The 4 Brain Superpowers You Need to Be a Successful Leader, According to Neuroscience 10-16

Leaders who understand how brains work can make themselves and their teams more nimble, innovative, and resilient.

Kevin Chin wants his executives to limber up their brains.

Chin's investment company, Arowana, based in Sydney, Australia, is expanding into London, Los Angeles, and Asia, and "it is imperative to have a senior leadership team that is mentally agile and resilient," says Chin. Last year, the entrepreneur began working with Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, executive coach, and lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Now, he is extending that coaching to his top decision-makers so they, too, can get in touch with their amygdala.

Interest in applying neuroscience to business has been mounting for decades. One reason, according to Swart, is that leaders prefer the idea of optimizing an organ--which is tangible--to the idea of optimizing behavior--which is not. "If I say, 'You need to be more emotionally intelligent,' I have had people respond, 'I don't understand what I'm supposed to do,'" she says. "If I tell them, 'You can build a pathway in your brain that will make it easier for you,' then many are more willing to embark on that process."

Optimized thinking requires a healthy brain, and so part of Swart's advice falls into the familiar sleep-eat-hydrate-and-exercise domain. Disturbed sleep is particularly damaging. Your IQ can take a hit of 5 percent or more after a bad night. (Swart began working with Chin to combat the debilitating effects of jet lag on his sleep and, consequently, his thinking.)

A well-fed, rested, and oxygenated brain is necessary for mental resilience and peak performance amid stress and uncertainty. "When all other things are equal, mental resilience is the factor that really distinguishes the CEO," says Swart. To improve resilience and performance, Swart recommends leaders work on the following:

1. Neuroplasticity

"Everything you have experienced in your life has molded and shaped your brain to favor certain behaviors and habits," says Swart. But those behaviors and habits may not be optimal. By focusing attention on and repeatedly practicing new, desirable behaviors, leaders can redirect their brains' chemical, hormonal, and physical resources to create new pathways. The old ones, meanwhile, wither from lack of use.

Learning--particularly attention-heavy subjects like a language or a musical instrument--is the best way to enhance plasticity. "The fact that you are forced to attend to things that your brain hasn't experienced before has its own benefit apart from what you learn," says Swart. "The brain becomes more flexible, which [supports] things like being able to regulate your emotions, solve complex problems, and think more creatively."

2. Brain agility

To be nimble, you must think nimbly. Brain agility is the ability to switch seamlessly among different ways of thinking: from the logical to the intuitive to the creative. Agility may be particularly important for entrepreneurs. "The fact that the brain is likely to think in diverse ways or absorb diverse ideas means that you are more likely to spot trends, pivot, be ahead of the curve," says Swart.
Multitaskers who try to use several modes of thinking at once generally do less well at all of them. Swart recommends working on problems consecutively and looking at them from different angles. Leaders can also leverage different thinking styles within their teams.

3. Mindset mastery

People with fixed mindsets believe traits like intelligence and talent are settled. People with growth mindsets see themselves as works in progress who develop their intelligence and talent through hard work. A fixed mindset leads to stagnation: a growth mindset to innovation and progress.
Leaders with fixed mindsets should use neuroplasticity to try to move themselves toward growth, according to Swart. For entrepreneurs, that may not be a stretch. "It is about your appetite for risk and attitude toward failure, so it makes sense that entrepreneurs are more comfortable with this," she says.

4. Simplicity

A hyperactive world places impossible demands on limited brains. Stress rises. Decision-making suffers. Swart advises that leaders practice mindfulness--focusing on their bodies, breathing, and thoughts in the moment--as a way to reduce stress hormones and multiply folds in the part of the brain associated with executive function. She is also an advocate of reducing noncritical decisions. "Figure out what you are going to wear the night before or wear the same thing every day," she says.
Leaders who know how to improve their own brain function can then apply those lessons to their companies. For example, by creating cross-functional work programs they help employees forge new neuro-pathways and develop brain flexibility as they master unfamiliar knowledge and skills.
Leaders can also use their understanding of the brain to drive fear and stress out of the workplace and to develop trust. Stress spikes cortisol in the brain, which negatively affects thinking and the ability to control emotions. At sustained levels, people go into survival mode.

By contrast, "if you are in a really exciting environment where you have got lots of the hormone oxytocin flowing around your organization, you are more likely to make decisions that are not based on scarcity and survival but on abundance," says Swart. Innovation and risk-taking flourish.

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This is the relationship between money and happiness 04-25

Can money buy you happiness? 

It’s a longstanding question that has many different answers, depending on who you ask.

Today’s chart approaches this fundamental question from a data-driven perspective, and it provides one potential solution: money does buy some happiness, but only to a limited extent.

Money and happiness

First, a thinking exercise.

Let’s say you have two hypothetical people: one of them is named Beff Jezos and he’s a billionaire, and the other is named Jill Smith and she has a more average net worth. Who do you think would be happiest if their wealth was instantly doubled?

Beff might be happy that he’s got more in the bank, but materially his life is unlikely to change much – after all, he’s a billionaire. On the flipside, Jill also has more in the bank and is likely able to use those additional resources to provide better opportunities for her family, get out of debt, or improve her work-life balance.

These resources translate to real changes for Jill, potentially increasing her level of satisfaction with life.

Just like these hypotheticals, the data tells a similar story when we look at countries.

The data-driven approach

World Bank

In general, this means that as a country’s wealth increases from $10k to $20k per person, it will likely slide up the happiness scale as well. For a double from $30k to $60k, the relationship still holds – but it tends to have far more variance. This variance is where things get interesting.

Outlier regions

Some of the most obvious outliers can be found in Latin America and the Middle East:

In Latin America, people self-report that they are more satisfied than the trend between money and happiness would predict.

Costa Rica stands out in particular here, with a GDP per capita of $15,400 and a 7.14 rating on the Cantril Ladder (which is a measure of happiness). Whether it’s the country’s rugged coastlines or the local culture that does the trick, Costa Rica has higher happiness ratings than the U.S., Belgium, or Germany – all countries with far higher levels of wealth.

In the Middle East, the situation is mostly reversed. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and the U.A.E. are all on the other side of the trend line.

Outlier countries

Within regions, there is even plenty of variance.

We just mentioned the Middle East as a place where the wealth-happiness continuum doesn’t seem to hold up as well as it does in other places in the world.

Interestingly, in Qatar, which is actually the wealthiest country in the world on a per capita basis ($127k), things are even more out of whack. Qatar only scores a 6.37 on the Cantril Ladder, making it a big exception even within the context of the already-outlying Middle East. 

Nearby Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and Oman are all poorer than Qatar per capita, yet they are happier places. Oman rates a 6.85 on the satisfaction scale, with less than one-third the wealth per capita of Qatar.

There are other outlier jurisdictions on the list as well: Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan are all significantly happier than the trend line (or their regional location) would project. Meanwhile, places like Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, and Luxembourg are less happy than wealth would predict.

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Why a Grateful Brain Is a Giving One 12-31

The neural connection between gratitude and altruism is very deep, suggests new research.

When you think about gratitude and its place in our culture, you might not immediately think about morality—that is, matters of right and wrong.

Often, we make gratitude sound like it’s all about you. In the domain of self-help, we hear that gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life—or that when we are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.

In fact, research does support the idea that gratitude helps people who practice it. They report fewer physical symptoms of illness, more optimism, greater goal attainment, and decreased anxiety and depression, among other health benefits.

If you stop with feeling good, gratitude certainly seems more like a platitude than a moral emotion that motivates reciprocity and altruism. But here is where I think many of us get gratitude wrong.
There is a much older, pre-self-help conception of gratitude as an emotion with moral motivations.

To first-century philosopher Cicero, gratitude was a matter of religious obligation “to the immortal gods.” Modern psychologists such as Michael McCullough and colleagues have systemized it this way: Gratitude is a “moral barometer”—an acknowledgement “that one has been the beneficiary of another person’s moral actions.” They go on to argue that gratitude is also a moral reinforcer, meaning that you’ll see a “thanks” from others as a reward that will lead you to give more in the future.

My own work has tried to map the relationship between gratitude and altruism in the brain. I am discovering that the neural connection between the two is very deep, and that cultivating gratitude may encourage us to feel more generous. We don’t say “thanks” for selfish reasons. Far from it: Gratitude, like giving, might be its own reward.

Neural rewards for giving

When we think about research on the relationship between gratitude and altruism, there are generally two main approaches.

First, we can ask whether people who seem to be more grateful are also more altruistic. Researchers use questionnaires to determine the degree to which someone is characteristically grateful. They ask other questions to determine the degree to which someone is generally giving. Finally, they use statistics to determine the extent to which someone’s altruism could be predicted from their gratitude.

Such studies are helpful for understanding the way gratitude could relate to altruism—in fact, the two do appear to go hand in hand—but of course, they depend on a person’s ability to judge their own gratitude and altruism. We can imagine someone touting himself as tremendously grateful, or the most generous person since Mother Theresa, but this could certainly be untrue. That’s why studies using these methods cannot explain why grateful people might behave prosocially. Perhaps they just feel guilty. Or perhaps altruistic people feel good when other people do well. How can we know?

At this point, we need to take an experimental approach. In one recent study, some colleagues of mine tried to understand the relationship between general prosocial tendencies and the way the brain responds to charitable donations. To start, the researchers assessed the prosocial tendencies of the participants using questionnaires. Then, they supplied participants with real money and put them in an MRI scanner that measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain.

In the scanner, the money could go to either the participants themselves or to a charity, such as a local food bank. Sometimes, these gifts were voluntary; sometimes not, so that it was more like a tax than a donation. This distinction was important, because in the tax-like condition, the participant doesn’t get to feel good about a charitable choice—only about the charity getting money. As the money transferred, my colleagues focused on reward centers of the brain—the regions that give us a dose of feel-good neurotransmitters—in order to compare the brain’s response to these various conditions.

The result? My colleagues found that the more prosocial participants felt far more inner reward when the money went to charity than to themselves. They found something else interesting: The older the participant, the larger this benevolent disposition—suggesting that, with age, your brain may reward you more when you see good in the world, rather than when you yourself get some benefit.

Stepping back from results like these, we are left to wonder about what makes someone grateful or altruistic in the first place. Is it a matter of the right dose of prosocial genes? Or is it a lifetime of experiences or family socialization that encourage both gratitude and giving?

My colleagues’ study answered some big questions, but also left some unanswered. One of these big questions involved the link between gratitude and altruism. Do they go hand in hand? Does gratitude actually encourage altruism?

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Classical and Jazz musicians show different brain responses to unexpected events, study finds 10-31

Scientists at Wesleyan University have used electroencephalography to uncover differences in how the brains of Classical and Jazz musicians react to an unexpected chord progression.

Their new study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, sheds new light on the nature of the creative process.

“I have been a classical musician for many years, and have always been inspired by the great jazz masters who can improvise beautiful performances on the spot,” explained study author Psyche Loui. “Whenever I tried to improvise I always felt inhibited and self-conscious, and this spurred my questions about jazz improvisation as a model for creativity more generally: What makes people creative improvisers, and what can this tell us about how we can all learn to be more creative?”

The researchers used EEG to compare the electrical brain activity of 12 Jazz musicians (with improvisation training), 12 Classical musicians (without improvisation training), and 12 non-musicians while they listened to a series of chord progressions. Some of the chords followed a progression that was typical of Western music, while others had an unexpected progression.

Louie and her colleagues found that Jazz musicians had a significantly different electrophysiological response to the unexpected progression, which indicated they had an increased perceptual sensitivity to unexpected stimuli along with an increased engagement with unexpected events.

“Creativity is about how our brains treat the unexpected,” Loui told PsyPost. “Everyone (regardless of how creative) knows when they encounter something unexpected. But people who are more creative are more perceptually sensitive and more cognitively engaged with unexpectedness. They also more readily accept this unexpectedness as being part of the vocabulary.

“This three-stage process: sensitivity, engagement, and acceptance, occurs very rapidly, within a second of our brains encountering the unexpected event. With our design we can resolve these differences and relate them to creative behavior, and I think that’s very cool.”

Previous research has found that Jazz improvisers and other creative individuals show higher levels of openness to experience and divergent thinking — meaning the ability to “think outside the box.”

But without additional research it is unclear if the new findings apply to other creative individuals who are not musicians.

“We looked at three groups of subjects: jazz musicians, classical musicians, and people with no musical training other than normal schooling, so the results are most closely tied to musical training. It remains to be seen whether other types of creative groups, e.g. slam poets, cartoonists, interpretive dancers, etc. might show the same results,” Loui explained.

“It would also be important to find out whether these differences emerge as a result of training, or whether they reflect pre-existing differences between people who choose to pursue training in different styles. We are currently conducting a longitudinal study to get at that question.”

“This is the first paper of a string of research coming from our lab that use different methodologies to understand jazz improvisation,” Loui added. “We are also doing structural and functional MRI, as well as more behavioral testing, including psychophysical listening tests and also production tests, where we have people play music in our lab.”

The study, “Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity“, was also co-authored by Emily Przysinda, Tima Zeng, Kellyn Maves, and Cameron Arkin. 


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How to defend against your own mind 20-10

Image credit: Shyam's Imagination Library


New project to use podcasts, video to illuminate bias, improve decision-making. 

When it comes to some of the most important decisions we make — how much to bid for a house, the right person to hire, or how to plan for the future — there is strong scientific evidence that our brains play tricks on us.




Luckily, Mahzarin Banaji has a solution: Understand how your mind works so that you can learn to outsmart it.

The Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics and chair of the Department of Psychology is launching a new project — dubbed Outsmarting Human Minds — aimed at using short videos and podcasts to expose hidden biases and explore ways to combat them.

“The behavioral sciences give us insights into what gets in the way of reaching our professional goals, of being true to our own deepest values,” Banaji said. “The science is not new, but its message is still one most people have difficulty grasping and understanding.”

Banaji and research fellow Olivia Kang, with funding from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a grant from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, developed Outsmarting Human Minds as a way to deliver up-to-date thinking about hidden biases in an engaging way.

“Everyone wants to know what’s happening in their minds, and they want to know what they can do to make better decisions,” Kang said. “The science is out there; the challenge is getting it to the public in a way that captures their interest.”

The impetus for the project came in part from Banaji’s perspective as a senior adviser on faculty development to Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith.

Speaking of that role, Banaji said, “I try to expose what the mind sciences have taught us about how we make decisions. The hope is that the faculty will put this information to use … in decisions about how to imagine the future of their disciplines.”

Banaji has taught on decision-making to any number of organizations, including corporations, nonprofits, and the military. Questions about how to confront hidden biases are common.



“I want to put the science in the hands of people — or rather, in the heads of people — and have them ask: How can I outsmart my own mind? How can I be the person I want to be?”

She emphasized that watching a video or listening to a podcast isn’t enough to address hidden bias.
“Learning brings awareness and understanding. It cannot itself put an end to the errors we make,” she said. “To achieve corrections that will matter to society, we must learn to behave differently.”

Said Kang: “We want to deliver this information to people in a way that doesn’t make them feel that they’re a bad person if they have these biases. The fact is, we all do. This is about acknowledging that hidden biases are a product of how we’re wired and the culture we live in. And then agreeing that we want to do something about it — that we can use this knowledge to improve the decisions we make in life and at work.”

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How to find Happiness at work 10-15

Image: Shyam's Imagination Library

Happiness is in short supply at work these days. Deadlines, staff shortages, productivity pressures and crazy stress push even the most talented and temperate people to want to quit their jobs. But that’s not a realistic option, even for folks in the C-suite. Annie McKee, director of the Penn CLO and Medical Education programs at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches leadership and emotional intelligence, has a better idea. In her book, How To Be Happy At Work, she outlines three requirements that workers need to feel more fulfilled on the job. McKee spoke about the concepts in her book on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

 The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton: How many people do you think are not happy at work?

Annie McKee: I don’t think we even have to guess. Gallup has been studying people for years, and upwards of two-thirds of us are either neutral, which means we don’t care, or we’re actively disengaged. Disengagement and happiness go hand in hand, so an awful lot of people are not happy at work. Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could. When we’re negative, cynical, pessimistic, we simply don’t give our all, and our brains don’t work that well just when we need people’s brains to be working beautifully.

Knowledge@Wharton: Has this problem ramped up in the last two decades or so? As much as digital is phenomenal for us, a lot of people feel under pressure because of what digital does to accelerate change.

McKee: The world is changing at a rapid pace, obviously. As much as we love our always-connected world, it can mean that we work all of the time. We’re always one minute away from that next email that’s going to bring tragedy or crisis to our working lives. Some of us never turn it off, and that’s not good for us.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where did your idea for the book come from?

McKee: I’ve worked in organizations all over the world for decades now. I’ve looked at leadership practices, emotional intelligence, culture and all of those things that impact the bottom line and people’s individual effectiveness. I decided to take another look and see what people were trying to tell us. All of these studies that we did around the world were practical studies. People were telling us, “I want to be happy, I want to be fulfilled, I want to love my job, I’m not as happy or as fulfilled as I could be, and here is what I need.” And then they went on to tell us what they need.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are executives aware of their employees’ problems? Are they also aware that they may susceptible to this?

“Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could.”

McKee: It doesn’t matter where you sit in the organization, you are susceptible to disengagement and unhappiness even at the very top. We think if you’re making all of that money and you’ve got all of that power and that great job, it’s going to be perfect. The best leaders in our organizations, at the very top and all the way down to the shop floor, understand that people matter, feelings matter, and it’s job number one to create a climate where people feel good about what they’re doing where they’re happy, engaged and ready to share their talents.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the key ingredients to finding that happiness?

McKee: From my work, I’ve discovered three things. Number one, people feel that they need to have impact on something that is important to them, whether it’s people or a cause or the bottom line. They need to feel that their work is purposeful, and it’s tied to values that they care about.
Number two, we need to feel optimistic that our work is tied to a personal vision of the future. The organization’s vision isn’t enough. As good as it may be, we have to know that what we’re doing ties to a personal vision of our future.

Number three, we need friends at work. We’ve learned over the course of our lives you shouldn’t be friends with people at work, that it’s dangerous somehow, that it will cloud your judgment. I don’t agree. I think we need to feel that we are with our tribe in the workplace, that we belong, that we’re with people that we respect and who respect us in return. We need warmth, we need caring, and we need to feel supported.

Knowledge@Wharton: I would think most people looking for a job, whether they are coming out of college or shifting careers mid-life, are looking for that area that would make them happy. When you have that expectation of being in the right sector to begin with, you hope that you have the happiness to go along with it.

McKee: We do hope that we get into the right organization and there’s a good fit between our values and the organization’s values. We really try hard. But we get in there and the pressures of everyday life, and the crises and the stress can really tamp down our enthusiasm and our happiness.

Also, a lot of us are susceptible to what I call happiness traps. We end up doing what we think we should do. We take that job with that fancy consulting firm or that wonderful organization not because we love it and not because it’s a fit, but because we think we should. Frankly, some of us have ambition that goes into overdrive. Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is that part of the reason why we see more people who have been with a company for 20 years, 25 years and suddenly pivot? They may be going to work for a nonprofit. You see these stories popping up, especially with people in the C-suite.

McKee: You do see that. You see senior leaders all of a sudden saying, “Enough is enough, I [want to do] something different.” But I really want to be clear, you don’t always have to run away. In fact, you want to run towards something. If you feel you’re not happy in the workplace, quitting your job is probably not the first answer, and some of us can’t. What we need to do is figure out what we need, what we want, how to have impact, what will make us feel hopeful about our future, what kind of people we want to work with and for, and then go find that either in our organization or elsewhere.

Happiness starts inside each of us. It’s tempting to blame that toxic boss or that horrible organizational culture, and those things may be true. But if you want to be happy at work, you first have to look inside and ask what is it that you want? What will make you feel fulfilled? Which happiness traps have you fallen prey to? And get yourself out.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the happiness traps?

McKee: There’s what I call the “should” trap. We do what we think we should do. We show up to work acting like someone we’re not. That is soul-destroying, and it’s fairly common. [There’s also] the “ambition” trap. When our ambition drives us from goal to goal and we don’t even stop to celebrate the accomplishment of those goals, something is wrong.

Some of us feel helpless, stuck. The “helplessness” trap may be the most serious of all. It’s really hard to get out of because we don’t feel we have any power. My message is we have a lot more power and control over not only our attitude but what we do and how we approach our work on a daily basis and in the long term than maybe we think we do.

“Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Earlier in your life, you found yourself fitting into these patterns as well.
McKee: I did. Early in my life I wasn’t teaching in a wonderful institution like Penn. I didn’t even have what you would call a professional career. I had jobs like waiting tables and cleaning houses and taking care of elderly people. I was making ends meet. And it wasn’t easy.

I had two choices, I could either say to myself this is miserable and I hate it, or I could look for something that was fulfilling in what I did. I tried to do that. I did find aspects of my job, whether it was cleaning houses and feeling like I was doing a good job or finding a mentor in some of these workplaces, that really made it worthwhile to me.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you have to be 100% happy all of the time? I think if you can find areas of happiness, it can make your job or your life so much easier to go through.
McKee: Happiness isn’t just about feeling good every moment of the day, and it’s not just about pleasure. That’s hedonism, and we’re not seeking that. Frankly, a little bit of stress is a good thing. It pushes us to be innovative and to do things differently and to push harder. So, it’s not about just feeling good. But we do need a foundation of purpose, hope and friendships. We do need to know that what we do matters at work, that we are doing something that is tied to our future, and that the people we work with are great.

Knowledge@Wharton: You mentioned taking the time to recognize your accomplishments, but there are companies that want you to push on to the next project. They don’t give you the opportunity to slow down even for an hour to enjoy it.

McKee: Most of our organizations are really hard-driving, especially publicly traded organizations. I’m not even sure they’re that different than other institutions these days. The pressure is on everywhere, and the reality is we do move from project to project, goal to goal. What choices can we make in the middle of that culture? We don’t have to be victims of our organizational culture, and we don’t have to be victims of that bad boss you might have or maybe you’ve had in the past. We can make choices about what we do with our time, our energy and our emotional stance.

Knowledge@Wharton: Going back to the friends component in the workplace, does it matter where those friends come from within the structure of the company? A lot of people say you have to be careful if you want to try to be friends with the boss.

McKee: It doesn’t matter where your friends are, but it does matter whether or not you have your eyes open and recognize what people are thinking about how you are behaving and who you are friends with. You’ve got to be aware of your organization’s culture and the rules of the road.
If you’re violating some of those rules — for example, going up the hierarchy and building friendships with people who are a couple levels above you or maybe in another division — you need to understand what the implications of that are. And you need to be maybe a little bit careful.

Knowledge@Wharton: How does the middle manager deal with this?

McKee: Middle managers get it from all sides. They are pulled in every direction, and it is probably the hardest job in any organization. They, more than anybody, need to hear this message. Life is too short to be unhappy at work. Middle managers have a tremendous impact on the people who work for them, and recognizing that you more than anybody are the creator and the curator of the culture in the organization is an important place to start.

Knowledge@Wharton: Sometimes managers forget about the life people have outside of work.
McKee: We’re here at the Wharton School, and we’ve been studying management now for over 100 years. Some of the early approaches to managing organizations are really destructive, and one of the aspects of that early research has been the attitude that people don’t matter and that private lives ought to be left at the door of the office. It’s impossible to leave our private lives at the door of the office. It doesn’t mean that we talk about it all of the time, but we bring our experiences with us and we bring our feelings with us. Managers need to recognize that.

It’s also hard to find what is commonly called work-life balance. By the way, I don’t like that phrase. I think it’s a myth. I don’t think there is any magic formula that says if we get it just right we’re going to be happy at work and happy at home. It’s more about understanding that the lines are blurred between work and home now, and we need to learn how to manage our choices and our attention.

Knowledge@Wharton: What about those who work remotely and can feel very isolated and disconnected?

McKee: I understand the isolation and feeling kind of left out. The reality is that it takes a lot more effort to build relationships when we work remotely. We need to take time. When we’re working remotely, we get on the phone, we do the work that needs to be done, we talk about the project, and we get off the phone. That leaves us feeling kind of empty. We need to take that extra five minutes to have a chat, have a laugh, feel like we are in a relationship with somebody. It takes effort and self-management because the temptation is to just do the work. You talk about the gig economy, right? We’re all sort of working in a portfolio manner these days. We take on this bit of work and that bit of work, and much of it is virtual.

“Life is too short to be unhappy at work.”

I think we need to figure this out because the bottom line is that we have not changed as human beings. We still need to feel like we belong, we need to feel that we’re cared for, and we need to be able to care for others in return. If we’re working far away, we’ve got to take extra time and make a concerted effort to build those relationships in a different kind of way than if we’re in person.
I’m a big proponent of working from home or working remotely. I think it’s really helpful to individuals and companies. People who are able to work at home feel trusted, and when you feel trusted you are more committed to your organization. A lot of people report being able to get more done away from the office because you don’t have the interruptions. The downside is that you have to find a way to keep the relationships fresh and alive because that’s as important as getting that project done.

Knowledge@Wharton: Companies seem to be more aware of employee happiness than they used to be, which is a good thing. Do you think we’re going to continue down that path?

McKee: Companies are more aware, so are enlightened CEOs and enlightened leaders. I think we will continue down the path for the following reasons. It’s not just nice-to-have, and it’s not just about feeling good. We’ve got solid research coming out of positive psychology, neuroscience and management that tells us that feelings matter. When we feel good, we’re smarter. And we need smart employees now. We need people who are committed, who are engaged. The research is pretty clear. Happiness before success. If we want our employees to be at their best, we need to care about their emotional well-being as well as their physical well-being.

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Is this Japanese concept the secret to a long, happy, meaningful life? 09-02

What’s your reason for getting up in the morning? Just trying to answer such a big question might make you want to crawl back into bed. If it does, the Japanese concept of ikigai could help.

Originating from a country with one of the world's oldest populations, the idea is becoming popular outside of Japan as a way to live longer and better.

While there is no direct English translation, ikigai is thought to combine the Japanese words ikiru, meaning “to live”, and kai, meaning “the realization of what one hopes for”. Together these definitions create the concept of “a reason to live” or the idea of having a purpose in life.

Ikigai also has historic links: gai originates from the word kai, which means shell. These were considered very valuable during the Heian period (794 to 1185), according to Akihiro Hasegawa, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at Toyo Eiwa University, adding a sense of "value in living".

To find this reason or purpose, experts recommend starting with four questions:

• What do you love?
• What are you good at?
• What does the world need from you?
• What can you get paid for?

Finding the answers and a balance between these four areas could be a route to ikigai for Westerners looking for a quick interpretation of this philosophy. But in Japan, ikigai is a slower process and often has nothing to do with work or income.

In a 2010 survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women, just 31% of participants cited work as their ikigai.

Gordon Matthews, professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and author of What Makes Life Worth Living?: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds, told the Telegraph that how people understand ikigai can, in fact, often be mapped to two other Japanese ideas – ittaikan and jiko jitsugen. Itaikkan refers to “a sense of oneness with, or commitment to, a group or role”, while jiko jitsugen relates more to self-realization.

Matthews says that ikigai will likely lead to a better life “because you will have something to live for”, but warns against viewing ikigai as a lifestyle choice: “Ikigai is not something grand or extraordinary. It’s something pretty matter-of-fact.”

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Pennsylvania restaurant offers discount for families who have phone-free meals 03-25

What would it take to get you to put down your phone during a meal?

Sarah’s Corner Café in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, is offering a deal for people who want to enjoy a meal, and each other, unplugged.

They’ve set up so-called “family recharging stations” at tables where you drop your phone into a basket.

“They let the server know and the server will bring over a basket with old fashioned Hangman and Tic Tac Toe and pencils because those games are interactive instead of coloring, which is solitary,” owner Barry Lynch told ABC News of how the restaurant's phone-free meals discount works.

If families make it through the meal without looking at their phones, they’re rewarded 10 percent off their bill.

                                                                                               

“A lot of people are starting to do it and it’s taken on a life of its own,” said Lynch. “I get huge feedback. Massive feedback.”

The idea for the “family recharging time” came to Lynch after observing many of his customers.

“There’s one particular family I knew used to come in on Sunday for breakfast after church. I knew the dad and the mom and two kids and we’d always say ‘hi,’” he recalled. “Every time I went over, one or two of the kids and sometimes the parents would be on the phone. I also knew the dad would commute to New York for work every day, which takes a lot of time. I asked him about that and he said, ‘Yeah, I still do it. It’s so nice to be together and these breakfasts are rare.’ And when he said that, I thought, ‘Oh wow. Something is going on here. I need to do something.’”

Lynch is thrilled by the positive response his phone-free meals have gotten and hopes they continue to enrich his customers’ family time.

“I just thought it was such a shame not to have more time together just to talk,” he said. “Look at my eyes. I’m here with you. How was your day?”

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How the Pursuit of Happiness Has Made Us Nervous Wrecks 12-10

Worry, anxiety and nervousness are at an all-time high in American society. The economy, terrorism, politics, work, parenting — the list of stressors is endless. But author Ruth Whippman believes there’s another reason why anxiety has become the new normal for Americans, and it has to do with the notion that happiness must be pursued above all else. The concept is even baked into the Declaration of Independence.

Whippman recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111 to discuss her new book, America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: A state of perpetual anxiety does feel like a new norm right now for most Americans.

Ruth Whippman: Absolutely. The World Health Organization says that America is the most anxious country on the planet and by a wide margin. A second-place country is very far down the list from America. We are, in this country, more likely to suffer from clinical symptoms of anxiety than anywhere else on the planet.

Knowledge@Wharton: You’re a British transplant. In doing this book, were you able to gain perspective on what’s going on here that maybe some of us don’t realize?

Whippman: As an outsider, when you come into a place completely new, you perhaps see things in a different way. It was quite the culture shock. We moved here when my husband got a job in Silicon Valley. We moved from fairly gray London to beautiful sun-drenched California. I imagined that my life here was going to be absolutely perfect. Free of anxiety. The beaches. The weather. Everything was going to be wonderful. But I started to notice very quickly that there was this real kind of sense of anxiety here — that far from being in this land of Instagrammed perfection, people were anxious about their lives and not necessarily any happier than the people back in London, who were perhaps a little bit more negative, a bit more cynical.

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think are the reasons Americans are so anxious right now?
Whippman: There are lots of genuine reasons why life can bring anxiety. Money worries, inequality, the state of the economy, health care — those sorts of big issues. But one of the things that I identified pretty early on was that people seem to be very culturally preoccupied with this idea of happiness, of finding happiness. I was having conversations with people, and the same topic would come up again and again, with people really kind of agonizing about it. Am I happy? Am I as happy as my neighbor? Am I as happy as my friends? Am I as happy as everybody on social media? Could I be happier if I tried harder? There seemed to be this real anxiety about being as happy as you could be.

“Mindfulness starts to feel like a tiny, teeny Band-Aid on a much, much bigger problem.”
I started looking into it, and this is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. This industry is devoted to this idea that if we just try a bit harder, if we do another thing, read another book, try another class, then we can become happier. And I think this is one of the big causes of anxiety in American society.

Knowledge@Wharton: Through what avenues is this a multibillion-dollar industry?
Whippman: It’s what you think of as the traditional self-help industry — the books, the apps, the causes. That amounts to about $11 billion. To put it in context, that’s about the same size as Hollywood. Recently, there’s been a new kind of subsidiary industry: for lack of a better term, the quasi-spiritual thing – [including] meditation, mindfulness, yoga. Although these things are supposed to be spiritual practices, they amount to probably the same in terms of the size of the industry.
Sponsored Content:

This is a huge new thing. It’s this idea that if we just buy another app or read another book or try another thing, then this new, improved version of ourselves will be fully self-actualized and fully happy. I think that, itself, is causing anxiety.

Knowledge@Wharton: What is the impact financially, culturally and in other areas?

Whippman: This idea of the American Dream — if you really work hard for something, then you can have it — is just out of reach; we’re trying to get to this kind of happy ever after. Psychologically, that’s pretty tough on people because our emotions don’t work quite like that. Just by trying harder, we can’t actually control our own emotions and make ourselves happier in that way.
It’s having a huge impact culturally. In the book, I start to look at all different areas of life. I look at the workplace, religion, social media, parenting. These ideas about making ourselves as happy as possible have infiltrated all different areas of American life.

Knowledge@Wharton: Focusing on the corporate end, there are people who have a mix of anxiety from both personal life and professional life, which ends up being a toxic formula for them. Think there are people who have anxiety in their personal lives, but work ends up being a catharsis.
Whippman: Work means different things to different people, and that depends on what your job is, how you feel about it, who your employer is. But I think that one trend that’s becoming true across the board, at least for professionals, is that we are working in America longer hours than almost anyone else in the world and than ever before in recent times. There’s a blurring of the lines between personal life and work. We’re never fully switched off. We’re on our cellphones; we’re checking our email every five minutes. There’s a joke about this new mantra that instead of work/life balance, come to me and talk about work/life integration. It’s something that works very well for employers and maybe less well for employees.

I’ve talked in the book about this whole idea of happiness in the workplace. It used to be that work was work and home was where you tried to find happiness and your social life and all the rest of it. There’s been a deliberate blurring of those boundaries. You see it where workplaces are offering dentists and doctors and video games and free food and that sort of thing to keep people working longer hours. [Employers are] even sending their staff to happiness training and mindfulness training.
Knowledge@Wharton: I have a 10-year-old and 7-year-old twins, and their school is doing

mindfulness training for kids. I’ve come around a little bit on it because I think it does help kids. Our kids are feeling more pressure at a younger age than they’ve ever felt before.

“Just by trying harder, we can’t actually control our own emotions and make ourselves happier in that way.”

Whippman: I think you’re absolutely right. Mindfulness has come to schools, to the military, to workplaces. It’s in corporations. It is a multibillion-dollar industry. I think mindfulness starts to feel like a tiny, teeny Band-Aid on a much, much bigger problem. You say your kids are under so much pressure, and I think that’s true of my kids and kids across the board and adults in the workplace. It’s this idea that we work these incredibly long hours, we’re very stressed and there’s pressure on us to be more productive than ever before. “Oh, and here’s your hour of mindfulness training every week.” It feels like you’re not really addressing the actual problem. You can’t pay your rent, you don’t have any health insurance, but oh, try a bit of mindfulness. You’re in a burning building and here’s a tiny little fire extinguisher. Try and sort it out.

The other thing about mindfulness is that there are great, grand claims for it. I am not saying that mindfulness is not helpful to certain people. It is. But the evidence for it is much weaker than is commonly claimed. There was a big meta-analysis [conducted] a year or two ago that showed there was no real difference in benefit between doing mindfulness and doing any kind of relaxation technique. Whatever that is for you, whether it’s getting a pedicure or just talking to a friend or listening to some music, mindfulness is of no benefit beyond that.

Knowledge@Wharton: Were there companies that you talked to that really showed that there was a level of happiness there? Or does pretty much every company have a level of angst in it?

Whippman: Some companies are better places to work than others, no doubt about it. I went to visit Zappos, which is very much pushing this happiness agenda. The CEO of the company, Tony Hsieh, is very interested in positive psychology. His company’s message is delivering happiness. You go to that company and there are balloon animals and parades and fireworks and they have out-of-hours socializing and free snacks. It’s very strongly encouraged that you socialize with your colleagues out of the workplace. I think this is a kind of corporate culture that is becoming more common. As I said before, this is blurring the lines between what is your boss’ business and your boss’ concern and what isn’t. For some people, that works great. Some people want to go to work and have a parade come past their desk and do a little disco and that kind of thing. For me, as a kind of awkward British person, I think it would be absolutely horrendous.

Knowledge@Wharton: Some companies make a Friday happy hour at the office the norm. A friend who worked for a big retail company told me they would have a once-a-month beer bash at the office. They were playing drinking games.

Whippman: That is particularly common around Silicon Valley and that kind of California culture. It’s this idea that your work mates should be your friends. They call it “cultural fit.” It’s the company culture, and you should take part in that. But I think it’s problematic for a lot of reasons. For me, I’m a mom, I work, I have young kids. I don’t want to be getting drunk in the office with my work mates. I want to be home. This pressure that the office has to be my social life, that I have to not just do my job and collect my paycheck, but I also have to emotionally perform and be a part of this whole big thing — I don’t want that. I think this socializing culture is particularly tough on women with families.

Knowledge@Wharton: This is something driven in part by millennials. Do you see it continuing for a long time, or will the next generation look at it differently?

Whippman: It’s hard to say because there could well be a backlash. People could say, “Just give me some space, I just want to go home. I don’t want to be doing my dry cleaning at work.” There [was an item] in the news recently that Facebook was actually paying for their female employees to have their eggs frozen so that they could delay child bearing. I feel like it’s getting to the point where it’s an intrusion on your personal liberty, your personal space and your private life. They’re not forcing anyone to do this, but it’s little by little.

Knowledge@Wharton: Some of these companies believe that these perks, like dry cleaning, are the way to go because you’re building culture within the corporation. There are people for whom that works perfectly.

“I think people are paradoxically likely to experience more happiness if they stop trying quite so hard.”

Whippman: The key element here should be choice. When you’re talking about making your company a good place to work that attracts good employees, there is nothing wrong with that. But I think cultural fit can quite often be a smoke screen for, “We only want a certain type of person to work at this company.” That can be problematic for diversity and for all kinds of reasons. Cultural fit means that you are kind of a big funster, that you drink with the boys every night. It could work very well for a 24-year-old software engineer who doesn’t have anywhere else to be, but it might not work so well for someone with a family or from a different kind of culture. It’s easy to say it has no bearing on your ability to do the job well.

Knowledge@Wharton: With all of this pursuit for happiness, a little less happiness ends up being a good thing from time to time?

Whippman: Well, not a little less happiness. But I think people are paradoxically likely to experience more happiness if they stop trying quite so hard. One of the things I noticed when we first moved here is that people talked about happiness almost like people talk about going on a diet. There’s no pleasure involved in it, but if I just try a bit harder, it would make me a good person or a better, more improved person to do this. I think to just take a step back, stop worrying about it, stop really pursuing it so relentlessly and just kind of hope that it comes along the way will actually lead to more happiness. There is quite a lot of research that backs that up, too.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are we setting ourselves up for another generation to follow in that path?
Whippman: This is a really big trend in parenting at the moment — that we are so invested in our kids’ happiness. When I was a kid, my mom [would say], “Off you go, go and play on your own, do your own thing,” and she wasn’t micromanaging my happiness. She wasn’t micromanaging every moment of my day, optimizing my experience.

With the coming of these helicopter parents who hover over our kids a lot, kids of college age now show more anxiety than any previous generation. There was one study recently that showed that an average high school or college student now has the same levels of anxiety as a psychiatric patient in the 1950s of a similar age. That’s grading it on the same test. So, I think we are creating a generation of anxious kids.

I think also for that generation, which has grown up with social media, happiness is really kind of the currency of social media. It’s all about putting your best foot forward and putting your blissful photos on Facebook where everybody is having a great time and everyone is at a great party and you’re Instagramming and it’s perfect. Everyone is talking about being authentic all the time, so obviously, it’s as authentic as nothing. I think that puts a great pressure on people now.

Social media is not one thing. There’s lots of different ways that people interact with social media. But one of the big things is making our lives seem as blissfully wonderful as they possibly can be. And it’s very easy; you just compare yourselves to others. I do it myself. We went apple picking in an orchard recently with my kids. Frankly, it was kind of a miserable day. It was really hot and our kids were whining the whole time. There was no water, there were no restrooms. But I still posted the one picture on my Facebook account of my kids smiling and holding up the apples and looking so happy. Everybody looking at that would think, what a perfect day they’ve had. And I do the same. I look at my neighbors or my friends and I say, “God, why is my life not like that?” It’s never been easier to compare ourselves unfavorably to other people.

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