Your Career Journey

Happiness at Work: Declan Edwards on Emotional Intelligence & Growth 🌱

• Emma Graham

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Can you actually learn happiness like a skill? In this inspiring episode, Emma is joined by Declan Edwards, founder of BU Happiness College and host of the 'How to Be Happy' podcast. Who reveals the science behind happiness and how emotional intelligence and positive psychology can transform your workplace well-being and personal growth.

Join Emma as she uncovers how happiness skills, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness drive both success and happiness in life and at work. Declan shares how BU Happiness College helps individuals and organisations prioritise gratitude, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence to build stronger, healthier work environments.

🔥 If you’re ready to boost your happiness and success, this episode is packed with strategies around:

✨ How happiness skills influence personal growth and workplace well-being
✨ Why emotional intelligence is vital for success and happiness
✨ How gratitude and mindfulness improve workplace performance
✨ Positive psychology insights for building happiness at work
✨ The ripple effect of happiness on teams and culture
✨ Why workplace well-being is the future of high-performing companies
✨ Practical tools from the How to Be Happy podcast and BU Happiness College

This is your roadmap for aligning ambition with well-being, and success with meaning, straight from one of Australia's leading happiness researchers.

⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:09 Declan's Career Journey: From Journalism to Happiness Research
02:27 Discovering Positive Psychology
04:10 The Importance of Life Skills in Education
05:58 Defining Happiness
09:46 Happiness as a Skill
16:05 The Ripple Effect of Happiness
19:35 The Comparison Trap
23:25 Success vs. Happiness
24:21 The Importance of Happiness in the Workplace
24:53 Accidental Beginnings in Workplace Consulting
26:05 The Business Case for Happiness
28:08 Implementing Happiness Strategies in Organisations
29:49 The Personal Impact of Work and Happiness
33:00 The Evolution of Happiness Research
36:36 The Role of Challenge and Meaning in Happiness
37:53 Starting Points for Cultivating Happiness
41:41 Final Thoughts and Reflections

🎙️ Follow Declan Edwards & BU Happiness College:
Join the Book Waitlist ➡️ https://s.pointerpro.com/bookwaitlist
🎧 How to Be Happy on Spotify ➡️ https://open.spotify.com/show/0zriwga04Rl0pbjFuDF6Hl?si=1361a39f296e4b60
🎧 How to Be Happy on Apple Podcasts ➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/how-to-be-happy/id1361238593

Your host, Emma Graham, Career Coach and ex-recruiter, is here to help you with:

💡 Gain clarity on what’s important to you
💡 Confidently communicate your value
💡 Build a personal brand and a strong network
💡 Take a strategic approach to your next move
💡 Navigate the job market effectively
💡 Build career confidence with a repeatable success blueprint

🌐 Explore my coaching programs and free resources:
Website: https://www.egconsulting.au/
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/emmajgraham
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmagrahamcareercoach/

🎁 Free Resources:
📄 CV Development Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/cv-advice
📄 LinkedIn Profile Optimisation Guide: https://www.egconsulting.au/linkedin-profile-guide

📅 Book Your FREE Career Strategy Discovery Call:
https://calendly.com/emmagrahamconsulting/discovery-call

Emma :

Hello and welcome to Your Career Journey, the podcast designed to be your compass through the twists and turns of career development. Today I'm joined by Declan Edwards, a happiness researcher, coach and the founder of BU Happiness College. In this episode, Declan shares his own career journey, explores the science behind happiness skills and explains why putting happiness at the heart of the workplace isn't just good for people, it's essential for performance and and success. So I'm joined today by Declan, Declan Edwards. Welcome.

Declan:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

Emma :

Very, very welcome. So I'm super excited for this conversation, but kind of the obvious question, particularly on a podcast like mine is, what's the career journey to being a happiness researcher? How does that come about? Where did you start?

Declan:

Oh my God, my career journey to ending up here has been an absolute maze and mess, let me tell you that. Haven't

Emma :

they all?

Declan:

I was actually visiting recently some family of mine down in Canberra. My younger brother and sister live down there and they're 16 and 14. So they're starting to do the whole, what are they selecting for their electives at school? What are they thinking about for a career? And they were asking me, what did I want to do when I was their age? And I was like, when I was 14, I was still pretty sure I was going to try to play professional basketball. And when I was 16, I'd started getting interested in potentially going in the family footsteps, which a lot of our family history is in the military. And I was like, maybe I'll end up going into the military. Neither of those things played out. By the time I left high school, And I'm going, okay, well, a lot of my friends are going to university. Maybe I should go to university. And I'd had a teacher at school say, oh, you write pretty well. Maybe you should look at journalism. So off I went and did the first year of journalism. And it's something that now makes a lot of sense looking back. I didn't see it at the time. I was writing a lot of positive news stories, like a lot of what's going well in the world and what are these good things that are happening. And one of my tutors at the time at university kind of pulled me aside and said, hey, as a heads up, if you want to get a well-paid job as a journalist, you probably need to focus on front page news. And she's always, it's a bad stuff. Yeah. And she said, look, unfortunately, there's truth to the saying, if it bleeds, it leads. Like we need to look for pain right in the world. And I went, geez, I don't know if I want to dedicate my life to elevating those sorts of stories. So on a whim decided to change degree from journalism to health and was studying health. And the more I learned about health, the more I went, for a lot of people, for myself and a lot of people I was meeting, the gap wasn't so much that we don't know what to do to look after our health. I don't think it's a knowledge gap a lot of the time. We largely know that we should probably move our bodies a bit more. We should sleep well and we should drink water and eat relatively well. The gap was normally behavioral or psychological. And I went, oh, well, that's something I haven't learned a lot about. Can I go down there? And at the same time, I'd found some great mentors and coaches myself. And it almost seemed like they all had this toolkit of for a better life that I'd just never been exposed to. They were talking about things like emotional intelligence and compassion and empathy. And I'm like, yeah, I've heard of these words, but I don't feel like I've learned anything about them. Where did you guys learn all this? And they all started talking about the field of positive psychology. So an evidence-based research field that was focusing on how do we study what makes life worth living? How do we study what's good in human beings and good in the world? And how do we help people, you know, have really evidence-based strategic and practical tools to feel like they're living a little bit more intentionally with themselves and they're creating a life that's a bit happier. And I went, oh, so what does that mean? And they said, well, basically, it's happiness science. And I went, sign me up. I wish I learned about this 10 years earlier. Like, how am I only learning about this now? And thankfully, there was a postgraduate degree being offered in Australia that you could go into. Again, looking back, it was meant to be. If you had an undergrad degree in education, business, allied health, then you could go into this postgraduate degree in positive psychology. Lo and behold, I just finished this undergrad degree in health science and went, does this mean I'm eligible? And of course it did. So off I went and just fell deeply in love with positive psychology. It's now one of five modalities we use at my social enterprise, BU Happiness College. But I just have fallen so in love with understanding psychology Happiness, something that I think all human beings desire, but understanding it from a lens where it's pragmatic and practical and skills oriented, rather than something esoteric is like, oh, hopefully one day we'll be happy.

Emma :

Yeah, it's so true, isn't it? And I think it does go back to so much of that. schooling and as you're coming out of school and university. And I do wonder, I mean, I guess it's easy for me to say it was a long time ago that I was at school and I don't have kids, but I do wonder whether there should be more like life based learning. skills taught in school, even just certainly things like, you know, practical applications of happiness, 100%, but also, you know, financial planning and things that people are actually going to use in life. It would kind of make sense to me, but...

Declan:

100%. And look, there's starting to be, which I'm excited about. Like the more I talk to it, we've done a bit of work in the education sector and, you know, we're now hearing about basic financial literacy is starting to be taught in schools. We're seeing things like mindfulness being taught in schools. So there's some movement there, which is good to see. I think it's about time because realistically, yeah, a lot of our current education system was built around the industrial revolution. It was built into how do we teach people the skills to be good employees, not how do we teach people the skills to be good human beings? And I think that's what I'm more interested in now. That's why I opened a happiness college, right? It's like, how do we teach people the skills to be a genuinely good human being? And then through that, yeah, they're arguably more likely to be happier, more successful and leave a bigger impact on those around them.

Emma :

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's great to hear that that is starting to happen because it does just feel, as I said, from my very... outward perspective that it's just not really kind of fit for purpose and as you say was designed at a very different time and certainly you know the rise of AI and all this kind of stuff is going to have a huge impact on what we should be teaching kids in school and kind of how they're coming out into the world so awesome that you're starting to see that happen. This might seem a strange question but given what we're talking about I'm going to ask it anyway but What is happiness? How do you actually define happiness in terms of what you do?

Declan:

I'll reassure you first, it's not a strange question. I would actually argue it's one of the most human questions that we have because, oh my, Emma, we have been debating the answer to the question, what is happiness, for about three and a half thousand years. We can go back to the ancient Greeks and you have Aristotle and the Stoics going, oh, well, a happy life is a virtuous life. It's living in alignment with your values. It's being contributing to others. It's being helpful and moral, which I think is all fair and good game. And at the same time, we have this other group called the Hedonists at the time arguing, no, a happy life is as minimal pain as possible and as maximum pleasure. Like, it's sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Like, that's how we get there. Which, look, maybe there's some elements to be true. Maybe we could disprove some of that. I think for me, so if you're asking me to answer a three and a half thousand year old question, that's the question I've dedicated a lot of my career to over the last 10 years has been, what is happiness? And then how do we get more of it? So I will say to everyone listening, first and foremost, take my answer to this question with as much of a great assault as you want and recognize that I'm seen as, you know, through my work, thankfully seen as an expert in happiness, but I'm not an expert on you and your life. I never will be. And I don't think anyone has the one size fits all answer to what a happy life looks like for 8 billion people. There are some common elements, but you do need to put your own little spin on it. For me personally, I've come to believe that happiness, I experience happiness most fully when I have a really healthy relationship with who I am and where I am right now in life. So that's learning to be more compassionate and kind to myself. It's learning to have more acceptance and gratitude for the current challenges that I face and the current situations I'm in. And at the same time, whilst I'm having this great relationship with myself in this chapter of life, a big part of happiness for me is also having something meaningful to look forward to. And I find if I lean too much into either of those, sometimes I call it my inner CEO and my inner monk. My inner monk is all about being present and mindful and grateful and compassionate. But if he takes the wheel all the time... I'll admit, I get a little complacent sometimes, right? And on the other side, I've got this inner CEO, which is very driven, very focused on impact, very focused on what are the big goals I want to reach? What do I want to achieve? And if he only takes the wheel, then I often find myself getting stuck in like kind of a never enough thing. I'm always chasing the next accomplishment, never feeling good where I am. So for me, happiness is experienced when I can get those two parts of myself to work together and not be fighting each other. That's happiness.

Emma :

That's such an interesting way to think of it, because as you said, the first one, I was thinking that's so interesting because it's kind of at this point in time and you're not kind of spending time in the past, but also not spending time in the future. It is, you know, good in the moment, focus on the moment and not getting kind of pulled in either direction. But then when you add that second part, that is a sort of a looking forward to the future. And I guess that sort of drive and I was going to say ambition. I don't know if that's necessarily the right word, but, you know, drive to achieve a goal, challenge, perhaps all of those things that probably certainly to me sit within meaning and wanting to kind of accomplish something within life. The other side, I guess, of happiness and certainly the way that you're sort of talking about it there is that is happiness a skill? Like, is it this kind of floating thing that's kind of out here or is it something that we can... learn and kind of take a bit of ownership of in our own lives.

Declan:

Yeah. So this was one of the most profound changes in my understanding of happiness when I first started learning about positive psychology was realizing that happiness is something that people can get better at. Now, I'm not going to say that external circumstances have no impact on happiness. I don't believe that to be true. We know for a fact that You know, the quality of our relationships around us is a huge impact on our happiness. We know for a fact that the work that we do for a living has an impact on our happiness. Where we live has an impact. Our financial stability has an impact. These all have impacts. But we often, as a society, overestimate the impact that external forces have on happiness and dramatically underestimate the impact that our internal skills have on happiness. which leads us to kind of always chase happiness around the next external change, right? It's I'll be happy when I change jobs, when I get the promotion, when I get the pay rise, like it's always chasing. When I had this sort of shift in my perspective on happiness to go, well, hang on. Yes, that matters, but it doesn't matter as much as focusing on what's inside of me, the skills that I've built over the years, because those skills will last with me no matter whether I get the promotion, the pay rise, the change job, whatever it is. I'm a huge fan of the saying, no matter where I go, there I am. If I'm gambling on, I'll be happy in the next relationship or the next job. I've got news for you. You're bringing yourself to that next relationship or the next job. You're kind of stuck with yourself. And so to go, well, what skills do I have that I can bring with me no matter what life throws at me? And we know that these skills, they used to be called soft skills. We try to now call them human skills or happiness skills. Skills like emotional intelligence, skills like self-awareness, skills like effective communication and relationship building. These skills are so correlated with people saying that they live happier, more fulfilling lives. But interestingly, they're also remarkably correlated with being more quote unquote successful. Like people tend to perform better at work and in various parts of their life when they've worked on these skills. So I found that really empowering when I learned about that to go, Okay, yes, the external changes still matter, but I'm going to focus on internal change first, building these internal skill sets that are correlated with happiness, and then use those as a competitive advantage to then lead to these external changes. And from the outside looking in, some of the things I've been blessed to experience over the last five years in particular of my life I never would have guessed that I'd got to achieve, but it happened because I'd spent so long working on figuring out who I am, figuring out what my definition of happiness is, and then building the skills to allow me to then make those changes in a more sustainable way, rather than getting stuck on that I'll be happy when kind of

Emma :

trap. I think that's huge that I'll be happy now. And the other thing that you said there that really resonated both with me personally, because I've experienced it, but also through the work I do with my clients as well, is you said defining happiness for yourself. When I'm working with people, for me, it's kind of defining success for themselves. But I think that absolutely then flows into happiness. And for a long, long time, I was super guilty of, I called it kind of nextism, like you said before, I'll be happy when, or I'll be successful when. And it was always some future goal because as soon as I achieved it, I was on to the next, next, next, next. And I spent a long time doing that. And I guess in some ways you could argue that it served me well. It certainly drove me. But would I say that it was a particularly clean fuel? No. No. I think you kind of get to a point where you're like, I'm not sure this is actually doing me any good. And it was actually only when I kind of really stopped and thought about what success actually meant to me and came up with my own definition of that and realised actually that the one I'd been working towards wasn't even mine, that that kind of really changed. So, yeah, really interested to hear you sort of talk about happiness in very similar terms, in terms of, you know, what does that actually mean to me? And I'd imagine within that, you've got sort of certain pillars that you would want to kind of focus on. Is that how you view it?

Declan:

Yeah. So maybe not so much certain pillars, but I do. So I do kind of two approaches here with my happiness. One is there are different parts of my life that require different amounts of focus at any given time. Sometimes I use the analogy of life is a series of plates spinning around. you know, on sticks. And sometimes the plates are spinning really well and I don't need too much input from me. And other times the

Emma :

plates- Does

Declan:

that happen

Emma :

very often?

Declan:

No, right. And then sometimes the plates are very wobbly and I'm like, okay, we've got to do some stuff here. So like, you know, we look at what are the big plates, you know, for me, my career, my business, my marriage, I'm about to become a parent for the first time. That's going to be a big plate. Congratulations. Thank you. My health, my own development and wellbeing, my impact on others, right? These are the plates that we can look at. And so I'll try to just go, okay, well, which areas need more focus and love? And then- the areas that need more focus, what skills do I need to bring to them? And that brings me back to those internal skills that I've built over many years, right? So is it I need to bring a little bit more self-awareness? Is it I need to bring a little bit more self-compassion? Is it I need to bring a little bit more leadership and impact? Is it I need to bring a bit more decisiveness? Do I need to bring a bit more productivity skills? Are these skills, where's the gap essentially? Like where is the skills gap between what's going on currently in that area of my life and what I would ideally like to progress towards? So it puts me very firmly in the driver's seat. which can feel intimidating at times. I cannot tell you the amount of times in coaching sessions we've had members at our college go, yeah, but why is it me who needs to have the clearing conversation with a family member? Or why is it me who needs to drive that project forward? Or why is it me? Like, yeah, because you're the one who's at a happiness college learning these skills. Like with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you learn these skills, use them. And, you know, that is, can be confronting, but God, it's freeing as well to go, okay, yeah, I have the power inside of me. I have the opportunity here. I have the skills to actually make a pretty profoundly positive difference. Yeah. So people who learn the happiness skills are more likely to be generous. They're more likely to be charitable. They're more likely to be giving of their time and energy and resources to others. And it creates this beautiful ripple effect that I genuinely believe makes the world as a whole happier. It's the reason why at our college, you know, our vision is to grow global happiness. And from day one, we've been like, how in the world are we going to change the happiness of a whole planet with a small team based in Australia? And I think it's that. It's the ripple effect, right? Yeah. One person at a time. Yeah. 100%. I guarantee there's going to be people listening to this conversation that we're having who will learn one or two things that stick with them and hopefully they go practice it. And then I get to be real cheeky and not just count their life towards our ripple effect and tally, but all their family members and friends and colleagues.

Emma :

Yeah. It's so true. I mean, it's fundamentally the reason I started this podcast, actually, but perhaps slightly more so with a career lens that, you know, someone hears an insight or hears about someone's journey and takes that on board and changes something and it makes an impact on their life. Same principle, you know, you can change one small thing within yourself and that can have a fundamental change, as you say, not just on you, but on those around you, certainly, you know, family members, partner, et cetera, but in the workplace as well and hopefully out with the riffle goes.

Declan:

For me, that inspires a lot of hope. I think we live in a time where it can be easy, particularly with how much bias we have in media and technology towards the negative in the world. To loop back to the start of my career journey, that media bias that we

Emma :

have.

Declan:

I think it's very easy, and I still do it. Even as someone who's a happiness researcher, I'm not happy all day, every day. I've built skills of happiness, but that doesn't mean I'm always happy as my lead emotion. I definitely have times of self-doubt, of concern, and of... times of hopelessness of going, hey, is this working? Is the world moving in the direction that we want to see it moving in? I think there is something so hope-inspiring about being reminded consistently that we all have the potential and the ability to make a little bit of a difference. And if we all make a little bit of a difference, well, that adds up to be a lot of bit of a difference. I don't know, for me, when I get to the end of my career, when I get to the end of my life, I want to be able to look back and go, it mattered in some way. And the way I gauge whether it mattered is what impact did I leave behind? What difference did I make? And we all have the potential to do that.

Emma :

Yeah. And as you say, I think it's very easy to kind of look outwardly, globally, certainly through the media and social media as well, I'm sure has a huge impact and kind of it does all feel a bit negative and it all feels like everything's just going wrong and it can be very easy to kind of get sucked into that. But then I also think when you actually look at it more on an individual level or more from the perspective of your own life, it doesn't actually feel that way. So maybe I won't focus so much on that. Maybe I'll just focus on, you know, my own little kind of sphere of influence and do what I can within that. It does feel like a healthier way to live, probably.

Declan:

Yeah. And even if it isn't getting caught up in like, you know, everything's going wrong, how easy is it to get caught up these days in comparison? Oh my God. Especially in career, in our business, in comparing success metrics, you know, keeping up with the Joneses has never been easier to compare to, but also in some ways harder to do because we're all comparing to each other's highlight reels, right? No one's... It's becoming more common now for people to be very human and honest and authentic online and try to showcase... Their whole experience, not just the highlight reel of it. But yeah, comparison is something I wrestled with and still wrestle with sometimes. And it's such a thief of happiness, right? Comparing our journey to someone else's. And even comparing where we're at in life to some arbitrarily made up ladder or timeline. I

Emma :

spent years

Declan:

doing that. By X age, this is meant to happen. Or I'm this far into my career, so I should be doing this. Or I've been working at this company for this. It's all made up. And I remember someone pointing out to me once, they're like, think about how many decades of our life we put into climbing a career ladder. And did we ever ask at the start of it whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall in the first place?

Emma :

Yeah.

Declan:

And I think so many people, and I've felt this at times, I've seen so many people

Emma :

go,

Declan:

climb the ladder and you get there and you go, oh, that took a lot of effort. And then you go, shit, I don't actually like it. I don't want to be here. Now I need to get off this ladder and onto the next one. So I encourage everyone, ask first. Start with the vision in mind. What does a happy, and to your point for this podcast, what does a happy and successful life look like to you? To you.

Emma :

Yeah. Yeah. I heard a great, two things actually, but a great reframe of the career ladder recently, which I just loved. And that is that it's not a ladder, it's a rock wall. So you can go like left, right, backwards, across, diagonal. You can go in all different directions and you're not kind of just trapped in this up is the only way. And that there is only one path to the top and that I guess at the top is meant to define success. But I think thinking of it like a rock wall to me just makes a lot more sense. makes a lot more sense. And the other insight I've heard a few times that I really like to your point there about comparison is that, well, partly just because someone says everything's amazing doesn't mean that it's necessarily amazing. But the underlying point being is that you don't actually know outwardly the price that they've paid to get there. And that the inside of their heads might be an absolutely horrific place to be and the quality of their life as a result might be drastically affected. But by all outward metrics, they're incredibly successful and people kind of envy them. But would you actually want to be them? Would you actually want to have to have made the sacrifices that they have made to achieve that if you knew what those things were? Maybe not, probably not in a lot of instances. And I thought that was quite an interesting way as well to think about that sort of comparison piece because we all do it, don't we? Even if we don't mean to, it's very easy to get sucked into it. I think particularly if you spend, like I think we both do, a little bit too much time on LinkedIn, it's very easy to kind of fall into that. But yeah, I quite liked that kind of takeaway on it that just because it might look a certain way, you don't know what it's potentially cost that person to get there.

Declan:

Yeah. And let me share some insight on that and promise you as someone who's been fortunate enough to be welcomed into a lot of people's lives and to personally coach and mentor and work with them and to have them tell me sometimes things that they've never told anyone, not even their partner. I cannot tell you how many times I've met people, mentor people, coach people who are remarkably successful, but at the great cost of happiness. And I really have come to deeply believe in myself, and this might be blunt, but I do believe now that living a life of success at the expense of happiness is the greatest and most common form of failure. Now, that doesn't mean I don't think success is important. I think it's very important. But for me, it's start with happiness. Yeah, start with happiness and then let that fuel success. Rather than spending our life pursuing success, Spend it cultivating happiness for ourselves and others and let success be the byproduct of that.

Emma :

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we do it, don't we? Because we assume that once we are successful, we will therefore become happy and we've actually got it the wrong way around.

Declan:

Yeah, we do. The relationship between success and happiness has been backwards for a hundred and something years. We do need to

Emma :

flip it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really interested in how you work with organisations because I can certainly see, you know, individuals who kind of feel the pull to want to learn more and change some of this for themselves. But I'm interested from a company perspective and a business perspective because... Hopefully wrongly. My assumption is that a lot of businesses would kind of go, well, why would I do that? Why does that matter? Like, you know, we care about revenue and productivity and all of those things. So tell me about those conversations. Like, how do they typically go?

Declan:

Yeah, they've been some of my favorite conversations to be had in the last five years, to be honest. So I stumbled my way into doing workplace consulting and bringing happiness as a tangible skill to workplaces very much accidentally. In late 2019, funny timing when we all know what happens in 2020. In late 2019, one of our sophomore year members at the college who was there for himself. So he was learning the skills and signs of happiness for his own development. He reached out to me and said, hey, our organization is going through a massive change. We've been acquired. There's a big merger happening. Our culture's out the window. People's morale is really low. Burnout is skyrocketing. I'd love for you to come work with them. And I went, man, I've never worked with organizations or teams. And he goes, just teach them the same skills that you've been teaching me. They're all humans. Like teach them these human skills of happiness and we'll see what happens. And so thankfully I said, sure, let's give it a go and found myself working with them for a while. And I found this love for going, hang on, if I care about growing global happiness, like that's our vision at the organization, a massive amount of our hours are spent at work. Like work is a huge impact on how happy people feel in their life or a massive block and detractor to how happy they feel in their life. So if I care about making the world happier, I do need to care about making organizations happier. So I went back and did my master's thesis in positive psychology specifically on how is happiness defined and measured in a workplace setting? And is it a strategic competitive advantage to do so? And what I found really inspired me. You mentioned there, you know, People are having conversations like, why would we care about happiness? We care about productivity, performance, recruitment, revenue, profit. And what I found in the research is if organizations and leaders genuinely care about all those things, they need to care about happiness. Because if you go upstream, not even that far from profit, from productivity, from performance, Happiness is the end goal for all of it. We know for a fact, so for example, some of the research, Sean Aker and his team at Harvard did a study that found when sales teams in organizations learned the skills of happiness, the teams that learned about those skills had 37% higher sales over a year than the ones that didn't. Wild. We know from organizations that for every dollar that is invested strategically into enhancing the employee experience, a.k.a. how happy people are at work, they get about $2.67 to $3.27 back over a year in reduced turnover, reduced sick leave, absenteeism, higher productivity, higher brand equity. It pays to prioritize happiness in workplaces. Literally, right? I remember at one event, I said to a big room of accountants, actually, I said, hey, if I told you there was a stock on the market right now that you could put a dollar into, And over the next 12 months, it would either make you or save you $3 just to pull a number between those two. What would we all be doing straight after this talk? And everyone went, we would flood the market and buy it. And I joked, I said, okay, so this is now where I tell you I'm launching my own digital currency called HappyCoin. Not really. It's a big pyramid scheme. I went, no, then why are we not investing more into the employee experience?

Emma :

Good way to get a room of accountants though. Nicely,

Declan:

nicely done. I was like, yes, we're on. Smooth. Actually, they've invited me back to do more talks, so it must have landed well. But, you know, research from Gallup shows that it doesn't even have to be that much. It's about, I think it averaged about like 2.2, maybe a little bit less, 1.8 to 2.2. Let's call it two for round numbers. 2% of an organization's payroll cost. So let's say just for easy math, because I'm a happiness researcher, not a mathematician. Let's say they're spending a million dollars a year on wages, right? And we go, hey, 2% of that which is $20,000 a year, that is your budget to put strategically and specifically into improving the employee experience. So yes, that's teaching the skills and science of happiness, but it's also looking at the structural things that contribute. I'm not a fan. When organizations bring me in, I'm very clear with them. I'm like, hey, I cannot solve a systemic problem with individual solutions. So we have to look at this from top down and bottom up. We need to look at the skills that your team need to learn about burnout preemption and prevention, about productivity and performance, about flow theory and how to do their best work. But we also need to look at structurally what's going on with how you manage administrative load. We need to look at how your teams are set up to communicate and collaborate effectively. making happier, more thriving workplaces is not an individual employee challenge to solve. And if you try to get me to do it that way, I will tell you to stop

Emma :

it. Just teach the head of HR. That's all you have to do.

Declan:

So often I'll say to organizations, you can bring me in for a lunch and learn or for a mental health month talk once. And after that, if you like me, we've got to come back and do something more impactful and more long-term because I'm not going to be the token boy of happiness for your workplace. Yeah,

Emma :

absolutely. Super, super interesting. To your point before about we spend so much time at work, it's going to be a nice sequence, actually. The episode before this episode, there's a lady called Georgie who's written a book called Work That Matters. And she's found through research 90,000 hours we spend at work over our lifetime. So her thesis is why not spend that time doing work that matters through impactful work, but also work that is rewarding as well. She's got a really interesting take on it. So it's quite nice that they're coming back together. But yeah, 90,000 hours, it kind of really focuses the mind, I think, because I think what I was going to say, we've all done it. I shouldn't say that. Maybe some people haven't. I think a lot of us has done it. I certainly have that. The kind of I'll worry about that next year. Like I've got something else going on or this isn't a now problem. And before you realize five years have gone by, maybe 10 years have gone by and you've spent all that time. doing something that could potentially be making you miserable. And it just seems like such a waste.

Declan:

And to that point, I'm reminded of the saying, the longer you stay on the wrong train, the harder it is to get back. For every year that passes that we're just heading the wrong way, it is more challenging to then redirect. It's not impossible. It just means you've got further to come back. And to your point of going, hey, I get it. I run a happiness college. I remember the amount of business incubators we went through when I was starting the social enterprise. And they were like, the best way to start a business is to sell a painkiller, not a vitamin. Find something painful and fix it. And I went, mine's a vitamin. I'm teaching people the skills and science of happiness. In no way, shape or form do people view it as an absolute necessity right now. And so a lot of our way around that has had to be having conversations like, hey, this is something that most people will put in the I'll get to that one day basket.

Emma :

And

Declan:

then a year goes by, five years goes by, 10 years go by. And actually the thing that really changed my approach to be more proactive with learning the skills and science of happiness was a great book called The Common Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware. She's an Australian palliative nurse. She did this massive study on what people regret on their deathbed. Two of the top five, two of the top five most common things people regretted when they were on their deathbed looking back on life. I wish I hadn't worked so hard to the point of that 90,000 hours and prioritizing it. success over happiness. And the second one, another one of the top five, I wish I'd allowed myself to be happier.

Emma :

Yeah.

Declan:

Now, from my perspective as a happiness researcher, I don't think happiness is just a choice. I don't think it's just allow yourself to be happy. I would rephrase that as I wish I'd learned how to be happier. And

Emma :

maybe worked harder on it,

Declan:

yeah. Yeah, prioritized a little bit more. So the reality is the next five years, 10 years, as far as I know, unless any one of your listeners has figured out how to solve this... We are all going to get older in the next five to 10 years, right? Life is just going to continue moving forward for us. And it seems to move faster every passing year.

Emma :

It absolutely

Declan:

does. So if there was ever a time, I don't know, there's a great Chinese proverb, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The next best time is today. If there was ever a time to go, maybe I will take my happiness a little bit more seriously. Maybe I will prioritize learning the skills that lead to happiness. Hey, best time was 10 years ago. Next best time is now.

Emma :

Yeah, absolutely. I do think there is a shift, though, and I wonder if it's part of the kind of, I don't know what to call it, the sort of personal development movement more broadly, kind of, you know, personal growth movement that maybe even certainly 15 or 20 years ago, I think, you know, talking about happiness would have been seen as potentially a bit kind of niche, I'm going to call it. But I do think it has become much more of a normal thing to say like this is something that should be a part of of your life and and your toolkit and and the skills that you you kind of have do you do you see that shift do you feel it yourself

Declan:

I do and I see an expansion of even how we talk about happiness because I think in the early big run of like the 90s early 2000s self-help era happiness was very individualized rather than collective. When we know now from the research that happiness, sure, it's created inside of us, but it's nourished between us. It's nourished by other people. So we do need community and connection. In the 90s and early 2000s, happiness was often seen through a lens of deficit. What are you doing wrong and not doing well that you need to fix to be happy? Now we're seeing a much more strengths-oriented layer of like, what do you do well? What are your strengths? What are your values? How do we do more of that? And I think we're seeing it shift from Happiness, you know, in the 90s and 2000s era of self-help was very esoteric, ambitious, and kind of seen through one dimension of just like, you know, being really joyful or successful. And we're now starting to see more happiness as a series of skills, as something that's evidence-based and scientific, and also as something that doesn't always present itself as joy, right? Yeah. Happiness is not just joy. Sometimes you'll feel happiness as contentment or peacefulness or trust or acceptance. Yeah. There's all these other, or pride, there's all these other expressions that fit under the happiness kind of emotional umbrella term. And I think the more we've learned about that and the better that science has done at communicating those findings, because like I'll put my head, I'm not the world's best happiness researcher or academic. I think what I do quite well is take what's being found in the literature and academia and put it in a way that people actually give a shit about. Yeah. which is kind of important the vast majority of you know of academic literature is read when I did my master's thesis we're getting it ready for publication and I looked up our curiosity how many people are likely to read this thesis once it's in a journal and it was below 50 the average academic journal is read by less than 50 people in its entire lifetime which is wild to me because there's so much good research out there so I think we've gotten better at going hey this is the way to approach happiness, which is evidence-based, it's scientific, it's rigorous. And it's a little bit more, I find encouraging than some of the early iterations of self-help, which were a little bit guilt and shame coded. Like you're not happy because you're doing it wrong.

Emma :

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like your point on joy there and of the words that you listed. The word that was in my mind as well, and I'm interested in your take on it, was challenge. I think as humans, we're kind of hardwired to want challenge and to want something to strive for. And I think it goes back to that sort of drive and ambition, but using it in a way which is perhaps a more positive kind of approach to it that I think part of part of my kind of happiness equation is is challenge like it's having something that that challenges me do you do you see that in your own kind of approach to it or in in others

Declan:

yeah and I'm

Emma :

just super weird

Declan:

I might I might add something to it which might help make more sense for you and for the listeners as well so This comes from a field of research called Logotherapy, which was pioneered by Dr. Viktor Frankl. He wrote a great book called Man's Search for Meaning. It's this idea that as humans, we are hardwired with a desire for challenge. However, that challenge has to also be combined with a sense of meaning to it. It's meaningful challenge that we crave. And what we found through that is challenge that feels devoid of meaning so it's like why is this even happening why am i doing this yes unfair and horrible yeah yeah so challenge devoid of meaning feels like suffering yeah but challenge that is combined with meaning feels like growth and growth is a real core human desire and value to feel like we're progressing and growing and improving in some way so to that point we can reverse engineer and go well if growth is important to us It means we also need to give a shit about challenge, but we need to make sure that challenge is wrapped up in a real sense of personal meaning, which again comes back to our earlier conversation. Know what success and happiness looks like to you because that's where you'll find meaning.

Emma :

Yeah. For someone listening to this, obviously they should go and follow you and look at all the things you do and listen to your podcast, etc. But if there was a, and I know it's not as simple as this, but if there was one thing or maybe not one thing, a starting point that you would suggest to them, what would that be?

Declan:

Yeah, so this is the question I asked myself about two and a half years ago when I started writing my book on happiness, which is coming up. So it's coming out soon. I went, okay, I teach 70 skills of happiness at our college, at BU Happiness College. There are 70 distinct skills. It's very hard to teach 70 skills in the length of a podcast episode or length of one book. I'd have to write a few tomes, like the British Encyclopedia, to cover them all. And so I found myself asking, well, what are the most important five? And then to that point, what's the most important one to start with? And thankfully for me, There's been a lot of consensus amongst researchers over the last 30, 40 years on what is the most important skill of happiness to start with, which makes the rest a little bit easier to access and a little bit more effective to implement. And that skill is emotional intelligence. Now, even that, I would argue emotional intelligence is actually a series of skills. So if we then go even more granular and go, well, what does it mean to be intelligent with our emotions? The most important from my perspective is emotional awareness and literacy, right? And it's a huge gap that most of us have, even as functioning adults, our ability to recognize and name distinct emotions is really low, really low. I remember learning from Brene Brown, who's one of my heroes in this space, a great researcher, that the gold standard for emotional awareness and literacy is we should all be able to recognize and name 30 distinct emotions.

Emma :

God, I couldn't get anywhere near 30.

Declan:

Tell me about it. I'm a happiness researcher. When she said that, I went, can I get there? Like, I've dedicated 10 years of my life. Five? How does it happen? Well, it's interesting you say that because the most common is like five to seven. And test this. If you go out and ask people today, hey, how are you feeling lately? How are you going? Most of the time you'll get good, not bad, you know, which most of these aren't even feelings, right? Stress, busy, right? But if we go a little bit deeper and go, no, seriously, tell me, how are you feeling? Like, what's going on? Most people can't do more than seven. So we've got this massive gap. How do we expect ourselves to be intelligent with our emotions if we cannot recognize them and name them? So start with that. And the easiest tool, if you just want an absolute free tool to start with, two-word self-check-ins. Randomly in your week, ask myself, if I was to describe to someone how I'm feeling today in only two words, what two words would I use and why? And try to challenge yourself to not always land on the same two. Get curious, right? If you're like, okay, well, at the moment, listening to this, maybe you're feeling... ironically, curious, or is it inquisitive? What makes those two different to each other? Or maybe you're feeling, I'm going to hope here, inspired or hopeful, right? So we can dig into that. Maybe you've got a lot on your plate and you're feeling rushed or overwhelmed or a bit exhausted or deflated, right? The more words we have to describe our internal world, the more clarity we can bring to it, which means we can work with it so much more effectively. So start with that as a skill.

Emma :

That's super interesting because I think we all tend to default to certain words and maybe because they're a bit more socially acceptable. Like we just tend to kind of go to the same things. Like if someone, I'm trying to think in a workplace, if someone asked you how you were feeling and you said, I'm feeling really curious today. I suspect they'd probably get a bit of a double take and maybe that's part of it. It's just kind of, a social acceptance of a broader vocabulary when it comes to talking about those things. But that's a really interesting exercise. I'm going to start doing that because I'm definitely guilty of using the same words all the time. Final question, Declan. It is always the final question here. And that is, what do you know now that you wish you knew then?

Declan:

That the skills of happiness, like everything, any valuable skill in life, take time. They take time to learn. They take time to practice. They take time to get better at. You're going to stuff them up. I've stuffed them up countless times over the last 10 years. And that's kind of the point, right? Like if you're learning a language, you know that you're going to stuff up your sentences. If you're learning a musical instrument, you're going to play some wrong notes. When it comes to learning how to expand your emotional literacy, like we just spoke about, or learning to be a bit kinder to yourself or bringing more clarity to your vision for what a happy fulfilling life is on your terms and other people's that's not going to happen overnight it's not going to happen smoothly you're going to stuff up you're going to stumble but i promise you and something i wish i could tell myself years ago when i thought that i'd just like you know, go to uni and do a post-grad in positive psychology and then be like, yes, I've mastered happiness forever now. I wish I could go back, right? On to the next thing. I wish I could go back to myself, hey, this will take time. It is a consistent effort, but my God, is it worth it? It is so worth doing. And I think that is something that's kind of kept me going now, but in the early days of starting, you know, a social enterprise focused on happiness skills, when I was like, is this even going to launch? Is this going to do anything? I wish I could go back and say to myself hey it's worth it it is worth doing

Emma :

nice Thank you. I think that's a really nice place to, an inspirational place to finish. Thank you so much, Declan. Super interesting. And yeah, I just love how, as you said, you've obviously gone through the training and the academia and you're the one out here translating some of that, that more dense material, shall we call it, but for everyday consumption. And it's awesome. And I also really love your approach to that idea of the ripple effect and let's hope we can create our own little ripple effect with this conversation and that someone listening will take note and make a change and hopefully become happier as a result.

Declan:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm confident it will. I'm confident in the ripple effect being spread from this. And speaking as you said, yes, a lot of my work has been translating dense work into something a bit more bite-sized and manageable. So for your listeners, if you've enjoyed this conversation and you like, I'm assuming you like podcasts because you're listening to one or watching one at the moment, but

Emma :

obviously

Declan:

I'd love to have you come across and join me on my podcast, How To Be Happy, where I break down that science and skills of happiness a little bit more. It's just in little bite-sized chunks. And I will ask you if I can pop a little link for your audience and for the listeners in the show notes to do a pre-registration of interest for my upcoming book on the skills and science of happiness. Very exciting. The whole first chapter. I promise you that the whole first chapter is all about emotional literacy and awareness. So if you listen to that and went, I should learn that, definitely sign up for pre-registration to the book. What's the book called? We don't have a locked in name yet. I've got one that I really like, but we're still in the final stages. Top secret. We'll keep them on a little hush hush, but I promise that anyone on that pre-registration list will be the first to find out.

Emma :

Sounds good. Yeah, I'll pop that in the show notes for anyone listening or watching. Thank you so much.

Declan:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Emma :

Before you go, I've got a quick favour to ask. If you enjoyed this episode or something in it resonated with you, I'd love it if you could leave a quick review or rating on Apple Podcasts. It's one of the best ways to help more people find the show and I love to hear what's landing with you. Just scroll down in the app, tap a star rating and if you've got 30 seconds, leave a few words too. Thanks again for listening. I really appreciate it.

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Emma Graham

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