Watch: Module 10 – Feedback & Happiness (18:09)

The primary feedback loop regarding business success is cash flow. Accountants, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and auditors carefully measure, plot, and track their sources and uses of cash to ensure the company is robust and healthy. Most successful companies also use other metrics to track their Triple Bottom Line (3BL) with metrics related to people, profit and planet.

Managers of companies have many business tools at their disposal to measure feedback, eliminate contradictions and build support systems that maximize their profits and 3BL metrics. They regularly use success metrics to decide whether to change their underlying policies, organizational structure, goals, plans, mission statement, core competencies, products and services. In addition to all those managerial causal-based logic feedback metrics, entrepreneurial companies use lean metrics and pirate metrics to measure hypothesis test results like number of page views, number of click throughs, or number of paid users (ECLD Module #5 covered several great books you can check out to learn more about these). Companies use IT systems to provide executives with an up-to-date accurate dashboard of key business indicators to help them with their daily decision-making.

The most obvious key performance indicator of whether your life is in balance is your emotional feedback. You don’t need a fancy IT system or accountants to measure this one, you have your own private highly advanced feedback system built in – your emotions. But you still need to monitor your IT system to make sure it’s giving you appropriate feedback. If your subconscious and conscious beliefs, values, goals and actions are in harmony, then your emotional response system is properly tuned and your emotions are giving you good signals. If your internal self-talk includes dysfunctional beliefs or contradictions then these may hinder your happiness. Your executive dashboard may also include key metrics like health information (e.g. weight), time management (e.g. hours spent networking or studying), and progress toward your goals (e.g. number of people interviewed), but your emotions provide a more immediate clue to how you’re doing overall which is why journaling is suggested to help you track them.

Happiness and well-being are the positive emotional responses to the pursuit and achievement of your values. We’ve been focussing on monitoring happiness to motivate you towards chosen values rather than on avoiding a negative emotional state such as suffering. I’ve been referring to this positive emotional response as “happiness”, but this term encompasses a wide range of positive emotional states including joy, contentment, meaning, pleasure, engagement, flow, well-being, flourishing and feeling elated, cheerful, appreciative, satisfied, fulfilled, motivated, thankful and/or vital. Following the academic literature, I’ve collectively been referring to this basket of positive emotional states as happiness and well-being.

The problem with measuring and tracking negative emotional responses is that they do not provide a positive guide to action and thus are less useful than measuring positive emotional responses [especially when you are trying to get from +2 to +8 instead of struggling to go from -7 to -3]. You want to take advantage of the positive motivational system and focus associated with pursuing values rather than the negative avoidance system which only tells you to run from a snake. You also don’t want to reinforce the negative things by focussing on them unless you have to. Of course, you should measure and track and remove sources of unhappiness in your life, but you shouldn’t primarily focus on them. Ruminating over the negative aspects of your life is not a path to happiness [Again, I’m coming at this from a positive psychology and science of motivation perspective to help you get from +2 to +8.].

What kind of happiness are we talking about? We’re talking about the quality of your happiness, including its durability, not just increasing the day-to-day level of your positive emotions. The academic literature talks about two different kinds of happiness. Your short-term positive (or negative) emotions are called “affect” or “hedonic happiness” which may arise from eating ice cream, having sex, or going on a roller coaster. These are good emotions and the positive psychology literature encourages people to increase this kind of hedonic happiness as long as it does not negatively impact your long-term happiness. Eating ice cream is great, as an occasional treat, but a healthy balanced diet for long-term flourishing and well-being cannot be based on eating candy and ice cream. Many of these short-term hedonic sources of pleasure and positive emotional responses just don’t work in the long-term.

One reason why hedonic happiness doesn’t work in the long run is what Martin Seligman calls the “hedonic treadmill” – the more we get the more we want. Each little burst of pleasure wears off quickly and leaves us wanting more. We enjoy our new phone (or job, promotion, car, house…) for a while, but then we want a newer and bigger one pretty soon thereafter.

So when I’m talking about happiness and well-being, I’m not speaking here primarily about the superficial or temporary pleasure or excitement known as hedonic happiness or positive affect. These are certainly welcome in your life, but are not a good guide to long-term successful flourishing, well-being and satisfaction.

I am talking about a more fundamental sort of happiness; the kind that sustains you and survives setbacks. Aristotle called this second kind of happiness “eudemonia” – feeling satisfied with your life and that your life has meaning. You won’t be happy all the time in the sense of lightheartedness, excitement, etc., but you will always know your capacity for happiness and have a positive outlook on your life and future. Academics sometimes call this “subjective well-being” to differentiate it from other kinds of happiness. Maslow called it “self-actualization”.

This figure showing happiness over time illustrates what I mean. You will experience emotional highs and lows throughout the day/week/month, a kind of temporary variability that tends to be driven by external events like the weather, traffic, rude people or interesting people you meet. Here you need to have the wisdom to recognize whether or not the event is something that is under your control (Pilot-in-the-Plane Principle).

As described in the videos, there is virtually nothing you can do to change reality. You don’t control the weather, the traffic, where you were born, the fact that we die, or which team wins the Super Bowl. Nor do you control other people as much as you might wish or hope you could. The only thing you can control are your own actions, habits, character and emotional responses to these events.

There are three categories of emotional response/control. The first is your emotional reaction to day-to-day events outside of your control. In these situations, you need the wisdom to first recognize that it is outside your control, set goals and take the actions that are within your control, and then, if it happens frequently enough, develop the capacity to control your negative emotional reactions using Positive Self-Talk to re-frame (potentially also benefitting from mindfulness, meditation, NLP, CBT and/or CT-R).

There are many things outside of your control. For one thing, you cannot change the past. You cannot change where you are right NOW. Designers talk about this a lot, and they make a good point. You are where you are (Bird-in-the-Hand Principle). Being unhappy about it may give you the motivation to set goals and take the actions required to change the status quo, but being unhappy on its own does not change these facts of reality. The best you can do is accept where you are and move on from there. I’m not saying it’s easy, but focussing on what is within your control is a more useful path to happiness.

If you live in Toronto, like I do, you can’t control whether or not someone will drive too aggressively, cut you off in traffic, give you the finger or throw their burning cigarette out the window. You can’t control whether it’s cold and rainy in May when you really wish summer would finally start. Various of these external events beyond my control would “make me” experience negative affective emotions or reduce my happiness level. So I set some goals and took the actions that were under my control. I started taking the GO Train more frequently to avoid driving and I tried to avoid events that required me to drive during rush hour. I also started spending time in warmer parts of the world like Italy during April and May to avoid the lousy Toronto weather.

While these actions were helpful, however, they failed to completely eliminate these causes of unhappiness and resolve my design challenges. I still had to drive every now and then and sometimes it rained while travelling. I needed to learn how to control my negative emotional reactions to these external events. I had to learn how to have a bright sunny day in my mind regardless of whether or not it was raining outside. I needed to learn how to control my emotional reaction to jerks. For this I needed to ask myself the 5 Why’s and use Positive Self-Talk to re-frame or re-write the subconscious beliefs that were causing my unhappiness in the first place. All these new habits and beliefs reduced the amount of negative emotion in my life.

The second category of emotional response/control is regarding the day-to-day events that are within your control. Here, you should take the time to celebrate your successes, eat ice cream as a treat, listen to great music, buy yourself flowers, reinforce your positive actions and really savour, and be grateful for, the positive moments during the day. This is a fundamental skill that all the happiness experts agree upon. They recommend that you “catch yourself in the act” and reward yourself in the moment by taking pride and satisfaction in your large and small successes as well as savouring pleasurable activities. They also recommend that you take time each evening to remember your accomplishments and recall at least three things that you are grateful for or made you happy that day (ECLD Tool #2: Observe Yourself using Journaling). On the flip side, if your own actions resulted in unhappiness, you need to be kind to yourself, give yourself a break and learn and grow from your mistakes. Here I’ve suggested to you the growth mindset and Tool #7: Failure Immunity. Tools like this help you learn from and re-frame your mistakes. Instead of reinforcing dysfunctional or negative subconscious beliefs and automatic self-talk (e.g. “I’m stupid” or “I’m bad at networking”), you want to build resiliency, grit and tenacity by disputing the negative beliefs and re-framing them into positive ones. Again, Positive Self-Talk can be used to take control of your programming by reducing dysfunctional beliefs and reinforcing positive beliefs (e.g. “I bounce back quickly from my mistakes” or “It’s difficult, but I practise and am getting better at networking”).

You can think of these first two categories of emotional response/control as reducing the day-to-day variability in the affective hedonic aspects of your happiness graph. You want to reduce the lows by building resiliency and increase the highs through savouring, celebrating your successes, practising gratitude and creating moments of positive hedonic happiness. You want to set goals, form habits and take actions that reduce the lows and increase the highs where appropriate.

The third kind of happiness is long-term eudemonia and well-being built on satisfaction with the overall course or trajectory of your life. It is not directly related to the daily ups and downs but instead refers to whether you are on the right path or not. This is the overall slope of your happiness graph – it should be going up over time as you discover, work towards and achieve your values. This deeper, more sustainable kind of well-being relates to happiness with yourself and your life and whether you feel it has balance and you have the right goals and values and you are heading in the right direction. This results from satisfaction with who you are, where you are going, and whether you feel empowered to bring about the kind of life you want. [Note that your eudemonic sense of well-being seems to automatically go up if you reduce your negative emotions and increase your positive emotions, but only to a certain point. After that you need to focus more consciously on meaning and self-actualization to get further increases to well-being.]

An empowered person is able to maximize their happiness throughout life despite the negatives beyond their control, by figuring out what is causing them unhappiness and, if it is some thing or situation within their control or influence, taking the steps needed to change it. One of the things you might need to do to get this kind of happiness is identify any contradictions causing unhappiness and adjust either your values and beliefs or goals or actions to bring them into alignment or harmony. This has been called “living without wax” – not allowing flaws in your character – having integrity. No gardener deliberately leaves a patch of weeds growing in their garden because they know these weeds will spread and degrade the rest of the plants. This is covered in ECLD Module #11 and the next chapter.