Transcriber: Ahmed Moussa Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Hi everybody.
So, I was lying on the beach 10 years ago in the Maldives.
I definitely recommend it!
And I decided to change my life and start from scratch.
I needed a break, for sure.
I’ve been working for 20 years in a well-known management consultancy firm.
And I had a side passion and that side passion had to do with people.
I’ve always found it fascinating that some people seem to be flourishing
and on fire, and others, often with similar profiles, just seem to flounder.
Didn’t makes sense to me!
And in fact, the environment I was working in
was a perfect laboratory for this
because in my firm they would hire people with the same amazing grades
from the same great schools, usually from the same background,
and then put them in the same jobs,
the same age and give them the same pace of progression.
That’s an awful lot of sameness, right?
And yet, despite the sameness, almost immediately,
you saw a separation and some people you could see there on fire flourishing
and had oxygen to spare.
And others, were just struggling to keep their head above the water.
My first reaction was that seems so cruel, so, so unfair.
Then I thought,
actually that’s really interesting,
I want to know about these guys, I want some of that for myself.
So this became a passion of mine and it was actually in the Maldives
that I decided to go from... the second passion of my life
to make this the primary passion of my life
and my vision was to say,
wouldn’t it be great if we could create something that would allow
the largest number of people to flourish and live vibrant lives
and own the difference that they make to their world?
Own the difference that you make to your world.
I think this is a really good definition
for leadership in today’s totally unstructured world.
There’re a couple of challenges with it.
First thing you need to know
what the difference is that you want to make.
And then you need to decide you're going to own it.
So it is in the Maldives that I decided that I was going to own this.
I had a second aha moment in the Maldives.
I told you it was good
and what I realized was I actually don’t know
the subject well enough.
It’s a passion, but, I didn’t really know well enough
to sort of have any chance of achieving the vision I had in mind.
So, as I was flying back to Europe, I thought,
I'm going to have to find a partner.
A subject matter expert who’s going to help me with this.
And, you know, when you look for something,
sometimes that’s when you find it, and so it was just a few months later,
I was in a huge conference with a thousand people.
And at this conference, there was the very famous Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar,
one of the leading experts globally from Harvard in positive psychology:
This is the science of flourishing.
And instead of shaking his hand and moving on,
which is what I normally do
when I saw him, I thought he looks interesting.
You know what? I'm going to sit next to him at dinner tonight.
And so we’re in this huge room with hundreds of people milling around,
most of whom wanted to speak to how I sat next to him
and kept him for myself. And we chatted.
And we hatched a plan and our idea was to create a process,
a tech enabled process that we could scale and we’re going to scale
the science of flourishing to benefit as many people as we can
and benefit humanity.
And so what I want to share with you now are five keys
that for YOU
can help unlock those doors to flourishing,
living a vibrant life and owning the difference you make to your world.
Now, you may be wondering,
how is it that I know about these
and how can we be sure that they’re the right keys?
Good question.
I think if I was in the audience, I’d probably ask the same question.
So I can reassure you, we spent a year --
sometimes I like to say we were humble integrators.
We looked at the full body of 25 years of research
that’s gone into positive psychology.
And we said we want to create something that’s obviously
representative of science, but just as important,
accessible so that anybody can look at that go... yeah. That makes sense.
So those five keys, very conveniently,
their first letters make up the word SHARP,
and so I'm going to walk through those five things today.
So let’s start with the letter S for strengths.
I guess most of us have heard that it’s important to play to our strengths.
But there’s a problem. The problem is we don’t do it!
And the reason why we don’t do it is we’ve been conditioned
starting in childhood.
To think that the way to progress in life is by fixing our weaknesses,
think of those school grades, think of your work environment
where you have developmental feedback.
Zooming in on the bits that don’t work. By the way, there’s nothing wrong.
It's really important to work on your development,
but the effect is that it’s had a sort of stilted effect on our strength antennae.
If I were to ask everybody in this room,
tell me about your top three development needs,
I’d probably get a really good list
and maybe a few action plans thrown in as well.
But now I’ve asked you tell me about your top three character strengths.
Most people kind of scratch their head a bit and say, you know what,
I’m not sure I can even tell you what my character strengths are.
That’s the opportunity!
Because it’s when we’re playing to our strengths
and those strengths are front and center in our life that we feel closer to that
best version of ourselves is when our curiosity kicks in,
and our creativity kicks in. That’s the opportunity.
So that’s the first letter, S for strengths.
The second letter is H, H for health.
Now, I’m not talking about I need to go visit my doctor health.
Here I’m talking about stress.
What do we do about stress?
Here’s the thing, stress is going nowhere.
So, all of those remedies that talk about how we need to eliminate or reduce stress,
they have a problem! And there’s another problem.
Wait for this... stress is good for you.
We need it!
I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning if I didn’t have some stress.
Of course there’re boundaries,
but, fundamentally, the point is any approach that demonizes stress
is problematic.
So we need a new relationship to stress.
And the answer has to do with our energy level.
Think of a really energetic person you know, bubbling with energy,
perhaps annoyingly energetic.
You’re likely to say, aren’t they lucky? They’ve got all that energy! Yeah?
Well, guess what? It’s not luck.
And the thing is, when you have lots of energy, when you are feeling energized,
that’s when you can embrace the stresses, it’s when you’re drained,
that you can't cope with the stress.
And so we need to go from thinking that our energy level is just kind of
something we have to knowing that not only we can, but we have to manage this.
Some of it’s obvious, like getting a good night’s sleep.
Some of it is much less obvious.
Have you ever had a 15 second slightly unpleasant interaction with a friend
or a colleague and all of the drain energy that just drained from your body
ever have that?
I think you probably have.
If this happens over the course of the day maybe two or three times,
and by the end of the day, you're just drained.
We can anticipate and manage this.
It’s fundamental for living a vibrant life.
The third letter is A, for absorption, slightly different word,
this has to do with the fact that
we’re also terribly distracted all the time.
You know, oftentimes when we think we’re being more productive
because we're multitasking.
But we’re not being more productive at all we’re zero tasking.
Imagine you’re in front of your computer and there are several tabs open.
There’s your e-mail,
there’s that word document you’re supposed to finish.
There’s the football scores, there’s the news,
you’re spending time,
just kind of hovering and hesitating.
So much of our lives are spent in that mode of hesitation and hovering.
It's as though we take several hours of our day every day
and throw those hours out of the window.
So what we’re saying is, instead of living on the basis of A,
let’s say 21 hour a day, bring those hours back in.
Not through fake multitasking,
but through real mono tasking, through mindful engagement.
That’s the opportunity.
And what this does, it gives us extra oxygen.
You decide what you do with those extra hours. Maybe you want to sleep with them.
They belong to you. Do what you want.
Maybe you want to use them to be more productive. That's fine. It's your life.
And then the fourth letter is R... for relationships.
Now that’s a word, it makes more sense.
But what we’re talking about here is
think about what it means to be a leader in today’s world.
Now, the relevant question is no longer am I a leader?
Because if somebody doesn't like you in today's world,
they can just get up and walk.
Maybe not tomorrow morning, but, you know, it's a fluid world. People can move.
The question we should all be asking is,
Why would anybody want to be led by me?
And here there’re a couple of things that feel as though they’re not compatible,
but actually they need to go together.
And this is your authenticity and your positivity.
Now, oftentimes, we think that they don’t work.
And I can be really, really authentic and direct.
It's going to come out a bit negative, though, or I can be really,
really nice and caring and empathetic, but I'll be holding something back.
In other words, sacrificing my authenticity
on the altar of my positivity.
What we’re saying is
people, it’s not only desirable, but totally possible,
and this’s what people need.
To be totally authentic because people want to feel they’re hearing it as it is.
But in a positive and caring way.
And then the fifth of these five letters is P for purpose,
this has to do with the Why am I doing what I’m doing? question.
Not the big meaning of life question, we can save that for another talk.
But today, Thursday, meaning IN life question,
when I get home from work today and say,
“Why did I do it?” What am I saying?
Paying the rent, putting kids through college, or is it something more to it?
Now, the thing is, most people kind of think that
meaning comes from somewhere outside of me.
When I get that promotion, everything is going to be fine.
Or when we negotiate that big contract, guess what?
Those external things, they offer no more than
a transient peak in life satisfaction.
And afterwards you go back to being as happy or as unhappy as you were before.
So the opportunity here is to understand that we can reframe where we can choose
to put the meaning into what we’re doing every day and I have been
so inspired by everything I’ve heard so far today of people doing just that.
And the benefits of living from a sense of purpose are huge.
Just think of this idea of perseverance, you know, what happens --
What do you do when somebody says no to you? How do you respond?
Do you kind of go? OK, I guess it’s no then.
Or do you go no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me explain.
What’s the difference between those two answers?
This person is driven by that sense of conviction, that sense of purpose.
They know why that matters.
So I’ve just presented to you five ideas, five keys.
And if you play with some or all of these,
you can get closer to that vibrant person who’s owning
owning the difference you want to make in your life.
Now, right now, you might be going, wow, that was a lot for me to internalize,
maybe even a little bit intimidating.
My message for you is don’t try to remember what I’ve just said.
I'm serious, don't try to remember it,
what I want you to do is think of the metaphor of compound interest
on your bank account. I’ll come back to this in a second.
I want you to remember one thing I said today.
Maybe on strengths, maybe on mono tasking, maybe on reframing for purpose,
you will decide, but here’s the thing:
I want you to make tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, TOMORROW.
One small positive change to your life on that one thing,
that's all you have to do, but you have to do it.
And if you do it, and if you like it,
then you’ll come back for more, just like compound interest,
your positive life habits can build up over time.
Thanks for listening.