Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00E9ZUQKQ | Format: PDF
Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change Description
In his international best seller, The Happiness Advantage, Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor described why happiness is the precursor to greater success. This book is about what comes before both. Because before we can be happy or successful, we need to first develop the ability to see that positive change is possible. Only once we learn to see the world through a more positive lens can we summon all our motivation, emotion, and intelligence to achieve our personal and professional goals.
In Before Happiness, Achor reveals five actionable, proven strategies for changing our lens to positive:
- The Most Valuable Reality: See a broader range of ideas and solutions by changing the details on which your brain chooses to focus
- Success Mapping: Set goals oriented around the things in life that matter to you most, whether career advancement or family or making a difference in the world
- The X-spot: Use success accelerants to propel you more quickly towards those goals, whether finishing a marathon, reaching a sales target, learning a language, or losing 10 pounds
- Noise-Canceling: Boost the signal pointing you to opportunities and possibilities that others miss
- Positive Inception: Transfer these skills to your team, your employees, and everyone around you
By mastering these strategies, you'll create a renewable source of positivity, motivation, and engagement that will allow you to reach your fullest potential in everything you do.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 14 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 10, 2013
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00E9ZUQKQ
If you Google "Investment advice" you will get over one hundred and fifty million different sites to check out. If you were to investigate just a few, you would find much conflicting information. Do the same for "happiness" and you get even more sites and more conflicting information. One of the problems we have today is that we are bombarded with information - but so much of it is conflicting. Most of us are lacking an objective method of separating the helpful from the noise.
Shawn Achor, the author of Before Happiness, is a highly acclaimed positive psychologist. He is also the author of a previous book - The Happiness Advantage. His passion is the study of happiness - discovering what really leads to happiness and also discovering those things that block our way.
In Before Happiness, he gives us 5 key methods to better understand how we can create more happiness in our own lives and the lives of those around us.
The first key is to understand that we create our own reality by what we focus on. We can choose to focus on the negative things in life or we can choose to take a more positive approach. He is not advocating irrational optimism - which he says is delusional. "Your reality is a choice; what you choose to focus on shapes how you perceive and interpret your world."
The second key is the meaning we assign to things in life - Mr. Achor calls them meaning markers. You will learn how to set better goals based on what is meaningful to you and your life.
The third key is what he calls the X-Spot. This concept is best illustrated by the kick a marathon runner gets when they see the finish line in sight. They get a burst of energy to finish the race.
There used to be an advertisement in the Airlines' inflight magazine for a service that provided subscribers with a summary of ten "important" how to succeed in business books each month. This is the sort of book that would have been easy to summarize. When i ordered this book, i thought the focus was how to put in place the precursors for happiness in one's life. Although the author pays lip service to this goal, 95% of the book focuses on how to do better in business. It offers no real insights, but relies on the gimmick that is common in these books: coming up with a new jargon to describe standard steps toward succeeding. So, for example, the ability to recognize alternative ways of approaching a problem is called: "positive genius." After giving an outline of what one needs to do to succeed in business, the author then cites recent research studies in psychology and social psychology to support relatively obvious approaches. The author's system is to recognize the most positive view of the reality with which one is confronted, set appropriate goals, come up with alternative views of the reality so as to come up with the best approaches to reaching one's goals, come up with interim goals and align your resources to reach that goal,get rid of negative distractions, and convince others to buy into your approach. Jargon is invented to label each of these five steps: Reality Architecture, Mental Cartography, the X Spot, Noise Cancelling, and Postive Inception. Like most of these how to succeed in business books, they are most effective for people who are not particularly introspective. But for those who find themselves motivated by slogans, this is a great flavor of the month.
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