The Daily 2 Minute Secret to Happiness - Shawn Achor

Wouldn't it be great if you could be happy by doing something for just 2 minutes a day? Well that's exactly what the data and research shows. Watch this great talk by psychologist Sean Achor to see how you can do exactly that.

Taking Action- Random Acts of Kindness (Lyubomirsky, 2005)

What we had the CEO's do is before you open up your inbox, for the first thing in the day, before reading a single email and that's actually the only hard part of this study, you had to write a 2-minute email just praising or thanking someone in your social support network, not a coworker but  it's a family member or an old teacher or coach or someone you met at the conference, just someone you want to thank or praise for something. Just  2 minutes and you're done. What we found is, if you do this for three days you're hooked. All day long you think about that one email you sent this morning and being such a great person for sending such emails.

The reason why you do this experiment is over period of 21 days in a row your brain learns you have a robust social support network. You have 21 people in your social support network who have meaning to you and you just activated it in a meaningful way. As a result we found a correlation between CEO's social support and the happiness is 0.7 which doesn't sound that sexy but that's significantly higher than the correlation between smoking and cancer so if you had social support you definitely have a great chance of having happiness and without it that's the very first thing that goes with the happiness.

In my book I have a whole chapter on social investment which is studying individuals and companies that in the midst of challenge, instead of divesting from The Social Network they invest, they actually ramp it up and in doing so the success rate continues to rise where's the others continue to flag. I was working with UBS and one of the managers was telling me that there's a vehicle that would go round on Friday afternoons (the beer cart) after the markets close and it was a great way of bonding with everyone and if you're tired after working on the week and he said when the economy starts to fall, they cut back and the first thing of course you cut is the things that seem frivolous like the beer cart but of course if you cut the  social support its a mistake but that is what they did and they cut the beer cart but this manager reached into his own pocket to buy beer for his team. He said "I'm a professional investor I've done this for 20 years and it's the best investment I've made because my team in the midst of all the struggles while we losing people to other companies I didn't lose a single person on my team and they continue to do many of the things they want to because they saw me as a person who cared about them". This  just confirms the research that shows employees are more engaged if they believe that their manager cares for them.

I don't think we need to buy some beer for people to win their social support but I think we can write a two minute email to somebody in our social support network to ramp up a belief in our social network and improve happiness