Lessons

Lesson Info

What To Expect In This Class

Let me go over the 10 skills we'll be learning in this course. First, and we'll be doing this one today after this intro section, is the now-how mindset. So the now-how mindset is actually a very, very quick way to try to exercise the happy juices in our brain. I like the word happy juices, endorphins and dopamine and all those good ones. And you will also meet the number one happiness expert in the world, you know who that is? It's not me, it's you! (laughing) And the reason for this is because you've been living with yourself your entire life, you know that? You know yourself far better than I ever could. I think the biggest mistake, and I've read a lot of happiness books, I've taken a lot of happiness courses, the biggest mistake is that people prescribe one formula for everyone, but that's impossible, because what works for me might not work for you. So today we're going to be customizing the entire course for you with something that I call the chart of happiness. So we're going to...

be doing that today. Oh, I also wanna tell you a very quick story about this, and this has to do with a purple bear. So this is a story that was actually told to me by Mrs. Brown at my elementary school. And my elementary school, every year, there would be a big raffle to raise money for charity. So what would happen was is for a whole week they would have some sort of donated prize and kids would come by and pay a dollar for a raffle ticket and at the end of the week, they would pull out all the tickets and you'd get this prize. And Mrs. Brown told me this story of this one girl, we'll call her Suzy, I don't know her actual name. So Suzy was very, very excited about this bear, Mrs. Brown said that she was like, she saw this purple bear and it was like she saw her soulmate. And every day at lunch she would come by and she would ask if she could hold the bear and she would pet the bear and she would talk to her parents about it, she told everyone how much she wanted it. And finally, Friday came, and Mrs. Brown said to me, I was praying that Suzy would win this bear, 'cause I did not know what would happen if she didn't. So Mrs. Brown is like circling the raffle bowl and she's like please just be Suzy, and she pulls out a ticket, and it's little Johnny's name, not Suzy. And immediately Suzy bursts into tears. And she's crying, she's so upset, Johnny like walks off with the bear. And Mrs. Brown's like, she's sitting with Suzy and she's like, it's okay, it'll be okay. Suzy, how many tickets did you buy for this bear? And Suzy looked at her and she was like, you had to buy a ticket? I think, and Mrs. Brown actually told me this story after I was telling her I was talking about happiness research, because if we could use this bear as a metaphor for happiness, we give happiness a lot of lip service. We constantly talk about how much we want it. We want it so bad, we read articles on happiness, we covet it, but when it actually comes down to doing the work or buying the ticket, either we didn't know we had to buy a ticket in the first place, 'cause we weren't born with it, or we don't know the skills we have to do to get it, to exercise it. So today I wanna teach you, and especially in the now-how mindset, I wanna teach you those skills. Day two we'll be talking about mastery. So I'm going to be going through an exercise that I call your skill temperature, or taking a temperature for your skills. We are gonna be focusing on the power of capability. So we don't often think about happiness in terms of power, but I actually think that power can give us great happiness. And I'm gonna be teaching you something called the designed life, where as I mentioned, we don't always know that we have to buy a ticket, we don't know that we have as much control as we do over our lives. I'm gonna be bringing a lot of control back into our lives, especially with our skills. Day three is play, it's one of my favorite days. So I think, as adults, we've forgotten how to play. And play is sort of silly, right? Play is for kids, silly rabbit. But I actually think that there is a way to have adult play in a PG way. When I was practicing this I was like, we're gonna learn how to do adult play. And I was like, wait a minute. I don't know if that sounds right. So we're going to be doing adult play in a PG way. And we're gonna be doing something that I call playstorming, which is far more fun than brainstorming, I will tell you, and we're gonna be talking about how we can incorporate more play into our lives. Day four is about control. So how many people are recovering control freaks? Yeah, okay, me too. I was like, there has to be more than just me. So I'm going to teach you how to use control in a good way. So we are gonna be talking about happiness experiments. So we are gonna be doing some happiness experiments in here as well as I'm gonna be teaching you how to use happiness experiments in your life. Day number five is about wow. And that day is very specifically titled because it is after our inner kids. So days three, four, and five, so play, control, and wow, are really harnessing that inner kid. This is me, my mom's like favorite outfit, my mom put me in all these outfits. She was very pleased when I told her I was putting a bunch of these pictures into my presentation. She's like, oh someone else is gonna see them, there was no Instagram when you were a baby! I was like, great. So, have you ever noticed that when you're with a kid, they are wowed by everything, right? They're like, power windows, wow! Ice cream, wow, sky, wow! So we're gonna be bringing a little bit of that wow back into our life with something I call the five stages of wow. We hear about the five stages of grief, I think that wow should have five stages, too. Day number six, we're gonna be talking about our g-spots, and I'm not gonna tell you what they are right now. But you're gonna have to tune in to find out what they are and yes, they're PG. Mostly, okay. Day number seven is I'm gonna be teaching you the concept of a Sangha. So this is about building community, or building a sense of belonging, which is incredibly important to our happiness. Full confession is this day makes me the most nervous. So there's a reason why it's day seven and not day one. (laughing) Hoping to work my way up to it. This is also, this was skill number one for me and my happiness journey. So I actually started with this skill, the people in my life, people skills, which is one of the reasons why I talk about being a recovering awkward person. This was skill number one for me on my journey, so I'm saving it for seven for us. Whew, hopefully it'll make me less nervous by the time I get there. Alright, day number eight, I'm gonna be talking about mindset, very specifically, this is a mindset heavy day. We're gonna be talking about luck, and I had to share, sneak peek, one study that's like one of my favorites about this day. And this is about the power of expectations. So in this study, they had participants enter a dark room. So a totally dark room, they had them sit down at a table. And they told them, we are going to give you a bowl of strawberry yogurt. We'd like you to take a few bites of this yogurt, and then we're gonna ask you some questions about this yogurt, the creaminess, the flavor. 59% of the participants rated the yogurt as having a nice strawberry flavor. However, it was actually chocolate yogurt. What? I know, right, like your face is like, what? Yeah, so, people expected to taste strawberry, and therefore they did, even though this was chocolate yogurt. So our mind is incredibly powerful, and I want us to use that in a really interesting way when it comes to happiness. And I won't be serving any strawberry or chocolate yogurt, we won't be doing that experiment, I thought about it. Oh, I thought about it, I was like, can we have a dark room set up in CreativeLive? I thought it'd be too much, so, you have to take my word for it. Day number nine is triangle theory. So triangle theory is about wellness. It is very, very hard to talk about happiness, mental happiness, without talking about our physical body. You almost can't separate mental wellness from physiological happiness. There are so many chemicals, when you dive into the science of happiness in the body and in the mind, there's so many chemicals that regulate different aspects of our happiness. Happiness is one word that we're gonna be using, but actually, there are so many things that effect happiness, for example, happiness has to do with our willpower, our motivation, our stress, our enjoyment. It talks about bad habits, anxiety, trust, all these different things effect our happiness in some way. And they're all related to some kind of chemical. So we know that oxytocin produces feelings of trust and reduces our anxiety. We know that melatonin, for example, is an incredibly important part of our sleep, and sleep, you get a low day of sleep, it is not a happy day the next day. So all of these different things effect our happiness, and we're gonna talking about the physical side of happiness in day number nine. Day number 10, bringing everything together into a theory that I call assertivism. So I live my life according to assertivism, it's sort of my religion, if you will. And so I'm going to hopefully being indoctrinating you into my cult of assertivism by day 10. We'll be taking some pledges, we'll walk through fire. It'll be a good day. Can I get a hoorah! Alright, let me talk about what this course is and is not, so we can get really clear to make sure you know this course is for you. One, this course is not something you have heard before. We all know the importance of affirmations, gratitude journals. I will not be talking about them. I am hoping I will give you skills and strategies you have never heard before when it comes to happiness. This is also not therapy. So if you want to do therapy, I am in full support of it. If you feel like you're taking this course or you're doing some of the happy warm-up exercises and you're like, you know what? I think I need more, like I need more help than this, please, please go get help. We actually have in your bonus material a K10 distress test. So you can take that test to see where you fall if you wanna get some more help. This course is great along with therapy if you'd like to do it, but it is not therapy, I'm not a counselor, I'm not a therapist, I'm just a real person who has struggled a lot with unhappiness, and I'm hoping to share my story. What it is, this is a very science-based course. We will have, I think, almost every five slides, some kind of a study. So everything we will be talking about is science-based. I also believe in tactics. So I don't want to give you soft, fuzzy ideas just that you can think about, I want to give you real things that you can do now and today that you can use for it, and lastly, while we will be doing short-term things like dancing and singing, maybe? We will be doing those short-term things that immediately press those happiness g-spots, but we will also be doing things to build us for the long-term. So although this is only 10 days, I built this course to be re-watched. Maybe the first time you take it, you focus on pillars two and six, you really focus on those two, 'cause career was your number one area that you wanted to focus on. Maybe in a few months you decide, you know what, I wanna focus on this more health stuff. I'm gonna focus on day number nine, triangle of wellness, or wellness theory, I'm gonna focus on day number one. So I want you to be able to re-watch them as you're learning the pillars. Here's the cool thing. So this is the first time of any of my courses I was actually able to launch this course as a beta version a year ago, test everything in it, and then redeliver it to you. So a year ago, I developed this entire course called The School of Happiness for about 300 beta students. And they all knew they were beta students, they're amazing, some of them are watching. I had them take this course, and then we tracked them. I looked and saw which strategies worked, which ones didn't. Which quizzes made sense and which ones didn't. Which activities were people's favorite, which ones did people hate. So what you are seeing now is really the perfected, honed version from those beta students, and I wanna thank you guys for watching at home, for giving me so much good feedback to make it perfect for you guys. One thing that we learned, we learned a couple of mistakes from that class, was that we had spread it out over 10 weeks, so we did a lesson every Monday. It was too long. What happened is people lost momentum. So instead, when I was talking to CreativeLive, I said let's make it 10 days so people can really keep the momentum, and if people wanna slow it down, they can. But what we did learn is, I was worried, I was like ugh, but if we put it in 10 days, we miss that 21 day behavior change. 10 days is not that long in the scheme of things, it takes 21 to 31 to 41 days to get behavior change. So what we did is, to kind of get the benefit of both, is this is a 10 day course, but I have 21 days of happiness challenges that I will email you every day to support you even beyond the course. They are totally free quotes, challenges, videos, exercises, so please, as you are taking the course, sign up and get the 21 day challenge so I can support you even after the 10 days. The single most important ingredient, according to Shawn Achor and he is an amazing happiness researcher, is people, and this did not surprise me at all, as I run the Science of People and talk a lot about people skills. So what I encourage you to do, my final kind of bonus, is to get a partner in joy. So we talk about partners in crime, but I much prefer partners in joy. So I want you to think about someone who could possibly take this course along with you. Now, we are very lucky in here. We take this course with each other, I am hopefully your partner in joy in here. But at home, I really, really encourage you to think of someone that you can use as a partner in joy. So quick questions for you to just think about, who pops into your head. Who supports you most? Who pops into your head for that? Who needs a little happiness in their life? So this course is not only about your happiness, it's also about gifting happiness to others. Who do you think could use this course even more than you? Lastly, who is a good accountability partner? So some of the exercises, I learned from the beta version of the course, are a little intimidating. They're a lot, they can be very personal, and it's really nice to have someone who kinda just nudges you a little bit, pushes you. I will be that for you guys, I'll be nudging you a lot in this course and calling on you without raising your hand, I apologize ahead of time, 'cause I'm your accountability partner. So I force you to answer. So I want you to think about this person. In the beta version, we also asked people to get a partner in joy, and it worked really well. So this was sort of the breakdown for them. So we asked, who will you ask to be your partner in joy? So most people picked their spouse or partner, but we had people who said friends, a couple of family members, and even a new friend. You are welcome to get a new friend, another fellow happiness student, in the chat forums, I think they're live today. And we have a Power of Happiness Facebook group. So if you're looking for a digital partner in joy, hop on there and be like, I need someone awesome! And then someone awesome will reply to you. The other thing I decided to do was in your bonus materials, I gave you discussion questions for each day. So like a book club, you get reading questions, I also gave you discussion questions along with each course. So if you're virtual, like you're taking it with someone who's across the country or across the world, you can open this and then chat with each other with these questions, to stimulate answers every day. So I have those in the bonuses for you.