Today I had the chance to attend Shawn Achor's presentation "Science of Positive Leadership", a two hour session based on his book "The Happiness Advantage". I have already been eagerly sharing some of the points with my coworkers, and am looking forward to apply some of his ideas to some of the more unhappy people that I know. I even had the chance to ask a question about how to deal with them, and he gave some very good ideas about that.
Afterwards, I came across this article: "Veritas without a Purpose: Why Shawn Achor’s Happiness Advantage Will Leave People Unhappy" by Benjamin J. Montoya, January 21, 2011.
He mentioned how Shawn in his book (and his talks) uses the example of Harvard students who should be very happy that they are in Harvard, and all the advantages and resources they have in their life. Instead of being happy, the students play a game of "misery poker" and see who can complain the most about their situation as students. Shawn in his talk today mentioned speaking to kids in Zimbabwe who have a very different lens that they view school with, a lens of knowing they are privileges, and that they are happy to be in school. This is an outlook that causes them to be very happy about being in school, and happy about doing the work that comes with school.
When they are happy, IQ increases, resiliency increases, creativity increases, immune system increases, by as much as 30%. Happiness creates a cascade of success. When unhappy, the brain is consumed in a fight or flight reaction that stunts creativity, intelligence, and ability, and leads to poorer outcomes.
Montoya says that Achor's answer is wrong, that is like giving energy pills to someone dying of cancer: it is a temporary aid that doesn't address the real fatal issue the person is facing!
Montoya brings out an interesting piece of info that Achor reveals:
Interestingly, Achor reveals an important piece of information about a motto of Harvard. He explains, “Harvard had a motto that reflected the school’s religious roots: Veritas, Christo et Ecclesiae (Truth, for Christ and the Church). For many years now, that motto has been truncated to a single word: Veritas, or just truth.” Notice that while “truth” is still important at Harvard, it has now lost its original purpose. Now it is simply Veritas without a purpose – not “for” anything. Perhaps this is a hint of the problem that lies at the heart of the unhappiness of their students.
Montoya then sums it up very well:
 | Their unhappiness is a symptom of the real problem, which is that rather than serving the God who created them, they are serving idols that cannot satisfy.
The God of the Bible created us all. Yet we chose to rebel against Him. He graciously gave us His Son to die in our place and bear the wrath we deserve. The Bible commands all of us to repent of our sin and place our faith in Jesus Christ. If we do, we can be made right with God. Only then can we experience true happiness in this life and in the life to come. This is certainly not to say that you will always be happy in this life as the false prophets of the so-called prosperity gospel claim. Yet apart from Jesus Christ, true happiness will never be experienced. |
Shawn Achor's presentation is very compelling. He would be very good as a stand up comedian. He showed us a slide of a brain study that shows the difference between frontal lobe being lit up during happy problem solving, versus energy being stolen from that region by an amygdalia of a person who is a pessimist and is in an unhappy fight or flight mode. The slide is not in his book.
I spoke with Shawn Anchor today about the fact that his ideas and exercises he had us do during his talk are very close to NLP, and that NLP (along with mermerism, hypnotism, and other related things) are viewed with great suspicion in very conservative Christian circles as being Satanic entry ways into the mind.
They are concerned because most of these methods involve putting onself under the control of someone else, or emptying ones mind, which gives an entry point for Satan. A better, God given, way to get the same benefits is to focus on contemplating a section of the Bible, and to never give up our God given power of choice and freewill and put it in the hands of another fallible human being.
Shawn said that he was brought up a Christian, but then trained at a Budhist seminary, and now he considers himself a kind of Budhist Christian. While there are many wonderful ideas in many religious traditions, non-Christian traditions also have some fundamental disagreements with Biblical Christianity because their world views are fundamentally different. The most glaring difference is often not only the sin issue, but on what man must do about it.
In an effort to be conciliatory, Achor may be hiding that he has turned his back on Christian explanations for the sin based problems of this world. If he is trying to be wise in the ways of this world, and find solutions that don't depend on an acknowledgement of what God says our real problem is in this world, that would be a shame. Such is the downfall of many psychologists.
Unfortunately, many people who are at their core very angry people, perhaps through genetics, do not want to surrender their anger. They feed on it, they define themselves with it, they excuse themselves from their realities of their own causes of their situation with it, they use their anger to validate themselves.
Often they seem to want others to be as unhappy, angry, and depressed as they are.
They need transformation, just like everyone else.
But often they react with great anger at any suggestion that a solution is to be found in surrendering this anger to God, and to seek God's transformation for their issues. That would require them to admit that someone other than themself has the real answer to the problems of this life. It would require a response of surrender, and repentance, that they aren't willing to give because they are not willing to acknowledge that they are wrong about anything.
I look at Shawn Achor's research and wonder, as a Christian, how can we get something good out of what science is learning about how fearfully and wonderfully our bodies are made, without turning our back on Christian faith and practice? Brain imaging studies are revealing fascinating things. That slide about the brain effects of thinking about problems when happy, versus the distraction of being angry or unhappy, is very compelling. If it is true.
For Shawn's benefit, his research does seem to be mainly about what one can do to themselves to be more happy, productive and successful. From what I saw, it doesn't seem to be about manipulating someone else.
The trap, though, as Montoya points out, is to think that Achor's ideas are enough, to think that we can do it on our own. Like Paul says, "that which I want to do, I don't do, and that which I don't want to do, I do."
Shawn addressed that issue with a talk about "activation energy": Make it easier for yourself to do the right thing, even if it is only shaving 20 seconds off of getting started on something like putting the guitar on a guitar stand instead of having to dig it out of its case in the closet everyday, to get rid of the brains excuse "It takes to long to get out the guitar to practice". And be sure to do the right thing for 21 days so that it can become a habit. And for the bad habits, make them more difficult, like put your remote control batteries in another room so that to turn on the TV you have to go through extra effort, more effort than the good habit of just picking up the book at your elbow.
All this is well and good. It's hard to diet when all you are thinking about is the chocolate eclair that you can't eat. That's why we need internal transformation, to have the mind of Christ in us.
 | Philippians 2: 3-11 Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to death even death on a cross. |
What we really need is surrender to the transformation that Christ wants to do in us. Anything short of that is doomed to fail, because only Christ's transformation deals with the internal sin issue. Without it, we are just leopards trying to dye our spots.
Remember, Christ chose the simple things of this world to confound the wise.....
Misspellings:
- Sean Anchor
- Shawn Anchor
- Sean Achor
The audio book is about 7 hours in total, and is read by Shawn Achor. Unfortunately it is distributed by Audible as two large files. I wrote about looking for Software to Split MP3 files to break the audio book into manageable chunks.