing other things we enjoy.
What we don’t realise is that the things that make us happy are often accessible to us right now and it’s just about getting that balance right.
We’re going to return to this concept a bit later on.”
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