Foreign. Hey, so welcome back to the podcast! I Am super excited first that you are listening and secondly because of my guest. Now before I tell you who he is Uh, I'm I'm kind of obsessed with this guy and mainly for the work that he's done. One book that I'm not gonna hold up yet because that'll immediately give it away if you're watching this on YouTube Uh, but I'll just say it has something to do with something I talk about a lot, which is just how do we find more joy and happiness as we deal with the stresses of our business life, our personal life.

the you know, constantly being pulled out as you know I'm speaking to the choir here. you know exactly what I'm saying. Um, but it's not just that I'm obsessed about his work, but it's that I finally get to share the stage with them. Yes, he is our guest speaker this year at the success Summit our 20th anniversary uh, my friend listening Sean Acre Sean Thank you so much not just for being on the podcast but for also sharing a stage with me coming up in August this year.

How you doing man? I'm doing great I'm so looking forward to August too! Yes, and the fact that we both get a drive there from our house is also kind of a nice little treat. Yes, that's absolutely true. So Sean there's a there's a good chance that you know one person listening right now is going to say all right Tom's all fired up about this and I like Tom who it's like, give him just like I literally wrote down my note was like give him a little backstory you know I was thinking about uh, you know your Mentor right? Dr uh talban like Shahar like help them understand why I'm so fired up about this. Like with your backstory, that's a nice way of saying most people won't know who I am no no, no I think everybody knows who you are, but there's all you know what I know, just joking.

So uh yeah. so I am a a positive psychologist I Researched in a field called positive Psychology which was a offshoot of traditional psychology which normally would look at depression and disorder and we wanted to look at the positive side of the curve. If somebody could deviate from their normal life to experience depression and go down, why couldn't they go in the other direction? So I was actually at Harvard Divinity School before getting into this work and I was studying how your belief systems changed the way you look at the world, Why you give why you forgive, why you wake up in the morning. Um, you know a doctor who believes in a God versus one that doesn't believe in a god.

Both of them can heal a patient, but the effect upon the doctor is different because of the mindset. So while I was doing that, some people in the psychology department said hey, we'd love to see if we could quantify this and I was like, you can't quantify happiness and joy. Those are subjective experiences and he said, well, if you can quantify, you know, uh, you know, depression, why couldn't we quantify Joy right? So I got hooked. So I I Research.

Not only can people change, but what happens to their brain when they become more positive? Yes, so Sean What? Like early on in your life, something something had to have happened that triggered sort of this Obsession around this I mean did you just fall into it when you were at college? Um, well it was. You know what came at me from every single angle? Um I Grew up in a household with a father who was a neuroscientist. So he was at Baylor University and I I literally in the womb. He was already doing experiments on me.

He put my very pregnant and clearly very patient mom through one of the very first prenatal um eegs to see if they could test my brain waves in utero. It failed. He said it was my fault, but I uh from the very beginning I think I was hardwired for this interest in what causes the brain to architect the world in the way it does. Like, where, where do we find meaning? where do we find joy That led me to the Divinity School and I feel like I'm doing much of the same work and positive psychology as we're really trying to understand the very lens to which people view the world because that lens that you have that other people have transforms and predicts what's about to happen next, right? So having been in the personal professional development space my goodness for like three decades which now starts to make me feel a little bit old.

um I feel like I've tried so many different things that you know all of a sudden you wake up one day and today a client said to me I don't understand how you do it like how do you have all these businesses going on all this travel, all this stress, a loving relationship, maintain good health, have all like like how do you do it and the only answer I could say was I've just created a psychology that just things just don't bother me as much I'm able to still find Joy There's a good chance someone listening right now literally is saying screw you Tom Ferry I am knee deep in Anger upset emotion I Just talked to a CEO client a client of mine a couple days ago who literally said you know I'm I'm six months into my new business I've never been a CEO before I've never been a Founder I've never been an owner is it always going to be like this and I said what do you mean he goes I want to kill myself in one minute and eight minutes later I'm in absolute ecstasy and I don't feel like I have any control of it at all. What would you say to that person? There's a lot of things that need to be said to that person and to all of us because I think what they're describing is what we all experience in microform where we fluctuate between extremes. You know, even as a happiness researcher, you know being in the space if I have too many talks in one month, if I say yes to too many research projects I'm like I cannot I just wish all this would go away, right? Yeah, and then the next month I don't have any research projects and no one's calling for talks I'm like, well, that was the end of my career. It's over completely over, right so you could fluctuate between those extremes and the more we fluctuate, the more we actually miss out on some of the other moments of Joy I Believe that the brain basically is like a super computer, but that can process only one or two things at a time.

Which means that every thought we have, um, has an opportunity cost of every other thought, right? So when I'm thinking about that negativity or frustration or wishing this work would go away or wishing this time period would go away, I'm missing out on all the thoughts that could actually be more adaptive with my life that are equally true, right? I'm not saying that the neg, that's the crucial part. um I Remember one time my wife yeah I I called my wife on the phone and I've been traveling too much and um I was like honey I'm not gonna get home. my flight's three hours delayed I can't believe this happened I started telling her Litany of negative things that had happened that day and I was like I'm not gonna see the kids and instead of jumping right to you know, well, you're a happiness researcher which he could have done um she said I'm so sorry you're experiencing that So acknowledged that what I was experiencing was true and then a few minutes later she was like, how are the other flights and almost every one of them Tom was was canceled I was the only flight going out within that short period of time and suddenly I'm still three hours delayed. Equally true.

But my Counterpoint my counterfactual to that event changed completely. and because of that, it changed the meaning in those moments and we see that across the board. I mean I know when I give talks to groups of people like I'll get to do in August that there are people that are like, well, of course he's happy. he's a happiness researcher.

he's married to a happiness researcher, right? He's on stage. um I Got into this research. The other answer to your question that you asked earlier is I went through two years of depression while I was at Harvard when my job was to make sure that the Harvard students didn't go through depression and what we got to see was how hard it is to not only put this Research into practice sometimes, but how hard it is to um, be in a world where we're competing for a success at the same time we're trying to architect meaning when we oftentimes don't have enough sleep and we have too many demands in our time and we have constant phones and text messages eating up our limited brain resources. So part of this research is built upon the back of going through depression myself and seeing how this research had an implication for a single person I'm a single data point.

But then when we started doing this with more and more people and literally with tens of thousands now, hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, we started to realize this wasn't something that worked for one person or for two people or for somebody who gets to go on stage or who gets to travel a whole bunch. This was something that worked because we're human. So with that said, all of the research, the hundreds of thousands of people you have to have discovered the four or five. I I Hate to use the phrase hacks or you know, like processes or steps, formulas, whatever you want to call it.

Um, but I know my listener is very much like the people you work with go-getters Let's get it done right. They might be listing this on on like high Speed right? Like there's that just. It's just how they're wired right and I love you I'm the same way I Get it. What are two or three things that between now and the summit If you said to them, hey, just test this for the next you know, call it few weeks, few months and then I'll see you in August and I'll take you from this test to the next test.

What would some of those early tests be? Um I can tell you the two that are the most successful and short period of time. Um I'll say both of them. But let me also say for the go-getters who are listening that actually I think the most important change is a mindset shift rather than a behavioral shift. But let me tell you the behavioral shifts first.

Um, if you want to test out this research every day before the conference, write down or say out loud. Three new things you're grateful for. That have occurred over the past 24 hours. You've heard it before.

Um, the problem is that when we repeat, it's the rote part of the brain instead of the part of the brain that's scanning. So when you scan for three new things you're grateful for. Just like when you practice golf or pickleball or tennis, your brain gets better at it and what we find is that somewhere in a 21 day period of time, your brain takes a shortcut and it's passive. This is important for all the people that are working so hard and so fast when they're hustling is that this is a passive change that occurs within your life that your brain takes a shortcut to actually remember the pinpricks of positivity and process them so you have them the next day when you're writing down or saying out loud.

The three things you're grateful for, and what we find is that people are genetic pessimists who have been practicing this for five decades. We find 21 days later, they test on average as low level optimists on average and that they keep going Beyond 21 days the pattern keeps. Rising So if you want to test this research out in the smallest and most concrete and practical form, it's writing down or saying out loud. Three new things you're grateful for.

That have occurred over the past 24 hours. The other one that's even more powerful. But first. Sean Just so I'm clear, where could somebody test, where could they go to figure out where am I on that scale of sort of pessimism.

optimism? Great question. So we we quantify all this because if you just feel a little bit different, you actually don't keep doing it because you're not sure if that's really working right. And then you know when things are not working at work because you feel all that stress, right? So we created metrics and you can actually look at all of them and they're almost all of them are free. They're at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology website, so just Google Positive Psychology in University of Pennsylvania you can get a free login there and then you can use all the public domain questions and then you can write them down yourselves right so you can use them elsewhere.

But you can track yourself over time and what allows you to do is to see where you currently fit on a scale of optimism compared to a threshold or test your your perceived stress levels or perceived social connection score. So if you do that at the beginning. for those of you that love the science portion of it, right, test yourself at the beginning, right? This is just like going to the gym and seeing how much you can you know bench press right now and then see how much you can bench pressed in August It's the same exact mechanism that works for happiness, joy, and optimism. We just assume that's much more complicated because it's occurring in the brain instead of the bicep.

So back on the gratitudes. uh, my older brother and I My goodness, Um, it feels like two decades-ish ago. so it's Gotta even be longer than it's probably 27 years ago. We we created a thing called the 1010 Formula and for us, it was.

Here's the 10 things I'm grateful for and then a little Journal just write down 10 things you're grateful for and then the 10 things I'm looking to attract right? and sometimes it was 10 things that I'm just appreciating I'm acknowledging. But mostly it was like 10 things I wanted to attract and I look back at doing that discipline for easily easily two decades and ultimately like turned into little books and maybe someone listening right now I was like oh, I used to have those journals. how long does it take in your opinion or in your data, right in your science To say someone that might be listening to this and saying really, one more person telling me I gotta write down what I'm freaking grateful. You know what I mean like there's gonna be someone like that.

Maybe maybe they were. This podcast was sent to someone and they're like oh now I know why they sent it to me. But you know in all seriousness, like how fast should somebody know the shift because I've done the okay today I'm grateful for interviewing shot on my podcast, but the reality was I was tired I you know I also had a two hour delay on my flight last night. You know all these excuses and you don't always see the immediate benefit.

How long? Um, so it's multifaceted. On the one hand, it could be instantaneous because the brain can't do two things at once. It actually can't be scanning for the Litany of the bad while your brain is scanning for the positive. So even though you have true things going on, they're negative, which we all have, even if we're a happiness researcher.

What we're finding is that there are equally true things that are existing in reality that our brain is not processing. and whatever our brain doesn't process, we just miss. What we find is um, and hopefully we'll get to talk about this a little bit in August But if you play Tetris for five hours in a row, you if you sleep, you actually oftentimes will dream about Tetris Your brain gets stuck in these patterns. Um, I work with tax Auditors They scan for mistakes and errors and forms and then when they lead other teams, all they're doing is scanning for mistakes and errors.

Nothing to praise or recognize. When they go home to their kids, all they see are the flaws and blemishes and they think once I solve these they're not. then I'll fall happier. What we find is we get stuck in these patterns.

our brains. The easiest thing for your brain to do is to scan the world for threat. That's the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala, everything else in the brain that evolved around it. That's the part that builds meaning.

but it takes conscious effort to be able to do that. So you know I often hear people saying you know happy people are the ones that are not that smart, right? Happy people are the ones that don't get it. Happy people are the ones that in the midst of a world that is full of negative things that are true, can still process and parse out meaning and then perceive ways to make their lives in other people's lives better. What we're finding is that happiness takes more effort, but it actually when you take those few moments to write down those gratitudes for example, it literally trains your brain to get better.

So long term is where we're going with this. instantaneous. you can feel it, but you're going to go right back down to your genetic set point. What we find is that your genetic set point is the starting block and most people think that they are only their genes in their environment.

So deep down they think that no matter what podcast they listen to how how many talks they go to, they're going to be the same person before and after because they can't change their genes and they can't really change the macron environment instantaneously. so they have to wait for the World to Change. What we find is that these small habits that everyone's been talking about for literally every single major religious tradition for thousands of years are the building blocks of how the brain learns how to perceive a more adaptive reality in the midst of true negative things. Yes, I'm always fascinated by the genetic conversation.

One of my mentors would always say, you know, like genetics are like a gun, but you still have to pull the trigger. So just just because you've always or your family or your current, you still have to pull the trigger. You have to make that conscious choice. So I love that you said two behaviors and then a mindset shift.

What's the second? Behavior the second behavior is very quick and for the Skeptics they're gonna be like, well, he's gonna do something I Know I've heard before we got people at LinkedIn For example, we've done this worldwide. Right down in a two minute maximum period of time, a positive text message or email praising or thanking one person in their life. We do it for a specific reason. Um, what we find is that when you do this, if you do it, you immediately if you do it for three days in a row, you literally get addicted to it because you spend all day long thinking about how amazing you are for the two minutes you spend in the morning, even if you're a jerk the rest of the day, right? But the real value is around day eight, everyone runs out of people that they realize I'm not a crazy extrovert, right? I Don't have these deep meaningful relationships I Wrote to everyone in my favorites list and my mom twice.

That's everyone. And then you have to scan and then you scan for who's the mentor who got you into this or who is that incredibly inspirational uh, person in your life growing up or who's your kids first grade teacher the transform your kid's life. But you don't talk to them anymore because your kids in college, right? Or uh, that person on your soccer team. we were talking about this beforehand.

You start to realize you have all these weak ties. But loneliness is not the absence of people We found. the loneliness is the absence of feeling like you have a meaningful impact upon people or they upon you within two minutes. That's all it takes for your brain to construct a node of meaning around that person and you have a mental map of social connection.

You write to just 21 people. if you only do it for 21 days in a row, your social connection score Rises To the top 15 percent of people worldwide. Regardless, if you're a high introvert, if you're traveling too much, or you're in Social isolation and what we find is this the perception of social connection. The reason I mention that is if there's a key to happiness.

I Believe In This Research it's your social connection score. Breath, depth and meaning in your social relationships. It's why our work is Meaningful It's why being happier is Meaningful because we believe it's going to have a positive impact upon other people. Sean Would you restate the line about I was I literally I When I do a podcast I'm probably like one of the few podcasters that's like listening and learning.

Listening and learning like taking notes. But you said something about like loneliness is loneliness is not the absence of people. it's the absence of feeling like you have a meaningful impact upon someone or they upon you because we can be surrounded by people. But if we don't feel like those interactions are meaningful, if we're not even scanning for it, then it erodes the social connection we fill within those moments.

But suddenly, if you do something meaningful for someone, even a stranger, that person is now a meaningful connection within your life. And we actually found. um, this is not my research. This is other people's research.

They found that social connection is as predictive of how long you end up living as obesity, high blood pressure, or smoking. So we can get somebody to extend their life as much by stopping smoking is getting them to write two-minute positive emails. But when they write the positive emails, they build social connection which is the greatest predictor of them stopping a negative habit, right? You start to see all these beautiful interconnections that occur. What I love about it too is you know so much of my work with helping real estate agents and loan officers and others leaders.

You know, building their organizations is it's cliche. It's keep it simple like there are like I I wrote a my fourth book which I've not published in the book's called plays That Work and and it's just a series of I know when you do this, this and this, you get that and it's a great way to describe it to business people because I'm like if you just look at Sports and say if I'm running a play and it works and I can keep scoring and I can keep winning I'm going to run that play until the defense stops me. And when you get people to realize like there's just the Simplicity of businesses finding out what's working, creating the flywheel, running it over and over and over. And to me, what you said here is just.

it's a simple reminder of these two plays. create joy and happiness and connection and the word loneliness. You and I both know dealing with entrepreneurs right CEOs of companies leaders, men and women alike. Everybody goes through it like as you as you climb and Ascend Oftentimes they feel more and more isolated, more and more lonely and that second one is a beautiful way to remove some of that unnecessary pain and drama and just get back to feeling connected.

So I really I just I love both those and I'm taking it on. So for all my friends, you'll see me doing it. It'll be on Instagram So watch out for it on. my Instagram stories.

doing the gratitudes every day. So what's the mindset shift? Well, I think you alluded to it? Uh, just briefly. Uh, right there. What Let me say one other quick thing that I think will connect to it about the social connection piece.

Um, at LinkedIn To quantify the effects, we actually found that if someone receives three touch points of those praise over a six-month period of time. It turns out the retention rates there went from 80 to 94. So same pay, same building, same everything. and yet their desire to be part of that team changed dramatically.

That's why they got excited because that's where tens of millions of dollars in terms of their hiring practices. Well, I got excited if someone receives three touch points of Praise Turns out when you look at the platform we're looking at, they doubled the amount of Praise they were giving into it. Those people that receive the praise change the amount of Praise that they give out. Which means you start to see these Ripple effects that occur throughout the entire Community We're working with all the public schools in Flint Michigan and we found if we could raise the levels of happiness for the teachers, the teachers, students, parents, or Guardians well-being score started improving.

We were working with them. The students test scores are rising. We weren't working with them. What we were finding was the small changes to the mindset and behavior of a few people with an ecosystem chain.

just the entire ecosystem which I think you know as you were talking about those entrepreneurs I think we get lonely. but the other thing that we all experience is we think if I can just get to that next point to this next point I'm really working hard towards then I'm going to feel happier, right? And that I think is the mindset shift that has to occur before the behavioral shift Because this is why dieting oftentimes doesn't work because we try to change a behavior without the mindset ship first. Um, for those that are listening that are the hustlers, the go-getters Um, we follow a very simple formula: a Creed that if you work harder, you'll be more successful and then just think how happy you'll be right? Think how happy you'll be if you could be that you know that NFL football star or that you know that incredibly successful entrepreneur right? Or that billionaire right? Think how happy you could be if you had this number of people on Instagram Right We think to ourselves, as soon as I get that degree, think how happy I'll be or when I get married, think how happy I'll be right. Or when I have this nest egg or once the pandemic is over, think how happy will be.

remember that one like everyone was like well this would just get over, then we'll fall. and then we find out that doesn't work at all. The reason for it is back in the 50s, there is a series of studies done that showed us something so important that no one talks about. which is that every time your brain has a success, your brain changes the goal post of what success looks like.

It moves it up. The reason that's important is your brain is designed to make sure your pursuit of happiness never works. If happiness is on the opposite side of success because success is a moving Target for the brain and everyone listening already knows that because if you have a degree or you're making money, or you have relationships right or you've had some sort of accomplishment in the past, you should already be happy. But that's not house.

That's not how happiness works, right? Actually, we find a success. Rises We actually don't find a large connection to people's levels of happiness. If that was true, the happiest people in the world much happier than anyone listening would be the billionaires. Oprah You know the you know the Hall of Famers right? Those would be the happiest people.

and what we find is higher levels of substance abuse and feeling jaded because they were. They're an A-list celebrity, they can't make more money or become more popular and it didn't work. Um but what we found in this research that if there's one message that I I hope to really um to share it in August is that the formulas backwards I Believe. But it actually works the other way.

Happiness, to me isn't pleasure. Happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential and joy you can experience even when life is not pleasurable which is entrepreneurs. People know that's a lot of our work or being on those planes or getting delayed right? Living in this world or in the midst of childbirth. It's not high levels of pleasure all the time, yet moments of Joy can exist even in the midst of it.

In fact, we've only experienced joy in the midst of a broken world. So the question is, how do we create it? And what we found is that every single business and educational outcome we've tested for at Harvard School of Education at Harvard Business School every business and educational outcome Rises Dramatically, when your brain is positive compared to your own brain and negative neutral stress sales Rise by 37 productivity by 31 we find that the same level of stress if you have a positive mindset like you were talking about that's one of your superpowers, right is you can have all the stress and yet it doesn't seem to phase you. Part of what it is is that when we identify the meaning of Vault with stress or see where it's going, the negative impacts of stress evaporate. We actually did that in a study that was published in the Top Psychology Journal where We found if you just identify the meaning involved with your stress, it has a completely different effect upon the body we're working the Marines out of Camp Pendleton six Battalion Marines And they don't onboard you to their organization with a beach vacation.

they onboard you with boot camp because they know if you go through stress with the right lens and with other people. which is why I'm excited to be with everyone there in August is it transforms that stress into something that's life-giving and meaningful and we find you live longer, your symptoms become less acute, your social bonds deepen everything we test for on standardized tests the United States and schools Rises dramatically. When the human brain is positive, so all that's to say is twofold. I Think happiness is the greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy, and what I believe is that happiness isn't the end of our work.

Happiness is the means. And if it's the means, when we become more positive, we get to really see our potential as entrepreneurs, as parents, as spouses, as poets, as people, all players. I Love that you added in pickleball too, by the way. just just saying just saying they're saying the new version of paddle tennis become is becoming the new pickleball.

Sean I Know for the person listening right now they Now understand why I'm so pumped about you being at the summit we we spend so much time talking about the psychology of success. we spend so much time looking at the the very practical tactical ways like I One of my one of my promises of this event is you don't need to ask how anymore when you come here the the how will be delivered Sean's going to deliver the how on this and Jimmy is going to deliver how to get 100 listings and Tom's gonna deliver and Jason and Susan and like all the we're all gonna deliver, their issue is going to be more about what do I want to do Why do I want to do it and who do I need to maybe get a little more juice from to make sure I get get it done faster or maybe who do I need to have do it for me. So so much of what you're saying is is falling so in alignment with this. Um I Love the two exercises I Love the thought that happiness is the single greatest competitive Advantage Uh closing thoughts before they get to experience you you know, in-depth live super fun with 6 000 other people in Dallas Closing thoughts before we bounce I Hope people will test this out even before we get together because we find that those are the people especially the Skeptics who try it out that become these converts that are the greatest champions for This research and have the longest term impact.

So if you're a skeptic, just try this out if you're already an optimist, we actually find that you can improve dramatically and that that effect spills over to other people as well. And what we're finding is, don't try and do this alone. Happiness is not as an individual sport at all. Happiness and success are individual or interconnected traits.

So if you can find some way of working with somebody on this, become much better together. Yeah! I Agree! 100 Thank you so much man! I know we're both you know, jamming busy today. Uh, thank you for bringing a little more happiness to my world and to my friend listening today. Uh, for you out there listening, you might want to send this to a few of your buddies.

Um, I'm definitely going to start the Gratitude challenge I hope you're gonna do the same and I'm definitely doing the same touch point of just acknowledging somebody that's had a positive impact on my life. and and I I'm looking like I have a big less so Sean It's going to be easy for me to get to about I don't know. It feels like 8 000 that are inside my phone. so for a couple of my friends out there now, you'll know.

Oh that's why Fairy sent it to me. Yes, All right. John Thank you so much I Can't wait to see you face to face in August or maybe around town before uh before we get there. So thank you for joining us if our friend listening.

Thank you so much for watching foreign.