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Happiness Office Hours

so welcome. We're having a little F A Q session. A little happy office hours. Everyone we have. The bear is our supporter here. We're passing him around, kind of sort of a big talking stick, although that might be hard to like throw across. So the question for me, Yes, this class has been truly, truly eye opening and so helpful. Yes, and so thank you. So one question I have is often go to meetings. And sometimes meetings can corporate more meetings in turn into something that you didn't expect, and the conversation gets a little intensified and gets a little intense. And how do you center yourself to make sure that you come off? That's positive, even though the conversation that we might having is not so positive. Do you have any tips with that? Yes. So the first thing is, is, if you know that you're going to go into, ah, high intensity situation, This could be for some people like me, a board meeting for other people. It might be a night club or a party, right? I actually really encou...

rage you to refuel, so you want to set yourself up for success. The problem is is a lot of us go into these high intensity events and we kind of don't emotionally prepare, right? So we're busy all day. We're doing our to do list will go. I know I have that board meeting and it's in the back of our head were kind of dreading it. We're worrying about it, and so we don't take any time beforehand to refuel the brain. The way the prefrontal cortex works is you can warm up the brain toe act in the way that you want to act. So actually, before you even go into the meeting knowing what nourishing activities you can dio especially what skills you could exercise before you go into the meeting is better than any kind of confidence. I could even give you in the moment. Because if you walk into the meeting and you've just, like, aced your your skill that you were expressing beforehand, maybe you I don't know, like for me one of things that makes me feel really capable is going through my feed. Lee. I don't know if anyone has, like, pocket or feebly, so I love research. Right. Research is one of my kind of skill areas. So what I do to, like, kind of refuel from a work perspective is I stay away from email and I'll go through my feed. Leon categorize and I tag all my studies. I go into my pocket, I'm moving things into folders. I start to color code them. And that kind of gives me this like, nice sort of power, mental power posing Before I go in, I would say it actually happens before you're even in the meeting from body language. If you don't mind me saying from like a nonverbal perspective, voice tone is you're gonna be your biggest giveaway for anxiety in the moments even more than body language or nervous ticks. And so when you hear yourself start to go a little bit higher into your register, you really start to sound really nervous when you're in board meetings. Yeah, so one of things you can do is I talked about this in the power of body language class. I think it's day number two when you hear yourself go up and I did it this whole course. When I heard myself starting to go up, I would take a deep breath in and speak on the out breath. It's impossible to go into your higher range when you're speaks. Right now I'm doing it. And so if I heard myself starting to get a little nervous with you guys, I would then take a deep breath and speak on the out breath. That is much more calming, so kind of to two things for you. Um, we talked about this a little off line the other day, but I was interested in what you might have to say about the power of happiness in partner relationships. Yes. OK, so Annie and I were talking at lunch about, you know, how do you even begin to approach your partner to take it? You know, my husband was here in the back around Creativelive, and he was even. We're talking a little bit about the questions, but I haven't even sat down with my own partner to take this course yet. And after my discussion with Annie, I said to him, I was like, You know, we should maybe sit down and do the workbook together, So if you have a partner who you're thinking, I really would like to take this course with them. It's kind of overwhelming to say I would like to sit down for 11 hours and take a course with you, right? Like that's a lot to ask someone, especially if they're not as into all my learning. As you write, people learn differently. So you will learn from online courses like creative life. Some people are book people, so pick your partners kind of ideal way of learning. If they're more of like a a reader, maybe you just do the workbook with them. Like maybe you print out two copies of the workbook and you re teach it right? Don't Don't even use these videos. Go to the workbook and then read Teach it to them. So you can say, OK, I'm just doing, like, a random page here. Okay, So, um, learning bucket list. So in this lesson, But as he was talking about growth versus fixed mindset, So growth mindset is right and you start to begin to teach it a. That really helps you with your retention and be it kind of makes it more interactive experience. So it could be the videos. It also could be taking the audio from these videos and doing it like a podcast. So, yes, it was visual. But you don't have to see me and my amazing makeup on all of us to be able to get it. So maybe it's on a long car ride, you know, listening to each section like it's a podcast and then talking about it. So I would think about the way that you and your partner like to do things together and then mimicking that when I was thinking about the saying in the group community thing. One of the challenges I've run up against is that I'm single in a group with a lot of couples. Yes, what kind of tips do you have? Because some, sometimes it just feels so natural. And you don't feel like 1/3 wheel or fifth wheel in a group. Yeah, but other times it's really, really noticeable that I'm the only one without another partner there. Yeah, so it's a really good question, actually. Was talking to one of my best friends in Portland about this. Brennan shot out Brennan s. So we were talking about the difference between couples versus singles. And if you're in like a mixed group, what's that what that's like. So the very first thing I would try to think about is, Are there any patterns? So are there certain couples that make you feel more welcome or less welcome? Like, is it? Are there certain people that help those kind of mixed times feel better or worse? And are there certain kind of activities that make you feel better or worse, Like our group dinners? I'm saying, for example, great. You feel that sense of belonging, No problem like activities or road trips or concerts don't feel is good for whatever reason. So try to pick the people and the times that work best. And that way you're kind of fitting in your chart of happiness, so that when you do see that group, your pick, you're saying yes to the right ones. Or at least you're preparing yourself mentally for those right ones, right where you know that's working. Second is, I think that that could be kind of a quest. Is finding people where sort of couple ing up doesn't really matter? You're finding those people whether they're individuals or their friends, their family members, where you can feel that sense of belonging and the couple nous doesn't have doesn't come into play for it. That was a little bit harder is that might take a little bit longer. Do you have a quest? My Iceland, Iceland and got a solo trip will probably. I've kind of given myself the permission to go on solo trips whenever I want, because other times, if you wait until somebody else is ready to go, they just never go and you don't go either. Okay, so I love this. So I think solar tripping is great, but it doesn't mean in the planning process has to be solo. So maybe it's I have no idea. But, like maybe there is some kind of a meet up group where you could, either. It's trucks to travel related meeting group. It's a travel hacking group, and the Creativelive has a travel hacking class. There's a Facebook group for people who are local in your community because you're in Vancouver, right? I wonder if there's a travel hacking group where you could find people based on your quest, so maybe they're not gonna quest with you, but they could at least be your people. They value travel or they valued doing solo trips. I wonder if you could find those people around that in addition to that group of couples and sort of mixed singles, I'm starting Teoh from a lot of people that I'm learning from respecting and gathering nuggets of wisdom from I'm asking them to tell me a one thing that you've given us a lot of anything. Yes, and I'm just curious if you could give us one treasure, one gold nugget, What would be your one thing? Who? Okay, okay, okay. That's a good question. I would say, probably job crafting. So a lot of you raised your hand at the beginning when I brought up career with that five when I asked, like health career friendships. A lot of you did raise your hand a career. I think that job crafting is one of the most powerful things we can do because it's a lever for professional success and freshman happiness. You know, it's like, really powerful for both, so really sitting down and listing the skills you use every day. So not what you do every day, but like sitting down and being like okay, like for I'll do my day, for example, So when I get up in the morning, typically I read first thing in the morning, so learning would be the skill there, right? The next thing I usually do is email, and I'm pretty efficient email, but maybe be communicating right. I'm OK with it, but not great. That would be one skill used next researching, like do all the all the different researching or developing study with the next skill and seeing what skills air coming up throughout the day and then crafting those skills being like, Whoa, I'm spending four hours a day on email communication, which is like not one of my strongest skills. How can I give more of this away? How can I make someone's a job where their email communication is their thing and then take more time for my actual a work? So I would say job crafting specifically would be the one nugget that I encourage really strongly. Yeah, just build on that for maybe some of your previous students who aren't entrepreneurs or have their own business if they're in a more corporate environment. If you have any success stories to share of how after taking this course, they may have been able to pitch away to tailor their existing role or add on something differently that would be more suitable to their skills and help their happiness. Yes. So, um, I don't remember her name since. Sorry, if you're watching and I don't get your name, right. So what she was saying is that what they do and her company, or at least a lot of corporate companies is you have projects, your different clients. And when you're on a project, you kind of use those set of skills, and that's it. But every time you start a new project renew with a new client, you do have a little bit of wiggle room about what you volunteered to do or how you divvy up the job. And so what she did is she sat down with the client right after the course for the work she was doing, and she was like, OK, I'm doing ah, lot of on site communication with this client interpersonal interfacing. She loves that she loves going on site, but she really, really didn't, like, sort of the back end office stuff in numbers, not huge into accounting, not huge in statistics. I guess in her job. There's a lot of graph making graphs, things like that. And she says she realized it was pretty equal and she thought, You know what? Maybe next time I sit down before I start the project, I could go into it saying, Hey, I analyzed what? I didn't this last project and I realized I'm spending all these hours on doing mathematical analysis, and I This could be done faster, right? So she pitched it in a way that was like, You will get more company, big corporate company. You will get more bang for your buck if you don't have me doing this. I love interfacing with clients. I love talking to them. We need to get a finance person who are someone who's better with this. Give them that. They will get it done, what I get done in four hours on in two hours. So her big thing was trying to pitch it to the company in a way that was actually a win win, and it worked really well for her. So now what's it doesn't have to be tomorrow, but on your next project. I think that that's a way that you could pitch it to your your big corporate company. And I think that actually job crafting, as that example in Google showed, is even more flexible. Entrepreneurship. For example, In my job, I have to do a lot, but I have to do everything. I don't like accounting, but I have to do it because it's only me, my team of six. They're not accountants right there. Wonderful. They do marketing, communications, content writing, researching. But I'm the one who has to do payroll on the one who has to do taxes. And so in some ways I'm more limited in my choices in some ways. So it's not always better for entrepreneurs. I promise anyone else other questions. No other questions. Okay, well, at home. If you have questions of any of these questions brought up questions for you, go on our Facebook group. Go on my twitter at via AdWords and ask us any questions you want and I cannot wait to hear from you. I hope you enjoy this class and I will see you for our next creative life class.