I want you to be happy.
My focus is leadership, design, and innovation for happier communities. It’s important to me that you enjoy the journey of solving problems that matter, and stay healthy and well… ideally feeling even healthier as you do work that gives you meaning and fulfilment.
When I’m working with people – and through my book Solve Problems That Matter – my ambition is they feel that I’m with them and working alongside them. Cheering them on, but also helping challenge them, to test thinking, and iterate – to succeed sooner.
When I wrote Solve Problems That Matter in 2021, I started with mindset. It’s chapter one. Why? Research shows we’re 30% more effective and productive when we’re positive.
I was lucky to learn the power of the mind and how we think very early in life. Over the years these lessons have been reinforced, and I’ve learnt a lot more about the neuroscience and psychology of how our brain and mind work.
“When we are happy – when our mindset and mood are positive – we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.”
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage
You might be thinking, of course I want to be happy – everyone does but it’s not that easy.
I think of happiness as “being well and doing well”, it takes action, and it’s something we create for ourselves. This is consistent with Shawn Achor’s happiness research, which led him to the conclusion that “happiness is not just a mood – it’s a work ethic.”
The great news is this means we can build some basic habits into our workflow to help create our own happiness. There are simple, practical things we can do to literally change our brain chemistry to increase our feeling of positivity – which leads to being more successful.
The purpose of starting with mindset and happiness habits is to create the foundations to look after our personal wellbeing while making a positive impact – so we stay healthy and positive without getting overwhelmed and burnt out.
What’s your favourite happiness habit?
Growth Mindset
Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford University studies human motivation – and how it relates to our success in life. She’s famous for developing mindset theory, which she describes in a compelling and easy to understand way in her awesome book Mindset. Mindset is our beliefs and attitudes that influence the way we think, feel, and behave in any given situation.
Why am I sharing this? From Carol Dweck’s work and other positive neuroscience research, it’s clear that our mindset, including the way we view risk and failure, is critical to our happiness, creativity, and success. Her work shows us the power of our most basic beliefs – about the world, and especially about ourselves.
Before exploring the two mindsets, I think it’s helpful to know a bit about the power of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity
Until not that long ago, it was thought that the brain didn’t really change after childhood – that it was pretty fixed by the time we became adults. Thankfully research over the past decade has shown that’s not true.
Research shows that our brains adapt to new situations. When we learn or do something new, we create new connections and pathways in our brains – a dynamic process that’s happening every day in response to our changing needs. This is called neuroplasticity. The power of these findings and the concept of neurogenesis make me very excited and optimistic.
Our established patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving have become habits – building up connections and pathways in our brain over time to form our core beliefs and attitudes. Our mindset. A lot of this is very positive and makes up who we are and how we see the world. We all have some bad habits we’d like to change though. And we can.
When we think about something differently, we start building new pathways. If we choose to keep practicing this new way of thinking, it becomes a habit, and the new pathway will get stronger and easier – and the old pattern of thinking becomes weaker. When you’ve learnt something new, changed your mind about something, broken a bad habit – this is what happened. This is neuroplasticity in action. We experience it all the time.
This simple two-minute video gives a great overview…
Growth vs Fixed Mindset
With some basic understanding of the power of neuroplasticity, let’s explore the two mindsets from Carol Dweck’s work. Fixed and growth.
Before outlining this, I think it’s important to mention that this isn’t talking about two types of people. Even though we might primarily show a fixed mindset, that’s not who we are. We can decide to build and practice a growth mindset. That’s the whole premise of mindset theory.
In reality, we all have a growth mindset about some things and situations, and certain triggers may cause us to fall into a fixed mindset. So, what do the two mindsets look like?
Growth Mindset
In a growth mindset, we have an underlying belief that our intelligence, skills and ability, creativity, talent, and more – all grow through effort over time. A belief that if we learn and practice, we can achieve what we want.
Common examples used for a growth mindset include:
- “Failure is an opportunity to grow”
- “I can learn to do anything I want”
- “Challenges help me grow”
- “Feedback is constructive”
- “I like to try new things”
- “My effort and attitude determine my abilities”
- “I am inspired by the success of others”
With a growth mindset, we seek challenges and see failure as part of learning, we persevere when we face obstacles, see feedback as constructive, and are inspired by other people’s success. We are reflective, curious, and open to change.
Fixed Mindset
Fixed mindset shows up as the belief that our qualities are fixed – these might be our intelligence, skills and ability, creativity, talent, or other things. You either have it or you don’t. A fixed mindset is a belief that our intelligence and talent are limited. A belief that we’re either good or bad at something because of the talent we were born with – and it can’t really be changed.
Common examples used for a fixed mindset include:
- “Failure is the limit of my abilities”
- “I’m either good at it or I’m not”
- “I stick to what I know”
- “Feedback and criticism are personal”
- “I don’t like to be challenged”
- “I’m jealous of other people’s success”
- “When I’m frustrated, I give up”
- “That’s just who I am. I can’t change it”
With a fixed mindset, we avoid challenges, give up easily, and ignore feedback. When we’re triggered into our fixed mindset, we also tend to demonstrate some negative behaviours.
Risk, Failure & The Power of Yet
Designing, building, and launching new ideas means dealing with plenty of things that don’t go quite as we might hope… and requires perseverance and resilience. It’s worth the effort to develop more of a growth mindset and understand the basics of the neuroscience.
As Carol Dweck says in Mindset “in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from”.
She also talks about the power of “yet” in her great 2014 TED talk. She heard about a school where if they didn’t pass a course, the grade they received was “Not Yet”. This was a way to help students understand that they’re “on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future”. Her research with students found those with a growth mindset performed better, and had a very different perception of their experiences.
“Not only weren’t they discouraged by failure, they didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning.”
Carol Dweck
Our ideas about risk and effort come from our mindset. When we’re in a positive mindset, we realise the value of challenging ourselves, and we want to put in the effort to learn and grow.
Taking risks means having the courage to be vulnerable. To take on situations with “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure”, as Brené Brown says. I love her quote:
“No vulnerability, no creativity. No tolerance for failure, no innovation. It is that simple. If you’re not willing to fail, you can’t innovate.”
Brené Brown
We need to build healthy ways to deal with the real and perceived threats that we’ll face… in life, but especially on our journey of solving problems that matter.
Threats, Rewards & Triggers
We spend a lot of our time on autopilot, our minds following well-established patterns of thinking that we’ve built up over time, and also through how our brains have developed. Part of that autopilot is to respond to certain triggers in negative ways, which can also trigger our fixed mindset.
I’ll talk about cognitive biases in a future post, but neuroscientists have named one of these automatic habits of the brain “negativity bias”. It’s been found that our brains scan for threats every fifth of a second, below our conscious awareness. There are five times as many neural circuits that detect potential threats as there are that detect opportunities or rewards.
Another key finding is that our brains aren’t very good at differentiating between physical threats and social threats. Research has found that just the words “let me give you some feedback” creates a threat response in our brain, especially in cultures with low psychological safety.
The way we respond to potential threats – and opportunities – is emotional, and centred in the limbic system. Our brain uses the same instinctual response system in social situations as it does for physical survival.
From these insights, you can begin to see how easily we can be triggered into a negative headspace, resulting in behaviours that aren’t good for us or those around us. This includes getting defensive, withdrawing, giving up, catastrophising, lashing out and blaming others, and complaining. I know it’s not fun to feel like this, and I know I’m not fun to be around if I behave in these ways.
So, what can we do? One of the key things is to build awareness of our autopilot responses and identify the key triggers that cause us to feel threatened. Neuroscientists call this metacognition – thinking about thinking.
The SCARF Model by David Rock is a really simple way to think about the five key domains that influence our behaviour in social situations. SCARF stands for:
- Status: sense of personal worth, especially relative to other people
- Certainty: sense of feeling we can make accurate predictions about the future
- Autonomy: sense of feeling in control of our lives and events
- Relatedness: sense of feeling safe and connected to people
- Fairness: sense and perception of fair exchanges with people
I find this is a simple tool to think about ways I might feel threatened, and identify situations that might trigger my threat response. It’s also useful when thinking about what other people are experiencing, building empathy, and consciously designing for psychological safety.
There’s so much more research on this topic, but we’ve covered a bit on what’s going on in our heads and nervous system… and some ways we can recognise our triggers and when we’re likely to feel a threat response. What do we do with that information?
Reframing & Happiness Habits
Practising our happiness habits, including mindfulness, helps us build more awareness and the ability to slow down and observe our thoughts and feelings. We can get some distance and time to choose our response to these triggers, rather than an immediate emotional reaction. This engages different parts of our brain to when we’re triggered into a fight, flight, or freeze response.
It doesn’t change the fact that there will be things that don’t go how we hope and occasionally we’ll feel frustrated, hurt or upset. Sometimes we get stuck replaying these events on a loop in our head. They reinforce the negative stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world works. This is where reframing can be powerful.
In design, we often talk about reframing. Consciously looking at the problem from different perspectives to open up possibilities and generate innovative solutions. Reframing is about changing the story. There’s a similar approach in positive neuroscience that applies to our mindset and the stories we tell ourselves. It’s called cognitive reappraisal, or reframing.
Take Action with Reframing
Reframing helps us build on the awareness we’ve been developing. It uses techniques to reframe negative events, changing our perspective and how we perceive them. One technique is called Benefit Finding. This is a really simple exercise, and can be a natural extension to the Simple Gratitude Journal Exercise.
Getting Started
To get into a positive headspace, start with the Simple Gratitude Journal Exercise.
All you do is write down three good things that happened in your day – with how it made you feel, who was involved, and why it made you feel good.
The Exercise
Thinking about the thing that didn’t go how you hoped, write a few sentences to describe the situation. Focus on the situation rather than diving in to re-feel the whole experience.
Now, write down three positive things about the situation – flipping the focus from what didn’t go well in the situation, to finding the things that did.
This is sometimes called looking on the bright side or finding the silver lining. It might sound way too simple, but research has shown it has a powerful effect. With practice, it helps to build new patterns of thinking and make the stories we tell ourselves more positive.
If you want to learn more about the basics of this neuroscience and more reframing techniques, I recommend Anette Prehn’s free The Neuroscience of Reframing & How to Do It course on Udemy.
Another great program is the Brain Power Series by Shelley Laslett from Vitae.
Solve Problems That Matter
This is an excerpt from my book Solve Problems That Matter, where I go into a lot more detail on all of the things I’ve covered in this post… and plenty more.
It’s a playbook with actions and worksheets to help you take a human-centred design and living systems approach to design, build, and launch your idea. Ideas that customers love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet… all while increasing wellbeing.
Let’s Collaborate
We specialise in coaching, training, and working alongside leaders.
A key way we do this is by designing and delivering action learning experiences with masterclasses, workshops, innovation sprints, and leadership, design thinking & innovation programs. These sessions build personal, team, and organisational capability to solve problems that matter with more:
- ❤️ Clarity on your purpose, goals, and approach to navigate complexity and make progress
- 🎯 Momentum to achieve your goals by building the workflows, rhythms, and habits for success
- 🌿 Confidence to move forward with more certainty and less risk while increasing your wellbeing
Ready to have fun collaborating to solve problems that matter?
