Meet Becky: Happiness is the Highest-Value Investment

“We are not taught the ways that mental well-being or happiness really impact our overall, not just well-being, but performance and success. Oftentimes happiness feels fluffy but I would argue that . . . living happy might be one of the highest value investments we can make in ourselves, in our families, in our communities and in the world.”

 In this episode of Practice Well(Being) our co-cost Rebecca Morrison shares her wisdom including:

• How you can leverage happiness as a competitive advantage.'
• A fail-proof method to get unstuck.
• Living Happy isn’t about bypassing the tough stuff but rather being able to successfully navigate every emotion that the human condition might bring our way.

 She also explains how happiness fits in to the bigger picture of well-being, why happiness (or positive emotion) is her favorite place to start when trying to improve your well-being and why you shouldn’t get hung up on believing that your circumstances are primarily responsible for happiness.

 You can connect with Nita and Becky on LinkedIn. You can also learn more about Becky’s work on her website at www.untanglehappiness.com. 

Transcript

In this episode of practice wellbeing. My co-host Becky Morrison talks about her journey from lawyer to executive to happiness coach. We not only get to know Becky, but start digging into some really important concepts and research around happiness, positive emotion, performance, and the investments we make in optimizing our lives and ability to succeed.

We are not taught the ways that happiness and having more positive emotional experiences really impact our overall wellbeing, performance and success. Oftentimes, happiness is a word that feels fluffy, but Becky talks about it as one of the highest value investments that we can make for ourselves and the.

It's a turbo boost for our performance. Thank you for listening in. Let's get to it.

Hi, Becky. Hi Nita. Hi. I am so happy to be here for episode two of the practice wellbeing podcast. And we are here to learn a little bit more about you and your journey to, um, to where we are today and the conversations that we're going to have about, you know, well-being in the legal industry. And so I actually thought it would be just a great place to start to get a little bit more about your background because.

You've had quite a winding journey to get here. And I want to hear more about you getting from lawyer to happiness coach and I'm sure the listeners do too. Awesome. Yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about our conversation in the last episode and you know, you've been at the same organization, but not in the same role, so I don't want to make it sound like you've been just doing the same old thing for 19 years, but it's such a contrast because I've kind of feel like I've been here, there, and a little bit of everywhere over the last two ads, but that same timeframe.

So I've gone from litigator to law firm administrator, kind of in a hybrid legal technology role to, um, working for a small entrepreneurial finance company to starting my own coaching business as a happiness coach and author and speaker. And it is like one of those journeys that people hear about and they got questions like.

How does a lawyer end up as a happiness coach? Right. So I always struggle with sort of like people ask, well, how did that happen? Or where did that start? And the short answer is there's no one thing that made it happen, right? It is a series of experiences, moments, things I've learned that have led me to this place.

When I think about some of the biggest defining moments, one big defining moment that jumps forward is, you know, probably now about 16 years ago, I found myself one evening sitting on the floor of my bathroom. My husband was working in counter-terrorism at the time. And he had been called into work late at the time.

I was a litigator and antitrust litigator, and we were getting ready for a big administrative trial in front of the FTC. And I had some late night calls that I thought I was going to be able to stay late and take, but here the world exploded and I was stuck with our toddler stock. Not really, but with our toddler.

Yup. And I was doing. So I had my toddler in the bath and I had, cause this was 16 years ago, the cordless phone clipped to the back of my pants with like the wired earphones in and I've got the toilet seat, cover clothes and the notebook on the toilet seat, cover and papers spread all around. I'm on the phone with our experts who have an upcoming deposition and we're doing some prep and I'm, I'm like the key associate on the expert team.

So I'm supposed to be sort of participating, taking notes, like doing heavy lifting in this call, which I was doing. And as we sort of wrap that up, I had two thoughts in quick succession. Number one, who says you can't do it all, like who says you can't be a present parent and a really successful litigator and all the things.

And then without almost missing a breath or a beat, I had the second thought, which was, but I'm tired, maybe even exhausted. And I'm pretty sure this is unsustainable and probably most scarily and most important to me. I'm not sure that it's what I want to be doing that it's making me happy. Interesting.

And so that's a moment real early in my career where I started down this road of like what actually matters to me. Because up until that point, I had done a lot of checking the boxes, good grades, good schools, good jobs, partnership, track, good money, all of those things. So, yeah. Well, so it's interesting.

Cause I want to, I mean, I kind of feel like a lot of people can probably relate to what you just said in terms of, you know, feeling like a conflict or like having two sort of thoughts at the same time. Like, oh, I'm, I'm crushing it here. But really is this like, am I happy doing what I'm doing or am I just kind of in that hustle?

Like we talked about the last time. Um, and, and I just so much in my flow with that, but, you know, I guess I kind of wanted to, cause we talk a little bit about happiness and I think that sometimes when, um, we say that in and amongst, you know, our peers in the legal industry, You get a little bit of an eye roll or you get like a, a, a thought about like, what do you mean?

Like, I'm, I'm happy when I achieve success or I'm happy, you know, when, because I've just like done these really big things, but. They don't really consider what exactly is happiness. And then they think about it, like, it's this kind of fluffy concept. So when people say things to you, like, what is really happiness matter if you've got success or they think about it, like happiness is a fluffy topic that we don't really need to be talking about in legal.

What would you say to that? So I have a couple of thoughts. The first is, this is the part of my current job where I feel like the not greatest lawyer, because there's not the words that really concisely convey what I mean when I talk about happiness. And so when I use the word happiness, I use it for a couple of different things.

There is the momentary experience of being happy of having happiness and that's important. But then there is this notion and it's talked about in the social science research, um, they call it affect balance. And so it is actually. The notion of having more positive, emotional experiences on average than tough ones, the negative ones.

So it is an actual equation. And when I talk about happiness, I am also talking about living in a way that you have a positive affect balance, but that's not something that people intuitively understand. They understand how. That's sad. They hear happiness and they think fluffy. And this is where for me, the research has kind of blown my mind as I've gotten deeper into it because we are not taught the ways that mental wellbeing or positive affect balance or happiness or positive emotions generally really impact our overall.

Not just wellbeing, but performance and success. And so oftentimes happiness feels fluffy, but I would argue that happiness might be. And when I say happiness here, I mean that aspect, balance peace living happy might be one of the highest value investments we can make in ourselves, in our families, in our communities and in the world.

I remember we had a conversation a few months ago where you were talking about this as like this investment that you make in yourself. And I think you had actually shared with me some research by a famous. Researcher on happiness, Shawn Achor, who said something to the effect. I could be misquoting this, but like the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.

You nailed the quote by the way. Not surprisingly, but yeah, that is the quote twitchy and it is a great summary. I think of how I view happiness and there's a lot packed into that quote. So Shawn anchor is in awesome happiness researcher. And then there are some other big names in the space, right?

There's Dr. Martin Seligman who is sort of the father of positive psychology. There is a father, son duo. I think their last name is, um, Diener, D I E N E R. And they've sort of done the exhaustive compilation of the research, including their own research on happiness. That sort of gives us all the studies that say that happy people live longer.

Happy people have stronger immune systems, happy people, um, make connections, build relationships more easily, happy people earn more happy. People are more productive, happy people sell more. I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on to also including, I mean, so then there's another woman that I'm going to forget her name, but she's out of a lab in, I think it's the university of North Carolina chapel hill who is sort of the mother of this theory that it it's called the broaden and build theory.

And it's, um, the research there tells us that when we have a positive, emotional experience, The actual, just moment of positive emotional experience does two things for us. It broadens our perspective. It broadens how we see the world. It makes us more creative, better problem solvers. It really just like, you know, we've talked a little bit about like zooming in and zooming out last episode.

It's a zoom out moment when we have a positive, emotional experience. And then the second thing, and that's the build piece is this is an over-simplification, but the way that I think about it is it's like putting deposits in your resilience, picket. So it actually builds your stores of emotional energy, your source of strength to weather, the difficult times that are kind of inevitable as part of the human experience.

So I want to, I totally agree with that and it makes complete and total sense when you lay it out that way. So thank you for saying it so concisely, but I want to bring it to another, another point to layer on top of that, that I think is important to consider in this time. When, particularly in this industry, like, you know, we really need to be thinking many steps ahead.

We talk a lot about, for example, and use the word innovation, right? And we say, you know, we need to be kind of on the cutting edge of innovation. We need to be doing more creative things, to be able to add client value, to be more efficient, to, you know, and an aunt. Right. What's so interesting about the connection between happiness and that is, you kind of said it before.

It's like it enables for more creativity, more empathy, easier ways to solve problems or spot problems. And. When you think about what is required to be truly innovative, you need to be honing those empathy skills and those creativity skills and those resilience skills and those relationships. Building type skills so that you can create new ideas and create an environment I should say, where you're able to generate new ideas and not just have like, kind of an, an exhausted, like mindset that's whatever the opposite of.

Yeah, and I love that you, so like one of the things that I think we've talked about this before, sort of in our conversations, not on the podcast, but one of the things I appreciate about you is I think we come at this work from a little different side, right? Like you come out of, you always does such a great job of situating it in the context of the industry and the context of the strategy.

And I really think about it from, you know, starting at the individual. Right, right. And so what I want to say in response to that, You know, I'll talk about it individually. First, when I get stuck, one of the things I have learned to do, and this is not something I did for a long, like this, isn't an old habit.

This is something that I've done based on the research that I've learned about. When I feel stuck, I do something that I know will bring me a positive, emotional expense. So, you know, you talk about like, I'm stuck, I'm gonna go take a walk. That's great. But if you can also add to that walk, something that truly brings you joy or truly brings you contentment or truly brings you gratitude.

Right? The list of positive emotions is much bigger than just joy and happiness. You're gonna almost by definition, be better prepared to get unstuck. Yep, exactly. And so now if you take that and multiply it. To a team of people or an organization full of people who have now learned that, oh, if I'm intentional about seeking out positive emotional experiences, I will be more creative that are ready to solve problems, more resilient.

You can just like, think about it's like, I used to play Mario. When I was like the kid, my parents, when I was, let me rent a Nintendo from bead, like blockbuster for the weekend. That's how old I am. But, um, you would get like these turbo boosts, right? And it's almost like that it's like a turbo boost for your performance and for your health and for the health of your brain.

I mean, that makes total sense. It makes total sense. Getting your yourself into a, we used to say this. We went through this training many, many, many years ago where, you know, if you found yourself kind of in a negative head space, this notion of. Getting to like curious, right? So you could ask questions instead of feeling in a place of judgment or feeling down, getting curious so that you could at least get to that place where you could tip into that positive emotion.

Yep. And I thank you for bringing it up that way too, because I want to make clear that one of the things that I don't want to be communicating and that I don't want to be suggesting to people is that they don't. Honor, the very real challenges and the very real tough, maybe less enjoyable emotions that come our way.

This is not about like a fake it till you make it pretend you're happy and pretend this bad thing isn't happening. It's actually you hit the nail on the head. It's twofold one. It's actually taking the time to figure out what those tougher emotions are here to tell you. What's the message and wisdom because in my book, every single emotion that comes our way has wisdom for.

And so how can we extract that wisdom? And often when we extract that wisdom, it allows that emotion to be released. And that's not like an immediate, overnight thing that might take time. And with some bigger challenges, it's going to take a lot of time. And there's nothing wrong with that, because if you're doing this work kind of on an ongoing basis, if you're looking for the opportunities to inject the positive, even on the hard days, that's how you keep your bank account in the green.

Absolutely. So talk about this in the context of, you know, cause we talk about happiness here and your sort of individual emotion, right. To, to get you to that place. Can you share because so many of the people in our industry or the, or businesses generally are now looking at, you know, how are we focusing on our people where people is like becoming.

You know, people's strategy is essentially like business strategy moving forward and you don't hear too often. That it's, we're focusing on people's happiness. It's more that you hear we're focusing. I mean, it's sort of understood or it's applied, I should say, but it's the way that it's spoken about is we are, we are coming up with a wellbeing strategy.

So talk a little bit about like, how does happen. Fit into wellbeing. Like what does that, where does that align? Yeah. So when you talk about happiness and the effect balance sense. So we talked a little bit last episode about the positive psychology rubric. You know, that P the PERMA and positive emotion is the P in PERMA.

It is one element of PERMA. It happens to be my favorite element of PERMA. It's not that I don't find tremendous value in the engagement and the relationships and the meaning and the achievement, but those all often have, have to include other people. Happiness starts with you, happiness. There's a bunch of levers in the positive emotion space that you can pull and that you can pull regardless of your circumstance.

'cause that's a big one for me. Like if we rewind to that moment with that bathtub and you know, I'm on the floor where I went from, there was, oh, I have to leave the practice of. And what I have learned since is I'm not sure I would have had to leave the practice of law in order to figure out what was really important to me, or even to have what was really important to me.

But I just didn't see another way, because I had this notion that a lot of us have that our happiness or satisfaction or positive, overall positive emotional situation is tied tightly to our circumstances. And the research tells us it's not. The research tells us that our circumstances are only responsible for 10% of our happiness and there's 50% that's genetic.

So that has to do with sort of a generalized happiness affect balance set point that we're kind of come with right then there's 40%. That's about our daily thoughts and actually. Back to your daily commitments. Yep. Well, it's so funny because I, I didn't even know that you were going to go there, but I just wrote something down because I was going to ask you about it.

I was going to say, what do you think about this? Because I have this quote. Up in my bedroom and I'm not looking at it right now, but I wrote it down from memory here. So I might have it just a little bit off. The poet is positivity is a choice and the happiness in your own life is dependent on the quality of your thoughts.

It sounds like that speaks to that 40%. It does speak to that 40%, a hundred percent. And I think where it gets murky and muddy and sticky for people, right, is that we humans like to take good things and take them to an extreme and make them bad. And so that's, that's what we do with that idea sometimes is then bring judgment on ourselves when we can't get our positivity there in our.

And here's the deal when we're in a tough moment, it's not about, and you said it perfectly, it's not about shifting straight into positivity. It's about shifting to curiosity and why am I here? What is happening? What are the messages? What else could I look at? What else could I consider? What else could I see?

What tools do I need? What support do I need? But it's not just about like, oh, you know, just, oh, the sun is shining. Like I'll just forget the really real stuff. So that's one piece. The second piece is I've got this notion and I know there's, there's certain sort of emotions that cannot coexist in a single moment.

But when we look at our day, we are a super highway of emotion. We have like 12 billion lanes. I don't know how many, a lot of lanes and what we try to do is we try to make it. So we're only driving on one lane and that's unrealistic. It's like, why are you closing all of these lanes? Let's keep all the lanes open and then let's choose which lanes we're prioritizing, which lanes we're focusing on, which lanes we're seeking out to drive in.

When we feel like there's a choice, right? That's where the power comes. So the power isn't there. I mean, to me, like there are some moments that you can not escape, very real pain, very real sadness, very real anger, very real fear. It's not about running away from those moments into positivity. There's like all these middle ground moments that we're not really being thoughtful about that we're not really thinking through where we're focusing or what we're making them.

And I'll give you a super simple example. One exercise that I do with people. As I ask them to make a menu of their essential sources of joy. So things that make them happy, but we distill it down to really basic things. Things that you could drop right in your day at any given moment. And there are some commonalities that I've found in those things.

Things like being in nature, being with a loved one, getting a hug, being with my pet. Now, if you stopped to thought, how many times a day am I interacting with my. For those of us who work from home like me, that's a lot of times a day, like I'm letting them out a couple of times I'm feeding them at least twice.

Like there's stuff. Now I could just show up to that interaction with my phone in my hand, or with my thought on my work, or I could show up with the goal of extracting a positive, emotional experience from that most. And that's where the magic happens is in that messy middle. It sounds to me, and I don't mean to like, try to take everything you're saying and distill it or, or to it, but it sounds to me like it's just doing it with intentionality and really thinking about how is this serving me in this moment?

And I have a choice about that. Nope. Do I want to just kind of own it in. Not to literally literally phone it in or do I want to make this as valuable as a compostable, right. To me, that's where we make the investment. Right? As in sort of like finding these moments that are already happening and shifting them from the neutral column, or maybe even the negative column, if we're busy, spinning about something that's going on, that's challenging for us to the positive column.

So do you think that, I mean, everything that you're saying right now makes a lot of sense, but I'm curious is do you think that for people listening, for example, that somebody could have the responsible, that's just like, it sounds like a lot of work or it seems really hard. Do you think that people need to.

Like completely changed the way that they're living their lives right now, in order to be able to experience what you're talking about to have this intentionality around creating positive emotion, like, what is it that you think like for the listeners, if you had to distill it down here for them into.

Do they have to make massive changes to be able to do what, what you're talking about? No, in fact, the beauty is it can come with really small changes, right? Like I think that, you know, one of my favorite simple exercises, right. And it's not just, well, let me tell you what it is. And then I want to say more about it is every day, at least once a day to record.

And that means write down, tell someone, text someone, voice memo. I don't care how you record it. Something that made you smile back. And I use that language deliberately because I don't want you to overthink it. It can literally be. I saw a funny meme. I, you know, somebody told a joke, I saw a friend, it doesn't have to be complicated.

Just something that made you smile. And the reason that I like that, so people are going to hear that come on. Like really? But the reason that I like that is because there's research on it, there's research on it that says that if you do that simple act for 21 days, You will experience increases in engagement and happiness in appreciation in gratitude, and you actually literally rewire your brain to notice more good things.

I want to add something to that please. Cause I think it's really important, really important to this, that simple act that you're talking about. For me the way that I understand it or that a way that I intellectually process what you just said is when you write down or you acknowledged something that made you smile, that you are putting yourself.

In a place of, you just said it appreciation and gratitude. And why is that so important? Because let me tell you what cannot exist when you are in a place of appreciation and gratitude. What can not exist is fear and anger. They literally in your body cannot happen simultaneous. And fear and anger are two emotions, negative emotions that I think get people stuck on a regular daily, sometimes hourly basis.

And I say hourly because we talk, what people listening right now are oftentimes on the billable hour. So I will just say that those two things, once again, Gratitude and appreciation and fear and anger cannot exist simultaneously. You are one or the other. Yep. And what I see with the clients that I work with back to your original question, which was, do you have to radically change your circumstances to really make an impact?

What I see is when people start deploying these little tools, these little shifts, their perspective shifts. Their resilience, piggy bank grows, their creativity grows, and then we're trying to solve or address what I would say they would define as the real problems. We're doing it from a place of, of sort of solid foundation of mental wellbeing and happiness.

And so we're not running away from. Something, we're not escaping our unhappiness and trying to solve this one element of the equation, which by the way, is what I did after that bathtub moment. I said, oh, I need to be in a job where I have more control over my time. And I thought that was the variable.

And I got lucky because I landed in an organization, a law firm that was amazing. And it turned out to be much more than just solving that variable. But what I see people do is a lot of times, while I need to leave this organization, this culture is not. My values, aren't aligned to have a bad boss, whatever it is.

And they solved the one variable only to find that there's a long list of variables that are at play, that are influencing their overall happiness and wellbeing. And they haven't really stopped to think about what is actually important to me for all of these variables. And then architecture the solution from that place.

And I just want to connect the dots here too, between our two conversations, one from the other day, and then one to now, which is around, it's going back to that kind of inward connection to like, you know, your purpose, who you are as an individual, what it is that fills you up, mind, body, and soul. Those are the things that connect to your happiness, into your joy, right?

So however you want to call it different sides of the same point or whatnot, but it is, it's all connected to the same. And all of that connects to your overall holistic. Wow. Yep. And you said it, cause we talked yesterday about the thread, right? The thread that goes from purpose to daily activity and then on that thread, right.

Are, are these sort of like this interim place of really thinking about, okay, I've got a purpose I'm connected into that, but how will I be expressing that in this season of my life? What's my current top priority. And then how do I align my daily activities around that? And in a way that remains connected to my purpose.

And so it is all of these wonderful layers coming together to make wellbeing more possible. Yes. For the individual and for the. Yeah, right? Yes. Yes. You, I don't think it's like hand in glove, right? Like, I don't know that you can have collective wellbeing without individual wellbeing and because of the impact of relationships and people and environment on us, which are real, they may, maybe not the thing, primarily responsible for our happiness, but they are a real part of our overall wellbeing.

You can't have personal wellbeing without the collective wellbeing. Exactly. Well on that. I just want to say this has been so much fun to learn a little bit more about you, Becky, and you know, your focus on happiness and how that kind of fits into our overall, you know, exploration of wellbeing, you know, generally, but also specifically within the legal industry.

Um, I can't wait to kind of continue this thread as we talk to our future guests on the podcast, but we're going to do our rapid fire questions here at the end. And I want to add. Because we've been on the topic of happiness. Can you tell me what is something that has made you happy? Oh, shoot. I had a really good answer, but it didn't happen today.

Um, I would say one of my big things on that list of like sort of little simple ways to be happy as clean sheets. Um, but what I will say has made me happy today is I have a puppy with a booboo paw, but he has been really cuddly and that extra love from him. I'm like loving, not loving that. He's not feeling great.

He'll be fine. Loving that like, love that I'm getting, I'm going to ask you another last question. What is something that somebody has said to you? It can be a quote or just from a conversation that has stuck with you that relates to this topic of happiness or just something that somebody has said that has brought you happiness, because they've said it something that you think about.

So it's not squarely related, but this is what's popping into my head. As I started my coaching business, I read a book called essentialism by Greg McCowan. And I don't know that I have a quote from him per se, but I have, he has like some drawings in his book and it's the notion of focused energy versus diffuse energy and really putting our energy as much as possible towards the things that matter most to us.

And so I often think about, am I feeling. Like with a bunch of squiggly lines or I'm feeling like an arrow and I want to feel like an arrow. So what do I need to do to feel like an arrow? And that kind of goes to the notion. I've heard you say this before, like what you focus on tends to grow. So pointing that arrow toward what you want to grow and what you want to kind of manifest for yourself.

So I love that. I appreciate that so much about you, that you do have this way about you. That I don't know. Every time I talk to you, Becky, I feel. My arrow just gets a little bit straighter in the direction that I wanted to go. So thank you so much. Well, thank you for saying that because that's literally my job, which seems kind of no, no, no, no.

And I say that because I'm like, I kind of somebody who can't believe that my job is actually helping people do that because it's so powerful and so valuable and so much fun. So I feel really lucky to be able to do this. And extra lucky to be doing this with you. I mean, I know we've said it and like we could go on and on and on, but like, I think we're in for a fun ride over the next handful of episodes.

As we kind of expand what we know about this space with guests that we bring in. Yep. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for today and thank you all for listening.

Hi, this is Nita. You can connect with both Becky and me on LinkedIn links are in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you. If you know someone who is doing meaningful work that contributes to wellbeing and think they'd be a great guest for our show. Please let us. And if you're enjoying the show, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.